“ Ididn’t spill any of my business on the street. That’s why it’s dangerous, idiot sister! People with bad motives are passing all this around from leaks in other offices. Just don’t help them validate the rumors, if you have any sense. I’d far, far rather be on my regular job than what I’m doing tomorrow, but I didn’t get that choice. I’m not supposed to go on the street for the next few days, and I’m not supposed to contact you or anybody else I care about, partly for your own protection. I don’t slink for anybody. But listen to me, don’t tell anybody what I just told you, not even the denial. Don’t hedge answers with them. Don’t try to defend me. It only creates more rumors. Just get out of here and stay out. It’s a lot safer. I love you. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
“ Whywon’t you tell me what you do for them?”
“I can’t. If I’m any of the things you suspect, you know I can’t. I assure you I won’t do anything disgraceful. I won’t do anything I don’t believe in. I swear to you I want all this business over and out of my life as fast as possible. And if you dare spread it around the street what your personal guess is about what I do, you’re going to ruin my life, Ardath—you’re going to ruin my life and maybe cost me my job, just for starters.”
“Oh, job, job, job. This is so déclassé, brother. Just swear to me you’re not a slink.”
“Far worse than the crystal egg. I know. I know. I swear I’m not a slink.” Which dangerously narrowed the field of her suspicions, but pinned nothing down. He reached out and patted her hand. He knew everything had to revolve around Ardath when it came down to emotions. Everything had to, or Ardath refused to deal with it, or understand it, and he was the appointed family expert at dealing with Ardath. Scared—damned right he was scared at the moment, because she’d decided to be a fool. “I honestly I can’t help it. I’m just running messages. So that’s that. So I ask you, sister mine, sweet, intelligent sister, just go somewhere and don’t get further involved, and above all don’t assume you know anything about my business. I know, I know all this is all luscious gossip-fuel, and I know whoever’s brought you this rumor is not your friend, and is trying to score on you, and you’re all hot to defend us both; but I have absolutely no choice about going into this meeting if I want to keep my job, and I damned sure don’t want what I do and where I go gossiped all over the street. My job isn’t one where you ever want to be famous.”
“Forget the damned job! You’re my brother! You don’t ever have to care what those people want! Only for what people think of you, out where it matters.”
“The Trend isn’t life and breath to me, Ardath. If you want the brutal truth, I don’t ever intend to slip into the Trend, not even with the solid gold chance you could give me, and I couldn’t live in the Style. Ever. I’m not that sort. So don’t plot it for me.”
“You could be. I could help you. You have the looks…”
“I’m telling you I don’t have any interest in it, none. Absolutely none. What does interest me, what most interests me in my whole life is my job, which I assure you twice and three times isn’t being a slink, so that leaves you your other guess, doesn’t it? And your being here and telling me these things and me telling you isn’t good. I could get in real, deep trouble, thanks to these gossips that aren’t your friends. So don’trepeat this. Don’t repeat any of it and don’t speculate even to your nearest and dearest. Be smart for me, be smarter than any of them, and keep what you know about me absolutely to yourself, no matter how the gossips annoy you. You can ignore them. This is my life,this is absolutely my life we’re discussing here.”
The simple case finally got through to his sister. Ardath sometimes, in little moments, became Arden, and Arden reached out her hands to him in a distress of her own. “Brother,—if you’re really in this terrible deep secret, if you really are—”
“Beyond that,” he said before she could work up momentum in her anguish, “more than that, I’m putting you in actual danger telling you as much as I have, and I insist, I want you to get out of here right now. Declare me anathema in the Trend if you have to. If the rumor gets too strange, I want you to create a fuss, make a protest of the scandal, make it clear you don’t know anything or care to know—but keep insisting this business of me being a slink is just outrageous and stupid, and don’t say courier. Say I’m sleeping with someone unsavory. I don’t care. We can mend it later. The gossip all comes round again, forever. It’s all just a game, isn’t it?”
The patterns were back on her skin. Profuse and agitated. “Your reputation isn’t a game! My life isn’t a game!”
No, the Trend wasn’t ever a game, to Ardath. The Trend was life and breath to her: what was visible, what was en vogue, defined all she valued, all she was. And the line was always a razor edge, that divided a designer from a grotesque, a divinity from failure and ruin. A brother gathering intel for the police as a slink or meeting with Earthers as a high-clearance tap-courier wasn’t a reputation enhancement. He could do her real damage.
Well, so was the line of virtue a Project tap had to walk, a very fine line, one without compromise…without ties outside, and absolutely without publicity. Ardath was upset with what limited things she had now to guess. They were at a very difficult division of interests.
He touched her hand. “It may get much worse, I tell you. Be angry at me as long as you need to. Curse me as long as you need to. I’ll still love you. And right now, do us all a favor. Just get the hell out of here.”
“This is ridiculous. You can at least tell mewhat’s really going on that everybody’s so worried about, or why you, of all people!”
“If I knew, I still couldn’t say, and the truth is, I don’t know what’s going on. Use your head, sister. My apartment’s bugged. Possibly I am, in ways I don’t know and can’t even detect operating. Go. Do I have to throw you out? For God’s sake don’t discuss what we’ve just said.”
“Don’t talk like that!”
“I’m serious. Life is sometimes actually very serious. My job is. My career is. The enhancements that make you what you are aren’t visible in me, but I can tell you they exist. They’re as numerous, as expensive, and as irrevocable. I can’t go back from what I am, I don’t want to go back, and frankly I’m in a lot of trouble if I ever give my boss the notion I ought to be decommissioned. If my situation personally inconveniences you, I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do.”
“Dammit. That’s not fair!” There was his sister. And she was sorry for what she’d said, and he was.
“I didn’t mean that, Arden. I don’t mean it.”
She flung her arms around him, a hard hug.
He hugged her back, then disengaged. “Fine. Now go. Get as mad as you have to get at me and forget all the rest of it for all time.”
“I can’t forget it. What when they ask me?”
“ Who’sasking? Did you tell anybody you were going to ask me?” He didn’t want his sister to end up the subject of an official query, but he had absolutely no compunction about setting the department slinks on certain ones on the street. “Is it Algol? If it is, I swear I’ll shut him up.”
“Everyone’s asking, is all.”
“I askedwho’s asking. Name names.”
“Capricorn.” That was another known bad actor, a prankster. “And Algol. Algol said he’d talked to you. That you were looking worried and wouldn’t answer his questions.”
“What did he say about me? I’m asking seriously, is he your source?”
“He was asking about you, if I’d seen you. He was upset about the curfew on Blunt.”
“Stay away from Algol!”
“Why?”
“Because he’s trouble, sister. Because he’s affiliated in places so entirely déclassé you don’t even want a whisper of his real affiliations. Trust me that I know. And if he’s my trouble now, I swear I’m going to settle with him.”