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sort of backed away into the other side of the house, which didn’t seem really like him. I got a spider-sense that there were other people around. Ashley 3 , probably—Marena’s housekeeper—and maybe her creepy driver with the ridiculously would-be scary name, Grgur.
    “I’m in the orifice,” Marena’s voice called. Maybe she’d forgotten that I’d never been here before. Except that wasn’t like her. I looked back at Sic. He kind of indicated that it was to the right. I went to the right, across pseudoglyphish cast flagstones, through a stony living room with a sort of squashed cathedral ceiling—maybe they call it a hut ceiling?—and through a high trapezoidal door into a dimly lit room with a big table smattered with monitors and hard drives. There were big French doors on the far side with a dark garden and a narrow pool glowing phthalocyanine blue. Something stretched up and—
    Whoa.

( 5 )
     
    T he something had kissed me on the lower lip. It was Marena. She was in a sort of anthracite-gray, probably pashmina sort of top and a matching sort of bottom, with a sort of hairband thingie and a necklace with a hundred and eight garnet beads on it. Her face—it was a square, flat face, maybe too ethnic for a lot of howlies, but the sort of thing you really like if you like that sort of thing—her face was tanner, as expected, and it seemed more so because of big silver clustery Bucellati earrings that seemed clunky for her. She stepped back and sank to her normal height. She looked a little uncomfortable.
    “Hi, that was nice,” I said. She said hi.
    I looked at her. She looked at me. I looked away first.
    “You’re looking really good,” she said.
    “Thanks.” Damn, now if I tell her she looks good it’ll sound insincere. Instead I started to tell her how she looked tan.
    “No, I mean you really look healthy and happy and everything,” she said. Really? I wondered. I’d thought I was moping, what with the Sic business and everything. “What’s up?”
    “Up? Nothing.”
    “Really?”
    “Nothing,” I said.
    “You’ve been working out, right?”
    “Well, I changed the fluidized bed filters in the sponge tanks.”
    “No, really, you’re doing good, right?”
    “Better never. I mean, never better.”
    There was a pause. You know how they say that when you’re at a loss for words to talk about something that’s in the room? So I looked around the room. There was a huge monitor on a big wooden easel, like it was an oil painting, and there was a sketch on the monitor of a sort of Mayanesque city, and I indicated it.
    “Did you do that freehand?” I asked. She said yes. I said that was really something. It was too. The girl really could sketch. “That’s what it’ll look like from the plaza,” she said.
    “What will?”
    “You know, Neo-Teo™.” That is, she didn’t pronounce the little ™ symbol, but I heard the name like it was there. “I mean, the analog version.”
    “By
analog
you mean real, right?” I asked.
    “Oh, yeah, real life, full scale, inhabitable, the whole thing. I’m the first single person in charge of designing a city this large since, like, Peter the Great.”
    “Cool,” I inarticulated. Marena talked fast sometimes, almost like she was from 1940s radio, and it could take one a second to digest what she’d said. I liked it about her, though. These days if you take a business-presentations class or whatever they always tell you to speak as slow as sloth shit, not just so the ’tards can keep up but because they’ve done studies where people think the same exact speech is more important if it takes two minutes instead of one minute. On the other hand, if you’ve ever been in, say, any software-development meetings of more than three people, you might have seen how there’ll be two or three people who figure the problem out right away, and they work it out together speaking really fast with all this heavy jargon, and then when they’ve solved the