"Datto may be Tagalog chief. Summa is Latin sum. Total message is nonsense in fifty languages. The clear message, Escudo green is pale probably a code. Escudo is Portuguese currency presently equal to U.S. $0.348. End of Report."

Confidential report (on scratchboard) of Elder Compassion to H.R.H. Dink ger-Dink, Prince Porphyrogenite of Empire, Heir-Apparent to the Throne, Scion of the Triple Crown, Count of the Northern Marches, Admiralissimo of the Conquest Forces of Empire, Captain-Commander of the XLIIth Subversion-and-Conquest Task Force (Sol III):

"She whispered to her pillow, local time 2 A.M., 'I love him.'"

Orison hadn't gone to sleep easily. She'd suppressed information from J-12, saying nothing to him about the Microfabridae, surely the most striking objective discovery of her two days' spying within the Taft Bank. More central in her thoughts than her disloyalty to the Treasury Department, though, was Dink Gerding. He'd told her that she was half in love with him. He was half wrong, she thought. "I love him entirely," she whispered, not knowing that J-12—in carelessness, not subterfuge—had left the receiver-switch open to the pillow she'd made her confidante.

The Wall Street Journal greeted her the next morning, curled up in her "In" basket. She'd just switched on her microphone and said "Good morning" to her invisible listener when Mr. Wanji stepped from the elevator. His ears, she saw, were bare today. But they were pink—a shocking, porcelain, opaque, Toby-mug shade of pink.

She looked away from this latest manifestation of peculiarity in banker's ears. "Good morning, Mr. Wanji," she said.

"Hi, doll," Wanji said. "The brain-guy says you don't have to read out loud any more. Just read quiet-like. Dig?"

"Yes, sir," she said. "Shall I take notes on anything in particular?"

"Naw," Wanji said. "The brain-guy, he remembers everything."

"The brain-guy?" Orison asked. "Is that Dink Gerding?"

"Naw. Dink's the boss. The brain-guy is the man who makes the wheels go round," Wanji said. He pressed the "Up" button of the elevator. As Wanji embarked, Orison observed that the elevator operator had the same shocking-pink ears.

Had those earmuffs been designed to hide this pinkness, the symptom of some rare and disfiguring disease? 

 Prev. P 20/37 next