Changing Vision by Julie E. Czerneda Page B

it came to making excuses to leave a shared table.
    This time, Paul beat me to it, tapping the credit slot on the table with a company chip to pay for what little we’d managed to enjoy, and making it clear we were about to cut the meeting short. “Leave it with us, Janet,” he said. “I’ll have Meony-ro go over these charges immediately—he’s our legal expert. By the end of the day, we’ll turn all this into a claim against Tly for your time and our losses. You’ll see.”
    Meony-ro?
I managed to keep my ears and other body parts perfectly still this time, though what legal expertise Paul thought our clerk had, beyond a rumored familiarity with the wrong side of it, I couldn’t imagine. The Kraal was pleasant in a stoic way, and a good worker, if inclined to party with too much enthusiasm and expand my guest list to include his less-than-mannered friends. He was, I recalled, reasonablygood at mechanical things. I squinted, wishing for enough light to read Paul’s eyes.
    I could, however, see him stand, and quickly followed suit. We should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
    “So that’s it,” Captain Chase said, staying seated, her voice about as warm as the eye of an Minascan ice hurricane. “I’m to go back to the
’Lass
as if nothing’s happened. I’m to tell my crew—most of whom used to live on a certain world which no longer exists—that I knuckled under to the Tly, let them take our cargo, and came home to knuckle under again to this—” a fierce stab with her finger at the pile of plas sheets between us on the table.
    This was the Chase I knew and avoided whenever possible. I took a semi-discreet step backward, putting myself out of the ring of light and the debate. Paul did the opposite, stepping closer to her side and, putting one arm over her shoulders, bending to whisper so only she—and those beings present with extraordinary ears—could hear: “That’s exactly what you must do, Janet. I promise we’ll get to the bottom of it, but it’s not going to be fast and it’s not going to be clean. Understand me? There’s more going on here than the obvious. Let us do the hunting—for now.”
    Her voice was an edged whisper in return. I couldn’t see her face clearly from this distance and in this miserable excuse for lighting—I’d already bumped into another patron’s chair and had to mutter an apology. “Then you’d better be careful, Paul Cameron. What is it the locals say? If you toss a net into unknown waters, have your blaster ready.”
    He’d
better be careful?
I repeated to myself, somewhat miffed. How easily she ignored my role in everything done by Cameron & Ki.
    The light wasn’t too dim for me to see her reach up to Paul’s neck with one hand and start to pull his face toward hers. I deliberately and politely looked away. Somehow my oversized foot happened to snag the nearest leg of our table, jarring it so approximately half a bowl of cream-coated pyati became a tidal wave to flood the tabletop and most of its surroundings.
    “Es!”

6: Conservatory Afternoon
    AS I matured—growing up not quite being accurate, since web-form did not perceptibly alter in physical structure with time—as I matured from birth to what passed as adulthood for my kind, I’d frequently experienced what Humans call “trouble.” It involved, with depressing consistency, some fairly innocent and usually well-intentioned act on my part followed by some unexpected or expected consequence to that act, wrapped up with someone important to my life being really annoyed with me.
    For most of my life, that person had been Ersh. Ersh had been outstandingly effective at drawing guilt out of me that I’d never imagined existed. She didn’t argue, rarely shouted, and had all the soul-withering, conscience-racking dignity of a being who had lived long enough to believe, with justification, she had to have seen it all—until I arrived. The little surprises I’d unwittingly awarded her