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key industries in the Cordade Cluster. Didn’t your sister explain?”

“I didn’t see her; I got this in the mails, from Mother.”

“Ah yes. Your mother is a dear person; my old friend Arielle knew her as a girl, you know. Before she married your father. Very upright, Arielle said, and not at all inclined to play social games, but charming in a quiet way,” Ford thought that was a fair description of his mother, although it left out her intelligence, her wit, and her considerable personal beauty. He had inherited her smooth bronze skin, and the bones that let him pass in any level of society. True enough, even if his mother had known that the bank clerk was someone’s cousin, she would not have approved of such calculation in one of her daughters. Auntie Q went on, “I’m sure, though, that any daughter of your mother’s would have had a genuine affection for the young man, no matter what his connections.”

“Mother said so.” Interesting, too, that Mother had never mentioned knowing a friend of Auntie Q’s, all those times his father had talked about her. Had she known that Arielle was Auntie Q’s friend? Or not cared? He tried to puzzle it out, aware of a growing fuzziness in his head. He blinked to clear his vision, and realized that Auntie Q was peering at him, her mouth pursed.

“You’re feeling ill again.” It was not a question. Nor did he question it: he was feeling ill again. This time the onset was slower, more in the head than the stomach, a feeling of swooping and drifting, of being smothered in pale flowers.

“Sorry,” he said. He could see in her eyes that he was being tiresome. Visiting relatives were supposed to be entertaining. They were supposed to listen to her stories and provide the material for new ones she could tell elsewhere. They were not supposed to collapse ungracefully in her exquisitely furnished rooms, fouling the air with bad smells.

He realized he had fallen sideways off his chair onto the floor. A disgrace. She did not say it aloud and he did not need her to say it. He knew it. He lay there remembering to breathe, wishing desperately that he

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