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imagined, found the contrast irresistible.
    It couldn’t have been Nouel’s
looks
.
    André made some noise coming up, though Nouel certainly expected him; he’d IMed a query before he left his office, and gotten the nod to come down. Nouel was tangled up with a woman who lived on Yap, and sometimes when he seemed to be alone, he was actually quite distracted.
    But this time, Nouel pushed the chair opposite out with his foot; André dropped into it lightly and reached for the order pad. “What’s the play tonight?”
    “Zaire,”
Nouel said. “Voltaire. Will you stay for it?”
    “I could be convinced,” André answered, pulling up reviews, a synopsis, and clips on his headset. “Do you know the special?”
    Nouel made a broad gesture with a heavily ringed hand. Jewels caught the candlelight, their flash and sparkle enhanced by Nouel’s skins. André knew at least two rings were external hard memory, easily exchanged or discarded, while one housed a cutting laser. “I haven’t ordered.”
    “Oh.” André downloaded the specials, IMed them to Nouel via a direct-read. “There’s shiro,” he said, as if Nouel would not have noticed it. A local-world, deep-sea, heavy-bodied whitefish. Most of it was exported to the Core to feed the sushi market as a welcome replacement for Earth’s own extinct stocks of albacore and escolar.
    Nouel smacked his lips. “A bottle of wine?”
    “I am at your disposal,” André answered, and pushed the order pad to Nouel. Nouel must have livelinked it, because André didn’t see him touch a key. André was buying, of course. It was part of the honorarium one paid Nouel in exchange for his information.
    “Oh, I don’t think I’ll dispose of you just yet.” He tipped his thumb to the stage. “Not until I hear your opinion of the play. They run a repertory here, you know. It’s rare to get something genuinely new.”
    André did know, but it would have been rude to mention it. He nodded, instead, and thumbed through the drug list. Expensive alcohol, opiates, tailored drugs. Nothing unexpected. He settled on a brandy and also ordered a gin and ice for Nouel, as his was rattling in the glass.
    Nouel nodded thanks, and their drinks arrived a moment later. Nothing had yet replaced the live waiter; expert systems did not maintain an adequate standard of customer service, and people liked to be smiled at. He stirred his ice with the glass rod and said, “Was this just a social call, André?”
    “If it were, would I be plying you with alcohol?”
    Nouel laughed, head down and shoulders back, almost spilling his drink. He wasn’t an archinformist, but he employed them. Nouel was a broker. And sometimes he could find out things that weren’t in a data hold. “Ask. Before the fish comes; I hate to talk when I could be eating.”
    “Lucienne Spivak,” André said.
    A long whistle like the call of trains since time immemorial rose over the tinkling neono. You got the Bayside view here, and with it the sound of lighters landing day and night, ferrying cargo and—more rarely—personnel up to the orbital transfer station. You didn’t build a matter transfer station on a habitable planet.
    Just in case.
    Nouel stopped with his drink tipped to his lips. He looked at it thoughtfully, took a sip anyway, and set it down precisely in its own ring of condensation. “What’s it worth to you?”
    “Three hundred,” André replied, a flat inflexible offer.
    “Make them pay you hazard,” Nouel said. “If you haven’t shaken hands on it already. How fast do you need it?”
    Closs wanted the job done as fast as safely possible. He had told André he had intelligence that Spivak was going to receive damaging information from a source inside Rim, and that he needed her removed before she could pass it on.
    “Fastest. Who is she?” André waved his brandy snifter under his nose, wafting the aroma from the glass. “Other than the presumed head of GreenWorld, now that Tavish is