Jem

“Now there,” said Sir Tam over her shoulder, “is a feature worth studying. Go ahead, Nan. Let your impulses carry you. Try it out.”

“Certainly not!” She moved away from his touching hand and added formally, “Sir Tam, I must tell you that I am an engaged person. It is not correct for me to allow myself to be in a situation of this kind.”

“How quaint.”

“Sir Tam!” She was almost shrieking now, and furiously angry, not only with him but with herself. If she had used a tiny bit of intelligence she would have known this was coming and could have avoided it. A delicate hint that this was the wrong time. A suggestion of — what? Of a social disease, if necessary. Anything. But she was trapped, the waterbed before her, this gland case behind, already with his lips against her ear, whispering buzzingly so that her headache exploded again. Desperately she caught at a straw.

“We — we were speaking of Godfrey Me

“What?”

“Godfrey Me

He was silent for a moment, neither releasing her nor trying to pull her closer. “Do you know God Me

“Only through his daughter. I was able to keep her from going to jail once.”

His arm was definitely less tight. After a moment he patted her gently and stepped away. “Let’s have a drink,” he said, ringing for the stewardesses. The satyr’s smile had been replaced by the diplomat’s.

The conversation was back on its tracks again, for which Ana was intensely grateful. She even managed to return to the little cubicle with the armchairs and to persuade the stewardess to bring her a nice cup of strong chai instead of the whiskey Gulsmit suggested. He seemed greatly interested in the story of Margie Me

Such trivial things seemed to interest him, but Nan was content to go on dredging up memories for him all the way across the Atlantic, as long as it meant his keeping his hands to himself. When she was wrung dry he leaned back, nursing the new drink the stewardess had poured for him and squinting out at the blue-black and cloudless sky.

“Very interesting,” he said at last. “That poor little girl. Of course, I’ve known her since she was tiny.” It had not occurred to Ana that Margie Me

“Not in a personal sense,” she said, careful not to add lying to the fault of being untruthful. “Of course he is of great importance in cultural matters. I too am deeply concerned about culture.”

“Culture,” repeated Sir Tam meditatively. He seemed about to produce a real smile but managed to retain the diplomatic one instead. “You are a dear, Nan,” he said, and shook his wristwatch to make the red numerals blink on. “Ah, almost there,” he said regretfully. “But of course you must allow me to escort you to your hotel.”

The morning session of the UN was exhausting. There was no time for a real lunch because she had to post-edit the computer translations of what she had already translated once that morning before they could be printed. And the afternoon session was one long catfight.

The debate was on fishing rights for Antarctic krill. Because it was food, tempers ran high. And because sea lore is almost as old an area of human interest as eating, the translation was demanding. There were no places where she could coast, no technical words that were new-coined and common to almost all languages. Every language had developed its own words for ships, seamanship, and above all, eating, at the dawn of language itself. Only three of Nan’s languages were in use — Bulgarian, English, and Russian. The Pakistanis were not involved in the debate, and there were plenty of others proficient in the Romance languages. So there were long periods when she could listen without having to speak. But there was no rest even in those periods; she needed to remember every word she could. The UN delegates had the awful habit of quoting each other at length — sometimes with approval, sometimes with a sneer, always with the risk of some tiny hairsplit that she had to get just right. Her headaches were immense.

That was, of course, the price you paid for having the two hemispheres of your brain surgically sliced apart. Not to mention the stitching back of parts of them that kept you from stumbling into things or falling down, or the DNA injections that left your neck swollen and your eyes bulging for weeks at a time and sometimes caused seizures indistinguishable from epilepsy. That had been a surprise. They hadn’t told her about those things when she signed up to become a split-brain translator — not really. You never did know what pain was going to be until you had it.

What made the whole day an order of magnitude worse was that she was starved for sleep. Sir Tam had followed her to her very door and then planted a foot inside it. His hands had been all over her in the limousine all the way in from the airport. The only way she could think to get rid of him was to pretend such exhaustion that she could not stay awake another second, even though it was just after lunch, New York time. And then she found she had talked herself into it.

So she did go to sleep. And woke up before midnight with the chance for any more sleep gone. And what was there to do with the eleven hours before the morning session would begin?

A letter to Ahmed, of course. A few hours with English irregular verbs. Another hour or so listening to the tapes she had just made to check her accent. But then she was tired and fretful. What she needed most was a walk from her apartment past the university into the fresh morning air of the park, but that was ten thousand kilometers away in Sofia. In New York you did not go walking in the fresh morning air. And so she had turned up for duty in the translator’s booth feeling as though a hard day’s work was already behind her, and her head throbbing and pounding in two different rhythms, one in each temple…

Her mind had wandered. She forced it back. It was Sir Tam asking for the floor now, and she had to put his words into Bulgarian.

His face was purple-red, and he was shouting. With one half of her brain Nan wondered at that while the other half was automatically processing his words. So much passion about such little fish! Not even fish. They were some sort of crustacean, weren’t they? To Nan, “krill” was something that old-fashioned peasant gra

But Sir Tam was excited. The Fuel Bloc needed it desperately, he shouted. Had to have it! Was entitled to it, by all the laws of civilized humanity! The Fuel Bloc already possessed the fleets of long-range factory ships that could seine the cold Antarctic Ocean. He quoted Pacem in Maris and the British-Portuguese Treaty of A.D. 1242. The tiny bodies of the creatures that made up the krill, he declaimed, were absolutely essential to British agriculture, being the very best kind of fertilizer for their crops.

At which the Uruguayan delegate interrupted, snarling, “Agriculture! You are using this essential protein to feed to animals.”

“Of course,” Sir Tam replied stoutly. “We are not blessed with the advantages given your country, Seсor Corrubias. We do not have immense plains on which our cattle can graze. In order to feed them properly, we must have imports—”