Agnete said, “Why were they fighting?”
He shifted his head to look at her. Agnete met his gaze without flinching. “He and his wife were fighting about something. And then they stopped. Maybe there’s something in that?”
The old man weighed the idea while he took another puff on his cigar. His eyes shifted up to the sky, but he wasn’t looking at anything. Or not anything that was there.
“He have any friends?”
Lara shook her head. “None that he ever talked about. He doesn’t do relationships with people. Just responsibilities to them.”
“So just the wife, then, as far as you know. Sex and friendship. That’s a tough knot to unwind.”
“I think he really loves her,” she said. Again the little twitch of regret. They were going to have to be careful how they used her, moving forward. She was going to talk herself into falling in love with Rittenaur if they took their eyes off her.
The old man made a deep, soft sound. Like satisfaction. The yacht bobbed on the waves. “I forget, you know? I just forget.”
“What, boss?”
“How complicated people are. How many kinds of hunger we’re working with.”
“Not following you.”
The old man shrugged, and the fake arm almost matched the real one. The movement was still just a little asymmetrical. It made him seem jaunty.
“There was a guy I knew back in Sol system used to say that money was like sex. You thought it would fix everything until you got a lot of it. Because that’s what we all reach for. Anything we need, anything we want, anything that’s grinding us down, we can get high or rich or laid and make it better. Only if that was true, people would eventually get enough drugs or money or sex and be happy.”
“We’d be out of jobs,” Agnete said.
“But Rittenaur…” The old man went on like she hadn’t spoken. “This guy lives his whole life in this culture where it’s about…”
“Duty,” Lara said.
“So,” Agnete said, “the way a normal person tries to get out of the hole by putting a needle in their arm or fucking a pretty body or working a hundred hours a week, he tries to get out by being a good man.” She said the words slowly to see if they sounded true.
“Only it doesn’t work for him any better than that other shit does for the rest of us,” the old man said. Then, a moment later, “Look at the wife. If he loves her as much as Lara thinks, she’s the weak spot.”
“What am I looking for?” Agnete asked.
“Whatever’s there. Every addict has to hit bottom,” the old man said. “Maybe we can help him with that.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Agnete said.
“I know it didn’t exactly work, but…” Lara hesitated, afraid to ask. “Our thing?”
She was asking about the debt her attempted seduction was going to pay off.
“How much did you owe us?” he asked.
“You know exactly how much,” Lara replied.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s off the books now,” the old man said. “But stay out of my casinos. You’re very bad at poker.”
Business concluded, they watched the sun speed across the sky and dive for the horizon. The water was turning golden as they angled back for shore. The old man made them all steaks on the little range, the meat decanted fresh from the growth disk.
When they got back to civilization, Agnete put her resources into the wife and Xi-Tamyan Agricultural Concern, where she had offices. She wasn’t looking for something in particular—an affair, an illegal drug habit, a second life. Anything.
Even so, it took her days to find it.
* * *