"She's leaving tomorrow," David said. "You could go a little easier on her." He stood up, hefting his tool chest.

"All right, I'm sorry," Laura told him. There wasn't time to get into it now. This was business.

She greeted the Canadians and took the baby back. They were part of a production wing from a Rizome subsidiary in

Toronto, on vacation as a reward for increased production.

They were sunburned but cheerful.

Another pair of guests came in: Senor and Senora Kurosawa, from Brazil. They were fourth-generation Brazilians, with

Rizome-Unitika, a textile branch of the firm. They had no

English, and their Japanese was amazingly bad, laden with

Portuguese loan words and much Latin arm waving. They complimented Laura on the food. It was their last day, too.

Then, trouble arrived. The Europeans were up. There were three of them and they were not Rizome people, but bankers from Luxembourg. There was a banker's conference in the works tomorrow, a major do by all accounts. The Europeans had come a day early. Laura was sorry for it.

The Luxembourgers sat morosely for breakfast. Their leader and chief negotiator was a Monsieur Karageorgiu, a tawny- skinned man in his fifties, with greenish eyes and carefully waved hair. The name marked him as a Europeanized Turk; his grandparents had probably been "guest workers" in Ger- many or Benelux. Karageorgiu wore an exquisitely tailored suit of cream-colored Italian linen.

His crisp, precise, and perfect shoes were like objets d'art,

Laura thought. Shoes engineered to high precision, like the power plant of a Mercedes. It almost hurt to see him walk in them. No one at Rizome would have dared to wear them; the righteous mockery would have been merciless. He reminded

Laura of the diplomats she'd seen as a kid, of a lost standard in studied elegance.