"The board's not very much work, evening meetings once a month and I think if you're leveraging it properly you spend a fair bit of time fielding requests and having dinners and so forth but with a good secretary it's still a part-time job. People do that while their kids are young, it's rarer to do it on top of a full career track but hardly unheard of and you'll have a very good secretary."

"How should I go about sourcing a very good secretary?"

He pats his boyfriend. "Draws them out of the woodwork."

"Kiala Aven just moved, her office is empty, you should go there at the week's start and - I'll email you details, actually."

"I'll await them with bated breath. I have a new address now but the old one forwards."

"I recommend having the official and the personal separate, good for the soul. And your secretary'll have access to the official one."

"Oh, yes, I just have a new personal, I've been holding off on the official until I have a better idea of what official things I'll be doing."

"That makes sense. What do you think you're good at?"

"Adjusting for or independent of the preconceptions I expect to encounter -?"

"I can probably adjust for those a bit better, honestly, so independent -"

"I'm good at keeping on top of correspondence and adjusting for people's backgrounds when interpreting them and not letting personal or physical matters affect my work - no one else in the decontamination protocol was able to carry on ten consecutive minutes of conversation comfortably, for comparison -"

"She was very talkative."

" - I think the court probably is a good fit, then, though I remain averse to one that'll make you enemies or heavens forbid sees you adjudicating a case that touches on reds. Yellow criminal is probably safe enough that way."

"Seems unlikely to involve questions of pollution or anything overwhelmingly sensitive."

"Exactly. And people aren't likely to ask you very often to decide it one way or the other as a favor - might come up occasionally, but it's worse with greens."

"Is that mostly a matter of people's families coming up -"

"Your family, your staff - it's rather an acknowledged perk of working here that if your employer likes you they can make your son's stupid college behavior cease haunting him - you might want to run requests by someone while you're finding your feet, so you know who is asking something very ordinary and who is hoping you'll be a pushover "

Nod. "Who is a good person to send things by -"

"Not me, you're not going to be working in contexts where it's useful to be knowably my protegé and there are serious drawbacks to the cleaning process looking like a family matter. Litif Aven if she seems comfortable around you and Nepans Aven if she doesn't."

Shasali notes that down.

"You are going to give her misapprehensions about how Machiavellian we are."

"I am going to give her correct apprehensions about how Machiavellian I am. But if you want to introduce her to people who will compliment the dress by all means."

"You look very nice."

Smile. "Thank you."

And he will introduce her to his parents, who shake her hand with maybe the vaguest touch of reluctance but are otherwise perfectly friendly - his mother's governor of a coastal district, his father manages land there - and his cousins on his mother's side - an ambassador and an administrator - and his little sister, who is four and of undecided ambitions.