“I’ll see what I can do. She’s ARM responsibility. Could she be dead?”

“For all I know. Carlos cut her. I don’t know how bad, but I saw blood.”

“Carlos…yah. Sigmund isn’t going to like that. What do I give him for proof?”

“You might find traces of him on the island, but I doubt it, Ander. I think Feather dumped him in the hopper for biomass. The closest you’ll get to any remains of Carlos Wu is right here.” He didn’t understand. I stretched my arms, flexing my still not quite familiar body. “Not the fish, Ander. Me.”

“Stet. Which island?”

“On another matter,” I said. “Carlos Wu’s experimental autodoc is a very valuable item. I propose to sell it to you.”

Ander studied me, mildly amused. His hands wandered into pockets and came out with a silver match and a box of fat green cigars. He said, “Your bargaining position isn’t that terrific.”

Was he really going to fire up that thing? Tobacco, it had to be tobacco.

I tore my eyes off his hands. “Cheap,” I assured him. “I can’t touch it myself, after all, and you can’t afford to lose it. Look at me! That thing rebuilt me from a severed head!”

“Buying up your trash is not exactly in my job description.”

“I’ll sell you the location. You collect it and do with it as you will. One hundred thousand stars.”

Ander smiled at the number, conveying that it was too high even to be funny. He said, “They wouldn’t let me smoke on the ship. Want one?”

“No,” I said, watching all my problems solve themselves. Well, half my problems. I could run clear off the planet while Ander worked at getting himself out of a cell. But he’d chosen the wrong restaurant, and I didn’t believe it, anyway. He’d delayed too long; his body language was wrong.

I said, “Wait up. Don’t light that.”

He sat there with the cigar poking out of the center of his grin. “I thought you’d let me do it.”

I said, “I toyed with the notion. If it was just a matter of you going to jail, futz, that might improve my leverage. I could make you an offer you couldn’t walk away from.”

“You used to have the tobacco habit yourself.”

“But I gave it up to make Sharrol happy, and tanj if my sense of taste didn’t come back. Ander, put those things away. Pacifica is a big spaceship.”

“Make you nervous?”

“Ander, don’t tease the kzinti.”

The breath caught in his throat. The match and cigar disappeared with minimal motions of his hands. Then his head turned casually.