Miles relaxed. Perhaps it was going to be all right. "Yes, and yes. But it was understandable. Which is enough said."

Galeni nodded shortly, back to his normal cool mode.

"Um . . . I hope I was your only confidant, that night."

"Yes. But that is only the preamble to what I came for. Something rather more difficult has come up."

Now what? Please, no more complicated love-lives . . . "Oh? What sort of something?"

"It's a professional dilemma, not a personal one this time."

I'm out of ImpSec, Miles carefully did not point out. He waited, curiosity aroused.

Galeni frowned more deeply. "Tell me . . . have you ever caught Simon Illyan in a mistake?"

"Well, he fired me," said Miles wryly.

Galeni's hand twitched, rejecting the joke. "No. I mean an error."

Miles hesitated. "He's not superhuman. I've seen him get led astray, down some incorrect line of reasoning, though not too often. He's pretty good about constantly rechecking his theories against new data."

"Not complex mistakes. Simple ones."

"Not really." Miles paused. "Have you?"

"Never before this. I haven't worked intimately with him, you understand. There's a weekly briefing with my department, and the occasional special request for information. But there have been four . . . odd incidents in the last three days."

"Incidents, eh? What sort?"

"The first one . . . he asked me for a digest I was preparing. I finished it and sent it upstairs, then two hours later he called down and requested it again. There was a moment of confusion, then his secretary confirmed from the office log I had delivered it, and said he'd already handed it in to him. Illyan then found the code card on his desk, and apologized. And I didn't think anything more about it."

"He was . . . impatient," Miles suggested.

Galeni shrugged. "The second thing was so small, just a memo from his office with the wrong date. I called his secretary and had it corrected. No problem."

"Mm."

Galeni took a breath. "The third thing was a memo with the wrong date, addressed to my predecessor, who hasn't been there for five months, and asking for the latest report on a certain joint Komarran-Barrayaran trade fleet that had gone on a long circuit out past Tau Ceti. And which had returned to home orbit six months ago. When I called up to find out just what kind of information he wanted, he denied asking for any such thing. I shot the memo back to him, and he got real quiet, and cut the com. That was this morning."

"That's three."

"Then there was the weekly briefing this afternoon with my department, the five of us Komarran affairs analysts and General Allegre. You know Illyan's normal delivery style. Long pauses, but very incisive when he does speak. There were . . . more pauses. And what came out in between seemed to jump around, sometimes bewilderingly. He dismissed us early, before we were half done."

"Um . . . what was today's topic?"

Galeni's mouth shut.