Fringe nodded, acknowledging that she still had her natal accoutrements. Did the nosy ogre think she might have sold her hair? Her stone-green eyes? Or given them away? Well, why not. People did sell their features sometimes. Features, organs, appendages. Sometimes they were forced to.
He made what was meant to be an apologetic grin and shrugged one enormous shoulder. “Somebody told me your pa adopted her. You honestly didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know,” she repeated, so surprised she forgot it was none of his business. “But then, I haven’t talked to Pa for … well, for quite a while.”
“Old barstid,” commented Curvis, shaking his massive head as though this confirmed an earlier opinion. “Doing a thing like that to his own blood.” He stroked a capacious pocket on his chest where something moved beneath the fabric. Some device. Or a live thing, maybe.
Fringe swallowed the lump behind her breastbone and said with an expressionless face, “Since it eliminates my debt risk, I ought to be grateful.” Despite her words, she was still thinking it might be some kind of mistake.
She took up Char’s Book to look again, but it wasn’t a mistake. The new daughter really was the only family member named, as well as the sole heir. Fringe felt a cold wash of sadness, like a flash flood down a long dry gully, not for the inheritance (she’d never thought there’d be anything to inherit) but because there was no word there for her. And because the Book said Char had adopted the new daughter and written off his natural one at a time he had made a promise of quite a different kind to Fringe.
She took a deep breath and put the Book down, the little chain that linked it to the claim desk rattling noisily. One of the uniformed assemblers frowned up from his workstation, then went back to the figures rolling by on his tabletop display. Someone’s lifetime transactions being put together there. Everything came here, in the end. Whatever you hoped or dreamed or actually managed to accomplish; whatever you failed at or fell short of, it all came to Final Equity, where creditors, friends, and kinfolk, who could be creditors of a different sort, looked over the result amid confused murmurs and muffled sobs and angry mutters. The vaulted hall soaked up the sounds, softened them. There were always deaths and killings, so there were always books set out for people to examine. They came and went, their feet making shuffly whispers in the quiet. It was all very ordinary, Fringe told herself sternly. No cause for tears or guilt or sentimentalism. He’s dead, that’s all. He left you no word, but then, if he didn’t talk to you while you were alive, why should you expect a word after he died?
When Fringe looked up again, she caught the woman, Yilland, staring at her with an avid, restless expression, like some hungry animal in too small a cage. Fringe let her glance slide across the woman’s face, and then back to the book, wondering whether the balance in it would be enough to satisfy the claimants against Char’s Book, or whether the woman across the room would be asked to make satisfaction. Heirs were sometimes sold, entire or in parts, to cover the debts of a deceased. Creditors had been known to get nasty carving up an heir. Fringe had paid out a good bit on debt insurance over the last fifteen years. She’d been more than a little anxious, knowing Pa as she did. Well, wasted credit. She needn’t have worried. She was out of it.
And Yilland so-called Dorwalk was in.
Fringe nodded a farewell to the bald ogre, then turned and walked away, eyes straight ahead, striding from the Hall like a woman with somewhere to go, only to be accosted by a uniformed flunky at the portal. The Final Equity Exec begged the courtesy of an interview, said he. She glared in disbelief, but he nodded and beckoned and pressed his lips together impatiently until she followed him. Curvis, the giant, was watching this encounter from across the room, head cocked to one side. She cocked her own in reply, and shrugged. Who knew what Execs wanted?
She was led down the echoing corridor into the office wing behind the Hall, where the flunky paused at a tall door, rapped on it, opened it, and bowed her through. The Exec sat behind a desk that looked carved from a single block of chalcedony, though Fringe, mentally computing weight and noting the relatively fragile structure on which it rested, believed it a fake, symbolic, an accoutrement of Executive class. No other class handled money matters so well, no other class displayed such elegant contempt. People born Executives didn’t need money, so they could disdain it. No other class could pretend to justice so convincingly, for Executives didn’t need that, either. This man was classly dignified and alert too, she could see that; but then, Executives were the only class that could and did declassify members for being stupid.
He turned a serene gaze upon her and took his time assessing what he saw. “Char Dorwalk’s Book came up on the Files to be approved by this office,” he said. “The scanner advised me you were present in the Hall. Examining the record, it occurs to me you may wish to make a death claim against the estate of your natural father. Disinheritance is always subject to review by this office, and so far as I can see from your father’s Book, you were cut off for no valid reason. I find no record you were ever notified or given a chance to object. You’re entitled to file a death claim.”
“By this office,” indeed. Why
