In her excitement over being invited to Duncan’s by Margaret ST. Clair, Mina left work early to change into something appropriate for the occasion without a thought about her promised meeting with Vivian at the same time.

The first thing she did after stepping through the door and closing it behind her was to open her wall-sized telewindow with the voice command. "Alpha window, open" she said. The window opened and the flat surface of a program board appeared behind it."

"Show me Duncan’s on the river."

A glittering, ornate edifice on the downtown waterfront filled the window, with the Ambassador Bridge lighting the night sky adjacent to its high, jewel-colored, glass walls. Three boxes sat on the bottom of the screen; the first labeled, "FLOOR PLAN," the second, "MENU," and the third, "GUIDED TOUR."

Mina brought up the floor plan and looked for the ladies room. She spied one on each end of the dining room, with couches, dressers and mirrors, discretely spaced stalls and a nook for a ladies room attendant near the door. While she studied the diagram and the names of key personnel, she shed her clothes and began running her bath water with a, "Housekeeper. Run bath," voice command. Then she repeated aloud the names of the ladies room attendants, "Tiffy and Ruth, Tiffy and Ruth...."

Now, as she turned and glided up her spiral staircase to her spacious bathroom, she was naked. She liked being naked when she was alone. She liked her body. She liked to look at it in the wall to ceiling mirrors she had in every room in the house. She liked how it felt, she liked to feel the good parts with her hands. She did it every chance she got.

The incident in the alley seemed so far away she could pretend for the moment that it hadn’t happened. She stepped into the rising, ankle deep water of her sunken bathtub and preened. She stroked her hair, her face, her breasts, her thighs, bending and twisting this way and that to strike the most daring poses she could see in the wall mirror. Yes, it was narcissistic as hell, but would any other beautiful creature be blamed for admiring itself if it could? Would a Monarch butterfly? Would a Bengal tiger? And was it so wrong to touch herself where she needed to be touched when there could never be anyone else to do it? It wasn’t as though she didn’t want a friend with whom she could be sexually intimate in the real world. She did. Desperately. Preferably a man, but....

Though she hated to admit it, her real world desires were hopelessly heterosexual, boringly normal, 95% legal. But since her hidden handicap prevented her from ever living that life, she was not completely bound by her natural inclinations. She could always dream of venturing outside of herself and outside of the law in far more dramatic style than she was about to do with her naughty fingers. She could invent all manner of wicked things for her and her imaginary partner or partners to do.

Her black cherry nipples stiffened and she tweaked one with her thumb and forefinger as she ran her other hand down her nicely rounded tummy to the neatly trimmed curls below. Oh yes, she was wicked, so wicked to be doing this at all, but to watch herself do it bordered on depravity.

That was the voice of her real-world self beginning to take charge the way it always did when she lost her concentration. She broke her fall into the dreaded pit of normalcy with a deftly expanded continuation of her original auto-erotic self-image....

It had to be deviant at the very least, she thought. Not the act alone, but the thoughts that went with it, thoughts of what she had seen truly deviant people on flashback do throughout the ages. She’d seen it all and shared in the pleasure of the willing participants more often than not. Yes, Mina, she thought to herself, you’re a nasty, nasty girl....

Duncan’s was the only place Margaret could think of where she and Mina could get away with being seen together without raising eyebrows. From the company’s point of view, they had a legitimate reason to be there, which made it the ideal place to hide in plain sight.

Margaret arrived first. She and the maitre d’ exchanged greetings by name and he led her to her table in a secluded part of the restaurant. Her favorite drink was already on the table. As she sat there anxiously awaiting Mina’s arrival, she decided that it was best to look busy, which moved her to get busy.

She pulled an electronic note pad out of her purse and folded back the lid, looking over the all white, mostly male patrons sitting mostly in pairs and undoubtedly talking mostly shop. As she observed, she jotted down whatever came to mind. Duncan’s was the only place she felt secure enough to enter her thoughts in writing. She did it often. It sharpened her observation skills and kept her intellectually nimble.

The only other female executive was immediately distinguishable by her opaque blouse and mid-thigh suit fashioned from the same expensive Softglow material as the men’s. The rest of the female patrons wore upper-thigh length skirts or dresses with tastefully translucent tops. It rankled Margaret that the see-through tops were considered tasteful only because of the perfectly proportioned, perfectly formed breasts beneath them, capped by perfect nipples centered in perfectly round aureoles. Her secretary would have been turned away at the door.

The idea that conformity equaled perfection was everywhere and damn few people saw anything wrong with it. Those who did were wise to keep quiet because the subtle penalties for not conforming to such standards were immediate and severe.

Subtlety is the key to everything, Margaret wrote, as she studied the women with the flesh of their standardized breasts on proud display. They were all salaried employees of major firms like Condor whose clothing reflected their status as intelligent, hard-working, image-conscious women on the way up.

The transition between opaque and transparent apparel for the masses was so gradual that nobody of note noticed. It was the opposite of what happened in the last century when fashion leaders tried to force a change overnight. Back then, female breasts were thought of as private parts. Anything associated with privacy and the human body carried with it an unspoken suggestion of forbidden activity. A woman who showed her private parts in public was, therefore, a sexual exhibitionist signaling her willingness to do more in private.

That was yesterday. Today, the public exposure of a lower class woman’s breasts was no more an indication of her sexuality than the bare breasts of primitive tribeswomen in their native habitats. They became an issue of public decency only if they were too large or too small or too poorly shaped to pass the "community standard test" in court. That too, the whole notion of one size and shape of bosom being right and all others wrong, came about too gradually for most people to notice. There had always been popular preferences that varied from time to time and place to place, but never such universal intolerance for difference.

The same thing happened to men without full heads of hair. Only in the poorest of neighborhoods could you find them. And just like people of either sex with the wrong eye color, men with the wrong amount of hair would never see the inside of a place like Duncan’s. They were all barred by law from any establishment in the better neighborhoods where food was served.

If someone had tried to bring those things about all at once, they would have been angrily resisted or laughingly ignored. But ever so slowly, through the shared perceptions of telewindows and National Public Radio, it became fashionable to accept them all. Imperceptibly, fashion became custom and eventually, custom became law.

Yes, thought Margaret, subtlety is the key. "To control such subtle perceptions of the American people is to control their hearts and minds. It is to form the basis of their dreams and to deny them the ability to question the obvious absurdities of their everyday experience."

The words belonged to her secret mentor, Hector Clay, but they were her feelings before they were his words, feelings that she had been struggling for years to articulate. She wrote them down together with her own thoughts and observations.

Two pages into her work, Margaret looked up and noticed a man in his early thirties using a note pad similar to hers and talking to an unseen person at the same time. He was sitting alone by the window in a Softglow, midnight-blue, business suit. Softglow was the brand name for the exotic fiber in clothing that separated people with expensive tastes and means from those without. Combined with other exotic fibers from Laos and China, it made fabrics that changed hue with changing light. The more elusive the glow and the wider range of nuances in color, the more expensive the garment and the more educated the eye that could see the difference.

Margaret could safely assume that the man in the blue suit was a junior executive by his ensemble alone and destined to stay a junior executive for a long time. Although his suit's intensity level was correct, she could see each time he moved that the color spread was too narrow. It marked the wearer as someone who knew only enough about what was really going on to get by. Besides, only the very top or the very bottom of the executive heap was ever seated by the window of a high profile executive restaurant. No one under fifty was ever at the very top.

Had the man been well enough connected to ascend the corporate heights he would have been well enough informed to know how to dress and where not to sit before he started the climb. He would have known what cologne to use, which words and phrases to add or delete from his vocabulary and which items on the menu not to order. These were the bits of information that senior executive positions in the Fortune Fifteen were made of. They were the passwords to power that determined the nominees and then separated them from the winners.

At another table next to the window, sitting back to back with the young junior exec was an older man in a green Softglow suit. His hair was the color of polished copper. With hair like that, Margaret guessed that he must have been damn good at whatever he did to get anywhere in his firm unless he owned it.

He was sipping coffee and watching a flexible screen which unfolded to the sides like a menu and changed on both inside surfaces like the screen on Margaret’s writing pad. Most electronic periodicals featured moving pictures like those of two dimensional TV sets of the late 20^th century. The sound must have been coming through an implanted multi-channel transceiver of a kind that was replacing earplug and earlobe receivers the way those innovations had replaced hand-held telephones and single purpose radio sets. Margaret was thinking about getting one herself when she was sure all the unintended transmission bugs had been worked out. From the smile on the man’s face, Margaret knew he was getting his money’s worth.

He turned his head toward the street. Margaret could see that he was watching a stunning, mahogany-skinned woman in a purple Softglow business suit as tasteful and expensive as her own, getting out of a suburban taxi cab.

She was wearing a dark blue, leather, shoulder strap purse which matched her high-healed shoes. As the cab pulled away, she turned and walked to the restaurant door with the confident stride of a winner. She was the picture of what every woman in the male-dominated world of corporate leadership wished she could be—except for her color.

The maitre d’ led Mina to the table amid turning heads and a mixture of warm and cool appraisals, admiring gazes and a few jealous stares from women in see-through tops.

Margaret thrilled at the sight of her as any member of a small minority does when one of its own stands out so splendidly in a crowd. It made her proud to be a woman. She knew that African-Americans of either sex in Softglow suites were so unusual a sight in Duncan’s that Mina was bound to turn a few heads for that reason alone, but she chose not to dwell on that.

Margaret stood and greeted Mina with a formal handshake to set the tone for their first meeting in public as the maitre d’ pulled back the adjacent seat. Later on she could drop the formality without the effect of suggesting a prior link between them if the wrong person happened to be looking.

Mina played her role to perfection, right down to the mild, silent rebuke she gave the mater d’ for suggesting a wine before handing Mina the wine list and the wine she chose for herself. Margaret beamed at her protégé’s adroit handling of the situation. Her coolness under pressure was going to be helpful in making her an outstanding program supervisor. Margaret knew how to look cool when she was bordering on panic but she had a gut-level feeling that Mina didn’t know what panic was....

God! thought Mina, I gotta pee! She was walking a tightrope in a high wind over a rugged canyon. It seemed that she was doing a lot of that lately. If she could keep her balance long enough to reach a stable plateau, the pain signal to empty her bladder would go away. If she didn’t, she was going to have to let it go where she sat and flow where it would. The pain was horrible but she was not going to run anywhere for any reason.

As afraid as she was of not excusing herself, she was more afraid of what it would say about her intestinal fortitude if she did. The latter fear had the affect of concentrating her attention so narrowly on the tasks at hand that all other thoughts and feelings were reduced to irrelevant distractions. She was O.K. now. The painful pressure on her bladder was gone. She was going to be all right.

Mina wasn’t sure where she picked up that trick, but it served her well since mid-adolescence and she was sure that it would get her through this meeting, whatever it entailed.

Then it hit her. Hector Clay!

There he was again, his words as she heard them on her fourteenth birthday playing over and over through the wall of her sister’s bedroom: "When you are confronted with a fearful situation, you can be sure that fear will guide your actions. The choice will be yours as to whether it will be the baser fear of the coward or the nobler fear of being a coward. Let it be the nobler fear and you need never again wonder what you will do when called upon in circumstances of great potential sacrifice to do the right thing."

Damn that man! thought Mina. He had the most appalling knack for popping up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Margaret was impressed by Mina’s casually correct performance but she was too good an observer not to notice little signs of strain that told another tale. For once Margaret had to admit that a gut feeling of hers was wrong. She almost laughed out loud at how close she came to being tricked by her own false face of confidence sitting next to her at the table. They were both afraid of a lot of things and stubbornly determined not to let their baser fears take charge.

It was time to get down to business.

"Ms. Foski... Mina... Look, I’d appreciate it if we could cut the crap and just talk to each other."

Mina was intrigued by the woman’s change of expression. Although their earlier meeting in the lavatory had suggested an honest tête-à-tête, here, she didn’t expect one. People in Margaret’s position said what they wanted to say to people in Mina’s position and people in Mina’s position said what people in Margaret’s position wanted to hear. If the boss wanted them to call each other by their first names then that is what they would do. There was no reason for the mistress of the manor to stumble over that if she was playing a power game with the help.

Mina’s eyes told Margaret that she was listening and the older woman got to the point. "Hal Finley is retiring at the end of the month and I want you to be the new PS."

Mina looked confused, as though PS, the familiar acronym for "program supervisor," had no meaning. She blinked. "What?" she asked, dumbly.

Margaret started to laugh at the silly expression on the pretty woman’s face, then checked herself and sipped her drink. Looking discretely over the rim of her glass, she saw Mina touch her fingertips to her chest as if to quell a rapidly developing case of heartburn. Margaret lowered her glass to the table.

"I want you to be the new PS," she repeated. "If you want the job it’s yours."

"Wait a minute," said Mina, unable to imagine who above Margaret would have given the necessary approval. "Isn’t that a four/three-level decision?"

"Normally. This time it went to the top."

"To Jeff Easton?"

"That’s level two. I’m talking about the old man, himself."

"You can’t mean Mr. Piper."

"Fives and up call him Dean. If it hadn’t been for him and Easton you might not have made it. I don’t think I have to tell you what kind of shithead McBain is about Afros who won’t change color."

"He’s thrown a few hints," said Mina.

"He gave the nod to hire you away from Tanaka before he found out what color you were. He saw that you were way underpaid for what you were doing as a nine, and he knew he was getting a bargain by bringing you in two pay grades higher. If you had gotten your race changed he would have backed you all the way to five and put you on a fast track to four with me. The only ones who would have stood in your way were the guys who want to keep you out because you’re a women."

"Really?" said Mina feeling an incongruous barrage of pride, anger, ambition, uncertainty and shame. So her status with the company wasn’t as cut-and-dried as she thought. It was hard to know how to feel with all of those revelations about where she stood with the company and why pelting her at once. These were not the kinds of things that a grade four district manager tells a grade seven programmer without a reason.

"Really," said Margaret. "I think that’s why Easton and Piper got in on it. Tanaka has Condor in a bind. If we don’t get a big lift in our action programming soon CBI will probably go the way of the television industry and the Dodo bird in two or three years. The company needs a hotshot or two in high enough positions to get what they want without being so high up that they can’t be reined in."

"A five," said Mina.

"That’s right, a five. Normally we don’t have a situation where the best candidate for the job, hands down, is a woman working for another woman. If it wasn’t for that, you would have been a six long before now. With your credentials you would have hired in as a supervisor at Tanaka or Condor if you’d been a man and every programming executive in the company knows it. If they couldn’t bump somebody out to make room for you they would have brought you in under some piece of deadwood who was about to drift on out to sea and moved you up when he rolled out with the tide. I think that’s what happened with Finley."

The maitre d’ returned with Mina’s drink. She accepted it without the usual sampling ritual and Margaret told him they would order later.

"As you wish," he said as he bowed away.

"Tell me more about Finley," said Mina. "How did a jackass like that hold on to that job so long?"

Margaret laughed. "Ever take a good look at that ring he wears with the flat black stone and the gold border? You don’t fire those guys, you don’t hire them and you pretend you don’t know what rumors they’re spreading about you when they can’t think of anything better to do. "McBain’s secretary told mine that he was retiring about five minutes before I saw you."

Mina shook her head slowly from side to side. Then she cocked her head to one side and squinted, "Does this have anything to do with my sister?"

Margaret gasped, as if someone had yanked her chair out from under her. "What made you say that?"

"Tell me. Please. Does it?"

Margaret tried to speak with her hands, then tossed them in the air. "I wish I knew. To tell you the truth, I’ve been wondering the same thing. That’s another reason I wanted to see you here. But I didn’t know how to approach it." She searched Mina’s fathomless blue eyes... "I’m still not sure," she said.

Mina could have played it safe and simply refused to take the job. Or she could have opened up and told Margaret everything that had happened to her that day to make her wonder about Condor’s possible interest in Vivian. She was too wound up to think clearly. She could see that Margaret had also tensed up considerably.

She offered the woman a weak smile, "Let’s eat," she said.

"Good idea," said Margaret, wondering whether she had said too much or not enough. She reached for her menu and pretended to study it as she peeked at Mina pretending to study hers. She looked up for only a split second. It was the same split second that Mina chose to peek at her....

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