"I have someone to talk to first."

"So, John, which are you going to choose?" Judith asked. "Big Pink? Or Cheeky Impertinent?"

Sheba laughed. "And what are you going to tell Mother?" she said.

John told his sisters, "I don't know yet. I could see it going either way. I had a few more things I want to know."

"Oooh-oooh, such deliberation!" Sheba said. "Don't burn out your little grey cells. When will we know?"

"I have someone to talk to first," John said. He took a deep breath, remembering the profiles on the TCD and CI annual reports.

"Wasn't that what your interview day was for?" Sheba said.

"Who is it?" Judith asked.

"Someone I didn't see on the interview," John said.

"Ooh, sneaky, tell," Sheba said. "Who is she?"

"I'll tell you later, I don't know if I get an appointment," John said.

Sheba and Judith left off pestering him. John made a phone call. He was pleased that the switchboard put it through to the man he was looking for.

"Mr. Pearl, this is John...yes, I'm the young man who just interviewed at TCD. And CI, yes."

Within a few minutes, John had made an appointment with Rod Pearl, TCD's wizard of networking, for the next day after lunch. The next day, he dressed up in one of the more conservative tunic suits that Sheba and Judith had helped him pick out, and made his way to TCD's headquarters again.

After the receptionist let him onto the floor and pointed the way, John threaded his way along a green stripe painted on the floor that led to a double yellow stripe that went round a corner. John saw Rod waving to him from the door of an office at the end of a long hall. Rod was casually dressed, in a loose, broadly-striped top and rope-belted trousers that made John think of the crew of a sailing ship. His dark hair wasn't dressed up in any particular way, just sort of cut and left, and it was starting to silver.

"So you're here to ask me what it's like being a man in a woman's world?" Rod asked. "I don't think about it much now, but it was hard as Hella's hairpins getting anyone to listen to me at first. Oh, I should offer you something," he said. He opened a small cooler and squinted inside. "Do you like Red Ewe?" he asked John, looking round.

The expression on John's face was all the answer Rod needed.

"Oh, well, neither do I," Rod said. "It seems to be popular for no reason I can fathom. How about Minerva's Tears?"

John accepted the tall, cool blue can. Rod took one for himself. John had heard about it at college, that it was starting to displace Red Ewe among the folks pulling all-nighters.

Minerva's Tears certainly tasted better than Red Ewe.

"Let's talk about your field of study for a bit. You said on the phone that you'd done design work?" Rod said.

After fifteen minutes of intense conversation with Rod, who liked to wave his arms about to make a point -- not discreet at all, quite free movement for a man, John thought -- and after a can of Minerva's Tears, John's head was buzzing. Rod drew him out on some of his design ideas and projects, and asked him where he thought TCD might have some opportunities.

The look of amusement on Rod's face grew as John ran down his list of ideas for TCD.

"Come, John," Rod said. "Let me show you something, and you can tell me if you see the same thing I do."

Rod leapt up from his office chair and led John out into the hall, further down the double yellow stripe to an elevator, and down to a cavernous basement office where John and Rod watched the activity from behind the railings of a catwalk.

The basement office was connected by ramps to the outside. TCD utility trucks came and went, loaded or unloaded, according to some internal logic John didn't follow at first.

"What is this?" John asked Rod.

"Just watch for a bit," Rod said. "That technician over there, say."

Rod pointed to a young woman in a pink TCD uniform -- coveralls, perhaps an installer? -- getting out of her truck rolling a piece of equipment behind her. She connected it to a station on the wall, fiddled with it, watched closely for a while, then picked up a printed card that emerged from a slot and wheeled the equipment back to the truck.

"Now that one," Rod said.

This technician was a little older, her uniform approximating a business suit, with a pink skirt and white blouse with pink accents. A consulting programmer? She stepped out of a company car, lugging a device the size of a small suitcase, and repeated the first technician's routine with the wall station, though adding an additional step of typing into an attached keyboard.

"They're...reporting jobs finished, and getting new ones?" John said.

"That's right," Rod said.

John furrowed his brow. "So this all goes into Big Pink's order automation?" he said. "And so the company knows what's up all the time?"

"More or less," Rod said. "Finished work or updates come in, new orders go out with all the details into their service units, the card has the schedule, service ticket number, and contact information for the customer."

"Do...do you have this for the sales department? Clients and prospects? For sharing briefing documents?" John said.

Rod grinned.

John said, "Do you think other companies could use something like this for helping their traveling staff work together? Even executives, you know, they take so many meetings, something like this could help their staff keep everything straight."

Rod laughed. He tousled John's hair. "Good boy, you see it," he said. "Big Pink is a little slow on the uptake sometimes, and the dragon running the service department is pleased to sit atop the treasure, not knowing it would be just as valuable spread throughout the company, or even sold. Big Pink could break out of the back rooms with the white-coated priestesses tending to the big old machines grinding the numbers. Let's go back to my office."

Rod and John chatted more casually.

"So...are you in a household, Rod?" John asked. Rod's mother might have passed, so perhaps a younger matriarch had taken charge? But a neglectful one, from Rod's careless appearance and incautious manner of speaking and moving.

Rod laughed. "Well, no, actually," he said. "I'm sort of a pet, I suppose I would say. Lilith, Victoria, Semiramis, they sort of pass me round amongst themselves. I suppose I'm a bit of a prodigy, I've sired girls in three households of TCD's Old Girls, and a boy or two somewhere, I'm sure. But I have a room at Cynthia's. She has a little household in the corner of the Big Pink campus."

Rod and John talked about John's prospects as a designer.

"It's much as you guessed," Rod said. "If you have an ambitious woman fronting for you, you can have influence. I'm rare in having influence of my own, because I've pulled Big Pink out of technical snarl-ups more than once, and I made sure that they knew it. But I didn't get anywhere until I had a sponsor. Well, I suppose I got somewhere. Got a lot of ideas stolen. But when they needed someone to finish baking the half-baked thing they'd made, they had to come back to me. Now as a product designer? You might have to prove yourself, then hint that some other design outfit was going to poach you. And up till a year or two, that design outfit would have been Cowrie Intuitive." Rod shook his head and laughed. "They're still wildly progressive. I hope they can hold onto that. You might do better starting there."

An electric bell rang in the corridor.

"Afternoon jill and spill," Rod said. "Mostly I just work through it, but I could take you to the networking department lounge. The prune-faced harpies would appreciate a pretty young man like you coming to play. Otherwise I'll let you go and I'll get back to work."

John swallowed. It would be a good networking experience in more than just the technical sense, if he didn't get off on the wrong foot. But maybe he should go home and consider things with a cool head. After popping himself off to get that cool head.

Rod looked at John's face. "They're not really harpies, but you know, you've been to college, they're what the brainy girls turn into, ten or twenty years out. Full of themselves, too impatient to charm a young man who's somehow wandered into their den. I won't let them give you a hard time if you wanted to go."