"Yes."
"I heard about you. You are Inis. How much did he pay for you?"
Inis shuddered.
"He paid for me as much as they asked."
"Does he love you?"
"Mr. Bemish likes me quite a bit." Inis said.
"Why haven't I seen you at the construction?"
Inis smiled guiltily.
"Mr. Bemish really wanted me to be at the construction," Inis said.
"He taught me himself how to work with accounting software and make accounting reports. He made me his secretary. And then this crap happened…
I was once sitting in the office in the evening when three workers came in.
They were going to file a complaint about their manager but when they saw me sitting there alone, they assaulted me and… I was just able to call for help. After that, I asked Mr. Bemish to let me stay in the villa and he agreed."
Inis straightened up and added proudly.
"But I do a lot of stuff here. I check all the bills and last month I saved Mr. Bemish two hundred thousand when I noticed one local official running fake accounts through the company."
She sighed and added.
"We still had to give this official a fifty thousand bribe."
"What software do you use," Ashinik asked.
He had practically no experience with computers and, frankly, he was afraid of these scary answerers that Earthmen always carried with them like handkerchiefs and at every third word took them out of their pockets and spread open. Seeing them always reminded him one of the most popular sect myths — that demons took their souls out and put them in these organic silicon handkerchiefs or iron boxes and the demons' souls felt lonely and blinked on the monitors with multicolored lights.
Inis started saying something but Ashinik had drifted off. "The demon is not very jealous if he leaves his concubine alone with a young man," he thought.
Ashinik returned to the construction in three days and Bemish was very happy since it was quite difficult to manage things without him. Bemish happened to send Ashinik to villa several times for important papers or with some orders and Ashinik always drove there with a visible delight.
Soon Inis appeared in Bemish's office again as a secretary and Ashinik's frequent trips to the villa came to an end. Ashinik and Inis were quite a bit younger than Terence Bemish — she was seventeen, he was twenty — but Bemish just didn't notice how Inis' blushed when his young deputy entered the company director's office and how often Ashinik and Inis ate together in the company cafeteria or in one of the port's restaurants that had grown around like mushrooms.
Although, Terence Bemish declared at his first meeting with Inis some words about the freedom of will, in reality this freedom of will extended only as far as him making Inis his secretary — while Inis was a nice and kind girl, blindingly bright she was not. Bemish was quite happy when she handed him a clean shirt and socks in the morning, excellent coffee at noon and spent nights in his bed — when, of course, the Assalah company head was not having fun in a capital bordello or at a high rank official reception that would usually come to an end in the same bordello.
Bemish took as good care of her as he did of expensive house furniture but he knew that nothing better than a secretary could come out of Inis — a nice pleasant girl with a warm heart and, let's admit it, not a very smart head. And Terence Bemish assigned automatically any unintelligent person to a place at the very bottom of his rating list.
The next week, Trevis visited the construction. The meeting had been planned a while ago and had nothing to do with the zealots' affair but Trevis probably heard something during the flight. His first question upon arrival was,
"Terence, what's going on here? They say that you appointed some zealot to be your deputy?"
"Let me introduce Ashinik to you," Bemish said.
Ashinik bowed. Trevis stared at the youth.
"Do you consider me a demon?" Trevis inquired.
"I am not familiar with you," Ashinik answered seriously, "But what I've heard about you makes me think that a lot of people would call you a demon and you wouldn't take an offence at this name anyway."
Trevis laughed out.
"Well, even if you are a zealot, at least you are not crazy," he said.
On the eighteenth, Bemish spoke to the sovereign Varnazd. It happened the following way.
Bemish collected quite a number of papers requiring Shavash's signature and he arrived to the capital in person bringing the papers and gifts with him. He was told that Shavash was in the palace and he would be there till morning. Bemish went to the palace. He entered without an issue.
Umpteen pavilions and inner yards and the gardens breathing with freshness were so unexpectedly beautiful that Bemish, tired of the banging concrete blocks and of all the filth of his huge construction, forgot everything walking thoughtlessly amidst the dancing gods and pompously cackling peacocks. Suddenly somebody called him out of a carved gazebo.
"Mr. Bemish!"
Bemish turned around and came closer trying to recall where, out of all the endless receptions, he saw this young official with a nice and uncertain face and eyebrows pulling upwards like a sparrow's tail.
"Don't you recognize me?" the official asked smiling.
"Oh, my sovereign," Bemish exclaimed, going down on one knee, "How can one not recognize you?!"
The sovereign pointed Bemish to a woven chair deep in the gazebo. Bemish sat in the chair and pushed the paper folder behind his back.
"I wanted to ask you," the sovereign continued, "What is "unfathomable?"
"What?" Bemish was astounded. The sovereign picked a volume lying in front of him and read, stretching the vowels slightly.
Unfathomable sea, whose waves are years,
Ocean of time, whose waters of deep woe,
Are salted with the salt of human tears…
Bemish lowered his eyes looking at the front page — it was Percy Bysshe Shelley.
"Ah," Bemish said, "Unfathomable means bottomless. It's a poetic word. I don't think anybody would need it now."
"Yes," the sovereign nodded, "A lot of poetic words disappeared from your language. But numerous abbreviations appeared, didn't they?
Bemish nodded.
"It's a pity," the sovereign said, "that they don't translate your old books. They translate dictionaries and manuals but not Shelley."