Part Two: The Hall of Names

Entry 89. 2416–2419. The refusals. The building.

I went home the slow way, which the reader now knows is the only way I go, twenty-eight months this time, working the infirmary of an ore ship whose master had posted the berth listing with the line MEDICAL OFFICER WANTED, PREVIOUS APPLICANTS NEED NOT BE FAMOUS, which is Belt humor, and which was also, I understood by then, a diagnosis: the settled worlds had spent eleven years deciding what I was, and having decided, they now had to decide what to do with me, and the second question was in every way harder, because the first had one answer and the second had ten thousand wrong ones, and most of the wrong ones were promotions.