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paintings but not on a screen, or faces that looked unattractive in repose but quite stunning when animated, or merely plain until the person smiled.
    Jaal had been born with a face that looked - she said herself - committee design: unharmonious, stuck together, nothing quite matching. Yet to almost everybody who had ever met her, she seemed outrageously attractive, thanks to some alchemy of physiognomy, personality and expression. Fassin’s private estimation was that Jaal’s was a face still waiting to be grown into, and that she would be more beautiful when she was middle-aged than she was now. It was one reason he had asked her to marry him.
    They could look forward, Fassin had every reason to believe, to a long life together, and just as it had been sensible to marry within his profession -- and to make a match that would meet with the enthusiastic approval of their respective Septs, strengthening the bonds between two of the most important Seer houses - so it had been only prudent to take that likely longevity into account.
    Of course, as Slow Seers Fassin and Jaal’s shared future would be absolutely if not relatively longer than that of most of their contemporaries, and radically different; in the slow-time of a long delve, Seers aged very slowly indeed, and Uncle Slovius’s fourteen centuries, while short of the record and not yet (thankfully, naturally) his limit, should not be difficult to surpass. Seer spouses and loved ones had to schedule their slow-time and normal life carefully so as not to get too out of synch with each other, lest the protagonists lose touch emotionally. The life of Tchayan Olmey, Fassin’s old mentor and tutor, had hinged on just such an unforeseen discontinuity, leaving her stranded from an old love.
    ‘Anything wrong?’ Jaal asked him.
    ‘Just this, ah, interview thing.’ He glanced at the antique clock across the room.
    ‘Who’s it with?’
    ‘Can’t say,’ he told her. He’d mentioned having an appointment for an interview later when he’d first met Jaal off her suborb shuttle at the house port in the valley below, but she’d been too busy telling him about the latest gossip from the capital and the scandal regarding her Aunt Feem and the Sept Khustrial boy to question him any further on the matter. Her shower, their supper and then more urgent matters had taken precedence thereafter.
    ‘You can’t say?’ she said, frowning, turning further round towards him, lifting and repositioning one dark breast on his light brown chest as she did so. There was something, he thought, not for the first time, about an aureola more pale than its surroundings… ‘Oh, Fass,’ Jaal said, sounding annoyed, ‘it’s not a girl, is it? Not a servant girl? Fucking forfend, not before we’re married, surely?’
    She was smiling. He grinned back. ‘Nuisance, but has to be done. Sorry.’
    ‘You really can’t say?’ She shifted her head, and blonde hair spilled over his shoulder. It felt even better than it looked.
    ‘Really,’ he said.
    Jaal was staring intently at his mouth. ‘Really?’ she asked.
    ‘Well.’ He licked his teeth. ‘I can say it’s not a girl.’ She was still staring intently at his mouth. ‘Look, Jaal, have I got some sort of foreign matter lodged in there?’
    She pushed her mouth slowly up towards his. ‘Not,’ she said, ‘yet.’
    *
    ‘You are Fassin Taak, of the Seer Sept Bantrabal, ‘glantine moon, Nasqueron gas-giant planet, Ulubis star and system?’
    ‘Yes, I am.’
    ‘You are physically present here and not any sort of projection or other kind of representation?’
    ‘Correct.’
    ‘You are still an active Slow Seer, domiciled in the seasonal houses of Sept Bantrabal and working from the satellite-moon Third Fury?’
    ‘Yes, yes and yes.’
    ‘Good. Fassin Taak, everything that will pass between you and this construct is in strictest confidence. You will respect that confidence and communicate to others no more of what we shall talk