The Dark Lady

you can find out why.”
    “Possibly he, too, is enamored of the model's face,” I suggested.
    “I doubt it.”
    “Might I ask why?”
    “Because I haven't made any attempt to keep my purchases a secret, and he's never yet made me an offer for any of my artwork.”
    “I will look into the matter, Mr. Abercrombie,” I said.
    “See that you do,” he said, dismissing me.
    And this was how I left the employ of Tai Chong, who felt compassion for all races, and joined the service of Malcolm Abercrombie, who disliked all races equally— including, I suspected, his own.

4.
    My Dear Pattern Mother:
    Much has happened in the six weeks that I have been in the employ of Mr. Malcolm Abercrombie, and now that I am once again on Far London, I shall relate the details to you.
    But first I think I should tell you about Mr. Abercrombie himself, since you expressed some dismay about my entering his employ, based on my first description of him.
    He is, in truth, a most unusual man. I originally felt that he was a bigot; I was wrong. It would be fairer to say that he dislikes all races equally, including Man. And yet I am no longer uncomfortable in his company, possibly because he treats me with the same lack of cordiality that he treats everyone, even his own grand-daughter.
    And, as if in contradiction to my assessment, he is also capable of acts of the utmost generosity and loyalty, although he does not like to be thanked for them, and indeed is at his most surly on those occasions when I have tried.
    For example, I had to journey to Binder X on a mission for him. Only one passenger ship per week flies there from Far London, since it has little commerce with the Inner Frontier, and when I applied for passage, I was told that all the second-class seats had been taken and that aliens (which is Man's somewhat curious term for non-Men, since Man himself is an alien on more than a million worlds) were not permitted to purchase first-class compartments, even though I was demonstrably able to pay for one and more than half of them had not been sold. I reported my predicament to Mr. Abercrombie, who made a single call— and suddenly I was given not merely a compartment but a two-room suite! It was such an act of generosity that I could not bring myself to tell him that the moment the ship took off I immediately left my quarters and spent most of the journey in the second-class lounge, mingling with the other non-human passengers. If he cannot understand the concept of the House, how could I ever explain to him the warmth and security of the Herd?
    When I thanked him for sparing me this imagined humiliation, he replied that I was his employee, and that the insult was to him. It was not the treatment of aliens as inferiors that bothered him; in fact, it is a concept with which he is in wholehearted agreement. But the treatment of Malcolm Abercrombie's servants as inferiors is evidently not to be tolerated, even when that servant is myself.
    He is truly a man of contradictions. One of the wealthiest men on Far London, able to purchase anything that he desires, he nonetheless seems not to enjoy his money. His knowledge of art is, at best, limited, and yet he has spent a considerable portion of his fortune on it. Most Men refuse to use robotic or non-human assistants or employees, fearing the encroachment of the former and feeling contemptuous of the latter, but Mr. Abercrombie's house is run by three robots, and I am the only other sentient entity with access to the premises. He has made an enormous contribution to a local hospital in the name of one of his deceased sons, and yet he distrusts doctors so much that he suffers with a very painful tumor at the base of his spine rather than allow them to remove it. He refuses to speak about either of his dead sons, though I feel certain that he loved them; he speaks constantly of his daughter and his grandchild, both of whom— unbelievably— he loathes. He spends thousands of credits on his gardens, and never walks through them or even looks at them from his window. He speaks to me in the most insulting manner, and yet I believe he would never permit any other Man to do the same, at least while I am in his employ. He pays me barely enough for my own subsistence, and yet I know he has made generous arrangements with both the Claiborne Galleries and the House of Crsthionn. He has a huge stock of wine, whiskey, and other human stimulants, but I have never known him to partake of any of