Dr. Verlanic's lips were taut, her features frozen in controlled anger.  "You'll have to excuse me," she told the young man sitting across the table from her.  "I warned them that this was bound to happen, that they couldn't fill postings like this based only on their intuitions and the Service's needs."  She took a deep breath.  "But that's not any fault of yours.  You don't have any idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

Alexi shook his head in confusion.  "Not a clue."

"Well, you can probably guess this involves Renee, your lover."

"I figured that much."

"She came in this morning, along with the rest of her group." Dr. Verlanic consulted a notebook before her.  "Thirty-eight of them, being sent to postings all over the world.  You knew that."

"Sure.  It's all we talked about last night, pretty much all we talked about for the last week.  She was going to send me a note when she got established, tell me where she was.  Then I was going to see about going there too, go to be with her."

"You're accepting your subsidy."  Her tone was pointedly nonjudgmental.

"Yeah, but I do some side work, that's allowed, waiting on tables sometimes, tutoring algebra and Russian.  I saved some money, I have enough to travel to be with her."

"Your money, not hers."

"No, no, we know the rules.  It's all mine."

"So you're committed enough to go live with her but not enough to get married."

Alexi's look was very uncomfortable.  "Well, there's a problem.  She wants to get married, have kids.  I want to wait a while longer, take our time."

"I see."  He thought that she might be growing angry with him but it was only resigned irritation.  "Your life is pretty nice the way it is, all your needs are met, you have pretty lovers.  Why screw it up with children and responsibilities?"  She sighed.  "But that's not why you're here.  Or why I'm here.  Look, Renee accepted a posting this morning, started to go through with it and then got cold feet.  She decided she didn't want to accept it after all."

"It must have been a pretty awful place.  She's very committed."

"Of course she is.  We all are."  She started to say something else but stopped in mid-breath.  "Anyway, it wasn't a problem of the posting being to where as to being as what."  From the look on his face, she saw that she might as well be speaking in Mandarin.  "Let me back up.  Not all our missions are to different countries, some of them are to different peoples."

"Peoples..."

"Non-human peoples.  The Slyph.  The Zaltys.  The mer-folk."

"You have diplomatic relations with...creatures?"  The thought was obviously new to him.

"Of course.  They're important to us, they're separate Powers, of course we have missions to them.  The complication is that some non-humans, most of them actually, aren't comfortable in our environment and we aren't comfortable in theirs.  We can't do our work if there's no comfort level between our representatives."

"So you need to get a level of comfort," he prompted.

"So to get a level of comfort, all the staff of our missions to them get transformed.  They become the same, physically, as the peoples they're assigned to."

"And that's what you did to Renee."

Dr. Verlanic spread her hands.  "She didn't take it very well."

"Take what very well?  You still haven't told me what happened to her."

Dr. Verlanic adjusted her glasses.  "You're right, I haven't told you."  She looked him straight in the eyes.  "We shrunk her."

It took a minute or two before Renee started to regain control.  I'm past the Rubicon now, she thought, and I'd better deal with it.  Still lying beneath the great white sheet of fabric, she wriggled into the dark green pants.  She had to rise to a kneeling position to put on the shirt, then climb to her feet and fumble through the drooping folds to find her former neckhole, or maybe an armhole, and scramble out into the world again.  She practiced controlling her breath, trying to will her heart to stop pounding and her legs to quit trembling.

The clearness of the light was surprising.  It was like being in a whole new world, which in a way she was.  From the center of a field of white cloth, she looked out at her surroundings.  Beyond the edges of the cloth, strange plants grew out of what looked like wet gravel.  Her perceptions shifted focus and recognised the plants for what they were: common garden flowers, tulips taller than she was, towering daffodils.  She drifted to the edge of the dirt and looked down on a smaller flower, a crocus.  It was a slight relief to be able to look down on at least one thing; some small bit of confidence returned.  She steeled herself to look up, and out.

The gigantic bushes and trees were almost normal seeming, not at all startling.  Maybe I'm getting used to this, she thought, as her gaze climbed to the sky.  She looked up, and up, and up.  The sky was so far up.  The world was such a huge place.  Concentrate, dammit, concentrate, she told herself.  Deep breaths, think calmness, relax, relax.  And she did relax, slightly, enough to rip her attention from that yawning blue depth and onto things closer to her plane.  There was relief in the finite windowframes of the great building surrounding the garden, in the glint of sunlight on a roof line.  She made a quarter turn, looking, when she saw the face.  The guard had moved closer and was silently and impassively regarding her.  He leaned over now, inspecting the reduced figure she had become.  It was the blank stare on the that enormous expressionless face that finally set her off.

She began to scream.

"She's resting now, unconscious."  Dr. Verlanic's tone had become clinical while she described the events in the garden.  "The officer had the wit to throw her cloak over her again, then he sprayed her with sedative.  We're keeping her that way."

"So what can I do about it?"  There was a part of Alexi that wanted to be angry with this woman, with this whole organisation for what they had done to Renee, but he knew better than to let that surface.  He'd accepted his subsidy; he knew his place. Getting angry wouldn't help Renee in any case.  He needed to work with these people, not antagonise them.  "You must need me to do something."

"Unfortunately, we do.  We don't like like bringing outsiders into our problems."  Dr. Verlanic might have added, especially outsiders like Alexi, but there was no need for that.  "Renee had a pretty violent reaction to her change and the Service was somewhat at fault there.  We should have had have a more helpful person with her at the time; she should have been briefed more thoroughly.  Nobody even considered the possibility of agoraphobia.  She's still sleeping now but we want somebody she trusts present when she wakes up.  She doesn't have any close family near here and her Service friends are all unavailable at the moment.  That leaves you."

"So you want me to be there when she wakes up."

"To be there and be comforting.  Help her adjust."

Since the rent was paid for another ten days, there was no trouble about using her old apartment.  He even had a spare key that he had neglected to return.  Better yet, it was a furnished apartment, still perfectly livable.  True, there might be a shortage of towels in the closet or food on the shelves but the place lacked nothing that he'd be needing.  Alexi carefully set the light basket down on the kitchen counter, took off his coat, cautiously lifted a corner of the cloth covering the basket and peered inside.

Renee was still out cold, face down, burrowing into the folds of the towel in the basket bottom.  He felt a faint gust of warmth escape past his cheek, carrying a whiff of her familiar scent.  Almost reverently, he replaced the covering and considered his next move.  The living room or bedroom would be more comfortable places for him to wait and for her to wake.  The coffee table for her, he decided, the couch for him, only a couple of steps away.  He gently moved her basket and settled himself down.  Lord, it occurred to him,  what a strange trip this is.  Waiting for lover to wake up, that was nothing new, but waiting for one who had been miniaturised and traumatised, that was novel.  He composed himself to reflect on the past few hours.

Truth to tell, this wasn't like waiting for Renee to wake up.  The poor shrunken being in the basket wasn't Renee any more.  It wasn't the person he'd courted, flirted with, made love to.  What pretenses could he show when she woke?  He'd do what he could, yes.  Comfort her, yes.  He'd be helping a stranger though and he knew it.  Renee was gone from his world.  He stared glumly at the basket on the table for what seemed a very long time.

Depressing thoughts are boring thoughts, if lingered on for any length of time, and Alexi had a low tolerance for boredom.  It actually wasn't very long before the minutes started to drag and he looked around the room for something to distract himself.  All Renee's books were packed, periodicals discarded.  He thought about watching a video show but that would clearly be inappropriate.  At least he could listen to music.  He had the system start one of her programs.

She woke to familiar sounds, musical tendrils creeping into her brain, elegant violin notes that were new even now, though she'd heard them a thousand times.  Comfort came with what she heard, other senses contributing too, touch, smell, all reassuring.  She loved to linger in the place between sleep and waking, knowing full well where she was and where she was going, while banishing the bad dreams still lingering.  It was never a place she could stay long; always the tide of awakening carried her on to full consciousness.  Soon enough she was awake.

The surroundings had a familiar feel even as they were totally strange.  Dim light, a small room, soft coarse fabric underneath her - this was no place she had ever been.  And she never went to sleep fully clothed, in a Service uniform yet.  All the phantoms from her dreams returned in full reality.  Those hadn't been unpleasant dreams but the truth.  Drastic, turbulent things had happened to her; she had been altered, reduced, shrunk.

She moved not a muscle below her neck and raised her head only enough to turn it from side to side, enough to confirm that her initial impressions were correct.  She was alone in some sort of small dim room with a soft fabric floor.  Looking up, she could see that the ceiling was lumpy and baggy, most likely fabric too.  But where did that music come from?  How did the Service know that she loved Grappelli?  There was only one way to find out.  She'd have to face her new world eventually; it might as well be now.  She stood up, reached up, pushed aside a fold in the cloth draped overhead and peeked out.

She was in a great chamber, well lit and vaguely familiar.  A vertical shape puzzled her briefly until she adjusted for scale and recognised it easily: a door frame.  She appeared to be an ordinary room magnified to hugeness.  At the thought, her heart skipped a beat and she had to close her eyes and withdraw.  Stop thinking about it that way, she told herself furiously as she re-opened her eyes in the comforting dimness.  The room out there is the same size it's always been.  You're the one who's shrunk.

The realisation sunk in more thoroughly this time and for the first time she really accepted it.  She had shrunk and there was nothing to be done about it.  Nothing, that is, but to deal with it.  She felt her way along the wall, absently trying to identify the material.  Wood of some sort, rough, unfinished, round, like small logs.  Very small logs, of course: sticks.  She was in a basket in the middle of a room.  Feeling more confident with the increased knowledge, she picked a point opposite her first vantage to try a second time.  Now the room looked very familiar for the obvious reason that it was her apartment.  She recognized the layout of the front door, the hallway leading to the bedroom, the edge of the sofa.  She shifted her position slightly, opening a different gap in the cloth enveloping her head.  There was a person sitting on her sofa, looking directly at her.

She ducked down immediately, her newly rebuilt confidence badly shaken.  What, exactly, was going on?  That was her apartment out there, she was sure of that, and she had been shrunk, she was even more sure of that.  But that had happened at Service headquarters, in a pleasant, private garden, or so she remembered.  She'd moved out of this place earlier in the morning.  But her memories were uncertain, tinged with confusion and terror.  Maybe something else had happened, something more sinister.  For a moment she shivered, frantically considering what to do next.  It wasn't like she had a lot of alternatives.  She could try to hide where she was or she could try to learn more.  She stood erect and looked out again.

It certainly was her apartment.  Even though she'd only lived there a few weeks, she'd been very fond of it, at home the minute she'd first set foot there.  The only jarring note present was the man sitting on her sofa, not staring directly at her now, looking apprehensively around the room instead.  She adjusted for perspective, this time without effort, and he slipped into recognition.  There was no reason for Alexi to be here, but then again, there was no reason for her to be here either.

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