"It kills me, though," says Miles. "Emotionally speaking. There's no way out. I want to tell you a lot of things about my work - innocuous things, things like how long I expect to be out on a trip, or that I passed through Tau Ceti between runs and nearly got my face bitten off by a very pretty lizard - I hasten to clarify that this is a facetious example and has not actually happened. Or slightly less innocuous but still reasonable-for-most-ImpSec-fellows-with-wives things, like when I come back from a trip whether it was of the egg-sitting variety or actually involved getting shot at."

He turns back and paces in the other direction.

"And I can't. Because you are very, very smart, and even if you don't want the secrets, won't ask for the secrets, won't do anything with the secrets - I am just as forsworn if you happen to figure one out from a series of individually innocent hints that I could have avoided dropping but chose to be careless about. So I have to turn my entire career into the biggest black hole of non-information I possibly can, even though I very much don't want to - particularly because, if you started getting close to something so secret you could not even be allowed to know there was a secret there at all, and I had to lie to you to protect it - I would, God help me. And I want to do that even less. Words cannot express nor the vast reaches of space encompass how much I don't want to have to lie to my wife in the service of my empire, but," he throws up his hands, "that's the fucking job for you."