The attaché receives the cartridge (pp. 34–35)
his black-veiled, ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening any constrictive clothing, adjusting the room’s lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin […] the medical attaché’s wife, like all the veiled wives and companions of the Prince’s legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account.
Context
The first veil in the book, the evening the Entertainment arrives in the mail — worn as pure wordless servility, an entire class of "veiled wives and companions" attending the men who become the samizdat's first victims. The U.H.I.D. arc will invert every term of it: Joelle's veil hides rather than effaces, elects rather than obeys.