Starmind

10 The Shimizu Hotel 7 January 2064

By the time Jay and his brother had finished a room-service dinner and separated for the night, it was 21:45. Jay tried to call Eva, but her phone was not even accepting messages. He and Rand had accomplished so much work that he decided to celebrate. He jaunted to Jake’s, in the Deluxe Tier, one of the livelier of the Shimizu’s twenty-one taverns—and one of only three in which off-duty employees were welcome. There he found some friends, and settled down to matching orbits with them.

He liked Jake’s; he had become a semiregular there since Ethan left him for an earthworm. The management frowned on spilled blood or broken bones, but was tolerant of merriment short of that point. It was a great place to hear extravagant lies. One red-faced old man, for instance, a wildcat asteroid miner named Wang Bin who had come to the Shimizu to drink up a lucky strike, insisted on telling the whole room about a “white Stardancer” he claimed to have seen on his last trip out. “Damn near ran into him, no beacon or anything, spotted him by eyeball. Just like any other Stardancer, but white as a slug. Didn’t even have the manners to acknowledge my hail.” And a groundhog dancer from Terra who had joined Jay’s table told them all a whopper about a broken ankle that had healed itself just in time for a curtain.

The dancer was attractive, close enough to his age and well built—but as Jay thought about making an approach, he realized he still wasn’t ready. The memory of Ethan was still too clear. A few abortive experiments had reconfirmed for him that casual sex is best with oneself—certainly simpler.

A sense of duty made Jay leave sooner than he wanted to. As soon as he got back to his room, he tried Eva again. Considering the late hour, he did not expect to reach her; he hoped to leave a message requesting an appointment for a chat tomorrow. But the face that appeared onscreen was not Jeeves. Instead he saw a bald and beardless man who had done nothing to disguise the fact that he was well over ninety years old, dressed in black loose-fitting tunic and trousers.

“Hi, Reb,” Jay said after a moment of surprise. “I heard you were coming over. How are things in Top Step?”

Reb Hawkins bent forward in the Buddhist gassho bow, then smiled warmly. “Hello, Jay. It’s good to see you again. Things are well in Top Step, I’m happy to say. How is it with you these days?”

It had been a long day; Jay was too tired for tact. “To be honest, Reb, I’m consumed with curiosity. Is Eva still up?”

“She’s gone to bed, but she told me to expect your call. Why don’t you come over for a cup? We haven’t talked in a while. Or are you too tired? I know you’ve been working hard on the new piece.”

Jay was torn. His brain hurt. But he did want to know why his old friend had decided not to die after all, and it was not the sort of question that could be dealt with over the phone. “I’m on my way.”

Hawkins-roshi was something of a legend in space. He was a Zen Buddhist monk, and the oldest continuous resident of Top Step, the Earth-orbiting asteroid where human beings came to enter Symbiosis. For over forty years, until his retirement, he had helped hundreds of thousands of postulants make that profound transition, from Homo sapiens to Homo caelestis, with minimal psychological and spiritual trauma. A cronkite had once referred to him as the Modest Midwife to the Starmind. During those four decades, he had also made regular visits to most of the other human habitations in High Earth Orbit, including the Shimizu, dispensing spiritual sustenance and friendship to Buddhists and nonBuddhists alike. He and Eva were old and close friends, had known each other since they’d been groundhogs. Jay had met Reb through her.

Almost the moment Eva’s door had dilated behind Jay, he was glad he had come. He had forgotten how soothing Reb’s presence could be. It was not merely his obvious years; Jay was pretty sure Reb had had the same effect on people when he was a teenager. He simply had an almost tangible aura around him, projected a zone of serenity, of clarity, of acceptance. There is a quality dancers call “presence,” and Jay was very good at achieving it onstage. Therefore he knew how amazing it was for Reb to have it all the time, every day. Presumably Hawkins-roshi had an automatic pilot, like everybody else… but he never seemed to use it. He would surely have long since been abbot of his own monastery somewhere down on Earth by now, if he had not found a career more important to him in space; helping human beings become something more.

“How long are you here for?” Jay asked him. “Can that big rock get along without you?”

Reb smiled. “Top Step can get along just fine without me. I’m retired, remember? It’s Meiya’s headache these days. I’ll be here for a week, or until Eva throws me out, whichever comes first. I can use the vacation.”

“I’m glad. I’d like to have a long talk with you sometime.”

Reb nodded. “But not tonight. You’re exhausted. You don’t want any tea, do you? I’ll make this as quick as I can. You want to know why Eva has changed her mind.”

Jay nodded gratefully. “She told you she’d confided in me, then.”

Reb nodded. “We talked for a long time. About suffering, and what it is for. About friendship, and what that is for. About what she has done since she came here to space, and what she might do yet. About samsara. In the end I was able to persuade her that to end one’s life when one is not in mortal pain or fear is a kind of arrogance.”

Jay stared. He had said much the same thing to Eva, in one form or another, at least a dozen times in the last month. “But Eva is arrogant,” he blurted out.

Reb said nothing.

It came to Jay that perhaps Reb was just better than he was at teaching people about arrogance. Come to think of it, he was doing it now…

“Well,” Jay said lamely, “that’s great, then. I’m glad you managed to get through to her. But I still don’t see how you—”

“How do you feel about Eva’s new decision?” Reb interrupted quietly. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

One of the problems with talking with holy men was their uncanny habit of putting a finger—gently, nonthreateningly—right on your sore spots. Another was the difficulty of successfully bullshitting them. “Ambivalent,” he admitted.

Reb nodded. “I can see why. What a mix of emotions you must have felt, when she asked you to dance at her dying.”

Jay nodded vigorous agreement. “Oh God, yes! Sad, of course, but also proud to have been asked, and annoyed at the extra workload, and creatively stimulated, and… and Reb, I’m almost as confused right now. I’m glad we’re not going to lose her. But I’ve just gone through a month of trauma and grief reconciling myself to the idea that we were… and I’ve wasted hours of work on a piece that now may never get performed, at a time when I was already up to my ass in alligators… and—”

“And?”

“—and if you want to know the truth, a part of me resents the hell out of you, for accomplishing in one conversation what I’ve failed to do in a month of trying. I mean, I know this is your line of work—but she and I have been friends a long time. Part of me wants to kick you—and then go wake her up and punch her in the nose.”

Reb grinned. “You’re welcome to kick me. But if you feel you must wake Eva, make sure your insurance is paid up first. Whatever Eva’s brain may be thinking at any given moment, her body’s survival instincts are strong… and I happen to know she fights dirty.”

“Yeah, I know.” Jay had once seen a foolish person behave rudely to Eva. He lived.

“Think of it this way. A man tries to split a tough piece of wood with an ax. He strikes again and again, day after day, with no result. Then another man comes along and takes a tentative swing. The wood splits with a loud crack. Did the first man play no part?”

“Well… sure, he did. But he’s going to feel frustrated as hell.”

“So you didn’t just want Eva not to die; you wanted the credit for changing her mind. Be content with partial credit, all right?”

Jay laughed ruefully. “You’re right. I’m being silly.”

“Also known as the human condition. You’re tired and high. Go to bed, and in the morning you’ll be a much more admirable human being. I’ll be impressed, I promise.”

Jay laughed out loud. Reb could always jolly him out of a sulk. “You’re right. Uh… look, tomorrow’s going to be hectic. Could you ask Eva if she can set aside time for a visit with me the day after tomorrow?”

“I’ll tell Jeeves.”

“Thanks. And could you and I have a talk the day after that?”

“Whenever you like. I’m going to be busy myself tomorrow, but the rest of the week is pretty much open. Diaghilev and Rild can work out a time.”

“Good. I’ll see you then.”

“And I’ll see you tomorrow night at the performance,” Reb said.

“Oh, right. I should have known you’d be on the comp list.”

They exchanged bows, and Jay left. On the way home his thoughts were so scattered that he let Diaghilev navigate for him. Eva’s sudden flip-flop just seemed so weird, so… arbitrary. Rhea would have said that it didn’t ring true artistically. Eva spends sixteen years making up her mind, withstands a month of argument from me… and then Reb shows up and tells her suicide isn’t nice, and she folds? There had to be more to it than that. What else had Reb said to her? All Jay could think of to do was to ask her at his first opportunity.

As he jaunted along, he remembered some of Reb’s closing words. “Diaghilev and Rild can work out a time.” Jay was struck by that now. Reb met thousands of people a year, juggled trillions of details… and had remembered the name of Jay’s AI without checking. He himself had forgotten that Reb called his own AI “Rild”—and had never gotten around to following up his original mental note to find out what that name signified. Whereas he was willing to bet that Reb knew not only who Sergei Diaghilev had been, but exactly what he symbolized for Jay. Perhaps here was a clue as to why Reb had succeeded with Eva where he had failed. Reb retained every detail of what people told him, and followed them up, thought them through. “Sergei,” he said suddenly, “who did Reb Hawkins name his AI for?”

“I don’t know, Jay. Shall I find out?”

“Please.”

“Waiting… The only match I find on file is a character in a twentieth-century novel called LORD OF LIGHT, by Roger Zelazny. Rild was student of the Buddha, a former assassin who came to surpass his master in enlightenment.”

The answer was interesting—but what caught Jay’s attention was its first word. It had taken Diaghilev a startlingly long time—nearly two whole seconds—to tap into the vast memory cores of the Net. It was late at night; most guests and staff were asleep. Someone must be using a hell of a lot of bandwidth and processing power for something.

Of course. The Fat Five were inboard. When Leviathan swims under your boat, the sea swells.

He was essentially asleep before he reached his suite; Diaghilev guided him inside, sealed the door, undressed him, administered hangover preventative, and strapped him into his sleepsack so that he would not wake with the classic free-fall stiff neck. His dreams were full of Stardancers… millions upon countless millions of them, swarming around Terra like moths around a fire, staining the ionosphere red with their numbers.

The next day began with an omen, to which he paid insufficient attention.

“Huh? Whazzit?”

“I’m sorry, Jay,” Diaghilev said, “but Evelyn Martin insists on speaking to you at once.”

Jay suggested some other things Martin could do instead; Diaghilev pointed out that they were physically impossible. “Not for him they aren’t. All right, all right: audio only, accept. What the fuck do you want?”

“You’re not archiving tonight, right?” Martin’s nasal voice demanded.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” From time to time, especially if he had made any alterations in the choreography, Jay would have a concert recorded for archival purposes—and some of the camera angles would include the faces of the audience. Martin was afraid he might do so tonight, with the Fat Five in the house. As a matter of fact, he had been planning to. “Of course not. Anyway, what’s the difference? By the time the tapes are edited, the uips will be long gone, and the fact that they’ve been here won’t be secret anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Martin said. “Just promise me the cameras stay off tonight. If you want to swear it on your mother’s grave, I won’t mind.”

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“I don’t give a shit. I’ve been up all night, swimming in a river of shit upside down, and the tide’s still coming in: they come aboard in a couple of hours. I feel like that little Dutch kid that used to go around sticking his finger in lesbians; if it ain’t one thing it’s six others. On top of everything else I had a guest croak on me a couple of hours ago, like I got nothing else to do—”

“A guest died?” That was unusual. The Shimizu had diagnostics and emergency medical facilities as good as anything on Terra; it would take something like an exploding bullet to the brain to defeat them. The saying was, You couldn’t die here if you tried. “How did he manage that?”

“Genius. Apparently he built the comm gear in his p-suit himself. So he’s outside taking a stroll, and he goes to put in a call to his heap, up at the dock. Only his homemade antenna slips out of alignment when his homemade power supply blows up, so he microwaves his frontal lobe instead. So now I got to grease all the news weasels to forget to file the story, and rummage through the antheap down there to find his dirtbag relatives and grease them—”

Jay did not want to hear about french-fried brains and PR men’s problems before coffee. “Who was he?” he interrupted. “Anybody I’d know?”

“Nah—just checked in yesterday. Some old rock rat who struck it rich, and decided to spend his fortune and the last minutes of his life making mine miserable. Why the hell couldn’t the inconsiderate bastard have poached his brains out there in the Belt somewhere, where it wouldn’t have been my problem?”

Alcoholic memory stirred. “Wait a minute. Chinese guy? Wang something?”

“How the hell did you know?” Martin sounded suspicious.

“I ran into him at Jake’s last night. He was telling us all some yarn about a white Stardancer.”

“Jesus Christ—keep that quiet, will you? It’s gonna be hard enough sitting on this, and those bastards love anything with a Stardancer hook, gives ’em great visuals to cut to. ‘White Stardancer,’ my ass—the old fart’s probably been sautéeing his cerebrum for weeks now, and only just finished the job this morning. Hey, that’s it—if he was already brain-damaged when he got here, we got no liability at all—”

This triggered Jay’s gag reflex. “I’ll keep the cameras off tonight, Ev,” he said, and cut the connection. Getting back to sleep was out of the question now, so he called for coffee, unstrapped himself from his sleepsack, and began his day.

Twelve extremely hectic hours later, he met Rand and his family at their suite and journeyed with them to the Nova Dance Theatre. All were dressed in their finest, and the adults were as nervous as if they were about to go onstage themselves. They chattered along the way, and fiddled with their seams and fastenings, and inspected each other for unseen flaws in costume or makeup. Only Colly seemed to take it all in stride; money and power did not impress her, since she did not use the former and had all she presently wanted of the latter.

They had to pass a checkpoint to reach the foyer, manned by six very serious-looking guards, each wearing different-colored armbands. No weapons were visible, but it was clear that they were available. Jay noticed with amusement that the guards seemed to watch each other as carefully and constantly as they did the civilians. Five private security forces, plus the Shimizu security, and none of them trusted any of the others.

And indeed, when they had passed thumbprint and retina checks and entered the foyer, Nika, the tech director, approached them before Jay could even begin trying to spot the uips. “Boss,” she said, “how the hell am I supposed to call the show with a six-pack of gorillas looking over my shoulder, frowning every time I touch something?”

“Jesus,” Jay muttered. “They’re even back in the tech hole?”

“They seem to think it’s their fucking command center,” she said bitterly. “And there’s more six-packs at every entrance and exit to this area, plus one at each stage wing. I don’t care about them, as long as none of the dancers crash into them when they exit, but can’t you get me a little elbow room in the hole?”

Jay thought about it. “I don’t think so, Nika. They’re right; that area has to be secured. If I were an assassin, backstage is the way I’d come in. Do the best you can, okay? At least Rand and I won’t be in there with all of you; we’re watching this one from the house. Just tell the goons not to touch anything while the concert’s running.”

“None of them would dare. The other five would shoot him. They get nervous every time I touch a control. Honest to God, I never saw such a paranoid bunch in my life.”

“If you needed bodyguards, wouldn’t you want them to be paranoid? I have to go—”

Nika jaunted off, frowning, and Jay caught up with Rand and his family. They were just being presented to the honored guests by Katherine Tokugawa.

“Mr. Imaro Amin… Pandit Chatur Birla… Honorable Chen Ling Ho… Ms. Victoria Hathaway… Citizen Grijk Krugnk… please permit me to present the Shimizu’s Co-Artistic Directors: our resident choreographer, Mr. Jay Sasaki, and our resident Shaper, Rand Porter.” All bowed. Jay was amused again. Kate had solved an impossible protocol problem in the only way she could—by introducing the five uips to her vips in alphabetical order…

“We bid you welcome to Nova Dance Theatre, lady and gentlemen,” Rand said smoothly. “It gives me great pride to present my wife, the author Rhea Paixao, and our daughter, Colly.”

More bows all around. “I read your last book, AND CALL HER BLESSED, with great pleasure, Ms. Paixao,” Birla said.

“So did I,” Hathaway said, “and it was wonderful. Even better than THE FREE LUNCH.”

“I would have to agree,” Birla said, “although it is a close call. I have conversations with characters of yours all the time.”

Rhea thanked them, turning a fetching shade of pink. The compliments had to be genuine: the uips had not expected to meet her, and had no reason to stroke her if they had. Jay was stunned to learn that people as rich as this read fiction for pleasure—two of them, anyway. And while Rhea had a good and growing literary reputation, she had never yet had a top-ten bestseller: you had to care about good books to know of her work. Interesting. Uips were not automatically philistines. Rand caught his eye and grinned, and Jay knew precisely what he was thinking: if they like Rhea’s stuff, they’ll like ours.

While the conversational pleasantries flowed back and forth, Jay studied these five people who could make Kate Tokugawa snap to attention. He had never met a whole handful of trillionaires before.

Amin was a Kikuyu financier from Kenya, said to be the only African trillionaire. Of average height and mass, he was in his early forties and looked thirty, except for his eyes; he was the most obviously vicious of the five. His hair was straightened, but paradoxically his skin tone was artificially darkened, to a Bantu black which did not match his nose and cheek structure. His fortune was based on Earth-to-orbit shipping. He ignored the arbitrary local vertical which everyone else had adopted—the Terrans from habit, the spacers out of politeness—and just let himself drift free.

Birla, a swarthy Marwari from Rajputna, was the talker of the group, which made him seem more trivial than he could possibly have been. He was a hundred and twenty—four years older than Eva!—and looked forty. According to the bio Jay had scanned, he was ostensibly a devout Hindu, but he seemed in no hurry at all to reincarnate. The friendly twinkle in his eyes had to be fake, but it was a good fake. He owned as large a proportion of the Terran and orbital media as the UN would let him, and influenced even more; Evelyn Martin hovered near him solicitously, ready to open a vein on request.

Chen Ling Ho, a Mandarin from Beijing, was fifty and looked fifty. He was short to the point of tininess, smaller than Kate, and looked as benign and childlike as Colly. Jay had read that his enemies called him The Krait. He was also the Zen Buddhist at whose request Reb Hawkins had been invited to the Shimizu. That interested Jay: there were many Chinese Buddhists, but few who followed the Soto path, which had originated in twelfth-century Japan. Chen was a grandson of the legendary Chen Ten Li, the twentieth-century statesman who had been present at the creation of the Starmind; heavy (and early) family investment in nanotechnology had made Ten Li rich beyond measure. In defiance of tradition, it had been the second generation—his son Chen Hsi Feng—who had nearly succeeded in destroying the family name and fortune, by becoming an antiStardancer fanatic and launching a treacherous and doomed attack on the Starmind. Ling Ho, the third generation, had miraculously managed to salvage most of the wreckage, largely thanks to adroit fence-mending with the Starmind. That doubtless accounted for his conversion to Reb Hawkins’s faith. Jay wondered how many trillionaire Zen students there were.

Victoria Hathaway was a WASP from New York; calendar age eighty-seven, apparent age just under thirty. She looked like holo stars wished they looked—but there was a coldness in her eyes and mouth that made Jay think of her as a long sleek shiny pair of scissors, with a carefully trimmed little tuft of pubic hair just at the place where the blades joined. Most of her money was said to be in real estate, on and off Terra, and she was famous for both her ruthlessness and her absolute lack of any vestige of a sense of humor—though no one dared mention the latter quality to her face.

Grijk Krugnk was by far the ugliest of the lot, a Slav of some kind from Votoskojek who was sixty-six and looked fiftyish. He was built like a power plant, but not as pretty, so obviously a brute that many had found him fatally easy to underestimate. His wealth sprang from power generation, most of it spaceborne. Oddly, he was the only one of the five whose English was utterly unaccented, like a cronkite’s. He handled himself in free-fall as well as Amin, but made less of a point of it. His complexion must have been ruddy on earth; in zero gee his face looked like a tomato.

Each of the five had a personal bodyguard, and all but Chen had an additional companion as well. These latter were introduced, but Jay didn’t bother to remember any of the names; they were obviously AIs with a pulse. The killers were not introduced, as it might have distracted them. Chen’s bodyguard seemed to be the only one with any extensive space experience: Jay noticed that he watched feet as well as hands. That made his boss the smartest of the five uips.

“Is there anything you would like to tell us about the work we are about to see, Mr. Sasaki? Mr. Porter?” Birla asked, snapping Jay out of his reverie. Rand let him take it.

“No, sir,” he said. “If it doesn’t speak for itself, then nothing I could say will help. Shall we go in?”

Perhaps taking their cue from Tokugawa’s introduction, the five uips entered the theater in alphabetical order. Once inside, things got briefly complicated again.

This piece, Spatial Delivery, had been staged for proscenium performance, rather than in the sphere. That is, it was designed so that the audience used only half of the available “seating” area, strapping their backs to a common hemisphere, and the piece was performed against the backdrop of the other half. This cut audience capacity in half, but was a lot easier to choreograph and shape than a spherical piece which had to look good from all possible angles at once.

But if five people sit against a hemisphere, and keep pretending that there is a local vertical, then some of them must sit “above” others.

After a few seconds of backing and filling, the five decided face was more important than up and down, and solved the problem by making a puffball, like a two-dimensional version of Colly’s beloved angelfish. Lesser mortals filled in the gaps between them in whatever orientation suited them. Jay sat with Rand and his family in the center. He saw Eva nearby, and waved; she waved back.

The house lights dimmed, Rand’s overture began, and Jay forgot anything as trivial as trillionaires.

The first half went very well. Emerging from his warm fog to the realization that he must make small talk during the intermission was like being dumped from a snug bed into an icy vacuum.

And indeed it developed that the intermission chatter of uips was every bit as inane and clumsy as that of the mere vips Jay was used to. They all liked it so far, of course, and said so—but for all the wrong reasons, some that Jay would never have thought of in a million years. Intermissions always made Jay wish he had taken up engineering, or any trade where the customer’s wishes were possible to fathom. Talking to civilians usually reminded him forcefully that no artist ever succeeds save by dumb luck. Since he believed the purpose of art was to communicate, this tended to depress him slightly.

Five minutes before the end of the interval, he excused himself from the gathering, saying that he needed to check something with his technician backstage. Rand seized the opportunity to accompany him, ignoring his wife’s brief look of dismay, and they jaunted back into the empty theater together.

There were four “wings,” short cylindrical tunnels of invisibility created by Rand’s shaping gear, at the four cardinal points of the terminator that divided audience from stage. Dancers seemed to materialize as they entered, vanish as they exited. Knowing that two of the wings would be blocked by knots of dancers nerving themselves up to go on for the second act, Jay and Rand picked one of the other two at random.

And nearly got themselves shot by trigger-happy guards. “Jesus, folks, relax,” Jay said. “There won’t even be anybody out there to protect for another five minutes yet. Why don’t you safety those damned things until then? I don’t want you drilling one of my dancers on their way to the can.” Shaking his head, he passed on until he came to the tech hole, which was located at the farthest point of the theater, so that its one-way glass looked out past the dancers toward the audience. In fact, he and Rand had nothing to accomplish here; Nika had this piece on tracks by now. The tech hole was simply the nearest place to hide for a few minutes.

Not wanting to risk being shot again, he paused at the door and touched the intercom button. “It’s me and Rand, Nika,” he said. “Coming in.”

The door opened on horror.

Five bodies, drifting limp in free-fall crouch. Jack-in-the-box effect made them move toward him as the door swung open. Nika was one of them. A barely perceptible bitter odor preceded them; Jay could not identify it but knew it was trouble. “Oh, shit,” Rand said behind him.

“Hold your breath,” he snapped, and leaped into the hole. The room’s air system had already scavenged up most of the bitter gas, but who knew how much it took to immobilize a man?

He did not have time to find out if any of the floating bodies were alive; more urgently he needed to know who was missing. Sure enough, the worst possible: the Shimizu’s man. His brain raced. The assassin had planned to kill from here, firing through the one-way glass into the house. At Jay’s announcement he had bolted out one of the other two doors from the hole—seconds ago. His only move now was to cut through another six-pack somehow, enter the theater through one of the four wings, leave by the audience entrance, and try to kamikaze whomever his intended victim was out in the foyer. But which wing? Presumably he knew which two were mobbed with dancers; he had been hanging out in the hole. And if Nika had had her mikes hot… he knew which wing was guarded by a six-pack who had just been told to safety their weapons. By Jay! The son of a bitch could have circled around behind them while they were gaping in the open door of the hole…

“Make an announcement,” he brayed at Rand, and pointed to Nika’s board and mike.

“What do I say?”

“Run for your fucking lives!” He left the hole at full thruster power.

He began deep breathing as he left the hole—can’t have too much oxygen in a crisis—but within seconds he held his breath again as he detected more of that bitter smell ahead. The assassin had had a second gas-bomb—and kept it to use where it would do him the most good. As Jay came around the curve he saw the six-pack he had passed moments earlier, drifting with the air-currents. He wanted to decelerate to a stop and peer cautiously into that magic tunnel before entering it—but he was traveling so fast he’d have had to overshoot it and beat back, and he just didn’t have the time. Instead he threw himself into a power turn and rocketed right into it at max acceleration.

That probably saved his life. The assassin was still in the tunnel, waiting to scrag Jay the moment his head showed. But Jay arrived like a right hook, smashing solidly into him before he could fire. They recoiled from each other violently, and the assassin lost his grip on his weapon, a hand laser. But there was no gravity to take it away; it kept station with him as he tumbled, and he grabbed it again on the second flailing try.

The assassin was a very good shot. But Jay was a very good dancer—and fortunately the gun was a pulse job rather than a garden-hose-type continuous-beam laser. He twisted, arched, feinted, leaped, contracted, and bolts of shining death missed him by centimeters. He had one further advantage: he could use all four thrusters, while the assassin had to reserve one wrist for aiming. Thank God the man seemed to be out of knockout bombs.

But Jay could not hope to close; it was all he could do to stay alive. And any second his luck must run out. He could leap through the imaginary wall of the tunnel, but the killer would only follow. Any minute now the nearest six-pack would arrive behind him, and none of them would hesitate to fire through him even if they identified him as a friendly. Jay had time to realize that he was going to die protecting people he did not like or even respect, and then the tunnel had a blowout. A hole the size of a Frisbee appeared in its wall with a plosive phuff, jagged metal teeth pointing outward; the shriek of escaping air tore at their ears and pressure began to drop.

Of course it is impossible for a holographic cylinder to have a blowout, and in any case the nearest vacuum was hundreds of meters away. But both men were spacers; they reacted quite instinctively, dropping their quarrel and leaping for the hole together to seal it with their bodies if necessary. Only one of them remembered on the way that the greatest shaper in human space was presently in the tech hole, and that this tunnel belonged to him.

11

Eva was the first to enter the tunnel; nearly at once she reversed thrust and recoiled backward into Reb, who was at her heels. A weapon she was not licensed to possess vanished from her hand. Jay had clearly coped. Even her atrophied sense of smell could detect the odors of burned metal and burned meat.

“Nice work,” she said. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

Jay’s eyes met hers, but it took him a second or two to recognize her. “I got him,” he said wonderingly.

That much was clear. The body that floated between them was so obviously a corpse that Eva’s subconscious had ignored the gun it still clutched in one hand. Boiling brains leave a skull any way they can. Jay had a small smear of suet on his right cheek that must have burned him as it struck, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Eva threaded her way through horrid drifting tendrils of brains and blood and took Jay in her arms. “That you did,” she said soothingly, wiping his cheek. “That you did.”

Rand arrived just then; at Eva’s signal he left Jay to her. She gestured again, and he and Reb took charge of the body, towing it backstage, shooing its gore along with it.

Sure enough, Rhea and Colly were the next to arrive. At the alarm, all five uips had ducked for cover and their guards had clustered around them, and mere vips had struggled to get away from them, and Tokugawa and Martin had called for information—but Rhea and Colly had both realized they had family in the firezone. Rhea hadn’t been able to stop her daughter, but had gotten—barely—ahead of her to shield her from possible fire. Eva moved so that she and Jay blocked their way. “He’s fine,” she said quickly. “Wait here for him.”

Rhea was frantic. “I’ve got to—”

“You’ve got to wait here,” Eva said, indicating Colly with her eyes.

“I—yes, okay.” She got a firm grip on Colly. “He’s really all right?”

“Not a scratch, truly.”

“He saved my life,” Jay said.

“And others,” Eva agreed. “Both of you did. I’m surprised at you, Jay—I thought you had more sense than to be a hero.”

“I had to,” he said. “It was partly my fault.”

She put a hand over his mouth. “He’s delirious,” she said to Rhea. “All the adrenalin.” She turned back to Jay, put her lips to his ear. “As your attorney, I advise you to shut the hell up. You are not competent to assess blame.”

He blinked at her. “You’re not an attorney, Eva.”

“The hell I’m not. I’m licensed for the High Court—and if you don’t start zipping your lip I’m going to need to be. When they get here, you tell them facts only, get it? Facts only. You can draw conclusions when you’re thinking more clearly. Okay?” She shook his shoulders. “Okay?”

“Sure, Eva. Facts only. That’s good.” She studied him carefully, decided he was not quite in shock in the medical sense—but close.

The tunnel went away; Rand must have reached the tech hole. Almost at once they were hip-deep in people, all talking at once—all five uips, assorted assistants and bodyguards, the Shimizu’s security chief, the house physician. The loudest by a good margin was Martin. Eva bellowed for silence, but her tired old lungs weren’t equal to the task.

Reb’s amplified voice filled the theater like the voice of God. “Ladies and gentlemen, please compose yourselves. There is no longer any reason for alarm. An attempted assassination has failed, and the situation is under control. Please return to the foyer as quickly and quietly as you can; emergency personnel will be arriving and you are in their way. You will all receive a detailed report when things have clarified.”

Rand’s voice joined him. “Dancers, please join our guests in the foyer and escort them to the reception room. The rest of tonight’s concert is canceled.”

The tumult of attempted conversation became even louder—but at Martin’s physical insistence, they at last began moving away, with Tokugawa in the lead. Rand told Rhea to take Colly back to their suite, and she agreed without argument. Dr. O’Regan and Chief Cruz remained behind. “Who was it?” Cruz asked.

“One of yours,” Eva said. “Dunno which—he didn’t have his face with him.”

Cruz’s face darkened. “I know which. Shit. Where’d they take him, the tech hole?”

“I think so.” She turned to Jay. “Can you stand another look at the son of a bitch? Chief Cruz needs you to show her what happened.”

“Oh sure,” he said.

As they left the tunnel, they had to duck around tumbling bodies and a few severed limbs—but fortunately no more horrid trails of blood, as laser amputation tends to self-cauterize. Eva noticed how hard Cruz had to work to ignore the one in Shimizu livery.

Cruz made them wait briefly outside the tech hole. Two crime-scene technicians and three interns all arrived at once; she and the doctor went inside with them. The security chief emerged with Rand in less than a minute, scowling blackly. The conference took place there in the corridor. Cruz—mortified that one of her own people had been the killer—obviously wanted Eva gone, but did not dare try to chase her out. Eva did not even have to claim status as Jay’s attorney of fact; a steely glance was all it took. She and Cruz had taken each other’s measure a long time ago.

So she was able to ride herd on Jay. She was fond of the boy, and his raving about the attempted assassination being partly his fault had unsettled her. If Cruz had heard that, the questioning might well have taken place under drugs. At Eva’s direction, Jay gave a baldly factual account of what had occurred. She spotted what he had meant as soon as he said it—“I told them to safety their damned weapons and continued on to the hole”—but of course no one else saw any blame in that. It was what anyone might have said in his place. She was glad she had gotten to him first.

“Pity you couldn’t have taken him alive,” Cruz said, when Jay had finished the story and Rand had added events from his perspective. “I hate to let someone kill a dozen people in my care without asking him who paid for it.”

“I was dead,” Jay said, “and then Rand gave me a split-second advantage. I didn’t think about it. I grabbed his gun hand and made him shoot himself under the chin. I’d do it again.”

“Oh, I wasn’t criticizing! Do it again, if there’s a next time.”

Eva snorted at that. If Jay had not gotten lucky, Cruz would have had more dead—and perhaps a dead uip or two as well—and would have been looking for work tomorrow.

“I wish he was still alive too,” Jay said. “So I could kill him again. Nika’s… Nika was special.” Suddenly he shook his head with great violence. “Jesus! Did that really happen?” He giggled.

“You’ve got everything you need for now, right, Chief?” Eva said.

Cruz frowned, but nodded. “I may want to hypno him tomorrow.”

“Gotta wait for it to seep into long-term storage for hypno to do any good,” she agreed. “Jeeves—”

“Yes, madam?” He shimmered into existence, urbane and unflappable.

“Take Mr. Sasaki home. My place, not his. Bunk him down in my bed and make me a doss in Guest Room Two.”

“Very good, madam. If you would be good enough to follow me, sir…”

“Half a mo.” She motioned Jay close and murmured in his ear. “Want Jacques to join you?”

He blinked at her and struggled with the question. Jacques’s job description read, “hedonic technician”—but Eva happened to know that he was more artist than technician, a natural healer and comforter. “No,” Jay said, and then, “I don’t think so,” and then he blushed slightly and said, “Uh… yes. Please.”

She nodded. “Tell Jeeves. Run along now.”

Once he was gone, she turned back to Cruz. “How did you know who the assassin was?”

“Eh?”

“You said, ‘I know which.’ How did you know?”

“Oh. Savannavong only joined the force a month ago. I wouldn’t have used him on this job, for that reason—but Hanh came down sick this afternoon and I was stretched thin.”

“Savannavong was real good at making people come down sick,” Rand said bitterly. “Hanh got lucky.”

“So did you two,” Cruz said. “You both reacted like trained cops. Either of you ever in service?”

“I did two years with NYPD. Draftee. But that was over twenty years ago, and I never drew my weapon in the line of duty. Jay’s never had any kind of combat training, to my knowledge. We just kept making mistakes until the bastard was dead.”

“You’d better get home,” Eva said. “Your wife still doesn’t know the details.”

“Chief?”

“Go ahead.”

Rand threw her a grateful glance and made his escape.

People were coming and going from the tech hole now, bringing in forensic equipment and taking out corpses. But they gave the glowering Chief Cruz a wide berth; for the moment Eva was effectively alone with her. “Does your thumb hurt, Chief?” Eva asked suddenly.

“Eh? Yes it does—why? How did you know?”

“Because I figure you for an honest cop. The moment that alarm sounded, an honest cop in your shoes would have pushed a button and flooded the whole damn theater and backstage area with sleepy gas.”

“I did! Some son of a bitch had—”

“I know. It didn’t work, so you kept pushing; that’s why your thumb hurts.”

Cruz nodded slowly. “I see.” She thought some more. “Well, it wouldn’t have helped anyway; the bastard obviously had nose filters in.”

Eva nodded. “Like you do. But you didn’t know that at the time. An honest cop couldn’t have.”

“But why disable the sleepy gas if he had filters?”

“So he’d have maximum confusion to escape in after he made his kill? Squawking civilians in all directions.”

“God dammit, Eva—”

“Relax, Rani—I’m on your side. I know this whole episode makes you look like a horse’s ass, but I can’t think of anything you could’ve done better. And I’ll tell Kate Tokugawa that, if you like. But if I were you, I’d have Dr. O’Regan document that thumb sprain.”

She left Cruz and went to the reception, curious to see how the ultimately rich responded to a brush with death. Six cronkites ambushed her just outside the door, looking like children who needed to urinate; the first in line named a figure. “No comment,” she said. He named a second figure, and when she refused that too, a bidding war developed. She brushed through them grandly and entered the hall. Guards prevented them from following; frustrated, they all jaunted off to file what little they already had.

The party had that slightly forced gaiety which screams of fear just past. But the uips themselves seemed the calmest people in the room—except for Reb, of course. In fact, the only person who still showed any overt signs of fear was Evelyn Martin, grinning and sweating and talking even faster than usual. He spotted her, detached himself and came over.

“Hi, Eva,” he said loudly. “So glad you could make it.” Sotto voce he added, “Anything else gone wrong out there? Any more assassins come to squeeze my ulcers? Fresh stiffs? Other major felonies? Chief Cruz find out the assassin is a High Council member or anything like that?”

“Good news,” she said. “No news.” Louder, she added. “Awful to see you, Evelyn. You’re looking uglier than usual tonight.”

He beamed. “Thank you, dear—-have you met our honored guests? Chen Ling Ho, for instance?”

“Get a grip, Evelyn. I introduced you to Ling. Why don’t you go take a trank?”

“I’m at system max now,” he said.

“Take stimulants, then. Your voice will rise above the audible range and you won’t be so conspicuous.” She drifted away, and joined her escort, Dr. Chen. He was chatting with Reb and Victoria Hathaway. Chen introduced her to Hathaway—who regarded her aged features with barely concealed horror.

“Hello, dear,” Eva said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“We’ve met?” Hathaway said, disbelieving but polite.

“I knew your grandmother. You peed on my lap once.”

Hathaway gave the only possible reply: dead silence.

Chen intervened. “Eva, have they determined yet who was the assassin’s intended target?”

She shrugged. “For all Cruz can tell at this point, he was a good guy, come to take out Evelyn Martin on behalf of all mankind.”

That got a laugh; even Hathaway almost smiled. “I assume the man’s background is being checked?”

Eva shrugged again. “Sure. But it’s a waste of time. The background check you have to go through to get hired for Shimizu security can’t be improved on. Serious money went into this.” She made sure her gaze was not resting on either Chen or Hathaway. “I will bet cash the person who hired it done is in this room.”

Hathaway flinched, but Chen only nodded. “The probability is high,” he agreed.

“Was it you, Chen?” Hathaway asked bluntly.

Again Chen looked as if he were remembering what it felt like to smile. “Twelve dead, none of them the right one? I’m offended, Victoria. Can you truly believe me so inartistic?”

“Oh, but you can believe it of me, right?”

“Since you ask, yes. Now we are both offended. Shall we seek another topic of conversation?”

Eva had a mischievous thought. “Unless you’d like me to narrow the list of suspects for you,” she said.

“How?” Chen and Hathaway and Reb all asked simultaneously.

“Well, only theoretically. I don’t actually expect, uh, people of your caliber to submit to a body search. But I’ll bet a dead frog the person who hired that killer is wearing nose filters. He or she knew the killer would be covering his escape with death gas, and might have been forced to flee past his employer. Nose filters that go in far enough to be invisible aren’t easily removed.”

Hathaway objected. “That wouldn’t prove a thing. Any of us might be wearing nose filters out of simple paranoia. In light of events, it would seem an intelligent precaution.”

Eva nodded. “But you’re probably not all filtered. I said ‘narrow the list,’ not nail it down. Irrelevant anyway; none of you will tolerate a search on principle—and I don’t blame you.”

“Then why did you bring it up?” Hathaway snapped.

Eva did not answer. But she was already enjoying the mental picture. As the word spread, the five would spend the next hour discreetly trying to peer up each other’s nostrils. Victoria Hathaway might actually not look down her nose at anyone for the rest of the night.

Reb escorted her home. They took double-bulbs of Irish coffee to the window, and sat looking out at Mother Terra in companionable silence for some time.

“Jeeves,” she said then, “is Jay awake?”

“He and Master Jacques are both sound asleep, madam.”

“Thank you. Let me know if he wakes.” He shimmered away again, and she turned to Reb. “That bedroom is soundproof anyhow.”

Reb nodded. “Go ahead.”

“I need a better cover story for him. About why I’m still using up air. Oh, you did a good job. But I heard his voice, and he didn’t really buy it, deep down. I’m afraid I shot my mouth off to him about why I was planning to take a cab. He’s not going to be satisfied with what you told him. And I don’t know what else to say. The boy knows me too well. And he spent a whole month trying to change my mind: his pride demands a convincing explanation.”

“Not just pride, Eva. He loves you.”

“So what do I tell him? I can’t tell him about—”

“No. I suggest you stall as long as possible. With everything that’s happened tonight, he’ll be too busy to remember the question for a few days. When he does, you can be unavailable for some additional time. It may be weeks before he has time and opportunity to brace you about it.”

“And what then?”

“You tell him I promised you entertaining surprises were still in store for you—and proved it the very next day.”

“And if he persists?”

“Let icicles form on your brow and tell him it’s personal. A shame to hurt his feelings, of course, but I don’t see what else you can do.”

She sighed, and sipped her drink. “You’re right. I can’t tell him.”

“No, you cannot. I should not have told you, Eva. But you are my oldest living friend, and I could not see you leave just before everything changed.”

She found her eyes stinging, and shut up. They shared more silence for a time.

“Do you think it was Chen?” she asked at last.

“Behind tonight’s violence, you mean? I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think an inartistic hit would be a very artistic touch indeed. But it’s hard to refute his essential point. If he’d done it, it would have worked, however garishly.”

“Apparently it was only by incredible chance that it didn’t.”

“And I tend to find incredible chance incredible. But I’d bet my life both Jay and Rand are straight.” She glanced over her shoulder at the bedroom door. “You know what I mean. They’re both honest.”

“The gods have blessed us,” Reb said cheerfully.

“They have?”

“Of course. How often does life hand you a really good puzzle?”

She blinked, and grinned. “You’re right. Not often enough these days. I feel like a sixty-year-old again.”

12 Kechar Dzong Lo Monthang The Kingdom of Lo, Nepal 12 January 2065

“There was a time,” the old monk said above the howling of the late afternoon wind, “when this kingdom controlled all trade throughout the Himalayas. It was the top of the roof of the world.”

Gunter Schmidt thought, I will not kill my travel agent. That is far too merciful. I will sue him until he bleeds from the eyes.

“Of course,” the old man said with magnificent redundance, “all that was long ago.” He underlined the unnecessary words with a sweeping and equally superfluous gesture. Every square inch of the immense fortress-cum-temple within which they stood shouted that the structure had already been a long-abandoned ruin on the day Johann Sebastian Bach died.

From their vantage point on one of its flat rooftops, they could see Lo itself laid out below them in the merciless sunlight of a cloudless December afternoon, a collection of flat-roofed, log-laddered earthen dwellings at the base of the hill on which this crumbling castle of Kechar Dzong stood. Even by Fourth World standards, the Kingdom of Lo was unimpressive. The land was parched, supporting nothing higher than thornbushes; a few carefully nurtured stands of poplar and willow saplings were to be found in the village itself, but wood had been too precious to burn here for centuries. The brief growing season was over, and even the Himalayan vista in the distance could not overcome the bleakness and desolation of the landscape. The kingdom was permitted to exist, semiautonomously with its own king and queen, within the larger kingdom of Nepal—largely because there was nothing here worth arguing over.

“What happened?” Gunter asked, not because he wanted to know, but because he wanted to hear the old monk say something he didn’t know already.

“Calamity. The Kali Gandaki moved.”

“I hate when that happens.”

The old man actually seemed to catch the sarcasm. “The Kali Gandaki was the river from which the strength of Kechar Dzong flowed. It once passed by right there—” He indicated a vague gully meandering through a section of rocky outcroppings no more or less desolate than any other, a few hundred meters downslope. “But when it changed its location at the end of the sixteenth century…”

Gunter understood now, and his anger deepened. “And ever since, you have been praying for its return—”

“—in the Tiji ceremony, the elaborate and beautiful ritual I told you of earlier, yes,” the old monk agreed happily. “Dorje Jono, the son of the demon who moved the river, repels his father with the power of his magical dancing, and brings water back to the land. The Tiji ceremony takes three full days, and involves every member of the kingdom who is well enough to travel. We summon them with the two mountain horns I showed you downstairs, each of them four meters long. For three days Lo becomes the most magical place in the Himalayas, with damyin music and feasting and dancing and singing and beautiful costumes and pageantry and—”

“In May,” Gunter said through his teeth.

His rhapsody interrupted, the old man blinked at the venom in Gunter’s tone. “Well, yes, as I said, that is when foreigners usually visit us. We seldom see a European this late in the year.”

“Really?” Gunter said, pulling his parka tighter at his throat against the sharp and icy wind. He mentally replayed the conversation with his travel agent, realizing in hindsight that while the man had waxed eloquent about the Tiji festival, he had never specifically said when it was held. He had only seemed to suggest, somehow, that Gunter barely had time to book his passage if he wanted to be there in time. The trip here had been quite arduous. The last fifty kilometers had been accomplished on horseback, following a guide with whom Gunter had no languages in common. So I can’t sue the bastard, and killing him is too good for him. Ah, but what about torture?

From somewhere in the far distance to the north came the half-mournful, half-comic sound of a Tibetan mountain horn like the two Gunter had been shown downstairs, a sustained baritone bleat that made him think of a brontosaur dying in agony. It made the mountains ring with echoes. “What’s that?” he asked idly. “Call to prayer? Some sort of religious ceremony in another temple?” Perhaps this trip need not be a total loss. Exotic religions were a hobby of Gunter’s; having had his mouth set for a grand festive colorful Buddhist ceremony, he was now prepared to settle for the local equivalent of Vespers, rather than go home empty-handed.

But the old man was shaking his head. “I have no idea.”

For some reason, this irritated Gunter. “Well, who lives up that way, then?”

The old man looked sore puzzled. “Hardly anyone. There is an old hermit who lives in that general direction… and I know he has such a horn, because I have seen it outside his home. But I have never heard him blow it—if indeed that is his horn.”

Gunter lost his manners. He had wasted a week and a fortune to see something exotic, and now he was freezing his buns off in a crumbled ruin—an empty crumbled ruin—that would be deserted for the next six months, with a canny native guide—clearly one of the oldest inhabitants of the area—who could not even tell him the significance of a simple mountain horn signal. “Perhaps it is Charlie Parker,” he snarled, “practicing in secret until the day when Kansas City needs him again!”

He did not expect the monk to get the reference, of course—but the gesture the old man made indicated that he had not even heard the remark. The wind had redoubled in fierceness and volume. “Never mind!” he said, louder, and could not even hear himself this time. Again the monk pantomimed, Excuse me? Gunter’s temper boiled over; he waved his arms angrily, gave a wordless shout of exasperation, and set off toward Lo, below. He deliberately left the ancient ruin by a different exit than the one by which he and the monk had entered, one which was more difficult to negotiate, and once he had reached the ground he continued at a pace which he knew the old man would be unable to match. He had forgotten how difficult the climb up had been.

Within a few hundred meters, he was breathing hard. It occurred to him suddenly, as he was negotiating a two-meter drop-off, that in his irritation he was about to leave here completely empty-handed. He stopped and took his camera from his shirt pocket. At least he could get some good shots of the ruined temple itself. He had purchased enough memory for five straight days of shooting; might as well get a few minutes. He turned and grunted with satisfaction: the decaying temple really did look striking against the sky. It somehow gave Gunter the impression of a fortress built to defend men against the gods. Unsuccessfully. He backed off a few steps for a better angle, and checked the camera’s charge. To avoid wasting power, he disabled the audio pickup. The wind was really roaring now, and he could overdub the audio later, with something suitably timeless and melancholy.

He peered through the viewfinder and panned across the face of the ruin, left to right and then back again. He did not see the old monk anywhere, and wondered if he were still within the walls, paralyzed by Gunter’s rudeness. Then he did see him—and sure enough, he was standing in the same window they had both been looking out from, minutes earlier. He appeared to be doing jumping jacks.

Gunter grunted in surprise, and zoomed in. No, the old man was hopping up and down and flapping his arms, but not in any organized fashion. He seemed to be waving at Gunter. Gunter zoomed in farther, and became even more puzzled. The old man appeared to be laughing like a loon. And he was pointing now, pointing to the north. Was he trying to say something about that silly horn blast? In sign language, at this distance? Gunter waved back with his free hand, signing, forget it. This seemed to convulse the aged monk; he held his ribs and roared with silent laughter.

Gunter had heard of this: Himalayans were known to go into spontaneous laughing jags, due to the low oxygen content at this height. He found it annoying: here he was trying to get an imposing shot of this ancient temple, and its caretaker was capering like an ape in the foreground. Go away, he gestured. Get out of the window!

The monk nodded at once, still laughing merrily, and vanished from the window. Gunter kept shooting. Now the wind began to devil him, increasing its force until it was tugging at his clothes, pressing at him like a Tokyo commuter, hammering at his eardrums. The camera was just big enough to present sail-area to it; the wind kept trying to force it to the right. Gunter had image-stabilization circuitry, but knew that this much wavering was taxing it. He twisted slightly to his right to put his back toward the wind, shielding the camera with his hunched left shoulder. The wind pressed especially hard at his ankles, for some reason, and his feet began to feel chilly. Oh fine, he thought, defective boots on top of everything else. I am definitely going to sue somebody when I get home!

But almost as he finished the thought, he realized that his feet were actually cold, colder than they should have been even if the boots’ heating systems had both failed completely. He glanced down, and discovered that he was standing ankle deep in crystal clear water. It rose as he watched, climbing his shins.

He looked to the north, and saw the Kali Gandaki river returning, after five centuries, dividing around his feet. Now his ear could distinguish between the sound of its passage and the similar sound of the wind. For no reason at all he remembered the damned travel agent saying that the Tiji festival was also known as the Festival of Impermanence.

From above him, in the temple, came the continuous BBBRRRRRAATTTTTTTT! of a mountain horn, cutting cleanly through the wind and water noise to alert the village below, and this horn sounded to Gunter more like a brontosaur laughing…