Starmind. Part 8

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 cla.s.sic 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 f.u.c.k 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 ch.o.r.eography, 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 s.h.i.+t. I've been up all night, swimming in a river of s.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+mizu 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 ifyou 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 greasethem-"

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 h.e.l.l couldn't the inconsiderate b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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? w.a.n.g something?"

"How the h.e.l.l 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds love anything with a Stardancer hook, gives 'em great visuals to cut to. 'White Stardancer,' my a.s.s-the old fart's probably been sauteeing 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 pa.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt that the guards seemed to watch each other as carefully and constantly as they did the civilians. Five private security forces, plus the s.h.i.+mizu security, and none of them trusted any of the others.

And indeed, when they had pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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 f.u.c.king 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 a.s.sa.s.sin, 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 timeI touch a control. Honest to G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+mizu's Co-Artistic Directors: our resident ch.o.r.eographer, 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 tocare 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'sstuff, 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 ma.s.s, 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 artificiallydarkened , to a Bantu black which did not match his nose and cheek structure. His fortune was based on Earth-to-orbit s.h.i.+pping. He ignored the arbitrary local vertical which everyone else had adopted-the Terrans from habit, the s.p.a.cers 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 s.h.i.+mizu. That interested Jay: there were many Chinese Buddhists, but few who followed the Soto path, which had originated in twelfth-century j.a.pan. 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 thesecond 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 s.p.a.ceborne.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 ch.o.r.eograph 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 d.a.m.ned things until then? I don't want you drilling one of my dancers on their way to the can." Shaking his head, he pa.s.sed on until he came to the tech hole, which was located at the farthest point of the theater, so that its one-way gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton. "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,s.h.i.+t," 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 s.h.i.+mizu's man. His brain raced. The a.s.sa.s.sin had planned to kill from here, firing through the one-way gla.s.s 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-packwho had just been told to safety their weapons. By Jay! The son of a b.i.t.c.h 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 f.u.c.king 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sa.s.sin was still in the tunnel, waiting to scrag Jay the moment his head showed. But Jay arrived like a right hook, smas.h.i.+ng solidly into him before he could fire. They recoiled from each other violently, and the a.s.sa.s.sin 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 s.h.i.+ning death missed him by centimeters. He had one further advantage: he could use all four thrusters, while the a.s.sa.s.sin had to reserve one wrist for aiming. Thank G.o.d 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 plosivephuff, jagged metal teeth pointing outward; the shriek of escaping air tore at their ears and pressure began to drop.

Of courseit 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 s.p.a.cers; they reacted quite instinctively, dropping their quarrel and leaping for the hole together to seal it with their bodies if necessary. Only oneof them remembered on the way that the greatest shaper in human s.p.a.ce 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 p.i.s.s 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 h.e.l.l up. You are not competent toa.s.sess blame."

He blinked at her. "You're not an attorney, Eva."

"The h.e.l.l 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, a.s.sorted a.s.sistants and bodyguards, the s.h.i.+mizu'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 G.o.d. "Ladies and gentlemen, please compose yourselves. There is no longer any reason for alarm. An attempted a.s.sa.s.sination 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.