That was when he shot himself.
The effects of Harriman Giyt’s suicide on his son were threefold. First, young Evesham discovered he had been left without enough money to finish college. He had to figure out a way of tricking the university records systems into believing that his tuition had been paid. He turned out to be pretty good at that sort of thing, which naturally led to his later career.
Second, he resolved never to find himself in his father’s position, which meant he never intended to depend on a salary for his livelihood. And third, he acquired that lifelong distaste for guns—for, as a matter of fact, every one of the cunning devices human beings had invented to end the lives of other human beings. All of them, way back to the most primitive. Clubs were bad enough, swords worse. With the emergence of catapults and arrows things got worse still, because now humans could kill each other at a distance. And then, starting somewhere early in the nineteenth century, things got really bad. Rifles. Machine guns. Bomber planes. Guided missiles. Tricky devices like the bus that could fly around a corner and shower needle-pointed fléchettes on people who had thought they were perfectly safe from harm . . . Well, it was all nasty, and the thought that those were the tools of conquest took a lot of the pleasure out of some of Giyt’s favorite daydreams.
Anyway, it wasn’t their battlefield triumphs that he most envied about the great conquerors of the past. It was something quite different.
All those wickedly villainous heroes had something Giyt didn’t have. They had attainable goals. They knew what they wanted to do with their lives—never mind that the way they did it would cause a lot of unhappiness for the people they did it to. While he really had very little idea of what to do with his own.
Military conquest, for Giyt, was only a daydream. He knew it. He would have settled for less—for example, for some untamed wilderness where he could buy himself an estate with some of the reserve money from his hidden accounts. Buy the estate. Not kill for it. And then he would clear the land and plant his crops and be a genuine pioneer.
Unfortunately, Giyt couldn’t find the right kind of place. There were plenty of wildernesses on Earth, sure, but they all suffered from one (or more) of three disqualifying traits. Either they were already chockablock with people so desperately poor that the neighbors would take all the fun out of pioneering. Or they were burdened with unpleasant disease organisms. Or the climate was nasty.
So he contented himself with what he had.
Which, really, was not all that bad. Here in Bal Harbor he had a decent cubicle to sleep in and all the appliances he wanted and the finest food the city of Wichita had to offer any time he chose to go out to eat. He had his unregistered terminal. Sometimes he used this to roam the net or created a scout program to roam it for him, something armed with key words to check out and one of Giyt’s own sniffer programs to watch out for defensive bugs. It was very easy to find secrets that way. Sometimes Giyt thought it might be interesting to write a book that exposed some of the political sins his scout discovered for him; but he never held on to that thought for very long. The secrets of the real world were actually pretty boring, and anyway the real world was what Evesham Giyt wanted to avoid.
Giyt liked his solitude. He kept it secure, too. Once or twice it had been threatened—most severely of all, long before, when he had been surprised by an intrusion on his screen: “Hey, warmonger! I liked your Canadian invasion plan. Ever think of doing it for real?”
Giyt didn’t reply to the unknown hacker, of course. He didn’t use those access codes again, either; he doubled his cutouts, and he never heard from that person again. He even thought for a little while of physically moving himself to some other town or even some other continent, but in the thoroughly homogenized world he lived in, what was the point? Giyt had no compelling reason to think he had to stay in Wichita, but even less reason to move.
Actually, in Wichita, Giyt had just about everything you could acquire that went to make life bearable . . . but that wasn’t all.
He also had Rina.
Rina was a very big plus in Giyt’s life. Rina was lively, pretty, and dark, a tiny woman almost half a meter shorter than Giyt himself but twice as energetic. She was smart. She had organized her life almost as efficiently as Giyt had his own. She was also crazy about Evesham Giyt and she was absolutely wonderful in the sack.
That last part, he supposed, was one of the fringe benefits of her former profession as a hooker, although she had explained to him very soon in their relationship that she had specialized in whips-and-chains domination because that way you didn’t actually have to screw any customer you didn’t really like. Probably she thought telling Giyt that would ease any jealousy he might feel. She needn’t have worried. Giyt didn’t mind any of that. Rina’s whoring was well in the past and had left her with neither a habit nor any STD. About the only trace of it in her present life was that sometimes Rina would shyly suggest that being handcuffed to the bed might be nice for a change, and once in a while he obliged her for old time’s sake. He drew the line at the whips and chains, though, and usually it was nice, friendly, just-for-fun sex. They’d go out to have a good meal somewhere—Thai or Provencal for preference, because there were good places for both only a short autocab ride away. Of course it was generally Rina who paid the bill with her credit wristlet, and that was another nice thing about Rina. She never asked why Giyt didn’t use credit of his own. She didn’t have to. Obviously she figured out that Giyt didn’t want to submit to being sniffed and thus identified in some databank somewhere. And of course, he always reimbursed her in cash, with a little extra rounded off.
Then when dinner was over, they’d go back to his slide and climb in, and when they’d retracted the slide and put on the privacy locks, they were all alone in their warm, pleasant, personal place with the minibar and the climate control and whatever kind of music suited their mood from his library of fifteen or sixteen thousand pieces, and maybe a light show or a porn disk to get them started. Once in a while he’d even invite her to stay overnight, because her own cubicle was really pretty spartan—Rina was living on savings while she finished her business-management courses at the Wichita campus of KU. Sometimes in bed Giyt would be lying on one side, putting himself to sleep by watching the story of Kamehameha conquering the island of Oahu, while she was trying to make sense of the difference between liquid versus colloidal nonconvertible debentures on her own screen on the other. Giyt sort of liked that. It was comfortably domestic. And did not represent a commitment.
Rina took her schooling seriously, too. She studied hard. She didn’t really have to bother, because Giyt had showed her early how easily she could improve her grades by accessing the school’s databank—for that matter, could award herself as many degrees as she liked, summa cum laude if she wanted them that way, and not go through the trouble of passing examinations at all. Rina caught on quickly. She had a natural ability for jiggling computer systems, but she wouldn’t do any actual tampering with the school records and wouldn’t let Giyt do it for her either. She didn’t want good grades, she explained. She wanted to actually learn this crap. She didn’t need to cheat anyway, really, because she was a straight-A student all down the line. There was a moral issue there for Rina, too. That sort of thing was like Peeping Tom stuff. Which was too much like business. The former hooker had no interest in invading someone else’s privacy.