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?”