“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.