The hotel’s doorman looked them up and down, sniffing ostentatiously. George stared straight ahead; Ronnie gave Raffa’s name and smiled. The doorman pointed to the public comunit in the upper lobby.
“What a hole,” George said, as they made their way around the open shaft.
“Yes . . . just a moment.” Ronnie called the desk, who transferred his call to Raffa’s room. It bleeped repeatedly, and just when he was sure she had been kidnapped by vicious thugs who would stake her out over a stingtail nest, the receiver clicked.
“Hello?”
“Raffa! It’s Ronnie!”
“Oh—I was in the shower.” His mind drifted into a fantasy of Raffa in the shower—of himself in the shower—of both of them—until recalled by her impatient “Ronnie!”
“Yes, sorry. We had a few problems, and I was wondering—could we come down?”
“Here?” She sounded almost as prim as her mother. “I mean—why? We weren’t going to be seen together—”
“It’s too late, Raffa.” He took a deep breath and told her about Hubert, and the men at the transient barracks, as fast as he could. “And we need to use a shower, and get some clean clothes. . . .”
“I suppose,” she said. “Or—wait—I’ll come up. If you’re that raggedy, they might not let you come down.”
He and George leaned their elbows on the railing of the open shaft, watching the waterfall and ignoring the disapproving glare of the doorman that periodically scorched their backs. Raffa was safe. That’s what mattered.
Raffa emerged from the lift looking clean, cool, and confident. She handed them each a plastic strip. “Here. You can’t go back there—not to stay, anyway—so I went ahead and got rooms for you here. I’d be delighted to have you in mine, but there’s not enough space. I’ve got things spread all over.”
“Angelic Raffaele,” George said. “Are you sure it’s Ronnie you want to marry?”
“Absolutely,” said Raffa. She gave Ronnie a look. “Don’t worry. I don’t mind about the smell.”
She led them to the lift, smiling brilliantly at the doorman, whose dour expression finally shifted. He shrugged, hands out, and gave the boys a friendly nod. “My mistake, sirs.”
“You’re on ten,” Raffa said. “Adjoining singles—I thought you might prefer that, in case—” In case of what, she didn’t say. It meant two showers, anyway. And, in this hotel, modern clothes-freshers. By the time Ronnie had showered, his clothes held no trace of the flowery perfume. His shoes still reeked faintly, but at least they were completely dry.
Dinner, in the hotel’s dining room, completed his cure, he thought. Raffa in the cherry-colored backless dress with the full sleeves, the waterfall cascading behind her . . . good food . . . he could live with that. He was not sure he could live with George, who was giving his own version of their day. Finally even Raffa had had enough.
“All right, George. I understand—you had a horrible day and found out nothing useful except that there’s a retired neurosynthetic chemist who wants to meet us. Let me tell you about mine.” She described a tour of a pharmaceutical plant, a vast production line where gleaming robots ground and mixed chemicals, where the resulting paste, forced into molds, popped out as pills, to be coated with colored liquid that dried hard and shiny. Thence through pill counters, into boxes, past inspectors . . . boring, Ronnie thought. It made his feet ache to think of it.
“But the funniest thing—when I said Aunt Marta was interested in investing here because someone had died in the Morreline family, he turned absolutely white.”
“Who?” Ronnie asked.
“My guide. And hustled me back to the corporate offices. You’d think I’d just insulted the CEO or something. I just made it up, really; someone’s always dying in big families.”
“Ottala!” George said. “It’s Ottala who died.” The shock hit Ronnie with the same unpleasant thump of reality as the bullies’ fists. That made sense of a lot of things.
The disadvantage of a good hotel is that there is no way for guests to sneak out unobserved. Someone is always on duty by the public exits. And Twoville offered no nightlife of the sort to attract three wealthy young tourists . . . not after that afternoon. Raffa had suggested a walk along the shore, but Ronnie explained about stingtails and tickflies. They ended up in Raffa’s suite by default; she had a sitting room.
“But if Ottala was killed here—if she was in one of the factories—”
“We’re not here to solve Ottala’s murder,” George said. He paced around the room, peering at everything, before settling into a chair. “Dear heavens, what an ugly lamp! We’re here to find out about the rejuvenation drugs—”
“Aren’t you forgetting Ottala’s Aunt Venezia?” Raffa asked. “She would want us to find out about Ottala’s murder.”
“Not if it included getting killed,” George said, then added hastily, “and even if it did, I personally don’t want to get killed finding out. I want to go back to civilization, which this isn’t, and let Patchcock stew in its own mess.” His shoes, unlike Ronnie’s, had peeled in the automated shoe cleaner. The only footwear in the hotel gift shop were sandals, iridescent lime-green straps over black soles.
“It can’t all be the same villains,” Raffa said. “The Morrelines making Ottala’s aunt do those hideous pots so that she won’t have time to interfere in the business is one thing. But they wouldn’t have killed Ottala. Whoever killed Ottala had another reason.”
“They hated her because she was rich,” George said gloomily, staring at his ruined shoes.
“It had to be more than that,” Raffa said. “We’re all rich, and no one’s killed us yet.”
“Not for want of trying,” George said. “Look at the past few years: we all got shot at on Sirialis. Someone shot Sarah, thinking she was Brun. Ronnie and I were kidnapped by the clones.”
“That wasn’t because we were rich,” Ronnie said. “It was because we knew something someone didn’t want us to know—they thought we were dangerous.”
“So you think Ottala knew something she wasn’t supposed to know? And if we can find out—” Raffa kicked off her shoes and curled her legs under her.
“What if she found out her family were making rejuvenation drugs illegally—would they kill her then?”
“What if she found out someone was adulterating the drugs—maybe not her family, maybe someone else?”
“But why?” Raffa bounced a little, on the couch. “What could anyone gain by adulterating rejuvenation drugs?”
Ronnie thought about it. “Well . . . if people don’t like the whole process—if they think it’s wrong—then they might do something to make it not work . . . or something.” He had no idea how that might be done.
“If I were an ordinary person,” George said, in the tone of one who knows he will never be ordinary, “I would resent rejuvenation. There are all these rich people, who are going to live forever, and then there’s me—the ordinary person making pills, say—who’s never going to get anywhere. It used to be that even rich people died, sometimes inconveniently, and fortunes shifted around—there were opportunities—but now—”
“Even rich people could resent it,” Ronnie said. “Take my father . . . he’s rejuved only once, but he will again, I’m sure. They want me to be grown up and responsible, but not enough to challenge him. I could be eighty or ninety myself before I have a chance to run a business. Even older.”
“And we’re always making snide remarks about free-birthers, but if people died off soon enough, there wouldn’t be any worry about overpopulation. Not even on ships.” George nodded, as if he’d said something profound, then his gaze sharpened. “Free-birthers!”
“What?”
“Logical group to oppose rejuvenation technology. Raffa, where’s the work force from? Originally?”