The Stardance Trilogy (73 page)

Jay’s turn to take a deep breath. “One potential glitch…but I’ll make sure it doesn’t express. Don’t even give it a thought.”

“Fine. What am I not thinking of?”

“He says he wants a two-month trial period. He’ll finish out Pribhara’s season—but if his wife and daughter don’t like it up here, he’ll quit then.”

Her eyes closed momentarily, and the ghost of a frown chased across her brow; those were the only external signs she gave. Those who choose style over substance are compelled to stay with style no matter how tough it gets. But Jay knew she was furious. And here he was, a convenient and fully qualified target…

“Why couldn’t his family have come up with him the last time?” she asked quietly.

“His wife was on deadline and couldn’t leave her desk for more than a few days,” Jay reminded her. “She’s a writer. Remember, they thought he had at least two more seasons—two more years—before the Board would make a final choice…and only a twenty-five percent chance it’d turn out to be him.”

Tokugawa had her hands clasped in the
kûkanzen mudra—
but now she was unconsciously twiddling her thumbs. The effect was so ludicrous that he knew she would be even angrier if she became aware of it; he concentrated his gaze on her eyes. “True,” she admitted grudgingly. “We are rushing him. His demand is reasonable. But if his wife decides she’s a groundhog, the house loses face. Damn Pribhara—this is her fault.”

Privately he disagreed. Pribhara could not help being a perpendicular. None of those poor unfortunates could. If anything, the situation was the fault of the Shimizu’s Board of Directors, for not simply picking a shaper. The three-year rotating audition scheme had always seemed crackbrained to Jay; something like this had been bound to happen. But his advice had been ignored, and now was not the time to mention it. The blame looked better on Pribhara than it did on him…

“I’d better call in Martin,” she said. “I hate speaking to the man, but this is his pidgin. Maybe he can…” Her voice trailed off disconsolately.

Jay empathized completely. Even for a PR man, Evelyn Martin was a weasel; you wanted to bathe after talking with him on the phone. But he
was
gifted at spin control—

A metaphorical lightbulb seemed to appear over Jay’s head.

“You’re not looking at this right,” he said suddenly. “This isn’t bad news—it’s mitigated good news. All it takes is a little spin control.”

“Explain.”

“Look, all Martin’s press release has to say is that Pribhara has canceled for medical reasons, and that Porter has graciously consented to fill out her term. At the end of two months,
maybe
you have to announce that Porter has dropped out too, and let Choy and Mazurski carry on competing from there—a minor kerfluffle. But most likely his wife and kid will love this place as much as everyone else does—so you announce
then
that he’s been given the final position and has accepted. Either way, none of the Board’s face is lost.”

“Your brother would accept that? Not announce that we’ve picked him as the final winner until he’s committed himself? And not announce that at all, ever, if he decides to opt out?”

“Gladly, I think. It gets him out of an impossible situation too.” He had a rush of brains to the head. “But you should bump him to the permanent salary right away.”

Her thumbs stopped twiddling. “Done. Mr. Cohn!”

Her AI materialized its lawyer-persona between her and Jay, facing both of them. As always, Mr. Cohn reminded Jay of an impossibly motionless shark. “Yes, ma’am?”

She gave instructions for the amendment of Rand’s contract, relying on Cohn’s legal software to translate her wishes from conversational English into Lawyerese, and spoke her signature. At Jay’s suggestion, she had Cohn upload a copy to Diaghilev so that Jay could pass the document on to Rand later that night. Then she dismissed the AI and turned back to Jay. “Sasaki?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve earned your air today.”

He smiled; the first sincere smile of the day. He felt as if he had just successfully matched orbits by eyeball, without a computer—a terrestrial analogy might be walking a tightrope over an abyss. “Always nice to hear. I’ll let you get back to your meditation.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But first, your reward.
You
get to tell Martin about all this.”

He grimaced. “It’s true, then; no good deed goes unpunished.”

“Except those committed by Stardancers. They seem to be exempt.”

“That’s an idea,” he said. “I’ll go out the airlock without a suit.”

“‘In space,’” she said, seeming to be quoting something, “‘no one can hear you scream.’ Please yourself—but see Martin first.”

Jay sighed. “Yes, boss. After I’ve eaten.”

He had originally intended to call Eva Hoffman and beg off on the chat she had asked for. But now he needed to tell someone how relieved he was, and how clever he had been in wiggling, at least for the moment, off the spot marked X. As he left Tokugawa’s office, he consulted the mental list of people he trusted enough to share news like this, and—Ethan being history now—found only Eva’s name. She was not an employee of the house, plugged into that grapevine…nor did she fraternize much with the other guests, even the other Permanents. Most of them considered her crazy. She was easy to talk to, and in his opinion she had more character and style than any ten other people he knew. He had often thought that if Eva were, oh, say, seventy years younger, he might have considered turning hetero again for her. Hell, even sixty years younger…

Telling Diaghilev to call ahead and announce him, he left the Core and jaunted back outboard, through both Deluxe Tier (peasant country, at least in Shimizu terms) and UltraDeluxe Tier (the bourgeoisie; governors, national-level executives and so forth), all the way to the Prime Tier, the outer suites with the most cubic and a naked-eye view of space. Eva’s digs were in the Prime Plus hemiTier: the one whose view included Earth. She had chosen a suite offset from the center of that section, so that the home planet did not completely dominate the view, a choice Jay approved of since he had made the same one himself. Her door opened for him when he reached it, and her voice bade him enter.

Her suite was lavish and comfortable and hushed. As a long-time resident of the Shimizu, he knew the second most expensive thing in it was the hush. The third most expensive thing was the sheer cubic volume, and the air that filled it. Jay was one of the half-dozen hotel staff with enough clout to rate quarters in Prime Plus, and his own suite was a quarter the size of this one. Even by the standards of a permanent guest of the Shimizu, Eva was wealthy. Kate Tokugawa would have said that her assets were “substantial,” only a step below “impressive.”

His eyes found Eva where they expected to, by the room’s
most
expensive feature: floating within the three-meter-across bubble window (called an imax for obscure historical reasons), which made the best Prime Tier suites cost twice as much as Deluxe accommodations. As was her custom when at home, she was wearing only wings and fins, sculling them gently and quite unconsciously to hold her position in space against the gentle current of airflow. It was a sight he had seen countless times, and still found striking and moving: a butterfly with a withered body, Rodin’s
She Who Was Once the Beautiful Heaulmière
somehow given the wings of a swan by the gods in clumsy compensation for the ruin of her beauty. Nobody looked sixty anymore these days—certainly no one whose real age had three digits—and Jay found Eva’s defiant decay paradoxically entrancing. Especially juxtaposed against the wings, modern and high-tech…and that absurdly expensive surround-window…and the stars beyond, their steady fossil light unthinkably older than Eva could ever hope to be. He wished he had the nerve to use the image in a dance…

But Eva never missed a premiere. She had been born back in the days when nudity was strongly taboo—and while she’d obviously come into the twenty-first century, he had noted that she was never nude save when closeted with intimates.

Oddly, the thought had never once occurred to him that he would probably be free to use the image as he pleased one day, all too soon—that it could not be long before Eva died. If it had, the thought would have saddened him…but there was something about Eva that kept him from having it.

He politely removed his own clothing and let bee-sized tugbots take charge of each garment. He did not bother to remove his own wrist and ankle thrusters. Eva didn’t object to their emissions, she just didn’t care to use thrusters herself if she didn’t have to; and Jay felt far more naked without them than he did without clothes. Nonetheless he allowed other tugbots to give him his own set of wings and fins, slid them on over his thrusters, and used them to join his hostess at the window. He was, if anything, more skillful at air-swimming than she was; he simply preferred the superior kinetic and kinesthetic versatility thrusters offered.

The jaunt to her side was uncomplicated: the room seemed as starkly furnished as a Zen master’s cell, all its fabulous conveniences invisible until they were needed. That was its fourth most expensive feature.

She rode the turbulence of his arrival expertly, and helped him steady himself into station beside her, just far enough away to allow them both wingroom, all without taking her gaze from the window. She had chosen a local vertical that put Earth in the lower left quadrant of the window. Perhaps a fifth of the planet was visible, a lens-shaped slice of Old Home. The rest of the view was of eternity.

They shared it in silence for perhaps a minute.

“Drink with me, Jay,” she said then.

He didn’t care much for alcohol as a rule; he hated what it did to his balance and kinesthetic sense. But he did not hesitate. “Name your poison.” He told himself that it would anesthetize him against having to talk with Martin later.

“Jeeves,” she called, and her AI shimmered into view, oriented to her local vertical and seeming to be standing on air.

“Yes, madam?”

“The good stuff.”

One holographic eyebrow rose half a centimeter. “Very good, madam.”

Both of Jay’s eyebrows rose at least that much. This was not going to be a casual conversation. He stopped rehearsing his account of how clever he had been in Kate’s office.

J
EEVES MOVED AWAY WITHOUT MOVING HIS LEGS
, as if he were under gravity and his feet were on wheels, and ceased to exist when he left the humans’ peripheral vision. Tugbots delivered an amber bottle, two bulbs and a spherical table to the spot where he had vanished. As they arrived, Jeeves reformed, and picked them all out of the air expertly as he “rolled” back into view. He placed the table between Eva and Jay and told it to stay there, placed a bulb against either side of its velcro surface and the bottle in the center facing them, so that the table looked like a stylized Pinocchio, and shimmied back a pace. Eva thanked and dismissed him; once again he glided out of view before dissolving.

“I never thought I’d see that again,” Jay said respectfully.

She nodded. The bottle was an ancient quart of Black Bush, about three quarters full. It was something like a century old, and its contents were twelve years older than that, a blend of whiskey so fine that at the time of bottling it could not legally be exported from Ireland. Its source was the oldest distillery on Earth, whose charter-to-distill had been granted in 1608. There probably was not another bottle like it left anywhere in the Solar System. Jay was the only person in the Shimizu besides herself who had ever seen it; they had shared a dram the night Ethan’s goodbye message arrived from Terra.

He steadied her while she poured, a process of pulling the bottle away while chasing it with the open end of the bulb, then pinching off the flow with one thumb while she sealed the bulb with the other. She did it better than the Chief Sommelier in the Hall of Lucullus, losing not a drop of the precious whiskey, fiercely proud of her ability to control her aged fingers. Jay accepted his bulb with thanks. He brought it up past his nose in a slow gentle curve, squeezing slightly so that the nipple dilated and the bouquet came to him. When she had filled her own bulb and replaced the bottle, he raised his in salute, and they drank.

The silence stretched on.

“Silly,” she said at last. “I’ll never get over how silly it is.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You could blindfold me, tug me around the hotel enough to confuse me, lead me into any room in the place and dock me in front of its window…take off the blindfold and
defy
me, without looking away from the window, to tell you which Tier I was in. There is no way to tell a real window from a fake one without instruments. And yet this thing is worth every yen it costs me. About the gross annual product of a medium town…and I’d pay three times as much if I had to. Why?”

He seemed to know a rhetorical question when he heard it; he made no reply.

“Why are they so goddam
happy
, Jay?” she asked then.

“Who?”

She gestured at the Earth. “Them.” Her gesture widened to take in orbital space, then widened farther. “All of them. Our species. The human race in this year of Our Lord 2064. I think I know why the Stardancers are happy—but why people too?”

“I’m not sure exactly what you mean.”

“Exactly. That’s what I mean.” She squeezed more whiskey into her mouth, rolled it around and swallowed. God, she missed her taste buds sometimes. “They probably don’t even seem all that happy to you, do they?”

“I never really thought about—”

“Trust me. I’ve been watching the human race a long time. At this point we ought to be more traumatized than ever before in our history. The Curve of Change is almost vertical by now, like a goosing finger—you do know about the Curve?”

“Sure.”

Of course he did—as a dry old chestnut from a history lesson. For millennia the curve of human social and technological progress had trended upward, but so slowly as to be almost imperceptible…then all at once it had passed some critical threshold and begun climbing sharply. Ever
more
sharply, the rate of increase itself accelerating steadily, until the race lurched from covered wagons to spaceships, from kingdoms and fiefs to planetary government, from chronic global poverty to staggering near-universal wealth, in a single century. Remarkable. Inexplicable. Where would it all end? And so on.