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  " . . . at about suppertime. Listen, I don't want to crowd you, but . . . how soon can you come up? The sooner you can make it, the less trouble I'll have selling this trial period."

  Rand acquired the harried look of someone who is trying to solve a tricky problem while long-distance charges are ticking away. He glanced sideways. "What do you think, hon?"

  After a time, Rhea's voice came from out of frame. "Three days, minimum. I'd like a month. I'd like a year, dammit."

  "I think I can get three days, no sweat," Jay said cheerfully.

  Rand tried for a diversion. "Anything we can bring up for you?"

  "If I think of anything, I'll tell you when you call back." He gave the phone his best grin. "Listen, this is really great news. Really, Rhea—you'll see! Kiss Blondie for me. Phone off." As Rand's smiling image dissolved, he went on, "Diaghilev, where's Kate?"

  "In her office, Jay. Do you wish an appointment to see her? She has an opening in her calendar tomorrow at—"

  "No, I want her now. She'll see me. ETA fifteen minutes."

  "Yes, Jay. You're right: Ms. Boswell has accepted for her. Fifteen minutes from . . . mark."

  "Shower please, Diaghilev."

  "Yes, Jay."

  The studio shower accepted and cleansed him; ten minutes later he was dry, shaved, groomed and jaunting along the corridors of the Inner Sphere, heading inboard toward Katherine Tokugawa's executive office in the Core.

  Heads turned as he floated past, but only one of the hotel guests had the nerve to call out to him. "Hello, Jay. You look happy—good news?"

  Jay made a long arm and grabbed a jaunt-loop, braked himself to a halt. His boss would have a fit if she ever heard that a mere guest had learned news of this importance before she did—but Eva Hoffman was more than just a guest: she had been a resident fixture in the Shimizu for sixteen years now. He glanced around mock-conspiratorially. "Are you sure those are your original eyes?"

  Eva grinned. She was one hundred sixteen years old, and showed most of them—having, most unusually, given up controlling her appearance on her hundredth birthday. She drew stares everywhere she went in the Shimizu these days . . . the most horrified of them coming from those guests whose own odometers had rolled past zero. "Thirty years ago I'd have known exactly why you were looking happy, at twice the distance. So your brother's coming back up to stay, eh? Congratulations."

  "Thanks. I'm excited."

  "Me too. You two do good work together. Pribhara was a waste of air."

  "She . . . had her own way of doing things."

  "Yeah. Wrong. Would you like me to take charge of his wife and daughter? What's her name, Spaniel?" Eva, of course, knew perfectly well what Colly's name was. "Help them get reoriented to free-fall, their first day, show 'em around the Mausoleum, and all that, so that you and Rand can get right down to work?"

  He was touched by the offer. Eva was a Shimizu institution, and she did not offer her time lightly or often. She was one of very few guests who knew her way around the place as well as Jay, who did not need to follow some AI's trail of blinking lights to get where she was going. "I think I've got that covered," he said. "But if they do need more help, I'll know where to come. Thanks, Eva."

  She looked dubious. "Who have you got in mind?" Eva had a low opinion of most of the Shimizu's staff Orientators—which Jay shared.

  "The new kid. Iowa."

  "Seen him a couple of times; don't know him."

  "He's a natural. Spaceborn."

  That interested her. "Is that good? Will he know what it is they don't know?"

  Jay nodded. "He's been dealing with mudfeet all his life, one way or another. The ones here are just richer, that's all. I think he and Colly are really going to hit it off."

  "I'll have to meet him. I always wanted to get to know a spaceborn."

  Diaghilev cleared his virtual throat. "One minute, Jay."

  Jay was still in Deluxe country—the cheapest of the Shimizu's accommodations, the inner-sphere suites with no windows onto space. It was time to jaunt. "I've got to go. Uh . . . look, keep this absolutely top secret for, oh, at least another fifteen minutes, okay?"

  "Twelve, my final offer."

  "Okay, I'll talk fast." He kissed her wrinkled cheek and pushed off.

  "Drop by for a chat before dinner, all right?" she called after him. "Something I want to ask you."

  He waved agreement without looking back.

  * * *

  He passed quickly through the rest of the Deluxe Tier to the inmost core, jaunted past his own suite without stopping, and reached the executive offices on time. Warned of his arrival by Diaghilev, Tokugawa's own AI had materialized its Personal Executive Assistant persona for him, rather than the Front-Desk Clerk avatar it would have shown to a guest. "Good afternoon, Mr. Sasaki," she said. Her voice was oddly flat and nasal, perhaps in an attempt to make her seem real.

  "Good afternoon, Ms. Boswell."

  "Ms. Tokugawa will see you now." The door to the inner sanctum dilated.

  Jay jaunted through it, brushing the doorway with his fingertips to decelerate himself to a stop inside.

  Katherine Tokugawa was sitting kukanzen in the center of her spherical office, dressed in black ceremonial robes, her back to him. At the sound of the door hissing shut behind him, she unlaced her fingers, unfolded her legs from lotus, and flexed at the waist, rotating until she faced him. He politely spun until their local verticals matched, and they exchanged a bow. Then they each "took a seat," in the free-fall sense of the term, giving a short puff with their thrusters so that they backed away from each other and velcroed their backs and buttocks to opposing surfaces, Jay maneuvering to avoid sitting on the door he had just come through; they sat more or less simultaneously.

  "Well?" she said then, in the slow exhalation of one emerging from profound meditation.

  It was all bullshit, of course, and Jay knew it. If she had really been meditating, she'd have velcroed herself to a wall or some other support. A person who sits kukanzen in the center of a room in zero gee, unsecured, sooner or later ends up bumping against the air-exhaust . . . and shutting down the airflow only causes a ball of exhaled carbon dioxide to accumulate and smother the meditator. The Manager of the Shimizu was—as the job called for—one of those people who prize appearance over content, style over substance, and Rinzai Buddhism was merely part of her admittedly impressive act. To have actually practiced it would have been an inefficient use of time.

  But Jay was not about to let his boss know he saw through her. Not when he was about to piss her off. He slowed his breathing, adjusting to her rhythm. "My brother said yes," he told her.

  She smiled wearily.

  Tokugawa—he dared not let himself think of her as "Kate" while in her presence—was a hundred and sixty centimeters long, and massed forty-six kilos. In free-fall her small size had the effect of making her seem to be a little farther away than she actually was. Which made her seem just a little more crisply in focus than other people. She had stabilized her apparent age at forty standard years, with silver streaks in her hair that were in different places each time you met her. Jay had no idea what her real age might be. She was the granddaughter of Yoji Tokugawa, who had succeeded Bryce Carrington as Chairman of the Board of the original Skyfac consortium back before the turn of the millennium, and her family still controlled a large share of space industry today. She had their "look of eagles," backed by a competence that few Tokugawas actually possessed anymore: she looked so much like the Manager of the finest hotel in human space that her genuine fitness for the job was almost a happy accident. Neither attribute particularly impressed Jay, but then, he had to work for her.

  "Good," she said quietly. "It was about time for something to go right."

  "Troubles, Ms. Tokugawa?" Jay asked, testing the waters to see just how bad a time this was to bring up the matter of the two-month escape clause Rand wanted.

  She made a flicking-away gesture. "Not really. Just an infinity of minor
nuisances."

  "How minor? Is the house still pressurized?"

  "For the moment," she replied drily. "No, nothing serious. I've got a major economic summit coming up next month, with so much weight I'm going to have to double security, and—"

  "Excuse me, I could have sworn you just said you were going to double security."

  "I did."

  Jay stared. "There is no such quantity. You can't double infinity. God isn't as secure as a Shimizu guest."

  She grimaced. "If He had security like those five are going to have, Satan would never have gotten off a speech, much less a coup attempt. Their combined resources are . . ." She paused, and Jay waited, curious to hear what word she would choose. " . . . impressive," she finished, and he repressed an impulse to lift his eyebrows. Any personal fortune that impressed Katherine Tokugawa staggered Jay. "If they ask me to, I'll have to taste-test their food myself—or anything else they want."

  "That does sound like a lot of pressure."

  "Special diets, special requirements, protocol headaches—the Muslim needs to know where Mecca is at all times, precisely, and the Chinese wants me to have that Soto Zen roshi flown in from Top Step to do dokusan with him, and as for the American—well, never mind what she'll want—and of course each and every one of them must be honored and coddled and pampered precisely as much as the other four, to the tenth decimal, never mind that it's apples and—" She caught herself, glanced down at her meditation robes, and took a long cleansing breath. "Never mind any of it. It's par for the course these days. And not your pidgin. About your brother—any problems I should be aware of?"

  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 kukanzen 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 h
is 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.