The Sagittarius Whorl Page 7

  "Rats. I was afraid this wouldn't be easy."

  Jake glowered at me. "You really really need to find him?"

  "Yes."

  "May I ask why?"

  All I said was, "Is there any unofficial way you can track him down?"

  "There are always ways. They can take time, which I don't have, and cost money, of which I am chronically short. Why don't you hire one of the big tracer outfits? Or—" He broke off. You could almost see the legendary lightbulb clicking on above his head. "Wait a second, now. Tregarth last came to our attention peddling actinic-beam weaponry from a Carnelian subsidiary to the Y'tata. It occurs to me there's something quick and dirty I could try."

  "Do it."

  "Meet me in the lobby of CCID HQ about 1730 hours. Bring an open-ended blind EFT card. If my idea pans out, maybe you can use the card to buy something besides a night on the town."

  He ended the call and I went to breakfast, whistling "Empty Saddles in the Old Corral."

  Rosalia served me huevos rancheros and a honey-sweet Chilean watermelon the size of a grapefruit, remarking that my father had already left for Toronto in his private hopper. Not in a good mood.

  "Too bad," I remarked. "I hope it wasn't something I said."

  I'd already talked to Jane Nelligan at Rampart Tower, a couple of time zones ahead of Arizona, asking her to get a status report on the refit job on Makebate and make appointments with Adam Stanislawski and Lorne Buchanan. She called back as I was finishing my second cup of coffee, and I answered on my pocket phone.

  "Chairman Stanislawski has a very crowded schedule today," she said briskly. "He can see you for fifteen minutes at noon in his office at Macrodur Tower if that'll suffice. Otherwise he's not available till Monday."

  Jane is always brisk, as well as tactful and awesomely efficient. Since I am nothing of the sort, I value her as a pearl beyond price. She is married to the head vet at the Sunder-land Racecourse, has twin sons in business school at Commonwealth UT, and copes like a steely eyed drill sergeant with the forty-six gung-ho lawyers who comprise Rampart's Toronto-based legal staff.

  I told Jane that a noon touch-and-go at Macrodur was dandy. All I wanted to do was get Adam's reaction to my nomination. Unless I missed my guess, his opinion was going to coincide with my own and save me a lot of aggravation with Simon and Eve.

  "Lorne Buchanan's gatekeepers were reluctant to accommodate you," Jane continued. "I took the liberty of taking your father's name in vain since you told me the meeting was urgent. That did the trick. Citizen Buchanan prefers to come to you. He won't be in his office today."

  "I can't imagine why."

  "I've made the appointment for 1430 hours in our penthouse conference room. Citizen Buchanan will stay as long as need be. His security people insist on sweeping the place for bugs before the meeting. They want to check you out personally, too. I couldn't get them to budge on the stipulation."

  I laughed. "Perfectly acceptable. See that Rampart InSec returns the courtesy to El Queso Grande himself and his flunkies. Also, alert Karl Nazarian to expect one psy-chotronic interrogation subject following Buchanan's meeting with me."

  "Himself?" Jane's eyes widened.

  "Yep. And I want the results before the end of the afternoon."

  "Right... The final fuel-bunker and radiation barrier modifications of your starship were completed last week. The survey instrumentation is installed, except for a Carnelian LRIR-1400J scanner that seems to be on permanent back order."

  "Tell the mechanics to find one any which way and plug it in immediately. I don't care if they have to steal it off a Carney dock or buy it on the goddamn black market."

  "Very well." She turned away from the phone video pickup, then returned holding a StelEx letterpak. "This arrived less than an hour ago, marked 'personal and confidential.' The sender is your friend, Captain Bermudez."

  "Would you please open it?"

  She did. "A small e-slate requiring your ID for activation. And this."

  She held up a platinum neck chain holding two gold wedding rings.

  I felt my breath catch. Mimo had been holding the rings for me ever since they were rescued from the stomach of a house-eating sea toad. They had belonged to me and my former wife, Joanna DeVet.

  I told Jane, "Please put the rings and the slate in my office safe."

  "Right. There have been more messages for you since we spoke earlier, most of them from the media. I gave them the standard referral to our public affairs department. Geraldo Gonzalez also called and said it was very important that you and he talk before you, urn, quote, flit off to some godforsaken boonie planet, unquote."

  Gerry chaired the Reversionist Nominating Committee, the group empowered to select the single Commonwealth Assembly delegate the party was newly entitled to, following the latest poll of CHW citizens. The committee had been deeply divided on my tentative candidacy, in spite of the fact that I was their principal financial resource and had also brought them the publicity that had finally gained the party its lone seat. However, certain Reverse stalwarts felt I wasn't anti-Big-Business enough to be their standard bearer. Others contended I was too flaky. Both points were valid.

  After reading last night's Journal, Gerry and his crew were probably scared to death that I'd accept the Rampart chairmanship, mutate instantly into a capitalist swine, and cut off all their lovely money.

  "I'll give Gonzalez half an hour. Make the appointment for 1300 in my office. Anything else?"

  "Bethany Frost heard you were coming in. She wants to talk to you briefly about your brother, Dan."

  "Rats." This I didn't need. "Maybe for a few minutes in my office, if there's time after I finish with Buchanan. But I'm off to meet Jake Silver around 1715. Two for dinner, just me for the show. Cancel the second Shakespeare ticket. Jake begged off."

  "I'll take care of it. Is there anything else you need me to arrange before you arrive? A limo and security escort for the restaurant and theater?"

  "Nope. I'll wear my Anonyme and take the Path just like an ordinary citizen. Media stalkers will never notice me in the capital crush. I'm in disguise." I held the phone at arm's length so she could check me out.

  I'd seen no reason to conform to Rampart Concern's dress code during my stint as Chief Legal Officer, since I rarely left the tower. My customary work attire of ratty jeans, scuffed boots, and tired western-wear shirts had scandalized Jane Nelligan sadly, although she never said a disapproving word. Today, however, I'd donned a featherweight charcoal worsted business suit with a matching silk turtleneck, a muted aquamarine scarf, and a silver neck brooch inset with a small nugget of turquoise. The only vestige of maverickhood I'd allowed myself were a pair of well-polished, low-heel, pointy-toed, Tony Lama cowboy boots in black mokcrok, peeking out from beneath my elegantly creased trousers.

  "Unbelievable," Jane murmured. "You'll certainly impress Stanislawski and Buchanan. If they recognize you at all."

  "Oh, they will," I said dryly. "I can guarantee that."

  I said goodbye and finished my coffee. Then I exited the ranch house through the kitchen, kissing Rosalia the cook on her cheek as I passed by.

  It was a beautiful Arizona morning, clear and cool, with the sun shining over Buzzard Roost Mesa and warblers singing their hearts out among the ponderosa pines. I heard the faint whinny of a horse from over by the stock barns. Maybe it was Billy, saying hasta la vista.

  Empty saddles in the old corral.

  Carrying a briefcase full of executive paraphernalia, I trudged down the manicured gravel path to the hopper pad, where my Garrison-Laguna hoppercraft waited. No pilot. I almost always do my own driving. It's a control thing.

  Control.

  I'd fallen asleep last night brooding about it, and when I woke my mind was firmly made up. It wasn't going to take me months to decide on my future—assuming I had any when my Haluk excursion was over. I knew for certain that I'd never again relinquish control of my life to any person or any institution. Not to Rampart Ama
lgamated Concern. Not to the Reversionist Party.

  The head seat at Rampart's boardroom table had never been a viable career choice for me. It was true that I'd be in a powerful position to advance Reversionist ideals if I became Rampart's chairman. Setting the agenda and having a tie-breaking vote on the board could significantly affect company policy. But the personal independence that had always been so important to me would be lost if I took Simon's place. I'd be fenced in by constant decision-making, forced to weigh every action and utterance because it could influence the lives and fortunes of billions of people, poisoned by creeping expediency, morphing inevitably into the kind of corporate drone I professed to despise.

  I couldn't do it. My skills were adversarial, not executive. I'd been a competent cop, a cunning legal strategist, and a damned fine vigilante. But I was no organization man. No way, no how.

  Serious politics wasn't an option, either. It was one thing to play grandstanding left-wing firebrand as I'd done two years earlier, trumpeting radical ideas without taking responsibility for their implementation, happily twisting establishment tails while the tabloid media egged me on: Asahel Frost—another rich man with a big mouth and a bee in his bonnet, convinced he has the answers to the galaxy's ills!

  I still thought my answers were good ones. However, serving as the sole Assembly Delegate of a fledgling splinter party was simply not a practical course of action. Why, I'd have to learn tact and diplomacy. Legislative horsetrading. The art of graceful compromise.

  Me?

  Who was I kidding? Even the best and brightest Liberal Party lawmakers, such as my friend Sontag, endured a perpetual uphill battle in an Assembly dominated by Conservative creatures of the Hundred Concerns. An amateur like me didn't have a prayer.

  There was a more appropriate way for me to advance the Reversionist cause. I intended to discuss it with Gerry Gonzalez today.

  Whistling "Happy Trails to You," I climbed into my flying machine, entered the destination in the navigator, and let myself be whisked off to Toronto.

  You pronounce it "Trawna" unless you're a hopeless clodhopper or belong to an alien race, in which case you or your mechanical translator doggedly voice every vowel and consonent. While Torontonians snicker.

  The city was born as a native "place of meetings" where two rivers flowing into Lake Ontario flanked a convenient marshy plain. Scattered tribes came there to swap furs and copper and shell beads. It became a small French trading post in 1720, and later it was briefly the capital of British Canada. Waves of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought steady economic growth and a uniquely cosmopolitan character that made Toronto a popular choice for the United Nations' permanent headquarters, then for the capital of the Commonwealth of Human Worlds as the commercialization of the stars began.

  By the year 2236 the conurbation sprawled across 20,000 square kilometers above the northern shore of the lake. Its population was about seventeen million—most of them human. Viewed at night from space, Toronto proclaims itself with a triumphant blaze of light, beyond any doubt the largest and most prosperous city on the planet Earth.

  The original mosquito-plagued trading ground between the Humber and Don Rivers remains the city center, augmented now by scores of artificial islands out in the lake. A semipermeable force-umbrella 40 kilometers in diameter fends off inconvenient weather phenomena. Toronto's heart bristles with hundreds of multihued crystal towers crammed with offices and apartments, interconnected by skyways and the computerized highroad network. Beneath the surface streets lie rapid-transit and service subways, along with the unique warren of underground pedestrian walks known as the Path.

  Many of the modern buildings stand astride venerable Canadian structures that have been carefully preserved. Churches, grand hotels, theaters, and picturesque old shopping precincts and restaurants are hedged by clear piers and buttresses that support the soaring towers.

  Sometimes the new hovers pleasingly over the old. The massive Commonwealth Assembly House rises on sturdy glassy stilts above the old Ontario Parliament buildings; historic BCE Place is comfortably embraced by Omnivore Concern's fanciful obelisk; Macrodur Tower benevolently engulfs St. James Cathedral. But in other cases the overall effect is more ominous. Carnelian's ugly needle of beef-bouillon-colored silica glass, entangled in a dozen skyways, overwhelms the stately old City Hall, while the 400-story ithyphallic monstrosity that houses Galapharma seems on the point of crushing the Queen's Quay Terminal.

  Rampart Tower, only thirty-five years old and innocent of historic underpinnings, is a relatively modest blue-and-white skyscraper across the street from Grange Park. It is neither distinguished nor ugly, a mere hundred stories high, served by three vehicle skyways and having a hopper pad for aerial access. Before Rampart attained Concern status, it only occupied the top fifteen floors, leasing out the rest. The expanded firm now filled the entire building. God knew what would happen after the consolidation.

  The conference room where I would meet Lorne Buchanan today was a circular chamber at Rampart Tower's summit. My offices and the rest of the Legal Department occupied the ninety-sixth floor. The place I called home while I resided in the capital was a small clutch of rooms on the lake side of the seventy-third floor, identical to the suites housing transient junior executives, except for a hologram mounted over the fake fireplace that depicted a yellow submarine named Pernio II, chugging wistfully along the surface of a sapphire alien lagoon.

  I hated my Rampart Tower apartment. But I'd resisted Simon's urgings that I get myself a more suitable dwelling in The Beaches or one of the other upscale parts of town. No use bothering, I told him. I wasn't planning to stay.

  He'd never believed me.

  The sky was leaden and a combination of cold rain and sleet was falling when my aircraft arrived at the southern outskirts of Toronto Conurbation ATZ. I gave Traffic Control my destination, Macrodur Tower's upper landing shelf, and was promptly shunted into a holding formation over the dull green lake while computers sequenced my hopper—and about four dozen others—to touch down in the identical place.

  It was already quarter to twelve. I'd been delayed by a traffic-vector glitch in Chicago airspace. I got on the phone to warn Stanislawski's secretary that I might not be able to make the appointment unless I jumped the line.

  "I'll arrange priority routing," she told me. "You'll be landing in a restricted area. Please wait in your aircraft until a transport capsule arrives."

  Beneath the force-field, Toronto's central district was sheltered from the icy rain. But occasionally, vagaries of cold air-flow and high humidity conspired to produce weird artificial clouds under the protective roof. It was happening today. Although it was high noon, the fielded part of the city was sunk in heavy twilight. Swags of mist hung spookily around the illuminated towers and hid the tips of the loftier ones.

  The engineers at Macrodur's skyport dealt efficiently with the nuisance, clearing the air with infrared beacons. My hopper settled onto a sequestered pad, alphanumerics and transponder ID discreetly masked by security electronics from the moment I exited controlled airspace. Not a living soul was in sight, in spite of the fact that scores of aircraft were taking off and landing.

  A VIP transport capsule with one-way windows came gliding out to meet me and extruded a boarding tunnel that docked with the door of my hopper. A robot voice requested an iris scan to confirm my identity. I showed it my eyeball, then climbed in as instructed.

  The skyport, like the rest of the building's gold and white exterior, was exquisitely designed. But once inside the tower walls, the visitor was conveyed through corridors and anti-grav transit tubes that were uniformly mushroom-colored, blank, and claustrophobic, lacking any directional signs. All I saw as I sped toward Stanislawski's offices were anonymous carts and capsules traveling on unfathomable errands. The doors leading off the access platforms were unmarked, giving no hint of what lay beyond them.

  I had visited Macrodur Tower—but not the chairman's lair
—numbers of times over the past couple of years. Worrywart financial mavens concerned about Macrodur's investment in Rampart periodically commanded me to explain my more bizarre tactics during the Galapharma trial. Sometimes Adam Stanislawski attended the interrogations; more often he didn't. But he had always expressed complete confidence in me, and on one occasion had gone out of his way to reaffirm his personal decision to grant Rampart the venture credit it had so desperately needed. His action had paved the way for Rampart's upgrade to Concern status and finally forced the hand of Galapharma's lunatic CEO, Alistair Drummond, contributing to his downfall.

  The Macrodur chairman's access platform was as featureless as all the others. There were no obvious security features guarding the great man, who admitted me to his private office himself. Three walls of the large room were covered with alternating strips of dark wood paneling and buff grass-cloth. The fourth wall, behind a vast Victorian partners desk, was an enormous window. Heavy drapes of dark green monk's cloth framed the eerie scene outside. The pictures on the walls were nonholographic, romantic terrestrial landscapes with the exception of a woman's portrait in oils above the green marble fireplace. No modern data-processing or communication equipment was in evidence, but I suspected that most of the antique cabinets, presses, and escritoires furnishing the room had been gutted and stuffed with cyber-ware.

  "Filthy day," said Adam Stanislawski. "Let's sit by the fire and have some coffee."

  He was in his mid-sixties, of stocky build, and had abundant white hair and a grandfatherly mustache, in defiance of alpha male corporate chic. His hyacinth-blue eyes were small, alive with intelligence, humor, and fuck-not-with-me authority.

  "Thank you for seeing me, sir," I said, taking a designated chair. Adam is one of the few persons I know who naturally rates an honorific.

  "My pleasure, Helly. I believe you take your coffee black these days." He handed me a plain stoneware cup of steaming brew.