A Second Chance at Eden (11 page)

‘Yes. I am his student.’

And did I hear a defensive note in her voice? Her expression remained perfectly composed. Funny, but she was the first person so far who hadn’t said how much they regretted Penny’s death. But, then, Hoi Yin could give an ice maiden a bad case of frostbite.

‘Really? That’s auspicious. I would like to study under him as well. I wondered if you could ask him for me.’

‘You wish to change your profession?’

‘No. My neuron symbionts should be working by tomorrow. Dr Arburry said I’d need tutoring on their use. I would like Wing-Tsit Chong to be my tutor.’

She blinked, which for her seemed to be the equivalent of open-mouthed astonishment. ‘Wing-Tsit Chong has many very important tasks. These are difficult times, both for him and Eden. Forgive me, but I do not believe he should spend his time on something quite so trivial.’

‘None the less, I’d like you to ask him. At most it will take a second of his valuable time to say no. You might tell him that I wish to perform my job to the best of my ability; and to do that I must have the most complete understanding of affinity it is possible for a novice to have. For that, I would prefer to be instructed by its inventor.’ I smiled at her. ‘And if he says no, I won’t take offence. Perhaps then you’d consider the job? You certainly seem to have a firm grasp of the principles.’

Her cheeks coloured slightly. ‘I will convey your request.’

*

Shannon called me just after Hoi Yin walked out.

‘I think you’re psychic, boss,’ she said. The image on the desktop terminal screen showed me her usual grin was even broader than normal.

‘Tell me.’

‘I’ve just finished running down the wills of all those Boston members you gave me. And, surprise surprise, they all follow exactly the same format as Maowkavitz’s: a trust fund to be administered in whatever way the trustees see fit. And they all nominate each other as trustees. It reads like financial incest.’

‘If they were all to die, what would the total sum come to?’

‘Christ, boss; half of them are just ordinary folks, worth a few grand; but there’s a lot of them like Penny: multimillionaires. It’s hard to say. You know the way rich people tangle up their money in bonds and property deals.’

‘Try,’ I urged drily. ‘I expect you already have.’

‘OK, well you got me there, boss; I did some informal checking with Forbes Media Corp for the biggies. I’d guess around five billion wattdollars. Purely unofficial.’

‘Interesting. So if their wills aren’t changed, the last one left alive will inherit the lot.’

‘Holy shit, you think someone’s going to work down the list?’

‘No, I doubt it. Too obvious. But I still want to know what Boston intends to do with all that money.’

*

It was Nyberg who drove me to my interview with Antony Harwood. From the way she acted I thought she might be angling for some kind of executive-assistant role. She told me how she’d sorted out my interviews with the three trustees nominated in Maowkavitz’s will. I also got a résumé on her career to date, and how she was studying for her detective exams. But she was a conscientious officer, if a little too regimented, and obviously trying to advance herself. No crime.

I did wonder idly if she was a covert agent for JSKP security, assigned to keep tabs on me. It seemed as though she was always there when I turned round. Paranoid. But then it was a growing feeling, this awareness of constant observation. The more I had Eden explained to me, the more conscious I was of how little privacy I had from it. Did it watch me sleeping? On the toilet? Eating? Did it laugh at my spreading gut when I took my uniform off at night? Did it have a sense of humour, even? Or did it, with its cubic-kilometre brain, regard us all as little more than insignificant gnats flittering round? Were our petty intrigues of the slightest interest? Or were we merely tiresome?

I think I had the right to be paranoid.

Antony Harwood’s company, Quantumsoft, had a modest office building in what aspired to be the administration and business section of town. A white and bronze H-shaped structure surrounded by bushy palm trees which seemed a lot bigger than five years of growth could account for. It was all very Californian, quite deliberately.

Quantumsoft was a typical Californian vertical. After the Big One2 quake in
AD
2058 a lot of the high-tech companies resident in Los Angeles quietly shut up shop in the old city and moved up to High Angeles, a new asteroid that had been shunted into Earth orbit by controlled nuclear explosions. The asteroid project had been sponsored by the California legislature; always Green-orientated, the state wanted the raw materials from the rock to replace all its environmentally unsound groundside mining operations. A laudable notion, if somewhat late in the day. The kind of companies which ascended tended to be small, dynamic research and software enterprises, with a core of highly motivated, very bright, very innovative staff. And, ultimately, very wealthy staff. The verticals were geared towards producing and developing cutting-edge concepts, a pure, Green, cerebral industrial community; leaving their groundside subsidiary factories with the grubby task of actually manufacturing the goods they thought up.

High Angeles itself was one of the largest asteroids in the O’Neill Halo after New Kong, although even its central biosphere cavern wasn’t a fifth of the size of Eden’s verdant parkland. After the miners finished extracting its ore and minerals, and the verticals moved in, it developed into little more than a giant spaceborne Cabana club for clever millionaires. Millionaires who made no secret of their resentment with the unbreakable fiscal ties which bound the asteroid to Earth. They no longer had to endure quakes, and gangs, and ecowarriors, and crime, and pollution, but their physical safety came with a price: specifically Californian taxes.

However distant it might be from the battered Pacific coast, High Angeles was still owned by the state. With its vast mineral reserves and its dynamic verticals the asteroid remained the single largest source of revenue for the legislature. After pouring billions of wattdollars into its capture and starting up its biosphere, the Earthside senators weren’t about to let its privileged occupants cheat ordinary taxpayers out of their investment by turning it into an independent tax haven, no matter how much bribe money they were offered.

Ironically, as High Angeles siphoned off talent and wealth from Earth, so Eden drew the cream of the O’Neill Halo. The challenge Jupiter presented proved an irresistible attraction to the corporate aristocracy. Pacific Nugene was a prime example. Quantumsoft was another.

Antony Harwood rose from behind his desk to greet me as I entered his office: an overweight fifty-five-year-old with a thick black beard. He had changed out of his mourning suit since the funeral, wearing designer casuals as if they were a uniform, open-neck silk shirt and glossy black jeans, along with a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots.

Some people, you just know right from the moment you clap eyes on them that you’re not going to like them. No definable reason, they just don’t fit your sensibilities. For me, Harwood was one such.

‘I can give you a couple of minutes, but I am kinda busy right now,’ he said as we shook hands. As generous and jovial as his size suggested, but with a quality of steel.

‘Me too, someone got murdered a couple of days ago. And, understandably, I’m rather anxious to find out who did it.’

Harwood gave me a second, more thorough, appraisal, his humour bleeding away. He indicated a crescent sofa and table conversation area next to the window wall. ‘I heard what they say about you: the honest policeman. JSKP should have put you in a museum, Chief, the rarity value oughta haul in a pretty good crowd.’

‘Along with the honest businessman, I expect.’

There was a flash of white teeth in the centre of his beard. ‘OK, bad start. My mistake. Let’s backtrack and begin fresh. What can I do for you?’

‘Penny Maowkavitz. You knew her quite well.’

‘Sure I knew Penny. Sharp character, her tongue as well as her mind.’

‘You must have spent a lot of time with her, the two of you were contemporaries. So firstly, did she ever say anything, drop any hint, that she thought she might be in danger?’

‘Not a thing. We had disagreements. It was kinda inevitable, the way she was, but they were all professional differences. Penny never got personal in any way, not with anyone.’

‘What does Boston intend to do with her money? Your money too, come to that?’

He smiled again, showing an expression of polite bafflement. ‘Boston? What’s that?’

‘What does Boston want the money for?’

The smile tightened. ‘Sorry.
No comprende, señor
.’

‘I see. Well, let me explain. For an act of premeditated murder to be committed, logically there must be a motive. Right now I have exactly three suspects: Bob Parkinson, Pieter Zernov, and yourself. You three have the only motive my investigative team has been able to uncover so far. You have been placed in sole charge of a trust fund worth eight hundred million wattdollars, with absolutely no legal constraints or guidelines on how you spend it. So unless you can convince me right here and now in this office that you don’t intend to simply split it three ways and disappear into the sunset, you’re going to find yourself sleeping in my department’s unpleasantly small hospitality suite, with no room service, for the rest of your life.
Comprende?
’

‘No way. You can’t make that bunch of crap stick, and you know it. This is just blatant intimidation, Chief. My legal boys will put blisters on your ass, they’ll kick you so hard.’

‘You think so? Then try this. I wasn’t joking when I said you’re a murder suspect. That officially makes you a potential hazard to other residents. And as the lawful civil security officer of an inhabited space station I have the right to expel anyone I regard as a possible endangerment to the population of said station or its artificial ecosphere environment. Check it out: clause twenty-four in the revised UN Space Law Act of 2068, to which Eden is a signatory. Boston will just have to start the revolution without you.’

‘All right, let’s try and remain calm here, shall we? We both want the same thing: Penny’s killer behind bars.’

‘We do indeed. I’m perfectly calm, and I’m also waiting.’

‘I’d like a minute to myself.’

‘Confer with whoever you want. You’re not going anywhere.’

He glowered, then pressed his fingertips to his temple, concentrating hard.

Despite my initial misgivings I was becoming impatient for my symbionts to start working. What must it be like to call on friends and colleagues for support whenever you wanted? Must do wonders for the ego.

My gaze wandered round the office. Standard corporate glitz; tastefully furnished in some Mexican–Japanese fusion, expensive art quietly on show. It seemed all very cold and functional to me. I stared at a picture on the wall behind Harwood. Surely it must be a copy? But then again I couldn’t imagine Harwood settling for copies of Picasso.

He surfaced from his trance, shaking his shoulders about like a wrestler preparing for a difficult grapple. ‘OK, why don’t we take a hypothetical situation.’

I groaned, but let it pass.

‘If an independent nation were to nationalize the property of a company which was in its domain, the international courts would disallow the legality of the move, and seize the assets of that nation as compensation for the owners. There was a rock-solid precedent set in the Botswana case of 2024; when Colonel Matomie’s new government confiscated the Stranton Corp’s car factory. Colonel Matomie thought he was in a nineteen-sixties timewarp, back when all the new ex-colonial governments were grabbing any foreign asset for themselves. Stranton hauled him into the UN International Court; it took them a couple of years, but the ruling was unequivocally in their favour. The factory was their property, and Matomie’s government was guilty of theft. Stranton applied for a sequestration injunction. Botswana’s airliners were impounded as soon as they touched down on foreign soil, power from South Africa’s grid was shut off, all non-humanitarian imports were embargoed. Matomie had to back down and return the factory. Ever since then, Marxist regimes have had a real problem nationalizing foreign enterprises. Sure, there’s nothing to stop them from harassing the workforce, or shut businesses down with phoney health regulations, impose ludicrous taxes, or simply refuse to grant operating licences. But they can’t own the property, not if the original owners don’t want to sell.’

‘Yes, I can see how that would cause problems for you people. The only bona fide economic asset out here is the He
₃
mining operation. Even if the people of Eden declared independence there’s nothing to stop the JSKP from housing its workers in another habitat. Eden by itself would become financially unviable; you couldn’t compete in the microgee industry market because of the transport costs. Anything you build can also be built in the O’Neill Halo, and for far less. You have to have the mining operation as well as the habitat if you are to succeed.’

Harwood gave an indifferent shrug. ‘So you say. But my hypothetical government already has a small stake in the foreign factory it wants to take into national ownership. That changes the entire legal ball game; the whole concept of ownership and rights becomes far more ambiguous.’

‘Ah!’ I clicked my fingers as the full realization hit me. ‘You’re going to engineer a leveraged buyout from the existing shareholders, and probably try to oust the existing board members as well. No wonder you need all that money.’ I stopped, recalling the briefing files I’d studied on the JSKP. ‘But even that can’t be enough. You only have a few billion available. JSKP is a multi-trillion-wattdollar venture; it won’t break even for another fifty years.’

‘No government on Earth is going to disrupt the flow of goods from this hypothetical nationalized factory. They can’t afford to, the product it manufactures is unique and extraordinarily valuable. Ultimately, the courts and the financial community will permit this proposed managerial restructuring, especially as full compensation will be paid. Nobody is trying to cheat anyone out of anything. A large proportion of the money which Penny and other philanthropists have pledged to this hypothetical government will be spent on legal battles; which are shaping up to be very violent and depressingly prolonged.’