The Diamond Moon (6 page)

“I’d be a right fool to say that, wouldn’t I? Seeing as how I’m one of less than half a dozen people who can read Culture X script. So is Forster, which is how I know him. Which has nothing to do with Mays and his theories.”

Marianne gave it up then, and drained the last of her champagne. She studied the empty flute and said, “There’s a lot I don’t know about you.” She was stating a fact, not starting a flirtation. Panic creased his brows. “I’ve done it again, launched into a lecture. I always . . .”

 

“I like to learn things,” she said plainly. “Besides, you shouldn’t try to be somebody you aren’t.”

“Look, Marianne . . . if you don’t mind my tagging alone with you and Redfield, maybe we could talk more. Not about me,” he said hastily. “I mean about Amalthea and Culture X . . . or whatever you’d like.”

“Sure. Thanks,” she said, with an open and thoroughly charming smile. “I’d like that. Got any more of this?” She wiggled the glass at him.

Watching from over their heads, Randolph Mays ob-served that Hawkins, having offered to continue his con-versation with her later, soon ran out of things to say; when his bottle was dry he awkwardly retreated. Marianne watched him thoughtfully, but made no effort to stop him.

Mays chuckled quietly, as if he’d been privy to a confidential joke.
VI
Under the ice of the Shoreless Ocean, night passed by the artificial count of the hours, and morning came like clockwork. Morning changed imperceptibly to afternoon.

Luke Lim, having skipped breakfast and then lunch in order to pursue his commission into the commercial corri-dors and back alleys—it was one of the ways he maintained his skinny charm—tugged pensively at the straggling hairs on his chin while he studied the holographic nude Asian female on the wall calendar. She was kneeling, leaning forward with an innocent smile on her red-painted lips, and she held a pure white lotus blossom in her lap, its golden heart ablaze with the date and time. Luke’s stomach growled.

Lowering his gaze a few centimeters from the calendar, Luke could stare into the sweating face and evasive eyes of an overfed blond man who sat in a swivel armchair rearranging yellow slips of paper on his desk. For half a minute the two men sat wordlessly, almost as if they were a pair of music lovers trying to concentrate on the clash and wail of the Chinese opera that filtered through the thin wall between them and the barber shop next door. Then the faxlink on the credenza beeped and spit out another hardcopy.

The fat man grunted and leaned perilously over the star-board rail of his armchair to snag the paper from the tray. He glanced at it and grunted again, leaning to port across the littered desktop to hand it to Luke, who folded it and stuck it in the breast pocket of his work shirt.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Von Frisch.” Luke got up to leave.

 

“For once I can say the same,” the fat man grumbled. “Which suggests you are spending somebody else’s money.”

 

“Better if you keep your guesses to yourself.”

 

“Gladly, my friend. But who else in our small village will believe that Lim and Sons needs a submarine just to fulfill a municipal reservoir maintenance contract?”

“Nobody needs to believe anything, if they never hear about it.” Luke paused at the door in the opaque wall and as if on impulse groped in the back pocket of his canvas pants. He brought out a worn leather chip case and ex-tracted a credit sliver. “I know we took care of your bonus, but I almost forgot your
bonus
bonus.”

He reached over and grabbed the fingerprint-smeared black plastic infolink unit on the desk and stabbed the sliver into the slot. “Let’s say two percent of net, payable one month from delivery”—Luke withdrew the sliver and put it back in his wallet—“if I haven’t heard whispers in the cor-ridors about the sale of a Europan sub by then.”
“Your generosity overwhelms me,” said the fat man, al-though he did a creditable job of hiding his surprise. “Rest assured that anything you hear won’t have come from
my
people.”

Luke jerked his head toward the surveillance chip in the corner of the ceiling. “Just the same, I’d fry that peeper.”

 

The fat man grunted. “Doesn’t work anyway.”

 

“Yeah?” Luke grinned his mocking grin. “Your money.” He turned and pushed through the door.

Von Frisch instantly calculated the amount of Luke’s attempted bribe; he thought he knew where he could sell the information for more. At least it was worth a try, and with luck and a bit of discretion, Luke would never hear of it.

The fat man waited until Luke had had a chance to leave the brokerage and disappear into the crowd outside. He touched a button to de-opaque the partition; in the outer office his staff of two, harriedlooking middle-aged male clerks who were suddenly aware that they were once more under the eye of the boss, crouched in painful concentration over their flatscreens.

He keyed the office interlink and offloaded the contents of the surveillance chip onto a sliver, then erased the pre-vious twenty-four hours’ surveillance. Fingering the black sliver in one pudgy hand, he punched keys on the phonelink with the other; like those of most businesses, his phone was equipped with oneway scrambling to prevent, or at least impede, tracing.

“This is the Ganymede Interplanetary Hotel,” said a robot operator. “How may we assist you?”

 

“Sir Randolph Mays’s room.”

 

“I’ll see if he’s registered, sir.”

 

“He’s registered. Or he will be soon.”

 

“Ringing, sir.”

Fresh from two days of quarantine, Marianne Mitchell and Bill Hawkins found themselves crushed together in a corner by an over-full load of passengers, riding an elevator car down into the heart of Shoreless Ocean city. The last thirty meters of the slow descent were in a free-standing glass tube through the axis of the underground city’s central dome. The view opened out suddenly, and Marianne gaped at the startling mass of people on the floor far below.
The crowd spilled in and out through four great gates, outlined in gold, set in the square walls upon which the dome appeared to rest—although the masonry shell was really a false ceiling suspended in a hollow carved from the ice. As the elevator car moved lower, she could see upward to the vast, intricate, richly painted Tibetan-style mandala that covered the inner surface of the dome.

“You can’t see the floor for the crowd,” Hawkins said, “but if you could, you’d see an enormous ShriYantra laid out in tile.”

 

“What’s that?”

“A geometric device, an aid to meditation. Outer square, inner lotus, interlocking triangles in the center. A symbol of evolution and enlightenment, a symbol of the world, a symbol of Shiva, a symbol of the progenitive goddess, the yoni . . .”

“Stop, my head’s spinning.”

 

“At any rate, a symbol Buddhists and Hindus are both happy with. By the way, this elevator shaft is supposed to represent the lingam in the yoni.”

 

“Lingam?”

 

“Another object of meditation.” He coughed.

 

“Somehow these people don’t seem like they’re meditat-ing. Shopping, maybe.”

 

The heavenly car came to rest and the doors slid open.

 

“If we’re separated, head for the east gate—that one over there.” Hawkins barely got the words out before the two of them were expelled into the mob.

 

Marianne kept a vice grip on his arm. She was glad he knew where he was going; she was sure she could never have found the restaurant Blake Redfield had named without Hawkins to guide her.

Finding the right current in the human stream, they plunged through the east gate into a narrow passage, which soon bifurcated, then divided again. They were in what seemed a rabbit warren or ant’s nest of curving tunnels and passages, jammed with people, spiraling up and down and crossing each other at unexpected and seemingly random intervals. For Marianne the yellow and brown faces around her evoked no comparisons with rabbits or ants, however—she was too much a child of the widely (if shallowly) tol-erant 21st century for the easy slurs of 19th-century racism to hold any metaphoric force for her—she was merely overwhelmed by dense humanity.
After twenty minutes of effort and many questions, which Hawkins insisted upon bawling out in a sort of pidgin, they found the restaurant, a Singaporean establish-ment aptly named the Straits Cafe.

Inside, it was as busy as the jam-packed little alley-wide corridor it fronted. The air was rich with a compound aroma—sharp spices, hot meats, steamed rice, and undercurrents of other, unidentifiable odors. Hawkins hesi-tated in the doorway. A teenage girl wearing a viddie--inspired version of the latest interplanetary fashions—orange and green baggies were in this year—started toward them, tattered menus in hand, but Hawkins waved her off, having caught sight of Blake Redfield at a table for four next to a wall-sized aquarium.

Marianne hadn’t been expecting much from the son of her mother’s friend, so Blake was an interesting surprise: handsome, freckle-faced, auburn-haired, an American with continental airs and too much money—it showed in his clothes, his hairstyle, his expensive men’s cologne.

And when he spoke, it sounded in his English-flavored accent. “You’re Marianne, nice to meet you,” he said, getting to his feet, a bit distracted.

There was another man at the table, an emaciated Chi-nese in work clothes who barely glanced at Hawkins but positively leered at Marianne. “This is Luke Lim,” Blake said. “Marianne, uh. Mitchell. Bill Hawkins. Thanks for taking over for me, Bill. Sit down, everybody sit down.”

Hawkins and Marianne exchanged glances and sat down side by side, facing the aquarium wall, their faces lit by the greenish light that filtered through its none-too-clean water.

 

Menus arrived. Hawkins barely glanced at his. The ex-pression on Marianne’s face conveyed her bewilderment—

 

—not lost on Luke Lim. “The rock cod is fresh,” he said to her. “Also nervous.” He tapped the glass and grinned, an appalling display of yellow teeth and goatee hairs.

She returned a feeble smile and found herself staring past him at the ugliest fish she’d ever seen, all flaps and wrinkles and stringy parts the color of mucilage, floating at Lim’s eye level where he leaned his head against the aquar-ium glass.

Man and fish studied her in return.

 

“Uh, I think . . .”

 

“On the other hand, you might prefer the deep-fried shredded taro,” said Lim. “Very . . . crunchy.”

She couldn’t believe he was licking his lips at her like that. She stared at him, fascinated. “Until you start chewing it,” Bill Hawkins warned. “Then it turns into one-finger poi, right in your mouth.”

“What’s poi?” Marianne asked softly, almost whispering.

 

“A Polynesian word for library paste,” Hawkins said grumpily. “Blue gray in color. One-finger is the gooiest sort.”

 

Luke Lim had turned his wild leer full upon Hawkins. “Apparently Mr. Hawkins doesn’t appreciate our Singapo-rean cuisine.”

 

“When were you last in Singapore?” Hawkins asked—mildly enough, yet enough to cause tension; he and Lim had taken an instant mutual dislike.

 

“Oh dear,” Marianne murmured, turning back to the menu. Surely she would find there a few familiar words, like beef, potatoes, spinach. . . .

“Forster’s off with the others tonight,” Blake said to Hawkins, diverting his attention. “He wants to see you tomorrow morning. You’ve got a room waiting in the Inter-planetary. You can sit in it, or in the bar, or wander ’round the town, but don’t expect to find anybody in our so-called office.” Blake hadn’t even glanced at Marianne since she and Hawkins had sat down. “Luke and I—we’ll be in touch, don’t worry —we’ve recently concluded arrangements for the delivery of, uh, the first item.”

“The what?”

 

“Item A,” Lim said meticulously. “He paid me to call it that. At least in public.”

 

“We’re working on the second,” said Blake.

 

“Item B,” Luke said helpfully.

 

“Why all the damned secrecy?” Hawkins asked.

 

“Forster’s orders,” Blake said. “We’re under observation.”

 

“I should bloody well think so. By about three-quarters of the population of the inhabited worlds.”

 

“Dressed like this, in fact,” Blake said, “I’m a
bloody
neon sign, but I think it would be even odder if I were to greet Ms. Mitchell in my customary get-up these days.”

 

“What’s that mean?” “Did you notice Randolph Mays with you on
Helios
? No? I’m not surprised.”

 

“Mays?” asked Marianne, perking up.

 

“Would you like to know how Randolph Mays managed to get himself comfortably ensconced in the Interplanetary Hotel for two days during which all the rest of you have been detained in quarantine?”

 

“Sir Randolph Mays is in our hotel?” Marianne asked.

Blake was still ignoring her, fixing a stern eye on Haw-kins and barely restraining himself from tapping a forefin-ger on the tabletop. “Mays has contacts, informants, friends in places high and low. He knows customs types and hotel managers and maitre d’s and all that sort, knows what they like, which is clean money—which he’s also got. The man’s
not
just a fatuous old Oxbridge don, Bill, to whom the BBC mistakenly offered a pulpit from which to spout bull. He’s a damned good investigative reporter, stalking history on the hoof. And we have the misfortune to be his quarry of the moment.” Blake reached for the sliver of paper covered with handwriting that indicated his and Lim’s bill. “Luke and I have already had lunch. If you wouldn’t mind carrying on with Marianne here, Bill . . . I mean . . .”

“Quite, delighted to,” Hawkins said quickly, before Blake could make it worse. “Assuming that’s all right with you, Marianne.”

 

Two bright red patches had appeared high on Marianne’s cheeks. “Why waste another minute on me? I’m capable of looking after myself.”

 

“Marianne,” Hawkins said fervently, “I can think of nothing I would rather do—much less
need
do— than spend the next few hours in your company.”

 

“Catch you at the hotel in the morning, then.” Blake had already stood up. He looked at Marianne, his eyes unfocused. “Sorry, really I am. This way it works out for everybody.”