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
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
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