The walls of the elevator remained transparent, but other than the lightness in his feet and the fluttering of his stomach, there was no impression of actual movement through the core of the tower. If there were imperfections in the wellstone walls of the shaft, they were imperceptible at these speeds, smearing together into a featureless gray blur.
Anyway, the ride would take twenty minutes, so this was as good a time as any for a telephone conference. “Call Mack,” he said to the wall.
A rectangular hologram window appeared on the side of the elevator after a few seconds' delay, and there was the artfully homely face of Mack Duggins, the son of Celia Duggins and Karl Smoit.
“Yeah? Oh, hi Boss.” Mack was out in the street somewhere, walking briskly on his short legs, not quite huffing with the exertion. The holie's view followed right along with him as he walked, and Conrad imagined his own face, in a rectangular holie window of its own, following Mack along the street, along the facades of shops and homes and restaurants, growing and shrinking as it went, struggling to maintain a constant apparent size and range from Mack's point of view. Every now and then, people jostled past him, blocking the view, but despite the ongoing population explosion, Domesville remained a small town, without too terribly much foot traffic.
Any resident of the Queendom—or of the Earthly societies which preceded it—would be surprised by Mack's appearance: a meter and a half of dense muscle and even denser skin, dark green in color and as bumpy as the hide of a dinosaur. The nose was prominent in his squashed-pumpkin face, the eyes were large, and the teeth so sharp and numerous that his mouth seemed barely able to close around them.
Mack was a troll. There was nothing particularly unusual about this—the body form was optimized for the long days and nights, the bitter seas and tough native foods of Planet Two, and its subculture included nearly a thousand individuals in Domesville alone. These were mostly native children who had never seen the light of Sol except as a pinpoint in the night sky, and they wore their troll skins with proud defiance, as youngsters before them might have worn a jacket of rakish well-leather. Children had always had this talent: to pervert the practical into something symbolic. And truthfully, this had the desired effect in that Conrad was less inclined to trust a troll than he was a human being. Except for Mack, of course.
“You treat me like I look,” a young trolless had once accused Conrad, on a crowded street at Festival time.
Conrad's crime: stepping away from her so as not to loom. And his reply: “Obviously, miss. Our appearance is the first thing we say to the people around us, and yours is a scream of defiance.”
To her credit, the trolless had giggled at that, and winked an enormous eyelid, and melted back into the rear of the crowd to be among her friends, her own kind.
But in Mack's case Conrad knew the person beneath the skin—indeed, had known the person before the skin—and had long since stopped noticing the way he looked. In some sense this was the underlying message of Mack's appearance: that it was appearance itself that could not be trusted. Mack could be a wiseass without even opening his mouth.
“Hi,” Conrad said to him over the holie link. “I'm going to be late on the job site this afternoon. I'd like you to complete the survey on your own, if that's all right, and then get those damned foundation people out there. I want a slab of actual stone this time—preferably basalt, but I'll take what I can get.”
There were basalts in P2's metal-poor crust, but they were buried very deep, and approached the surface only at Belladonna Canyon in the Southern Lowlands, where a robotic quarry with no permanent human (or troll, or other humanoid) residents turned out a meager and sporadic supply of cobblestone and foundation slab. And without tectonics raising ocean floors into mountain ranges every now and again, P2 didn't offer much in the way of sandstone either. Mostly, Conrad had to make do with pumices and granites, or even, in a pinch, blocks of poured concrete. These days he was using wellstone only as needed, as its price seemed to be pegged to the colony's population numbers and was therefore rising steadily.
And come to think of it, maybe that was the kind of warning sign the King and Queen of Sol were asking about. Certainly, in an optimal economy the goods and services should grow at least as quickly as the consumer base. Right?
“All right,” Mack said uncertainly. “I can handle that. Should I stop short of threatening violence?”
“Please,” Conrad confirmed. “But not too far short. We can't keep building on pumice—not if we're going to live forever.”
“Understood. I hope you don't mind a bit of curiosity though; what's so important all of a sudden? Not another woman, I hope.”
“No. Well, fifty-fifty chance, I guess. I'm going to see a doctor.”
Mack slowed a little, then resumed his quick pace. “Anything wrong?”
“Just a tune-up,” Conrad assured him. “It's been a while. We mustn't neglect these things—the delicate machineries which support the soul.”
“Noted,” Mack said. “Shall I expect you later?”
“Just play it by ear. Your ears are big enough for that, I should think. Anyway, I'm not quite sure how the hospitals work anymore, or how long it takes. Don't expect me until you see me.”
Mack seemed satisfied with that, but it was hard to tell for certain, because trolls usually looked satisfied. “All right, then, Boss. Have fun.”
Mack took instruction very well, needing little in the way of hand-holding or micromanagement, and in Conrad's experience that was a very good sign indeed. The best leaders were also, for whatever reason, the best subordinates. Mack was a bit, well, green for a leadership position just yet—only ten years old by the calendar, possibly twenty or twenty-five if you counted adult-equivalent experience, for his childhood had been brief. But Conrad was grooming him, and when the time came, he hoped to hand over a lot of his day-to-day labors to this enterprising young man, freeing himself up for certain big-picture issues, like why his materials were getting so damned expensive.
Bother it, maybe he should have taken Bruno and Tamra a bit more seriously. He cleared his throat. “Mack, I've heard a . . . rumor, I guess, that we might have some economic troubles lurking in the background. Not us personally—I mean the whole colony. Would you keep your eyes and ears open for me?”
“Sure, Boss. What sort of troubles?”
“If I knew, I'd tell you. But we're already facing price increases which affect our ability to do business, and that may have something to do with it. Just be aware.”
“There has been some gossip, I guess.”
Conrad raised an eyebrow. “Yes? Like what?”
And here Mack showed what a disturbing thing the smile of a troll could be. “Sir, if I repeated it, I'd be gossiping. But I can try to get some details for you. Should I ask around?”
“Not overtly,” Conrad said, after thinking about it for a moment. “It may be nothing. It's probably nothing. But if you see any signs that things are maybe not going so well, let me know.”
“All right,” Mack said with typical pragmatism. “Will do.”
And he would. Mack was a man of his word, and reasonably creative to boot. The funny part was, neither of Mack's parents—both of them human—had ever displayed much initiative or leadership, or even a good work ethic. But when you mixed them together just so, you got something more than the apparent sum of the parts. It couldn't be anything in the way he was raised, because Mack wasn't “raised” at all in the usual sense. Like most of the children of Barnard, he was born in a fax machine, as a weighted random mixing of the genes and generic memories of his parents. He had entered the world at the physiological age of fifteen, knowing how to speak and walk and tie knots, and with the vague sense that he'd had a childhood somewhere, though the specific details were muddy.