“God.”
“God?” The sheer incredulity in Renard’s voice betrayed the first tiny crack in his composure.
Nicklin turned away in amusement—Renard probably ate hard-nosed business tycoons for breakfast, but he had never dealt with a deranged preacher whose chief adviser was a dead woman in a box. He discovered that Renard’s wife was looking directly at him.
“Could I trouble someone for a hot drink?” she whispered.
“Coffee?”
“I could whip up some tea,” he replied, also whispering, pleased by the unexpected opportunity to separate her from the others.
“Tea would be fine.”
“I’ll join you in a cup.” He flicked a glance towards Montane and Renard as he left his seat. “This could go on a long time.”
“I was beginning to get that impression.” She stood up and walked with him to the cupboard at the far end of the office where the meagre refreshment supply was kept. This is good, Nicklin told himself. Things are going well, but Scott was right in what he said. The trick is not to be too direct. Show an interest in the woman as a rounded human being (and this one certainly qualifies on that score). Ask her about her beliefs and hobbies and dreams, and all that stuff…
As he was spooning tea out of Montane’s antique caddy he tilted his head, frowned a little and said, “I think I’ve seen you on television. Was your name London?”
“It still is,” Silvia replied. “I kept my previous name when I married Rick.”
“I thought I was right.”
“Perhaps you picked up some of the transmissions from Portal 36 on the day when… when everything changed.” Something seemed to happen in Silvia’s brown eyes as she spoke. It was a swift and fleeting change, the wind brushing the surface of a deep lake, but it was enough to persuade Nicklin that the events at Portal 36 should be left alone.
“Perhaps,” he said, “but I’m thinking more of… Was it called the Anima Mundi Foundation?”
“Yes!” Silvia’s face was animated, suddenly made younger. “Are you interested in Karal London’s work?”
Nicklin spurred his memory and it did not fail him. “On the survival of the personality after physical death? Fascinating subject.”
“It’s the most important subject of all. Have you attended any of the Foundation’s seminars or seen any of the publications?”
“No—I’ve been out in the sticks for the last year or so, and I didn’t have much chance to…”
Silvia touched his arm. “But you’re familiar with the basics of mindon science?”
“I never quite got to grips with it,” Nicklin said cautiously as he set out two cups.
“But it’s all so beautifully simple!” Silvia continued, still keeping her voice low, but speaking with a fervent rapidity. “The mindon is a class of particle which was postulated a long time ago, but its existence wasn’t finally proved until last year. Thanks to Karal’s work we now know that mind is a universal property of matter, and that even elementary particles are endowed with it to some degree…”
Nicklin went on preparing the tea, nodding occasionally and awaiting his chance to divert Silvia on to more personal matters. Having led off with claims he had trouble accepting, she progressed—in tones of utter conviction—to something called “mental space” in which there existed mindon duplicates of human brains.
He found himself growing bemused under the bombardment of mystical ideas expressed in the jargon of nuclear physics, and still the right conversational opening failed to arrive. What in hell is going wrong with everybody today? he wondered as he filled the two cups. Ami the only person in the whole world who is still anchored in reality?
“…shows that a personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and therefore it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain’s complex physical organisation in order to develop.” Silvia eyed him intently. “You can see that, can’t you?”
Nicklin moved her cup a centimetre closer to her. “Do you take milk?”
She ignored the tea, her gaze hunting across his face. “I really would like to hear what you think.”
“I think the whole concept is very impressive,” he said. His original dreams of hotel bedroom afternoons with Silvia were fading by the minute, and a disagreement at this stage could put paid to them altogether.
“Impressive.” Silvia nodded to show her awareness of the word’s ambivalence. “All right—what bothers you most?”
Amazed by how far the conversation had deviated from the one he had visualised, Nicklin said, “I guess it was all that stuff about how a personality is created. If, as you say, all matter has a mindon component—and all that’s needed for a personality to be conjured into existence is physical complexity—then you don’t need to bring in any biological—”
“Jim!” Corey Montane’s intrusive voice was thorned with impatience. “Bring your tea to the table, will you?”
Nicklin put on a rueful expression. “I have to slide over there and do some work—but I’d like to go on with this.”
“I’d like that, too,” Silvia said. “We can talk some more after the meeting.”
He smiled, keeping his eyes on hers. “That’s not what I meant.”
Her expression remained unchanged for a moment, and he realised she had plunged so deeply into her special realm of metaphysics that she was having genuine difficulty in getting back to the mundane world. But when it came her reaction was unequivocal.
“You said you had to slide back to your work—so why don’t you do that?” She turned away from him to pick up her teacup.
Nicklin was unwilling to be dismissed so easily. “I was only checking. No harm in checking.”
“Do people like you never get bored with themselves?”
“I could ask you the same question,” he said pleasantly as he moved away to rejoin the group at the table. He found that events had moved quickly during his absence. Renard had apparently shelved the idea of acquiring the Tara, and had assumed the role of broker for every type of component.
“I understand from Corey,” he said, “that you’re in the market for a couple of dozen 5M decks.”
“That’s about right.” Nicklin was careful not to show any enthusiasm. “We’re thinking of putting in perhaps another twenty-five.”
“I’ve got them.”
“What price?”
“Oh…” Renard closed his eyes for a second, pretending to make a calculation. “Let’s say thirty-thousand. Monits, that is—not orbs.”
Nicklin ignored the implication that he was a country boy and unaccustomed to global currency. The price was much less than he had expected from a business shark like Renard, and he began to look around for a catch.
“What condition are they in?”
“Unused,” Renard said comfortably. “They’re pretty old, of course, but unused. Most of them are still in the plastic skins.”
Nicklin saw Montane and Voorsanger exchange congratulatory glances, and his conviction that something was wrong with Renard’s offer grew stronger. He went over the figures again in his mind, and suddenly he understood the cat-and-mouse game that Renard was playing. The bastard! he thought with reluctant admiration. He’s even more of a shit than I gave him credit for!
“Well, Rick,” Montane said, “on that basis I believe we can go ahead and—”
“Before you go too far,” Nicklin cut in, “ask Mr Renard if thirty-thousand is the unit price.”
Montane frowned at him, then gaped at Renard. “But that would make it… three-quarters of a million for twenty-five old decks!”