Tokugawa had her hands clasped in the kukanzen mudra—but now she was unconsciously twiddling her thumbs. The effect was so ludicrous that he knew she would be even angrier if she became aware of it; he concentrated his gaze on her eyes. “True,” she admitted grudgingly. “We are rushing him. His demand is reasonable. But if his wife decides she’s a groundhog, the house loses face. Damn Pribhara—this is her fault.”
Privately he disagreed. Pribhara could not help being a perpendicular. None of those poor unfortunates could. If anything, the situation was the fault of the Shimizu’s Board of Directors, for not simply picking a shaper. The three-year rotating audition scheme had always seemed crackbrained to Jay; something like this had been bound to happen. But his advice had been ignored, and now was not the time to mention it. The blame looked better on Pribhara than it did on him…
“I’d better call in Martin,” she said. “I hate speaking to the man, but this is his pidgin. Maybe he can…” Her voice trailed off disconsolately.
Jay empathized completely. Even for a PR man, Evelyn Martin was a weasel; you wanted to bathe after talking with him on the phone. But he was gifted at spin control—
A metaphorical lightbulb seemed to appear over Jay’s head.
“You’re not looking at this right,” he said suddenly. “This isn’t bad news—it’s mitigated good news. All it takes is a little spin control.”
“Explain.”
“Look, all Martin’s press release has to say is that Pribhara has canceled for medical reasons, and that Porter has graciously consented to fill out her term. At the end of two months, maybe you have to announce that Porter has dropped out too, and let Choy and Mazurski carry on competing from there—a minor kerfluffle. But most likely his wife and kid will love this place as much as everyone else does—so you announce then that he’s been given the final position and has accepted. Either way, none of the Board’s face is lost.”
“Your brother would accept that? Not announce that we’ve picked him as the final winner until he’s committed himself? And not announce that at all, ever, if he decides to opt out?”
“Gladly, I think. It gets him out of an impossible situation too.” He had a rush of brains to the head. “But you should bump him to the permanent salary right away.”
Her thumbs stopped twiddling. “Done. Mr. Cohn!”
Her AI materialized its lawyer-persona between her and Jay, facing both of them. As always, Mr. Cohn reminded Jay of an impossibly motionless shark. “Yes, ma’am?”
She gave instructions for the amendment of Rand’s contract, relying on Cohn’s legal software to translate her wishes from conversational English into Lawyerese, and spoke her signature. At Jay’s suggestion, she had Cohn upload a copy to Diaghilev so that Jay could pass the document on to Rand later that night. Then she dismissed the AI and turned back to Jay. “Sasaki?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve earned your air today.”
He smiled; the first sincere smile of the day. He felt as if he had just successfully matched orbits by eyeball, without a computer—a terrestrial analogy might be walking a tightrope over an abyss. “Always nice to hear. I’ll let you get back to your meditation.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But first, your reward. You get to tell Martin about all this.”
He grimaced. “It’s true, then; no good deed goes unpunished.”
“Except those committed by Stardancers. They seem to be exempt.”
“That’s an idea,” he said. “I’ll go out the airlock without a suit.”
“ ‘In space,’ ” she said, seeming to be quoting something, “ ‘no one can hear you scream.’ Please yourself—but see Martin first.”
Jay sighed. “Yes, boss. After I’ve eaten.”
He had originally intended to call Eva Hoffman and beg off on the chat she had asked for. But now he needed to tell someone how relieved he was, and how clever he had been in wiggling, at least for the moment, off the spot marked X. As he left Tokugawa’s office, he consulted the mental list of people he trusted enough to share news like this, and—Ethan being history now—found only Eva’s name. She was not an employee of the house, plugged into that grapevine… nor did she fraternize much with the other guests, even the other Permanents. Most of them considered her crazy. She was easy to talk to, and in his opinion she had more character and style than any ten other people he knew. He had often thought that if Eva were, oh, say, seventy years younger, he might have considered turning hetero again for her. Hell, even sixty years younger…
Telling Diaghilev to call ahead and announce him, he left the Core and jaunted back outboard, through both Deluxe Tier (peasant country, at least in Shimizu terms) and UltraDeluxe Tier (the bourgeoisie; governors, national-level executives and so forth), all the way to the Prime Tier, the outer suites with the most cubic and a naked-eye view of space. Eva’s digs were in the Prime Plus hemiTier: the one whose view included Earth. She had chosen a suite offset from the center of that section, so that the home planet did not completely dominate the view, a choice Jay approved of since he had made the same one himself. Her door opened for him when he reached it, and her voice bade him enter.
Her suite was lavish and comfortable and hushed. As a long-time resident of the Shimizu, he knew the second most expensive thing in it was the hush. The third most expensive thing was the sheer cubic volume, and the air that filled it. Jay was one of the half-dozen hotel staff with enough clout to rate quarters in Prime Plus, and his own suite was a quarter the size of this one. Even by the standards of a permanent guest of the Shimizu, Eva was wealthy. Kate Tokugawa would have said that her assets were “substantial,” only a step below “impressive.”
His eyes found Eva where they expected to, by the room’s most expensive feature: floating within the three-meter-across bubble window (called an imax for obscure historical reasons), which made the best Prime Tier suites cost twice as much as Deluxe accommodations. As was her custom when at home, she was wearing only wings and fins, sculling them gently and quite unconsciously to hold her position in space against the gentle current of airflow. It was a sight he had seen countless times, and still found striking and moving: a butterfly with a withered body, Rodin’s She Who Was Once the Beautiful Heaulmière somehow given the wings of a swan by the gods in clumsy compensation for the ruin of her beauty. Nobody looked sixty anymore these days—certainly no one whose real age had three digits—and Jay found Eva’s defiant decay paradoxically entrancing. Especially juxtaposed against the wings, modern and high-tech… and that absurdly expensive surround-window… and the stars beyond, their steady fossil light unthinkably older than Eva could ever hope to be. He wished he had the nerve to use the image in a dance…
But Eva never missed a premiere. She had been born back in the days when nudity was strongly taboo—and while she’d obviously come into the twenty-first century, he had noted that she was never nude save when closeted with intimates.
Oddly, the thought had never once occurred to him that he would probably be free to use the image as he pleased one day, all too soon—that it could not be long before Eva died. If it had, the thought would have saddened him… but there was something about Eva that kept him from having it.
He politely removed his own clothing and let bee-sized tugbots take charge of each garment. He did not bother to remove his own wrist and ankle thrusters. Eva didn’t object to their emissions, she just didn’t care to use thrusters herself if she didn’t have to; and Jay felt far more naked without them than he did without clothes. Nonetheless he allowed other tugbots to give him his own set of wings and fins, slid them on over his thrusters, and used them to join his hostess at the window. He was, if anything, more skillful at air-swimming than she was; he simply preferred the superior kinetic and kinesthetic versatility thrusters offered.