“You’re moping,” he said to Jade. Despite the successes of Jade’s series on Sam Gunn, Solar News’s corporate headquarters on Earth had not deigned to enlarge the office space in Selene. Profits first, was the motto in Orlando.
Sitting in front of Jumbo Jim’s messy, cluttered desk, Jade nodded despondently. “I guess I am moping,” she admitted.
“You’re going through your assignments like a sleepwalker,” Jim added, pushing aside a small mountain of reports and memos to reach for the milkshake mug on the corner of his desk. Several of the monomolecular sheets slid languidly to the floor.
“I guess I am,” Jade repeated. Then, pulling herself up straighter, she said, “It’s this Sam Gunn thing. I can’t get it out of my mind.”
Gradowsky took a long pull on his milkshake. Wiping chocolate foam from his lips with the back of his hand, he said, “All right, here’s what I’m going to do. You’re off all assignments for the next three days. You spend the time tracking Sam down.”
“Three days? Jim! Thanks!” Jade wanted to jump over the desk and kiss him.
“Three days,” Gradowsky warned, holding up three fingers. “Then I want you here with all your brains working.”
“Thanks, Jim,” she repeated, bolting from the chair and heading for the door.
Monica Bianco was sympathetic but not terribly helpful. Her office, like Jade’s, was nothing more than a cubicle with shoulder-high partitions, although she had adorned the wobbly walls with photos of her abundant family back Earthside. Every timeJade saw the pictures she thought about how much she wished she had a family. But she had no one—except, maybe, Sam Gunn.
“I don’t see how you can flush him out,” Monica was saying. “If he’s squirreled away in the maintenance level or out in one of the emergency shelters it’d take a small army to find him.”
Jade agreed gloomily. But she insisted, “There’s got to be some way.”
“Like what?”
“Like … I don’t know.”
Monica leaned back in her chair. “You’ve been following Sam’s life for the past three years. Don’t you have a feeling for how he thinks? How his mind works?”
“Well, sort of.”
“So?”
Jade thought about it for several silent moments. Then it hit her. “That’s it!” she shouted, and ran from Monica’s office, leaving the older woman sitting open-mouthed behind her desk.
Sam wouldn’t hide out in some ratty corner of a warehouse, she told herself as she slid behind the desk in her own cubicle. Not Sam!
She called up the guest list of the Selenite Hotel, the poshest hostelry on the Moon. He wouldn’t use his own name, of course, Jade told herself as she scanned the list. Some of the names were blanked out and photo IDs missing, guests who wanted complete privacy.
Then she spotted a face that was obviously phony. A gold turban wrapped around the head of a man whose luxuriant black beard was so thick that all she could see of his face was a generous beak of a nose and tiny, squinty eyes of some indeterminate light color.
Who else? Jade asked herself.
The name beneath the image read “Sri Malabar Singh Satay.” Jade laughed aloud. A phony if I ever saw one! she told herself. Just as phony as that snout and beard.
To make sure, she looked up his biography. It was impressive. If the data could be believed, Malabar Singh Satay was one of Earth’s foremost musicians, a concert pianist, and scion of a fabulously wealthy Sikh family that had fled the biowar that had depopulated the Indian subcontinent and now made their principal residence on the island of Malabar in the East Indies.
Yeah, right! Jade said to herself. So what’s he doing on the Moon?
She contacted the Selenite Hotel and was put through to Mr. Satay’s suite with only a minimum of delay. A darkly beautiful woman with large, lustrous eyes answered her call and agreed, in a silky voice that carried an exotic slightly singsong lilt, to allow Jade to interview Mr. Satay that very afternoon.
Jade laughed to herself all the way to the hotel. He thinks he can fool me with that phony beard and schnozzola, she thought. Fingering the voice analyzer she was carrying in her purse, Jade told herself, I’ve got his voiceprint on the chip; no matter what kind of crazy accent he tries to use, the analyzer will pin him down. Once it chimes, Sam’s game is up.
The same woman opened the door to Satay’s suite and welcomed Jade in with a bow and a sweeping gesture. Despite the fact that she wearing a perfectly ordinary pants suit and hardly any jewelry at all, she looked exotic and terribly beautiful to Jade. Must be the perfume, Jade told herself as she followed the woman into a sumptuously furnished living room. A massive grand piano stood in one corner, beneath a smart screen that showed a view of the long-destroyed Taj Mahal.
“I am Indra,” the young woman said. “Mr. Satay’s daughter.”
Daughter? Jade immediately felt her face flush with emotion. But before she could say a word, Malabar Singh Satay stepped into the room like a Mogul emperor entering his throne chamber.
He was much taller than Jade had expected, his skin a dark, almost coppery color. The turban adds to his height, she told herself. And the beard hides most of his face.
“Ms. Inconnu,” said Satay in a low, gravely voice. He pressed his hands together before his face and dipped his chin slightly. The voice analyzer in Jade’s purse remained silent.
She bowed back, self-consciously. “Mr. Satay,” she murmured. She saw that he was wearing white silk gloves. To protect his pianist’s hands, she thought. And not leave any fingerprints.
Satay was much taller than Sam would be, Jade realized. Tall and slim and somehow elegant-looking in a thigh-length brocaded jacket with a high, tight collar. He gestured Jade to the striped couch in the middle of the big room, then perched straight-backed on the facing armchair. Indra moved silently behind Jade; she couldn’t tell if the woman had taken a chair or left the room altogether.
“I am so very glad you asked for this interview,” Satay said. “It is always a pleasure to be interviewed by the news media, yes indeed. I am afraid that I am something of an egotist. It must very likely be an essential part of a concert pianist’s personality.”
Fumbling for an idea, Jade stammered, “It… it’s not often that we … the people of Selene, that is … we don’t get many distinguished musicians visiting us.”
He seemed to smile. With the beard and luxuriant mustache, it was difficult to tell.
“Oh my goodness, not at all. On the contrary, Ms. Inconnu, Selene has a very illustrious symphony orchestra. Indeed, many of the finest musicians on Earth have come here to retire and then extended their careers in the low gravity and relaxed social atmosphere of your delightful community. I feel honored to be allowed to perform with them, certainly I do.”
As they chatted on, Jade became more and more convinced that this elegant man actually was who he claimed to be, and not Sam Gunn in disguise. After nearly an hour of talking, he got up and went to the piano, stripped off the silk gloves, and began to play the languid opening bars of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” for Jade.
“Rather appropriate, considering where we are,” he said over the music, “don’t you believe so?”
Jade had to agree. It wasn’t until Satay had completed the piece with its stirring final movement that she realized she was no closer to finding Sam than she had been before meeting the pianist.
As the last notes faded away, Jade sat on the sofa, too awed by the music to applaud.
“That’s … beautiful,” she breathed, knowing that her words were terribly lame.
“Thank you so very much,” Satay replied, without moving from the piano bench. He eyed her for a silent moment, then asked, “Are you not the woman who narrated those illuminating biographical shows about Sam Gunn?”