Monica looked as if she would cry. “I’m sorry, honey. But you had to know.”
Jade went through her morning as if disembodied, watching this redheaded young woman from an enormous distance as she made her way down the gray tunnels of Selene, conducted a perfunctory interview with a dull whining architect, then ate a solitary lunch in the darkest corner of the Pelican Bar, speaking to no one, not even a robot waiter. She punched up her order on the keyboard built into the wall of her booth.
There is no one you can trust, Jade told herself. Absolutely no one. Not even Monica. She’s bugged her fiancé’s office. Not one single human being in the whole solar system can be trusted. Not a damned one. I’m alone. I’ve always been alone and I always will be.
A robot brought her lunch tray. She ignored its cheerful programmed banter and it rolled away.
Jade could not eat more than a single mouthful. The food stuck in her throat. The cola tasted flat and sour.
She leaned her head against the back of the booth, eyes filling with tears, alone and lost in a world that had never cared whether she lived or died. It’s not fair! she cried silently. It’s just not fucking goddamned shitting fair.
Life is never fair. She remembered somebody told her that Sam Gunn had often said that. No, not quite. Sam had put it differently. “Life isn’t fair, so the best thing you can do is load the dice in your own favor.” That’s what Sam had said.
Don’t get mad, Jade told herself. Get even.
Grimly she slid out of the booth and headed for the ticket office of Lunar Transport.
“This is going to be kind of tough for me to talk about,” Jade said.
“Don’t give it a second thought, little one,” said Yoni, Mistress of Ecstasy. “Monica filled my ears with the whole story while you were on your way here.”
Here was the employee’s lounge of Dante’s Inferno, the biggest casino/hotel/house of pleasure in Hell Crater. It had been Sam Gunn’s sardonic idea of humor to turn Hell into a complex of entertainment centers. The crater had been named after an eighteenth-century Jesuit astronomer, Maximilian Hell, who once directed the Vienna Observatory.
Jade had overspent her personal credit account to ride the passenger rocket from Selene, after telling Monica what she was going to do. Mother Monica apparently had gotten on the fiber-optic link with Yoni as soon as Jade hung up.
The lounge was small but quite plush. Yoni sat on a small fabric-covered couch; Jade on a softly cushioned easy chair.
Jade had interviewed the Mistress of Ecstasy weeks earlier. Yoni had been left at the altar by Sam Gunn more than twenty years ago. But although she had every reason to hate Sam, she said, “I guess I still have a soft spot in my heart for the little SOB.”
Yoni claimed to be the child of a mystical pleasure cult from deep in the mysterious mountains of Nepal. Actually she had been born in the mining settlement at Aristarchus, of Chinese-American parents from San Francisco. She was tall for an oriental, Jade thought, and her bosom was so extraordinary, even though the rest of her figure was willowy slim, that Jade decided she must have been enhanced by implants. She wore a tight-fitting silk sheath of shining gold with a plunging neckline and skirt slashed to the hip.
She had worn a luxurious auburn wig when Jade had first interviewed her. Now she sat, relaxed, her hair cropped almost as short as a military cut. It was sprinkled with gray. Yoni was still beautiful, although to Jade she seemed awfully elderly for her chosen line of work. Cosmetic surgery had done its best, but there were still lines in her face, veins on the backs of her hands. Her dark almond eyes seemed very knowing, as if they had witnessed every possible kind of human frailty.
“Then you know,” Jade choked out the words, “about Raki… and me.”
Yoni smiled sadly and patted Jade’s knee. “You’re not the first woman to be roughed up by a man.”
“Can you help me?”
Yoni’s almond eyes became inscrutable. “In what way? I won’t risk damaging this house’s reputation just to help you get even with a jerk.”
Jade blinked at her. “No, that isn’t what I want at all.”
“Then what?”
“I want him to approve my doing a biography of Sam Gunn.”
It was Yoni’s turn to look surprised. “Is that what you’re after?”
“Yes.”
Yoni leaned back in her couch and crossed her long legs. “Let me get this straight. You want me to make him change his mind about this video biography you want to do.”
Jade nodded.
“Why should I help you?”
For a moment Jade had no answer. Then she heard herself say, “For Sam’s sake.”
“For Sam’s sake!” Yoni tilted her head back and laughed heartily. “Why in the name of the seventy-seven devils of Tibet should I care an eyelash about Sam? He’s dead and gone and that’s that.”
Jade said, “I thought you had a soft spot in your heart for him.”
“In my heart, little one. Not my head.”
“You don’t feel any obligation toward Sam?”
“If he were here I’d kick him in the balls. And he’d know why.”
“Even though he gave you the controlling interest in Dante’s Inferno?”
After her interview with Yoni, Jade had accessed all the records she could find about Dante’s. S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, had originally built the place. Yoni had been a licensed prostitute in the European lunar settlement, New Europa, when Sam had briefly fallen in love with her. He had left her at the altar, true enough. He had also left her fifty-five percent of the shares of the newly opened Dante’s Inferno. The rest he had sold off to help finance a venture to the Asteroid Belt.
Yoni gazed up at the smooth, faintly glowing ceiling panels, then across the lounge at the computer-graphics images mounted on the walls. They were all of tall, buxom women, blonde, redheaded, gleaming black hair. They wore leather, or daintily feminine lace, or nothing but jewelry. They were all Yoni, Mistress of Ecstasy, in her various computer-simulated embodiments.
Finally she looked back at Jade. “You’re right,” she admitted. “I owe the little bastard.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
Without answering, Yoni got to her feet and started for the door. “Come on down to my office. I’ll have to look up your john’s file.”
Yoni’s office looked to Jade like a millionaire’s living room. Bigger than any office she had ever seen; bigger than any apartment, for that matter. And there were doors leading to other rooms, as well. Oriental carpets on the floor. Video windows on every wall. The furniture alone must have cost millions to tote up from Earth: Chinese prayer tables of real wood, lacquered and glistening; long low settees covered in striped fabrics; even a hologram fireplace that actually threw off heat.
Jade stood in the middle of the huge room, almost breathless with admiration, while Yoni went straight to a delicately small desk tucked into a corner and tapped on the keyboard cunningly built into its gleaming top.
The silk painting of misty mountains above the desk turned into a small display screen.
“Most johns don’t use their real names here,” Yoni muttered, mostly to herself, “but we can usually trace their credit accounts, even when they’ve established a temporary one to cover their identity.”
Jade drifted toward the desk, resisting the urge to touch the vases, the real flowers, the ivory figurines resting on an end table.
“You said he calls himself Rocky?”
“Raki.”Jade spelled it.
“H’m. Here he is, full name and everything. He’s not trying to hide from anybody.”
“He’s married….”
“Two wives,” Yoni said, as the data on the screen scrolled by. “One in Orlando and one in Istanbul. Plus a few girlfriends that he sees regularly, here and there.”