Approach control nudged his air car closer to the pinnacle of the tower, and he turned his attention fully to it.
Hoskins Tower was just over four hundred stories tall and a kilometer in diameter—a huge, hollow hexagon of steel and ceramacrete, dotted with air traffic access points and thrusting up from the greenery so far below. There'd been a time when Nouveau Paris' towers, each a small city in its own right, were its pride, but Hoskins Tower's supposedly near-indestructible ceramacrete was already beginning to crack and scale after barely thirty years. Seen close at hand, the tower's skin was leprous with slap-dash patches and repairs, and though it wasn't evident from the outside, Pierre knew its upper twenty-three floors had been closed off and abandoned over five T-years ago because of massive plumbing failures. Hoskins was still on the waiting list for repair crews who, probably, would get around to its pipes someday. Assuming, of course, that the bureaucrats didn't end up diverting them to some more urgent "emergency" (like repairs to President Harris' swimming pool)... or that the repair crews didn't decide life would be easier on the Dole and simply quit.
Pierre didn't like Hoskins Tower. It reminded him of too many things from his own past, and the fact that even a Dolist Manager with his clout hadn't been able to get its plumbing fixed infuriated him. But this was "his" district of the capital. He controlled the votes of the people who lived in Hoskins, and it was to him they looked for their share of the welfare system's spoils. That made him a very important man to them—and gave him a security screen here that even Palmer-Levy couldn't match... or breach.
Pierre's lips curled back from his teeth as approach control inserted him into the tower's hollow top and his air car began drifting down the patchily lit bore. Despite the physical youth prolong conferred, he was ninety-one T-years old, and he remembered other days. Days when he'd fought his way off the Dole, before the rot had set so deep. There'd been a time when Hoskins Towers plumbing would have been fixed within days—when the discovery that the bureaucrats in charge of its construction had used substandard materials and evaded building codes throughout the massive structure in order to pocket enormous profits would have led to indictments and prison time. Now, no one even cared.
He punched an inconspicuous button, and the air car withdrew itself from approach control's grip, it was illegal—and supposedly impossible—to do that, but like everything else in the Peoples Republic, there were ways around that for anyone with the money to buy them and the will to use them.
He slid the air car sideways, sidling up to an abandoned apartment on the three hundred and ninety-third floor, and settled it onto a terrace. The terrace hadn't been designed for such landings, but that was why the air car was so small and light.
It was time, Pierre thought as he powered down the systems, for someone to fix Hoskins Tower. Among other things.
Wallace Canning raised his head, the movement quick and nervous. Heels clacked sharply on the bare floor, echoing and resounding down the hollow, empty corridors until it seemed an entire, unseen legion was converging upon him, but he'd been to plenty of meetings like this over the last three years, if not any under quite such outre conditions. He was no longer prone to panic, and his pulse trickled back to normal as his ears sorted out the single pair of feet at the heart of the murmuring echoes and a patch of light appeared.
He leaned back against the wall, watching the patch become a beam that swung from side to side as the walker picked his way down the steps from the mezzanine. Halfway down, the beam flicked up, pinning Canning to the wall while he screwed up his eyes against its intensity. It held on him for an instant, then swiveled back down to the bits and pieces of fallen ceiling littering the stairs. It reached their bottom at last and crossed to Canning, and then Rob Pierre shifted the light to his left hand and extended his right.
"Good to see you, Wallace," Pierre said, and Canning nodded with a smile that was no longer forced.
"Good to see you, too, Sir," he said. There'd been a time when saying "Sir" to a Prole, even one who was also a Dolist Manager, would have choked him. But those days were gone, for Wallace Canning had fallen from grace. His diplomatic career had ended in humiliation and failure, and not even his Legislaturalist family had been able to save him from the consequences. Worse, they hadn't even tried.
Canning had become an object lesson, a warning for those who failed. They'd stripped him of place and position, banished him into Prole housing like Hoskins Tower and into the monthly lines that gathered for their Basic Living Stipend checks. They'd turned him into a Dolist, but not like other Dolists. His accent and speech patterns, even the way he walked or looked at others, all singled him out as "different" in the eyes of his new fellows. Rejected by everyone he'd ever known, he'd found himself shunned by those whose equal he'd become, and it had seemed hate and self-pity were all that was left to him.
"Have the others arrived?" Pierre asked.
"Yes, Sir. Once I looked the site over, I decided to use the tennis court instead of the main concourse because the court doesn't have any skylights and I only had to black out two sections of windows."
"Good, Wallace." Pierre nodded and clapped the younger man on the shoulder. Quite a few of the so-called "leaders" Pierre was about to meet with tonight would have dithered for hours over something as simple as moving the meeting site a distance of forty or fifty meters. Canning had simply gone ahead and done it. It was a small thing, perhaps, but leadership and initiative were always made up of small things.
Canning turned to lead the way, but the hand on his shoulder stopped him. He turned back to Pierre, and not even the strange shadows across the other man's bottom-lit face could hide his concern.
"Are you certain you're ready for this, Wallace?" His voice was soft, almost gentle, but there was urgency in it. "I can't completely guarantee all these people are exactly what they seem."
"I trust your judgment, Sir." It was hard for Canning to say that, and even harder to mean it, but it was also true. There were many points upon which he still differed with this man, but he trusted him implicitly, and he made himself grin. "After all, I know you caught at least one InSec plant. I'd like to think that means you caught both of them."
"I'm afraid there's only one way to find out," Pierre sighed, and laid his arm across the ex-Legislaturalist's shoulders. "Oh, well! Let's go do it."
Canning nodded and swept aside the thick sheet of fabric which had been hung across an out-sized arch. The arch gave access to a short, broad passage between turnstiles and ticket-taker's windows, and Pierre followed his guide down it to the matching fabric barrier hung at its far end.
Canning thrust it aside in turn, and the politician switched off his handlight as they stepped into dim illumination. Their feet were loud on the bare floor, and the air smelled of musty disuse and abandonment. It was as if the building were the corpse of some mighty tree, rotting from the inside out, but the wan glow of widely spaced light tubes guided them across the back of the echoing concourse, past the basketball court and swimming pools thick in dust, to the central element of the long-dead sports complex.
Canning pushed another draped cloth barrier aside, and Pierre blinked. Clearly Canning had managed to replace most of the overhead lights that had been scavenged by tenants since the tennis court was abandoned, and the result of his labors was all Pierre could have wished. The blacked-out windows confined the light, hiding it from any outside eye, but it transformed the spacious tennis court into an illuminated stage. There was a powerful symbolism in meeting in this decaying monument to mismanagement and corruption, but Canning's work crew had created a pocket of light and order in its midst. They'd even swept and mopped, dusted the spectators' seats and cleared away the cobwebs, and there was an equally powerful symbolism in that. Despite the risk every person in this chamber ran, there was no aura of furtive concealment, none of the paranoiac stealthiness with which other clandestine groups met.