"But legally . . ."
He shook his head. "Leave it, please, my love."
She stepped back, bowing her head obediently, while beside her, his dark eyes taking in everything, the boy frowned.
"Well? What do you want?"
The two men got to their feet abruptly, surprised by the sudden presence of Tolonen in the room, shocked by the hostility in his voice.
"Forgive us for intruding at this hour," began the first of them, a rotund and balding man in pale lemon silks, "but this matter—"
Tolonen cut in. "You'll forgive me if I'm less than polite, Shih Berrenson, but I'm not accustomed to being dragged from my breakfast for ad hoc meetings. I am a busy man—a very busy man—and should you wish to make an appointment with me it can be done through my Private Secretary."
Berrenson looked to his partner, Fox, then ducked his head slightly, as if at the same time agreeing and disagreeing with Tolonen.
"Forgive me, Marshal, but that is exactly what we have been trying to do for the past six days. A dozen times we've approached him to arrange an audience with you and each time your man has put us off. In the end we were left with no option—"
"—but to come knocking on my door like tradesmen."
Berrenson's face stiffened. Beside him the thin-faced Fox looked indignant.
"Tradesmen?"
Tolonen stepped right up to him, then tapped his chest with the fingers of his golden, artificial arm. "Tradesmen. Wheeler-dealers. What do you want me to call you? Ch'un tzu?" He laughed coldly. "No, gentlemen, let's not hide the fact with pretty words. I know what you want."
Berrenson stared at the golden fingers pressed into his chest, then met Tolonen's eyes again. "Whatever your personal feelings are in this matter, I feel it would be best—"
"Best?" Tolonen shook his head. "What would be best would be for you to go away and stop pestering the child. He is grateful, certainly, but your attempts to turn such gratitude into financial advantage are— and let me make this absolutely clear—becoming tiresome."
Berrenson took a long breath, then looked to his colleague again. "I see we are wasting our time here. It seems the Marshal has no understanding of how things work in the realm of finance. Not that that's surprising. He is, after all, a mere soldier."
The insult was barely out before Berrenson found himself sprawling backward. He sat up, groaning, blood dripping from his nose and from the gash in his top lip. Fox looked on, astonished.
"Nothing," Tolonen said, standing over him threateningly. "You shall have nothing. You or any of your pack of jackals."
Berrenson dabbed at his broken nose with the collar of his silks, then glared up at the old man. "You'll regret this, Tolonen. Before I'm done GenSyn won't be worth a fucking five-^uan note."
Tolonen laughed. "Is that a threat, Shih Berrenson? Because if it is, you'd better be prepared to carry it out. But let me warn you, you loathsome little insect. If I find you've said one word that's detrimental to the Company or made one deal that could harm my ward's interests, then I'll come for you . . . personally, you understand me? And next time it won't be just your nose I'll break, it'll be every bone in that obese tradesman's body of yours." He leaned in close, pushing his face almost into Berrenson's. "Understand me?"
Berrenson nodded. - "Good. Now go. And don't bother me again." • ..
KIM WAITED AS THE DOOR hissed back, then stepped through, his breath warm in the protective suit. This was a secure area and as the door closed behind him, sealing itself airtight, a fine mist enveloped him, killing any bacteria he might have brought in from outside.
Inside, beyond the second airtight door, was the garden he had had built at the center of the labs. There, beneath a fake blue sky that was eternally summer, were the two dozen special rosebushes he had had planted in the rich, dark earth that covered the whole of the thirty-by-thirty area to a depth of three feet.
As the second door slid back, Kim stepped inside, the microfine filters in the helmet allowing him to smell the sweet scent of the roses. He stopped a moment, eyes closed, enjoying the early-morning warmth, the strange freshness of the place, then walked on, making his way down the lines of bushes.
SimFic had spent more than fifteen million yuan building this place, simply to humor him. The thought of that—of the waste—had worried him at first, but then he'd begun to see it from their viewpoint. Here he could think—here, undisturbed, he could put flesh to the bone of speculation. And thinking was what he was paid to do.
He smiled, seeing the first of the webs glimmering wetly in the fake sunlight. It was beautiful. Delicately, indescribably beautiful. It was as if it touched some blueprint deep inside him and struck a resonating chord. He crouched beside it, staring at its delicate symmetry. It was an orb web, spun by the simple European garden spider, Araneus diadematus.
Yesterday he had watched her spin this web, making first the spokes and then the central spiral. A broader "guide" spiral—a kind of scaffolding—had followed, and then the great spiral itself, the "bridge lines" as they were called. He had watched fascinated as she wove and gummed the threads, her tiny rounded body balanced on the scaffolding as she plucked the gummed line to spread the tiny droplets equidis-tantly along its length. When he had first seen it he had thrilled to the discovery, recognizing once more the importance of the laws of resonance and how they governed the natural world—from the largest things to the smallest—and it had brought back to him a moment when he had witnessed a great spiderlike machine hum and produce a chair from nothingness. So long ago that seemed, yet the moment was linked to this, resonating down the years. Memories . . . they, too, obeyed the laws of resonance.
He moved on. Beside the orb web spiders he had others—scaffold-web spiders like Nesticidae that had settled in a tiny rocky cave he had had built at the far end of the garden, and triangular-web spiders like Hyptiotes. But his favorite was the elegant Dinopis, a net-throwing spider with the face of a fairy-tale ogre. How often he had watched her construct her net between her back legs and then wait, with a patience that seemed limitless, to snare any insect foolish enough to pass below.
Insects had long been banned from City Earth. The great tyrant Tsao Ch'un had had them eradicated from the levels, building intricate systems of filters and barriers to keep them out. But here, in this single airtight room, he, Kim Ward, had brought them back. Using stored DNA, GenSyn had rebuilt these once-common species specially for him: these and their prey—ants and beetles, centipedes, ladybirds and flies, silk moths and aphids.
It had not been easy, however. He had first needed to get Li Yuan's permission. A special Edict had been passed, cosigned by all three T'ang, while SimFic, for their part, had guaranteed that there would be no breaches of the strict quarantine procedures.
He looked about him, feeling a brief contentment. Here he had mused on many things: on the physical nature of memory; on the aging of cells and the use of nanotechnology to induce the rapid healing of damaged tissue; on the duplication of neurons; and, most recently, on the creation of a safe and stable intelligence-enhancement drug. Each time he had come here knowing no answer, and each time the tranquillity of the garden had woven its magic spell, conjuring something from the depths of him.
But now it was almost done, his time in exile finished. In four weeks he could walk from here, a free man again, the pulsing band gone from around his neck. If he chose.