"Certainly. And Sims—?"
Tomaso kept his satisfied smile to himself, but it was easy to see that Sims was on the edge of panic. "Be prepared for a serious conversation. We need to find these people, and we need them quickly. Your contacts may lead where Mirabal's do not."
Sims was beginning to shake, and Tomaso knew he was eager to get off the line. He waved a dismissing hand, and the picture died.
Wu and Mirabal were both watching him. Wu looked on the verge of fainting. Mirabal's emotions were sealed under a wall of control so mountainous that Tomaso had the bizarre sensation of watching an explosion in extreme slow-motion.
"We can retire to the medical unit I have set up in the next room. And then, if you wish, you may join the party which should be commencing in an hour."
Wu and Mirabal left—one tiny and pale-skinned, the other enormous and dark. Do they hate me? Tomaso asked himself. No. Wu will regain control, and realize that I have released him. Mirabal, though.. .Who knew what really went on in that massive mind and body? Who truly wanted to know, as long as the animal dwelling in Mirabal's soul occasionally got the raw meat it needed. Who cared?
They might hate him for the moment, but it was really Luis they hated, Luis who had tricked them into carrying the seeds of death within their bodies. But now other seeds had been sown.
Seeds of trust.
Tomaso eased his bulk from the chair, stretching and yawning with a smile. He had time, and that was all he needed.
Almost...
The door opened to his thumbprint, and he stepped out into the hall. A smocked guard saluted as he passed.
He kicked his shoes off his feet as he approached Luis's bedchamber. Correction— Tomaso's bed chamber. The halls with their soft-glowing tapestries, the warm pile carpeting, the employees—all were his. Below him, he could hear the sound of preparations for the party.
But one very special guest should already have arrived.
The door to the bedroom loomed ahead, a massive panel of mahogany that seemed out of place with the rest of the decor. Luis had wanted it that way, had insisted on the appearance of solidity and old-world power. If not for the perfect hinges on which the door floated, it would have been monstrous to move; but with them it responded to a fingertouch.
"Luis," he said softly, shaking his head. Why did you have to be such a fool? A breath of sorrow shadowed his face for an instant.
Even though he had been in Luis's quarters many times, it was difficult to quell the sudden intake of breath, the wide-eyed appreciation for what his brother had created. The carpet fibers were light-conductive synthetic, and the illumination rose up through it in undulating waves of gold and silver. There was no music, but there was something soothing in the air, a pulsing hum which could be adjusted to bring sleep or excite sensuality.
The bed itself was a creation in shimmering white, raised four feet above the floor, a circular mattress mounted upon a layer-cake of carpeted, circular stairs.
A low snarl of anticipation rose in his throat. Behind the gleaming crystal wet bar stood a woman who watched him with huge, tear-filmed eyes as she poured herself a drink.
"So, Tomaso," Nadine said, her hands unsteady as he approached her. "I am here."
He stopped, eyes tracing her perfect face, the incredible fineness of her shoulder-length hair. In the room's dim, provocative light she seemed more a sculpture than a living woman.
"I didn't want to be here again. To see this place." She leaned back against the bar and took a sip of some concoction almost as golden as her skin. It seemed to calm her. "So, tell me what you want, and then let me go."
He stepped closer to her, and her eyes narrowed. "I'm not interested in that, Tomaso."
"I understand you better than you know, Nadine."
She brushed her hair back, laughing sourly. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"I understand that you didn't love my brother. That you never did. You loved his power."
"He was a Man," she said, and threw her cup into the sink. It shattered, shards of glass spraying out past the porcelain. Nadine brushed one off her arm, sucked at the shallow cut before looking up in anger. "The only real man I've ever known."
"Yes. You loved the tightness of his body, and the way he moved, and held you. That's what you told yourself. But you were lying."
She started to take another drink, then put the cut-crystal bottle back, glaring at him. "I don't need to listen to this kind of insult, Tomaso." Her brows beetled together. Even the lines they created were beautiful. "Why don't you get to the point?"
"All right then. The point is that you loved his power, his wealth. And that lives on in me."
"You? Isn't it a little soon for you to start propositioning his mistress?"
"Listen to me. Luis was a man, the living symbol of the Ortega dynasty. That, if anything, is what you loved." She stiffened, starting to turn away. "That is what I love, what I have given my entire life to. To revere a woman I haven't touched in ten years. To pay honor to a man who was dead before I reached puberty. To keep alive a tradition, a strength, which is more important than my own life—than anyone's life. Why do you think I would look down on you?"
"I'm going," Nadine said, the three syllables rolling off the perfect lips disdainfully.
She reached behind her, picking up her fur wrap and whipping it around her shoulders.
"Nadine!" he said as she walked to the door. "I can't give you Luis, but I can give you what he never would."
She paused, a barely perceptible break in stride, then continued on.
He felt as if his stomach were burning. Was he so little, and Luis so much? Were his hands, his soft hands, so repulsive when compared to the corded musculature of his brother? "I can give you what you always wanted."
She was at the door now. Why wouldn't she turn? Why wouldn't this woman even turn and look at him?
"I'll give you my name."
She stopped now, and he could virtually see her ears peel back and flatten against her head, like a bitch given the scent.
"You would not," she said flatly. But she had turned, and the turning put the lie to her words. "It would dishonor your family."
"My family is not just something out there somewhere, real and solid, with me some kind of emotionless puppet. I am my family. I can show them, make them respect me, care for my needs and wants." He stopped, and his voice grew steady. "And I want you. I've always wanted you, Nadine, from the first time I saw you, and knew that I could never have a woman such as you because I was only the Little Brother of Luis."
"You can buy women."
"I want you."
"You're trying to buy me."
"But not with money alone. Not with the things that any other man can give you. I can give you children who will be heirs to a kingdom. I can give you power and glory. I can give you love."
She stared into his face, thinking. Then, slowly, the door closed behind her, shutting with an oiled metallic click. "You don't have the strength to go against your family," she said. Her words were hard, but the first trace of warmth had crept into her voice.
"Don't decide now. Stay tonight. Stay—and watch the party. You may have changed your mind by the end of the evening." He walked up to her, felt the change in her body, heard the unasked question— is he lying?
"Stay here," he said. "Food will be brought to you. You can watch the party on the wall monitors." He paused, to insure that his next words would sink in. "I strongly suggest that you not come downstairs until the party is over." She stiffened slightly. "You may if you wish, but it might be safer for you if you didn't."
He turned then, and left the room.
Tomaso slipped into the guest bedroom.
The entire floor was soft, warm plastic, malleable throw pillows making up the remainder of the decor. Plastic hookah hoses pumped in smoke of varying compositions and intensities, according to the needs of the user. Tomaso walked carefully across the floor, rebalancing with each step as it sank
under his feet. It gave a rasping squeak, almost a moan, with every footfall.
He picked up one of the hoses, and drew on it experimentally. Sweetish—that was the opium-hashish mix. He exhaled harshly, waiting for the instant of dizziness to pass.
There were faceted light-refraction crystals hanging from the glowing ceiling, fragmenting the illumination into a thousand patch worked rainbows. He removed a rectangular card from his vest pocket and spoke into it. "Tacumsi?"
It was a moment before the card vibrated in response. "Yes, sir. Would you like your blood pressure?"
"Pulse will do." Tomaso touched his forefinger to his wrist. "When ready."
"We've got seventy-seven."
"Excellent. Your voice is a little flat, however. I'll need a new comcard immediately. Are all systems in and operative?"
"We're waiting for the programmers to link up the last of the inputs." He paused. "If what you told us is correct, we'll need real-time dimensional biopsies on maybe eighty people. Tall order, Mr. Ortega."
"You can handle it."
"Well, we'll do our best."
"I'm counting on it. I want every single guest linked in and ready by eight forty-five."
"Yes, sir."
He slipped the card back into his pocket and looked around the room again. There was nothing, absolutely nothing for any of the guests to see or find, but the bedroom was as open as a glass cage. He grinned, a little trill of excitement ran through him at the thought.
At eight o'clock the guests began to arrive.
Their cars glided down the drive and coasted in on the restricted airspace, guided by beacons and landing lights. As the guests exited their vehicles, they were escorted through the first zone in groups of five or six, checked and rechecked. Many of them had been present the night of Luis's death, so there were no complaints.
Tomaso greeted them at the door, shaking hands, kissing cheeks or lingeringly offered lips. He distinctly remembered when the same women would barely speak to him. Now they managed to rub suggestively against him before entering the house. One half of him tried to smile while the other longed to spit in their faces.
By the time Tomaso escaped to the cool dryness of the basement, his armpits were damp with perspiration, and he had a pounding headache. Damn! How did Luis do it? How could anyone deal with this madness without going insane? The requests for special food, drugs, and women. The separate eating quarters for those who preferred to keep their clothes on, those who preferred their entertainment in private, and those, like Tucker, the Congressman from San Francisco, whose streak of exhibitionism always drove him to perform his "specialty" in the center of the room. Tomaso hoped Tucker had brought his own vegetable oil this time.
He felt a familiar burning sensation in his stomach, and keyed his porta-doc to feed a few grams of antacid into his system. He paused, waiting for the slow fire to die down, listening to the sounds of the party above. Happy sounds. Laughing, singing—
"They don't miss me. Not at all." He whispered it, the sound of his own voice something alien and strange. He looked up at the top of the stair.
Below him there were other sounds, human and machine sounds, dim and muffled by a heavy steel door. He thumbprinted the lock, and the door hissed open for him.
The three technicians in the room stood to greet him. Tomaso shook hands with them warmly. Their palms seemed flatter, dryer, less sticky than the hands of the hoodlums and politicians who had gathered overhead to pick at the remains of dear dead Luis's empire.
On the flatscreen readout above his head, he could see into the living room, its singing tapestries moaning as his guests picked through their plates.
Steinbrenner, the quiet, stick figure of a woman who ran his computer analysis programs came up from behind, touching his arm timidly.
"Tomaso," she said in her whisper of a voice, "we'll have a variable display on the center screen. The left screen will provide a readout on whatever you throw center. The right screen will give us an average readout over the entirety of the participants in your—" There was an almost imperceptible pause before she said, "experiments." She said it haughtily, but Tomaso didn't let that bother him. Her apparent distaste had never interfered with any of the experiments she conducted. She brushed back a strand of sallow brown hair, and sniffed. She turned him around, and walked him to a holo stage, one similar to but smaller than the one in his brother's study. "Here we have the most sophisticated tool. You will be able to call any particular... participant ... up on the stage for a color-coded analysis. For instance—" she called back over her shoulder, to the large black man hunched over his console, 'Tacumsi, give us a sample."
He nodded, his hands flying over the keys, and die center screen zoomed in on one couple, lounging on pillows and eating globules of spiced cheese. Tacumsi's voice was a bass rumble. "Here we are."
The holo stage flickered, and it was as if a shower of glitter had fallen through a battery of colored lights. The air above the stage was all Stardust and kaleidoscoped hues, slowly taking shape as two human beings.
The reproduction was startlingly sharp. Tomaso leaned close, inspecting, satisfied.
"Give me blood pressure and alcohol content," he murmured.
"Easy, sir. One forty over sixty on the man; one thirty-five over fifty for the woman. Alcohol content—none, either one. Picking up some residual cannabinols, however. My guess is that they'll head for the hemp pretty soon."
"Follow them."
"Who are they?" Steinbrenner asked.
"The woman is Chyrmin Russell. She's the executive editor of a string of fashion magazines. An extremely valuable contact. She provides some of our best girls." He tried to imagine Steinbrenner's thin body sheered of its unattractive clothing, and failed. A damn good thing, he mused, that she was as intelligent as she was. If she had had to sell her ass for a living, she would have ended up in the work farms for sure.
"And the man?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. She finds her gigolos wherever she can, and drops them as soon as the gloss wears off. I don't think I've ever seen her without a hunk on her arm." He nodded thoughtfully. "And never the same hunk twice, either. Tacumsi, has anyone made it into the hemp room yet? Or the orgy room?"
Thick dark fingers played against silent rows of keys. A flat image, a group of three naked people twining in a rounded triangle. "Just these three."
Now Tomaso took his seat, gazing up at the flatscreen images. "All right. Stay with Russell and her stud. Find out what they're eating—cheese balls? Fine. Program the food processor to add .1 gram of Cyloxibin to each ball. Same for the other food. Klause, I want you to calculate the average intake of the other food items, and begin spiking them so that each guest receives between .3 and two grams."
The conveyor belts running out of the automated kitchen never paused an instant, but now they were carrying drugged food, and the guests were downing it with gusto.
Tomaso chuckled grimly. Steinbrenner had the computer give her a temporary printout on magnetic film, and compared the sheet to notes in her private book.
"I've got Patricks's notes. Apparently, the drug can be taken orally or intravenously. Mixed with a carrying agent, it can be absorbed through the skin. I propose mixing dimethylsulfoxide into the lubricant creme in the orgy room, and combining that with a reduced Cyloxibin powder."
He looked at her face, trying to find a trace of emotion there, and saw none. "Do it."
"Sir—" Klause, the biochemist, began, not taking his eyes off the columns of figures growing on his screen, "did you have the time to examine my last report?"
"I haven't been clear enough to read anything lately."
"Well, preliminary reports indicate that the powder which was compressed to make the Cyloxibin tablets wasn't of ordinary chemical composition."
"No?" Tomaso frowned. "I remember reading the analysis. I have the formula. What do you mean?"
"Well, the tablets were composed of compressed spores and a neutral bonding
agent. Millions of spores to a tablet."
"Spores?" Tomaso watched the screen again. Couples were beginning to drift up to the dancing areas. Conversation was quieting and another few people had made their way to the orgy room. "What kind of spores?"
"A fungus of some kind. Mushroom, probably."
"Huh." He hunched his shoulders. "Something from the psilocybin family, most probably. I want you to run a crosscheck on the formula we got from Patricks. Make sure he didn't pull a fast one. If there is any variance at all, synthesize using the tablets as your basis. Start from scratch if you have to. Also—begin efforts to cultivate the fungus, whatever it is. I expect a complete wing of your lab converted to—whatever— growing mushrooms."
"Mycology."
"Fine. Steinbrenner, what about Russell?"
"I'm not sure I've seen anyone eat as many cheese balls at one sitting." Steinbrenner smiled uneasily. "And that brings her dosage to—2.4 grams. Five times the basic dosage. About two and a half times the dosage Patricks recommended."
"Do we have an estimation on toxicity?"
"LD50 for white rats was about two hundred eighty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. That comes out to about eighteen grams for an average adult."
"Fine. Start tapering off on the drug if your scans show that the guests are reaching minimum threshold levels. Some of them won't kick over; most will, and we'll probably end up with an overdose or two. Get the medivacs ready."
Tacumsi's controls had turned the screen into a patch-work of quasi-human figures, blotches of light, with each shimmering pattern carrying a different meaning to the trained eye. "Russell and friend," the big Black man rumbled. "They've both reached recommended maximum dosage."
The screen showed Chyrmin reclining against her pillow, hands wandering absently over the body of her companion, over his sinewy arms and neck. "Klause?"
"No change in metabolism yet. It's going to take at least twenty minutes for the drug to work its way into her system."
"I'm getting changes here," Steinbrenner barked. "Orgy room. Using the direct skin-absorption with crushed spores. Increase in breathing, pulse acceleration, and... pupil dilation."
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