To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga)

by William Rotsler

  The water crashed around them, louder now, pelting off their shoulders as they stood in the shallows and looked at each other.

  "Rio..."

  "Don't, Blake. I don't want just another damned quickie. I can't do that again. I'd rather..."

  "I want you, Rio. More than anything else in the world." They looked at each other, their eyes slitted against the cascade of the thin sheet of water. "I hardly know you, but I want you."

  Rio moved back, out of the waterfall. Her golden body gleamed with water drops in the warm night. Blake stepped free of the water and they looked at each other until Rio looked away.

  Blake smiled. "I've gotten in trouble before, being so ... so impulsive. I'm a romantic. It's the way I've been programmed, I suppose."

  Rio smiled at him, a sad, weary smile. "Don't," she said.

  "Yes," Blake said and moved a step closer in the water. "To hell with 'Blake Mason, Environmental Concepts,' to hell with money, to hell with Voss Investments and Voss Oil and Voss This and Voss That. To hell with a tomb for the ages."

  "It isn't just a tomb." Rio stopped short, and her lips parted. "Don't, Blake, please. He can get angry. You haven't seen that side of him. He can be ruthless. He has power. He can ruin people when he gets angry enough. Ruin ... and worse! He owns Costa Verde, he owns Bodigard and all those toughs, he owns senators and ministers and police chiefs."

  "I don't care," Blake said, and, amazingly, he really felt that he didn't. "I've been looking for you ... all my life ... and I'm not going to lose you!"

  Rio pulled further back, staring into his eyes, her face sad and frightened. "No, Blake, you ... you don't understand..." She turned swiftly and dove into the pool, swimming strongly to the opposite side. Blake swam after her, but she was already up the pool steps and running across the tiles before he reached the edge. She disappeared into the house.

  Dripping, wet, he trotted after her, looking each way as he came into the hall. He did not see her, and had run a few feet toward the main hall, when he saw his shed water splashing on the carpet. He looked back, turned and ran, tracing her by the dark spots on the Verneuil carpet. But the droplets ceased before he came to an intersecting passage, and he had lost her.

  Arbitrarily, he took the right-hand corridor and proceeded along it until he saw an open door. Beyond it, a Mexican family sat at dinner. The women glanced at Blake and quickly looked back at their dishes. The men looked at him impassively, their faces telling him this was their territory. These were the workers who trimmed the trees, tended the garden, cleared storm damage, did the maintenance, serviced the boats, and cooked the meals. They were not the pretty creatures who served their employer in a different way; they were honest, hard workers, too polite to show their shock at a near-naked man invading their home. Blake started to speak but turned away instead.

  Walking back toward the main hail, he glanced into the rooms that were open, seeing the pairings that had broken off from the mass still seething in the main room. In one room he saw Sundance curled up in Theta's arms, but neither noticed Blake. The music in the main hall did not completely mask the short, earnest gasps coming from the pile of glistening flesh. Blake looked for Voss, but did not see him in the melee.

  Blake found another corridor he had not searched, and followed it. The walls and ceiling were molten metal, gleaming and flowing stripes of gold, bands of silver, streamers of bright copper, all flowing down in eye-hurting streaks of fiery rivers and cool, slow-moving swaths. Blake ignored the Guinevere sensatron panels that lined the walls like wallpaper, hurried through to the next grouping of rooms. He pushed open a partially closed door to find one of the maids, brown as a penny, polishing an intricate Steuben imitation of the Martian goblets from Northaxe.

  "Where's Rio?" he demanded. "Where's your master?"

  She was used to the antics of her employer's guests. She just stared at him with her large, dark eyes and pointed down the corridor. Blake whirled and plunged on.

  He found Voss in a library, elegantly robed in a deep-red Webwove. The multimillionaire looked up from a computer console and flicked off the machine, as if he did not want Blake to see what he was doing.

  "Hello," he said ambiably. "Why aren't you simmering in the fleshpot?"

  "Why aren't you?"

  Blake found it surprising he didn't hate the man. A quick, fragmented image of Voss and Rio in bed fell through his mind like a rock through a skylight. He forced himself to be calm, and listened to Voss's answer.

  "Too much of a good thing can kill a man," Voss said.

  Especially when there's Rio at night. Blake turned the knife in his own heart, and knew he was deliberately doing it.

  "You wandering around looking for something in particular, or just cruising?" Voss asked with a grin, his tanned face pleasant.

  "No, I..."

  Voss laughed and said, "Don't worry about it. You've seen the way my sister Theta lives. She rarely wears clothes anymore, except to dress for dinner on those few occasions she consents to attend. But why shouldn't she go nude, especially around here? She finds it stimulating, she says. Last year she wore nothing but jewelry by Ransom to the Daughters of Bilitis Ball."

  What did Sundance wear? Blake wondered. A collar and chain, artfully engraved "Property Of Rio” popped into his mind, collar and silver chain leading to Voss's claw.

  "Fifty years ago," Voss sighed, "my sister would have been locked up. But then," he chuckled, "fifty years ago most of us would have been in jail, for one thing or another. Do you realize how long marl was on the illegal list, for God's sake?"

  Blake nodded, trying to form the words he wanted to say.

  Voss gestured toward his video equipment. "They call me a male chauvinist, you know." He smiled crookedly and gave a short laugh. "All of us who are, shall we say, rich have women after us. Shawna has beautiful young men on her trail, and not a few women, either. Are we chauvinists because of that? I think not. These women..." – he gestured around, as if to include the houseguests – "they are selling a service, that's all. Nothing new about it. Men do the same thing and perhaps not in so honest a way." He stopped and sighed, fiddling with a Null-Edit tape on his desk. "Sometimes I think maybe I should not have so much money. People try to blackmail me and assassinate me, do a whistle on me." He smiled up at Blake in an innocent way. "I give my money away, I spend it, I use it, but I do so hate to have it conned out of me by some cheap whistler."

  Blake felt a moment's fear as he digested the words. Did Voss think he was a con man, intent on some high-stakes whistle? But his need drove him on and he spoke.

  "Jean-Michel."

  He stopped, and Voss politely prompted him. "Yes?"

  "Listen, I want to talk to you about something. Rio and I–"

  "Oh, Blake," Rio interrupted from the door, "you said you wouldn't tell him!"

  She moved past Blake, regal in a yellow dress that complimented her tanned skin, to sit on the arm of Voss's chair and kiss him on top of his head. He put a hand up to pat her bare arm and smiled up at her.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Blake and I had the greatest idea," she said with a smile, ignoring the designer, who felt foolish with only a bathing suit on while the others were dressed. He seemed to be in an embarrassing dream. "Suppose you had a duplicate mountain? Something to confuse the tomb hunters with. Something in the same area, about the same size, with some signs of human habitation, or touch."

  Voss smiled. "Yes, not bad. The trouble with those tombs of some of the Egyptian kings is that they were so damned obvious! They announced, no, declared where they were! The grave robbers arrived there before the body was even cold!" He looked at Blake. "Suppose we kept the exterior construction scars to an absolute minimum? We'll polarize the windows of the helicars, of course, and have a checkpoint somewhere after pickup where we can debug the ship and transfer the workers to another aircar. No traces."

  "They'll know the rough area, but in those mountains it could take them years to find the spo
t," Rio said. "They are still looking for the Lost Dutchman mine in the Superstition Mountains, you know. And Blake had the most marvelous idea..." She paused to smile at them both. "When you're ... you know ... inside ... we dynamite the whole mountainside and hide the enhance completely, very naturally. Maybe you could..." She gave Blake a look, then continued: "Maybe you could plant a thousand-year capsule with the coordinates."

  Blake had to admit she had some good ideas, even if some of them were supposed to be his. They might solve the problem of how to hide the tomb from grave robbers. But that's not what I want to say to Voss. "Jean-Michel, I–"

  "And you will bury us all with you forever," Rio interrupted with a cry, sliding into Voss's lap, throwing her arms wide and going theatrically limp.

  A dark expression crossed Voss's face, and for a second Blake believed that Rio's flippant suggestion was exactly what the man had in mind. Burying servants and retainers to serve in the afterlife, in addition to taking along all the treasure that would give him a secure environment in that forever future, was a familiar concept.

  Blake shrugged away the thought. It isn't sane, and Jean-Michel has shown the business world, at any rate, that he is decidedly sane, if a bit ruthless.

  Rio came abruptly to life with a whoop, and kissed Voss fast and hard. Then she jumped to her feet with an enthusiasm Blake had not seen before. She pulled the financier to his feet and urged him to come with her.

  "Come on!" she cried with mock seriousness, and Voss laughed. "That swim gave me an appetite. Let's eat!"

  Back in the main room most of the guests and their girls were lying about, breathing hard, idly watching three bodies actively engaged in a complex maneuver.

  "Attention, attention, attention!" Rio cried. "We're going to the Golden Iguana!"

  The announcement brought life to several and they struggled up. The women hurried off to put on something more appropriate to Puerto Vallarta's biggest quiver club.

  Rio turned to Voss, smiling like a mad leprechaun. "Okay, Boss Voss?"

  I feel like a dummy stuffed with straw, Blake thought. I just stand around and they push or pull. Push – I go! Pull – I stop!

  * * *

  In the morning Blake hated himself. He hated his sulky performance at the Iguana, and he hated Rio just a little when he found she was gone. A general goodbye note was pinned to a tapestry by the archway to the terrace where everyone was breakfasting on fruit and eggs. She was off to Greece and Corsica on business for Voss.

  Blake took a pill instead of breakfast and spent most of the day lying in his room, sliding through darkness and dawns, around stars and chasing comets. He was supposed to be starting his sketches, but all he drew were a few idle scratches that looked like malevolent pyramids.

  At dinner, he wore a black Darkmoon suit and a crimson stock. Looks like my throat is cut, he thought.

  Doreen had watched him dress, then disappeared. She returned wearing a silver collar and roses in her hair that were the exact shade of his shirt.

  He was silent through most of dinner, letting his melancholy pass for deep thought and responding only perfunctorily to Kresadlova's questions regarding the Shah, and the semi-secret Inner Palace of the All Baba cave complex in Syria. Voss seemed to note Blake's reluctant involvement and steered the industrialist away adroitly.

  After dinner, Blake engaged Voss in a technical talk on the tomb, burying himself in laser penetrations, stability ratios, air-conditioning, excavation volume, and manpower hours.

  Voss sat through his questions and self-answers amiably, but then insisted upon talking about basic designs.

  Blake tried to talk about artists he had considered, and how others might be schooled in some combination crafts that he had in mind, as well as about some Japanese laser stone-cutting techniques that could be used advantageously in precise sculpting of large areas from miniature models. But Voss kept returning the conversation to the basic design.

  Rather than admit he had not developed a full plan, Blake seized upon the one fragile idea he had. "A pyramid. A negative space in pyramidal shape. It's good structurally and is evocative of tradition." Blake was beginning to employ the patois of the pseudo-artist – not his usual manner at all – but his mind was really elsewhere. "We still don't know everything about the preserving qualities alleged to be adherent in the pyramid shape. But if we are to pattern your, urn, tomb on the general Egyptian style, it might be noted that the Great Pyramid of Cheops is different from the ordinary burial pyramid. We still have no true idea of how old it really is, you know. Even in the earliest writings it was considered ancient. But also, strangely enough, there is hardly a mention of the tomb in any of the writings throughout the history of Egypt!"

  Blake paused for breath. He was on automatic, filling up time.

  Voss spoke into the pause. Suavely and without damaging Blake's ego, he led him away from the historical aspects of Cheops to his own tomb. Then he said, "I will shortly be supplying you with the specifications for the inner chamber. This should be at the heart of the complex. All the rest – the living quarters, the art, everything – will be outside it." When Blake looked surprised, Voss smiled. "Then there will be air locks." Voss paused, as if considering his next words. "The inner chamber will have more than one sarcophagus, if you wish to call it that. I'm not certain just yet how many. Seven, I think."

  Your queen? Your slaves? Blake only nodded.

  The departure of the remainder of Voss's guests broke up their conversation and Blake took the opportunity to slip away. Doreen knocked on his door and called to him, but he did not answer.

  Chapter 7

  He was back in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Elaine had taken care of all his appointments, eliminating and reshuffling expertly.

  "I've started the publicity campaign on the Voss job, boss," she said. "Just your part in it. I'll leave the 'Big Picture' to Kramer and Reiss. They're handling all the personal Voss publicity. I just didn't want you to get lost in the shuffle. Say, are you listening to me?"

  Blake pulled his eyes away from the moody abstraction that the color synthesizer had created on the big screen, and smiled wanly at his secretary. "Sorry, mind a million miles away. You were talking about the publicity. Well, don't worry, Voss's people are handling it."

  Elaine sighed. "Doesn't it seem strange that he would want to publicize a tomb?"

  "Jean-Michel spoke to me about that. He figured he couldn't keep the project a secret, and if he tried to make it a Big Secret it would only attract more attention than it deserves. This way people will just write it off as a rich man's folly."

  "Isn't he awfully young to be thinking of ... you know."

  "It's his business. And ours! Is that mail to sign?"

  Elaine handed over the portfolio of letters and tapes. She stood at his shoulder, pointing out things, then asked, "Hey, boss, are the parties at that place as wild as I've heard?"

  "I've seen better."

  "Oh, don't disillusion me, Mr. Mason. I want to think the rich and famous have bigger and better orgies than anyone else. I want to know that someone has bigger and better orgies, someplace."

  Blake looked up at her in surprise. "I just can't imagine you at an orgy, Elaine. I'm sorry." He smiled, but he meant it.

  The silver-haired woman drew herself up. "I’ll have you know, sir, that I was once the talk of Allegheny ark, the queen of the Sunflower Nudist Park, and one time I had three hot affairs going at once. An upper-level ark senator, a soyafiber merchant, and a vice-president of Barbara Brown Security Services – the outfit that has half the police franchises in the Northeast. And not one of the three knew about the others! I, sir, am no stranger to free sexual expression!"

  Oh, god, you, too? Blake thought.

  Elaine bent closer, grinned with delighted wickedness, and said, "Did you bed down with some of Voss's private stock of sluts?"

  "Don't talk vulgarly," Blake admonished. "Yes, I bedded and linked and was bedded and linked, and all of Voss's private sto
ck is the same in the dark – terrific!" The knife twisted again: all but the ultra-private stock...

  "Marvelous!" Elaine said, hearing what she wanted to hear.

  "Now I suppose you'll tell your girlfriend at Fourzon Fabrics and she'll put it on the TIS and I'll have the Inquirer calling me up for a vidtab feature."

  "Boss! Me?"

  "You. That's what you did when I went to the opening of Freudian Frolics with that actress, whatshername, Shelley Graham."

  "Publicity, boss, that's all."

  "Huh. You just like having a boss who's in the news, so you can lord it over the other secretaries. You couldn't stand it when your friend Carmen's employer got that fighting robot manufacturer as a client."

  "But she got to go backstage at the Circus all the time. Aw, come on, boss, you gotta have your fun in these jobs."

  "Uh-huh. Here," he said, handing her the portfolio.

  "When do you start the prelims on the Voss job?" she asked.

  "Right away, today, yesterday. I've never seen a man more eager to upholster his grave."

  Elaine laughed and went out.

  Blake swung around in his chair to look out at the city, but almost at once Elaine buzzed. "Mrs. Shure on Two."

  "Tell her I’m not here."

  "She read about it in Celebcon."

  Blake groaned and turned back to the desk. He took a moment, inhaled, put on as sincere a smile as he could muster, and punched Line Two.

  "Mrs. Shure, how nice to hear from you! Pm sorry about not getting out to your home, but I had to leave town."

  "Oh, dear man, I know all about it! A Voss commission! It sounds just marvelous. You must come to dinner and tell us all about it."

  Blake winced at the "us," but kept his face calm and smiling. "I'm afraid my assistant must take the preliminary work, Mrs. Shure. I'm certain you won't mind. Just basic details. He'll report to me, and then we can work up something for presentation. He's a charming man. His name is Sebastian. He designed quite a few of the homes in the dead Antilles volcanoes – Miller's, Frank Fuller-Wright's, the Count of something or other's, Frank Sterling's – all built into those volcano bubbles. Pm sure you've heard of them."