"Oh, yes, indeed, Blake darling, but he's not you!"
Blake laughed, but deprecatingly. "Sebastian did a house for Brian Thorne on Madagascar, so you know he is first-rate. Thorne picked only the most talented people."
The woman's eyes narrowed as she said, "Then why is he working for you?"
"Some people hate paper work. Sebastian likes challenges, but I’m afraid he needs the clercial backup, which I supply. I'm certain you will like him; he is most charming and has some fascinating tales of the Antilles people, of Thorne and Shawna Hilton, whom he knows very well, and ... well, you can see he is completely qualified. He and I will work together on this, and I'm sure you would like what we come up with."
"Well, all right. But remember, we want you, just as soon as you're free." She hesitated only a fraction of a second before adding, "And bring Jean-Michel with you, of course."
Blake ended the conversation pleasantly, clicked off, punched the privacy button savagely, and turned again to look out the window.
Los Angeles hadn't looked so fresh and clean in ages. The sun glinted off a million windows and ten thousand domes. Scores of flat-sided buildings reflected the setting sun, throwing the whole landscape into sharp relief. The shadows of the mountainous arks spread across the city, merging into valleys of darkness, where lights were already glowing. The soft green of the Metro dome was in contrast to the red tower of the Connecticut Life tower in the shade of the Sunset arcolog. Aircars followed invisible lanes overhead. The air was clear, but there were no birds. Lights were coming on all over the eastern face of the arcology structures, and the Disneylife level of Great Western was glowly brightly.
Where are you? Blake Mason asked silently. And why are you there instead of here? Blake's chest hurt. He felt like a hand was clamping tightly around his throat. I haven't cried since 1 was a child, he thought, and felt a wetness on his cheek. One tear was a flood for a man who had not cried since he was a child.
Chapter 8
Voss looked at the preliminary model critically. He squatted and peered through the various entrances into the scale model. Blake rotated the table and tilted it, removing the pyramidal top so they could see inside.
"It's only a rough," Blake said. "Just a way of visualizing the three-dimensionality of it for you." Then he grinned. "For me, too. It's very difficult to think in three dimensions, you know."
"It's fine," Voss said absently. "Will it really look this good?"
"Better. Stabilized ferroconcrete with a life span longer than they have any way of testing. If it moves, the whole thing will move. It will be stronger than the rock around it. There will be a Stibbard mosaic on the floor here–"
"The Inner Chamber," Voss interrupted. "Is this the model here?"
Blake pulled off the plastic cover. "It's in a larger scale so you can see detail better. But just as your specs said. Stabilized lead sheathing, stabilized ferroconcrete stressed walls, and the whole thing floating independently within the outer chamber on a sealed moat of oil. A sphere within a sphere, like a ball bearing rolling in oil. I only have the specs on the top hemisphere, however." He looked significantly at Voss, who ignored him.
"You can leave that to the construction crews. Special installation," Voss muttered as he bent over the model.
There were seven sarcophagi indicated, a number which had at first bothered the designer, but he had assumed that Voss was making room for members of his family already dead or who might die before he did. He had shrugged it off as plans for a common family burial plot.
"Excellent," Voss breathed.
"I had the impression you did not wish any decoration in the inner chamber."
"Yes, purely functional. Inert materials. The outer chamber is just ... for amusement."
Blake nodded, not understanding at all. "It will be fully functional right up until you ... until you die." He had to force the words from his mouth: he found it uncomfortable talking to a man about his death, even if he was designing his tomb. But Voss had seemed to encourage that kind of conversation from the beginning of the discussions, months before. "There will be a portable fusion power plant on the outside, down the hill, to provide power for the construction – and for later, in case you want to live there."
Voss stared at the Inner Chamber model. Then he spoke. "Do you think about death, Blake?"
"No more than I must. It will get here in time. All too soon, I imagine, even with the geriatric drugs."
Voss nodded. "Even with the drugs we only live so long." He looked up at Blake and straightened with a sigh. "What would you do with yourself if you could live five hundred years? ... a thousand?"
Blake shrugged. "Learn. Experience. There are so many things I haven't done. I've had no time to pursue my studies in church architecture, and with so many of the churches impoverished, there are no commissions coming from that area. I'd travel, try different lifestyles."
"This business of the church architecture. Are you religious?"
Blake grinned. "No, I don't think so. Not in any formal way. Unless you count me as a devout hedonist."
Even as he said it, Blake felt a twinge of guilt. It was so common to project an image of a hedonist that it was automatic. Everyone did it.
"About a long life..." Voss asked, "what do you think about that?"
"It's more important, I think, to do something with your life, than to live a long time," Blake answered honestly. He smiled. "Better an hour as a lion than a lifetime as a lamb."
Voss's thin lips flickered in a smile. "Better yet a lifetime as a lion."
Blake started to reply, but Elaine's call stopped him. "A friend of Mr. Voss's is here, Mr. Mason."
"Ah, that's Sonya," Voss said. "Send her in."
What came in was a magnificent blonde, all tanned smooth skin and carefully designed sexy walk. She was encased in a sheer Starmist dress, carrying drinking glasses, and smiling. Elaine followed behind, a huge jeroboam of Château Astre from Voss's private vineyard in her arms.
"Sonya, this is Blake Mason. Sonya Vahlberg."
She smiled in a warm and extraordinarily friendly fashion, and Blake let the personality-plus wash over him without much of it sinking in. A new one for Voss
. . Well, what else would I expect a girl with all that beauty to do: sell soyaburgers or work in a balancing salon? Why shouldn't she go for a life of comfort and ease at the top of the heap?
Blake felt a certain sadness within himself. Am I getting just too damn cynical?
"How do you do?" Blake said pleasantly as Jean-Michel thumbed open the chilled bottle.
Sonya jumped when the cork exploded, and they all laughed. The wine was tasty and at just the right temperature. Elaine took one glassful at Voss's insistence, then tactfully disappeared. Sonya poured herself another as the men talked.
"The base camp has been set up," Voss said. "The men will arrive on Sunday. They are all well-trained employees from various of my companies. With the procedures we've set up – the blind jets, the deliberate confusion and so on – they won't know where they are within forty kilometers, if at all. They'll go in and come out at night."
Blake nodded as he poured them both more wine. Then he casually asked, "What's Rio doing these days? It's been several months since I've seen her." The question had been festering in his mind for weeks.
"Running around Yugoslavia, I think."
"Bulgaria," Sonya said, moving closer to Voss in an instinctive gesture that said, Competition is competition even if it isn't in sight.
"Oh?" Blake said, and dropped the subject as if it didn't matter.
They talked for a moment about Sonya's last film, Lord Frankenstein, which Voss had financed; then about how she had lost out to an Italian import on the remake of Captain Blood, a part she had badly wanted.
Blake brought up Rio again. "She's well, is she? Rio, I mean."
"Oh, Rio is never sick," Voss answered.
"Uh ... give her my love when you see her," Blake said, keeping his tone light,
almost polite.
"Certainly. Come, my pigeon," Voss said. He clasped Blake's hand and smiled into his eyes. "Keep it up. Don't worry about the other.jobs. Your staff can handle them, I'm sure. You stay on this one." Blake nodded. "We'll have dinner on CasteIli's yacht Friday and then we'll go to Casa Emperador, yes?"
Blake agreed, and they parted. He went back into the silent workroom and looked at the inner chamber model.
It was well designed and he thought it would be well made, well shielded against all sorts of radiation – almost a perfect tomb. The exterior of the site would be disguised and all traces of construction obliterated: the Mystery Tomb that everyone knows about but no one can find. Oh, someone would eventually find it, hacking their way into the tomb with a brute laser. Nothing was sacred, especially not the rich tomb of a multimillionaire.
But there was something about it that still bothered Blake. The tomb was almost too well made. The intricate shielding that had been included in the Inner Chamber specifications still troubled him. Why does a corpse worry about cosmic rays or stray radioactivity? Blake shrugged. People are often oddly concerned about their bodies after death, as if preserving them extended their power, their memory, or their existence in some afterworld.
But the heavy shielding still disturbed him. And the mystery. Moreover, certain things seemed not to have been told to him. For example, he had found out about the installation of a fusion plant in the lower hemisphere of the Inner Chamber completely by accident. Why a fusion plant? Voss had stipulated no powered art or devices in the outer chamber, and construction power was being supplied by an exterior plant. There was just enough of an aura of mystery about the fusion plant that Blake hesitated to bring it up to Voss. He was afraid Voss would tell him it was none of his business, and then a wall would be erected between them, a wall that Blake felt he could not afford. He needed good social relations with Jean-Michel Voss as a path to Rio.
Just for a second he imagined Voss, green-lit and clad in crumbling linen wrappings, carrying Rio in his arms, unconscious and with the night wind moving her sheer gown. For a moment, in his imagination, the light rippled over her flesh the way it had in the pool. Blake whipped his head to one side. "No!” he exclaimed aloud, then immediately felt foolish.
He heard someone enter behind him, and asked, "Elaine?"
"Was there anything you wanted before I go?"
"No, have a good night. See you in the morning. Oh, take whatever is left of the wine."
"Thanks, boss. That bottle is big enough to build a floating ark in. Good night."
Blake nodded, staring at the model of the Inner Chamber.
Why the hell would anyone go to so much trouble? When you are gone, you're gone. Even someone with 'loses ego should know that! No matter what all those religions say. They have proved nothing. Death is extinction. Give a body a decent burial to keep it from polluting the area. Or section it up for the organ banks and recycle the remains. But a tomb of this size? Elaine had reported that there was already some adverse publicity, people wondering why so much money was being spent on one man's tomb when there were people starving in India, in Central America, in Africa. People grumbled that the money could have been better spent fighting crime that was rampant in the arcos of Texas and Louisiana.
When the announcement of the tomb-building project had been made, the Voss empire took a nine-point drop in stocks and continued down for days. Voss had been prepared, and bought stock heavily before the market stabilized and the price went back up. He had made a profit of over 30,000,000, a substantial part of the tomb cost. Blake had wondered if the whole effort had been arranged for just that effect. Jean-Michel had smiled blandly at the suggestion, said others would probably try the same trick, and had then continued his intense discussion on the zero-defect aspects of the Inner Chamber's construction.
Blake had shrugged then and he shrugged again, now. He left the workroom and slumped into his chair behind the desk. The day was nearly gone, and the sunset brought Blake the melancholy that had so afflicted him of late. Not even the high adventure of this special commission had broken it.
He gazed out at the city, thinking of the high price he paid for his office to be on one of the exterior facets of the arcolog. He had considered it a necessary expense and had refused an inner office.
Money. It is always money. Money to live well, money to live at all. But that will change soon, Blake told himself. With the money from this one commission he would be able to retire, if he wished, roam the world, buy a condo at the top of an arcolog overlooking the Aegean, have a summer home with a modest helipad to receive guests, have a good wine cellar, clothes, art.
And, of course, a woman.
Rio.
Blake ripped his mind away, dialed opaque his expensive view, and sought distraction in his wallscreen. He poured himself a drink and let his eyes munch on the television.
A plainclothes detective was chasing a sweating man across the slippery top of an arcolog. Cornered, the sweating man turned and fired a laser, narrowly missing the detective, who returned his fire. The criminal screamed and the screen changed viewpoints to see a dummy fall from the crest of the ark.
Blake punched the control studs.
A crowd roared over the clang of steel. The screen cut from a wide view of Nero's Colosseum to tight close-ups of the desperate trio that faced the big French soldat robot, a curved sword in either waldo. One of the human fighters was a woman, bare to the waist, and bleeding from a bad shoulder cut.
Shaking his head, Blake changed channels. The Circus was getting too bloody for his tastes.
"–will bring you the latest news. Sheppard Maier, in Houston, on John Grennell's return from the Jupiter Mission and the tapes of Terry Ballard's tragic death on Callisto. Hans Siden on the phenomenon of a rise in church attendance. Jay Kinney with the latest in sports and arena highlights. And more, after these words from Steele Security Service, the ultimate in modem protection."
Stab.
Reverend Sam's Star of Bethlehem satellite was seen in a long shot against the curve of Earth and the blackness of space. A slow dissolve brought into view his famous "Firmament of God" clear-plastic dome space cathedral. A man in a white spacesuit floated with arms extended in the center.
"Sinners! The pendulum of excess is swinging against you! The–"
Click.
A newstape was in progress. A middle-aged man in a conservative suit sat in a room lined with tape shelves, speaking to an off-camera newsman.
"No, no, we here at the Methuselah Institute are certainly working on lengthening the life span of man, but we are hardly creating immortals." He chuckled indulgently.
"But Doctor Carrington," the off-camera voice said, "what of the statements of those who oppose such research, such as Gil Lawrence of Zero Population Control, and Reverend Neville of the Sacred Angels of God the Glorious Church, to name but two? They say you tamper with natural laws and increase the pressure of population."
The doctor shook his head and Blake listened closely. "No, Mr. Weinstock, there is nothing man was not meant to know. It is how he uses his knowledge that is important. If we were so successful as to be able to grant extended lifelines – and I must point out that this is speculation – if we were able to do that and a benefactor were to use that extended lifetime to oppress a people, then I would say it was wrong. But if a man or a woman were to use a longer than normal lifespan to learn, to gather wisdom, to help mankind, then I would say that it was good."
"Doctor, what of the rumors that you have perfected such techniques and are ready to start using them?"
Get out of that one! Blake "said" to the scientist.
"Rumors are not science, sir, they are rumors. It is true, we have been able to substantially increase the life span of fruit flies, worms, and some lower forms of vertebrates. But as to granting immortality..." He laughed heartily, but with restraint. "Don't be misled by our title, Mr. Weinstock, as so many have been. We are not creating nine-h
undred-year-old Methuselahs here." He seemed genuinely amused.
That's all we need, Blake thought, more people who will live even longer.
The camera cut to Weinstock. "We have been talking to Dr. Emil Carrington, director of the Methuselah Institute in New Haven, Connecticut, where scientists seek to find the cause for aging and perhaps give us all eternal life."
Blake's fingers hit the black button and the screen went dark.
Chapter 9
Sonya was waiting for Blake at the top of the seawall. She was wearing only sandals and an expensive necklace of lunar opals and Byzantium silver beads. She stood in a studied pose, smiling.
Blake shook his head with a smile. Voss has done it again, he thought. Voss, the plucker of the best and ripest fruit!
"Darling Blake," Sonya said with an intense whisper, and hugged him carefully. "Jean-Michel has been waiting for you. Come, darling."
Blake noticed that she didn't seem to sweat in the Mexican heat. Even in the bright sunlight, sudden death for most blondes, she was pampered perfection. But her great physical beauty aroused no lust in him, only distant admiration.
"Jean-Michel likes his guests to arrive by sea, have you noticed that?" Sonya said. "Maybe the trip was too rough?"
"No, it was quite nice."
"Then you have no excuse not to compliment me," she said, tossing back her long hair.
She laughed to take the bite from her words, but Blake saw that she was waiting. He mumbled a polite phrase, saw her expression, and expanded his words deftly into a flowery compliment that had no real feeling. It made him feel bad.
He saw Caren's familiar figure on an upper terrace. She was waving through a break in the trees. Next to her was a portly man with gray hair.
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