No Going Back (11 page)

I laughed. “Please. If anything were to happen to me, you could get away easily.”

“But I wouldn’t,” Lobo said, “as you should know.”

He was right. I was being unfair. “I do,” I said, “and I’m sorry. And, I truly appreciate it.”

A holo of the Pimlani estate appeared in the middle of the round.

“Before you turn all weepy and start trying to hug my walls,” Lobo said, “let’s go over this place.”

* * *

I left Lobo in an outdoor space at the far rear of the public landing zone he’d chosen. We’d discussed putting him in a hangar but ultimately decided to leave him in the open. Anyone looking for us would expect us to hide him under cover, but with the most recent set of mods, no one from Kang’s team should have been able to recognize him, so leaving him outside seemed the best overall choice. Plus, he could leave quickly if need be.

I set off on foot. Should someone track us to that area, I didn’t want any immediate taxi records. I carried a pack with a change of clothing, as well as a wallet that gave me an ID that should hold up for at least a few days and that had a rather substantial money balance. I don’t generally spend a lot, and over the years I’ve landed quite a few large scores, so I normally have no problem bearing the costs of small missions like these. I always tried, though, to bring far more money than I should ever need to spend, because sometimes extra money provided the best path out of a difficult situation.

I’m going to see an old friend, I realized, and I view it as a mission. I shook my head. Normal people didn’t think that way.

On the other hand, it could be a mission, because it could be a trap. When I knew Omani, she was brilliant and beautiful and fun, but she also possessed more than a little of the drive and ruthlessness that had made her family rich and powerful. I had no doubt that if she knew I didn’t age, she would lock me in a cage until either scientists she would hire had figured out what made me that way or she died.

I wasn’t wrong. It was a mission, and I’d do damned well to remember that fact.

Yet it was a mission no one was asking me to undertake. I could ignore Pimlani’s messages. In a few years at most, she’d almost certainly be dead, and the problem would have taken care of itself. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I owed her. Once, all those years ago, at least for a couple of years I had been sure we loved one another. We’d been together almost all the time, and for the most part the experience had been great. I hadn’t lived with a woman since that time—I didn’t count bunking with squad mates on combat or training missions—and I sure hadn’t let myself get that close to any other woman.

I shook my head to clear it. I’d been over this ground before. All I was doing was wasting time. I also wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings, which is never wise. Walking while lost in thought and mostly blind to the world around you is a good way to get hurt, particularly in a big city.

Most large cities follow similar layouts, but not York. York was an urban testimony to the power of very old money. Part of the usual layout more or less existed: Downtown areas crammed with skyscrapers gleaming with corporate logos held the center of the city, with neighborhoods of varying degrees of wealth sprawling all around it. What made York so different was that scattered through it were the estates of the seven families that had managed to hold onto their wealth and influence from the time of Haven’s colonization to today. The smallest of those estates was over fifty hectares, and most ran to a hundred or more hectares. These great wooded private areas were walled off from the rest of the city, protected by both machine and human security systems. They were as much parks as residences, though people lived in them to this day.

Omani’s family resided in the very largest of them, most of its multiple houses and the grand main building constructed during the first decade humans were on Haven.

Kang and many members of his family also lived in one of the estates. Fortunately, it was on the far side of York from Omani’s home.

I was walking in a commercial area that was rapidly transitioning to a tourist and residential district. In every big city on every world I’ve visited, the same human currents ebb and flow. A part of the city runs down and turns poor and dangerous. Those in power initially ignore it and try simply to contain its troubles; as long as what happens in it stays in it, even the police give it only token attention. Over time, of course, the problems of any area spill over into nearby zones, so politicians start making speeches about it, and the city sends in more cops. Meanwhile, the cost of living in the city keeps rising, so a few intrepid souls, lured by low prices in the bad parts of town, buy and move in. If all goes well, more follow them, and gentrification turns the district from dangerous to funky, and then from funky into a shopping and eating destination. Tourists come both to partake of the offerings of the vendors and to watch the natives, who marvel that somehow they’ve become attractions. The lucky districts stop their transformations there; the unlucky ones continue to morph from interesting to bland and ultimately become indistinguishable from others like them in any city on any world.

From the looks of this area—restaurants and shops inhabiting buildings that were new when I was here over a century ago, cute beige and curlicue signs that told me I was in the Swanson District, the bags of pedestrians fighting for attention as they displayed the acquisitions of their proud new owners—we had reached the full-on gentrified stage and were at the tipping point for the possible slide into blandness.

For my purposes, it was perfect. Hotels would be nearby, and crowds would ensure that I didn’t draw any particular attention to myself. Enough of the people I saw on the sidewalks were old that at least some parts of Swanson were bound to cater to them. The large outdoor market I’d once frequented abutted Swanson, so I was confident that somewhere in those two I would be able to find what I needed.

I thought about the old men at the auction. Many used exoskeletons. All were well dressed. Some, such as Kang with his cane, affected more traditional tools of the elderly. Kang moved in the same money circles as Omani, so he would make a suitable model.

The afternoon sun was on its way down, the day heading toward night, but from Lobo’s research I knew that both the shops here and the outdoor market’s stalls stayed open well into the night. I had time.

I hailed a taxi and had it drive me slowly toward the market. I’d hoped for a SleepSafe, but none was anywhere close to Omani’s estate. When we were a block from the market, I had the taxi take a slow loop around it toward the estate. We were still a few kilometers away when I spotted a three-story local hotel wedged between two equally tall buildings. It called itself the Swanson Market Inn. The holos on its street-facing walls proclaimed it to be a local tradition with the capacity to hold any size party.

I went inside and rented a small suite with an additional bedroom that connected to it, a room I said I would need as soon as my grandfather and others of my family arrived. I left the pack and the change of clothes and headed on foot to the market.

It was time to make me an old man.

124 years ago

York City

Planet Haven

CHAPTER 16

Jon Moore

T
he day I first kissed Omani Pimlani, I was preparing to meet her father.

“Is this really necessary?” I asked. We were standing outside her house after work one day. I was washing my face and hands in a sink those of us who worked outside used to clean our tools and ourselves.

“Meeting my dad?” she said.

“Yes.” I’d heard a lot of stories about him, and he was one of the richest and most powerful men on Haven, so I was nervous. I’d been spending a lot of time with his daughter over the past couple of months, nothing that I thought of as romantic, simply being together, but from what Liam and the others at work had said, no father believes any time a man spends with his daughter is innocent. That made it worse. Worse still, even being around anyone so powerful was directly contrary to my goal of maintaining a low profile.

Against all that, was the ability to spend time with Omani, who stood in front of me, staring into my eyes, and who was the best part of every day I got to see her.

“Yes,” she said, “it is necessary. He has no ability to require it—I’m thirty-eight years old—but he doesn’t see things that way. Plus, every other man I’ve ever dated has met him on the first or second date.” She paused, stepped back, and looked away for a second. “I think at least half of them saw me as the easiest way to meet him, because they always ended up wanting something from him.”

“Are we dating?” I said. I’d never thought of it that way. We met after work most days, ate some dinners in parks together, talked, listened to street musicians, walked around the giant market, and so on, but I’d never thought of it as dating.

She laughed and put her hand on my cheek. “You are so adorable.”

I blushed.

She laughed again. “See what I mean?”

“I’m getting that sense of being a pet again,” I said, “and I can’t say as I like it.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I meant it as a compliment.” She paused. “Is it bad that we’re dating?”

It wasn’t good for remaining unattached and ready to move on, but I loved the time we spent together. “No,” I said. “It’s just... I’ve never spent this much time with a woman before, and I’ve never dated anyone, so I don’t really understand it.”

She hugged me briefly and, as she held me, said into my ear, “Don’t worry. I do.”

As I often did with Omani, I had the unnerving feeling of walking into the middle of a play and, even though I was hearing the lines the actors were saying, having no clue what they meant.

She stepped back. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yes,” I said, “though only because you say we have to.”

“You could go home and change if you wanted.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m clean enough not to track dirt into your house, and it’s not like he doesn’t know what I do.”

She smiled. “Is there nothing you want from him?”

I shook my head. “Not a thing. Why would I?”

She smiled again. “Let’s go.”

She led me around the front of the main building to the far side, through a door there, and up an elevator to the top floor. “Daddy’s office is the entire top floor of the house.”

“That’s more room than most well-off families have in their whole houses,” I said.

She shrugged. “He likes a lot of space, and he likes the view.”

It was my turn to shrug. I’d never lived anywhere with more than a bathroom, a living area, and a bedroom. Many places I’ve stayed merged all of those into one room. “He can afford it,” I said.

She simply nodded.

We stepped out of the elevator into a wide, shallow waiting room with no windows and a lot of security cameras. Omani stepped to the door directly across from us, but it didn’t open.

She glanced back at me and whispered, “Great. He’s in a mood.” She stared up at one of the cameras and said, “Daddy, I’d like to introduce you to Jon, the man I’ve mentioned.”

“Come in,” his voice boomed from multiple speakers around the room. “I’m down with the computers.”

The door opened. She stepped closer to me and whispered, “He meets people there when he wants to show off. Just act impressed.”

“Why?” I said.

She stared at me for a second. “I always say that, but I guess it’s to make him happy. Act however you want.”

I nodded.

We walked across the vast single open room that occupied three-fourths of this floor. Shelves of ancient books filled much of the area, rows of them leading from either side of this central aisle. Here and there, small groups of chairs and tables stood like oases in a sea of books. Pictures and photographs and odd constructions of clay and rope and paper hung on the ends of bookcases and on walls. I’d never seen anything like it. I’d read about libraries, but as historical artifacts; any reader could get you anything you might want, were you the sort of person who liked to read. Most didn’t.

Near the other side of the space, we walked through an open archway into a room within a room, its walls full of displays. Some of the screens showed information I recognized as news; financial data filled most of them. The man I assumed to be her father stood across from us and stared out a window in the side of the house. He couldn’t be doing anything useful from there, so I figured he was trying to make a statement, showing that he would face us when he was good and ready. I had no particular desire to be there, so that was fine with me.

Omani, though, seemed concerned. She cleared her throat before she said, “Daddy, I’d like to introduce you to Jon Moore, the man I’ve been seeing.”

He turned around. He looked barely older than Omani, though that meant nothing. People with money tended to look the same from their mid-twenties into their sixties or seventies, until whenever the best medtech available could no longer make their skin appear young. He was shorter than Omani by almost a head, so he had to look up to meet my eyes. He stared at me for a few seconds, stepped toward me, and waited.

I stepped forward to meet him, stuck out my hand, and said, “It’s nice to meet you, sir.”

He waited a few seconds, then closed the rest of the distance between us and shook my hand. His grip was strong, but his hands had the smooth, soft feeling of a person who didn’t use them in his work. The handshake was brief.

He stepped back. “I’d ask what you do,” he said, “but of course I already know.” He stared at Omani for a moment, then back at me. “My daughter seems to like to annoy me with her choice of men, but she usually aims rather a bit higher.”

“Daddy!” she said.

I felt the anger rising in me, but I worked to keep it under control as I said to her, “It’s fine, Omani.” To him, I said, “Mr. Pimlani, I don’t know what you think is going on, but all we’ve been doing is spending time together for a couple of months. I also don’t know why you want to annoy Omani or insult me, but neither one seems like a good use of your time.”