Great North Road (45 page)

Someone sat at the table behind Angela. She paid them no attention.

Olivia-Jay leaned forward. “Lady E is leaving next week,” she confided.

“What? How do you know?” Angela was certain Evangeline had another month to go on her contract. Four months was standard.

“I overheard Marc-Anthony and Loanna talking about it yesterday.”

“I see.” Loanna was the wardrobe mistress, who before she worked at the mansion used to glam up celebrities for a Hollywood zone production company. Hating herself for asking, for being part of it all, Angela said: “Why?”

Olivia-Jay rolled her eyes. “One too many ideological rants to Brinkelle.”

“I thought that’s why she was here, to give Bartram something to shoot down.”

“They weren’t expecting someone quite so committed to the socialist cause. Brinkelle is worried she gets Bartram a little too worked up.”

Angela shook her head in disbelief. Bartram always started the politics argument at their evening meals. It was his preferred topic, animating him more than the other discussions. The more heated the ideological argument, the longer he kept Evangeline in his bed afterward. Angela suspected revenge sex was his favorite. Which made Brinkelle’s motivation highly questionable. “It’s just jealousy. She has a lot of daddy issues.”

Olivia-Jay giggled wildly. “I always think you’d be better off talking politics with him rather than Lady E.”

“Really? And can you imagine Evangeline telling him how Gilmer should play fullback, and Dewey ought to be on the other wing?”

“Got a point, there. See, you’re the smart one, Angela.”

She just smiled airily.
Don’t even get started on that discussion, however lighthearted.
“Come on, time to go.” She picked up her beachbag.

“No rush,” Olivia-Jay grumbled. “He’s having treatment today. He never wants us around after that.”

Angela had reluctantly come to admire Bartram for his dedication to the treatment. The biomedical Institute he’d founded was devoted to one thing: developing a human rejuvenation process. Like every branch of science, genetics had suffered a major slowdown when trans-spatial connections had unlocked the new worlds for settlement. In the new era, money did what money always did, and went for the fastest payoff. With the gateways opening, that was investment in entire planetary economies; familiar corporate growth patterns and government bond schemes but in markets that didn’t suffer from Earth’s heavy regulation and harsh taxes. It wasn’t cutting-edge tech companies that brought the quick big profits anymore, but the old staples of utilities and farming and distribution networks, and of course the algaepaddies. The money loved that. It was familiar and low risk with margins greater than gleaming short-lived technological breakthroughs. All the science-rooted consumerism corporates had suffered in the decades that followed publication of Wan Hi Chan’s theory; the money didn’t want maybes when it could have certainties.

That was why the three North brothers had eventually split: They had the money and the drive to break the stagnation, each pursuing his individual vision of the future. For Augustine it was the straight corporate route, continuing to grow the bioil giant that had the fiscal and political clout to shape destiny. His greatest accomplishment to date was the cartel that had broken the futures market and brought some much-needed stability to the trans-stellar economy. Constantine chose isolation supported by self-sustaining high-tech replication technology, hoping to achieve a human–machine synergy, elevating himself to the singularity. No one knew what kind of progress he’d made, but no new cyborg deities had yet materialized in Jupiter orbit. While Bartram lusted for the oldest human dream: eternal life.

Out of the three, it was looking like Bartram would be the first to fully succeed. To begin with, the Institute had given him a genuine daughter, the first and only genuine offspring to be born to the three brothers. She was the family and future they had been denied before, supplanting all the 2s. And now, by painful increments, his body was being returned to its youthful ideal. Even better, this time around his reconstituted genes would have the one-in-ten sequence factored in.

The process was phenomenally expensive. Some organs could be regrown for him; the heart, lungs, kidney, liver, spleen, bladder, muscles … a long useful list that modified stem cells could shape themselves into around pre-molded scaffolds of tissue, producing a viable body part ready for transplanting. But that still left the remainder of the human body: the all-important skin, and bone, and blood vessels and nerves, all of which had to be rejuvenated in situ with gene-replacement therapy. Then there was the brain, for which Bartram’s Institute had pushed neurogenesis techniques to astonishing new heights. It wasn’t just the cost that was staggering; the combined procedures took time. A lot of it. Rumor around the mansion was that Bartram had begun that stage twelve years ago.

Angela didn’t know, and didn’t really care how long or how much it cost. The results were clear enough. Today Bartram, at 109 years old, was more like a spry 50-year-old unexpectedly struck with arthritis. He resented the painful stiffness, but was resolute in his determination to overcome it.

“So we can spend even longer in town, then,” Angela said.

Olivia-Jay gave her a sly look. “Are you seeing someone?” she asked breathlessly.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I wouldn’t get anything if I did that, exclusivity is clause one in the contract. It’s the only one that ever matters.”

“You are, aren’t you?” Olivia-Jay was almost bouncing with excitement.

“No! I just want a bit of time to myself. That’s not unreasonable, is it? Now come on.”

They went to Birk-Unwin first, much to Olivia-Jay’s obvious disapproval. It was trying to push itself as a quality department store, but its pedigree showed in its accommodation: a revamped single-story food-processing factory with awkward stanchions running the length inside that couldn’t quite be disguised by fanciful marketing displays. Nor did the location help, halfway down Marbeuf Avenue, several blocks from where Abellia’s real glitz and glamour began. For all its aspirations, Birk-Unwin was always going to be reasonably priced, last-year’s-model merchandise for the middle-income patron. So Olivia-Jay sighed theatrically as Angela dragged her between counters. Eventually she found what she was looking for.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Olivia-Jay said as Angela got an assistant to unlock the jewelry cabinet.

“No.” Angela held up the gold banana-shaped cuff links, turning them in the light. They were the kind of deliberately gaudy trinket a low-rank manager would wear to demonstrate independence from the corporate machine—maybe something his fiancée had bought him. “I’ll take them,” she told the assistant.

“Angela!” Olivia-Jay protested.

“I know what I’m doing, thanks.”

“Clearly, you don’t. Because if you did … Come on, let’s go to Tiffany’s, or Jerrards, or anywhere. If you really loved him, you would.”

“I don’t, so flip it to zero.” She told her e-i to pay Birk-Unwin’s account, using her own money, not the mansion’s tab. “Gift-wrapped, please,” she asked the assistant.

Tying a purple ribbon around the box took an extra three minutes. Longer than it should, but then the man was sneaking glances at the pair of them while he wrapped and tied.

“I’ll catch you back at the Jag later,” she told a mildly pouty Olivia-Jay once they were outside.

“Suppose so.”

Angela let the girl take the first taxi. She wouldn’t put it past Olivia-Jay to try to follow her. Once she’d seen the cab turn off at the end of Marbeuf Avenue her e-i called another one for her.

“Monturiol Beach,” she told the auto. They pulled away from the curb emitting microwave and laser pulses, which the road guide cables and other autos deciphered; vehicles the length of the avenue adjusted their speed and positioning, allowing her cab into the modest flow. Angela peered down into her bag. She took out the gift box, unwrapped it carefully on her lap, and removed the gaudy cuff links. Then she reached into the beachbag and found the palm-sized black cardboard box that had been dropped in while she was sitting in the café.

It contained a pair of cuff links identical to the ones she’d just bought, as well as a pair of gossamer-thin grabber gloves. She took the gloves out carefully, remembering to hold them by the blue tag on the rim. They were so thin it was like holding mist. When she held them up they swayed about in the aircon streams with all the sluggish inertia of seaweed. As they moved, their refraction shimmer painted a phantom outline in the air—it was about the only way she could tell they existed.

Frightened they would tear, she carefully slid her hand up into the first one. She needn’t have worried; their molecular structure had been carefully designed. When it was on correctly, she peeled the blue tag off, activating the adhesion process. The grabber glove melded to her skin. Even when she held her hand ten centimeters from her eyes, there was no way she could tell the glove was on. She rubbed her cheek. It felt like skin. Satisfied there was no way anyone could detect the grabber glove outside of a spectroscopic analysis, Angela pulled the second glove on. After that she opened the gift box from Birk-Unwin and swapped the cufflinks around.

Monturiol Beach was a small cove with deep rocky headlands on either side. The land at the back was taken up by the Ibanez condominium, a sweeping white-concrete-and-dark-glass structure with eight tiered balconies along the front, and living walls at both ends, producing elaborate vertical gardens. Apartments inside started at eight million eurofrancs, with full valet services on tap, making it the nesting place of hard-edged bachelor types, the kind of executive who provided all the management and financial service support that the true corporate overlord didn’t like to be separated from.

The cab stopped by the main gate, the auto lacking authorization to proceed. Angela’s e-i gave the gate manager her identity certificate, and the cab rolled forward again. It stopped thirty seconds later under the eagle wings portico, and Angela climbed out. Behind her, the Birk-Unwin cuff links were wedged down the side of the seat cushions, unlikely to be found for months, if then. She’d swallowed the blue tags.

Angela took the lift to the eighth floor. There were only four apartments at that level, all penthouses. The door of number three recognized her, and opened.

Barclay North was waiting in the big open-plan lounge, with its balcony overlooking the deserted beach. Angela gave him a coy grin. “Hi,” she said, all husky-voiced.

“Hi yourself. You look great.”

“Thanks.” She did a little twirl, which sent the short flimsy skirt fabric rising up. That morning she’d dressed specifically for Barclay, not that it required much thought or effort—short skirt, tight white T-shirt without a bra, simple pumps; hair tied back, moisturized skin but no makeup. A slightly cheaper version of the clothing Marc-Anthony and Loanna made her wear at the mansion. They knew what Bartram liked, she’d been chosen for her toned-up athletic looks, and their clothes emphasized that. And of course, what one North liked all the others did, too. It wasn’t exactly trans-spatial connection science.

The twirl finished up with her in front of Barclay. She dropped her bag and wrapped her arms around him, kissing hungrily. Barclay was thirty-one and already appointed as Abellia’s Civic Administration’s comptroller—the kind of position Bartram insisted remain within the family domain. His age meant he was almost the last 2North to be born before Brinkelle. There would be no more of his kind—Bartram was expecting to walk away from his treatment with fully functional gonads. All future offspring would be like Brinkelle—a concept that made Angela shudder. It also made Barclay not a little jealous and resentful of his little sister, which made things easy for Angela from the first moment she started flirting with him.

The kiss finished. Still grinning, Angela pulled her T-shirt off, warming her face into a sultry I-can’t-wait expression. “I’ve got something for you,” she purred.

Barclay could barely look away from her naked torso. “Yeah?”

She took the ribbon-tied box from her bag and offered it to him. He opened it up, mildly curious. When the lid came off there was a flash of puzzlement, quickly and professionally hidden. “Thank you, Angela.” His lips twitched in genuine appreciation.

“I know it’s not much,” she said, her face tilted up, all youthfully serious now. “But I wanted to give you something. I want you to know how much you mean to me.”

His smile was proud. As expected. He was the one who bought trinkets for girls, not the other way around. Like all men, especially ones as powerful as the Norths, he liked to believe a beautiful girl would fall head-over-heels for him. And that’s what must be happening, because she had so much to lose personally if Bartram ever found out about their affair, so she must like him for him, not just his money and position.

“They’re quirky,” he said. “I like that. I’ll put them on right away.”

“No, don’t.” She slipped the skirt down her legs, then wiggled out of her thong. “At least, not right away.”

They did it in the Jacuzzi first, which he always liked. Then they took a break in the sauna, followed by more thrashing about on the lounge’s big cream leather couch. One time, she let him have her up against a wall, legs and arms spread wide, all nicely submissive, the way a North enjoyed. Her hands were open, with his pressing up against her, pushing her hard against the wall, fingers-to-fingers, palm-to-palm. She triggered the grab, allowing the glove circuits and receptors to record his complete biometric pattern.

After the wall, he collected a bottle of Champagne from the kitchen, and they finished up in the bedroom with him licking the icy fizzing drink off her abdomen and thighs—just like his brother-father.

M
ONDAY,
F
EBRUARY 11, 2143

The zone theater’s city virtual showed the citycab taxi pulling in to the curb outside the Suffren club on Carliol Street, just a few hundred meters from the Market Street station. A man walked backward out of the club and got into the taxi with a weird gravity-defying hop.