Realware

"Yes, but what about Mr. Olou?"

"Awful," said Onar, crawling over to the fallen Tongan. He leaned over Olou, thumping his chest and briefly attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "He's gone," said Onar presently. "It's my fault. I was showing off for you and I blundered. I'm a fool. A capering popinjay."

Mr. Olou's body lay utterly motionless, with a deep stillness that Yoke could somehow sense as that of a corpse. A sleeping person is only conditionally immobile; if you poke them, they'll arise. But Mr. Olou--Yoke could tell that no matter how much anyone bugged him, he'd never get up again. The stark moonlight made the dead man's mouth a ragged hole.

"Let's get out of here, Onar."

"I agree." He looked down at the body. "Forgive me, old friend." The elevator was turned off for the day, so they took the marble stairs down. There were no lights. Onar caught Yoke's elbow and made her pause on the first landing.

"Before we go any further, Yoke, I have to ask you something." His breath was warm and pleasant in the darkness.

"Okay," said Yoke. She had a feeling they were going to kiss. It was hardly appropriate, but for some reason that's what she wanted. She'd felt a redoubled attraction to Onar ever since the jellyfish blast. A way to spit in the face of Death?

"Can I trust you to keep a secret?" asked Onar softly.

"Trust 'Sue Miller'? What is that about, anyway?" She put her hands on Onar's waist, trying not to think of Mr. Olou.

"The business I'm down here for--my business with the King --it's rather hush-hush. Can you promise me that you won't talk to anyone about what you see and hear? If you can help me out on this, there might be some rather substantial rewards for you. But you mustn't tell."

"Oh yeah?" said Yoke. Now that she was primed to kiss Onar, she was having trouble focusing on what he was saying.

"Not Cobb, not your parents, not Tre and Terri, no one," whispered Onar as he put his arms around her. "Not yet. Eventually, everyone will know. And they'll be glad. I promise you. It's a wonderful surprise."

"All right," said Yoke, and pressed her lips to his. It was romantic here in the marble Tongan dark. Onar smelled good and his body felt strong and lithe. It was pleasant to embrace him. They kissed for a minute, and then Yoke broke it off, feeling guilty about dancing on Mr. Olou's grave.

Outside they found Ke

"Good evening. You are ready?"

"There's been an accident, Ke

"So it comes to that," said Ke

"Poor Olou," sighed Ke

"Why isn't Ke

"At Meta West they call me the anteater," said Onar with a little smile. "Meta West Link sells transmission time between the Earth and outer space. Mainly the Moon, but Mars and the asteroids too. My job is to keep cryps, phreaks, and ants from siphoning off free bandwidth." He opened his mouth and waggled his long, pointed tongue. "The ant's nightmare; the virgin's friend."

"Onar don't."

Ke

"Tongans used only to go crazy on Saturday nights," said Ke

"Ke

"Very many Mormons in Tonga," said Ke

"I don't think I've ever heard of them," said Yoke. "Is that a religion?"

"Oh yes," said Onar. "And they own the world's largest asimov computer. A machine under a mountain in Salt Lake City."

"I've heard of that big slave computer," said Yoke. "Cobb's simulation lived inside it for a while."

"You're thinking of the Heritagists' asimov computer," said Onar. "Which is also under a mountain in Salt Lake City. I have a theory that the two are one and the same."

"I went to college in Salt Lake City," said Ke

"The South Pacific program at Brigham Young University."

"Do you dislike moldies, Ke

"Yis."

"Will you stop changing the subject, Onar?" put in Yoke. "Finish telling me what you're doing here and what happened to Mr. Olou." Outside the window now was a Tongan food store, an open-air stand with shelves full of ca

"Very well, Yoke. Let's do Telecommunications 101. For short distances, an uvvy signal hopscotches from one uvvy to the next. Completely decentralized. For longer distances, the signal zooms up a thousand miles to a cheap little saucer-sat and gets bounced back down. Ever since the 2030s the saucer-sats have been imipolex jobbies that fly up to space by themselves. There's millions of them by now. The size of di

"Right," said Yoke. "Cobb ate one of them."

"That was a very moldie thing for Cobb to do," said Onar. "Moldies are such scavengers."

"So anyway," said Yoke. "Now you're going to tell me that since Meta West Link handles Earth-Moon signal transmissions, that means they have some really big saucer-sats, right?"

"Right-o," said Onar. "We call them sky-rays. Like manta ray or stingray? Big soft flappy things. They weigh a ton instead of a kilogram. And, unlike the little saucer-sats, they need a fungus-algae nervous system. Once you get that much mold-infested imipolex together, it's bound to wake up. And since we already know how to talk to moldies, it makes sense for the sky-rays to be made up of moldies. A sky-ray is twenty or thirty moldies stuck together to make one of those group creatures we call a 'grex.' You don't really own a sky-ray, it's a team that you hire. The moldies get paid in imipolex and they take turns working. Which is why you see so many of them hanging around Tonga. They come down here to breed, for one thing."

"And why Tonga?"

"The sky-rays stay in geosynchronous orbit; they circle the equator at some twenty-two thousand miles up. That's the altitude where the natural orbital speed exactly matches the rotational speed of the Earth. Geosynchronous means they're always above the same spot. Now, thanks to some clever international politicking by HRH's grandfather back before the mille