The Nano Flower gm-3 Read online

  The destruction had been spectacular even by the standards of a Europe which had almost collapsed into anarchy in those first few years of climatical tumult engendered by the Warming.

  Charlotte retained only vague recollections of her early childhood when the world was plunged into chaos, dream sequences of places and faces, a seemingly endless procession of days when it was too hot and there was never enough to eat. Half of her waking hours had been spent roaming London's wide bicycle-clogged streets, scavenging food from markets and street stalls. She had lived with her aunt Mavis, a woman in her late forties, with a round haunted face, always wearing floral-print dresses and pink slippers. Aunt Mavis never had a job; by design a lifetime dole dependant, she only took Charlotte in for the extra food allocation. Charlotte never saw any of it; her ration cards were traded with the spivs for bootleg gin, which Aunt Mavis would sit and drink in front of the big flatscreen on the lounge wall, curtains perpetually drawn.

  The woman had exchanged reality for Globecast's soaps, where formatted plots always rewarded a hard life with the glitter trappings of materialism and golden sunsets, love and caring. The channels offered her a glimpse of salvation from the Warming and the PSP, a world twisted out of recognition, becoming an electronic religion-substitute. Worshipped ceaselessly.

  One evening, when she was seven, Charlotte had returned home to find her aunt pressed against the flatscreen, knocking on it tearfully and pleading with the handsome smiling characters to let her in. She had been put in an orphanage not long after. The hunger ended then, replaced by work in the kitchens, peeling vegetables, washing crockery.

  That was when her life really began, the normality of school and other children. The only link with her past was a solid thread of determination never to be hungry again. Then Dmitri Baronski had come into her world when she was fifteen, and he made his offer, opening a door into a semi-magical realm where nobody ever lacked for anything.

  The Aston Martin reached Monaco's perimeter road, where the seamless translucent shell of the dome rose out of the concrete sea wall, curving gradually overhead, massive enough to hold up the sky. She could see a couple of jetties on the outside, sleek white-painted yachts bobbing gently at their moorings. Large circular tidal-turbine lagoons of gene-tailored coral mottled the quiet sea all the way out to the darkening horizon. Monaco still refused to plug into France's electrical grid, remaining resolutely independent.

  On the other side of the road were dignified hotels with black-glass lobby doors and long balconies. She watched them go past, feeling a vague sense of amusement that a town which had so meticulously recreated the ambience of long-lost imperialistic elegance in its fabric and culture should seek shelter by huddling under a hyper-modern structure like the dome. It was a failing of the set she moved through, she thought, that they never strived for anything new. The talent and resources deployed here could just as easily have been used to create something bold and innovative. Instead, they turned automatically to the past, drowning themselves in the safety of their genteel heritage.

  Yet, for her, the replication was less than perfect. She recognized the quality of crispness in the lines of the buildings, a cold efficiency in the determinedly handsome layout which betrayed the mentality of its originators. Monaco was a compact bundle of wealth, its borders jealously guarded. It had become an enclave, a fortified castle of the rich, complete with drawbridge.

  Even with her whiter than white passport and prepaid hotel reservation the Immigration officials had taken their time before allowing her in. Permanent residency within the principality was strictly limited; you had to be proposed by three residents and demonstrate assets in excess of four million Eurofrancs before you could even register for consideration.

  So Charlotte stood in the airport arrivals lounge in a queue of impatient, nervous people watching enviously as resident card holders zipped through their channel without any fuss. She had been afraid the hard-nosed woman behind the customs desk would open the flower box in her flight bag, ask questions about it. But the customs and immigration setup seemed more like a ritual than anything else. The wait, the questions, underlining that Monaco was different, not some common tourist resort or gambling state.

  It was while she was standing there that she saw the man for the second time that day. He was in the same queue, ten places behind her. There was something about him, the way his cool eyes were never looking at her when she turned round, his phlegmatic indifference to queueing, which set him slightly apart, creepy almost. At any other time she would have guessed him to be a hardline bodyguard for some Monaco plutocrat, coming home after a holiday. But she had seen him earlier in the day at the Cape Town spaceport, mingling among the crowd of friends and relatives that had greeted the other passengers on her spaceplane flight. If she had seen him in the departure lounge, waiting for the connecting flight to Monaco, then it would only be natural for him to be standing in the queue behind her. But what had he been doing in the crowd waiting for the spaceplane?

  Finally, her passport had been cleared, her invitation and hotel reservation validated by the Immigration officer, a matronly woman in a stiff blue uniform. Charlotte obediently thumbprinted the declaration on the officer's terminal, confirming that she had read and would abide by the principality's laws. She received her temporary visa from the unsmiling woman. Their eyes had met for a second, and Charlotte read the uniquely female contempt for the thousandth time. She had worn a scarlet Ashmi jumpsuit for her flight back to Earth, tucked into black leather cowboy boots, gold Arnstrad cybofax wafer clipped into her top pocket, Ferranti sunglasses. About as expensively casual as you could get; she enjoyed the look in the mirror, a designer test-pilot. Then the Immigration bitch went and smashed her mood.

  It was an appropriate entrance to Monaco, she thought later; scorn and suspicion dogging her steps.

  The El Harhari hotel wasn't much different to the others ringing the inside of the dome. A little larger, perhaps. Its colonnaded frontage a pearl-white marble that glowed pink in the directionless sunset. The Aston Martin swept smoothly up a looped drive lined by tall, bushy-topped palm trees. There was a stream of cars ahead of it, disgorging passengers outside the hotel's main entrance.

  The El Harhari was hosting the annual Newfields ball, a charity that sponsored educational courses for underprivileged children throughout Europe. There was nothing remarkable about the charity, or the ball. At least half a dozen similar fund-raising events were held in Monaco every night. But Newfields rose far above the ordinary by having Julia Evans on its board of trustees, making its ball the social event of the month. Tickets were seven thousand Eurofrancs apiece; touts charged twenty and cursed their scarcity.

  Dmitri Baronski, Charlotte's sponsor, had managed to get her one, shaking his head in dismay when she phoned him with the request. "What on Earth do you want to go to that function for?" he'd asked. His thin, lined face seemed more fragile than usual, white hair drooping limply. The valley outside the Prezda arcology where he lived was visible through his apartment's picture window behind him.

  "I just want to see Julia Evans," Charlotte had replied equitably. "I've always admired her. Meeting her would be a real treat." She didn't like holding out on the old man, but it was a harmless piece of fun, exciting too, in its own way. That was the real reason she had agreed to make the delivery. She had spent years striving to bring stability into her life, overlooking the fact that it was the partner of monotony.

  "All right," Baronski had grumbled. "But all she'll do is shake your hand and thank you for supporting the charity. Same as everybody else. You won't be invited back to Wilholm Manor for tea on the lawn, you know."

  "I don't expect to be. A handshake will suit me fine."

  It had taken him six hours to track down a ticket for her. She never doubted he could do it. Then when he called her at the Cape Town spaceport to confirm, he also told her to introduce herself to Jason Whitehurst as soon as she reached the El Harhari. "He's a nice enough o
ld boy; and he's English, too, so you should get on fine."

  "OK." She had kept her face perfectly composed, just as Baronski himself had trained her, not letting her disappointment show. But it would have been nice to go to just one ball as a regular guest.

  Baronski squirted Jason Whitehurst's data profile into her cybofax for her to study during the flight to Monaco, and signed off chuntering.

  She smiled fondly at the cybofax screen after his image had faded. Nothing ever seemed to faze the old duffer, no request too obtuse for him to handle; his shadowy web of contacts rivalled a superpower's intelligence agency. It was a job Charlotte would love to take over when he retired. She suspected most of his girls shared that ambition.

  The footman who opened the Aston Martin's door was dressed in smart grey livery. Charlotte alighted gracefully, careful not to smile when she caught his eyes straying to her legs as her skirt rode up on the car's cushioning. She'd had ten-centimetre bone grafts put in her legs, six centimetres above the knee, four below. Her muscles had been recontoured around the extensions. It was an expensive treatment, but well worth it. Her new legs were powerfully athletic, beautifully shaped; designed to make men wish.

  Five huge aureate chandeliers hung in the El Harhari's lobby, throwing a silver haze of light over the guests as they filed into the ballroom. The men wore formal dinner jackets, although some of them had military-style regalia complete with swords. The women were all in long gowns, dripping with diamonds.

  Charlotte moved easily through the crowd, holding the flower presentation box in her left hand. Her gown was made from navy-blue silk with a décolleté neckline; with her long neck and short clipped sandy hair it looked as though she was showing more skin than she actually was. She felt rather than saw several of the men watching her.

  She accepted a glass of champagne from the waiter, taking a sip as she looked round. The plush ballroom was nearly full, long stalactites of freshly cut flowers floated above the milling partygoers, a large orchestra occupied the raised stage. She saw a pair of matched Mercedes coupés on the side of the highly polished wooden dancefloor, the raffle's grand prize.

  Julia Evans was standing at the centre of a small group of Newfields' committee members, greeting a long queue of guests. A dinner-jacketed channel gossipcast cameraman covered each introduction. Charlotte studied her closely. The owner of Event Horizon was thirty-four, tall, with an attractive oval face and light complexion; her chestnut hair was worn long and straight, falling halfway down her back. Her dress was emerald green, a fabric as smooth as oil, stylish rather than ostentatious. Even her jewellery was modest, a few small intricate pieces; making the elderly gem-bedecked dowagers in the queue seem absurdly gauche in comparison.

  It was almost as though Julia Evans was using her own refinement to mock the crass flamboyance around her.

  Charlotte found it difficult to look away. Julia Evans's reputation exerted an intrinsic fascination. She had inherited Event Horizon, aged seventeen, from her equally famous grandfather, Philip Evans, and had gone on to run it with the kind of barbed efficiency which was beyond any of its rivals. The company's fortune was based on its gigaconductor patent, a universal energy-storage system used to power everything from household gear to spaceplanes. Julia had shrewdly exploited the money which licensing brought in to expand Event Horizon until it dominated the post-Warming English economy. There were just so many legends and rumours, so much gossip connected with this one woman, it was hard to relate all the allegations and acclaim to the slim figure standing a few metres away.

  Watching her, Charlotte decided there was something different about her after all, a kind of glacial discipline. Julia's small polite smile never faltered as she was introduced to the torrent of eager dignitaries. It was almost a regal quality.

  "Genuine power has an attraction more fundamental than gravity," Baronski once told Charlotte. "No matter whether it is an influence for good or supreme evil, it pulls people in and holds them spellbound."

  The effect Julia Evans had on people made Charlotte realize just how true that was. The snippets of conversation she'd overheard so far in the ballroom were all mundane, small talk. Everyone knew that Julia Evans didn't like to talk shop at social functions. It was faintly ridiculous, the whole Mediterranean coast was talking about the new alliance between Egypt and the Turkish Islamic Republic, worried about how it would affect regional trade, whether a new Jihad legion would rise in North Africa. And the people here must be the most interested of all, they stood to make or lose fortunes on the outcome. But there wasn't a word.

  She remembered a midnight conversation with one of her patrons, a high-grade financier, two or three years previously. He had confessed that his children were deliberately conceived to be the same age as Julia's two children in the hope they would prove acceptable playmates. That all-elusive key to the innermost coterie. At the time Charlotte had shaken her head in bemused disbelief. Now she wasn't so sure.

  Julia Evans's tawny eyes found Charlotte across the ballroom. With a guilty start Charlotte realized she must have been staring for well over a minute. She hurriedly took a sip of champagne to cover herself. Gawking like some adolescent wannabe who'd unexpectedly bumped into her idol. Thank heavens Baronski wasn't here to witness such a lapse.

  Charlotte quickly scanned the faces in the background. Before the party she had reviewed Julia Evans's data profile, the one Associated Press assembled, looking for someone close to her. She had sifted carefully through the information, deciding on three names which might provide a short cut to access.

  She walked round the end of the queue, towards the knot of people behind Julia Evans.

  Rachel Griffith was chatting to one of the Newfields committee members. A middle-aged woman trying not to let her boredom show. The data profile had said she'd been with Julia Evans for nineteen years; starting out as a bodyguard, then moving over to personal assistant when she got too old for hardliner activity.

  She gave Charlotte a quizzical look. There was that instant snap of recognition, condescension registering. "Yes?"

  "Would you see Julia Evans gets this, please." Charlotte handed over the box. It was twenty-five centimetres long, ten wide, with a transparent top showing the single mauve trumpet-shaped flower inside. A white bow was tied round the middle.

  Rachel Griffith took it in reflex, then gave the box a disparaging frown. "Who's it from?"

  "There is a card." It was in a small blank envelope tucked under the ribbon. Charlotte didn't quite have the courage to open it and read the message herself. As she turned away, she said, "Thank you so much," all sugary pleasant, to show how indifferent she was. Rewarded by Rachel Griffith's vexed expression.

  The box wouldn't be forgotten now. Charlotte felt pleased with herself making the connection with so much aplomb. How many other people could hand-deliver articles to the richest woman in the world and be sure they'd reach their destination? Baronski had taught her a damn sight more than etiquette and culture. There was an art to handling yourself in this kind of company. Perhaps that was why he had selected her. His scout in the orphanage staff must have recognized some kind of inherent ability. Character was more important than beauty in this game.

  Charlotte let herself be talked into a couple of dances before she started looking for her new patron. She'd be damned if she didn't get some enjoyment out of the party. The young men were charming, as they always were when they thought they were conversing with an equal; both in their twenties, one of them was at university in Oslo. They were good dancers.

  She thought she saw the creep from the airport while she was on the dancefloor, dressed in a waiter's white jacket. But he was on the other side of the ballroom, and he had his back to her, so it was hard to tell, and she certainly wasn't going to stop dancing to check.

  She located Jason Whitehurst in one of the side rooms; it was a refuge for the older people, with plenty of big leather armchairs, and waiter service. The data profile from Baronski said Jason White
hurst was sixty-six, a wealthy independent trader with a network of cargo agents all across the globe. She thought he looked like a Russian czar, straight backed, a pointed white beard, wearing the dress uniform of the King's Own Hussars. There was a discreet row of ribbons pinned on his chest. She recognized the one which was for the Mexico campaign. His eyes must have been implants, they were so clear, and startlingly blue.

  According to the profile Jason Whitehurst had a son, but there was no wife. Charlotte was relieved about that. Wives were a complication she could do without. Some simply ignored her, others treated her like a daughter, the worst were the ones who wanted to watch.

  Jason Whitehurst was in conversation with a couple of contemporaries, the three of them standing together with large brandy glasses in their hands. She walked right up and introduced herself.

  "Ah yes, the old Baron told me you'd be here," Jason Whitehurst said. His voice was beautifully clipped and precise. He left his friends with a brief wave.

  She liked that, there was no pretence, no charade that she was a relative or a friend's daughter. It spoke of complete self-confidence; Jason Whitehurst didn't have to care what anyone else thought. He could make a good patron, she thought, people like him always did. A man who had made a success of his life wasn't inclined to quibble over trivia. Not that money ever came into it. There was an established routine, no need for vulgarity. And Baronski would never tolerate anyone who didn't play by the rules.

  While she was with him, the patron would pay for all her clothes, her travel, incidentals; and there would be gifts, mostly jewellery, perfume, sometimes art, once a racehorse (she still laughed at Baronski's consternation over that). After it was over, after the patron had tired of her, Baronski would gather in all her gifts and pay her a straight twenty per cent.