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hope you will consent to another game, Mr. Dolfuss," she said.
"For you, lady," Dolfuss said, "anything. Anything at all."
Zoot gazed at the contents of his closet in bleak despair.
How to dress for one's suicide? he wondered. Did this count as a formal event,
or was he allowed to dress casually?
Formal, he decided. Go with dignity.
244 | WALTER JON WILLIAMS
He reached for his evening clothes, then hesitated. The jacket he'd invented
might be more appropriate: it was his trademark, after all. If the back of his
head was blown off he thought morbidly, at least he'd be recognizable.
He stood away from the closet. Perhaps he should just write the note first.
Traditionally this was done in High
Khosali, in which the parsing of each sentence commented on the sentence
before, the whole unrolling, ideally anyway, in as precise and rigorous terms
as a mathematical statement. Zoot spoke High Khosali fairly well, but minor
mistakes were easy to make; and he had to be careful as possible.
Nobody wanted to be known for bungling his last words, and Zoot would need to
produce two sets of them. A public apology, suitably phrased, to be found in
his breast pocket, along with a private note to Lady Dosvidern to be hand
delivered by a discreet member of the Very Private Letter service, apologizing
for destroying her reputation. There were certain delicacies to be observed as
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well: in the public statement, he had to make his reasons for killing himself
clear, publicly exonerate the lady of all suspicion, and yet in so doing never
mention her by name.
It was ironic, Zoot thought, that the cause of all this was just the sort of
thing that members of the Diadem were supposed to do. He was expected to have
affaires and scrapes and then have them broadcast throughout the Constellation
and Empire by the Diadem's own exclusive news service.
But Diadem members weren't supposed to botch things, weren't supposed to
babble and stare when subjected to pointed interviews, to blurt out obvious
untruths and cause potential Colonial Service incidents between opaque aliens
and their wives.
There was only one way for a gentleman to behave once he'd wrecked things to
that degree.
HOUSE OF SHARDS | 245
Zoot stepped to the closet again, hesitated once more.It was a practical issue
that finally decided him. After he'd blown his brains out, the famous jacket
would be a lot asier to clean than would formal evening clothes.
He still had to write his note.
Suicides, he realized in growing despair, were much more complicated than they
seemed.
Maijstral hastened down the corridor with her grace of Benn at his side. Roman
and Gregor followed behind, hovering at the edge of Maijstral's awareness,
their detectors deployed.
Roberta had a stylus and one of the credit chips from the
Casino: carefully she rearranged molecules as she walked, wrote an amount,
signed and thumbprinted it. She handed it to Maijstral.
"There. Your losses at tiles multiplied by a large factor."
Maijstral came to Dolfuss's door. He reached for the lock, hesitated, drew his
hand back. Electricity crackled through his nerves.
"What's wrong?" asked Roberta.
Maijstral did not quite trust himself to speak; instead his hand went to the
small of his back and drew out a pistol. His other hand took Roberta's
shoulder; he gently guided her away from the line of fire. Turning toward
Roman and
Gregor, he gestured significantly with the pistol. Weapons drawn, detectors
screening their eyes, the pair moved si-
lently down the corridor. Roman reached into a pocket and handed Maijstral a
pair of detector goggles: he drew them on with his free hand. A pair of media
globes rose out of
Roman's pocket and hovered in the air.
Maijstral paused for a moment of consideration. Roman and Gregor waited.
Roberta, violet eyes alight, bent and drew a small, elegant
246 | WALTER JON WILLIAMS
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|;
Nana-Coulville Elite spitfire from an ankle holster. Roman and Gregor observed
this with a certain amount of admi ration.
Maijstral, with careful consideration for the state of his nerves, concluded
that he was not going to be the first person into the room. With gestures,
Maijstral told Roman to dive through the door: he and Gregor would provide
cover fire and support.
Roman bowed; he flexed his muscles, set his pistol to
"lethal," opened the door lock with a touch of his hand and charged.
Through the haze of his fear, Maijstral experienced a moment of admiration for
the absolute grace of Roman's movement, for the elegance of Roman's execution,
his total silence.
Roman entered low and dove to his right out of the line of fire. A media globe
swooped over his head. Maijstral and Gregor followed, guns thrust forward.
The giant impact diamond was propped in a corner. No person was visible. The
bed was unmade Maijstral hadn't permitted maid service since he'd begun
stowing his loot in the room.
Roman, Gregor, and Maijstral fanned over the room.
Maijstral's heart thundered in his breast. He dropped by the bed into
convenient cover and kept his arms locked rigid in a firing position, thereby
feigning an inspection of anything beneath the mattress. There was, he
discovered, nothing none of the rolled paintings or compact sculptures that
had once belonged to the Baroness Silverside and that, as of midnight, had
become his personal property. Anger growled in his nerves. He stood, flipped
over his pillow.
The box with the Eltdown Shard was gone.
Roberta glided into the room, pistol ready in her hand, her eyes questioning.
HOUSE OF SHARDS | 247
Maijstral stepped to the closet and pointed his pistol at the closed door. "Fu
George," he said, "come out,
please."
There was a moment's pause, then the closet door came open. Geoff Fu George,
elegantly attired in an evening jacket that made an unfortunate contrast to
the bruising around his eyes, smiled ruefully. A pair of media globes orbited
his head as he stepped into the room. Apparently, with his equipment, he'd
managed to overcome the closet's reluctance to close.
"Gentlemen," he said, and bowed. "Your grace."
Fu George, Maijstral realized, had four pistols pointed at him. Maijstral's
nervousness eased; he seemed to be in control of the situation.
"The Shard, if you please," Maijstral said.
Fu George spread in hands in a helpless gesture.
"Sorry, Maijstral," he said. "I'd be perfectly happy to oblige you, but as it
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happens I don't have it."
"Its lordship is threatening the station?" Khamiss stared at
Lady Dosvidern in surprise.
Lord Qlp's voice boomed from the speakers. "It says,"
Lady Dosvidern said, her voice trembling, "that if it doesn't get the
Perfected Tear, it's going to ram the
Viscount Cheng into the antimatter bottle in the surface power plant and blow
everything up."
Khamiss ignored strangling sounds from the Tanquer and considered the
situation, wondering primarily if it was still possible to throw up her hands
and turn the situation over to
Mr. Sun.
Mr. Sun's choked, purple face rose in her mind. Probably not, she decided.
"Can its lordship do that?" Lady Dosvidern said. "Is
'here really antimatter onstation?" Her eyes were hopeless.
248 I WALTER JON WILLIAMS
HOUSE OF SHARDS I 249
"Isn't that old-fashioned? I thought everyone used sidestep systems these
days."
"Silverside Station's in an unstable orbit around an un stable star system,"
Khamiss said. "There's tremendous gravitational stress, and we need to adjust
our position and gravity from one second to the next. Energy expend-
iture is enormous, and a matter-antimatter reaction was the most efficient way
to provide it. The power plant got put on the surface so that if there was a
problem with the magnetic containment bottle, the antimatter would boil off
into space instead of blowing up Silverside."
Her ears flickered uncertainly. "That was the hope, at any rate."
"There's nothing protecting the bottle?"
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