Omnitopia Dawn (11 page)

She stood up. So did Phil. “You can always pass the time by thinking about your commission,” he said.

“Please,” Morgan said. “Some things one does for art’s sake.”

Phil smiled, shook her hand again, and headed for the door.

It opened before him: the silver- haired assistant showed him down the stairs. As he swung the gate to the sidewalk open and the beaux arts door shut at his back, Phil began to hum, and as the limo door was opened for him and he slipped in, he started to sing softly.

“The party’s ooooooverrrrr . . .”

And the limo door closed.

I
N A CIRCULAR ROOM directly under the pointed tower-roof of Castle Dev, the circular table of inlaid black ironwood was being prepped for a meeting. Pads were being laid out, bottles of mineral water fresh from the cooler set out with glasses and napkins, laptops brought in and set down at the places where their owners would sit. But out in the sunshine, half a mile away, a man on a black bike was pedaling slowly down a nearby path, thinking hard.

His phone rang, its ringtone singing a music-box version of “Hail to the Chief.” Dev sighed, braked, and hopped off the bike, walking it off the path onto the grass under a nearby tree and then letting it lean against him while he fished the phone out of his pocket. From about fifty feet farther back along the path, Dev heard the sound of badly smothered laughter. He glanced that way and saw a couple of his employees, one male and one female, watching him as they approached. The lady was talking to someone on her own cell phone, while the guy was texting someone at high speed. The phone-talker grinned at him as they got closer; the texter looked up and smiled too.

Dev rolled his eyes at them and tried to scowl, but he wasn’t really in a scowling mood at the moment and besides, they knew the joke. As he flipped his phone open, Phone Girl and Text Guy passed by. Phone Girl waved, Text Guy saluted snappily. Dev nodded, waved back, turned away. “Hi, Dad . . .”

“Morning, Son,” said Joseph Logan’s gravelly voice. “What the devil’s that noise?”

“Noise?” Dev said. He stared around him, trying to see what his father was talking about.

“That screeching!”

“What screeching? I can’t—” Then, in the tree above him, he located it. “Oh. It’s one of those jaybirds,” Dev said, peering up into the branches but unable to see anything: the birds in question were famously shy. “The beige and gray guys that keep wrecking your feeder.”

“Nonsense. Thing sounds like one of those birds you always hear screaming in nature movies. You should get rid of them, they’re probably dangerous.”

“Those are red-tailed hawks, Dad,” Dev said. “The TV people use that sound effect for every bird except the Bluebird of Happiness. If there
were
hawks here, we couldn’t get rid of them, they’re protected. Anyway, these are jays, and I can’t do anything about them. It’s their nesting season, and they’re protected too. Was there a reason for this call
besides
you trying to save me from the local wildlife?”

“I was worried about you,” said Dev’s dad. “Your stock is down.”

Dev rolled his eyes. His father might actually be worried about him, but the reasons would be far more complex than anything merely related to the antics of the stock market. “Jim says we’ll be fine. We’re hoping to hit a thousand by rollout day.”

The two statements were independently true, but Dev was hoping his father would take them as interrelated—that might buy him a few moments’ peace. But this was a futile hope. “Not that I don’t like Jim,” Dev’s dad said, and Dev thought,
Bzzt! Five points off for fibbing!—
“but he’s still kind of wet behind the ears at the corporate finance game—”
Bzzt!
Wall Street Journal
’s CFO of the Year!
“—and I’m a little worried about your exposure when you have all these conglomerates sniffing around your coattails and acquiring your shares on the sly. If you—”

“Dad,” Dev said, “before you get started, I know exactly what you’re thinking about, and it’s well nigh impossible for CapCities to do
anything
on the sly. They have as much on their plates and as many people staring at them right now as I do. CapCities wants to buy Shanghai Welter but can’t do it because they don’t have enough liquidity because of the jump Shanghai took on the NASDAQ last month. So CapCities has been strutting around the markets acting big for the past couple of weeks while they liquidize some of their other assets to cover their shortfall—” Dev heard his dad drawing breath to interrupt him, but he forcibly overrode his own politeness reflex and kept right on going. “And since our rollout’s coming up and we’re big in the news right now, it serves their purpose to pick up a little of our stock and make some smaller companies think
Wow, look at that, I bet they’re thinking about acquiring a controlling stake in Omnitopia! I bet they’ll want some smaller stuff, too, let’s divest ourselves all over them!
And Cap’ll pick up some of those little guys like Andorra Electronics and Delta V Broadcasting to cover the divisions they’re going to divest, which they’ve been looking for an excuse to get rid of for months. Then about two days after we roll out, they’ll say,
Sorry, your figures weren’t quite what we were expecting after all,
which will be true—they’ll be bigger, but never mind—and afterward CapCities will go off and buy Shanghai the way they wanted to, and everything will be fine. When it’s all over, I’ll send you the clippings.”

There was a brief silence.
Maybe the clippings thing was taking it a little too far,
Dev thought. The silence stretched. Finally his dad said, “The only reason you know all that is because Jim told you.”

Absolutely right,
Dev thought,
and that’s why you’re pissed—you didn’t get to tell me first. Which it’s not your job to do. Why do we have to have this same conversation every day with different words?
“That’s what he’s paid for,” Dev said. “And he’s one of the best in the business, or at least that’s the delusion that the
Wall Street Journal
has at the moment. So you relax, because Jim and I have it set up so that it’s gonna be easier for somebody to obtain a controlling stake in the moon than in Omnitopia. Meanwhile, where’s Mom? She said she was going to call yesterday evening, but I thought maybe she got busy.”

“She’s in the hospital,” his dad said, with what sounded to Dev like barely concealed triumph.

“For tests. Her back was acting up again.”

“Oh, God,” Dev said. “Do you know when’s she going to be out?”

“This afternoon. And you’d know, too, if you’d just concentrate a little more on staying in touch with her instead of playing the high and mighty corporate executive—”

Which I couldn’t play hard enough for you five minutes ago. I just can
not
win, can I?
“This afternoon?” Dev said. “When did she go in?”

“This morning—”

“So she’s not
in
the hospital, she’s
at
the hospital. At the clinic—”

“Oh, well, if you’re going to play semantics games with me—”

“Games are what it’s all about, Dad,” Dev said, in a voice intended to sound carelessly cheerful. If it was vengeance for his father trying to throw a fright into Dev over something relatively minor, at least it was a petty vengeance. “Who taught me to play hard? And speaking of games, you still haven’t RSVP’d for the big switch-throwing ceremony.”

“Uh,” his father said. “Well, I don’t know, it depends on your mom. If she doesn’t feel like going—”

“I understand completely,” Dev said. “Try to let me know by tomorrow night, okay? Otherwise I’m going to have to give your VIP seat to some minor head of state, and they’ll brag about it afterward, and then I’ll have to buy their country to put them in their place. It’d put a dent in
my
liquidity, and we can’t have that, can we? Gotta go now. Bye-bye.”

Dev punched the off button, and just stood there for a moment looking at his phone. Then he swore under his breath.
Why do we always have to be doing this to each other?
He thought.
I know he loves me but he has such
strange
ways of showing it.
Dev had trouble remembering any time in his life when the two of them hadn’t been at each other’s throats about something: when he first caught the gaming bug from his mom as a child, when he ditched his (dad- pleasing but ultimately unsatisfying) English lit degree program at Penn State to go study computer science at MIT, when he went on to finance his degree independently after his dad refused to pay for it . . . Endless introspection on the subject and one interesting but inconclusive bout of analysis had left Dev with plenty of theories about The Dad Thing, but no certainty.
Are we just two control freaks banging heads? Or is this a liberal-arts-versus-science argument?
Dev’s dad’s three degrees were all in the humanities, and his retirement from his emeritus professorship at Penn, though often threatened, never quite seemed ready to happen.
Or are we just having some kind of sublimated town-and-gown fight?
This was Dev’s favorite theory at the moment, since his huge financial success had taken none of the edge off his relationship with his father, and had for some time made it rather worse. Now his dad’s routine anger seemed generally to be shifting into what read as angry pride.
Who knows, maybe it’ll just be pride someday
. . . .

He sighed and speed-dialed his mom, hoping she was someplace where she could take the call. After only two rings, she answered. “Dev honey!”

“Mom, are you okay? I’m so sorry, I should have called you when you didn’t get back to me!”

“Oh, you silly boy, don’t beat yourself up, I’m fine.”

“Mom, people in the hospital are not fine! By definition! What’s wrong? Is there a problem with the implant?” His mom had had a synthetic disk replacement a couple of months previously, swapping in a liquid-filled implant for a lumbar disk crushed in an old skiing injury.

“Stop fussing, it’s not serious. They may need to put a little more silicone or whatever into the implant, that’s all. They’ve got me scheduled for a scan tomorrow morning, and then they’ll stick a needle in the little valve or whatever and pump the thing up if they have to.”

Her tone put him more at ease than anything specific she was saying. He could just see her, silver- haired, petite but regal, those gray eyes glinting as she lounged in some clinic chair at ASU, making the place look as if it had been suddenly taken over by a small but impeccably dressed reigning queen on her day off. “Okay,” Dev said. “I’ll stop worrying, then.”

There was a second’s pause. “I know that voice. You just got off the phone with Daddy.”

“Uh, yeah.”

His mom chuckled, though it was a rueful sound. “More needles. What day would be complete without you two sticking a few into each other? He’s just worried about the rollout, honey.”

“So worried he hasn’t RSVP’d yet.”

“You let me handle him,” Dev’s mom said. “We’ll be there. But it’s just another needle, Devvie, this making you wait.”

“Yeah, well, I really prefer his aggressive to his passive, Mom.”

“So do I, but we don’t always get to choose. Dev, don’t you have somewhere to be right now? You must be up to your eyeballs in meetings.”

He glanced at the phone’s clock. “Yeah, they’ll be waiting for me up in the Tower. You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m not in any pain, if that’s what you mean. I had a long day out yesterday, and it was bothering me then. I took an aspirin last night and it was fine. But they warned me not to ignore little twinges while the implant was bedding in, so I’m being careful. I’ll be home in a few hours. You go get on with your life!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” his mom said. “Unquestioning obedience.”

Dev raised his eyebrows, for he could think of no lie more outrageous that might come out of his mother. Bella Maria Logan née DiVincenzo was a rebel at heart and appreciated rebellion in others, which was probably the only reason Dev and his father were still talking to each other at all. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Call me when you get home, okay?”

“Will do.”

“Ciao Bella!”

“Knock ’em dead, Devvie,” she said, and hung up.

Dev put the phone away, then walked his bike back to the path and got on. As he started pedaling, the phone rang again.

“Don’t answer it, Boss!” said a voice from behind him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dev said as another of his employees, a buxom middle-aged Asian woman, passed him on a pink bike, wagging a warning finger at him. The phone kept ringing, then finally stopped, the call diverting to his PA’s office. Sometimes Dev suspected his people of having some kind of campus-wide warning system, so that e-mails or IMs or texts flew around campus whenever he was heading from one building to another: HE’S ON THE MOVE, DON’T LET HIM ANSWER THAT PHONE! For it was widely known that Dev couldn’t ride his bike and talk on the phone at the same time: he invariably fell off. The joke, though, suited him. In fact, he’d encouraged its spread. It meant that there was at least an hour or so each day—if divided into many small pieces—when Dev didn’t have to take phone calls from anybody.
If I’d known when we went public how much quiet time I was going to lose every day, I might never have done it.
But it was too late now. At least he had these precious moments, out in the sunshine or under his trees, when he could take a breath and just think—or
not
think. Dev knew that some people, not all of them his employees, thought he was eccentric—a local variation on the “bicycling royalty” of Europe—or else just calculating, trying to look homespun or nonelitist. He was happy enough to let them think that, but under no circumstance, unless he had a guest with him or the weather was genuinely foul, would he allow himself to be wrestled into a golf cart and a position where he would have to answer the phone.