The Sam Gunn Omnibus (24 page)

“Don’t give it a second thought,
little one,” said Yoni, Mistress of Ecstasy. “Monica filled my ears with the
whole story while you were on your way here.”

Here
was the employee’s
lounge of Dante’s Inferno, the biggest casino/hotel/house of pleasure in Hell
Crater. It had been Sam Gunn’s sardonic idea of humor to turn Hell into a
complex of entertainment centers. The crater had been named after an
eighteenth-century Jesuit astronomer, Maximilian Hell, who once directed the
Vienna Observatory.

Jade had overspent her personal
credit account to ride the passenger rocket from Selene, after telling Monica
what she was going to do. Mother Monica apparently had gotten on the
fiber-optic link with Yoni as soon as Jade hung up.

The lounge was small but quite
plush. Yoni sat on a small fabric-covered couch; Jade on a softly cushioned
easy chair.

Jade had interviewed the Mistress
of Ecstasy weeks earlier. Yoni had been left at the altar by Sam Gunn more than
twenty years ago. But although she had every reason to hate Sam, she said, “I guess
I still have a soft spot in my heart for the little SOB.”

Yoni claimed to be the child of a mystical
pleasure cult from deep in the mysterious mountains of Nepal. Actually she had
been born in the mining settlement at Aristarchus, of Chinese-American parents
from San Francisco. She was tall for an oriental, Jade thought, and her bosom
was so extraordinary, even though the rest of her figure was willowy slim, that
Jade decided she must have been enhanced by implants. She wore a tight-fitting
silk sheath of shining gold with a plunging neckline and skirt slashed to the
hip.

She had worn a luxurious auburn wig
when Jade had first interviewed her. Now she sat, relaxed, her hair cropped
almost as short as a military cut. It was sprinkled with gray. Yoni was still
beautiful, although to Jade she seemed awfully elderly for her chosen line of
work. Cosmetic surgery had done its best, but there were still lines in her
face, veins on the backs of her hands. Her dark almond eyes seemed very
knowing, as if they had witnessed every possible kind of human frailty.

“Then you know,” Jade choked out
the words, “about
Raki...
and me.”

Yoni smiled sadly and patted Jade’s
knee. “You’re not the first woman to be roughed up by a man.”

“Can you help me?”

Yoni’s almond eyes became
inscrutable. “In what way? I won’t risk damaging this house’s reputation just
to help you get even with a jerk.”

Jade blinked at her. “No, that isn’t
what I want at all.”

“Then what?”

“I want him to approve my doing a biography
of Sam Gunn.”

It was Yoni’s turn to look
surprised. “Is that what you’re after?”

“Yes.”

Yoni leaned back in her couch and
crossed her long legs. “Let me get this straight. You want me to make him
change his mind about this video biography you want to do.”

Jade nodded.

“Why should I help you?”

For a moment Jade had no answer.
Then she heard herself say, “For Sam’s sake.”

“For Sam’s sake!” Yoni tilted her
head back and laughed heartily. “Why in the name of the seventy-seven devils of
Tibet should I care an eyelash about Sam? He’s dead and gone and that’s that.”

Jade said, “I thought you had a
soft spot in your heart for him.”

“In my heart, little one. Not my
head.”

“You don’t feel any obligation
toward Sam?”

“If he were here I’d kick him in
the balls. And he’d know why.”

“Even though he gave you the
controlling interest in Dante’s Inferno?”

After her interview with Yoni, Jade
had accessed all the records she could find about Dante’s. S. Gunn Enterprises,
Unlimited, had originally built the place. Yoni had been a licensed prostitute
in the European lunar settlement, New Europa, when Sam had briefly fallen in
love with her. He had left her at the altar, true enough. He had also left her
fifty-five percent of the shares of the newly opened Dante’s Inferno. The rest
he had sold off to help finance a venture to the Asteroid Belt.

Yoni gazed up at the smooth,
faintly glowing ceiling panels, then across the lounge at the computer-graphics
images mounted on the walls. They were all of tall, buxom women, blonde,
redheaded, gleaming black hair. They wore leather, or daintily feminine lace,
or nothing but jewelry. They were all Yoni, Mistress of Ecstasy, in her various
computer-simulated embodiments.

Finally she looked back at Jade. “You’re
right,” she admitted. “I owe the little bastard.”

“Then you’ll help me?”

Without answering, Yoni got to her
feet and started for the door. “Come on down to my office. I’ll have to look up
your john’s file.”

YONI’S OFFICE LOOKED
to Jade like a millionaire’s
living room. Bigger than any office she had ever seen; bigger than any
apartment, for that matter. And there were doors leading to other rooms, as
well. Oriental carpets on the floor. Video windows on every wall. The furniture
alone must have cost millions to tote up from Earth: Chinese prayer tables of real
wood, lacquered and glistening; long low settees covered in striped fabrics;
even a hologram fireplace that actually threw off heat.

Jade
stood in the middle of the huge room, almost breathless with admiration, while
Yoni went straight to a delicately small desk tucked into a corner and tapped
on the keyboard cunningly built into its gleaming top.

The
silk painting of misty mountains above the desk turned into a small display
screen.

“Most
johns don’t use their real names here,” Yoni muttered, mostly to herself, “but
we can usually trace their credit accounts, even when they’ve established a
temporary one to cover their identity.”

Jade
drifted toward the desk, resisting the urge to touch the vases, the real
flowers, the ivory figurines resting on an end table.

“You
said he calls himself Rocky?”

“Raki.”Jade
spelled it.

“H’m.
Here he is, full name and everything. He’s not trying to hide from anybody.”

“He’s
married....”

“Two
wives,” Yoni said, as the data on the screen scrolled by. “One in Orlando and
one in Istanbul. Plus a few girlfriends that he sees regularly, here and there.”

Jade
let herself drop into the little straight-backed chair beside the desk.

“He
doesn’t make any secret of it, so there’s no way to use this information as
leverage on him.”

“Does
he
have ...
girlfriends ... here on
the Moon?”

Yoni
gave her a sidelong look. “No, when he’s here he comes to us. To me.”

Jade
felt her face redden.

Yoni
smiled knowingly at her. “He’s never seen me, little one. Not in the flesh. It’s
been years since I’ve done business with anyone flesh-to-flesh.” “Oh?”

“The
VR nets,” Yoni said, as if that explained everything. When she saw that Jade
did not understand she went on, “Most of my customers come here for our
simulations. They’re quite lifelike, with the virtual reality systems. We just
zip them up into a cocoon so the sensory net’s in contact with every centimeter
of their body, and then we play scenarios for them.”

“They
don’t want sex with real women?” Jade felt stupid asking it.

“Some
do, but what men want most is not sex so much as power. For most men, they feel
powerful when they’re screwing a woman. It makes them feel strong, especially when
the woman is doing exactly what they desire. That’s why the VR nets are so
popular. A john can have any woman he wants, any number of women, for the
asking.”

“Really?”

Yoni gave her a knowing smile. “We
have vids of Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Catherine the Great. One john wants
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; nobody else, just her. Another has a fixation on
Eleanor of Aquitaine. Thinks he’s Richard the Lionheart, I guess.”

“And it’s all preprogrammed
simulations?”

“The basic scenario is
preprogrammed. We always have a live operator in the loop to make sure
everything’s going right and to take care of any special needs that come up.”

Jade completely missed Yoni’s pun.
But she caught the unspoken implication.

“You keep disks of each session?”

“No!” Yoni snapped, almost
vehemently. Then, more gently, “Do you realize the kinds of corporate and
government people we have as clientele here? One hint, even the slightest
rumor, that we record their sessions and we would be out of business—or dead.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize ...”

Yoni smiled mysteriously. “We don’t
have to blackmail our guests, or even threaten to. These VR sessions can be
very powerful; they have a strong impact on the mind. Almost like a
posthypnotic suggestion, really.”

“You can influence people?” Jade
asked.

“Not directly. But—no one actually
understands what long-term effects these VR sessions have on a person’s mind.
Especially a habitual user. I have commissioned a couple of psychologists to
look into it, but so far their results have been too vague for any practical
use.”

“Could you—influence—Raki?”

With a shrug, Yoni said, “I don’t
know. He’s been here often, that’s true. But he’s not an addict, like some I could
name.”

Jade hesitated, feeling
embarrassed, then asked, “What kind of sex does he go in for?”

Glancing back at the computer
screen, Yoni said, “I don’t think you understand, little one. The man doesn’t
come here for sex. He gets his sexual needs fulfilled from flesh-and-blood
creatures like yourself.”

“Then
what... ?”

“For power, little one. Not sexual
power.
Corporate
power.”

Jade’s eyes went wide. She
understood. And she knew what had to be done.

ARAK AL KASHAN
gazed through his office window at
the Orlando skyline: tower after tower, marching well past the city limits,
past the open acreage of Disney World, and on out to the horizon. There was
power there, majesty and might in the modern sense. Beyond his line of sight,
he knew, construction crews were hard at work turning swampland and citrus
groves into more corporate temples of enduring concrete, stainless steel and
gleaming glass.

He leaned back in his plush leather
chair and sighed deeply. The moment had come. His trip to the Moon had been
relaxing, diverting. Now the moment of truth had arrived.

Getting to his feet, Raki squared
his shoulders as he inspected his image in the full-length mirror on the door
to his private lavatory. The jacket fit perfectly, he saw. Its camel’s-hair
tone brought out his tan. Good.

He snapped his fingers once and the
mirror turned opaque. Then he stepped around the desk and started toward the
door and the meeting of the board of directors of Solar News Network, Inc. This
was going to be
the
meeting. The one where
he took charge of the entire corporation, where he seized the reins of power
from the doddering old hands of the CEO and won the board’s approval as the new
chief of Solar News.

The day had come at last.

But before he could take three
steps across the precious Persian carpet, the door opened and a short,
disheveled man rushed in.

“You’re in trouble, pal. Deep shit,
if you don’t mind the expression.”

“Who the hell are you?” Raki
demanded.

“That’s not important. You’ve got a
real problem and I’m here to help you.”

Raki took a step backward, then
another, and felt his desk against the back of his legs. The little man seemed terribly
agitated, perhaps insane. His wiry rust-red hair was cropped short, yet it
still looked tangled and dirty. He wore coveralls of faded olive green, stained
here and there with what looked like grease or machine oil.