He folded his napkin and put it on the table. "Now eat up and let's roll, hoa, okay?"

I waited in the open-air lobby while Scott pulled the Phaeton up and out of the underground parking lot. The big Rolls sighed to a stop in front of me, and the rear passenger door swung open.

1 gestured no to that, crossing my hands edge to edge like karate chops meeting each other. Scott's voice sounded from an exterior speaker. "Problems, Mr. Dirk?"

"I don't want to ride in the playpen," I explained-feeling a touch foolish at talking to a car that was so obviously buttoned-up. "Any objection to company up front?"

I heard the ork chuckle, a slightly tinny sound through the speaker. "Your call, bruddah, but you're going to have me forgetting I'm a chauffeur here." The passenger compartment door shut again, and the right side front door clicked open. I walked around the big car, slid inside, and chunked the door shut. The driver's compartment was nothing compared to the playpen in back, predictably, but it still was more comfortable and well-appointed than some dosses I've lived in.

Scott grinned over at me. The hair-thin optic cable connecting his datajack to the control panel seemed to burn in the sun. "Okay, Mr. Dirk, anything in particular you want to see?"

I shrugged. "You're the kama'aina," I said. "You tell me what I should see?"

His grin broadened. "You got it, hoa." At the touch of a mental command, the limo slipped into gear and pulled away. "Any objection to a little music? Local stuff."

I shrugged. "Just as long as it's not 'Aloha Oe,' " I told him.

He laughed at that. "Not in this car, you can bet on that. Ever hear traditional slack-key?" I shook my head. "You're in for a treat, then." As Scott sat back comfortably and crossed his arms, the stereo clicked on and the car filled with music.

I've always had a taste for music-real music, stuff that shows some kind of talent, some kind of musicianship, not the drek that anyone with an attitude and a synth can churn out. Old blues or trad jazz preferably, but I've got a relatively open mind. Hell, I've even listened to country on occasion. Slack-key was something new-acoustic guitars, alternately strummed and intricately finger-picked. Something like bluegrass in technique, but with a sound and a feel all its own.

"You like?"

"I like," I confirmed. "I've got to get some of this for my collection. Who're the musicians?"

"An old group, they recorded back before the turn of the century. Kani-alu, they're called. None of them still alive: they all kicked from old age, or got cacked by the VITAS.

"I just picked up this disk a couple of days back. Some guys have gone back through the old catalog and remastered a bunch of this stuff." He paused. "If you want, you can have my copy when you leave. I'll pick up another."

"Thanks. I'd like that." To the lush strains played by musicians long dead, we cruised off the Diamond Head Hotel property and headed toward the city.

Scott was a good tour-guide; he had amusing and interesting stories to tell about nearly everything we passed. We cruised roughly northeast, then turned northwest to pass through Kapiolani Park in the shadow of Diamond Head itself. Then we cut down onto Kalakaua Avenue (what is it with Hawai'ians and the letter k?), which flanked the beach.

You could tell the tourists from the locals, both on the sand and in the water. The tourists were pale white-like slugs under a rock-or turning a painful-looking pinky-red. (I started thinking about sunscreen and the thinning ozone layer. I'd brought some spray-on SPF 45 goop, but would that be enough? I looked down at my arms: as slug-white as the other newbies.) In contrast, the locals-there weren't that many of them, for some reason-were all bronze or mahogany, the comfortable deep-down tan I'd seen on Sharon Young back in Cheyenne.

There was a little surf rolling in-breakers all of a meter high or so. A couple of pale tourists were trying to catch those waves on surfboards garishly emblazoned with the name of the company that had rented them out. It looked like an awful lot of work just to get wet. As we cruised slowly on, I saw one slag-an ebony-haired elf with ivory skin-actually get up onto his surfboard and ride it… for a whole two meters before he submarined the nose and went sploosh.

Then, out beyond him, somebody else caught a wave perfectly and was up in an instant. A troll, he was, on a board larger than some dining tables I've owned. His long black hair whipped in the wind as he cut his board back and forth across the margin of the small wave, dodging through the heads of swimmers like gates in a slalom. Swishing into the shallows, he dismounted smoothly, and in one motion he picked up his board-shoulders and arms bulging-swung it around, and started paddling out again. I watched the muscles working under the golden-brown skin of his massive back.

Scott had been watching the same show. "Nice moves," he said approvingly.

"Do you do that?"

"I do it," he confirmed with a chuckle, "but not around here. If you've got time, let me take you to see some real waves, brah. Thirty-footers, and one after another. Pretty close to heaven."

As I nodded, I realized something a little surprising. There was something disturbing about the view on the beach, and it took me a moment to make sense of it. All that bare skin-that was what bothered me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no prude. Bare skin is great; I fully and wholeheartedly approve of bare skin, under the right circumstances, and particularly with the right companion. But…

Bare skin means no armor. I looked at all the frying tourists sprawled on the sand. Most of them would be shaikujin-corporators from one or another of the megas. Where in Seattle would you see this many corporators wandering around in public without the benefit of any armor whatsoever? Nowhere, that's where. Here, a disgruntled sniper with a grudge to settle would have no trouble with one shot, one kill. Either the tourists were pretty fragging confident in the security provisions-pretty fragging overconfident, if you asked me-or the tropical sun had cooked the sense of self-preservation right out of their pointy little heads.

I pointed that out to Scott, and he nodded slowly. "A bit of both, that's what it is," he suggested. "Na Maka'i-that's the cops, the Hawai'i National Police Force, the HNPF- they keep things buttoned down pretty tight in Waikiki. This part of town ain't a good place to make trouble, hoa, trust me on that one. If you ain't corp, you ain't here, if you take my meaning."

"You're saying the whole of Waikiki's a corporate enclave?"

"More or less, brah, more or less." He nodded his big head. "It's a security thing. If you're walking the streets and you don't look the part, Na Maka'i's going to pull you over and ask you some questions-real polite, and all, but you'd better give them the right answers and have the datawork to back it up."

He shrugged. "But clamp-downs and heat-waves can do only so much, right? Security's good in Waikiki, but it's not that good." He gestured through the window at the scantily clad bothes on the beach. "If I really wanted to take down some suits, I could do it… and get away afterward."

I nodded slowly. That's basically how I had it scanned. "What about the locals, then?" I asked. I pointed to the surfing troll, who was already riding another wave. "You'd expect him to know better than to trust the cops. But he's not wearing any armor."

Scott chuckled. "No, he's not wearing armor, hoa, he is armor. You know the second most popular elective medical procedure in the whole of the islands?"

"Dermal armor," I guessed.

"You got it, brah. Nui dermal armor-dermal armor big-time. Along with bodysculpt to make it look good… or as good as you can get. See, now check out that slag over there? Classic example."