I looked where he was pointing, saw an ork strolling along the beach, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts even more garish than Scott's shirt. His arms and legs were scrawny; his shoulders weren't broad. But by Ghu did he have pecs and abs-massively cut, incredibly defined, as if they were chiseled out of some material other than flesh. Which they were, I realized. His chest and back were layered with enough dermal planting to stop a Manhunter round. The Seco on my hip would barely scratch him.

"Want to guess the most popular procedure?" Scott asked.

'Tell me."

"Sun-shielding, brah. Genetic treatment of the skin to block UV. They tried various chemical treatments, but you had to keep going in for a refresher because you'd eventually just exfoliate the treated skin. The genetic route, new skin is as resistant as the old. See this?" He extended his hand to me, pinched a fold of his skin. "This is SPF eighty-five, hoa. Permanent sunscreen.

I got my eyes done, too-modified iris and photosensitive chemicals in the lens. I don't need shades no matter how bright it gets."

"Expensive, I guess?"

"The eyes, yes," he admitted. Then he chuckled. "Glad Nebula picked up the tab.

"But the skin treatment? No, brah, it's not bad at all. The clinics have got it down to a real assembly-line process, and you've got nui kinds to pick from. Full treatment costs five thousand nuyen, good for life. And lots of the clinics, they offer special family packages-you, the wife, and all the ankle-biters for seven-Kay." He poked my pale forearm. "If you decide to stay here, you might consider it yourself."

"Hey," I protested quickly, "I'm not staying. Just doing my job, then I'm gone."

The chauffeur shrugged. 'That's what everyone says," he told me, "at first."

Still on Kalakaua Avenue, we rolled westward into downtown Waikiki.

I didn't really know what to expect from Waikiki, except that I thought it would be different, somehow. I was disappointed. It was just another city, really. Apart from the curving beach, the rich blue ocean, and the perfect weather, it could just as well have been the corporate enclave in just about any metroplex anywhere in the world. Okay, it was cleaner than most other cities I've seen. But apart from that, this could just as easily have been the rich corporate quarter of Tokyo or Chiba.

Why did I pick two Japanese cities as examples? The people on the sidewalks, chummer, that's why. Nine out of ten of them were Nihonese. I wondered about that for a while, but then I remembered something I'd read a long time ago.

Apparently, during the last decades of the last century, lots of Japanese-and lots of Japanese money-moved into the islands. (The smart-ass who'd written the article I read said something like, "After the Japanese couldn't conquer Ha-wai'i in World War II, they came in afterward and bought it.") Add a large resident Nihonese population to the influx of tourists from Japan-based megacorps, and that would explain it

Scott tooled the Phaeton along the broad, spotless street of Waikiki, showing me all the major sites. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel-"The Pink Lady," Scott called it-a flamingo pink extravaganza of pseudo-Moorish architecture that was more than a century old, but was still recognized as one of the most sumptuous hotels in the islands. The International Market Place, an open-air market comprising scores of booths and stores, under the spreading branches of a banyan tree. (Scott explained that the original International Market Place had been turned into a convention center around the turn of the century, but that after a fire destroyed the center in 2022, the City Council ordered another banyan planted, and the Market Place returned to its earlier glory.) And on and on. Eventually, the sumptuous-looking hotels started to blur into one another, and my eyes started to glaze over.

Scott noticed almost immethately, pulled the car over, and turned to me. "You getting bored, is that it?"

I shrugged. "Call it culture shock, maybe."

The ork snorted. "You call this culture? This is glitz, brah, pure and simple."

"That's what I mean," I told him. "I'm not used to this much money concentrated in one place."

"I got it now, Mr. Dirk." Scott laughed. "You want to see the other side of the coin, right? Okay, you'll get it." And he pulled the car back out into the traffic.

As soon as we were out of the Waikiki enclave, into the real Honolulu, I felt a lot more at home and comfortable. (Depressing, in a way, but there it is.) According to Scott, the official population of Honolulu is almost three million- just a hundred thousand or so less than Seattle's. That's the official figure, of course, in both cases. In Seattle, if you lump in the SINless-the homeless, the indigent, the transient, and the shadowy-the total rises to, depending on which estimate you believe, just short of four million to well over five and a quarter million.

The Honolulu number is probably an underestimate as well, but-cruising down its highways and byways-I couldn't believe that the difference between official population and real population was that great. Don't get me wrong, I did see vagrants and homeless types. (I made sure that Scott included appropriate places on the tour.) But they were nowhere near as numerous as in Seattle, or even in Cheyenne. There were some pretty drekky low-rent areas, and one or two ancient tenement complexes that prompted ideas of urban renewal using high-explosives, but there wasn't anything I'd really class as slums. And there certainly wasn't anything as squalid and soul-killing as Hell's Kitchen, Glow City, or the Barrens back in Seattle.

The most interesting thing about Honolulu, to my mind, was the proximity of the drekkier parts of town to the corporate heart. Around the intersection of King Street and Punchbowl Street, you've got the financial guts of the city, all pristine skyrakers and corp smoothies on the street. Less than half a klick away, there's the "vice shopping mall" that is Hotel Street, lined with sex shows, tough-looking bars, and porno chip outlets, populated by broken-down jammers of all four orientations (hetero and homo male, hetero and homo female), by chipleggers and flashmeisters, and by the fresh meat strolling by to do business with same. Even Seattle has managed to segregate the two facets of its economy a little more.

Hotel Street was the heart of Chinatown, according to Scott, but I didn't see too many ethnic Chinese on the streets. Lots of big slags and biffs who I guessed were native Polynesians and an almost equal number I tentatively labeled as Filipinos. As we cruised slowly by, I watched the action-contract negotiations of various sordid kinds-come to a stop as the participants stared at the Phaeton gliding past. There probably weren't that many Rolls-Royces to be seen in this neck of the woods, I figured. (Come to think of it, that slow cruise pointed out another difference between Honolulu and the underbelly of Seattle: nobody so much as took a potshot at the car.)

From Chinatown we headed west again, swinging past the airport, past the huge restricted area that was the Pearl Harbor military base, and into the region known as Ewa (EH-vah; Scott made sure I got the pronunciation right). As recently as thirty years ago, my tour-guide told me, Ewa had been a city in its own right, close to but still distinct from Honolulu itself. No longer: The larger city had sprawled out, eventually absorbing the smaller. (Much like Everett and Fort Lewis, now that I came to think about it.) Apart from the weather and the clarity of the air, as we drove the streets of Ewa I could easily imagine I was in Renton.

I checked my watch. We'd been cruising for almost two hours, and my stomach was starting to make growling noises again, despite the big breakfast. "I need a bite to eat," I told Scott. "And it's getting on to Miller time, too."