“What do you love best in all the world?” the young woman asked Gabriel King as she took his hand and drew him away from the table where she had placed the vase.

It was a strange question, but she asked it as if it were serious—and she was, after all, authentically young. She had come to him in the flesh, seeking enlightenment Gabriel had not the slightest idea what he loved best in all the world.

Everything he had done—everything, at least, that he remembered having done—he had done for money, but he had never been an overdevout worshipper at the shrine of Mammon. He had made money because that was what people of his particular tribe had always done. His foster father and his foster grandfather before him had made money, in the crisis and its aftermath, and six or seven generations of woman-born Kings before them had made money even during the Dark Ages of the unextended life span. Kings had always been the most loyal and best-rewarded servants of the forebears of the MegaMall, even in the dark days before the Pharaohs of Capitalism had formed the Hardinist Cabal and brought a precious world order out of primordial chaos.

Gabriel was sure that those primitive Kings had never been ashamed to make money. Even before the days of Leon Gantz and his marvelous shamirs they had probably made it from decadence, devastation, destruction, decay, dereliction, and decivilization… It had been, he had to suppose, their particular version of divine right. But Gabriel, unlike the worst of them, had never loved money. No matter what he had done in the name of progress and the service of the MegaMall, he had severed his connection with that heritage of unalloyed greed, “I’ve loved many people and many things at different times,” he told the woman, knowing that his answer was a little belated. “Too many, I think, for any one person or any one thing to stand out as the best.” It might even have been true. You’ve lived too long, his forefathers might have said. You’ve had three life-times instead of one, and no true sons to carry forward the family name. You’ve betrayed our heritage for your own selfish pleasure. And you never even loved the money you made.

The Kings are dead, he said silently, by way of imaginary reply. Long live the King.

He guided the young woman to the door of the bedroom, which was privacy-screened. Given that the apartment building was so relentlessly respectable, he had every faith in the assurance that the bedroom walls contained neither hidden eyes nor hidden ears.

As me door slid open before them Gabriel increased the length of his stride slightly, but the woman reached out to pull him back, forcing him to hesitate on the threshold.

She turned to look briefly at the golden flowers, as if approving her own excellent taste; then she turned back to him, looking up into his face as if to do exactly the same. She reached up, put her hand at the back of his neck, and eased his face forward and down, so that she could kiss him on the lips.

The kiss was deliberately languorous, as if she were savoring a moment that would remain precious in memory for a long time.

Gabriel felt giddy again. He could not help but wonder why the young woman seemed to like him so much. For a moment, he was half-convinced that her presence—indeed, her very existence—was a mere delusion, a siren unnaturally wrenched by some trick of his failing intellect out of some uniquely seductive virtual environment. He was, however, old enough and wise enough not to question his good fortune too closely.

A man of his age—a member of the last generation which had no alternative but to be mortal—owed it both to himself and his vanishing species to do his utmost to drain the last drop of pleasure from every random whim of happy chance.

Like his as-yet-undiscovered predecessors, Gabriel King did not know that he had already begun to die, and that the murderous shadow would move upon him with remarkable swiftness.

Investigation: Act One The Trebizond Tower

Charlotte had plugged her beltphone into a wall socket so that she could bring up a full-sized image on the screen mounted beside the door of Gabriel King’s apartment. Unfortunately, the only image of Walter Czastka she had so far been able to obtain was that of a sim which must have been coded eighty or ninety years ago. It was a very low-grade sim, no more capable than the meanest of modern sloths, and it had obviously been programmed with brutal simplicity.

“Dr. Czastka is unable to take your call at the moment,” it said for the fourth time.

“The codes I’ve just transmitted are empowered to set aside any instruction written into your programming,” Charlotte replied, unable to help herself. She was used to dealing with silvers, even when she had to talk to an answerphone.

“This is Detective Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the United Nations police, and your programmer will be guilty of a criminal offense if you do not summon him immediately to take this call in person.” “Dr. Czastka is unable to take your call at the moment,” said the missing man’s doppelganger, as it had been programmed to do in response to any and all inquiries. In programming it thus, Walter Czastka was indeed committing a technical offense, given that he was a fully certified expert whose services could be commandeered by any duly authorized agent of the World Government—but he had probably never expected to receive any kind of urgent summons from the police, given that his field of certified expertise was the design and development of flowering plants.

As she broke the connection, temporarily admitting defeat, Charlotte bit her lip. It was bad enough to be assigned as site supervisor to an area which the forensic team had insisted on sealing tight—after rating it a grade A biohazard, thus forcing her to conduct her part of the investigation from the corridor outside—without having expert witnesses ducking out of their duties by assigning obsolete sims to the vital task of answering their phones.

She tried desperately to collect her thoughts. This was by far the biggest case of her fledgling career, and it was certainly the most remarkable. Routine police work was incredibly dull, at least for site-supervision officers, and there had been nothing in her training or experience to prepare her for anything half as bizarre as this. When the newscasters got hold of it, it was going to generate a lot of interest—interest which would put immense pressure on Hal Watson and his silver surfers, if they hadn’t yet got to the bottom of the affair.

The building supervisor, whose name was Rex Carnevon, handed her a bag full of eyes and ears. He was an unfashionably small man, whose girth suggested that his IT was having difficulty compensating for the effects of his appetites. There wasn’t much that could be done to add to his height, but even a building supervisor should be sufficiently well paid to afford regular body-image readjustments.

“That’s it,” Carnevon said resentfully. “Every last one. The lobby, the elevator, and the corridor are all blind and deaf until I can get the replacements in.” “Thanks,” she said dully.

“You’re welcome,” the supervisor informed her, implying by his tone that she was not at all welcome.

Charlotte was supposed to treat members of the public with politeness and respect at all times, especially when they were cooperating to the best of their ability, but something in the supervisor’s manner got right up her nose.

“If anything turns up on the evening news, Mr. Carnevon,” she said, in what she hoped was a suitably menacing manner, “I’ll make sure that whoever leaked it never holds a position of trust in this city again.” “Oh, sure,” Carnevon said. “I really want it broadcast all over the world that the King of Shamirs was murdered in my building. I can’t wait to give them the pictures of the killer riding up in my elevator carrying a bunch of fancy flowers. Miss Holmes, if anything leaks, you’d better make sure that your own backyard is clean, because it sure as hell won’t have come from me.” “We don’t know for certain that anyone has been murdered, Mr. Carnevon,” Charlotte informed him with a sigh. “And if, in fact, someone has, we certainly don’t know that the young woman who came up in the elevator was responsible.” “Of course not,” the supervisor said sarcastically. “I’m only the one who answered the alarm call. If I’d been fool enough to barge in after seeing what I saw through the spy eyes I’d probably be dead too—and there wouldn’t be any point in your friends staggering around in those damn moon suits. Believe me, Miss Holmes, that wasn’t any accidental death—and he was absolutely fine before that whore called in on him. She was even carrying a bunch of fancy flowers—what more do you want?” What Charlotte wanted, and what Hal would certainly demand, was evidence.