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gestured at the shielding. “I see you’re a
cautious man.”
    “I need to be,” he said, “in my position.
Mis’ Nakada, last year you became involved with my
great-granddaughter Sayuri.”
    He didn’t say it like a question, but I
treated it as one.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Naturally,” he told me, “I had you
thoroughly investigated after that.”
    “Naturally,” I agreed. I hadn’t really
thought about it, and I certainly never noticed any investigation,
but it made sense, and he had the resources to do the job right,
without buzzing me.
    “I would like to ask you a question,
though.”
    I noticed the floater gliding forward, so
that it could get a good look at my eyes when I answered whatever
it was I was about to be asked. I didn’t say anything.
    “Have you ever had any contact with any
member of my family, other than Sayuri and myself?”
    That was not the question I had expected, but
it was an easy one.
    “Not that I know of,” I said.
    “Another question, then. Have you ever had
any contact with Sayuri other than during that unfortunate affair
on Epimetheus?”
    “No.” I’d have liked to have given a more
interesting answer, but the single syllable really covered the
whole thing.
    “Have you ever before had any contact with me ?”
    “Not directly,” I said. “I tried to contact
you about Sayuri last year, but I wound up dealing entirely with
flunkies.” I wondered if he were worried about clones, frauds,
mindwipes, or what, that he didn’t know himself whether we’d been
in touch before.
    I wondered if Ziyang Subbha would have
resented being called a flunky. I suspected he was pretty high up
in Nakada’s organization.
    “Are you carrying any recording devices or
microintelligences?” Nakada asked.
    “Yes,” I said. I didn’t see any point in
lying.
    He glanced up at the floater.
    “She’s either telling the truth or she was
ready for this,” it said.
    The old man sighed.
    “Life is so complicated,” he said, “and there
is so little we can trust. Everything we do, there is some way to
interfere. Everything we think we know, there is some way it could
be faked, or some way it could be changed. Mis’ Hsing, you did me a
service last year—for reasons of your own, I know, and I would
hardly expect otherwise. You did me a service in regard to little
Sayuri, and I saw no purpose there beyond the honest and
straightforward.”
    “I did it for the money,” I said. I didn’t
want the old man to think I was some kind of idealist. I have some
standards, but I’m no philanthropist.
    “Is anything more straightforward?” He almost
smiled. “And yet you did not betray our secrets in pursuit of more
money. You kept your word. You live a simple life, by my standards,
and you have shown yourself to be of use. I have decided to trust
you.”
    “Thanks,” I said, not without a hint of
sarcasm.
    “I need to trust someone,” he went on, “and I
cannot trust anyone in my family, nor in all my corporation, nor
anyone associated with them. I cannot trust anyone who has lived
long on Prometheus, for my family and Nakada Enterprises are
everywhere here. Even picking someone at random, from all those on
this planet, the odds are that she would be tainted. So I have
turned to you, an Epimethean and an outcast who has shown herself
to be a competent investigator.”
    “Fine,” I said, “so that’s why you picked me.
So what’s this problem that you can’t trust anyone with?”
    He hesitated, and then said, “Mis’ Nakada,
someone is trying to kill me.”
    That was not really very startling, given his
position, and I was about to say so when he added, “Someone in my
own family, I think.”
     

Chapter Three
    This theory was obviously supposed to be a surprise
to me, but I didn’t really look at it that way.
    After all, when you get right down to it,
there aren’t that many possible motives for murder. Sex, money,
revenge, and defective programming are the big ones, and all