Read Online House of the Sun by Nigel Findley - Free Book Online Page B

time—on the throne). Campaigning on the platform of cutting back—way back—on the megacorps' freedoms, Na Kama'aina politicos won a significant number of seats in the legislature. King Kam suddenly found himself confronting a strong faction within his own government that was dedicated to tossing him out on his hoop. He managed to keep control of the majority, but it was a very close thing.
    King Kam IV died in 2045—no, the Na Kama'aina didn't off him ... I don't think—and the faction of the government that had backed him retained just enough influence to put the successor he'd designated on the throne: his son, Gordon Ho. At age twenty-five, our boy Gordon became King Kamehameha V, and still wears the funky yellow-feathered headdress of the Ali'i .
    I was still chewing over all the facts I'd absorbed and trying to make overall sense of them when the suborbital touched down at Awalani—"Sky Harbor."
    "Welcome to Hawai'i," the flight attendant announced.

5
    Call it the Montgomery Principle of Inverse Relationships. The faster you can get somewhere, the longer the wait for customs at the other end. Honolulu's Awalani Airport added another nice, big data-point to my mental graph.
    I timed it. After spending only forty-some minutes to travel six thousand klicks, it took more than sixty minutes to traverse the fifteen meters from the end of the customs/immigration lineup to freedom in the lobby of the airport.
    The only difference between the Hawai'ian customs officials and the functionaries who'd hassled me at Casper was the tans. Other than that, it was the same trolls in undersized uniforms watching from the sidelines while humorless drones asked me questions about whether I was importing meat products in my luggage. (I've always had the perverse impulse to ask a customs drone whether a dismembered body in my suitcase qualifies as "meat products . . .")
    As I waited in the "Foreign Visitors" lineup, I watched with growling bitterness the speed with which the returning kama'ainas —the locals, Hawai'ian citizens—were processed through. No probing questions about meat products for them, and smiles and greetings of "Aloha" instead of a cold-voiced "Travel documentation, please."
    At last I was through, though, into a pleasantly spacious and airy lobby, which suddenly struck me as packed with a disproportionate number of trolls and orks—at least in comparison to Cheyenne and even Seattle. Now that I thought about it, I remembered that the juvenile Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia had stated that the combined proportion of orks and trolls was something like thirty-three percent . What was it in Seattle? Closer to twenty-one, I thought. Well, I'd always heard that the Hawai'ians bred them big.
    * * *
    Through the customs nonsense at last, I started thinking about my next problem. Namely, where the frag was I going, and to do what ? I'd be met—that's what the dwarf with the road-kill eyebrows had told me at Casper. By who, though, that was the question?
    A question that was answered almost immediately. As I stood there looking vaguely lost, a figure separated itself from a passel of camera-laden Nihonese tourists, and approached. A large figure—an ork with a rather astounding set of shoulders and small tusks that looked impossibly white against his tanned skin—wearing a well-tailored business suit. In his big hands he held a little laser-printed sign that read "Tozer." This time I didn't have any trouble remembering that was supposed to be me, so I beckoned him over.
    He gave me a broad smile that would have looked much more friendly without those fangs. " Mr. Brian Tozer?" he asked me in a voice like midnight and velvet.
    I nodded. "That's me." I reached in my pocket and pulled out my credstick, the one with my digital password stored in memory, and offered it to him.
    He chuckled—a sound like big rocks rolling in a fast-flowing stream—and waved it off. "I know you're you, Mr. Tozer," he said. "You look a lot