Strings by Dave Duncan Page A

execution.
    The sharks were closing. He had known it for months, and this time he could see no raft to hand. China was poised to recognize the World Chamber. Then the U.N. would vanish overnight, or at least as soon as Cheung Olsen Paraschuk had called and won a global election. When the U.N. went, so would Hastings Willoughby; and so, too, would Hubbard Agnes. She must see the danger as well as he did. There was the real reason he was so eagerly answering her call—for comfort, to be told that once again she had found a plan that would save them both.
    Sprawled out across the seat at full length, he gloomed for a long while in lonely luxury, ignoring the cityscape hurtling by, debating whether he dared cancel and return. Inevitably he concluded that to start displaying indecision would only make things worse.
    It was a fine day: the rain was classed as “harmless,” and the UV flux was as low as it ever got at that time of year. He saw endless miles of shanty towns, and estuaries that had once been valleys, and salt marsh that had once been farmland. None of them warmed his blue mood. He watched holo. He received bulletins from his office. The Indian government in Delhi had announced that it was withdrawing its U.N. delegation and allowing elections for Chamber representation. But the Delhi government controlled little or none of the country, and the other claimants had been Chamber supporters for years. One of the two rival Japanese governments might follow; that would be more serious.
    Nor did his first glimpse of Institute HQ do anything to banish his sulks—it all looked so old now. Many of the buildings dated from the early twenties. By the time 4-I had been born, the need for cities to move to higher ground had been obvious, and thus, unlike most other large organizations, the Institute had never been forced into a massive relocation. Its shabbiness was one more reminder of the years that had died since Hastings Willoughby and Hubbard Agnes had together lifted the world by the scruff of its neck and shaken a little sense into it—not enough sense, but some.
    The Institute was old, more than thirty years old, and he had already been into his fifties when he slid its charter through an unsuspecting General Assembly one sleepy August afternoon. He could still remember the bulging veins, the purpling complexion on old DeJong, who had been S.G. then.
    “I turn mine back for one hour,” the fat Dutchman had screamed. But by then the deed had been done. The charter for Stellar Power had been approved, Agnes installed as director.
    A few years later she had applied enough bribery to return the favor, pulling strings to install Willoughby in DeJong’s chair.
    The good old days, alas!
    He was old. He would cheerfully retire in a day, except he knew he would be dead in a week. He had made far too many enemies.
    Age showed in his sagging belly, pitilessly revealed by the present fashion for absurdly tight clothes. Surgery would help, of course, had he not sickened of surgeons long ago. Modern sartorial engineers could do wonders, but he was old-fashioned enough to despise their mechanized corsets as shameless fakery. So he stayed his own prehistoric shape.
    He showed age also in petty irritation at having to wait until the security forces completed their inevitable wrangling. U.N. cops in sky blue, 4-I’s in dark red—bulls well named, they glowered at one another, huffing and puffing and pawing the rug. Legal fantasy made him the director’s superior, and inevitably that fiction prolonged the dispute. The arguments were settled at last in the way they always were—his own guards could accompany him, but they must go unarmed, and a batch of 4-I’s goons would in turn “guard” them.
    Age showed even in his foolish embarrassment when his false bones rang scan alarms, as they always did, requiring explanation. And when at last he limped along the corridor, peering over the heads of a dozen angry young grizzlies, he was