Strings by Dave Duncan Page B

very conscious of a steady click from his right knee. His prostheses were aging, too.
    The decor was outmoded, almost shabby. Even new it had been little more than adequate, he recalled, and now the executive suite of the world’s richest organization seemed blowsy and cheap and old-fashioned. Agnes had never cared much for ostentation. One day some unscrupulous whippersnapper would seize power and clean house. Then she would be gone, and probably Hasting Willoughby also, at much the same time. They had climbed to power on the same rope, and they would fall in the same coup, leaving nothing but their names collecting static in libraries.
    He was ushered at last into the big, familiar, five-sided office. How many of the current day’s rebels would recognize the deliberate irony in that design? If she had changed the carpet since he had last been there, then she had stayed with the same bland peach, and the ebony pentagonal table in the center was still the only large piece of furniture.
    Agnes came forward to greet him. She was wearing powder blue, as she so often did, to match her eyes, and her outfit could only be a Kaing original, or perhaps a Dom Lumi. Her hair was pure white, her gaze as sharp as ever, and her appearance immaculate. She had weathered well, but then Agnes’s dislike of ostentation had never extended to personal grooming. Her facial texture would have flattered a woman a generation younger, and modern medicine had preserved her figure.
    “Mr. Secretary General, this is indeed an honor.” She offered both hands. Her fingers showed her age, though.
    “I am a little early, I fear, Director…”
    The flunkies departed, the door was closed. He leaned over, keeping his weight off that tricky right knee and touching dry lips to well-moisturized cheek. Then she was all business as usual, waving him to a seat at the table and taking one close by.
    He felt very conscious of the bloodless appraisal behind the business-grade smile. As always, she wore a faint aura of impatience, as though she had already foreseen everything that anyone else was going to say and had long since made the right decision on the matter anyway.
    “You look as lovely as ever, Agnes. Not a day over forty.”
    “Rot. It must be five years since you were here.” She spoke with more emphasis than he had expected.
    “Three and a bit. And we met at the NASA Embassy, remember?”
    “So we did. Well, we have a moment before the conference—I am flattered to see I still have the power to bring you running. File for attention next week .”
    The last remark had been to System, in reply to some private query. She would not stop working just because she had a visitor. It was a widely-used technique, but he had never met anyone who did it better than Agnes, and she faked it less than most. Back in her younger days, Agnes had been able to read eight hundred words a minute and listen to a three-way conversation at the same time.
    “Blame it on my insatiable curiosity,” he said.
    Two of the five walls were floor-to-ceiling holos, displaying incredible vistas of peaks shrouded in pale pink ice, beetling against a violet sky—undoubtedly recorded on some world of lower gravity than Earth. The room was an eyrie perched high above the darkling valley. Willoughby leaned back and regarded her with sudden amusement.
    “Why the senile leer?” she inquired acidly.
    “Remember skiing? I never thought of it before, but these absurdly tight clothes we have to endure nowadays are almost exactly what we used to wear for skiing when we were kids.”
    “When I was a kid, you were not. Besides, throughout history, recreational style for clothes has become formal costume a couple of generations later.”
    “I didn’t know that!”
    “Well, you do now. Thank you for coming, Will.”
    “But you’re not going to tell me why?”
    Compared to Agnes, the sphinx was an open book. “Trust me.”
    “The last hundred men who did that are long