Zorken’s chief executive and president was a one Hamilton Horatio Gilder, who at 58 had held the position for eight years after promotion from vice president of the Legal Division—it was interesting that Zorken needed a full legal division, whereas most of even the larger-scale operations were able to make do with a department. Before that, he had climbed through the ranks from a background of finance, law, and business administration in a demonstration of loyalty and treachery surgically applied in appropriate directions in a way that would have earned a no-fault rating from Machiavelli. He had carved his way to the top—at least, so the adulatory testimonials said—without benefit of family connections or the impetus of previously entrenched wealth, but now presided over a dynasty of interlocking marriages and other forms of individual contract that owned the lion’s bite of Zorken-controlled assets across the Central Solar System. The clan disported themselves in residences scattered through the Belt and the Jovian moons, and had been featured in articles depicting life among the fashionable on the beaches of western Florida, mountain resorts in Bavaria, and the pleasure city of Durban, South Africa.
Gilder himself had three offspring, none of them from the brief marriage he had attempted at an early age, declining to repeat the experience since. In this he represented a departure from the staid conformity still generally expected of senior executives, but far from offering contrition, he apparently reveled in the image of rebelliousness and untamed individualism that it gave him. “Moral high ground is just a refuge for the mediocre,” he had told a journalist when the subject came up in an interview. The oldest daughter, Deirdre, 36, had withdrawn into a recluse religious order out in the Belt, and as a consequence wasn’t alluded to much in the “Who’s Where” reviews or the glitter pages. The antics and affairs of the 27-year-old playboy son, Achilles, however, received plenty of coverage. And then there was Marissa, 24, beautiful, beguiling, and doted upon, her wedding due that week, to be held at the corporate space-based citadel, Asgard, when it approached close to Mars.
It had been Hamilton Gilder, personally, who instigated the seizure of a delinquent customer’s asteroidal minerals-extraction facility—and, it turned out, several similar actions that hadn’t received the same publicity. In defense he had quoted Feliks Dzerzhinski, founder of the Soviet political police in the early 20th century: “Trust is good, but control is better.” Gilder seemed to like airing quotes and being quoted. A couple of others that Kieran took as indicative of his broad philosophy of life were Collis Huntington, the long-gone U.S. railroad tycoon’s: “Whatever isn’t nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry up isn’t nailed down.” And Charles Dickens: “Do other men, for they would do you.” There was also: “Our work is business. Assuring freedom and justice has never been the money community’s job,” attributed to Gilder, but suspiciously close, Kieran was sure, to something he’d come across somewhere else.
Like many figures who worried that one day their power might wane, Gilder was concerned about health and dispensed advice on promoting it. Germs weren’t the prime cause of anything, he maintained. Diseases happened when bodies already stressed and damaged for other reasons were no longer able to keep them in check. Attacking germs with drugs was just another way of misdirecting efforts on symptoms. The real causes lay with states of mind. If mere emotional extremes or exposure to the object of a phobia or a mania could produce physical changes, such as sweating, palpitations, flushing or paling, that were readily visible in moments, then what greater effects could be wrought by deeply rooted mental attitudes that persisted for months, years, or an entire lifetime? One of his favorite lines was, “There’s a reality behind what you see that you have to connect with.” Then, pointing to his head, “Learning to control what’s in there is the key to controlling everything else.”
And that was the lead into Hamilton Horatio Gilder’s fundamental world view, which he used as his explanation or justification for everything else. Much of it seemed to have come from Marissa. Kieran wondered if she might have been influenced at an earlier age by the apparently spiritual and mystical leanings of Deirdre—but that wasn’t the issue here.