Someone was prodding the council to allow him to build a golf course out on the floor of Alphonsus. Stavenger laughed at the idea, playing golf in space suits, but several council members seemed to be considering it quite seriously.
His desk phone chimed, and the synthesized voice announced, “Ms. Pahang is here.”
Stavenger turned to his desk and touched the button that opened his door. Jatar Pahang stepped through, smiling radiantly.
She was the world’s most popular video star, “The Flower of Malaya,” a tiny, delicate, exotic woman with lustrous dark eyes and long, flowing, midnight-black hair that cascaded over her bare shoulders. Her dress shimmered in the glareless overhead lights of Stavenger’s office as she walked delicately toward him.
Stavenger came around his desk and extended his hand to her. “Ms. Pahang, welcome to Selene.”
“Thank you,” she said in a voice that sounded like tiny silver bells.
“You’re even more beautiful than your images on-screen,” Stavenger said as he led her to one of the armchairs grouped around a small circular table in the corner of his office.
“You are very gracious, Mr. Stavenger,” she said as she sat in the chair. Her graceful frame made the chair seem far too large for her.
“My friends call me Doug.”
“Very well. And you must call me Jatar.”
“Thank you,” he said, sitting beside her. “All of Selene is at your feet. Our people are very excited to have you visit us.”
“This is my first time off Earth,” she said. “Except for two vids we made in the New China space station.”
“I’ve seen those videos,” Stavenger said, grinning.
“Ah. I hope you enjoyed them.”
“Very much,” he said. Then, pulling his chair a bit closer to hers, he asked, “What can I do, personally, to make your visit more . . . productive?”
She glanced at the ceiling. “We are alone?”
“Yes,” Stavenger assured her. “No listening devices here. No bugs of any kind.”
She nodded, her smile gone. “Good. The message I carry is for your ears alone.”
“I understand,” said Stavenger, also fully serious.
Jatar Pahang was not only the world’s most popular video star; she was also the mistress of Xu Xianqing, chairman of the world government’s inner council, and his secret envoy to Stavenger and the government of Selene.
CHAPTER 45
The art of governing, thought Xu Xianqing, is much like the art of playing the piano: never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
It had been a long, treacherous road to the leadership of the world government. Xianqing had left many friends, even members of his own family, by the wayside as he climbed to the shaky pinnacle of political power. The precepts of K’ung Fu-Tzu had been his nominal moral guide; the writings of Machiavelli his actual handbook. During his years of struggle and upward striving, more than once he marveled inwardly that he—or anyone—bothered even to try. Why am I driven to climb higher and higher? he asked himself. Why do I take on such pains, such risks, such unending toil?
He never found a satisfactory answer. A religious man might have concluded that he had been chosen for this service, but Xianqing was not a man of faith. Instead, he considered himself a fatalist, and reasoned that the blind forces of history had somehow pushed him to his present pinnacle of authority and power.
And responsibility. Perhaps that was the true, ultimate answer. Xianqing understood that with the power and authority came responsibility. The planet Earth was suffering a cataclysm unmatched in all of human history. The climate was changing so severely that no one could cope with the sudden, disastrous floods and droughts. Earthquakes raged. Cities were drowned by rising waters. Farmlands were parched by shifting rainfall patterns, then washed away by savage storms. Millions had already died, and hundreds of millions more were starving and homeless.
In many lands the bewildered, desperate people turned to fundamentalist faiths for help and strength. They traded their individual liberties for order and safety. And food.
Yet, Xianqing knew, the human communities on the Moon and in the Asteroid Belt lived as if the travails of their brethren on Earth meant nothing to them. They controlled untold wealth: energy that Earth’s peoples desperately needed, and natural resources beyond all that Mother Earth could provide its wretched and despairing children.