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 more sixty minutes to traverse the fifteen meters from the end of me 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 immethately. 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 healthier in person, y'know."

He'd probably seen my driver's license holo, or something like it, I figured. (If you ever actually look like your license holo, you're too sick to drive…) I shrugged. "Have it your way…" I hesitated, not knowing what to call him.

"Scott," he told me. "You can call me Scott, Mr. Tozer."

"Dirk," I responded automatically, then quickly corrected, "My name's Brian, but everyone's always called me Dirk." Frag, I had to be jet-lagged or something.

Scott's big brown eyes twinkled. "Dirk's chill with me," he said. "Let's get your luggage."

First-class passengers' luggage was routed to its own carousel, and most of my flight-mates had already collected theirs and cruised before the first bag even showed up in the cattle-class area. I pointed out my single bag, which Scott scooped up like it weighed nothing, then tossed it onto a little automated baggage cart that followed him around like a loyal spaniel. We led the spaniel-cart out of the terminal onto the road.

That's when the heat first hit me. Hell, it was only a little past oh-six-hundred, but I guessed the temperature was already around twenty-seven degrees, and the humidity was something horrendous. In seconds I felt my shirt start to stick to my back. Scott must have sensed my discomfort, because he chuckled again, and announced, "Going to be a nice toasty one, today. We're looking for thirty-one, thirty-two by midafternoon." He touched the cloth of my black shirt. "Hope you brought something a little more practical to wear, brah." I glanced pointedly at his suit, and he smiled again. "Yeah, but I'm paid to be uncomfortable."

The sky was still dark-that's right, it was the tropics, wasn't it? Dawn would be later and more sudden than I was used to in Cheyenne-but the sodium lights were almost as bright as day. Under their yellow glare. I saw where Scott was leading me: a metallic charcoal gray limo, a Rolls-Royce Phaeton, or some close cousin. A huge, low-slung thing that looked like it was doing Mach 2 while still parked at the curb. I let out a long, low whistle to show I was impressed.

Scott shrugged those massive shoulders. "Yeah," he acknowledged. "I still feel like that sometimes." From his pocket he pulled a little remote and pushed a button. With a silky whine like a high-speed turbine, the engine lit, and a moment later one of the oversized doors into the passenger compartment swung silently open. As the ork-chauffeur retrieved my bag from the spaniel-cart and tossed it into a trunk big enough for a game of Urban Brawl, I climbed into the back of the Phaeton.

Mental note: I must acquire myself one of these things at some point. Not to drive. To live in.

The passenger compartment looked bigger than some lower-class dosses I've rented; a huge, overstuffed couch where you'd expect there to be a rear seat. No, I corrected instantly, it wasn't a couch… unless you consider four-point harnesses to be standard equipment for your living room furniture. I settled down and felt the opulent upholstery wrap itself lovingly around my fundament. (Did the limo come with some device-a crane, perhaps-to pry passengers out of the deep seat again as an optional extra?) Impulsively, I pulled off my shoes and made fists with my toes in the deep-pile carpeting. (One of my favorite flat-film movies from the last century recommends it as a cure for jet-lag, and who am I to disagree?)

From the outside the big wraparound windows had been opaque, charcoal mirror-finish to match the coachwork. From inside they seemed to totally disappear… except for the fact that some subtle polarization removed the glare from the brilliant sodium streetlights. Between me and the driver's compartment was an array that looked like a waist-height entertainment wall unit: trid set, various formats of optical players, a stereo system that would give my technophile buddy Quincy wet dreams for the rest of his life, and something that looked like a scrambled satellite uplink commo unit. And, oh yes… a small liquor cabinet/wet-bar arrangement. Above the entertainment suite was a transparent kevlarplex screen. Through it I saw Scott slide into the front seat, push back a hank of hair, and slip a vehicle control line into his datajack. He turned around and grinned at me through a centimeter of reinforced kevlarplex. "Ready to go, Mr. Dirk?" His voice came from a hidden speaker somewhere behind my left ear.

"Only when you get rid of this thing," I told him, leaning forward to rap on the bulletproof screen. "I feel like I'm in an aquarium."