The sad little man was back in Fortunato’s office again.
Or perhaps it was a different sad little man. He couldn’t tell, and he didn’t care enough to find out. That sort of folk all looked the same to him.
In any event, a sad little man was in his office, once more whining and gnashing his teeth over the disruption to the flow of precious electronic blood into the black, shriveled heart of the Great Whore at whose teat he suckled.
“Mr. Fortunato, this is growing ridiculous,” the inconsequential man said. “We’re handing out vouchers and directing people towards the Lady, but with Mount Charles right across the hub from The Meadows, they’re just raking it in. How much longer is this farce going to continue?”
“‘Farce’?” Fortunato echoed. His high-backed hover chair was turned away from the sniveling little man, facing a bank of screens displaying bursts of colored static which his visual cortex chip was able to translate into images… visual content that was encrypted quite literally for his eyes only. “Is that all you think this is? A farce? My friend, I’m hurt… I’d like to think it at least rates being called a charade.”
“What is this even about?”
“It’s about the end of farces, my friend,” Fortunato said. He swung his chair around. “It’s about the end of the era of you and your mewling, crawling, grasping little kind.”
“Oh,” the man said. “Well, knowing that, I think… I think I like this even less.”
“I’m exercising my buy-out options, you see.”
“On The Meadows?”
“On everything,” Fortunato said.
“You don’t have that kind of capital!”
“I do not,” Fortunato agreed. “But I will. You are familiar, perhaps, with a work of art known as the Donna Stella?”
“Of course,” the man said.
“I plan on selling it,” Fortunato announced, with all the casualness of a man announcing his intent to take a stroll, “to raise the necessary funds.”
The man laughed.
“My plan amuses you, then?” the gambler-god asked.
“Sir… even if you could get your hands on the painting, it isn’t worth a fraction of what you’d need to buy out all the syndicates,” he said.
“Oh, you’re categorically wrong about that,” Fortunato said. “It is worth a fraction of what I need. In fact, it is worth almost exactly one thousandth of what I need.”
“I still don’t see how that helps you.”
“Of course you don’t. This place used to be a temple,” Fortunato said, shaking his head. “But it’s been taken over by moneychangers. I think it’s time I kicked them out.”
“Wouldn’t that make it awfully hard for customers to spend…”
“It’s a religious allusion, you twit,” Fortunato said. “From the First Coming of Christ.”
“You never struck me as a Christian.”
“I’m not. I’m a Fortunatoist. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a well-written fable. Have you never taken the time to read the Middle Testament?”
“I really don’t have time for myths.”
“Myths. Myths, he says. Myths. They thought New York was a myth once. An English colony in the middle of the American coast? Historians sneered. Then three decades ago, an architectural survey probe on Old Earth found ruins of a great—by ancient standards—city, right where the classical texts said it should be,” Fortunato said. “Can you imagine it? The Amazing Spider-Man. The Fantastic Four. All those supposedly mythic heroes of the ancient epics… and here is their city, exactly as the fables describe it to be. Scholars have actually posited that ‘Gotham’ and ‘Metropolis’ may in fact simply be nicknames for the same city. Do you see the implications?”
“Er, no.”
“These heroes and gods we read about as children, they once walked the world of our ancestors as men.”
“Oh, well, see, I’m actually a Galactic, so I never read the so-called ‘classical texts’ as a child…”
“That’s your problem exactly,” Fortuanto said. He turned back around to face the screens. “You have no poetry in your soul.”
“We don’t have poetry in the Confederation, actually.”
“Yes. You don’t have souls, either,” Fortunato said. He poised a long, ring-bedecked and elegantly-manicured finger over a button on his armrest. “That makes me feel somewhat better about doing this.”
“Doing what, sir?”
Fortunato pressed the button.
“Sir?” the man repeated.
Fortunato scowled.
“On a completely unrelated subject,” he said, “do you happen to know if the internal laser defense grid is offline for maintenance?”
“Uh, I think so,” the man said.
“Do me a favor,” Fortunato said. “Come back and tell me when it’s up and running again.”
“Um, okay.”
“And in the meantime, don’t repeat anything I said about the end of an era, the buy out, kicking out the moneychangers, or the Donna Stella. Any of it, really.”
“Uh… anything else?”
“Have somebody send me a Turkish coffee.”
“The coffee, or the sexual service?”
“Surprise me.”
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