3/18/2023 0 Comments Elsewhere rooftop![]() ![]() He was tall, probably around thirty years old, with prematurely gray hair and quietly probing eyes. Nomuri walked outside, toward his parked automobile, wondering how long that could last. That was not a happy thought for the useful men who occasionally wondered over drinks why it was that they, the ones who brought wealth into their nation, were treated as unusually productive peasants, by the ones who deemed themselves the masters of their country and their culture. Yet the industrialists who were beginning to innovate and offer the world genuinely new products were treated by their government masters as well, as unusually productive peasants at best. The Chinese people were as clever as any, and even communism could keep them down only so long. They exported a lot, but to this point the things exported were either fairly simple in design (like tennis shoes), or were manufactured mostly in strict accordance to standards established elsewhere and then slavishly copied here in China (like electronic gadgets). The PRC was still learning how to do that. The same was doubtless true of Taiwan, but Taiwan, like Japan, had a capitalist system which rewarded performance by giving it business and profits and comfortable salaries for the workers who turned out good work. For all their faults, the Japanese were competent engineers. Maybe it was, again, because the pieces didn't quite seem to fit together. The elevator ran smoothly enough, but somehow it just didn't feel right. Gravity! Kingsbury had grumped.The most underused energy source on the planet. Tommy-Ray, and the cloud that had followed him, had disappeared inside. He fell to the ground, covering his head until they'd passed over him. Whatever haunted it, hate-bloated faces, with mouths like tunnels, swatted him aside, and moved in to better business, uninterested in his little life. The dust on his heels flew at Howie as he came within striking distance of Tommy-Ray. Nothing between me and the blue Caribbean but the coconut palms and a few great hibiscus shrubs, covered with unearthly red blooms. They took me through the gardens to reach it, and then admitted me to a small building, and I found myself inside with the doors open to a small covered porch from which a little path went right down to the sand. I paid off the driver, and checked into a fine little beachfront room. Aaron caught it as well, and he hesitated, very obviously at a loss for a moment, before he continued: Michael had never seen Ryan so full of blatant hostility. ![]()
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