Robert Charrette - Arthur 01 - A Prince Among Men Read Free Page A

outer wall of the car, and dipped his head in acknowledgment of his audience's wild applause for his outstanding athletic prowess.
    That was when he realized that he actually did have an audience.
    Mister Johnson harramphed at his performance.
    "Hello, Mr. J." Geez, why did it have to be one of their neighbors to catch him cavorting about? Why couldn't it have been one of the billion strangers who shared the rezcom? And why Mr. Johnson, of all people? The old guy was so old that he probably couldn't remember how to spell young, let alone be it. John hoped his face wasn't too red. A tinkling sound in his ear, which might have been laughter or might have been distant machinery, turned up the heat and ensured that he was glowing enough to give off light. -
    Mister Johnson's mouth twitched, his usual grumpy hello.
    "Nice night," John said, eliciting another twitch. "Or it will be, anyway."
    Outside the lights of the city were beginning to wink on, to join the always-lit advertising banners and signs. Off to the east the first stars were showing in the sky, where the glow of the sprawl wasn't drowning them out. At least you could still see stars here in Worcester. Phil said you could really see stars where he came from, but John doubted he'd ever get out to Montana.
    Then again, why would he want to? Other than to see the stars, that was? Phil's back-home tales made it really sound boring, aside from the Wild West history and all that Native American stuff, but there wasn't any real history. No kingdoms and empires, no armies marching proudly in their steel armor, no pyramids, no parthenons, no musketeers and no legionaries, no crusades—just miserable, coldhearted geno-cidal campaigns and resource exploitation, embarrassing rather than uplifting. And cows. Phil wouldn't like it if he forgot the cows. Like cows were important to anybody but Phil. Geez, you'd think he was from Vermont.
    But even Vermont could seem exotic and far away to a guy who'd spent his whole life in one town. An "old-time safe haven," according to the Mitsutomo Keiretsu prop. John could see it all spread out beneath him as the elevator car rose: the old city, the Worcester Polytech campus, the Benjamin Harrison Project, the southwest hills where the old money still held out against the changes, the rebuilt commerce zone, and the Turnpike slicing through it all on its snaky way between Boston and upstate New York. It might not be an exciting place to live, but it didn't have the problems of, say, the Boston-Warwick corridor or the New York 'burb sprawl. Maybe those places should have had a Mitsutomo Keiretsu to look after them the way Worcester had.
    John had scanned some of the old newscasts and seen how a lot of people had been upset to learn that Mitsutomo and its trading partners had bought up most of the land and businesses in the area. The biggest gripe seemed to be that Mitsutomo had done it secretly. But the old Disney Corp had done the same thing down in Florida when they were setting up their empire, and they had made the Orlando economy. And it wasn't like Mitsutomo was turning the town into some kind of daimyo fief. The prop said they wanted to make Worcester a real American town, and for once the prop hadn't been a lie.
    Mitsutomo had a right to be proud of the work they had done in rehabilitating this old steel town. Their idea of "quin-tessentially American" was a little odd at times, but what could you expect from foreigners? Important thing was that they did something while the native governments sat and twiddled their thumbs. They had kept Worcester and much of western Massachusetts from tumbling into slum sprawl and urban blight zones like most of the East Coast cities. The old town might be a little kitschy for the mainstream these days, but old-fashioned didn't necessarily mean unfashionable. And what was wrong with old-fashioned, anyway?
    Nothing, a little voice said.
    John could only nod in agreement; some of the best things in life were