The Merchant Prince Volume 2: Outrageous Fortune

AT FIRST IT HAD been nothing but a whisper, more vapoury lies on the Omninet: The legendary Royal Newton had been overthrown, defeated by a mysterious stranger who had assumed his role.

The rumours percolated onto the news groups and trickled onto the back pages of the tabloids as gossip column fodder before duly shifting onto the front pages and becoming news. By then, of course, the story had fractured into a dozen versions, all of them "exclusive" and from "sources close to the Newton family."

Royal Newton, the richest man in the world, was dead; no, he was in a mental hospital; no, he was living in penury in the devastated remains of Paris or New Rome or London; no, he had been incarcerated in one of the satellite prison cubes that occasionally fell out of their orbits; no, he had killed himself; he had been overthrown in a palace coup; he had given away his fortune and become a monk; he had changed sex and become a nun; he had joined a troupe of neo-hippies and was living in Alaska, tending the caribou; he had been seen at the helm of an outward-bound colony ship... the variations became more exorbitant and fabulous with every passing hour.

And none of the stories, no matter how outrageous, came remotely close to the truth.

Royal Newton had been overthrown and ruined by Doctor John Dee, a five-hundred-year-old mathematician, rogue, and astrologer from the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Dee, who had seen how such things were done, had modeled himself on the merchant princes of his day and achieved what no one else had been able to.

Lee Vantis, however, was one of the handful of people in the world who knew that Royal Newton had not been killed and was still alive -- after a fashion. The electrician had been on call the day Newton had taken his heart attack, his plastic and metal artificial heart actually exploding within his chest. Paradoxically, even though Newton's artificial lungs had been shredded by the shards of chrome and Teflon, the heart's backup power cell had kept his blood circulating long enough for the doctors to hook him up to an artificial lung. The intricate Union demarcation rules on the Moonbase had dictated that an electrician had to handle the heart, and Vantis had been called in to remove the sparking and crackling artificial heart unit from Newton's chest. The myriad monitors and tubes draped from the man's body were proof enough that the richest man in the world was still alive.

Vantis had seen Newton twice in the weeks since the accident. Once when he had been back to the emergency ward to repair a faulty bed which insisted on folding itself shut at twelve noon every day -- whether it was occupied or not -- and on another occasion to reduce the pressure on the sliding doors which either closed with agonising slowness or snapped shut like the jaws of some rabid animal. On both occasions Vantis had been unable to find anything wrong with either piece of equipment and was beginning to suspect that the new religious movement which preached that God was in the machines might have something going for them.