I made a few phone calls and came up with more information. The last ship directly from Earth had landed four days ago. Mr. Venuccio could have come in by flitterboat, but it didn't seem likely, if he had, as he claimed, come all the way from Earth to see me. Aside from the fact that my staff in my New York office wouldn't have told him where I was, there was also the fact that no André Venuccio had come in on the last ship.
I made two more calls—one to Marty and one to Colonel Brock—and then began to get ready for my appointment with the enigmatic Mr. Venuccio.
The Seven Sisters is one of the most elaborate dining clubs on Ceres. It caters strictly to the moneyed class, and is positively drenched in snob appeal. The food is good, the liquor is good, and the entertainment is adequate. Since all three have to be imported from Earth, the first two are expensive and the last one is the best they can get, because most of the top-flight entertainers of Earth don't feel that it's worth their while to go asteroid-hopping.
It is one of the few public places in the Belt where you will be expected to "dress" for dinner. That means a jacket and Bermuda shorts over your union suit.
As far as decoration goes, the Seven Sisters is the lushest place in the Belt. The walls of the main dining room, which is about sixty by sixty feet in floor area, are paneled with white oak up to a height of eight feet. Wood is expensive in the Belt; forests on the asteroids share the null class with snowflakes on the sunward side of Mercury.
Above the paneling, the ceiling is domed and black, and a pattern of bright pinlights representing the Pleiades—greatly enlarged—glitters against the blackness.
The floor is decorative traction tile, white and pale blue, with rust-red geometric designs on it. In the middle of the floor, there is a hollow, transparent column, brightly illuminated from below. Four feet in diameter, it rises a dozen feet above the floor to a flat, truncated top that is opaque to prevent the light from hitting the dome overhead and ruining the pseudo-sky effect, and mirrored on the underside to reflect the light back down the column. Inside, thousands of tiny, faceted, plastic gems are kept constantly in motion by forced air currents, swirling up and down the inside of the transparent column—easy enough to do under Cerean gravity. Each spinning gem, scarcely larger than a pinhead, catches the light and scatters it around the room. It's a sort of macroscopic Tyndall effect that is quite impressive.
I told the headwaiter that I wanted Mr. Venuccio's table, and was escorted straight to it. Venuccio was waiting for me.
He stood up as I approached and gave me his stiff smile. He was short—not more than five foot six—and rather lean. I got the impression that his jacket was padded to make his shoulders appear wider than they were.