When he was born, William Tsung had been called 'the most expensive baby in the world'; he held the
title for only two years before it was claimed by his sister. She still held it, and now that the Family Laws
had been repealed, it would never be challenged.
Their father, the legendary Sir Lawrence, had been born when China had re-instituted the stringent
'One Child, One Family' rule; his generation had provided psychologists and social scientists with material
for endless studies. Having no brothers or sisters - and in many cases, no uncles or aunts - it was unique
in human history. Whether credit was due to the resilience of the species or the merit of the Chinese
'extended family' system would probably never be settled. The fact remained that the children of that
strange time were remarkably free from scars; but they were certainly not unaffected, and Sir Lawrence
had done his somewhat spectacular best to make up for the isolation of his infancy.
When his second child was born in '22, the licensing system had become law. You could have as many
children as you wished, provided only that you paid the appropriate fee. (The surviving old guard
communists were not the only ones who thought the whole scheme perfectly appalling, but they were
outvoted by their pragmatic colleagues in the fledgling congress of the People's Democratic Republic.)
Numbers one and two were free. Number three cost a million sols. Number four was two million.
Number five was four million, and so on. The fact that, in theory, there were no capitalists in the People's
Republic was cheerfully ignored.
Young Mr Tsung (that was years, of course, before King Edward gave him his KBE) never revealed if he
had any target in mind; he was still a fairly poor millionaire when his fifth child was born. But he was still
only forty, and when the purchase of Hong Kong did not take quite as much of his capital as he had
feared, he discovered that he had a considerable amount of small change in hand.
So ran the legend - but, like many other stories about Sir Lawrence, it was hard to distinguish fact
from mythology. There was certainly no truth in the persistent rumour that he had made his first fortune
through the famous shoe-box-sized pirate edition of the Library of Congress. The whole Molecular Memory
Module racket was an off-Earth operation, made possible by the United States' failure to sign the Lunar
Treaty.
Even though Sir Lawrence was not a multitrillionaire, the complex of corporations he had built up made
him the greatest financial power on earth - no small achievement for the son of a humble videocassette
peddler in what was still known as the New Territories. He probably never noticed the eight million for
Child Number Six, or even the thirty-two for Number Eight. The sixty-four he had to advance on Number
Nine attracted world publicity, and after Number Ten the bets placed on his future plans may well have
exceeded the two hundred and fifty-six million the next child would have cost him. However, at that point
the Lady Jasmine, who combined the best properties of steel and silk in exquisite proportion, decided that
the Tsung dynasty was adequately established.
It was quite by chance (if there is such a thing) that Sir Lawrence became personally involved in the
space business. He had, of course, extensive maritime and aeronautical interests, but these were handled
by his five sons and their associates. Sir Lawrence's real love was communications - newspapers (those
few that were left), books, magazines (paper and electronic) and, above all, the global television networks.
Then he had bought the magnificent old Peninsular Hotel, which to a poor Chinese boy had once
seemed the very symbol of wealth and power, and turned it into his residence and main office. He
surrounded it by a beautiful park, by the simple expedient of pushing the huge shopping centres
underground (his newly formed Laser Excavation Corporation made a fortune in the process, and set a
precedent for many other cities).
One day, as he was admiring the unparalleled skyline of the city across the harbour, he decided that a
further improvement was necessary. The view from the lower floors of the Peninsular had been blocked
for decades by a large building looking like a squashed golfball. This, Sir Lawrence decided, would have to
go.
The Director of the Hong Kong Planetarium - widely considered to be among the five best in the world -
had other ideas, and very soon Sir Lawrence was delighted to discover someone he could not buy at any
price. The two men became firm friends; but when Dr Hessenstein arranged a special presentation for Sir
Lawrence's sixtieth birthday, he did not know that he would help to change the history of the Solar
System.
