“Yes,” Andrea was saying, “I do see it.” She was peer- ing into the hologram of the box Marly had first seen in Virek’s construct of Gaudi’s park. “It’s your sort of thing.” She touched a stud and the Braun’s illusion winked out. Beyond the room’s single window, the sky was stippled with a few wisps of cirrus. “Too grim for me, too serious. Like the things you showed at your gallery. But that can only mean that Herr Virek has chosen well; you will solve his mystery for him. If I were you, considering the wage, I might take my own good time about it.” Andrea wore Marly’s gift, an expensive, beautifully detailed man’s dress shirt, in gray Flemish flannel. It was the sort of thing she liked most, and her delight in it was obvious. It set off her pale hair, and was very nearly the color of her eyes “He’s quite horrible, Virek, I think ..” Marly hesitated. “Quite likely,” Andrea said, taking another sip of coffee. “Do you expect anyone that wealthy to be a nice, normal sort?” “I felt, at one point, that he wasn’t quite human. Felt that very strongly.” “But he isn’t, Marly. You were talking with a projection, a special effect “Still She made a gesture of helplessness, which immediately made her feel annoyed with herself. “Still, he is very, very wealthy, and he’s paying you a great deal to do something that you may be uniquely suited to do.” Andrea smiled and readjusted a finely turned charcoal cuff. “You don’t have a great deal of choice, do you?” “I know. I suppose that’s what’s making me uneasy. “Well,” Andrea said, “I thought I might put off telling you a bit longer, but I have something else that may make you feel uneasy. If `uneasy’ is the word.” “Yes?” “I considered not telling you at all, but I’m sure he’ll get to you eventually. He smells money, I suppose.” Marly put her empty cup down carefully on the cluttered little rattan table. “He’s quite acute that way,” Andrea said. “When?” “Yesterday. It began, I think, about an hour after you would have had your interview with Virek. He called me at work. He left a message here, with the concierge. If I were to remove the screen program’ `she gestured toward the phone’ `I think he’d ring within thirty minutes.” Remembering the concierge’s eyes, the ticking of the bicy- cle chain. “He wants to talk, he said,” Andrea said. “Only to talk. Do you want to talk with him, Marly?” “Not” she said, and her voice was a little girl’s voice, high and ridiculous. Then, “Did he leave a number?” Andrea sighed, slowly shook her head, and then said, “Yes, of course he did.” V lip TIlE
Tire DARK wA5 FULL of honeycomb patterns the color of blood. Everything was warm. And soft, `too, mostly soft “What a mess,” one of the angels said, her voice far off but low and rich and very clear. “We should’ve clipped him out of Leon’s,” the other angel said. “They aren’t gonna like this upstairs “Must’ve had something in this big pocket here, see? They slashed it for him, getting it out.” “Not all they slashed, sister. Jesus. Here.” The patterns swung and swam as something moved his head. Cool palm against his cheek. “Don’t get any on your shirt,” the first angel said. “Two-a-Day ain’t gonna like this. Why you figure he freaked like that and ran?”
It pissed him off, because he wanted to sleep. He was asleep, for sure, but somehow Marsha’s jack-dreams were bleeding into his head so that he tumbled through broken sequences of People of Importance. The soap had been run- ning continuously since before he was born, the plot a multiheaded narrative tapeworm that coiled back in to devour itself every few months, then sprouted new heads hungry for tension and thrust. He could see it writhing in its totality, the way Marsha could never see it, an elongated spiral of Sense! Net DNA, cheap brittle ectoplasm spun out to uncounted hungry dreamers. Marsha, now, she had it from the POV of Michele Morgan Magnum, the female lead, hereditary corpo- rate head of Magnum AG. But today’s episode kept veering weirdly away from Michele’s frantically complex romantic entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed socioarchitectural descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for in- stance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, in- habited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend. Other segments of the jack-dream reminded him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated dia- grams of the Projects’ interior structure, and droning lectures in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents. These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even less convincing than the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room An entire wall opened onto a shallow balcony and a rectangle of cartoon- blue sky. The woman was black without being black, it seemed to Bobby, like a very, very dark and youthfully maternal version of one of the porno dolls on the unit in his bedroom. And had, it looked like, the identical small but cartoon-perfect breasts. (At this point, to add to his dull confusion, an astonishingly loud and very unNet voice said, “Now I call that a definite sign of life, Jackie. If the progno- sis ain’t bookin’ up yet, at least somethin’ is.”) And then went spinning back into the all-glitz universe of Michele Morgan Magnum, who was desperately struggling to prevent Magnum AG’s takeover by the sinister Shikoku-based Naka- mura industrial clan, represented in this case by (plot compli- cation) Michele’s main squeeze for the season, wealthy (but somehow grindingly in need of additional billions) New So- viet boy-politician Vasily Suslov, who looked and dressed remarkably like the Gothicks in Leon’s. The episode seemed to be reaching some sort of climaxan antique BMW fuel-cell conversion had just been strafed by servo-piloted miniature West German helicopters on the street below Covina Concourse Courts, Michele Morgan Magnum was pistol-whipping her treacherous personal secretary with a nickel-plated Nambu, and Susbov, who Bobby was coming increasingly to identify with, was casually preparing to get his ass out of town with a gorgeous female bodyguard who was Japanese but reminded Bobby intensely of another one of the dreamgirls on his holoporn unitwhen someone screamed Bobby had never heard anyone scream that way, and there was something horribly familiar about the voice. But before he could start to worry about it, those blood-red honeycombs came swirling in again and made him miss the end of People of Importance. Still, some part of him thought, as red went to black, he could always ask Marsha how it came out