The sky went white.
What was that?
Silence.
What was that?
Sensors indicate an explosion, the plane said. The magnitude suggests a tactical nuclear warhead, but there was no electromagnetic pulse. The locus of destruction was our point of departure.
The white glow faded and was gone.
Cancel course, he said.
Canceled. New headings, please.
Thats a good question, Turner said. He couldnt turn his head to look at the girl behind him. He wondered if she were dead yet.
15 BOX
MARLY DREAMED OF ALAN, dusk in a wildflower field, and he cradled her head, then caressed and broke her neck. Lay there unmoving but she knew what he was doing. He kissed her all over. He took her money and the keys to her room. The stars were huge now, fixed above the bright fields, and she could still feel his hands on her neck. .
She woke in the coffee-scented morning and saw the squares of sunlight spread across the books on Andreas table, heard Andreas comfortingly familiar morning cough as she lit a first cigarette from the stoves front burner. She shook off the dark colors of the dream and sat up on Andreas couch, hugging the dark red quilt around her knees. After Gnass, after the police and the reporters, shed never dreamed of him. Or if she did, shed guessed, she somehow censored the dreams, erased them before she woke. She shivered, although it was already a warm morning, and went into the bathroom. She wanted no more dreams of Alain.
Paco told me that Alain was armed when we met, she said when Andrea handed her the blue enamel mug of coffee.
Alain armed? Andrea divided the omelet and slid half onto Marlys plate. What a bizarre idea. It would be like... like arming a penguin. They both laughed. Alain is not the type, Andrea said Hed shoot his foot off in the middle of some passionate declaration about the state of art and the amount of the dinner bill. Hes a big shit, Alain, but thats hardly news. If I were you, Id expend a bit more worry on this Paco. What reason do you have for accepting that he works for Virek? She took a bite of omelet and reached for the salt.
I saw him. He was there in Vireks construct.
You saw something an image only, the image of a child which only resembled this man.
Marly watched Andrea eat her half of the omelet, letting her own grow cold on the plate How could she explain, about the sense shed had, walking from the Louvre? The conviction that something surrounded her now, monitoring her with relaxed precision; that she had become the focus of at least a part of Vireks empire. Hes a very wealthy man, she began.
Virek? Andrea put her knife and fork down on the plate and took up her coffee. I should say he is. If you believe the journalists, hes the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But theres the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No. Arent you going to eat that?
Marly began to mechanically cut and fork sections of the cooling omelet, while Andrea continued: You should look at the manuscript were working on this month.
Marly chewed, raised her eyebrows questioningly.
Its a history of the high-orbit industrial clans. A man at the University of Nice did it. Your Vireks even in it, come to think; hes cited as a counterexample, or rather as a type of parallel evolution. This fellow at Nice is interested in the paradox of individual wealth in a corporate age. in why it should still exist at all. Great wealth, I mean. He sees the high-orbit clans, people like the Tessier-Ashpools, as a very late variant on traditional patterns of aristocracy, late because the corporate mode doesnt really allow for an aristocracy. She put her cup down on her plate and carried the plate to the sink Actually, now that Ive started to describe it, it isnt that interesting. Theres a great deal of very gray prose about the nature of Mass Man. With caps, Mass Man. Hes big on caps Not much of a stylist. She spun the taps and water hissed out through the filtration unit.
But what does he say about Virek?
He says, if I remember all this correctly, and Im not at all certain that I do, that Virek is an even greater fluke than the industrial clans in orbit. The clans are trans-generational, and theres usually a fair bit of medicine involved: cryogenics, genetic manipulation, various ways to combat aging. The death of a given clan member, even a founding member, usually wouldnt bring the clan, as a business entity. to a crisis point. Theres always someone to step in, someone waiting. The difference between a clan and a corporation, however, is that you dont need to literally marry into a corporation
But they sign indentures.
Andrea shrugged. Thats like a lease. It isnt the same thing. Its job security, really. But when your Herr Virek dies, finally, when they run out of room to enlarge his vat, whatever, his business interests will lack a logical focus. At that point, our man in Nice has it, youll see Virek and Company either fragment or mutate, the latter giving us the Something Company and a true multinational, yet another home for capital-M Mass Man. She wiped her plate, rinsed it, dried it. and placed it in the pine rack beside the sink He says thats too bad, in a way, because there are so few people left who can even see the edge.
The edge?
The edge of the crowd. Were lost in the middle, you and I Or I still am, at any rate. She crossed the kitchen and put her hands on Marlys shoulders You want to take care in this. A part of you is already much happier, but now I see that I could have brought that about myself, simply by arranging a little lunch for you with your pig of a former lover The rest of it, Im not sure I think our academics theory is invalidated by the obvious fact that Virek and his kind are already far from human. I want you to be careful... Then she kissed Marlys cheek and went off to her work as an assistant editor in the fashionably archaic business of printing books.
She spent the morning at Andreas, with the Braun, viewing the holograms of the seven works. Each piece was extraordinary in its own way, but she repeatedly returned to the box Virek had shown her first. If I had the original here, she thought, and removed the glass, and one by one removed the objects inside, what would be left? Useless things, a frame of space, perhaps a smell like dust.
She sprawled on the couch, the Braun resting on her stomach, and stared into the box. It ached It seemed to her that the construction evoked something perfectly, but it was an emotion that lacked a name. She ran her hands through the bright illusion, tracing the length of the fluted, avian bone.
She was certain that Virek had already assigned an ornithologist the task of identifying the bird from whose wing that bone had come And it would be possible to date each object with the greatest precision, she supposed. Each tab of holofiche also housed an extensive report on the known origin of each piece, but something in her had deliberately avoided these. It was sometimes best, when you came to the mystery that was art, to come as a child. The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.
She put the Braun down on the low table beside the couch and crossed to Andreas phone, intending to check the time. She was meeting Paco at one, to discuss the mechanics of Alains payment. Alain had told her he would phone her at Andreas at three. When she punched for the time service, an automatic recap of satellite news strobed across the screen: a JAL shuttle had disintegrated during reentry over the Indian Ocean, investigators from the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis had been called in to examine the site of a brutal and apparently pointless bombing in a drab New Jersey residential suburb, militiamen were supervising the evacuation of the southern quadrant of New Bonn following the discovery, by construction workers, of two undetonated wartime rockets believed to be armed with biological weapons, and official sources in Arizona were denying Mexicos accusation of the detonation of a small-scale atomic or nuclear device near the Sonora border... As she watched, the recap cycled and the simulation of the shuttle began its fire-death again. She shook her head, tapping the button. It was noon.