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"I guess not," Laura said, leaning against the desk. She felt tired already, and it was only ten o'clock.
"I'm going to church this Sunday," Mrs. Rodriguez de- cided. "Que brujeria, eh? A witch! Did you see those eyes?
Like a snake." She crossed herself. "Don't laugh, Laura."
"Laugh? Hell, I'm ready to hang garlic." The baby wailed from the kitchen. A sudden Japanese phrase leapt into Laura's head. "Nakitsura ni hachi," she blurted. "It never rains but it pours. Only it's better in the original. `A bee for a crying face.' Why can't I ever remember that crap when I need it?"
Laura took the baby upstairs to the tower office to deal with the day's mail.
Laura's corporate specialty was public relations. When
David had designed the Lodge, Laura had prepared this room for business. It was equipped for major conferences; it was a full-scale node in the global Net.
The Lodge did most of its business as telex, straight print sent by wire, such as guest dossiers and arrival schedules.
Most of the world, even Africa, was wired for telex these. days. It was cheapest and simplest, and Rizome favored it.
"Fax" was more elaborate: entire facsimiles of documents, photographed and passed down the phone lines as streams of numbers. Fax was good for graphics and still photos; the fax machine was essentially a Xerox with a phone. It was great fun to play with.
The Lodge also took plenty of traditional phone traffic: voice without image, both live and recorded. Also voice with im- age: videophone. Rizome favored one-way prerecorded calls because they were more efficient. There was less chance of an expensive screwup in a one-way recorded call. And re- corded video could be subtitled for all of Rizome's language groups, a major advantage for a multinational.
The Lodge could also handle teleconferencing: multiple phone calls woven together. Teleconferencing was the expen- sive borderland where phones blurred into television. Run- ning a teleconference was an art worth knowing, especially in public relations. It was a cross between chairing a meeting and ru
Every year of her life, Laura thought, the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it.
Computers melted other machines, fusing them together.
Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk.
Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite.
Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus of data.
There'd been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to make it sound transcendently incredible.
She'd been more into it when she'd been setting it up.
Right now it seemed vastly more remarkable that Loretta was sitting up much straighter in her lap. "Looook at you, Lo- retta! Look how straight you can hold your head! Look at you, sweetie-face... . Wooga woog-woog-woog ... "
The Net was a lot, like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality.
Laura zoomed one-handed through her electronic junk mail.
Shop-by-wire catalogs. City Council campaigns. Charities.
Health insurance.
Laura erased the garbage and got down to business. A
message was waiting from Emily Donato.
Emily was Laura's prime news source for the backstage action in Rizome's Central Committee. Emily Donato was a first-term committee member.
Laura's alliance with Emily was twelve years old. They'd met in college at an international business class. Their shared backgrounds made friendship easy. Laura, a "diplobrat," had lived in Japan as an embassy kid. For Emily, childhood meant the massive industrial projects of Kuwait and Abu
Dhabi. The two of them had shared a room in college.
After graduation, they'd examined their recruiting offers and decided together on Rizome Industries Group. Rizome looked modern, it looked open, it had ideas. It was big enough for muscle and loose enough for speed.
The two of them had been double-teaming the company ever since.
Laura punched up the message and Emily's image flashed onto the screen. Emily sat behind her antique desk at home in
Atlanta, Rizome's headquarters. Home for Emily was a high- rise apartment downtown, a cell in a massive modern beehive of ceramic and composite plastic._
Filtered air, filtered water, halls like streets, elevators like vertical subways. A city set on end, for a crowded world.
Naturally everything about Emily's apartment struggled to obscure the facts. The place abounded in homey quirks and little touches of Victorian solidity: cornices, baroque door frames, rich mellow lighting. The wall behind Emily was papered in paisley arabesques, gold on maroon. Her polished wooden desktop was set as carefully as a stage: low keyboard at her right hand, pen and pencil holders with a slanting peacock plume, a gleaming paperweight of gypsum crystal.
The Chinese synthetic of Emily's frilled gray blouse had the faint shimmer of mother-of-pearl. Emily's chestnut-brown hair had been done by machine, with elaborate braids and little Dickensian curls at the temple. She wore long malachite earrings and a round cameo hologram at her neck. Emily's video image was very twenties, a modem reaction against the stark, dress-for-success took of generations of businesswomen.
To Laura's eye, the fashion suggested an antebellum southern belle filled to gushing with feminine graciousness.
"I've got the Report's rough draft," Emily a
"It's pretty much what we expected."
Emily pulled her copy of the Quarterly Report from a drawer.
She flipped pages. "Let's get to the major stuff. The
Committee election. We've got twelve candidates, which is a joke, but three frontru
Osaka lumber deal. He's pretty flexible for an oldline salary man, but I met him in Osaka last year. He drank a lot and wanted to pinch me. Besides, he's into countertrade, and that's my turf.
"So we'll have to back Suvendra. She came up through the
Djakarta office, so the East Asian contingent's behind her.
She's old, though." Emily frowned. "And she smokes. An ugly habit and it tends to rub people the wrong way. Those clove-scented Indonesian cancer sticks-one whiff and you're ready for a biopsy." She shuddered.
"Still, Suvendra's our best bet. At least, she'll appreciate our support. Unfortunately that moron Jensen is ru
She flipped pages, frowning. "Okay, a quick review of the party line. Let me know if you need more data on the arguments. Philippines farm project: no way. Farming's a black hole and Manila's price supports are bound to collapse. Kymera joint project: yes. Russian software deal: yes. The Sovs still have hard-currency problems, but we can cut a good countertrade in natural gas. Kuwaiti housing project: no. Islamic Republic: the terms are good but it stinks politically. No."
She paused. "Now here's one you didn't know about.
Grenada United Bank. The Committee's slipping this one in." For the first time, Emily looked uneasy. "They're an offshore bank. Not too savory. But the Committee figures it's time for a gesture of friendship. It won't do our reputation much good if the whole thing is hashed out in public. But it's harmless enough-we can let it go."