COUNT ZERO

He felt the second explosion through the soles of his deck shoes, and saw the idiot grin on the lump of plastique that sat on Ramirez’s cyberspace deck. There was no flash, only sound and the sting of concussion through the concrete of the lot.

And then he was in the cockpit, breathing the new-car smell of long-chain monomers, the familiar scent of newly minted technology, and the girl was behind him, an awkward doll sprawled in the embrace of the g-web that Conroy had paid a San Diego arms dealer to install behind the pilot’s web. The plane was quivering, a live thing, and as he squirmed deeper into his own web, he fumbled for the interface cable, found it, ripped the microsoft from his socket, and slid the cable-jack home.

Knowledge lit him like an arcade game, and he surged forward with the plane-ness of the jet, feeling the flexible airframe reshape itself for jump-off as the canopy whined smoothly down on its servos. The g-web ballooned around him, locking his limbs rigid, the gun still in his hand. “Go, motherfucker.” But the jet already knew, and g-force crushed him down into the dark.

“You lost consciousness,” the plane said Its chip-voice sounded vaguely like Conroy.

“How long?”

“Thirty-eight seconds.”

“Where are we?”

“Over Nagos.” The head-up display lit, a dozen constantly altered figures beneath a simplified map of the Arizona-Sonora line.

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.”

“That’s a good question,” Turner said. He couldn’t 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 Andrea’s table, heard Andrea’s comfortingly familiar morning cough as she lit a first cigarette from the stove’s front burner. She shook off the dark colors of the dream and sat up on Andrea’s couch, hugging the dark red quilt around her knees. After Gnass, after the police and the reporters, she’d never dreamed of him. Or if she did, she’d 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 Marly’s plate. “What a bizarre idea. It would be like... like arming a penguin.” They both laughed. “Alain is not the type,” Andrea said “He’d shoot his foot off in the middle of some passionate declaration about the state of art and the amount of the di

“I saw him. He was there in Virek’s 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 she’d 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 Virek’s empire. “He’s 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, he’s the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there’s the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No. Aren’t 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 we’re working on this month.”

Marly chewed, raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“It’s a history of the high-orbit industrial clans. A man at the University of Nice did it. Your Virek’s even in it, come to think; he’s 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 doesn’t really allow for an aristocracy.” She put her cup down on her plate and carried the plate to the sink “Actually, now that I’ve started to describe it, it isn’t that interesting. There’s a great deal of very gray prose about the nature of Mass Man. With caps, Mass Man. He’s 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 I’m 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 there’s 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 wouldn’t bring the clan, as a business entity. to a crisis point. There’s always someone to step in, someone waiting. The difference between a clan and a corporation, however, is that you don’t need to literally marry into a corporation

“But they sign indentures.”

Andrea shrugged. “That’s like a lease. It isn’t the same thing. It’s 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, you’ll 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 that’s 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. We’re lost in the middle, you and I Or I still am, at any rate.” She crossed the kitchen and put her hands on Marly’s 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, I’m not sure I think our academic’s 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 Marly’s cheek and went off to her work as an assistant editor in the fashionably archaic business of printing books.

She spent the morning at Andrea’s, 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.