COUNT ZERO

“You are disoriented. Please forgive me.”

Josef Virek was perched below her on one of the park’s serpentine benches, his wide shoulders hunched in a soft topcoat. His features had been vaguely familiar to her all her she remembered, for some reason, a photograph of life. Now Virek and the king of England. He smiled at her. His head was large and beautifully shaped beneath a brush of stiff dark gray hair. His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce. His eyes, very large behind the round, rimless glasses that were a trademark, were pale blue and strangely soft.

“Please.” He patted the bench’s random mosaic of shattered pottery with a narrow hand. “You must forgive my reliance on technology. I have been confined for over a decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stockholm. Or perhaps of hell. I am not a well man, Marly. Sit beside me.”

Taking a deep breath, she descended the stone steps and crossed the cobbles “Herr Virek,” she said, “I saw you lecture in Munich, two years ago. A critique of Faessler and his Autisuches Theater. You seemed well then...”

“Faessler?” Virek’s ta

She took her place beside him and peered down at the dirty pavement between the scuffed toes of her black Paris boots. She saw a chip of pale gravel, a rusted paper clip, the small dusty corpse of a bee or hornet. “It’s amazingly detailed...”

“Yes,” he said, “the new Maas biochips. You should know,” he continued, “that what I know of your private life is very nearly as detailed. More than you yourself do, in some instances.”

“You do?” It was easiest, she found, to focus on the city, picking out landmarks remembered from a half-dozen student holidays. There, just there, would be the Ramblas, parrots and flowers, the taverns serving dark beer and squid.

“Yes I know that it was your lover who convinced you that you had found a lost Cornell original...”

Many shut her eyes.

“He commissioned the forgery, hiring two talented student-artisans and an established historian who found himself in certain personal difficulties... He paid them with money he’d already extracted from your gallery, as you have no doubt guessed. You are crying...”

Marly nodded. A cool forefinger tapped her wrist.

“I bought Gnass. I bought the police off the case. The press weren’t worth buying; they rarely are And now, perhaps, your slight notoriety may work to your advantage.”

“Herr Virek, I – “

“A moment, please. Paco! Come here, child.”

Marly opened her eyes and saw a child of perhaps six years, tightly gotten up in dark suit coat and knickers, pale stockings, high-buttoned black patent boots. Brown hair fell across his forehead in a smooth wing. He held something in his hands, a box of some kind.

“Gaudi began the park in 1900,” Virek said “Paco wears the period costume. Come here, child. Show us your marvel.”

“Señor,” Paco lisped, bowing, and stepped forward to exhibit the thing he held.

Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects.

“Cornell,” she said, her tears forgotten. “Cornell?” She turned to Virek.

“Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist.”

“There are more? More boxes?”

“I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The u

But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.

The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skinbut the thing’s face was seared and blackened.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

“Gracias, Paco.”

Box and boy were gone.

She gaped.

“Ah. Forgive me, I have forgotten that these transitions are too abrupt for you. Now, however, we must discuss your assignment .

“Herr Virek,” she said, “what is ‘Paco’?”

“A subprogram.”

“I see.”

“I have hired you to find the maker of the box.”

“But, Herr Virek, with your resources -”

“Of which you are now one, child. Do you not wish to be employed? When the business of Gnass having been stung with a forged Cornell came to my attention, I saw that you might be of use in this matter.” He shrugged. “Credit me with a certain talent for obtaining desired results.”

“Certainly, Herr Virek! And, yes, I do wish to work!”

“Very well You will be paid a salary. You will be given access to certain lines of credit, although, should you need to purchase, let us say. substantial amounts of real estate”

“Real estate?”

“Or a corporation, or spacecraft. In that event, you will require my indirect authorization. Which you will almost certainly be given Otherwise, you will have a free hand I suggest, however, that you work on a scale with which you yourself are comfortable. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing touch with your intuition, and intuition, in a case such as this, is of crucial importance.” The famous smile glittered for her once more.

She took a deep breath. “Herr Virek, what if I fail? How long do I have to locate this artist?”

“The rest of your life,” he said.

Forgive me,” she found herself saying, to her horror, “but I understood you to say that you live in a – a vat?”

“Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh. Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something like a tenth of my a

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

A wing of night swept Barcelona’s sky. like the twitch of a vast slow shutter, and Virek and Gdell were gone, and she found herself seated again on the low leather bench, staring at torn sheets of stained cardboard.