While Kelly and his assistants were assembling her wardrobe for the trip, she felt as though the house itself were stirring around her, preparing for one of its many brief periods of vacancy.
She could hear their voices, from where she sat in the living room, their laughter. One of the assistants was a girl in a blue polycarbon exo that allowed her to carry the Hermés wardrobe cases as though they were weightless blocks of foam, the humming skeleton suit padding softly down the stairs on its blunt dinosaur feet. Blue skeleton, leather coffins.
Now Porphyre stood in the doorway. "Missy ready?" He wore a long, loose coat cut from tissue-thin black leather; rhinestone spurs glittered above the heels of black patent boots.
"Porphyre," she said, "youre in mufti. We have an entrance to make, in New York."
"The cameras are for you."
"Yes," she said, "for my reinsertion."
"Porphyre will keep well in the rear."
"Ive never known you to worry about upstaging anyone."
He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an avant-garde dentists fantasy of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.
"Danielle Stark will be flying with us." She heard the sound of the approaching helicopter. "Shes meeting us at LAX."
"Well strangle her," he said, his tone confidential, as he helped her on with the blue fox Kelly had selected. "If we promise to hint to the fax that the motive was sexual, she might even decide to play along . . ."
"Youre horrid."
"Danielle is a horror, missy."
"Look whos talking."
"Ah," said the hairdresser, narrowing his eyes, "but my soul is a childs."
Now the helicopter was landing.
Danielle Stark, associated with stim versions of both Vogue-Nippon and Vogue-Europa, was widely rumored to be in her late eighties. If it were true, Angie thought, covertly inspecting the journalists figure as the three of them boarded the Lear, Danielle and Porphyre would be on par for overall surgical modification. Apparently in her willowy early thirties, her only obvious augments were a pair of pale blue Zeiss implants. A young French fashion reporter had once referred to these as "modishly outdated"; the reporter, Net legend said, had never worked again.
And soon, Angie knew, Danielle would want to talk drugs, celebrity drugs, the cornflower eyes schoolgirl-wide to take it all in.
Under Porphyres daunting gaze, Danielle managed to contain herself until they were in cruise mode somewhere over Utah.
"I was hoping," she began, "that I wouldnt have to be the one to bring it up."
"Danielle," Angie countered, "I am sorry. How thoughtless." She touched the veneered face of the Hosaka flight kitchen, which purred softly and began to dispense tiny plates of tea-smoked duck, gulf oysters on black-pepper toast, crayfish flan, sesame pancakes . . . Porphyre, taking Angies cue, produced a bottle of chilled Chablis Danielles favorite, Angie now recalled. Someone Swift? had also remembered.
"Drugs," Danielle said, fifteen minutes later, finishing the last of the duck.
"Dont worry," Porphyre assured her. "When you get to New York, they have anything you want."
Danielle smiled. "Youre so amusing. Do you know Ive a copy of your birth certificate? I know your real name." She looked at him meaningfully, still smiling.
"sticks and stones, " he said, topping up her glass.
"Interesting notation regarding congenital defects." She sipped her wine.
"Congenital, genital . . . We all change so much these days, dont we? Whos been doing your hair, dear?" He leaned forward. "Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human."
Danielle smiled.
The interview itself went smoothly enough; Danielle was too skilled an interviewer to allow her feints to cross the pain threshold, where they might rally serious resistance. But when she brushed a fingertip back across her temple, depressing a subdermal switch that deactivated her recording gear, Angie tensed for the real onslaught.
"Thank you," Danielle said. "The rest of the flight, of course, is off the record."
"Why dont you just have another bottle or two and turn in?" Porphyre asked.
"What I dont see, dear," Danielle said, ignoring him, "is why you bothered . . ."
"Why I bothered, Danielle?"
"Going to that tedious clinic at all. Youve said it didnt affect your work. Youve also said there was no high, not in the usual sense." She giggled. "Though you do maintain that it was such a terribly addictive substance. Why did you decide to quit?"
"It was terribly expensive . . ."
"In your case, surely, thats academic."
True, Angie thought, though a week of it did cost something in the vicinity of your annual salary.
"I suppose I began to resent paying to feel normal. Or a poor approximation of normal."
"Did you build up a tolerance?"
"No."
"How odd."
"Not really. These designers provide substances that supposedly bypass the traditional drawbacks."
"Ah. But what about the new drawbacks, the now drawbacks?" Danielle poured herself more wine. "Ive heard another version of all this, of course."
"You have?"
"Of course I have. What it was, who made it, why you quit."
"Yes?"
"It was an antipsychotic, produced in Sense/Nets own labs. You quit taking it because youd rather be crazy."
Porphyre gently took the glass from Danielles hand as her lids fluttered heavily over the brilliant blue eyes. "Nightie-night, dear," he said. Danielles eyes closed and she began to snore gently.
"Porphyre, what ?"
"I dosed her wine," he said. "She wont know the difference, missy. She wont remember anything she didnt record . . ." He grinned broadly. "You really didnt want to have to listen to this bitch all the way back, did you?"
"But shell know, Porphyre!"
"No, she wont. Well tell her she killed three bottles by herself and made a disgusting mess in the washroom. And shell feel like it, too." He giggled.
Danielle Stark was still snoring, quite loudly now, in one of the two swing-down bunks in the rear of the cabin.
"Porphyre," Angie said, "do you think she mightve been right?"
The hairdresser gazed at her with his gorgeous, inhuman eyes. "And you wouldnt have known?"
"I dont know . . ."
He sighed. "Missy worries too much. Youre free now. Enjoy it."
"I do hear voices, Porphyre."
"Dont we all, missy?"
"No," she said, "not like mine. Do you know anything about African religions, Porphyre?"
He smirked. "Im not African."
"But when you were a child . . ."
"When I was a child," Porphyre said, "I was white."
"Oh . . ."
He laughed. "Religions, missy?"
"Before I came to the Net, I had friends. In New Jersey. They were black and . . . religious."
He smirked again and rolled his eyes. "Hoodoo sign, missy? Chickenbone and pennyroyal oil?"
"You know it isnt like that."
"And if I do?"
"Dont tease me, Porphyre. I need you."
"Missy has me. And yes, I know what you mean. And those are your voices?"
"They were. After I began to use the dust, they went away . . ."
"And now?"
"Theyre gone." But the impulse was past now, and she cringed from trying to tell him about Grande Brigitte and the drug in the jacket.
"Good," he said. "Thats good, missy."
The Lear began its descent over Ohio. Porphyre was staring at the bulkhead, still as a statue. Angie looked out at the cloud-country below as it rose toward them, remembering the game shed played on airplanes as a child, sending an imaginary Angie out to romp through cloud-canyons and over fluffy peaks grown magically solid. Those planes had belonged to Maas-Neotek, she supposed. From the Maas corporate jets shed gone on to Net Lears. She knew commercial airliners only as locations for her stims: New York to Paris on the maiden flight of JALs restored Concorde, with Robin and a hand-picked party of Net people.
Descending. Were they over New Jersey yet? Did the children swarming the rooftop playgrounds of Beauvoirs arcology hear the Lears engine? Did the sound of her passage sweep faintly over the condos of Bobbys childhood? How unthinkably intricate the world was, in sheer detail of mechanism, when Sense/Nets corporate will shook tiny bones in the ears of unknown, unknowing children . . .
"Porphyre knows certain things," he said, very softly. "But Porphyre needs time to think, missy . . ."
They were banking for the final approach.