"So he made you an offer."

"Offer, my ass. He just checked my papers and took me straight on out of there. Not a soul around, either, and it was Saturday afternoon. Took me out in the parking lot, there's this hover sittin' in the lot, skulls on the front, two big black guys waiting for us, and any way away from that float tank, that's just fine by me."

"Had our friend in the back?"

"No." Peeling off the gloves. "Had me drive him back to Cleveland, to this burb. Big old houses but the lawns all long and scraggy. Went to one with a lot of security, guess it was his. This one," and she tucked the blue sleeping bag up around the man's chin, "he was in a bedroom. I had to start right in. Kid told me he'd pay me good."

"And you knew he'd bring you out here, to the Solitude?"

"No. Don't think he did, either. Something happened. He came in next day and said we were leaving. I think something scared him. That's when he called him that, the Count. 'Cause he was angry and I think maybe scared.'the Count and his fucking LF,' he said."

"His what?"

" 'LF.' "

"What's that?"

"I think this," she said, pointing up at the featureless gray package mounted above the man's head.

She imagined Swift waiting for her on the deck, wearing the tweeds he favored in an L. A. winter, the vest and jacket mismatched, herringbone and houndstooth, but everything woven from the same wool, and that, probably, from the same sheep on the same hillside, the whole look orchestrated in London, by committee, in a room above a Floral Street shop he'd never seen. They did striped shirts for him, brought the cotton from Charvet in Paris; they made his ties, had the silk woven in Osaka, the Sense/Net logo embroidered tight and small. And still, somehow, he looked as though his mother had dressed him.

The deck was empty. The Dornier hovered, then darted away to its nest. Mamman Brigitte's presence still clung to her.

She went into the white kitchen and scrubbed drying blood from her face and hands. When she stepped into the living room, she felt as though she were seeing it for the first time. The bleached floor, the gilt frames and cut-velvet upholstery of the Louis XVI chairs, the Cubist backdrop of a Valmier. Like Hilton's wardrobe, she thought, contrived by talented strangers. Her boots tracked damp sand across the pale floor as she went to the stairwell.

Kelly Hickman, her wardrobe man, had been to the house while she'd been in the clinic; he'd arranged her working luggage in the master bedroom. Nine Hermés rifle cases, plain and rectangular, like coffins of burnished saddle hide. Her clothes were never folded; they lay each garment flat, between sheets of silk tissue.

She stood in the doorway, staring at the empty bed, the nine leather coffins.

She went into the bathroom, glass block and white mosaic tile, locking the door behind her. She opened one cabinet, then another, ignoring neat rows of unopened toiletries, patent medicines, cosmetics. She found the charger in the third cabinet, beside a bubble card of derms. She bent close, peering at the gray plastic, the Japanese logo, afraid to touch it. The charger looked new, unused. She was almost certain that she hadn't bought it, hadn't left it here. She took the drug from her jacket pocket and examined it, turning it over and over, watching the measured doses of violet dust tumble in their sealed compartments.

She saw herself place the packet on the white marble ledge, position the charger above it, remove a derm from its bubble and insert it. She saw the red flash of a diode when the charger had drawn off a dose; she saw herself remove the derm, balancing it like a white plastic leech on the tip of her index finger, its moist inner surface glittering with minute beads of DMSO -

She turned, took three steps to the toilet, and dropped the unopened packet into the bowl. It floated there like a toy raft, the drug still perfectly dry. Perfectly. Her hand shaking, she found a stainless nailfile and knelt on the white tile. She had to close her eyes when she held the packet and drove the tip of the file against the seam, twisting. The file clattered on tile as she touched the flush button and the two halves of the empty packet vanished. She rested her forehead against cool enamel, then forced herself to get up, go to the sink, and carefully wash her hands.

Because she wanted, now she really knew she wanted, to lick her fingers.

Later that day, in a gray afternoon, she found a corrugated plastic shipping canister in the garage, carried it up to the bedroom, and began to pack Bobby's remaining things. There wasn't much: a pair of leather jeans he hadn't liked, some shirts he'd either discarded or forgotten, and, in the teak bureau's bottom drawer, a cyberspace deck. It was an Ono-Sendai, hardly more than a toy. It lay amid a tangle of black leads, a cheap set of stim-trodes, a greasy-looking plastic tube of saline paste.

She remembered the deck he'd used, the one he'd taken with him, a gray factory-custom Hosaka with unmarked keys. It was a cowboy's deck; he'd insisted on traveling with it, even though it caused problems during customs checks. Why, she wondered, had he bought the Ono-Sendai? And why had he abandoned it? She was seated on the edge of the bed; she lifted the deck from the drawer and put it on her lap.

Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don't need it, he'd said. And she hadn't, because she'd dreamed cyberspace, as though the neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.

There's no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor's lecture in the arcology's executive crèche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers ... As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied ...

She leaned forward and picked up the trode-set, shook it to free its leads from the tangle.

No there, there.

She spread the elastic headband and settled the trodes across her temples -- one of the world's characteristic human gestures, but one she seldom performed. She tapped the Ono-Sendai's battery-test stud. Green for go. She touched the power stud and the bedroom vanished behind a colorless wall of sensory static. Her head filled with a torrent of white sound.

Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

"Angela," the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, "I have a call from Hilton Swift ... "

"Executive override?" She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen counter.

"No," it said, confidingly.

"Change your tone," she said, around a mouthful of beans. "Something with an edge of anxiety."

"Mr. Swift is waiting," the house said nervously.

"Better," she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, "but I want something closer to genuine hysteria ... "

"Will you take the call?" The voice was choked with tension.

"No," she said, "but keep your voice that way, I like it."

She walked into the living room, counting under her breath. Twelve, thirteen ...

"Angela," the house said gently, "I have a call from Hilton Swift -- "