Before Radmila could decide on anything, to scream or to run, Sonja had stalked straight over, silently, fluidly, and kicked Radmila in the stomach. Sonja's black-booted foot came blasting forward with blinding, immediate, practiced speed and slammed all the wind out of Radmila. That devastating kick had knocked her cold.

Other tourists had helped her after Sonja had stomped away. When John arrived, deeply worried, Radmila had lied to him. She had claimed that she had fainted, overcome by the shocking sight of the famous ruins of New York. John, who had loved her very much at the time, had known at once that she was lying to him. All kinds of trouble had followed from that.

The trauma of that event had been much worse than confronting Djordje, here in her home stronghold of Los Angeles. Being a man, and the last and the youngest, Djordje was less painful than the others. Djordje had always been different in that way.

At least she knew that Djordje would go away. Djordje was a traitor: he had always excelled at running away.

Now Dr. Feininger entered the hairdressing clinic. The Acquis diplomat seemed discomposed. The hairdressers' security people were even more ruthless to visitors than they were to the clientele.

"How do you do, Dr. Feininger? Let me persuade the staff to fetch you a chair."

"Oh no no, please, I don't want to speak with those people." Dr. Feininger had an overly perfect, German-accented English. She could hear him carefully machining his verb tenses. "So: Miss Mila Montalban, at last we meet. In person, so much smaller you seem than in your simulations!"

Radmila offered him a tender smile. "You flew here from Europe just to meet me? How exceptional!"

"Yes, I have what they used to call 'jet lag'!" Feininger pretended to yawn into his manicured hand.

"Please tell me all about your fascinating trip!"

"I logged every minute on my pundit site," said Feininger, shifting on his feet. "Round and round we spin inside that ring of magnets, many gravities…We were fired into suborbital arc…Free-fall, truly weightless…! You could see all of it! Though I don't compare my mediation with yours."

"I'm sure that your pundit site is very popular with your viewers." Feininger's enthusiasm for his toys reminded her of John. She had Feininger tagged by now: he was what they called an Acquis "thought leader."

As a postgovernmental organization, the Acquis was peppered all over with radical, crazy extremists, but pompous, netcentric blowhards like this guy were the organization's meat and bread.

Nothing ever made pious, politically correct Acquis geeks happier than some dully public "frank exchange of views." Radmila had met so many of them, at so many tiresome, life-draining political events, that she could literally smell Acquis thought leaders. Dr. Feininger smelled of cologne.

"What city is your own home base, Dr. Feininger?"

"My base is Cologne."

Radmila laughed musically. "Such a beautiful city!"

"I never expected to meet an American star so simply and modestly dressed," said Feininger, eyeing her cleavage in her terry-cloth gown. "One expects an American star to…well…billow, if that's the right word."

"Oh, we stars do billow. But this is my private life, and I chose to meet you here very privately."

"I understand that important distinction," said Feininger. "In political life, one also treads a fine line between public credibility and personal authenticity."

"It was brave of you to personally fly to Los Angeles," said Radmila. "I'm so proud that spaceflight is finally returning to vogue! Aerospace once meant a lot to California. We're so sentimental about our heritage…New attitudes from Europe, that's encouraging. We have some new American launch methods-those giant slingshots, I forget what you men call those…"

"Those are called 'tensile accelerators. "

"Yes, that was it." Radmila nodded respectfully. "Dr. Feininger, do you suppose, someday, those two methods might be combined? Then we could settle outer space-mankind's dream come true!"

"I happen to know rather a lot about this topic," said Feininger unsurprisingly. "Sadly I must inform you that no, the Acquis spaceflight methods, which are very extensively tested and constructed on the strictest precautionary principles, are by no means the same techniques as the aberrant efforts of certain American zealots who fling giant nanocarbon slingshots up the slopes of the Rocky Mountains."

"Have you ever seen that kind of space launch performed, Dr. Feininger?"

"What, me? No, certainly not."

"Would you like to see that done? My Family-Firm has a private launchpad."

"I see. I wasn't aware of that."

"Yes, we need that private launchpad in order to reach our private space station."

"I did know that the Montgomery-Montalbans had built a space station."

"Well, we didn't exactly build that. The Government of India built LilyPad. We simply took over management when India suffered their difficulties."

"Terrible business about India."

"Very terrible. We have so much to learn from Indian spiritual values."

Feininger wasn't happy about his lack of a chair or the way he'd been treated by the local staff, but he was clearly pleased to meet a Hollywood star so willing to talk his kind of utter crap.

"I like to think," said Feininger slowly, "that I have rather good instincts about people. You are not at all like your public image. I can sense that the private Mila Montalban is a rather fresh, direct, and un-pretentious woman."

"I hope you won't tell anybody that," Radmila twinkled. "My public-relations people get all upset with me when I fail to allure and mystify."

"May I ask you something, Miss Montalban? Not a personal question, but a public political issue? Why do you own a giant war machine that destroys the homes of helpless refugees with heat rays?"

"What, you mean in an immersive-world simulation? I can't remember my roles in immersive worlds-there are just too many."

"No, I meant last August," said Feininger politely. "In the streets of Los Angeles. You were lasciviously dancing on the top of a giant walking tripod that fired laser weapons into people's homes."

"Oh that!" said Radmila. "You mean our urban-renewal festival."

"That behavior truly baffles us in the Acquis," said Feininger.

"Please try not to worry," said Radmila, wide-eyed. "I'm just an actress. It's all for show."

"Leaving aside the social-justice aspects of preferentially wrecking the neighborhoods of the poor," said Feininger, "are you aware of what happens, technically speaking, within the legs of those tripods?"

"Should I be?"

"I know the sinister genius who constructed that device," said Feininger. "His name is Frank Osbourne, and he repeatedly seeks out radical construction methods that are judged unsafe by Acquis central committee. Then Osbourne deploys those methods! Not in harmless simulations-in real life ! He builds structures with dangerous crystalline iron and unproven nanocarbon piezo-cables, and then he uses those hazardous devices to demolish historical buildings. A deliberate provocation!"

"Frank is a very theoretical architect," said Radmila. "I think you're reading too much into his acts of whimsy."

Toddy's tea trolley rolled into the room. Toddy had gone to repeated effort to have tea served as she recovered from her hair-design interventions. Toddy would sit, sip tea, and stare into her hobject globes…

Toddy was no longer here, yet her infrastructure had survived her. Fresh tea had just arrived for the insane husk of a woman who'd been quietly fired into orbit.

"Oh, the tea is here!" Radmila chirped. "I do hope you like Indian tea, Dr. Feininger."

"It's Indian tea?"

"Yes of course! They're restoring plantations in Assam!"