ANDREA LIVED in the Quartier des Ternes, where her ancient building, like the others in her street, awaited sandblasting by the city’s relentless renovators. Beyond the dark entrance, one of Fuji Electric’s biofluorescent strips glowed dimly above a dilapidated wall of small wooden hutches, some with their slotted doors still intact. Marly knew that postmen had once made daily deposits of mail through those slots; there was something romantic about the idea, although the hutches, with their yellowing business cards announcing the occupations of long-vanished tenants, had always depressed her. The walls of the hallway were stapled with bulging loops of cable and fiber optics, each strand a potential nightmare for some hapless utilities repairman. At the far end, through an open door paneled with dusty pebble glass, was a disused courtyard, its cobbles shiny with damp.

The concierge was sitting in the courtyard as Marly entered the building, on a white plastic crate that had once held bottles of Evian water. He was patiently oiling each link of an old bicycle’s black chain. He glanced up as she began to climb the first flight of stairs, but registered no particular interest.

The stairs were made of marble, worn dull and concave by generations of tenants. Andrea’s apartment was on the fourth floor. Two rooms, kitchen, and bath. Marly had come here when she’d closed her gallery for the last time, when it was no longer possible to sleep in the makeshift bedroom she’d shared with Alain, the little room behind the storeroom. Now 4: the building brought her depression circling in again, but the feel of her new outfit and the tidy click of her bootheels on marble kept it at a distance. She wore an oversized leather coat a few shades lighter than her handbag, a wool skirt, and a silk blouse from Paris Isetan. She’d had her hair cut that morning on Faubourg St. Honoré, by a Burmese girl with a West German laser pencil; an expensive cut, subtle without being too conservative.

She touched the round plate bolted in the center of Andrea’s door, heard it peep once, softly, as it read the whorls and ridges of her fingertips. “It’s me, Andrea,” she said to the tiny microphone. A series of clanks and tickings as her friend unbolted the door.

Andrea stood there, dripping wet, in the old terry robe. She took in Marly’s new look, then smiled. “Did you get your job, or have you robbed a bank?” Marly stepped in, kissing her friend’s wet cheek. “It feels a bit of both,” she said, and laughed.

“Coffee,” said Andrea, “make us coffee Grandes crémes. I must rinse my hair And yours is beautiful...” She went into the bathroom and Marly heard a spray of water across porcelain.

“I’ve brought you a present,” Marly said, but Andrea couldn’t hear her She went into the kitchen and filled the kettle, lit the stove with the old-fashioned spark gun, and began to search the crowded shelves for coffee.

“Yes,” Andrea was saying, “I do see it.” She was peering into the hologram of the box Marly had first seen in Virek’s construct of Gaudi’s park. “It’s your sort of thing.” She touched a stud and the Braun’s illusion winked out.

Beyond the room’s single window, the sky was stippled with a few wisps of cirrus. “Too grim for me, too serious. Like the things you showed at your gallery. But that can only mean that Herr Virek has chosen well; you will solve his mystery for him. If I were you, considering the wage, I might take my own good time about it.” Andrea wore Marly’s gift, an expensive, beautifully detailed man’s dress shirt, in gray Flemish flannel. It was the sort of thing she liked most, and her delight in it was obvious. It set off her pale hair, and was very nearly the color of her eyes.

“He’s quite horrible, Virek, I think...” Marly hesitated.

“Quite likely,” Andrea said, taking another sip of coffee. “Do you expect anyone that wealthy to be a nice, normal sort?”

“I felt, at one point, that he wasn’t quite human. Felt that very strongly.”

“But he isn’t, Marly. You were talking with a projection, a special effect...”

“Still... “ She made a gesture of helplessness, which immediately made her feel annoyed with herself.

“Still, he is very, very wealthy, and he’s paying you a great deal to do something that you may be uniquely suited to do.” Andrea smiled and readjusted a finely turned charcoal cuff. “You don’t have a great deal of choice, do you?”

“I know. I suppose that’s what’s making me uneasy.”

“Well,” Andrea said, “I thought I might put off telling you a bit longer, but I have something else that may make you feel uneasy. If ‘uneasy’ is the word.”

“Yes?”

“I considered not telling you at all, but I’m sure he’ll get to you eventually. He smells money, I suppose.”

Marly put her empty cup down carefully on the cluttered little rattan table.

“He’s quite acute that way,” Andrea said.

“When?”

“Yesterday. It began, I think, about an hour after you would have had your interview with Virek. He called me at work. He left a message here, with the concierge. If I were to remove the screen program’ ‘she gestured toward the phone’ ‘I think he’d ring within thirty minutes.”

Remembering the concierge’s eyes, the ticking of the bicycle chain.

“He wants to talk, he said,” Andrea said. “Only to talk. Do you want to talk with him, Marly?”

“No,” she said, and her voice was a little girl’s voice, high and ridiculous. Then, “Did he leave a number?” Andrea sighed, slowly shook her head, and then said, “Yes, of course he did.”

THE DARK WAS FULL of honeycomb patterns the color of blood. Everything was warm. And soft, ‘too, mostly soft,

“What a mess,” one of the angels said, her voice far off but low and rich and very clear.

“We should’ve clipped him out of Leon’s,” the other angel said. “They aren’t gonna like this upstairs.”

“Must’ve had something in this big pocket here, see? They slashed it for him, getting it out.”

“Not all they slashed, sister. Jesus. Here.”

The patterns swung and swam as something moved his head. Cool palm against his cheek.

“Don’t get any on your shirt,” the first angel said.

“Two-a-Day ain’t gonna like this. Why you figure he freaked like that and ran?”

It pissed him off, because he wanted to sleep. He was asleep, for sure, but somehow Marsha’s jack-dreams were bleeding into his head so that he tumbled through broken sequences of People of Importance. The soap had been running continuously since before he was born, the plot a multiheaded narrative tapeworm that coiled back in to devour itself every few months, then sprouted new heads hungry for tension and thrust. He could see it writhing in its totality, the way Marsha could never see it, an elongated spiral of Sense/Net DNA, cheap brittle ectoplasm spun out to uncounted hungry dreamers. Marsha, now, she had it from the POV of Michele Morgan Magnum, the female lead, hereditary corporate head of Magnum AG. But today’s episode kept veering weirdly away from Michele’s frantically complex romantic entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed socioarchitectural descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for in-stance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, inhabited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend. Other segments of the jack-dream reminded him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated diagrams of the Projects’ interior structure, and droning lectures in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents. These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even less convincing than the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room An entire wall opened onto a shallow balcony and a rectangle of cartoon-blue sky. The woman was black without being black, it seemed to Bobby, like a very, very dark and youthfully maternal version of one of the porno dolls on the unit in his bedroom. And had, it looked like, the identical small but cartoon-perfect breasts. (At this point, to add to his dull confusion, an astonishingly loud and very unNet voice said, “Now I call that a definite sign of life, Jackie. If the prognosis ain’t lookin’ up yet, at least somethin’ is.”) And then went spinning back into the all-glitz universe of Michele Morgan Magnum, who was desperately struggling to prevent Magnum AG’s takeover by the sinister Shikoku-based Nakamura industrial clan, represented in this case by (plot complication) Michele’s main squeeze for the season, wealthy (but somehow grindingly in need of additional billions) New Soviet boy-politician Vasily Suslov, who looked and dressed remarkably like the Gothicks in Leon’s.