Gibson was intrigued by the way Nephredana managed to make six-hundred-year-old events sound like they had happened just yesterday.

"Around 1500, the Europeans started showing up, but Montezuma, who was emperor by then, was ready for them, and they were never able to establish a beachhead on the continent. The threat from across the Atlantic, however, really galvanized Aztec science. In less than seventy years, they had electricity, the internal-combustion engine, and powered flight and were taking their first shots at splitting the atom."

Gibson whistled. "You're putting me on?"

Nephredana shook her head. "Not a bit of it, You can't imag-ine what can be achieved in a state run by an absolute, life-and-death autocrat when the motivation's there. And remember something else: All this time they were still practicing the same sun-worshiping, human-sacrificing religion that they'd had when they were living in mud huts, only it had now grown to truly epic proportions. You should have seen the Great Solstice Festival of 1577. They snuffed a quarter of a million people at that four-day bash. Now that's what you call motivation."

"You make it sound like you were there."

Nephredana sighed, "I was. I was having an affair with a fighter pilot from Tenochtitlan at the time, but after that slayfest I had to dump him. Too much blood even for me."

"So what happened next?"

"They let off their first experimental bomb in 1605 and then spent the next ten years perfecting a method for delivering a nuclear holocaust. The means wasn't all that spectacular-a big, clumsy, prop-driven bomber, all fuel and bombload-but it could make it across the Atlantic and that was all that mattered. The Aztecs weren't all that bothered about getting their aircrews home again."

"Extra sacrifices?"

"Exactly."

" So what did they want to do? Nuke Europe back to the stone age?"

"Precisely that. They knew that the Eurotrash in their sailing ships would keep on coming, and, more to the point, they would inevitably pilfer bits and pieces of Aztec advanced technology, upgrade their armaments, and begin posing a real threat. According to Aztec thinking, a preemptory strike was the only answer, and, as an added plus, it would be one fuck of a bonanza of souls for the Sun God. By 1615, the Aztec military industrial complex was in high gear, turning out an armada of planes for the raid on Northern Europe."

"What stopped them?"

"Nothing stopped them."

"I don't understand,"

"That's because you're still thinking in terms of your own dimension. Just because you've still got Europe intact, you assume that everyone else has."

Gibson blinked. "You mean they did it?"

"Damn right they did it. July 4, 1618, the Night of the Many Suns. They laid a strip of bombs from Lisbon to Warsaw, as far north as London and as far south as Naples. No more Europe in the streamheat dimension. Of course, all the dust and fallout and the rest of the crap went straight around the world. Russia and China took a beating and then it blew right across the Pacific and over the Aztec Empire, swamping them with cancer, birth defects, and sterility. Unfortunately it didn't kill them outright."

"Did it make them stronger?"

Nephredana nodded. "Stronger, meaner, and crazier. They now ruled the planet in their dimension, as much of it as they hadn't turned into an atomic wasteland, and it was a grim, nasty place."

"They still went on with the human sacrifices?"

"Oh, yes, in fact they turned it into a science. They made inroads into death-moment energy physics that no normal culture would have imagined possible."

"Death-moment energy physics?"

"You wouldn't want to know about it, except that's how they first got started in the interdimensional transit business."

"When did they start that?"

"They discovered the trick of dimension transfer about a hundred years ago, but even before that they had already left their impression on other dimensions. The attack on Europe produced massive print-throughs."

"What are print-throughs?"

"When something as catastrophic as a nuclear attack occurs in one dimension, it can produce secondary effects in others nearby. In your dimension, the Night of the Many Suns and its aftermath was reflected as the Thirty Years' War and the plague. Eight million died in Germany alone."

"Does it have to be a nuclear attack?"

"No, but they do produce the most noticeable effects. When they dropped the A-bombs on Osaka and Nagasaki in your dimension, a giant reptile thawed out of the Arctic ice and went on a rampage through a parallel Tokyo."

Gibson was having a degree of trouble with some of this. "What about volcanos and natural explosions, do they cause print-through?"

Nephredana shook her head. "No, no, you're missing the point. It's not the crude energy release of the explosion that causes print-through, it's the cumulative effect of all the simultaneous death. When an entity dies there's a brief but massive release of psychic power and weird shit happens. Image that multiplied hundreds of thousands of times."

Despite the booze, Gibson felt a chill clutch at his chest. "Death-moment energy physics."

Nephredana raised her glass to him, "Now you're getting it, kid."

"I'm not sure I want it. Let's get back to the streamheat; when did they start operating?"

Nephredana was looking around at the parade of passing guests, and she seemed to be getting bored with the lecture. "It's like I said, they made the breakthrough a hundred years ago, and by the late 1920s they'd started running all over, trying to reshape the whole fucking multidimensional universe in their own image. They apparently arrived in your dimension too late for the Russian revolution but in plenty of time for Hitler. Tried to get in with Mao Tse-tung as well, but Chairman Mao wasn't buying, and he had a bunch of them shot. He was smart enough to realize that the streamheat image was truly nasty. They called themselves the TSD at first, Time Stream Directorate, but it didn't catch on, they got the name streamheat from-well talk of the devil!"

Gibson stiffened. "What?"

Nephredana pointed across the grand hall. "Isn't that the bitch that brought you here?"

Gibson peered in the direction she was indicating, and there was Smith, wearing a severely cut, off-the-shoulder evening dress, in conversation with two men in dinner jackets. As far as Gibson could see, she hadn't spotted him, but he turned to Nephredana with a good deal of alarm. "You think she's looking for me?"

Nephredana shook her head. "Don't flatter yourself. This party is exactly the kind of environment in which the stieamheat like to wheel and deal, but let's get out of here anyway. I don't think it'd be a good idea if she spotted you."

"So where to?"

"Let's go to the pistol gallery. I feel like shooting something."

"Pistol gallery?"

"Raus has a pistol gallery in a specially soundproofed corridor on the second floor. Raus has a lot of soundproofed areas in his mansion."

Gibson wasn't sure about the idea of pistol shooting. "I could use another drink after the history lesson."

Nephredana dismissed the implied objection. "We'll get one along the way."

"You've been here before?"

"Oh, yes."

She walked him in the direction of the postmodern staircase. The security men immediately lifted the ropes aside when they saw her coming. She didn't even have to say anything, and Gibson wondered if they knew her from previous experience or if they just recognized the look. Nephredana had a look and an attitude that could take her just about anywhere.

Beyond the red velvet ropes the party shifted into a whole other gear. They moved through a number of rooms, each of which had its own special attraction. In one, a dozen men and women were playing what looked like a version of high-stakes baccarat. A guest bedroom had been turned into an impromptu opium den where young men and women were, by turns, making themselves blissfully comatose by sucking on the multiple hoses of water pipe. The entertainment in some of the rooms was a little more perverse. In one that they passed through, couples sat round the shadowy walls, sipping cognac from balloon snifters as they watched a woman in a red leather cat suit administering electric shocks to a naked and kneeling young man. The large orchid house, which was an extension of the second floor under its own double-glazed dome, had been converted into a jungle room complete with parrots, Afro/Luxor drummers, highlife dancers, and a bar serving sticky cocktails with plastic snakes for swizzle sticks. Nephredana perversely decided that this would make an ideal pit stop. Gibson took one of the plastic-snake cocktails, wishing that he had a way to get some more of Raus's private stock, while Nephredana engaged the bartender-a muscular young man in a loincloth whose deep-blue skin had been oiled for the occasion-in lengthy conversation, obviously giving him the recipe for some fresh cocktail from hell.