“No,” the elf said slowly, “but I think I’ve learned not to ask the wrong questions.”

Salai stopped and looked at him hard. “I may have underestimated you,” he said. “Perhaps you will be ready for the move beyond. You’ve put your finger on the Johannite heresy.”

“I read about it,” Serrin confessed. It had only been a recent acquaintance.

“What on earth are you two talking about?” Michael demanded.

“It’s the belief that John the Baptist was the true divine figure,” Serrin said. “The people here have always believed that. Their sacred text is the Book of John. It was the image in the photo ID from the airport, the raised finger. ‘Remember John’. It’s something to do with this belief. That’s why we’re here. It’s the only thing about Ahvaz that’s singular. The cult is very small.”

“Good, you’re still only halfway there,” Salai said with the relief of someone who’s found that a bright and thoughtful child was not, after all, more intelligent than he or she ought to be. And they may be few in number, but one faithful and loyal man is worth more than a hundred fainthearts. Isn’t that true, Mister Mercenary?”

He looked at Streak and the elf saw him as someone not half so foppish and supercilious as he’d taken him to be.

“Too true, mate,” the elf said. “Well, now where?”

“To meet my master. But I cannot permit any form of weaponry. That means, I regret, that our fine friend here”-he looked disapprovingly at Juan-will have to remain outside. I cannot allow that thing,” and he pointed to the cyberarm, “inside a room with my master.”

“Of course,” Michael said. He handed over his own gun, and told the others to do the same.

“I don’t like this,” Streak growled. “I feel naked.”

“Get used to it,” Michael told him. “We have no choice. We’re not here to be threatened or harmed.”

“Far from it. You are called as witnesses,” Salai said with a returned air of annoying superciliousness.

“Bugger that. When they knock on the door it’s definitely time to get the Predator out,” Streak growled.

“I hardly meant Jehovah’s witnesses,” Salai said impatiently. “Nothing could be less apt, under the circumstances.”

“And now enough of this. If you’re ready, it’s time to meet my master and behave with the deference he deserves.”

Michael already had whoever they were going to meet tagged as a serious nutcase. Brilliant, obviously, but the man gibbering about the Prophet outside made him think they were about to meet someone with some very serious delusions indeed. He couldn’t know that the belief was useful to that very person, and one he allowed to remain unchallenged not least because it gave comfort to simple people who had, in return, given him sweat, labor, and love for many years now.

The internal doors down the corridor swung open. They were made of smoked glass and revealed nothing inside the room, so when what lay beyond them was revealed, the newcomers did not have the benefit of forewarning, and they were astounded by the scene before them.

The figure sat with his back to them in a high-backed chair, only the long, flowing gray hair visible to them, save for his long-fingered hands resting on the arms of the chair. The walls were covered with designs and sketches, finely rendered, apparently blueprints for optical systems of extraordinary complexity. On the desk before the figure was what had to be a cyberdeck, though it was unlike any they’d ever seen. It made the finest customized Fairlight look like a child’s toy. There was not a right-angle on it. It was sculpted, apparently of ivory or something similar, and had fluted edges and the eerie, unreal hyperreality of some alien artifact. It looked like it could only ever exist inside the extreme geometrical perfection of the Matrix, not out here in a real world of chaotic imperfections. Pearly light glowed around it, and in the near-darkness of the room it seemed for a moment that a reflection of that light covered the head of the seated figure like a halo. The nimbus winked out of existence and the figure turned around, the chair swiveling through a hundred and eighty degrees.

My God, Michael thought, this is the finest cosmetic job I’ve ever seen in my life. Forget the supermodels and the simsense stars, this is an absolutely perfect replica. Younger, of course. The photo ID wasn’t decked at all.

Staring at them, quietly and gravely and with his hands folded gently in his lap, was a person who for all the world was the perfect image of Leonardo da Vinci.

28

“I must commend your plastic surgeon,” Michael said. “It’s a magnificent job.”

“Shut up,” Serrin said swiftly. He knew, although the others-including Streak-had not realized it, that the figure was an elf. The long, flowing hair concealed the most obvious distinguishing feature, the ears, and the Looseness of the figure’s simple robed garment hid his body shape. But Serrin could tell instinctively that the man was elven, and that he was not the kind of person to trivialize himself with cosmetics. And all the implications of that made Serrin very worried indeed.

“I’m glad you are here,” the figure said in English, in a quiet voice that struck them all with the unstated force of its serene dignity. Seated simply in his chair, there was an aura about him that stopped wisecracks and levity in their tracks.

“Why are we here?” Michael asked, hoping to get the edge by doing the questioning.

The elf regarded him levelly, unblinking. “For different reasons, actually. In your case, because I expect to deal with Renraku through you. I also hope you may come here on a more permanent basis, but we can talk about that later.”

Michael ignored that last, surprising gambit. “Who are you?”

“You can see who I am.”

“I can see who you appear to be.”

“You can see who I am,” the elf repeated, without any impatience, but with a slight sadness instead. “I am who I appear to be.”

“No. Impossible.”

“Why?”

“Leonardo da Vinci has been dead for more than five hundred years.”

The elf smiled slightly. “We’ve grown used to such subterfuges,” he said simply. “There are times when it becomes necessary.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Perhaps at the moment you can’t,” the elf said sadly. “It doesn’t matter at this time. Are you interested in this?”

Michael looked longingly at the deck the man indicated with a wave of his slender hand.

“Come and see,” the elf invited him.

“I don’t see any hitcher ‘trodes,” Michael said uncertainly, his curiosity struggling with his fearful confusion.

“You won’t need that. Shall we see what your friends are doing in Chiba?”

“Are you serious? No, I’m Sorry, that was a stupid question. You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”

“Very simple,” the elf said. “Anyway, you need no jack. Just sit down.”

Michael sat in the chair next to the elf while the others, unsure of what they should be doing in this ritual, kept quiet and waited to see what would happen.

Michael had heard of the otaku, of course, the cybershamans who needed no deck to run the Matrix, but claimed some mystical communion with it, a union that let them use strange, singular skills in their autistic minds to work within it. And the elf worked in the same way, but he also channeled whatever he was doing through the deck, save that he used no physical link with it. He guided Michael’s persona-in itself an impossibility since Michael’s own deck was still in their plane, back at the airstrip-deep into the very heart of the Renraku Chiba core system. Everything within it, the icons of company deckers and reactive ice, was moving at a snail’s pace. They traveled through the system and the elf accessed some personnel records of Renraku’s top executives and danced back out of the system as easily as he’d penetrated it. To Michael, leaving it was like waking from a dream.