Bangkok. Gonzales climbed into the plane, placed his bag and the
memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated
himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.
The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog. After a while, the
blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-
wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted
until the ascending scream of engine noise told him they were
landing.
As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake
Tahoe stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on
the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final
pproach to Traynor's estate.
>From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past two
as independent auditor, Gonzales knew quite a bit about Frederick
Lewis Traynor, his boss. Traynor had wealth sufficient for even
the most extravagant tastesit was his family's, and he had known
nothing elsebut power whose smallest touch could shape lives,
imprint stone, that he longed for. From his position as head of
Internal Affairs, one of SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he
plotted ascent to the SenTrax Board; he wanted to be one of the
twenty people who had moved beyond negotiation and compromise,
whose desires were reality, whims action.
In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of eminence
that is privileged, when it wishes, not to exist. His house and
land occupied a chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there
had once been two casino-hotels and a section of state highway.
The hotels had been demolished, the highway diverted. The grounds
were now surrounded by a four-meter high fence of slatted black
steelalarmed, hot-wired, and robot-patrolled. The estate showed
on no map or record of purchase, ownership or taxation; neither
did the man himself.
When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great expanse
of green lawn, Traynor waited to meet him. He was short and
pudgy, and his skin was pale. His sparse hair lay limp in dark
curls on his skull. On his feet were soft black slippers, and he
wore an embroidered silk robegreen and blue and white and red,
with rearing dragons across back and front. He thought of himself
as Byroniceccentric and interesting, afflicted by geniusbut to
Gonzales and many others he appeared simply petulant and self-
indulgent.
Traynor stretched his arms wide and said, 'Mikhail,' giving
the name three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a
brief hug. Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said,
'You don't look too bad.'
'Is that why you brought me here, to look at me?'
Traynor shrugged. 'For that, maybe, and to talk to you about
your next job. Besides, I like you.'
Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his peculiar
boss's and rich man's way. Particularly, he seemed to like the
fact that Gonzales wasn't awed by the outward and visible
manifestations of his money and power.
'Good breeding,' Traynor had said to him once. 'That's your
secret: patrician and plebian blood mixed.' Mikhail
Mikhailovitch Gonzales was of mixed blood indeed; among others,
Russian Jews and Hispanics from Los Angeles on his mother's side,
Blacks from Chicago and Cubans from Miami on his father's. Among
his family background were slaves and field workers and bourgeois
counter-revolutionaries, along with the odd artist and smuggler
and con man.
However, whatever his breeding or experience, he had to put
up with lots of cheerful, condescending bullshit from Traynor, as
he had to put up with Traynor in general, because the man was rich
and powerful and the boss, and neither of them ever forgot it.
The two walked toward the house that stood facing the lake at
the lawn's far border, a Stately Home an idealized eighteenth-
century English architect might have built for an equally
idealized and indulgent patron. Off a golden domed center stood
three wings of creamy stone, the whole in restrained neo-Palladian
with no modern excesses of material, no foamed colored concrete
and composites, just the tan and creamy sandstone and rose marble
speaking wealth and taste.
They climbed up marble stairs and passed into the house and
under a looming interior dome that soared high above the central
rotunda where the house's three wings joined. They walked down a
hallway of dark wainscoting below cream walls and ceiling.
Gonzales caught glimpses of side rooms through open doorways
as they passed. One room appeared to front upon a night filled
with swirling nebulae and a million stars, the next on sunshine
and dazzling snows. Still another contained nothing but white
walls, floors of polished marble and a five-meter hand centered
motionless in mid-airindex finger extended, other three fingers
curled against the palm, thumb erect on top like the hammer of a
make-believe gun.
Mahogany doors parted in front of the two men, and they
passed into the library. Its dark-paneled walls gave away
nothing: even close up, the books might have been holo-fronts,
might have been real. Flat data entry modules were laid into
mahogany side tables that stood next to red leather easy chairs
and maroon velour couches.
'Sit down, Mikhail,' Traynor said.
Gonzales could feel the silence heavy and somber among the
dark invocations of another time, leather and furnishings
conjuring up men's clubs, smoking rooms, the somber whispers of
deals going down.
Traynor's eyes lost focus as he went rapt, listening to his
voice within. Even if he hadn't been aware of Traynor's
dependence on his Advisor, Gonzales would have known what was
happening. Traynor, higher up in the executive food chain than
anyone else of Gonzales's acquaintance, needed permanent real-time
