* * *
While he's having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition – his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink.
Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons – she still hasn't given up on the idea of government as the dominant superorganism of the age – but also because she loves him in her own peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills, overseas adventurism, and decaying infrastructure, she's willing to use self-denial, entrapment, predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any other tool that boosts the bottom line. She doesn't approve of Manfred's jetting around the world on free airline passes, making strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She
The reason he's running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted 96-hour-old blastula. Pam's bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children parasite meme.
PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there's one thing that Manfred really
* * *
Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model airplane show. It's a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer – he's had a tip-off that someone will be there – and besides, flying models are hot hacker shit this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras, and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers, and you've got the next generation of military stealth flyer: It's a fertile talent-show scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is happening in a decaying out-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor for events like this.
Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery. Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still need to eat.)
Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of electrocution. Big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional nightmare, painted all the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine-hygiene galley has been wheeled back to make room for a gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter – a microsat launcher and conference display, plonked there by the show's sponsors in a transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering geeks.
Manfred's glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: He pipes the image stream up to one of his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G. Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an intricate game of tag. Manfred's so busy tracking the warbirds that he nearly trips over the fat white tube's launcher-erector.
'Eh, Manfred! More care, s'il vous plait!'
He wipes the planes and glances round. 'Do I know you?' he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.
'Amsterdam, three years ago.' The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear.
'Annette from Arianespace marketing?' She nods, and he focuses on her. Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man: cropped bleached crew cut like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Only her skin color hints at her Berber ancestry. Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. Her raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as she sees his reaction. 'I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?'
'Why ' – her wave takes in the entirety of the show – 'this talent show, of course.' An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable tampon. 'It's good talent. We're hiring this year. If we re-enter the launcher market, we must employ only the best. Amateurs, not time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can offer.'
For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the flank of the booster. 'You outsourced your launch-vehicle fabrication?'
Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: 'Space hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and explode, they are passe, they say. Diversify, they say. Until -' She gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording everything she says, for the purposes of due diligence.
'I'm glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business,' he says seriously. 'It's going to be very important when the nanosystems conformational replication business gets going for real. A major strategic asset to any corporate entity in the field, even a hotel chain.' Especially now they've wound up NASA and the moon race is down to China and India, he thinks sourly.
Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. 'And yourself, mon cher? What brings you to the Confederacion?
You must have a deal in mind.'
'Well., it's Manfred's turn to shrug, 'I was hoping to find a CIA agent, but there don't seem to be any here today.'
' That is not surprising,' Annette says resentfully. 'The CIA thinks the space industry, she is dead. Fools!'
She continues for a minute, enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness. 'They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public,' she adds.
'All these wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special Plans…' She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor display.
An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's website, and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's boyfriend – a dashing young air force pilot – shows up to escort her away. 'Tourists,' she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with fingers twitching. 'Manfred?'
'Uh – what?'
'I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me.' She takes hold of his left arm and
