For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the past day, ever since he got back from Rome. He's developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and unable to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his predicament. Annette is putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly.
He's not sure why, but he glances her way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she's quite clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more comfortable around her than he did with Pam?
She stretches and pushes her goggles up. 'Oui?'
'I was just thinking.' He smiles. 'Three days and you haven't told me what I should be doing with myself, yet.'
She pulls a face. 'Why would I do that?'
'Oh, no reason. I'm just not over – ' He shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he feels he urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He's not sure: Starting with the occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships, he's been effectively – voluntarily – dominated by his partners. Maybe the antisubmissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why the creative malaise? Why isn't he coming up with original new ideas this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or could it be that he really is missing Pam?
Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and affection, and isn't sure whether or not this is love. 'When are they due?' she asks, leaning over him.
'Any -' The doorbell chimes.
'Ah. I will get that.' She stalks away, opens the door.
'You!'
Manfred's head snaps round as if he's on a leash. Her leash: But he wasn't expecting her to come in person.
'Yes, me,' Annette says easily. 'Come in. Be my guest.'
Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in tow. 'Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in,' she drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to anger than to humor. It's not like her, this blunt hostility, and he wonders where it came from.
Manfred rises. For a moment he's transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix wife, and his – mistress?
conspirator? lover? – side by side. The contrast is marked: Annette's expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela's angry sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam might have turned him into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. 'Can I offer you some coffee?' he asks. 'The party of the third part seems to be late.'
'Coffee would be great, mine's dark, no sugar,' twitters the lawyer. He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames: 'I'm recording this, I'm sure you understand.'
Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn't exist. 'Well, well, well.' She shakes her head. 'I'd expected better of you than a French tart's boudoir, Manny. And before the ink's dry on the divorce – these days that'll cost you, didn't you think of that?'
'I'm surprised you're not in the hospital,' he says, changing the subject. 'Is postnatal recovery outsourced these days?'
'The employers.' She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the broad wooden door. 'They subsidize everything when you reach my grade.' Pamela is wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: But to his surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes that he's completely unable to evaluate her gender, almost as if she's become a member of another species. 'As you'd be aware if you'd been paying attention.'
'I always pay attention, Pam. It's the only currency I carry.'
'Very droll, ha-ha,' interrupts Glashwiecz. 'You do realize that you're paying me while I stand here listening to this fascinating byplay?'
Manfred stares at him. 'You know I don't have any money.'
'Ah,' Glashwiecz smiles, 'but you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken – all a lack of paper documentation means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be something, hasn't there?'
A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. 'Your attack was rather elegant,' he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into the kitchen.
Glashwiecz nods. 'The idea was one of my interns',' he says. 'I don't understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same.'
'Uh-huh.' Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.
'So what's the scam?' Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. 'Where's the money?'
Manfred looks at him irritably. 'There is no money,' he says. 'The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained that?' His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer's Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring.
'C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm here for is to see that your wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you've got bags of it stuffed away – just look at your reputation! You didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?'
Manfred snorts. 'You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I -' The stereo bleeps.
Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it.
'You're making it hard on yourself,' Glashwiecz warns.
'Expecting company?' Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's direction.
'Not exactly -'
Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They're clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. 'That's them,' Annette says clearly.
'Mais Oui.' The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam.
'You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from Manfred?' she sniffs.
'You're making a big mistake, lady,' Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.
A burst of static from one of the troopers. 'No,' Annette says distantly. 'No mistake.'
She points at Glashwiecz. 'Are you aware of the takeover?'
'Takeover?' The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards.
'As of three hours ago,' Manfred says quietly, 'I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants – they take explosive business plans and detonate them.' Glashwiecz is looking pale – whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. 'Actually,
