orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems - vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans - and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator - the line between night and day - has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the west.
Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East Coast.
Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse. He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down at a solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit.
'Your information, sir,' the Librarian says.
Hiro startles and glances up. Earth swings down and out of his field of view and there is the Librarian, standing in front of the desk, holding out a hypercard. Like any librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around without audible footfalls.
'Can you make a little more noise when you walk? I'm easily startled,' Hiro says.
'It is done, sir. My apologies.'
Hiro reaches out for the hypercard. The Librarian takes half a step forward and leans toward him. This time, his foot makes a soft noise on the tatami mat, and Hiro can hear the white noise of his trousers sliding over his leg.
Hiro takes the hypercard and looks at it. The front is labeled
Results of Library search on:
Rife, Lawrence Robert, 1948-
He flips the card over. The back is divided into several dozen fingemail-sized icons. Some of them are little snapshots of the front pages of newspapers. Many of them are colorful, glowing rectangles: miniature television screens showing live video.
'That's impossible,' Hiro says. 'I'm sitting in a VW van, okay? I'm jacked in over a cellular link. You couldn't have moved that much video into my system that fast.'
'It was not necessary to move anything,' the Librarian says. 'All existing video on L. Bob Rife was collected by Dr. Lagos and placed in the Babel/Infocalypse stack, which you have in your system.'
'Oh.'
14
Hiro stares at the miniature TV in the upper left comer of the card. It zooms toward him until it's about the size of a twelve-inch low-def television set at arms' length. Then the video image begins to play. It's very poor eight-millimeter film footage of a high school football game in the sixties. No soundtrack.
'What is this game?'
The Librarian says, 'Odessa, Texas, 1965. L. Bob Rife is a fullback, number eight in the dark uniform.'
'This is more detail than I need. Can you summarize some of these things?'
'No. But I can list the contents briefly. The stack contains eleven high school football games. Rife was on the second-string Texas all-state team in his senior year. Then he proceeded to Rice on an academic scholarship and walked onto the football team, so there are also fourteen tapes of college games. Rife majored in communications.'
'Logically enough, considering what he became.'
'He became a television sports reporter in the Houston market, so there are fifty hours of footage from this period - mostly outtakes, of course. After two years in this line of work, Rife went into business with his great- uncle, a financier with roots in the oil business. The stack contains a few newspaper stories to that effect, which, as I note from reading them, are all textually related - implying that they came from the same source.'
'A press release.'
'Then there are no stories for five years.'
'He was up to something.'
'Then we begin to see more stories, mostly from the Religion sections of Houston newspapers, detailing Rife's contributions to various organizations.'
'That sounded like summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize.'
'I can't really. I was quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita Marquez recently, in my presence, when they were reviewing the same data.'
'Go on.'
'Rife contributed $500 to the Highlands Church of the Baptism by Fire, Reverend Wayne Bedford, head minister; $2,500 to the Pentecostal Youth League of Bayside, Reverend Wayne Bedford, president; $150,000 to the Pentecostal Church of the New Trinity, Reverend Wayne Bedford, founder and patriarch; $2.3 million to Rife Bible College, Reverend Wayne Bedford, President and chairman of the theology department; $20 million to the archaeology department of Rife Bible College, plus $45 million to the astronomy department and $100 million to the computer science department.'
'Did these donations take place before hyperinflation?'
'Yes, sir. They were, as the expression goes, real money.'
'That Wayne Bedford guy - is this the same Reverend Wayne who runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates?'
'The same.'
'Are you telling me that Rife owns the Reverend Wayne?'
'He owns a majority share in Pearlgate Associates, which is the multinational that runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates chain.'
'Okay, let's keep sifting through this,' Hiro says.
Hiro Peeps out over his goggles to confirm that Vitaly is still nowhere near the concert. Then he dives back in and continues to go over the video and the news stories that Lagos has compiled.
During the same years that Rife makes his contributions to the Reverend Wayne, he's showing up with increasing frequency in the business section, first in the local papers and later in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. There is a big flurry of publicity - obvious PR plants - after the Nipponese tried to use their old- boy network to shut him out of the telecommunications market there, and he took it to the American public, spending $10 million of his own money on a campaign to convince Americans that the Nipponese were duplicitous schemers. A triumphal cover on The Economist after the Nipponese finally knuckled under and let him corner the fiber-optics market in that country and, by extension, most of East Asia.
Finally, then, the lifestyle pieces start coming in. L. Bob Rife has let his publicist know that he wants to show a more human side. There is a personality journalism program that does a puff piece on Rife after he buys a new yacht, surplus, from the U.S. Government.
L. Bob Rife, last of the nineteenth-century monopolists, is shown consulting with his decorator in the captain's quarters. It looks nice as it is, considering that Rife bought this ship from the Navy, but it's not Texan enough for him. He wants it gutted and rebuilt. Then, shots of Rife maneuvering his steerlike body through the narrow passages and steep staircase of the ship's interior - typical boring gray steel Navy scape, which, he assures the interviewer, he is going to have spruced up considerably.
'Y'know, there's a story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht, he bought a pretty small one, like a seventy-footer or something. Small by the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he went and bought himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, 'What do you think I am, a Vanderbilt?' Haw! Well, anyway, welcome aboard my yacht.'
L. Bob Rife says this while standing on a huge open-air platform elevator along with the interviewer and the whole camera crew. The elevator is going up. In the background is the Pacific Ocean. As Rife is speaking the last
