House of the Sun (4 page)

Hawk was the first to go this time, turned into a flaming, twitching firebrand. Then Toshi, transfixed by a torrent of fire, and dancing in death like a dervish. I heard a scream from behind me, a shrill, piercing shriek that went on and on ...

And suddenly I was awake, my pulse pounding an insane tattoo in my ears, my chest laboring like a bellows. My body tingled, from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head, as though someone had tried using me as a resistor in a low-voltage electric circuit. I rolled my eyes wildly for a moment as reality reassembled itself around me.

Yes. I was lying on the bed in my Randall Avenue doss, staring at the shifting patterns that the lights of passing cars painted across my ceiling. I was still fully dressed, and my clothes were wringing wet with chill sweat. Very comfortable indeed. I tried to slow my breathing as I let comforting normality seep into my body and flush out the fear poisons.

It took me a moment to realize that the high-pitched shriek was still in my ears, as if the scream had followed me out of sleep. I blinked and shook my head, and—almost like a digital sound effect—the sound morphed from a semihuman squeal into a more familiar electronic tone. With a muffled curse, I swung into a sitting position and glared at my telecom.

An incoming call, that's all it was. The alert tone had penetrated my sleep, and my unconscious had gleefully taken it and woven it into the fabric of my dream. Just what I needed.

The tone cut off as the telecom software decided I wasn't going to pick up the call myself, and went into auto-answer mode. According to the data display in the corner of the screen, the call was directed to my default, rather than my private, mailbox, so I had little incentive to shake myself out of the rack to answer it in-the-meat. While the ancient telecom was chugging through the initial handshaking, I checked my finger-watch. Nigh on oh-three-thirty. Looked like I'd overslept on my intended one-hour nap. Idly, I wondered if Naomi the smartframe had made it back with the correlations already, or whether she'd been waylaid by some electronic diversions along her path.

The telecom screen blinked and an image appeared ... and my thoughts were suddenly anything
but
idle. I recognized the face at once. A middle-aged man: a strong face, a commanding, aquiline nose, and cold eyes. His hair was still cut short, subtly spiked, showing the chrome-lipped datajack in his right temple. When I'd last seen him, that hair had been salt-and-pepper, with the pepper predominant. Now it was almost pure gray-white, with only a few streaks of black left near the crown. His face looked older than it had only four years ago, too—a good decade older. The skin looked sallow and slightly loose, and there were dark bags under his eyes. I remembered the last time we'd spoken. He'd been working his guts out on an Ultra-Gym machine, running the computerized system at a setting of eighteen on a scale of twenty. Yet he'd still been able to carry on a conversation without gasping or yarfing up his lunch. Would he be able to handle even level
one
these days? I doubted it.

Jacques Barnard, his name was. When I'd last done business with him—if that's the right phrase—he'd been a senior vice president of Yamatetsu Corporation, in charge of the megacorp's Seattle operations. If my bookie would lay odds on that kind of thing, I'd have considered him a sure bet for senior management, the ultimate corporate warrior, undeterred by the obstacles in his way.

Now? I'd have tried to buy back that hypothetical bet. He looked like an old man, did Mr. Barnard, worn and ravaged.

Not by time, so much, as by
knowledge
. The eyes that burned out of my telecom screen looked like those of a man who'd learned things he simply didn't want to know. (And the fact of the matter was, I thought I could make a damn good guess as to what some of those "things" were .,.)

"
Mr. Montgomery, good day." Barnard's voice hadn't lost any of its resonance or its somewhat daunting self-confidence. "Or perhaps 'good evening' is more appropriate. It's unfortunate that I missed you, but"—he shrugged with a wry smile—"I don't imagine our daily schedules follow the same lines.

"I have some matters I wish to discuss with you, Mr. Montgomery," Barnard went on smoothly. "I assure you that the discussion will be mutually beneficial.

"I'm appending a secure switching code—a 'cold relay,' I think is the current term on the streets." A Receive icon blinked in the corner of the screen, and the telecom chuckled softly to itself as it stored a digital data string in its nonvolatile memory. "Please contact me as soon as practical," Barnard concluded. "I look forward to the chance of talking with you again." With a faint musical
bink,
the call terminated.

I don't know how long I stared at the blank screen. When I finally shook myself out of my self-absorbed funk, my eyes were so dry they felt gritty.

It's funny how things work out ... or it
might
be funny, if those things don't involve you personally. From my side, I failed to see the humor. That faint musical tone had signified more than the end of Barnard's call, hadn't it? It had also sounded the death knell of the life I'd been living. One simple
bink,
and everything changes.

I shook my head and sighed. What were the odds of
The
Dream
and Barnard's call coming together like that? Quite a coincidence.

Of course, some people wouldn't see it that way. That friend of Jocasta Yzerman's, for example, the one she'd taught with back in the sprawl. What was his name? Harold Move-in-Shadows, or something like that. Old Harold, he'd have told me in that sententious way of his that there's no such thing as coincidence, and that everything happens because it's the will of the Great Spirits. Yeah, right. If that's the case, then the Great Spirits have a pretty fragging twisted sense of humor.

The call ... I sighed again, a deep, heartfelt sound. It had to happen—I'd known that from the outset. When things had gone to hell in a handcart that night underneath Fort Lewis—when Hawk and Rodney and the others had been slaughtered—it was Jacques Barnard's cred that had put things back together again. He'd paid off the "Wrecking Crew"—the shadow team I'd hired—including death bonuses for Toshi and Hawk. He'd arranged for me to "die," at least as far as the people at Lone Star who might want to track me down were concerned. And, most important, he'd paid for the cybernetic replacement of the arm that the Queen spirit had burned away.

He'd never even discussed the matter with me. When I'd woken up in the hospital—an exorbitantly expensive private room, again courtesy of Mr. Barnard—it had all been handled. He'd never put any strings on the payments, never demanded any concessions from me.

He hadn't needed to, of course. We both knew the way things work. Corps and corporators don't give gifts; they make investments. Barnard had invested in me, and we both understood that some time down the road he'd come looking for a return on that investment. Over the intervening four years, he'd never mentioned the matter; hell, I'd never had
anything
to do with Yamatetsu during that time, and that was just the way I liked it. But again, he hadn't needed to mention it, or remind me. Megacorporations the world over have integrated a lot of ideas from the old Japanese world-view. When someone is in your debt, it's
his
responsibility to remember the fact, not yours to remind him.

So now it was time to call in the marker. That's what the call meant. I owed him for my arm, and my livelihood—frag, for my
life,
if you got right down to it—and he was going to collect.

Dully, I walked over to the telecom and idly pressed a few keys. The smartframe
had
made it back, filling temporary files with a couple of megapulses of data on Jonathan Bridge. Those files probably contained what I needed to discharge my contract with Sharon Young, and net myself some much-needed cred.

Yet I couldn't work up the enthusiasm to open them. What did it matter anyway? I couldn't guess what Barnard would want from me. Similarly, though, I couldn't imagine that paying off my debt would leave my life unaffected.

I didn't call Barnard back right away.

I couldn't drag it out
too
long, though. He'd tracked down my LTG number in Cheyenne, so it was a safe bet he knew I was in town. If I didn't return his call within some reasonable span of time, he might start wondering whether I'd forgotten my obligation or—worse—that I was considering shirking it. How would a high muckamuck corporator like Barnard respond to that kind of irresponsibility on my part? I remembered the two business-suited knee-breakers who'd escorted me to Barnard's enclave in Madison Park four years ago, and I had no desire to meet them again on less genteel terms.

Still, I pushed it as long as I figured was politically wise ... and then a bit longer. After all, up until the moment I actually placed that call, I could still lie to myself that I was a free agent.

I spent some of my time running a quick research scan on Jacques Barnard (know thine enemies in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards, and all that). I'd assumed that Barnard was still part of Yamatetsu's Seattle operations—the fact that the "cold relay" number he'd given me was a local node just reinforced the idea—but that turned out to be off the beam. Y-Seattle was now the purview of some slitch by the name of Mary Luce, while Barnard had been bumped upstairs to become executive vice president of Yamatetsu North America. With the promotion had come a transfer to the bright heart of the Yamatetsu world—the city of Kyoto, in Nihon.

So Jacques Barnard had shaken the mud and grime of the sprawl from his thousand-nuyen shoes, had he? What would that mean for me?

Putting off the inevitable is a mug's game. Finally I bit the bullet, and placed the call: seventeen hundred hours my time, oh-nine-hundred in Kyoto. I watched the icons flicker and flash along the bottom of the screen as my telecom dialed the LTG number Barnard had given me, and made the connection. My system synched up and shook hands with the Seattle node, then the call was suspended—put on hold, basically—by the remote station. I watched as my screen echoed a call to Denver ... and was put on hold again. The process happened three more times—when Barnard said a relay was cold, I decided, he meant you could use it for cryogenic research—before I finally saw the standard Ringing symbol blink.

I frowned as the telecom waited for an answer. What the frag was I going to get pulled into, here? If Barnard figured he needed a five-node relay to talk to me, I had the nasty feeling that we wouldn't be chatting about the weather ...

The telecom whined for an instant, then an image of Barnard himself filled the screen. He was sitting at a desk, as I'd expected, but not in an office. Or, at least, not an office like any I'd ever seen before. The background was slightly out of focus, but I could still make out white marble walls, broad windows, and an open door leading out under a portico, and beyond into an ornamental garden. Life-sized, classical-style statues stood in uncomfortable-looking poses among the flowering shrubs.

Barnard looked up from what he was doing—something that was outside his telecom's field of view—and smiled when he saw my face. "Mr. Montgomery." There was real warmth—or an impressive simulation of it, at least—in his voice. "I'm glad I was able to reach you."

It was funny, but in that instant, I was glad, too. I hadn't known it until now, but this moment had been haunting me for four years. Just as you can get so used to pain like a toothache that you forget it's there, I'd become accustomed to the chronic, low-grade stress of wondering when the call would come, when the other shoe would drop. But that didn't mean the stress hadn't been there, hadn't been real. Now, as Barnard smiled at me out of the screen, I felt a strange, twisty sensation in my gut . .. and I realized, with a shock, that it was four years' worth of tension finally being relieved.

"Mr. Barnard," I said noncommittally. "Long time."

His smile—more genuine than I'd have given his acting ability credit for—grew broader, and he leaned back in his chair. His telecom's video pickup adjusted focus, and I got a better view of the statues beyond the portico. "How are you enjoying the sunshine in Cheyenne, Mr. Montgomery?" he asked lightly. "A pleasant change from Seattle, I would imagine."

I shook my head, momentarily dumbstruck. He
was
talking about the fragging weather. With an effort, I brought my thoughts back under control. "A change is as good as a rest, that's what they say, at least." I glanced away from his face to the view behind him. "Wouldn't you agree?"

He chuckled. "There are some significant .. .
perquisites
... to corporate rank," he admitted. "I do rather like Kyoto. Have you ever visited the city?"

"Never had the time."

"Unfortunate." He pursed his lips momentarily. "But you do like to travel, I trust?"

"Only if I get to keep any frequent-flier points they give me," I said dryly. "Look, Mr. Barnard, despite appearances, I'm assuming that this
isn't
a social call."

He blinked, and his expression changed. For an instant, I could have almost believed that there was disappointment in his eyes. It was gone in a microsecond, and his face became the cool mask of the seasoned negotiator. "As you wish, Mr. Montgomery." He paused, as if to order his thoughts. "As you might have guessed, there is a ... a
matter,
one might say ... on which you can help me. Do you have a passport? Not in your own name, of course"—he chuckled softly—"considering that Derek Montgomery officially died in twenty fifty-two. But one that will pass muster?"