NETFEED/NEWS: Smell—The Final Frontier

(visual: WeeWin's olfactory testing lab)

VO: The Euro-Asian toy company WeeWin has announced what it calls "the first genuine scent delivery system" for net users without neurocannular capabilities. WeeWin says the NozKnoz (pronounced "noseknows") system uses a scent palette of basic olfactory stimuli to create millions of different odors,

(visual: Dougal Craigie, WeeWin VPPR)

CRAIGIE: "Many people don't use neurocannulas—not just because they can't afford them, but also for medical and religious reasons. So we are not just excited, but deeply proud to announce that you no longer need to have your brain wired to enjoy the many smells of the net. This is not one of those cheap chocolate-and-cheese pastiche systems—NozKnoz nasal delivery plugs give results that cannot be distinguished from neurocannular stimulation."

Dulcie snuck another look at her silent employer, certain at some irrational level of her being that even in his deathlike sleep he must be able to sense her guilt, but if he did, his still form gave no indication. She turned back to the small screen on her pad, which she had chosen because it seemed more discreet than the wide wallscreen.

Dread's hidden storage had remained adamantly inaccessible. She had thrown every sort of decryption and security-breaking gear at it, had found it protected by nothing more advanced than a password, no quantum cryptography or anything special, but her gear had run an almost uncountable amount of number and letter combinations past it without success.

For God's sake! It's just a goddamn password! Why can't I break this?

Of course, when it came to passwords, it always helped if you knew something about the person whose account you were trying to crack.

Reluctantly, she gave up on penetrating her employer's mysteries, closed off her access to Dread's system and then ran some cleanup gear. She doubted that either Dread or his security program were sophisticated enough to spot her incursion, but there was no sense taking chances.

Irritated with herself, her earlier bold mood dissolving into worry and second thoughts, she opened up the Jongleur files—her legitimate work, if you could use such a term to describe felonious data theft—and got back down to business. As the signifiers filled her tiny screen she swore, then transferred operations up to the wallscreen—it was hard enough trying to make sense of things in two dimensions, let alone on a screen measured in centimeters. She left it at that, though: for some reason she felt reluctant to submerge herself in a 3D environment, even though she could do some things more efficiently in wraparound.

I'm scared to be helpless in a VR setup while I'm in the same room with Dread, she realized. It's not street hoodlums, not burglars I'm frightened of . . . but him. That's great, Anwin—two weeks into the thing is a bit late to realize it.

She looked at the dark ridgeline of his profile, moving up and down gently now as the bed massaged him, and a sudden image from her childhood reading leaped into her brain. She almost dropped her coffee.

Jesus, I'm Renfield. That guy who ate the flies and spiders. And it's my job to watch over Count Dracula.

She felt a little better after a quick shower, although she had decided on a caffeine moratorium for the rest of the day.

Dracula? Let's not get too morbid, Anwin, she told herself as she sat back down to stare at the Jongleur files. Still, she thought, if her boss popped up out of his humming coffin just now, even full of kind words and barely-veiled sexual interest as he sometimes was, she didn't think she was going to be very receptive.

She did her best to narrow her attention, sifting through the Jongleur information that had not made the first cut, yet which somehow might still hide useful data about the Grail network. An hour passed and she began to feel more like herself, even taking a few minutes to try to reopen Jongleur's weird Ushabti file, but her failure to provide the proper code or password the first time had left it as mute and secretive as an oyster.

They're just the goddamn same, the two of them. No wonder Jongleur hired him. . . . She froze, stunned by her own stupidity in not having thought of it sooner. My God, of course. His employer! If anybody's going to have any information on our boy Dread it's going to be Jongleur!

Within moments she had moved the display of Jongleur files back to the pad and had started to search. A request for "Dread" turned up nothing useful, which didn't entirely surprise her, and neither did "Sydney" or "Cartagena" "Isla de Santuario" or anything else that came to mind. How could you search for information on someone when you had almost no information with which to begin a search?

Jaws clamped so hard in concentration that she would have a headache later, Dulcie pulled up the immense bank of J Corporation accounting records and sent dozens of different bits of specialized gear looking for anomalies while performing the same search on Jongleur's personal files. The guy has to be paid, she thought. No matter what they call it, there has to be a connection. She also pulled up Dread's own system, all of which she had already explored except for the hidden storage—"the locked room," as she had begun to think of it, a phrase out of memory that rang a faint bell she was too busy to heed. It was boring, mundane stuff, but she wasn't looking for a revelation there, not in data she'd already examined. She was looking for a match, however obscure, a place where an open end on the Jongleur side lined up with something similar on Dread's side.

It took almost two hours, but she found it at last. A short string of numbers on a single disbursement out of the J Corporation's staggeringly large operating budget, routed through several smaller companies with no obvious connection to the corporation, one in North Africa, the others in the Caribbean, matched another string of numbers in an account which, although it belonged to an apparently fictitious company, was nevertheless listed on Dread's own system. Based on the dates, she suspected she was looking at some of the expenses for setting up the Colombian assault. It seemed to be an emergency replacement for some funds that had been misrouted, which was the only reason she had found the connection.

It's the little mistakes that kill you every time, she thought gleefully.

With this single small thread in her fingers she began to pick her way backward, following the chain of authority, sometimes by easy steps, sometimes only by leaps of practiced intuition, until at last she found herself moving slowly back up the connection she had discovered between the J Corporation and Jongleur's own personal system. Her palms were sweating, her heart fluttering.

The strands led to a group of files in Jongleur's system labeled "disposal"—which she at first thought was a little joke on the old man's part, but when she began to examine them she found that they were indeed contracts, reports, and other information about the hugely complex waste removal systems of the artificial island, thousands and thousands of nested files, all perfectly, boringly normal. She sat back, stunned and disappointed. How could she have been so wrong? Had she missed a stitch back there somewhere, then followed the wrong thread all the way back across the tapestry? It would take her at least another few hours to go back over it and find her mistake.

She was just about to close the whole mess in disgust when she suddenly wondered why Jongleur should take such an interest in the waste removal infrastructure for the corporate property, to the extent of having it on his own personal system. It was his own principal residence, of course, but it still seemed odd. She checked and found that the same set of files existed in the corporate system, but that didn't prove anything—Jongleur could simply have wanted his own copy, perhaps because there was some more mundane accounting discrepancy he was examining. Still, the Jongleur that Dread had spoken of didn't seem like a man too interested in the day-to-day business of maintaining corporate headquarters.

Dulcie ran a comparison study of the two files, drumming her fingers impatiently until the processing marker stopped flashing.

Two files with the same name, She saw, excitement rising again. And the J Corp. version is smaller than the Jongleur version. Bingo!

A moment's spin of the digital tumblers and the larger file was open. Dulcie's fingers were no longer rapping on the edge of the pad but curling like the claws of a hunting bird ready to swoop. The extra information was secured in a lower layer, like a smuggler's false bottom bolted to the undercarriage of a truck. She keyed it open, holding her breath.

Something whined like a dental drill.

Files and signifiers began to leap onto the screen and dissolve. Message pointers flashed like tiny explosions. Her system defenses were screaming, the high-pitched alarm so painful that for a moment she could not understand what was happening.

Oh, shit—a 'phage! But why isn't my gear stopping it?

She had opened the file without proper permission and had set off a dataphage, one that her own gear apparently did not know how to handle. Within moments it would destroy all the material in the file, not just delete the markers but chew the actual data off the storage. God only knew what else it might do on the way—maybe take her whole system down.

Once, as a teenage babysitter in someone else's house, she had dumped an ashtray into a wastebasket and, without realizing it, set the wastebasket's contents on fire. The flames had climbed the long drapes of a picture window before she wandered back into the room. The feeling of terror and transgression had been just like this. It was all she could do not to leap up and smash the pad against the floor in an attempt to kill the horrible thing she had awakened.

Knowing that every second was critical, she switched the pad over to voice command and began calling up emergency measures, her system's equivalent of the volunteer fire department, since the dataphage's explosive onset had already overwhelmed her built-in regulators. Within a few moments she had managed to isolate the cancerous 'phage from the rest of her own data, but that was doing nothing to stop the destruction of the disposal file she had copied from Jongleur's system. And despite her quick move to firewall the damage, the 'phage seemed to have done odd things to her system already: the communications markers were flashing, as though she herself had been trying to obtain an outgoing line.

Another minute's frantic work enabled her to find another piece of emergency gear she had almost forgotten she had, allowing her at last to grab the isolated section of data and freeze it, but the destruction was huge if not total. She very much doubted there was anything left of the original group of files.

But that's just a copy, she reminded herself. The primary version's still there on the Jongleur system. I'll just call it up and copy it off again, then be more careful with it next time. . . .

It was only then that she understood the significance of the blinking communications marker. With dawning horror, she disconnected, but it was already too late. The implanted dataphage was an extreme measure, constructed not only to destroy the pirated file but to call out and destroy the master file, too, probably after sending a high-alert warning to the owner of the file to give them a chance to countermand.

But if Jongleur's not around, then the whole thing is just gone now. Gone. And if he is around, then I've just told him that someone has one of his most sensitive files.

A quick check confirmed her growing misery. The master file in question was now officially nonexistent.

"Shit," she said aloud. "Shit, shit, shit!"

"What's the problem, sweetness?"

Dulcie shrieked and her pad slid from her knee and thumped on the carpeted floor. Dread was standing beside her, all long, tawny muscles and bare skin, wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist so that he looked like a statue stepped down from its plinth. She had not even heard him approach.

"God, y–you scared me!" But the mere fact of his sudden appearance was not the only reason for her stuttering heart. The pad lay faceup on the floor, full of incriminating data. She dropped to her knees and picked it up, babbling to cover her real terror. "I didn't know . . . I thought you were . . . it's so quiet in here, but I didn't hear you. . . ."

As he stared at her, an amused smile quirking his mouth, she blanked the small screen. "Didn't mean to give you a heart attack," he said. "What's up?" He squinted at her pad. "Why aren't you using the wall?"

"My eyes . . . it gives me . . . makes my head ache, sometimes."

He nodded. "What pissed you off so badly?"

"What?" She was desperately trying to remember what was still open and flowing to the pad. What if he wanted to access his system? "Oh, just . . . some problems with security on some of Jongleur's files. Some of his banking stuff." As far as she knew, Dread's accounting data was still live and connected, her own gear waiting for further search requests. She cursed herself for not having done the prudent thing and copied the files she was examining to her own system. She had a desperate, clammy feeling that if he found out, something worse than the usual firing might be the result. She tried to calm her unsteady voice and speak lightly. "I've been doing this for hours and I'm ragged, utterly. Are you up for a while?"

He cocked his head. "Why?"

"I don't know. Could we go out and get some dinner, something? Just get out of here for an hour or two?"

Something moved behind his dark eyes; she prayed she hadn't caught him in a suspicious mood. "Right," he said after a moment. "Why not? Are you buying?"

She forced herself to laugh. "Sure. Just let me tidy up a few things. . . ."

While Dread was pulling on clothes, Dulcie closed and locked off everything, then ran her cleanup gear. She was trembling so badly she had to set her pad down on a table-top so she didn't drop it again.

How can he move so quietly? He got out of that thing and walked all the way across the room behind me and I never heard him. Maybe he really is a vampire. It wasn't a very good joke, not at the moment. She finished and turned off her pad, then wiped her sleeve across her face. The room was cool, but she was sweating.

Maybe Renfield needs to think about getting into another line of work. . . .

Dread was quite charming over dinner, flashing those white teeth, playfully exaggerating his Aussie machismo to try to make her laugh. If Dulcie had been meeting him for the first time she would have been quite taken by his stories of the strange places and even stranger folk he had met in his peculiar line of work. If it had been even a week earlier, she might have had that third glass of wine, even a fourth, and let herself descend into warm compliance. Instead, she spent the entire meal thinking about how close she had come to being caught, wondering every time he gave her one of his penetrating looks whether he was about to reveal that he knew what she had been doing.

Whether he suspected her of misbehavior or not, there was definitely something going on beneath the surface. Dread had always been subject to oddly high-flown, almost feverish bouts of enthusiasm. That was going on tonight, but it was twinned somehow with the watchful Dread she also knew, as though he were keeping a tight rein on himself because he knew he was on the brink of letting go entirely. As they walked back from the cafe he fell silent, looking neither at her nor the rain-spattered streets, but keeping his eyes fixed at a point somewhere above the invisible horizon. There was an unusual bounce in his step, a subtle but consistent flexing of muscles, as though he alone of all humanity had overcome gravity but had decided to maintain the pretense of obeying it.

In the main room of the loft, with the overhead fluorescents still off and only the red and white fairy-lights of the coma bed giving shape to the dark walls, he put his arm around her and drew her close. He was shockingly strong, even in this swift and apparently careless gesture; for half a moment she thought he planned to break her spine and did not doubt he could do it. Instead he laid his cheek against hers, his lips close to her ear.

"Shall we dance, sweetness? I have music inside me, you know. I can play it for you."

She had already spoiled any chance of a graceful exit by stiffening at his touch. Suddenly the idea of having sex with this man seemed far more disturbing than she had ever imagined it to be, not a question of morning-after remorse but of actual terror. A little voice deep inside her brain—the child-voice, the rememberer-of-stories—squealed He wants to steal your soul. . . ! She struggled to calm herself, although she was certain that with his sharp animal senses he must smell her fear. "I . . . I don't feel very good. Cramps. But . . . it was a very nice dinner."

His teeth gently, gently closed on her earlobe. The tiny pain sent a bolt of black lightning down her spine. "Oh, Dulcie, sweetness—you wouldn't be teasing a bloke, now would you?"

"No." Her heart was thumping painfully, I'm all alone. "No, I'm not that kind . . . I don't do that."

He took her jaw between index finger and thumb and turned her face so he cold look closely, his smile completely at odds with the shadowed hollows that were all she could see of his stare, like the black eyeholes of a mask. She felt a clawing urge to cry out, but for that brief moment, as if plunged into nightmare, she could make no sound.

When he let go of her, she almost fell.

"Well, then," he said lightly, "I suppose I might as well get back to work. It's quite a job being God, after all." He kissed his fingertip and touched it lightly against her dry lips. "Wouldn't want you to think I was the kind of man who can't control himself." He laughed, then with startling unconcern began to undress for the coma bed. Dulcie fled to the bathroom.

I don't trust myself anymore, she thought. I can't tell what's real and what's not. He's a monster? Then why didn't he just force me—I couldn't have lifted a finger. No pleading, no trying to scare me.

But she was scared, although the rationale-collectors of her upper mind were beginning to send memos, form committees, call meetings.

He's just . . . weird. Dark. But what did you expect? The guy is an international mercenary, for God's sake, not a homeroom teacher.

Just go to the airport, a more frightened voice told her. Get the hell out of town. Tell him your mother's dying. Tell him anything.

But I can't just walk out on him, she suddenly realized. He's not going to let me, is he? I'm the only person who knows what he's been doing. The nervous fear she had been feeling suddenly frosted over, turned into something thicker and colder. If he killed his boss, is he going to just let me walk away? Certainly not if I do it in a hurry—that's what starts a hunting animal chasing you.

Listen to you, Anwin—a hunting animal? Let's not get carried away. What has he done, really? He hired you. He's paying you. So you've decided you don't like him much. . . .

She sat up on the bed, head pounding. She fumbled in her bag without result, then remembered she had put her gun back in the drawer next to the coffee things.

Am I really being ridiculous? Besides, he's so fast—if he doesn't want to take no for an answer next time, would I even get the chance to use it? She let her purse slide to the floor. Too much. This is too much—I need some sleep.

Half an hour later, although the painblockers had dulled the throb of her head, sleep was still depressingly distant. She got up and walked quietly down the short hallway into the main section of the loft.

Dread was again lying in the special bed, serene as a buddha. A slightly less adult part of herself whispered, Typical man. I've got a headache and I'm thinking about shooting him, and he sleeps through everything.

But he wasn't sleeping, of course. He was back in the network, doing whatever it was that he did there. Dulcie had not seen the place for weeks, and found herself oddly nostalgic for it.

What the hell is he up to?

Angered by her own fearfulness, although it was by no means gone yet, she took her pad off the tabletop and retreated to her room, then slid closed the bolt on her door. Within moments she was surveying the almost complete destruction of the disposal files caused by the dataphage. She put her salvage gear to work and sat back, wishing she had some uncomplicated hobby with which to pass the time—smoking or serious drinking or Russian roulette.

Time for a major State of the Self meeting, Dulcie? She considered, but set it aside. Life was too strange right now, and it was never a good idea to make decisions when you were depressed and exhausted.

She had walked around the loft three times and returned messages from a few people in the States, including a cranky, rambling explanation from her neighbor Charlie about why she had accidentally fed dog food to Dulcie's cat Jones, which even a face-to-face call didn't ever quite clear up, before the gear finished its work. With very low expectations, she opened the salvaged files and found pretty much what she had expected—fragments. Some of them were incomprehensible segments of scrambled text, parts of what might have been accounting files or even personal messages, but now might as well have been written in a dead language. There were a few recognizable passages, but they were the predictable result of resurrecting a random half-percent of what had been a huge and diverse load of data, meaningless remnants of reports without enough context to make sense. The only intriguing thing was that some of the fragments were couched in what seemed like medical language, as though they were part of someone's health records. There was a mention of changing medications and a list of what seemed to be brain chemistry readouts, but oddly sophisticated, not the kind of thing you would expect in the medical records of even so important and unusual an employee as Dread.

In fact, based on the rubbish left after the dataphage's destructive attack, she couldn't even be sure these bits and pieces were about Dread. It was the logical deduction, but completely unprovable. Worse, though, was the fact that the disconnected bits gave her exactly nothing of what she had sought, information about her employer through his relationship with his own master, Felix Jongleur.

The one decent-sized chunk of data that remained coherent was a long image file, apparently one of hundreds according to its signifier, but the only one that had survived the data explosion. She managed to open it and run it, but was mystified by the small, grainy image, some kind of footage taken in what must have been a badly lit room, and perhaps by a camera with a hinky power supply. A white flash of emptiness was followed by a stark picture which seemed to show a small, dark-haired figure sitting at a table in a white room. A voice-over called a test number, then the camera zoomed in on the subject's hands and a small object lying between them on the table. Nothing else seemed to happen for some twenty seconds, then the camera pulled back again, some numbers were given by an off-camera voice, and the segment ended.

Dulcie sat back, puzzled. Normally she would have abandoned the whole thing as a loss, but she was still wired-up and nervous and wouldn't be able to sleep for hours. Also, she was unwilling to acknowledge defeat, however obvious the fact of that defeat might seem. She searched her system for image-enhancement gear—she had done a favor for a semi-friend who also worked the shadier areas of information transfer and he had paid her back with what he said was a package of state-of-the-art military image-crunchers—then began experimenting to see if she could make anything happen with the single surviving bit of visual imagery.

The first thing she did was work on enhancing the face of the subject. She couldn't improve it much, but brought enough clarity to the image to be certain it was a dark-haired and fairly dark-skinned boy. She stared at it stupidly for a moment, afraid to let herself believe what seemed obvious.

Could that be Dread? But he looks about thirteen. Why would Jongleur have footage of him when he was thirteen? What possible significance would it have?

She went back to work in earnest, struggling with the unfamiliar gear to get better resolution, wishing she knew more about this kind of work. She managed to alter the contrast enough to bring the cheekbone and jaw out from the fait of straight black hair and felt her pulse speed—the face certainly had something of Dread's shape to it. But no matter how much she tried, she could not make the image any clearer, which was odd because she could improve things like the edge of the table or the subject's hands into a grainy but precise image.

Thwarted, but inwardly convinced it was him, she next began to work on the object lying on the table between his hands, a dark lozenge about ten by five centimeters. When she realized that it wasn't a familiar object and stopped trying to see it that way, she was finally able to bring it into better focus. It was some kind of timer with a digital readout, like an oblong watch with no strap. As she ran the footage backward and forward she began to make out the pattern of the numbers, although she confused herself several times before she finally realized that halfway through the experiment or test the numbers on the readout suddenly began to run backward.

Dulcie shook her head. A teenage Dread holding a timer that ticked forward in the standard manner, then switched and began running the numbers backward? What the hell kind of experiment was that? And why would Jongleur have stashed it in this very secret equivalent of a personnel file?

She reviewed the experiment footage over and over, and although she had become so certain that the figure was Dread she could no longer imagine it otherwise, she could make no other sense of it. It was only when she ran the sequence back to its very beginning for a last look that she realized she hadn't paid any attention to the flash of white at the start, assuming it was just a blank caused by bad data. When she stopped and slowed it she saw that it was actually something white passing in front of the camera. Certain that it would prove to be only someone's lab coat, or perhaps the vastly distorted hand of the person filming the test as they adjusted the lens, she nevertheless began to play with it.

It was a card, she discovered after many minutes fiddling with the resolution—perhaps something with the experiment number marked on it. The beginning of the footage was gone, so it was only present for an instant before it was whipped away again, but she could see faint gray marks that she felt sure were writing. She started the round of enhancements all over again, determined to make the smudges legible.

Half an hour later the machine came up with the fifth and best iteration. The card was catching light from an overhead fluorescent, a glare which all but obliterated the camera's ability to see what was on it, but gear meant to recognize facial features from low-Earth orbit had finally turned the marks into recognizable words:

DR. CHAVEN—PROCEDURE #12831—WULGARU, JOHN

Dulcie suddenly had an intense sensation of being watched, of naked vulnerability. She looked up in a panic, certain that Dread had crept up behind her again, but her bedroom was empty, the door bolted. She closed her pad and walked quietly out into the hallway to make certain Dread was still prisoned in his whispering sarcophagus.

John Wulgaru, she thought when she got back. Her hands were shaking. Is that his name, then? Am I the only person who knows that? Or the only person still alive?

She dismissed such melodrama as the product of her nervousness. The important thing was, she had cracked it. Who else could have pulled it off? Damn few.

The roller coaster was now heading back upward. Dulcie was eager to do something, anything, with this hard-won bit of knowledge. She called up Dread's locked room, but the hidden storage did not respond to the name in any combination. Only slightly disappointed, she closed the connection. Even if his real name was almost completely unknown, Dread would probably not use it as a password, especially for a file which might well contain incriminating evidence about his professional life. But it was a first step—getting to know the system's owner was the best key to cracking it, and now she knew something important about Dread.

Dulcie paused for a moment to wonder why Jongleur had so effectively booby-trapped his information about Dread, but had left the Ushabti file, which was apparently concerned with something far larger and more important, the transfer of his estate, without similar protection. Perhaps because Jongleur knew there could be no good reason for anyone other than himself to be looking at the Dread information, she guessed, but the other file might wind up passing through the hands of attorneys, company officers, and various other third parties.

She drummed her fingers, anxious to do something else. At the very least, she could find out what records if any could be pulled up using her employer's newly-discovered name. She doubted there would be much of interest floating around, but as a veteran of the information wars she knew it was hard to completely eradicate anything from the vast worldwide matrix.

She set her gear on a shielded search for "Wulgaru," then went to lie down, stare at the ceiling, and grind her teeth.

As she had guessed, the search brought up little except a few bits here and there having to do with an Aboriginal myth. The longest and most complete version, by two people named Kuertner and Jigalong, came from an academic journal of folklore. It was a disturbing little story, strangely open-ended. Although it told her nothing useful about her employer, the hours she spent afterward waiting for sleep, mind already enflamed with all she had learned and done and risked that day, were troubled by the idea of a remorseless wooden man with stones for eyes.

Dread brought the music up louder as the chorus moaned its way up and down the twelve-tone scale, then fragmented into separate sharp cries like a little shower of suffering raindrops. He was in his own simulation, floating in his airy white house, surrounded by clear Outback light. He opened a view-window to check on his employee again, but she was sleeping now. He had spent much of the last several hours observing her as she fretted her way through whatever she was working on, wondering what he should do about The Dulcie Problem. A keen student of humanity in the same way that an exterminator makes it his work to understand class Insecta, Dread had not failed to notice the change in her feelings about him. Somehow, while he had been busy with his various experiments on me network, the fish had wriggled off the hook. Which meant she could no longer be trusted.

So maybe our Ms. Anwin's finally outlived her usefulness.

He pondered, bathing in the music, the air, the sparklingly clean desert light. God knew, he deserved a bit of a holiday. Maybe he should give her a day or two more to finish the work on Jongleur's files, then resolve the matter.

But could he afford to terminate Dulcie now? He still had many questions. Although his interest in the Grail network had begun to flag a little, he would find it hard to achieve his real world plans by himself without the network's powerful operating system, and here he was discovering real problems. His control over the basic functions of the network was nearly complete, but the apparently sentient part of the operating system was no longer responding quite so dramatically to the pain stimuli, as though the system had either learned to block the worst of it . . . or perhaps was just wearing down.

A trashed system would do him no good, however. Dread needed to know how far he could go, and also whether there were any alternatives in place, just in case he pushed the operating system too far and the whole thing collapsed. He might have tired of virtual destruction, but the Grail network was still the ultimate country without extradition. Even if his other plans went awry, he could always disappear into the Grail worlds, spend the rest of eternity there, just as Jongleur and his cronies had planned to do. At least, he could if Jongleur's immortality program really worked. He himself had interfered with its first moment of truth by his attack on the operating system, but it would be instructional to find and examine the Brotherhood's Ricardo Klement, who seemed to have been the only one actually to survive the process.

So the virtual universe still had its attractions—not least of which was the knowledge that his former companions, little blind Martine and the Sulaweyo woman and the rest, still hid from him there, awaiting capture and suitable punishment.

But the powers of Jongleur's worldwide corporate holdings and the Grail operating system's nearly limitless ability to manipulate information now presented an even larger field of opportunity. How would it feel to start a war, simply to amuse himself.? Force a great city to evacuate in the face of a biological weapon release? Bomb the great monuments of the world?

And as for his own particular urges, why not indulge them as well? There were several small, troubled nation-states in Africa and Asia where he could use Jongleur's power and money to buy himself a hundred thousand acres and total privacy. He could arrange for women to be brought there in any quantity he wanted—the bride-markets of the Indian subcontinent alone could serve everything except his need for variety.

The thought was so pleasurable that Dread actually squirmed a little in his column of semisolid air. I could just fence the perimeter and then let them go. A free-range hunting preserve, all mine.

The little stabs of musical misery washed over him. The godlike feeling had returned—in a weaker mind and spirit it might have seemed like madness, but Dread knew better. There was no one like him. No one.

And, as a god should, even when he soared to the outer limits of his own glory, he did not forget the little things.

Dulcie. So after I get her to finish the operating system research, shall I take her on a little camping trip out to the Bush? He considered this for a moment, lazily, until a mote of irritation fluttered up. But I didn't plan for it, and I let her arrive in a taxi. There's probably a record. If it looks like murder, there will be questions, and no matter how many layers there are between me and the lease on this place, I still don't need that kind of aggro, do I? Not now. So it will have to look like an accident.

Which doesn't mean I can't have fun with her first.

He decided to give his employee forty-eight hours to complete her work. Then, seized by a magnanimous urge, upped it to seventy-two.

Three days. Then some terrible thing will happen to the poor tourist girl from New York.

It would be fun deciding how it would happen, when he could pull himself away from the pressing business of the prisoners from the Circle and a few other projects within the network. But he would leave some of it to the final moment, of course—let it be spontaneous.

Otherwise, where was the art?