"I wanted to smack her. I knew that this was really about not embarra.s.sing her in front of the Sony Family, the nosy chattery ladies with the other franchises that Mom competed against for whuffie and bragging rights. But I'd learned something about drawing flies with honey that afternoon. The Sergeant could have made things very hard on me, but by giving him a little sugar, I turned it into an almost fun afternoon.

"Mom took me home and screamed herself raw, and I played it all very contrite, then walked over to the minimall so that I could buy some saline solution for my eyes, which were still as red as stoplights. We never spoke of it again, and on my sixteenth birthday, Mom gave me the keys to a Veddic Series 8, and the first thing I did was download new firmware for the ant.i.theft transponder that killed it. Two months later, it was stolen. I haven't driven a Sony since."

Linda smiles and then purses her lips. "Unrehea.r.s.ed enough?"

Art shakes his head. "Wow. What a story."

"Do you want to kiss me now?" Linda says, conversationally.

"I believe I do," Art says, and he does.

Linda pulls the back of his head to hers with one arm, and with the other, she half-shrugs out of her robe. Art pulls his shirt up to his armpits, feels the scorching softness of her chest on his, and groans. His erection grinds into her mons through his Jockey shorts, and he groans again as she sucks his tongue into her mouth and masticates it just shy of hard enough to hurt.

She breaks off and reaches down for the waistband of his Jockeys and his whole body arches in antic.i.p.ation.

Then his comm rings.

Again.

"f.u.c.k!" Art says, just as Linda says, "s.h.i.t!" and they both snort a laugh. Linda pulls his hand to her nipple again and Art shivers, sighs, and reaches for his comm, which won't stop ringing.

"It's me," Fede says.

"Jesus, Fede. What *is it*?"

"What is it? Art, you haven't been to the office for more than four hours in a week. It's going on noon, and you still aren't here." Fede's voice is hot and unreasoning.

Art feels his own temper rise in response. Where the h.e.l.l did Fede get off, anyway? "So f.u.c.king *what*, Fede? I don't actually work for you, you know. I've been taking care of stuff offsite."

"Oh, sure. Art, if you get in trouble, I'll get in trouble, and you know *exactly* what I mean."

"I'm not *in* trouble, Fede. I'm taking the day off -- why don't you call me tomorrow?"

"What the h.e.l.l does that mean? You can't just 'take the day off.' I *wrote* the G.o.dd.a.m.ned procedure. You have to fill in the form and get it signed by your supervisor. It needs to be *doc.u.mented*. Are you *trying* to undermine me?"

"You are so G.o.dd.a.m.ned *paranoid*, Federico. I got mugged last night, all right?

I've been in a police station for the past eighteen hours straight. I am going to take a shower and I am going to take a nap and I am going to get a ma.s.sage, and I am *not* going into the office and I am *not* going to fill in any forms.

This is not about you."

Fede pauses for a moment, and Art senses him marshalling his bad temper for another salvo. "I don't give a s.h.i.t, Art. If you're not coming into the office, you tell me, you hear? The VP of HR is going berserk, and I know exactly what it's about. He is on to us, you hear me? Every day that you're away and I'm covering for your a.s.s, he gets more and more certain. If you keep this s.h.i.t up, we're both dead."

"Hey, f.u.c.k you, Fede." Art is surprised to hear the words coming out of his mouth, but once they're out, he decides to go with them. "You can indulge your paranoid fantasies to your heart's content, but don't drag me into them. I got mugged last night. I had a near-fatal car crash a week ago. If the VP of HR wants to find out why I haven't been in the office, he can send me an email and I'll tell him exactly what's going on, and if he doesn't like it, he can toss my G.o.dd.a.m.ned salad. But I don't report to you. If you want to have a discussion, you call me and act like a human G.o.dd.a.m.ned being. Tomorrow. Good-bye, Fede." Art rings the comm off and snarls at it, then switches it off, switches off the emergency override, and briefly considers tossing it out the G.o.dd.a.m.ned window onto the precious English paving stones below. Instead, he hurls it into the soft cushions of the sofa.

He turns back to Linda and makes a conscious effort to wipe the snarl off his face. He ratchets a smile onto his lips. "Sorry, sorry. Last time, I swear." He crawls over to her on all fours. She's pulled her robe tight around her, and he slides a finger under the collar and slides it aside and darts in for a kiss on the hollow of her collarbone. She shies away and drops her cheek to her shoulder, shielding the affected area.

"I'm not --" she starts. "The moment's pa.s.sed, OK? Why don't we just cuddle, OK?"

12.

Art was at his desk at O'Malley House the next day when Fede knocked on his door. Fede was bearing a small translucent gift-bag made of some cunning combination of rough handmade paper and slick polymer. Art looked up from his comm and waved at the door.

Fede came in and put the parcel on Art's desk. Art looked askance at Fede, and Fede just waved at the bag with a go-ahead gesture. Art felt for the catch that would open the bag without tearing the materials, couldn't find it immediately, and reflexively fired up his comm and started to make notes on how a revised version of the bag could provide visual cues showing how to open it. Fede caught him at it and they traded grins.

Art probed the bag's orifice a while longer, then happened upon the release. The bag sighed apart, falling in three petals, and revealed its payload: a small, leather-worked box with a simple bra.s.s catch. Art flipped the catch and eased the box open. Inside, in a fitted foam cavity, was a gray lump of stone.

"It's an axe-head," Fede said. "It's 200,000 years old."

Art lifted it out of the box carefully and turned it about, admiring the clean tool marks from its shaping. It had heft and brutal simplicity, and a thin spot where a handle must have been lashed once upon a time. Art ran his fingertips over the smooth tool marks, over the tapered business end, where the stone had been painstakingly flaked into an edge. It was perfect.

Now that he was holding it, it was so obviously an axe, so clearly an axe. It needed no instruction. It explained itself. I am an axe. Hit things with me. Art couldn't think of a single means by which it could be improved.

"Fede," he said, "Fede, this is incredible --"

"I figured we needed to bury the hatchet, huh?"

"G.o.d, that's awful. Here's a tip: When you give a gift like this, just leave humor out of it, OK? You don't have the knack." Art slapped him on the shoulder to show him he was kidding, and reverently returned the axe to its cavity. "That is really one h.e.l.l of a gift, Fede. Thank you."

Fede stuck his hand out. Art shook it, and some of the week's tension melted away.

"Now, you're going to buy me lunch," Fede said.

"Deal."

They toddled off to Picadilly and grabbed seats at the counter of a South Indian place for a businessmen's lunch of thali and thick mango la.s.si, which coated their tongues in alkaline sweetness that put out the flames from the spiced veggies. Both men were sweating by the time they ordered their second round of la.s.si and Art had his hands on his belly, amazed as ever that something as insubstantial as the little platter's complement of veggies and naan could fill him as efficiently as it had.

"What are you working on now?" Fede asked, suppressing a curry-whiffing belch.

"Same s.h.i.t," Art said. "There are a million ways to make the service work. The rights-societies want lots of accounting and lots of pay-per-use. Ma.s.sPike hates that. It's a pain in the a.s.s to manage, and the clickthrough licenses and warnings they want to slap on are heinous. People are going to crash their cars f.u.c.king around with the 'I Agree' b.u.t.tons. Not to mention they want to require a firmware check on every stereo system that gets a song, make sure that this week's copy-protection is installed. So I'm coopering up all these user studies with weasels from the legal departments at the studios, where they just slaver all over this stuff, talking about how warm it all makes them feel to make sure that they're compensating artists and how grateful they are for the reminders to keep their software up to date and s.h.i.t. I'm modeling a system that has a clickthrough every time you cue up a new song, too. It's going to be perfect: the rights-societies are going to love it, and I've handpicked the peer review group at V/DT, stacked it up with total a.s.sholes who love manuals and following rules. It's going to sail through approval."

Fede grunted. "You don't think it'll be too obvious?"

Art laughed. "There is no such thing as too obvious in this context, man. These guys, they hate the end user, and for years they've been getting away with it because all their users are already used to being treated like s.h.i.t at the post office and the tube station. I mean, these people grew up with *coin-operated stoves*, for chrissakes! They pay television tax! Feed 'em s.h.i.t and they'll ask you for second helpings. Beg you for 'em! So no, I don't think it'll be too obvious. They'll mock up the whole system and march right into Ma.s.sPike with it, grinning like idiots. Don't worry about a thing."

"OK, OK. I get it. I won't worry."

Art signalled the counterman for their bill. The counterman waved distractedly in the manner of a harried restaurateur dealing with his regulars, and said something in Korean to the busgirl, who along with the Vietnamese chef and the Congolese sous chef, lent the joint a transworld sensibility that made it a favorite among the painfully global darlings of O'Malley House. The bus-girl found a pad and started totting up numbers, then keyed them into a Point-of-Sale terminal, which juiced Art's comm with an accounting for their lunch. This business with hand-noting everything before entering it into the PoS had driven Art to distraction when he'd first encountered it. He'd a.s.sumed that the terminal's UI was such that a computer-illiterate busgirl couldn't reliably key in the data without having it in front of her, and for months he'd cited it in net-bulls.h.i.t sessions as more evidence of the pervasive user-hostility that characterized the whole d.a.m.ned GMT.

He'd finally tried out his rant on the counterman, one foreigner to another, just a little Briton-bashing session between two refugees from the Colonial Jackboot. To his everlasting surprise, the counterman had vigorously defended the system, saying that he liked the PoS data-entry system just fine, but that the stack of torn-off paper stubs from the busgirl's receipt book was a good visualization tool, letting him eyeball the customer volume from hour to hour by checking the spike beside the till, and the rubberbanded stacks of yellowing paper lining his cellar's shelves gave him a wonderfully physical evidence of the growing success of his little eatery. There was a lesson there, Art knew, though he'd yet to codify it. User mythology was tricky that way.

Every time Art scribbled a tip into his comm and squirted it back at the PoS, he considered this little puzzle, eyes unfocusing for a moment while his vision turned inwards. As his eyes snapped back into focus, he noticed the young lad sitting on the long leg of the ell formed by the counter. He had bully short hair and broad shoulders, and a sneer that didn't quite disappear as he shoveled up the dhal with his biodegradable bamboo disposable spork.

He knew that guy from somewhere. The guy caught him staring and they locked eyes for a moment, and in that instant Art knew who the guy was. It was Tom, whom he had last seen stabbing at him with a tazer clutched in one shaking fist, face twisted in fury. Tom wasn't wearing his killsport armor, just nondescript athletic wear, and he wasn't with Lester and Tony, but it was him. Art watched Tom c.o.c.k his head to jog his memory, and then saw Tom recognize him. Uh-oh.

"We have to go. Now," he said to Fede, standing and walking away quickly, hand going to his comm. He stopped short of dialing 999, though -- he wasn't up for another police-station all-nighter. He got halfway up Picadilly before looking over his shoulder, and he saw Fede shouldering his way through the lunchtime crowd, looking p.i.s.sed. A few paces behind him came Tom, face contorted in a s.a.d.i.s.tic snarl.

Art did a little two-step of indecision, moving towards Fede, then away from him. He met Tom's eyes again, and Tom's ferocious, bared teeth spurred him on.

He turned abruptly into the tube station, waved his comm at a turnstile and dove into the thick of the crowd heading down the stairs to the Elephant and Castle platform. His comm rang.