BZRK (BZRK 1)

“Of course, ma’am,” Vincent said. “Why are we doing this?”

“Really? I’m a ‘ma’am,’ am I?” She mocked Vincent gently. She waved that question away. “No, I understand well enough the why of it. I’ve … met … the Armstrong Twins.” There was definitely a memory hovering just out of sight and giving her lilting enunciation sharp teeth. “No, I wanted to ask what it’s like. Down there? Is it very horrible?”

Vincent deflected the question to Nijinsky.

Nijinsky thought for a moment, finding his words. “No. It’s not horrible. I mean, at first, yes. And for some people, yes, they never come to … to love it.”

“But you do love it?”

“It’s … I’ve seen a lot of planet Earth,” Nijinsky said. “I’ve traveled a lot. And sometimes you might almost start getting bored with it. You might start thinking, Is that all there is? And then you go down in the meat.”

“Is that what you call it?”

Nijinsky nodded, a little embarrassed. “It’s like, the world, the planet, suddenly got so much bigger.”

“Not smaller?”

“No. By going down there, seeing what’s down there, it’s like you’ve spent your whole life just seeing surfaces. Like you’ve seen the covers of books and never seen the words inside. It’s vast down there. It’s a universe. It’s more universes than you can even imagine, because what I’ve seen is just a few parts of Homo sapiens at the nano. How many millions of other things are there to see? What’s the surface of a frog like? What’s it like to be down in the meat on a jellyfish? How about a cactus? A stalactite? A rattlesnake? It’s … You could never possibly run out of things to see.”

He sipped tea, which was now almost cold.

“I suppose it’s possible to enjoy it,” Tatiana said doubtfully.

“Some become addicted,” Vincent said, gloomy, no echo of Nijinsky’s enthusiasm. “Others are driven over the edge. They can’t handle it. It’s too much. They can’t unsee it.”

For a few moments they sat in silence, digesting each other’s words and nibbling at tea cakes.

“I know what happened in Shanghai and Mumbai,” Tatiana said. “It’s very important that neither you nor my British friends fail. We will likely lose Ts’ai and Chauksey. Do you know what this will mean?” Neither of them answered, so she did it herself. “The Armstrongs will be free to operate in China and in India. They’ll facilitate the spread of Nexus Humanus into those countries, allowing them to identify and recruit talent. They’ll gain access to resources— technology and money. They will be immeasurably stronger.”

“Yes,” Vincent said, narrowing his eyes curiously. He had expected a contact. He had not expected a lecture. This woman, he realized, was connected to Lear.

Might even be Lear herself. Only a blind man could fail to see the knife-edged intellect behind the beauty-queen eyes.

The thought knocked him off-balance. He had walked into the room sure that he was in charge. He no longer felt that way as he sat listening to Tatiana Featherstonehaugh lay out the strategic picture in a way that Lear never bothered to do.

“If you are able to keep President Morales safe, and if Mr. Bowen and Mrs. Hayashi are also kept safe, we at least have the possibility of reaching out to agencies within China and India and warning them. We can at least cut off any attempts to enlist the UN itself in the Armstrong cause.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nijinsky said.

“Don’t fail,” Tatiana Featherstonehaugh said, and there was nothing of the socialite or the trophy wife in that tone; that was pure, confident authority speaking. It was an order.

“No, ma’am,” they both said, despite having been warned off that title.

“How shall we do this then?” Tatiana asked, brightening and lightening at once.

“I’ll touch my finger to yours,” Vincent said. “And then Nijinsky will do the same.”

Tatiana held her hand out, palm up. “Don’t get yourselves killed. Someday when this is all over, I’d love to invite Mr. Nijinsky here to a dinner party. You, Vincent, don’t strike me as the party type.”

“No,” Vincent said, and looked just a little forlorn.

Dog fur at the nano level is less like a palm tree and more like a sort of limp asparagus. That was Plath’s first observation.

She wanted to focus on the fur, which was an overgrown forest of thick hairs, all pressed down around her so that it was dark down there, down there beneath the eerie forest on the German shepherd’s muzzle. She wanted to focus on anything that wasn’t one of her own biots with their smeared Plath eyes and compound bug eyes atop that, and the drooling spinneret mouth, and the bug legs and the mantis claws and …

She walked beside Keats, a hundred yards away from their biots on the dog. They were pretending to be young lovers because that was a good cover, two teenagers with their arms interlocked, occasionally bumping together deliberately and smiling, and maybe a butt grab here or there, the way a young couple might do walking through Central Park on a cold but clear fall morning.

But she was also down on that dog’s muzzle, the one being walked by the girl with the strange black-flame tattoo beneath one eye.