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"It looks like it should have pointy arches and snake-charmer music, somehow." Then Kevin
noticed that the window partly visible behind the half-closed drapes high on the wall opposite,
through which he could see lights reflecting off water, was rounded at the corners.
"Wait," Taki's voice said. "What was that? back to the right of where you're looking now."
"Where?" Kevin moved his gaze back to the right.
"Back a bit more. . . . There, on the end wall."
There were two doors in the end wall, the right-hand one closed, the other open to what
appeared to be steps going down.
Mounted on the wall as a centerpiece between the doors was a carved wooden crest in the
form of a composition of scrolls and ropework framing the inscriptionPrincess Dolores.
"It's a boat," Taki said. "Didn't the guy say something about Bellevue? You must be up on
Lake Washington somewhere."
"This is wonderful, Vanessa," the man in the red shirt was saying. "I hadn't realized it could
be worth so much." He made a face, accompanied by an empty-handed gesture, and then
smiled. "Will I still be able to afford you when you own all this?"
Vanessa moved close and pressed her head against his shoulder."We'll own it." She looked up
and murmured something close to his ear that didn't come through on the audio, and the man
slid an arm around her. Kevin watched with rising discomfort. At least, it wasn't his natural
mother, so he was spared having to deal with that. His strongest reaction was a feeling of
indignation on behalf of Eric. Taki, discreetly, refrained from comment.
"Let's go out to the bar on the fantail," the man in the red shirt said to Vanessa. "I'll mix us a
couple of drinks. Then we'll take a short drive. I think I know just the place." He slipped his
arm from her waist and took her hand. They moved to the end of the cabin bearing the carved
crest. The man opened the door to the right that had been closed, and showed Vanessa
through.
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"You could try getting the mec down," Taki suggested. "A bit of noise getting back into the
bag won't matter now."
Kevin was thinking the same thing. Vanessa would find it later, of course. But she wouldn't
even need to know that it had been out of the bag. It would just be a case of something
belonging to the boys having inadvertently found its way into her luggage. He turned to go back
the way he had come. . . .
And that was when he became aware of a freezing sensation in his back, almost painful. He
had been too preoccupied with events to notice it building up.
He flipped on the system menu and selected status. The mec's charge was almost exhausted,
pointer down in the red arc, which was pulsing. Almost certainly there wouldn't be enough to get
back down to the seat, then have to either fight up the outside of the plastic bag or cut through
into it. He deactivated, and all of a sudden was back at the house, sitting in a coupler in the
downstairs lab.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to do it," he told Taki, who was perched on a stool by the
bench alongside. "It hasn't got enough juice left. I think maybe we're just gonna have to write
off another one."
Later, Kevin called Eric at the lab. His outrage had abated, and he had decided that adult
business was something best left to adults. It wasn't as if Vanessa was related in any way that
made it his problem to get involved in personally, anyway. Even if it were, he had no idea what
he was supposed to do.
"Dad," he said. "Would it be okay for Taki to stay over tonight? We really got the plane
working properly today, and we're right in the middle of making the mods permanent. And
Mom and Harriet have both left."
"Sure," Eric said. "In fact, it would work out better. We can take Taki with us to Hiroyuki's
for the barbecue tomorrow, and it will save anyone having to pick him up tonight."
Kevin nodded, giving Taki a silent thumbs-up sign. "That's what we thought too."
"Oh, and Michelle was here at the lab again today," Eric said. "Apparently Ohira forgot to
invite her. I thought that was a bit unforgivable since she's hardly a stranger to the family. So I
said she could come along with us too. She'll be stopping by the house at about noon."
"Great," Kevin said. He frowned to himself. Had he imagined it, or was there just a hint of a
swagger in Eric's voice? A note of feeling quite pleased with himself, in fact.
"Okay, I shouldn't be very much longer. Put three steaks and some veg on the timer for about
eight. Then after dinner you can show me what you did on the plane."
"Sure. Will do. We'll see you later, then." Kevin hung up. "It's okay. You can drive back over
with us tomorrow." He looked back at the phone and contemplated it for a few seconds. "Good
for you Dad," he muttered, then nodded approvingly.
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CHAPTER NINE
It was late Friday evening in downtown Seattle. In her apartment on the Eastlake side of Lake
Union, Michelle pushed herself back from the computer in the cluttered room that she used as
a home office and stretched her arms back past the sides of the chair. In the dimmed lighting,
the blue from the screen picked out her features, while the rest of the room reflected the
subdued hues of city lights glowing on the far shore through the half-open drapes. Far to the
left, the floodlit Space Needle stood as a backdrop, its flickering image mirrored on water.
New York had been a city of lights and water too, but there the water was a separate element,
surrounding the city but as a thing apart, defining where a different existence began, like a
dark, besieging force. Here, the water insinuated itself and mingled with the lights, was part of
the city and its life.
The remains of a burrito-enchilada combination that she had called out for earlier in the
evening lay in a foil tray with sauce cups, wrappings, crumpled napkins, and an empty
Heineken can on the coffee table behind her chair. She'd had a dinner date with Tom tonight,
but called and taken a raincheck on the pretext of an urgent case due on Monday that was
going to take the whole weekend to prepare for. She didn't think he believed her, and she didn't
really care that much. She just wasn't up to another evening of being subjected to a
not-very-subtly-put line that a better life was waiting if only women would learn to loosen up a
little more, like men; in other words, if she took the initiative and asked, he'd be agreeable.
Instead, she had spent the time delving deeper into the matter that had taken up most of her
afternoon.
The collation summarized on the screen was from an information search and retrieval service
located in St. Louis, that she subscribed to electronic news clipping. The volume of
information generated by a modern society was simply too overwhelming to attempt tackling
raw and undigested. Michelle had already read the items listed. They revealed more clearly
than anything she had learned from Corfe the new upsurge of fears concerning DNC that
seemed to be circulating among the technical community. In fact, she was probably already
ahead of Corfe. Although it was he who had first alerted her, she didn't think he was aware of
the full extent and the virulence of what was going on.
There was an article in another scientific journal dredging up all the old material from
Microbotics again, plus making the totally spurious speculation that perhaps DNC was able to
mimic the action of known chemical causes of neural malfunctioning thus, by implication,
linking DNC to a whole lexicon of mental disorders on the basis of no factual evidence
whatever. An editorial in the same issue created horrific scenes of mass-demented children and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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