day; not even when we go out at dawn to kill a man; not when we drink martinis while planning the death of one or more targets under the burning sun of a southern afternoon, below a vast cracked mouth-dome screaming beneath the vanished ozone layer. Here, men talk in order to hide things. Here, men kill innocent people with the same cold tenacity as they exterminate the guilty. Here, you have to wonder if anyone is really innocent, or really guilty.
The dream takes him into another world now.
This time, it is night.
But it is the electric night of a Japanese metropolis. The interminable
daynight
of the endless city, looping in on itself all over the island and out into the ocean, where vast urban pseudopods shine their lights across the telluric abyss of the Sea of Japan.
This time he is with a woman, Mrs. Kuziwaki. They are in the offices of Mrs. Kuziwaki’s holding company at the top of a high-security, two-hundred-floor tower belonging to her and her consortium. The top floor, a personal guesthouse reserved for Mrs. Kuziwaki and her guests, is overhung by a roof with programmable translucency; at the moment, despite the four-meter thickness of refractory composite above their heads, they are under what appears to be an open sky.
He negotiates the final terms of the contract with the Japanese woman—the Lady of Osaka, as she is called here. Mrs. Kuziwaki manages an immense network of legal businesses, and a group of illegal ones that is only a bit smaller. She is married to an English lord who fled Great Britain after the Shari’a took over almost 80 percent of British territory during the Franco-European Civil War. She also controls one of the large municipal parties in the region.
She has a rival, another businesswoman and head of a competing political clan, another queen bee. And now “there is no other solution.”
We are the solution when there is no other solution,
says one of the Order’s maxims.
That is what he said to this lovely thirtysomething woman who wants to devour the world and anyone who challenges her, starting with that old bitch Mrs. Toshiro.
He said it to close the deal, and to show that his professionalism is not an empty promotional campaign by the Red Star Order, though he is still in the early stages of his promising career. They are at the top of the Lady of Osaka’s tower. They are rising above the clouds of Olympus. They are overlooking a planet of light, stationary and mobile; it sparkles coldly, resembling the highly magnified motherboard of a computer.
They are like gods.
It is the definitive meeting of money and crime, Heaven and power, blood and truth. This moment, he knows, was a pivotal one; it made him what he now is. The contract is negotiated, initialed, and signed on the huge table of uncloned acajou that cost as much as a midsize house in Africa. It is a vast rectangle of natural obsidian, blackness marbled with green flecks like the water of an enchanted pond that lures him to the center of the room.
The dream images swim for a moment, then realign themselves like a series of ellipses.
There it is. A luxurious IBM-Chanel gown is half-ruined as it is torn from her body to fly like a black tornado across the room. Two pretty breasts, raised high by a bra of fine, natural silk lace in dark red, darker than the night that surrounds them, are topped by honey-colored nipples, amber points that quiver under his fingernails. Long black hair sways gently, like a vertical grid made of leaf veins, against skin more luminous than the moon, whose light spills gently across the ashy lakes in the blue-orange dark radiance of the city lights. This is what he is seeing, touching, caressing. Marveling at, with the sort of stunned curiosity children experience when their souls are still entirely free.
He takes her savagely on the emerald green table. Her thighs are spread wide; he lifts them high, feeling with his hand the heat and wetness of the dark bush he can barely see. He
The dream takes him into another world now.
This time, it is night.
But it is the electric night of a Japanese metropolis. The interminable
daynight
of the endless city, looping in on itself all over the island and out into the ocean, where vast urban pseudopods shine their lights across the telluric abyss of the Sea of Japan.
This time he is with a woman, Mrs. Kuziwaki. They are in the offices of Mrs. Kuziwaki’s holding company at the top of a high-security, two-hundred-floor tower belonging to her and her consortium. The top floor, a personal guesthouse reserved for Mrs. Kuziwaki and her guests, is overhung by a roof with programmable translucency; at the moment, despite the four-meter thickness of refractory composite above their heads, they are under what appears to be an open sky.
He negotiates the final terms of the contract with the Japanese woman—the Lady of Osaka, as she is called here. Mrs. Kuziwaki manages an immense network of legal businesses, and a group of illegal ones that is only a bit smaller. She is married to an English lord who fled Great Britain after the Shari’a took over almost 80 percent of British territory during the Franco-European Civil War. She also controls one of the large municipal parties in the region.
She has a rival, another businesswoman and head of a competing political clan, another queen bee. And now “there is no other solution.”
We are the solution when there is no other solution,
says one of the Order’s maxims.
That is what he said to this lovely thirtysomething woman who wants to devour the world and anyone who challenges her, starting with that old bitch Mrs. Toshiro.
He said it to close the deal, and to show that his professionalism is not an empty promotional campaign by the Red Star Order, though he is still in the early stages of his promising career. They are at the top of the Lady of Osaka’s tower. They are rising above the clouds of Olympus. They are overlooking a planet of light, stationary and mobile; it sparkles coldly, resembling the highly magnified motherboard of a computer.
They are like gods.
It is the definitive meeting of money and crime, Heaven and power, blood and truth. This moment, he knows, was a pivotal one; it made him what he now is. The contract is negotiated, initialed, and signed on the huge table of uncloned acajou that cost as much as a midsize house in Africa. It is a vast rectangle of natural obsidian, blackness marbled with green flecks like the water of an enchanted pond that lures him to the center of the room.
The dream images swim for a moment, then realign themselves like a series of ellipses.
There it is. A luxurious IBM-Chanel gown is half-ruined as it is torn from her body to fly like a black tornado across the room. Two pretty breasts, raised high by a bra of fine, natural silk lace in dark red, darker than the night that surrounds them, are topped by honey-colored nipples, amber points that quiver under his fingernails. Long black hair sways gently, like a vertical grid made of leaf veins, against skin more luminous than the moon, whose light spills gently across the ashy lakes in the blue-orange dark radiance of the city lights. This is what he is seeing, touching, caressing. Marveling at, with the sort of stunned curiosity children experience when their souls are still entirely free.
He takes her savagely on the emerald green table. Her thighs are spread wide; he lifts them high, feeling with his hand the heat and wetness of the dark bush he can barely see. He
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