House of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

for senior management, the ultimate corporate warrior, undeterred by the obstacles in his way.
    Now? I'd have tried to buy back that hypothetical bet. He looked like an old man, did Mr. Barnard, worn and ravaged.
    Not by time, so much, as by knowledge . The eyes that burned out of my telecom screen looked like those of a man who'd learned things he simply didn't want to know. (And the fact of the matter was, I thought I could make a damn good guess as to what some of those "things" were .,.)
    " Mr. Montgomery, good day." Barnard's voice hadn't lost any of its resonance or its somewhat daunting self-confidence. "Or perhaps 'good evening' is more appropriate. It's unfortunate that I missed you, but"—he shrugged with a wry smile—"I don't imagine our daily schedules follow the same lines.
    "I have some matters I wish to discuss with you, Mr. Montgomery," Barnard went on smoothly. "I assure you that the discussion will be mutually beneficial.
    "I'm appending a secure switching code—a 'cold relay,' I think is the current term on the streets." A Receive icon blinked in the corner of the screen, and the telecom chuckled softly to itself as it stored a digital data string in its nonvolatile memory. "Please contact me as soon as practical," Barnard concluded. "I look forward to the chance of talking with you again." With a faint musical bink, the call terminated.
    I don't know how long I stared at the blank screen. When I finally shook myself out of my self-absorbed funk, my eyes were so dry they felt gritty.
    It's funny how things work out ... or it might be funny, if those things don't involve you personally. From my side, I failed to see the humor. That faint musical tone had signified more than the end of Barnard's call, hadn't it? It had also sounded the death knell of the life I'd been living. One simple bink, and everything changes.
    I shook my head and sighed. What were the odds of The Dream and Barnard's call coming together like that? Quite a coincidence.
    Of course, some people wouldn't see it that way. That friend of Jocasta Yzerman's, for example, the one she'd taught with back in the sprawl. What was his name? Harold Move-in-Shadows, or something like that. Old Harold, he'd have told me in that sententious way of his that there's no such thing as coincidence, and that everything happens because it's the will of the Great Spirits. Yeah, right. If that's the case, then the Great Spirits have a pretty fragging twisted sense of humor.
    The call ... I sighed again, a deep, heartfelt sound. It had to happen—I'd known that from the outset. When things had gone to hell in a handcart that night underneath Fort Lewis—when Hawk and Rodney and the others had been slaughtered—it was Jacques Barnard's cred that had put things back together again. He'd paid off the "Wrecking Crew"—the shadow team I'd hired—including death bonuses for Toshi and Hawk. He'd arranged for me to "die," at least as far as the people at Lone Star who might want to track me down were concerned. And, most important, he'd paid for the cybernetic replacement of the arm that the Queen spirit had burned away.
    He'd never even discussed the matter with me. When I'd woken up in the hospital—an exorbitantly expensive private room, again courtesy of Mr. Barnard—it had all been handled. He'd never put any strings on the payments, never demanded any concessions from me.
    He hadn't needed to, of course. We both knew the way things work. Corps and corporators don't give gifts; they make investments. Barnard had invested in me, and we both understood that some time down the road he'd come looking for a return on that investment. Over the intervening four years, he'd never mentioned the matter; hell, I'd never had anything to do with Yamatetsu during that time, and that was just the way I liked it. But again, he hadn't needed to mention it, or remind me. Megacorporations the world over have integrated a lot of ideas from the old Japanese world-view. When