House of the Sun Read Online Free PDF

someone is in your debt, it's his responsibility to remember the fact, not yours to remind him.
    So now it was time to call in the marker. That's what the call meant. I owed him for my arm, and my livelihood—frag, for my life, if you got right down to it—and he was going to collect.
    Dully, I walked over to the telecom and idly pressed a few keys. The smartframe had made it back, filling temporary files with a couple of megapulses of data on Jonathan Bridge. Those files probably contained what I needed to discharge my contract with Sharon Young, and net myself some much-needed cred.
    Yet I couldn't work up the enthusiasm to open them. What did it matter anyway? I couldn't guess what Barnard would want from me. Similarly, though, I couldn't imagine that paying off my debt would leave my life unaffected.
    I didn't call Barnard back right away.
    I couldn't drag it out too long, though. He'd tracked down my LTG number in Cheyenne, so it was a safe bet he knew I was in town. If I didn't return his call within some reasonable span of time, he might start wondering whether I'd forgotten my obligation or—worse—that I was considering shirking it. How would a high muckamuck corporator like Barnard respond to that kind of irresponsibility on my part? I remembered the two business-suited knee-breakers who'd escorted me to Barnard's enclave in Madison Park four years ago, and I had no desire to meet them again on less genteel terms.
    Still, I pushed it as long as I figured was politically wise ... and then a bit longer. After all, up until the moment I actually placed that call, I could still lie to myself that I was a free agent.
    I spent some of my time running a quick research scan on Jacques Barnard (know thine enemies in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards, and all that). I'd assumed that Barnard was still part of Yamatetsu's Seattle operations—the fact that the "cold relay" number he'd given me was a local node just reinforced the idea—but that turned out to be off the beam. Y-Seattle was now the purview of some slitch by the name of Mary Luce, while Barnard had been bumped upstairs to become executive vice president of Yamatetsu North America. With the promotion had come a transfer to the bright heart of the Yamatetsu world—the city of Kyoto, in Nihon.
    So Jacques Barnard had shaken the mud and grime of the sprawl from his thousand-nuyen shoes, had he? What would that mean for me?
    Putting off the inevitable is a mug's game. Finally I bit the bullet, and placed the call: seventeen hundred hours my time, oh-nine-hundred in Kyoto. I watched the icons flicker and flash along the bottom of the screen as my telecom dialed the LTG number Barnard had given me, and made the connection. My system synched up and shook hands with the Seattle node, then the call was suspended—put on hold, basically—by the remote station. I watched as my screen echoed a call to Denver ... and was put on hold again. The process happened three more times—when Barnard said a relay was cold, I decided, he meant you could use it for cryogenic research—before I finally saw the standard Ringing symbol blink.
    I frowned as the telecom waited for an answer. What the frag was I going to get pulled into, here? If Barnard figured he needed a five-node relay to talk to me, I had the nasty feeling that we wouldn't be chatting about the weather ...
    The telecom whined for an instant, then an image of Barnard himself filled the screen. He was sitting at a desk, as I'd expected, but not in an office. Or, at least, not an office like any I'd ever seen before. The background was slightly out of focus, but I could still make out white marble walls, broad windows, and an open door leading out under a portico, and beyond into an ornamental garden. Life-sized, classical-style statues stood in uncomfortable-looking poses among the flowering shrubs.
    Barnard looked up from what he was doing—something that was outside his telecom's field of