Zero History

“I don’t think he did either, most of the time. He was good at delegation. Delegated that
to some module of himself he didn’t have to hear from too often. Reg says he embodied
the decade that way.”
“Have you seen Reg yet?”
“We had lunch when you were in Paris.”
“How was that?”
Heidi shrugged, the jacket’s black-fringed left epaulet rising half an inch, falling back.
“Okay. I don’t usually have too much trouble with Reg. There’s a trick to that.”
“What is it?”
“I ignore everything he says,” said Heidi, with an uncharacteristically upbeat
seriousness. “Dr. Fujiwara taught me.” Then she frowned. “But Reg, he had his doubts
about you working for Bigend.”
“But he was the one who suggested it. It was his idea.”
“That was before he decided Bigend’s up to something.”
“Bigend’s defined by being up to something.”
“This is different,” said Heidi. “Inchmale doesn’t know what it is, right? Otherwise,
he’d tell. Can’t keep a secret. But his wife’s been getting the signals at work, some kind of
London PR hive-mind thing. Wires are humming, she says. Wires are hot, but there’s no
actual signal. Kind of subsonic buzz. PR people dreaming of Bigend. Imagining they see
his face on coins. Saying his name when they mean someone else. Omens, Reg says. Like
before a quake. He wants to talk to you about that. Just not on the phone.”
“There’s something going on at Blue Ant. Corporate spook stuff. Hubertus doesn’t
seem that concerned about it.” She remembered what he’d said about a long-term project
nearing fruition, his frustration with the timing of Sleight’s apparent defection.
“You don’t want to tell him who makes those jackets?”
“Fortunately, I don’t know who she is. But I’ve already told him that Meredith knows.
If she won’t tell me, and she won’t, because she doesn’t want to, and I don’t want her to,
he’ll go after her. He already has something she really wants, or he could have it, if he
hasn’t found it already.”
“Something changed your mind?”
“Something changed hers. She was going to do it, tell me. Then she decided not to.
Then she told me why. Told me a story.” It was Hollis’s turn to shrug. “Just like that,
sometimes.” She put her feet down on the carpet and stood, stretching. Walked to the
shelf, where the dart was centered perfectly, an instant and quite convincing Dadaist
assemblage, in one deep orbit of the rectilinear ebony head. When she tried to pull it out,
the head moved toward the edge of the shelf. “That’s really in there.” She steadied the
sculpture with her left hand, twisting the dart out with her right.
“It’s the mass. Behind a force-localizer.”
Hollis bent, peering into the head’s left eye socket. A tiny round hole. “How did you
learn to do that?”