Cyberpunk

crate of champagne. As short, fat, and repulsive as Parker might be, they would gladly knife one another for a chance to sleep in his clean sheets and raid his medicine cabinet.
    “No, thanks,” Rice said, untangling himself from the miles of wire connected to Parker’s recording gear.
    The image of Marie Antoinette had seized him and would not let go.
    Rice sat naked on the edge of the canopied bed, shivering a little in the air conditioning. Past the jutting window unit, through clouded panes of eighteenth-century glass, he saw a lush, green landscape sprinkled with tiny waterfalls.
    At ground level, a garden crew of former aristos in blue denim overalls trimmed weeds under the bored supervision of a peasant guard. The guard, clothed head to foot in camouflage except for a tricolor cockade on his fatigue cap, chewed gum and toyed with the strap of his cheap plastic machine gun. The gardens of Petit Trianon, like Versailles itself, were treasures deserving the best of care. They belonged to the Nation, since they were too large to be crammed through a time portal.
    Marie Antoinette sprawled across the bed’s expanse of pink satin, wearing a scrap of black-lace underwear and leafing through an issue of Vogue. The bedroom’s walls were crowded with Boucher canvases: acres of pert silky rumps, pink haunches, knowingly pursed lips. Rice looked dazedly from the portrait of Louise O’Morphy, kittenishly sprawled on a divan, to the sleek, creamy expanse of Toinette’s back and thighs. He took a deep, exhausted breath. “Man,” he said, “that guy could really paint.”
    Toinette cracked off a square of Hershey’s chocolate and pointed to the magazine. “I want the leather bikini,” she said. “Always, when I am a girl, my goddamn mother, she keep me in the goddamn corsets. She think my what-you-call, my shoulder blade sticks out too much.”
    Rice leaned back across her solid thighs and patted her bottom reassuringly. He felt wonderfully stupid; a week and a half of obsessive carnality had reduced him to a euphoric animal “Forget your mother, baby. You’re with me now. You want ze goddamn leather bikini, I get it for you.”
    Toinette licked chocolate from her fingertips. “Tomorrow we go out to the cottage, okay, man? We dress up like the peasants and make love in the hedges like noble savages.”
    Rice hesitated. His weekend furlough to Paris had stretched into a week and a half; by now security would be looking for him. To hell with them, he thought. “Great,” he said. “I’ll phone us up a picnic lunch. Foie gras and truffles, maybe some terrapin—” Toinette pouted. “I want the modem food. The pizza and burritos and the chicken fried.” When Rice shrugged, she threw her arms around his neck. “You love me, Rice?”
    “Love you? Baby, I love the very idea of you.” He was drunk on history out of control, careening under him like some great black motorcycle of the imagination. When he thought of Paris, take-out quiche-to-go stores springing up where guillotines might have been, a six-year-old Napoleon munching Dubble Bubble in Corsica, he felt like the archangel Michael on speed.
    Megalomania, he knew, was an occupational hazard. But he’d get back to work soon enough, in just a few more days . . .
    The phone rang. Rice burrowed into a plush house robe formerly owned by Louis XVI. Louis wouldn’t mind; he was now a happily divorced locksmith in Nice.
    Mozart’s face appeared on the phone’s tiny screen. “Hey, man, where are you?”
    “France,” Rice said vaguely. “What’s up?”
    “Trouble, man. Sutherland flipped out, and they’ve got her sedated. At least six key people have gone over the hill, counting you.” Mozart’s voice had only the faintest trace of accent left.
    “Hey, I’m not over the hill. I’ll be back in just a couple days. We’ve got, what, thirty other people in Northern Europe? If you’re worried about the quotas—”
    “Fuck the quotas. This is serious. There’s uprisings. Comanches raising hell on the rigs in Texas. Labor strikes in London and Vienna. Realtime is pissed. They’re talking about pulling us out.”
    “What?” Now he was alarmed.
    “Yeah. Word came down the line today. They say you guys let this whole operation get sloppy. Too much contamination, too much fraternization. Sutherland made a lot of trouble with the locals before she got found out. She was organizing the Masonistas for some kind of passive resistance and God knows