Jacques Barnard, his name was. When I'd last done business with him-if that's the right phrase-he'd been a senior vice president of Yamatetsu Corporation, in charge of the megacorp's Seattle operations. If my bookie would lay odds on that kind of thing, I'd have considered him a sure bet 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 me 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. "1 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 comer of the screen, and the telecom chuckled softly to itself as it stored a digital data string in its nonvol¬atile 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 "the," 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 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 Ninon.

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 me 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 me flowering shrubs.