Halo | Page 9

of things were happening. However, as
to the who? and the why? there can be no question. These are the new
players, and these are their games.
So welcome to the new millennium.)
----
4. Privileged Not to Exist
When Gonzales returned home, he found a message from Traynor:
"Will arrange for transportation tomorrow morning, five a.m., from
Northern Seattle Airtrack to my estate. Be prepared for immediate work.
Pack the memex and twenty-two kilos personal luggage."
"Shit," Gonzales said. "We just got home. Twenty-two kilos, huh? That
means we'll be going ... where do you think?"
The memex said, "Somewhere in orbit."
----
The airport limo held its spot in a locked sequence of a dozen vehicles
moving away from the city at two hundred kilometers an hour. Seattle's
northern suburbs showed as patches of light behind shifting mist and
steady-falling rain. Overhead, cargo blimps flying toward Vancouver
moved through the clouds like great cold water fish.
Gonzales got a quick view of a square where white and yellow
searchlights played across a concrete landscape, and a gangling
assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a brick
wall: a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to scrawl messages
to the world at large. Gonzales could only read ... GENT OF CHAN ...
With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit into North Seattle
Airtrack, then turned into the private field access road. A wire gate
opened in front of them as it received the codes the limo sent. Near the
SenTrax hangar waited a swing-wing exactly like the one that had

taken Gonzales from Pagan to Bangkok. Gonzales climbed into the
plane, placed his bag and the memex's shock-cases into the plane's
baggage locker, seated himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.
The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog. After a while, the blank
whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-wing's
engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted until the ascending
scream of engine noise told him they were landing.
As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake Tahoe
stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on the water's
edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final approach to
Traynor's estate.
From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past two as
independent auditor, Gonzales knew quite a bit about Frederick Lewis
Traynor, his boss. Traynor had wealth sufficient for even the most
extravagant tastes--it was his family's, and he had known nothing
else--but power whose smallest touch could shape lives, imprint stone,
that he longed for. From his position as head of Internal Affairs, one of
SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he plotted ascent to the SenTrax
Board; he wanted to be one of the twenty people who had moved
beyond negotiation and compromise, whose desires were reality,
whims action.
In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of eminence that is
privileged, when it wishes, not to exist. His house and land occupied a
chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there had once been
two casino-hotels and a section of state highway. The hotels had been
demolished, the highway diverted. The grounds were now surrounded
by a four-meter high fence of slatted black steel--alarmed, hot-wired,
and robot-patrolled. The estate showed on no map or record of
purchase, ownership or taxation; neither did the man himself.
When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great expanse of green
lawn, Traynor waited to meet him. He was short and pudgy, and his
skin was pale. His sparse hair lay limp in dark curls on his skull. On his
feet were soft black slippers, and he wore an embroidered silk

robe--green and blue and white and red, with rearing dragons across
back and front. He thought of himself as Byronic--eccentric and
interesting, afflicted by genius--but to Gonzales and many others he
appeared simply petulant and self-indulgent.
Traynor stretched his arms wide and said, "Mikhail," giving the name
three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a brief hug.
Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said, "You don't look
too bad."
"Is that why you brought me here, to look at me?"
Traynor shrugged. "For that, maybe, and to talk to you about your next
job. Besides, I like you."
Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his peculiar boss's and
rich man's way. Particularly, he seemed to like the fact that Gonzales
wasn't awed by the outward and visible manifestations of his money
and power.
"Good breeding," Traynor had said to him once. "That's your secret:
patrician and plebian blood mixed." Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales
was of mixed blood indeed; among others, Russian Jews and Hispanics
from Los Angeles on his mother's