From the Bookshelf of Around the Year in 52 Books …

Something happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a nuclear flash; the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman opposite went with it. It became very quiet.

I raised a hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended, and my arm seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion, and the white crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat; my heart paused in midbeat. I was

Not.

Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.

Sarah was sleeping, an assembly of low-frequency sine curves beneath the single sheet.

This time he hit me just under the rib cage, driving all the breath out of my body and paralyzing my lungs. I folded over his arm like a coat and slid off onto the floor, trying to draw breath.

I caught a final glimpse of Ortega’s face through the rain-streaked cabin window, then the wind seemed to carry the little craft away like an autumn leaf wheeling away and down toward the streets below.

There was a cold blue dawn over the city by the time I got back to Licktown, and everything had the wet gunmetal sheen of recent rain.

I stuck the Philip’s gun around the corner to the left and, without bothering to look, sewed a silent scribble of bullets across the red-lit air in the corridor. The weapon seemed to sigh them out like branches blowing in a breeze.

On my way out along the screaming corridors of the clinic, I killed every person I met, and melted their stacks to slag.

“Mr. Bancroft’s instructions give you carte blanche as far as I know.”

Carte blanche? Prescott had been springing these on me all morning. The words almost had the taste of heavy parchment. It was like something an Alain Marriott character would say in a Settlement years flick.

Well, you’re on Earth now.

“Used to use it for tracking whales and stuff. ... Back before places like this could afford the satellite time. Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.”

How shall I explain the dying that was done?
Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
The value of his days
Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
They will want to know
How was the audit done?
And I shall say that it was done,
For once,
By those who knew the worth
Of what was spent that day.

Down on the beach, the surf was up, a chorus line of ghosts along the sand.

If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first.

Beyond the windows, the noise of the crowd was rising like surf on a hard shingle beach.

“You sell them the virtual, and in a couple of months they come sniffing after the real thing. There’s a casual link, and you know it. Selling them something illegal gives you leverage, probably over some very influential people.