She has to admit to herself that it evidently does, as he brings the Hummer to a halt at the verge of the steep park. Grass soft-looking under mirror-world lamps. The legend Damien told her, which she can't now recall: a sort of English Icarus, who flew from here, or crashed here, long before the Roman city. The hill a place of worship, of sacrifice, of executions: Greenberry, prior to Primrose. That Druid thing.
Bigend doesn't bother to unfold his parking permission, surely the truest modern equivalent of the freedom of the city, but climbs out, putting on his Stetson in that same fussy way, and marches toward the hill's unseen crest. Lost for a moment in darkness between lamps. Cayce follows him, hearing the Hummer's chopped-off security-groan as he thumbs the button on his key. No path for Bigend, but straight on, climbing, Cayce bringing up the rear, hurrying to catch up, mentally kicking herself for letting him play her this way. Fool: Walk away into the night, down to the canal and along it to the locks. Past homeless men drinking cider on benches. But she doesn't. The grass, longer than it looks, wets her ankles. Not a city feeling.
There's a bench there, at the very top, and Bigend is already seated, looking down and out, across the Thames valley, a fairylit London winking through a lens of climate in large part generated by the vast settlement itself.
"Tell me 'no,'" he says.
"What?"
"Tell me you won't do it. Get it out of the way."
"I won't do it."
"You need to sleep on it."
She tries to frown, but she suddenly finds him unexpectedly comic. He knows exactly how much of a pain he can be, and something in his delivery lets her in on that; a technique for disarming people, but one that works.
"What would you do with him, if I found him for you, Hubertus?"
"I don't know."
"Become the producer?"
"I don't think so. I don't think there's a title, yet, for doing whatever it is that would be required. Advocate, perhaps? Facilitator?" He seems to be
"You'll have to do it without me."
He doesn't look up. "Sleep on it. Things look different, in the morning. There's someone I'd like you to talk with."
"Here," she says, removing his cowboy hat. She takes it in her left hand, allowing the creases at the front of her hand to align her thumb and fingers, first and second fingers along the central depression, and tips it onto her own head. She leaves it there, but uses her forefinger to lower the brim with a single measured tap. "Like that." She looks at him from under the brim. "Remove it this way." Tipping it off. She replaces it on his head. "The way you do it, it looks like you'd need a stepladder to get on the horse."
He tilts his head back, to see her from beneath the brim. "Thank you," he says.
Cayce takes a last look, out toward the fairy city. "Now drive me home. I'm tired."
AND in Damien's hallway, she stands on tiptoe to see that her single dark Cayce Pollard hair is still there, spit-pasted across the gap between door and frame, then removes her seldom-used compact from her envelope, fingers brushing the hard smooth cylinder from the robot girl. On her knees, then, to use the mirror to check that the powder she'd brushed across the underside of the doorknob is still there, undisturbed. Thank you, Commander Bond.
- /
After carefully checking that a number of other sub-miniature booby traps, follicular and otherwise, are intact and as she left them, she checks her e-mail.
One from Damien, one from Parkaboy.
She opens Damien's.
