Laura took the baby upstairs to the tower office to deal with the day's mail.

Laura's corporate specialty was public relations. When

David had designed the Lodge, Laura had prepared this room for business. It was equipped for major conferences; it was a full-scale node in the global Net.

The Lodge did most of its business as telex, straight print sent by wire, such as guest dossiers and arrival schedules.

Most of the world, even Africa, was wired for telex these. days. It was cheapest and simplest, and Rizome favored it.

"Fax" was more elaborate: entire facsimiles of documents, photographed and passed down the phone lines as streams of numbers. Fax was good for graphics and still photos; the fax machine was essentially a Xerox with a phone. It was great fun to play with.

The Lodge also took plenty of traditional phone traffic: voice without image, both live and recorded. Also voice with im- age: videophone. Rizome favored one-way prerecorded calls because they were more efficient. There was less chance of an expensive screwup in a one-way recorded call. And re- corded video could be subtitled for all of Rizome's language groups, a major advantage for a multinational.

The Lodge could also handle teleconferencing: multiple phone calls woven together. Teleconferencing was the expen- sive borderland where phones blurred into television. Run- ning a teleconference was an art worth knowing, especially in public relations. It was a cross between chairing a meeting and running a TV news show, and Laura had done it many times.

Every year of her life, Laura thought, the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it.

Computers melted other machines, fusing them together.