Laura punched up the message and Emily's image flashed onto the screen. Emily sat behind her antique desk at home in

Atlanta, Rizome's headquarters. Home for Emily was a high- rise apartment downtown, a cell in a massive modern beehive of ceramic and composite plastic._

Filtered air, filtered water, halls like streets, elevators like vertical subways. A city set on end, for a crowded world.

Naturally everything about Emily's apartment struggled to obscure the facts. The place abounded in homey quirks and little touches of Victorian solidity: cornices, baroque door frames, rich mellow lighting. The wall behind Emily was papered in paisley arabesques, gold on maroon. Her polished wooden desktop was set as carefully as a stage: low keyboard at her right hand, pen and pencil holders with a slanting peacock plume, a gleaming paperweight of gypsum crystal.

The Chinese synthetic of Emily's frilled gray blouse had the faint shimmer of mother-of-pearl. Emily's chestnut-brown hair had been done by machine, with elaborate braids and little Dickensian curls at the temple. She wore long malachite earrings and a round cameo hologram at her neck. Emily's video image was very twenties, a modem reaction against the stark, dress-for-success took of generations of businesswomen.

To Laura's eye, the fashion suggested an antebellum southern belle filled to gushing with feminine graciousness.

"I've got the Report's rough draft," Emily announced.

"It's pretty much what we expected."

Emily pulled her copy of the Quarterly Report from a drawer.

She flipped pages. "Let's get to the major stuff. The

Committee election. We've got twelve candidates, which is a joke, but three frontrunners. Pereira's an honest guy, you could play poker with him by telex, but he can't live down that Brasilia debacle. Tanaka pulled a real coup with that

Osaka lumber deal. He's pretty flexible for an oldline salary man, but I met him in Osaka last year. He drank a lot and wanted to pinch me. Besides, he's into countertrade, and that's my turf.