Read Cyberpunk for Free Online

the first time he’d seen the complex from outside its high chain-link fences. For two years, he’d been up to his neck getting the refinery operational. He’d directed teams all over the planet, as they caulked up Nantucket whalers to serve as tankers, or trained local pipefitters to lay down line as far away as the Sinai and the Gulf of Mexico.
    Now, finally, he was outside. Sutherland, the company’s political liaison, had warned him against going into the city. But Rice had no patience with her attitude. The smallest thing seemed to set Sutherland off. She lost sleep over the most trivial local complaints. She spent hours haranguing the “gate people,” the locals who waited day and night outside the square-mile complex, begging for radios, nylons, a jab of penicillin.
    To hell with her, Rice thought. The plant was up and breaking design records, and Rice was due for a little R and R. The way he saw it, anyone who couldn’t find some action in the Year of Our Lord 1775 had to be dead between the ears. He stood up, dusting windblown soot from his hands with a cambric handkerchief.
    A moped sputtered up the hill toward him, wobbling crazily. The rider couldn’t seem to keep his high-heeled, buckled pumps on the pedals while carrying a huge portable stereo in the crook of his right arm. The moped lurched to a stop at a respectful distance, and Rice recognized the music from the tape player: Symphony No. 40 in G Minor.
    The boy turned the volume down as Rice walked toward him. “Good evening, Mr. Plant Manager, sir. I am not interrupting?”
    “No, that’s okay.” Rice glanced at the bristling hedgehog cut that had replaced the boy’s outmoded wig. He’d seen the kid around the gates; he was one of the regulars. But the music had made something else fall into place. “You’re Mozart, aren’t you?”
    “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, your servant.”
    “I’ll be goddamned. Do you know what that tape is?”
    “It has my name on it.”
    “Yeah. You wrote it. Or would have, I guess I should say. About fifteen years from now.”
    Mozart nodded. “It is so beautiful. I have not the English to say how it is to hear it.”
    By this time most of the other gate people would have been well into some kind of pitch. Rice was impressed by the boy’s tact, not to mention his command of English. The standard native vocabulary didn’t go much beyond radio, drugs , and fuck . “Are you headed back toward town?” Rice asked.
    “Yes, Mr. Plant Manager, sir.”
    Something about the kid appealed to Rice. The enthusiasm, the gleam in the eyes. And, of course, he did happen to be one of the greatest composers of all time.
    “Forget the titles,” Rice said. “Where does a guy go for some fun around here?”
    At first Sutherland hadn’t wanted Rice at the meeting with Jefferson. But Rice knew a little temporal physics, and Jefferson had been pestering the American personnel with questions about time holes and parallel worlds.
    Rice, for his part, was thrilled at the chance to meet Thomas Jefferson, the first president of the United States. He’d never liked George Washington, was glad the man’s Masonic connections had made him refuse to join the company’s “godless” American government.
    Rice squirmed in his Dacron double knits as he and Sutherland waited in the newly air-conditioned boardroom of the Hohensalzburg Castle. “I forgot how greasy these suits feel,” he said.
    “At least,” Sutherland said, “you didn’t wear that goddamned hat today.” The VTOL jet from America was late, and she kept looking at her watch.
    “My tricorne?” Rice said. “You don’t like it?”
    “It’s a Masonista hat, for Christ’s sake. It’s a symbol of anti-modern reaction.” The Freemason Liberation Front was another of Sutherland’s nightmares, a local politico-religious group that had made a few pathetic attacks on the pipeline.
    “Oh, loosen up, will you, Sutherland? Some groupie of Mozart’s gave me the hat.