Floating City Read Free Page A

act.
    “No? Oh, what a pity.” Rock smiled. “Well, I’m not surprised, I suppose. Such a rare treasure is not so easily on display, even for favored guests?”
    “Uh.”
    Rock shrugged. “But, then, who knows, perhaps Mai is not so far away from us at this moment.”
    General Quan was almost finished with his second bowl of stew. His face was glistening with a combination of sweat and grease. He glared at Rock. “What nonsense are you speaking?”
    “Have you reached the bottom yet? Of the bowl, that is?”
    General Quan probed through the remnants of the thick sauce. “One more piece of delicious meat.” He picked it up with the tips of his chopsticks, was about to pop it in his mouth when something caught his eye. He held the piece of meat out so that he could see it better. He shook off the excess gravy.
    What he saw was the unmistakable glint of a magnificent Burmese sapphire, and he thought, Ah, the foreign devil is very clever—here is my real gift.
    But then his eyes opened wide and everything he had just eaten came spewing out, along with a long, low wail.
    The sapphire was embedded in a whole, human ear. His beloved Mai’s ear.

Book 1
Legends of Evil
    You will always find
some Eskimos willing to instruct
the Congolese on how to cope
with heat waves.
    —Stanislaw Lem

1
Saigon/Tokyo
    Nicholas Linnear was waiting for his man. While he did so, he drank a warm beer and observed the cockroach as large as his thumb survey the filthy room as if it were the shogun in feudal Japan. He was in a third-floor front room of the Anh Dan Hotel, a thoroughly unpleasant establishment that nevertheless suited his purposes. The sickly light thrown by one disheartened forty-watt bulb exposed the cracks, noxious stains, and peeling and discolored paint. It worked when electricity was provided (which wasn’t all that often) if one touched two ends of the exposed live wires together at the point on the wall where a plate and switch should have been. The smells of raw sewage and stale sex pervaded the entire hotel, and outside the appalling clamor from Nguyen Trai Street was an incessant and disreputable companion at all hours of the day and night. This was Saigon, after all, and worse, Cholon, where sooner or later all the dregs of the city ended up.
    Nicholas turned to look at Jisaku Shindo, the Japanese private detective hired by his partner Tanzan Nangi to unravel the mystery surrounding the murder of Vincent Tinh, the former director of the Saigon branch of Sato International, the giant keiretsu —conglomerate—Nangi and Linnear co-owned.
    “Do you think he’ll come?”
    “The friend of a friend said he would.” Shindo’s clipped speech cut through the humid atmosphere.
    Nicholas mentally reviewed the activities of Vincent Tinh. Tinh, it seemed, had had a private agenda. He had used his job at Sato International as a mask to conceal his nefarious business, stealing and selling the proprietary technology of Sato’s ultrasecret Chi Project. Under Nicholas’s guidance, the Chi Project was creating a revolutionary generation of computers that was a quantum leap beyond anything currently on the market or elsewhere in development. Based on neural-network technology, the first-generation Chi computer processed data in the same way the human brain did.
    Like most criminals—even those of the genius class—Tinh had been undone by his greed. Cobbling what he could purloin of the Chi technology with elements of the new American Hive computer (also based on a type of neural-net chip), he created here in Saigon a bastardized hybrid that he began to sell on the vast and immensely lucrative Southeast Asian gray market.
    Because of Tinh, Sato-Tomkin—the American arm of Sato International—and Nicholas in particular, had been accused by the Americans of theft, illegal manufacture, and espionage leading to treason. Nicholas, who had hired Tinh in the first place, had a compelling personal as well as a professional stake in