“Burnofsky?”

“Burnofsky?” She shook her head. “But good guess. No, it was Grey McLure. He was just starting—freaking out over his wife dying and he couldn’t save her with his new toys. Then his daughter and the aneurysm, yeah. Yeah. People went crazy, though, see? Off this new thing he’d invented. This biot!”

The word came out in a roar that made Bug Man jump back.

“This biot. So, maybe, yeah, maybe if a dying biot would make a sane person crazy, hey. Maybe, right? Yeah? Maybe the other way, too.”

“Jesus. They gave you a biot.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. My very own. And then they killed it. And you know what? It worked. It worked. I wasn’t crazy anymore.”

The hell you weren’t, Bug Man did not say.

“The tattoos stopped talking to me. I could cope, yeah. I could manage. Making tons of money. And then I saw it—saw the game. Saw the way I could do it. Make a whole new world, yeah.”

She fell silent then, staring down into her drink.

Bug Man stood on wobbly legs and went to the bathroom. In the glaring fluorescence he stared at his own face as if staring at a ghost. He was shaking. He felt an urge to sit down and empty his bowels, but who knew what the crazy woman would do?

Oh, that’s right, he told himself. Not crazy. No, she was all cured.

He peed and washed his hands, and having used up all his stalling tactics went back out.

Lystra Reid had not moved a muscle.

He sat down.

And unprompted she said, “Oh, and the actress? Sandra Piper? Bitch cut me off in traffic.”

ARTIFACT

Plath: I need Caligula.

Lear: Name the place.

SIXTEEN

The news was all about the Nobel madness. Twenty-four hours a day. MSNBC, Fox, CNN.

Only the BBC made a connection to the bizarre case of the New Zealand cops.

Only the Web site Buzzfeed made a connection between the Nobel madness and the inexplicable suicide of Sandra Piper.

Everyone, though, connected it to the bizarre death of the American, Chinese, and Brazilian heads of state.

Fear was spreading. A sharp observer would already be able to spot a wariness in people’s eyes and in their words. There was a feeling in the air.

Fear. Like the scent of smoke. Like the distant rumble of tank engines and clanking tracks. Like sirens in the night.

The theories about the cause were: food poisoning, mass hysteria, and some sort of terrorist attack using a form of nerve agent.

Only Cracked.com actually listed nanotech on its “8 Ways to Explain the Big Brain Meltdown.”

There were several loops of footage that ran more or less continuously online and on TV. One was a cell-phone video of a scene of madness from inside the Golden Hall. A second showed a bloodstained woman in a party dress rushing from the hall amid a panicked crowd, then suddenly launching herself at a passing woman and biting savagely into her neck. Another showed a former American secretary of state waving madly at invisible flying enemies.

Of course there were also clips of the new president looking solemn and vowing to give the Swedish government any assistance they required. Ditto footage of the British prime minister, the French president, and a long list of folks who had no idea what was going on, all vowing to get to the bottom of it.

Rye ergot. That was the first guess. Rye ergot, a disease caused by fungus that grows on some foods and can cause symptoms similar to an LSD overdose.

Tests for rye ergot were all negative.

“Just like Nijinsky,” Keats said. “It’s all connected.” He was watching the BBC coverage. “It’s all the same bloody thing, isn’t it.”

He was talking to no one. Plath was out, and though a part of Keats was with her—sitting on his hands, waiting for a cue—he felt alone. Abandoned. Both here and there. Both large and small. Slumped into his chair and on edge, ready for a race. Not for the first time, he wondered mordantly what he had to fear from madness. Wasn’t this already madness?

Billy was absorbed in a video game. Vincent was there, staring, almost forgotten by Keats.

Keats sat before the television, watching through his two eyes, and seeing the windows in his head, watching from other eyes. “It’s all one. But who?”

The voice when it spoke surprised him. What the voice said was chilling.

“Lear,” Vincent said.

Keats turned to look at him. He was still showing nothing, Vincent. A blank expression, sad eyes. Only his brow seemed to speak of any emotion; if tension can be called an emotion.

“Lear?” Keats said. “Not the Armstrong mystery weapon?”

“Games,” Vincent said, as though that word should mean everything and the saying of it had exhausted him.

Keats couldn’t quite think of what to say. On the one hand, this was Vincent. On the other hand, this was mad Vincent. Shattered Vincent.

Seventy percent Vincent.

“You want anything to eat?” Keats asked. “I was thinking of ordering Chinese.”

“Did Lear just see it?” Vincent mused, ignoring Keats. “Or has he known all along? Should I ask him?” There was something almost like a smile on Vincent’s lips. “There will be more.”

Keats might have pursued it, but a few thousand feet away, his much smaller self saw that the moment was fast approaching. He readied himself to confront the lion in his den.

With Nijinsky dead, Burnofsky was off his leash. He had no way of knowing this—not yet—but there was no longer a biot in his head. Or to be more accurate, there was still a biot attached to his optic nerve, but no one was peering through those biot eyes any longer. The biot had no real brain of its own, nor did it have instincts. It continued to live, but only to live. Immobile.