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“Yes, well.” He nods cautiously. “Bob. I assume you’re in on this ball?”

Franklin nods; beads clatter. “Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it’s been, well, waiting. If you’ve got something for us, we’re game.”

“Hmm.” The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays. “The depression’s got to end some time: but,” a nod to Annette from Paris, “with all due respect, I don’t think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers.”

“Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management.” Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line: “we are more flexible than the American space industry….”

Manfred shrugs. “That’s as may be.” He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising motel chain in French Guyana. Occasionally he nods.

Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in an outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in abreast pocket, and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred’s seen in ages. “Hi, Bob,” says the new arrival. “How’s life?”

“’S good.” Franklin nodes at Manfred; “Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?” He leans over. “Ivan’s a public arts guy. He’s heavily into extreme concrete.”

“Rubberized concrete,” Ivan says, slightly too loudly. “Pink rubberized concrete.”

“Ah!” He’s somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Ariannespace drops out of marketing zombiehood, sits up, and shows signs of possessing a non-corporate identity: “you are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon dioxide carrier and the dissolved polyme-thoxysilanes?” She claps her hands: “wonderful!”

“He rubberized what?” Manfred mutters in Bob’s ear.

Franklin shrugs. “Limestone, concrete, he doesn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, Germany doesn’t have an independent government any more, so who’d notice?”

“I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve,” Manfred complains. “Buy me another drink?”

“I’m going to rubberize Three Gorges!” Ivan explains loudly.

Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. “I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I’ve just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?”

“Sure, man.” Bob waves at the bar. “More of the same all round!” At the next table a person with make-up and long hair who’s wearing a dress — Manfred doesn’t want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros — is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: the translation stream in his glasses tell him they’re arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: “here, try this. You’ll like it.”

“Okay.” It’s some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy super-oxides: just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer! “Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?”

“Mugged? Hey, that’s heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped — did they sell you anything?”

“No, but they weren’t your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus