Free Interface by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George Page B

Governor of Illinois, which meant that this face of hers showed up on television and in the newspapers with so me regularity. She had to look respectable without being dowdy. She was also a doctor, so she had to look smart and professional. She w as a resident, so she had no money and couldn't spend any time at all worrying about how she looked. And she was the product of a small town in Illinois and had to go back there every couple of w eeks and not seem uppity and strange to her old Girl Scout c hums.
    Once you left the city limits of Chicago you were in Big Hair Territory. Mary Catherine had been the only girl in her high school who had escaped the syndrome. She had extremely thick, black, luxuriant Italian hair with a natural wave that, during the humid summers, turned into a curl. She would have preferred to shave her head for the duration of the residency. Dad was never happy unless she let it grow down to her waist. In compromise, she had settled on a cut that let it hang just above her shoulders.
    She showered and climbed into bed with wet hair. A few bits of mail had arrived, notes and cards from friends and family members in other parts of the country, and she leafed through them by her bedside lamp. Her eyes could not trace the handwriting, and the contents penetrated her brain only feebly. It was a waste of time. She reached to turn off the ringer on her telephone, but discovered that it was already turned off. She had probably turned it off the last time she had attempted to get some sleep, whenever that was. The time was 9:15 p.m. She set her three alarm clocks for five o'clock in the morning. She tossed the pager and the stun gun on to her bedside table. The pager no longer responded when she pushed the TEST button. Apparently the stun gun had fried its microchips.
    When she woke up, the bedside clocks all read within a few minutes of 9:45 and someone was pounding rhythmically on her front door with a heavy object. For a moment she thought she had overslept and that it was 9:45 in the morning, but then she realized that it was dark outside and her hair was still wet.
    It sounded like someone was trying to break in with a sledge- hammer. She pulled on jeans and an ILLINI sweatshirt, went to the door, and peered out through the peephole.
    It was a cop. The wide-angle view in the peephole made his body very large and his head very small, amplifying his already cop- like appearance. He had a hug L-shaped billy club in one hand and was patiently ramming the butt of it into her door. Standing behind the cop was a man in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets. He was shorter than the cop, so that the peephole magnified his face rather than his body. It was Mel Meyer.
    "Okay!" she shouted. "I'm up." She sounded cheerful and ready for anything, even though she was neither. Women of the prairie did not bitch, nag, or whine.
    Then she thought: Why is Mel here?
    Dad had as many lawyers as a mechanic had wrenches. He embodied a large business, a fortune, a few charities, and the state of Illinois, and lawyers came with all of those things. They were always around. Always calling Dad, taking him to dinner, coming over to his house with papers to sign. Sometimes she couldn't tell which were his friends, which were his business associates, and which were actually representing him. To Mary Catherine, lawyers had always seemed as common as air, the taxi drivers, bag boys, and janitors of the world of affairs.
    But if all those other lawyers were William A. Cozzano's army, then Mel Meyer was the stiletto strapped to his ankle. Mel was the e schatological counselor of the Cozzano clan, drafter of wills, ex ecutor of estates, godfather of children, and if the whole world turned to decadence and strife one day and civilization collapsed, an d Dad were trapped on a hilltop surrounded by the heathen, Mel w ould shoot himself in the head so that Dad could use his corpse as a rampart. He was small, bald, rumply, tired-looking,