"You have an audience of one, today, and looked at Tally Isham through his round, rimless glasses. "Hello, Marly."
Marly struggled to reach the trodes, but her arms were made of stone. G-torce, the shuttle lifting off from its concrete pad . . . He'd trapped her here . . .
"I understand," said Tally, smiling, leaning back against the balustrade, her elbows on warm rough stone. "What a lovely idea. Your Marly, Herr Virek, must be a lucky girl indeed . . ." And it came to her, to Marly, that this wasn't Sense/Net's Tally Isham, but a part of Virek's construct. a programmed point of view worked up from years of Top People, and that now there was no choice, no way out, except to accept it, to listen, to give Virek her attention. The fact of his having caught her here, pinned her here this way, told her that her intuition had been correct: The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek's money was a sort of universal soivent, dissolving barriers to his will. [CZ 174]
