1 The luminous flesh of giants

The  courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon,
high-impact plastic. He watches a  gunship  traverse  the  city's
middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its tho-
rax in a smooth black pod.  Hours earlier, missiles  have  fallen
in  a  northern  suburb;  seventy-three dead, the kill as yet un-
claimed. But here the mirrored  ziggurats  down  Lázaro  Cárdenas
flow  with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night's
barrage of dreams to  the  waiting  avenidas-business  as  usual,
world without end.  The air beyond the window touches each source
of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of  jaundice  edging
imperceptibly  into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fe-
cal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in  the
lens of night.  Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the back-
ground hiss of climate-control. He  imagines  himself  in  Tokyo,
this  room  in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself
in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red pa-
per lanterns line a narrow lane.  He opens his eyes.  Mexico City
is still there.  The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are
carefully  aligned  with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese
vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than  its  lin-
gering  aftertaste.  On the screen above the console, the ptichka
await him, all in a creamy frieze. When he takes up  the  remote,
their  high  sharp cheekbones twist in the space behind his eyes.
Their young men, invariably  entering  from  behind,  wear  black
leather  gloves. Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a
childhood: the reek of a black canal, steel racketing  steel  be-
neath  a  swaying  train,  the  high old ceilings of an apartment
overlooking a frozen park.  Twenty-eight peripheral images  frame
the  Russians in their earnest coupling; he glimpses figures car-
ried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of  an  Asian  ferry.   He
opens  another  of  the  little  bottles.  Now the ptichka, their
heads bobbing like well-oiled machines, swallow  their  arrogant,
self-absorbed  boyfriends.  The camera angles recall the ardor of
Soviet industrial cinema.  His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-
pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Is-
lamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a  frac-
tal-based  calligraphy.  He drinks the vodka.  He watches televi-
sion.

After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool  and  Florencia,
he  stares  out at the Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a
nanopore Swiss respirator chafing his freshly shaven  chin.   And
every  passing  face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed be-
hind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the  Dead,  resemble  the
silver-beaded  jaws  of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they
take, their manufacturers all make the  same  dubious,  obliquely
comforting  claims  about  viroids.   He's  thought to escape the
sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing  inter-
est,  but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.
An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn,  out  of
Avenida  Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dan-
gling bumper. A dusty rind of cola-colored  resin  and  shattered
mirror  seals  its every surface; only the windshield is exposed,
and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink,  reminding
him  of  the gunship's lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to ac-
crete, seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction,  around
this  carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning relic in its
spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to  add
its  filth to the already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind
the black windshield?  Trembling, he watches the thing pass.  The
driver  is  staring at him.  He tells the driver to return to the
hotel.

He comes awake from a dream of metal  voices,  down  the  vaulted
concourses  of some European airport, distant figures glimpsed in
mute rituals of departure.  Darkness. The  hiss  of  climate-con-
trol.  The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pil-
low. Sounds of traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All ten-
sion,  his  panic,  are gone. He remembers the atrium bar. Music.
Faces.  He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium.
It  is  all  he  knows of peace.  And, yes, the glasses are here,
tucked beside his telephone. He draws them out, opening  the  ear
pieces  with  a  guilty  pleasure  that has somehow endured since
Prague.  Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn't
think of it in those terms. But he has never bought another piece
of software and the black plastic frames  have  started  to  lose
their  sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now, sueded
white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like  this  one.
He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer in-
serts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned  to  provide  his
own, whispering to her as he fast-forwards through the clumsy ti-
tles and up the moonlit ragged hiliscape of a place that is  nei-
ther Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-focus digital approximation
of both.  She is waiting for him, always, in the white  house  up
the  canyon  road.  The  candles.  The wine. The jet-beaded dress
against the matte perfection of her  skin,  such  whiteness,  the
black  beads  drawn  smooth  and  cool  as a snake's belly up her
tensed thigh.  Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his  hands  move.
Later,  drifting  toward  sleep of a different texture, the phone
beneath his pillow chimes softly and only once.  Her  white  arms
enfold  him.  Her blondness eternal.  He sleeps.  IntenSecure had
their wagons detailed every three shifts. They used this big spe-
cialty  car wash off Colby; twenty coats of hand-rubbed Wet Honey
Sienna and you didn't let it get too shabby.  That  one  November
evening  the Republic of Desire put an end to his career in armed
response, Berry Rydell had arrived  there  a  little  early.   He
liked  the  way  it smelled inside. They had this pink stuff they
put through the power-washers to get the road film off,  and  the
smell  reminded  him  of  a summer job he'd had in Knoxville, his
last year in school. They'd been putting condos into the shell of
this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects want-
ed the cinder block walls stripped just  this  one  certain  way,
mostly  gray showing through but some old pink Safeway paint left
in the little dips and crannies. They were from Memphis and  they
wore black suits and white cotton shirts. The shirts had obvious-
ly cost more than the suits, or at least as much, and they  never
wore  ties  or undid the top button. Rydell had figured that that
was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he  knew
it was true. He'd overheard one of them explaining to the foreman
that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the mate-
rial's  passage  through time. He thought that was probably bull-
shit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what hap-
pened  to  old people on television.  But what it really amounted
to was getting most of this 5 2 Cruising with gunhead shitty  old
paint off thousands and thousands of square feet of equally shit-
ty cinder block, and you did it with an oscillating spray-head on
the  end  of  a long stainless handle. If you thought the foreman
wasn't looking, you could aim it at  another  kid,  twist  out  a
thirty-foot  rooster  tail  of stinging rainbow, and wash all his
sunbiock off. Rydell and his friends  all  wore  this  Australian
stuff that came in serious colors, so you could see where you had
and hadn't put it. Had to get your right distance on it,  though,
'cause  up  close those heads could take the chrome off a bumper.
Rydell and Buddy Crigger both got fired for doing that,  finally,
and then they walked across Jeff Davis to a beer joint and Rydell
wound up spending the night with this girl  from  Key  West,  the
first  time  he'd  ever slept beside a woman.  Now here he was in
Los Angeles, driving a six-wheeled  Hotspur  Hussar  with  twenty
coats  of  hand-rubbed  lacquer.  The  Hussar was an armored Land
Rover that could do a hundred and forty on a straightaway, assum-
ing  you could find one open and had the time to accelerate. Her-
nandez, his shift super, said you couldn't trust an Englishman to
build  anything  much  bigger than a hat, not if you wanted it to
work when you needed it; he said IntenSecure should've bought Is-
raeli  or  at least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph Lauren to de-
sign a tank anyway?  Rydell didn't  know  about  that,  but  that
paint  job was definitely trying too hard. He thought they proba-
bly wanted people to think  of  those  big  brown  United  Parcel
trucks,  and at the same time they maybe hoped it would look sort
of like something you'd see in an Episcopal church. Not too  much
gilt  on  the logo. Sort of restrained.  The people who worked in
the car wash were mostly Mongolian immigrants,  recent  ones  who
had  trouble  getting  better  jobs.  They did this crazy throat-
singing thing while they worked, and he liked to  hear  that.  He
couldn't figure out how they did it; sounded like tree-frogs, but
like it was two sounds at once.  6 Now they were buffing the rows
of  chromed  nubs down the sides. Those had been meant to support
electric crowd-control grids and were just chromed for looks. The
riot-wagons  in  Knoxville  had  been  electrified, but with this
drip-system that kept them wet, which was a lot nastier.   Rydell
took  the  pad  and the light-pen and signed the signature-plate.
Anderson handed Rydell the keys.  Somebody had written  that  in-
side,  'GUNHEAD,'  in  green  marker on the panel above the wind-
shield. The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked it. Sub-
lett  was  Texan,  a  refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-
sect. He said his mother had been getting ready to deed  his  ass
to  the  church, whatever that meant.  Sublett wasn't too anxious
to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten the idea that these  peo-
ple  figured  video was the Lord's preferred means of communicat-
ing, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush.  'He's
in the de-tails,' Sublett had said once. 'You gotta watch for Him
close.' Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that
Sublett  had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever
met, mostly old movies on channels that never ran  anything  but.
Sublett  said  Gunhead was the name of a robot tank in a Japanese
monster movie. Hernandez thought Sublett had written the name  on
there  himself.  Sublett  denied  it. Hernandez said take it off.
Sublett ignored him. It was still there, but Rydell knew  Sublett
was  too  law-abiding to commit any vandalism, and anyway the ink
in the marker might've killed him.  Sublett had had allergies. He
went into shock from various 7 kinds of cleaners and solvents, so
you couldn't get him to come into the car wash at all, ever.  The
allergies  made him light sensitive, too, so he had to wear these
mirrored contacts. What with the black  IntenSecure  uniform  and
his  dry blond hair, the contacts made him look like some kind of
Kian-assed Nazi robot. Which could get kind of complicated in the
wrong store on Sunset, say three in the morning and all you real-
ly wanted was some mineral water and a Coke. But Rydell  was  al-
ways  glad  to  have him on shift, because he was as determinedly
nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely to find. And he probably
wasn't even crazy. Both of which were definite pluses for Rydell.
As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regula-
tions for who could or couldn't be a hairdresser.  Like Rydell, a
lot of IntenSecure's response people were former police  officers
of  some kind, some were even ex-LAPD, and if the company's rules
about not carrying personal weapons on duty were any  indication,
his  co-workers  were  expected  to turn up packing all manner of
hardware. There were metal detectors on the staff-room doors  and
Hernandez  usually  had  a drawer full of push-daggers, nunchuks,
stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and whatever  else  the  detectors
had  picked up. Like Friday morning at a South Miami high school.
Hernandez gave it all back after the shift, but  when  they  went
calling,  they were supposed to make do with their Glocks and the
chunkers.  The Glocks were standard police issue, at least twenty
years old, that IntenSecure bought by the truckload from PDs that
could afford to upgrade to caseless ammunition. If you did it  by
the book, you kept the Glocks in their plastic holsters, and kept
the holsters Velcroed to the wagon's central  console.  When  you
answered  a  call,  you pulled a holstered pistol off the console
and stuck it on the patch provided on your uniform. That was  the
only time you were supposed to be out of the wagon with a gun on,
when you were actually responding.   The  chunkers  weren't  even
guns,  not  legally anyway, but a ten-second burst at close range
would chew somebody's face off. They  were  Israeli  riot-control
devices,  air-powered, that fired one-inch cubes of recycled rub-
ber. They looked like the result of a forced union between a  bu-
lipup  assault  rifle  and  an industrial staple gun, except they
were made out of this bright yellow plastic. When you pulled  the
trigger,  those chunks came out in a solid stream. If you got re-
ally good with one, you could shoot around corners; just kind  of
bounce them off a convenient surface. Up close, they'd eventually
cut a sheet of plywood in half, if you kept on shooting, and they
left major bruises out to about thirty yards. The theory was, you
didn't always encounter that many armed intruders, and a  chunker
was  a lot less likely to injure the client or the client's prop-
erty. If you did encounter an armed intruder, you had the  Glock.
Although  the  intruder  was  probably running caseless through a
floating breech-not part of the theory. Nor was it  part  of  the
theory  that seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened
on dancer, and were thereby both inhumanly  fast  and  clinically
psychotic.  There had been a lot of dancer in Knoxville, and some
of it had gotten Rydell suspended. He'd crawled into an apartment
where  a  machinist  named  Kenneth  Turvey was holding his girl-
friend, two little kids, and demanding to speak to the president.
Turvey  was  white, skinny, hadn't bathed in a month, and had the
Last Supper tattooed on his chest. It was a very fresh tattoo; it
hadn't  even scabbed over. Through a film of drying blood, Rydell
could see that Jesus didn't have any face. Neither did any of the
Apostles.   9  There  on  his  knees,  on  the girlfriend's dusty
polyester carpet, he'd watched that muzzle swing past. It was big
enough to put your fist down. He watched as Turvey took aim, back
through the open bedroom door, at the closet.  Turvey  moved  the
vise-grip handle and punched a hole the size of a fruit-juice can
through the closet door. The kids were  in  there.  They  must've
screamed,  though  Rydell  couldn't remember hearing it. Rydell's
lawyer later argued that he was not only deaf at this point,  hut
in a state of sonically induced catalepsy. Turvey's invention was
only a few decihels short of what  you  got  with  a  SWAT  stun-
grenade.  But  Rydell  couldn't  remember.  He  couldn't rememher
shooting Kenneth Turvey in the head, either, or anything else  at
all  until  he  woke  up in the hospital. There was a woman there
from Cops in Trouble, which had been Rydell's  father's  favorite
show,  but she said she couldn't actually talk to him until she'd
spoken with his agent. Rydell said he didn't have one.  She  said
she  knew  that, but one was going to call him.  Rydell lay there
thinking about all the times he and his father had  watched  Cops
in  Trouble.  'What  kind of trouble we talking here?' he finally
asked.  The woman just smiled. 'Whatever, Berry,  it'll  probably
be  adequate.'  He squinted up at her. She was sort of good-look-
ing. 'What's your name?'

Gunhead's displays were featureless slabs of liquid crystal; they
woke  when  Rydell inserted the key, typed the security code, and
ran a basic systems check. The cameras under the rear bumper were
his  favorites;  they made parking really easy; you could see ex-
actly where you were backing up. The downlink from the Death Star
wouldn't  work while he was still in the car wash, too much steel
in the building, but it was Sublett's job to keep  track  of  all
that  with  an  ear-bead.  There was a notice posted in the staff
room at IntenSecure, telling you it was  company  policy  not  to
call  it that, the Death Star, but everybody did anyway. The LAPD
called it that themselves. Officially it was the  Southern  Cali-
fornia  (icosynclinical  Law  Enforcement Satellite.  II Watching
the dashboard screens, Rydell backed carefully out of the  build-
ing.  Gunhead's  twin ceramic engines were new enough to still be
relatively quiet; Rydell could hear the tires squish over the wet
concrete floor.  Sublett was waiting outside, his silver eyes re-
flecting the red of passing taillights. Behind him, the  sun  was
setting, the sky's colors bespeaking more than the usual cocktail
of additives. He stepped back as Rydell reversed past  him,  anx-
ious  to  avoid the least droplet of spray from the tires. Rydell
was anxious too; he didn't want to have  to  haul  the  Texan  to
Cedars  again  if his allergies kicked up.  Rydell waited as Sub-
lett pulled on a pair  of  disposable  surgical  gloves.   Rydell
scanned the displays, satisfied. 'Not too shabby.'  Stealth hous-
es, so-called, were on Sublett's personal list of bad  calls.  He
said  the  air in them was toxic. Rydell didn't think it made any
sense, but he was tired of arguing about it. Stealth houses  were
bigger  than  most  regular houses, cost more, and Rydell figured
the owners would pay plenty to keep the air clean. Sublett  main-
tained that anybody who built a stealth house was paranoid to be-
gin with, would always keep the place locked up too tight, no air
circulation,  and  you'd  get that had toxic buildup.  If there'd
been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn't  known  about
them.  He thought it was an L.A. thing.  Ii Sublett, who'd worked
for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly  on  day  patrol  in
Venice, had been the first person to even mention them to Rydell.
When Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn't  be-
lieve the place; it just went down and down, dug in beneath some-
thing that looked  almost,  but  not  quite,  like  a  bombed-out
drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs inside, white plas-
ter, Turkish carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like
he'd  never seen before. But it was some kind of tricky call; do-
mestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the husband hit  the  wife,
the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just
a glitch. But it couldn't really be a glitch, because someone had
had  to hit the button, and there hadn't been any response to the
password call that came back to  them  three-point-eight  seconds
later.  She  must've messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then
hit the button. He'd been been riding with 'Big  George'  Kechak-
madze  that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) hadn't
liked it either. 'You see these people, they're subscribers, man;
nobody  bleeding,  you  get  your  ass out, okay?' Big George had
said, after. But Rydell kept remembering  a  tension  around  the
woman's eyes, how she held the collar of the big white robe fold-
ed against her throat. Her husband in a matching  robe  but  with
thick  hairy  legs  and expensive glasses. There'd been something
wrong there but he'd never know what. Not any more than he'd ever
understand  how their lives really worked, lives that looked like
what you saw on tv but weren't.  L.A. was full of mysteries, when
you  looked  at  it that way. No bottom to it.  He'd come to like
driving through it, though. Not when he had to  get  anywhere  in
particular,  but  just cruising with Gunhead was okay. Now he was
turning onto La Cienega and the little green cursor on the  clash
was doing the same.

Sublett  fell silent. Rydell felt sorry for him; the Texan really
didn't know any other way to start a conversation, and his  folks
back  home  in the trailer-camp would've seen all those films and
more.  Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'  Suhlett closed his  eyes,
scanning  his  inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'  Sublett
opened his eyes. 'Who was in it?'  Sublett's  blank  silver  eyes
widened  in  disbelief. 'Jesus, Berry, you shouldn't oughta watch
tv, not unless you're gonna pay it attention.'

He wasn't in the hospital very long, after he shot  Kenneth  Tur-
vey; barely two days. His lawyer, Aaron Pursley himself, made the
case that they should've kept him in there longer, the better  to
assess  the  extent of his post-traumatic shock. But Rydell hated
hospitals and anyway he didn't feel too bad; he just couldn't re-
call  exactly  what  had happened. And he had Karen Mendelsohn to
help him out with things, and his new agent,  Wellington  Ma,  to
deal  with the other people from Cops in Trouble, not one of them
as nice as Karen, who had long brown hair. Wellington Ma was Chi-
nese, lived in Los Angeles, and Karen said his father had been in
the Big Circle gang-though she advised Rydell not to bring it up.
Wellington  Ma's  business  card  was a rectangular slice of pink
synthetic quartz, laser-engraved with his name,  'The  Ma-Mariano
Agency,'  an  address on Beverly Boulevard, and all kinds of num-
bers and e-mail addresses. It arrived by GlobEx in its own little
gray  suede envelope while Rydell was still in the hospital.  Ry-
dell never actually did meet Wellington Ma,  at  least  not  'til
quite  a while later, but Karen would bring in a little briefcase
with a pair of eyephones on a wire and Rydell could talk with him
iii  his  office  in LA. It was the sharpest tele Is presence rig
Rydell had ever used, and it really did look  just  like  he  was
right  there. He could see out the window to where there was this
lopsided pyramid the color of a Noxzema jar. He asked  Wellington
Ma  what  that  was and Ma said it was the old Design Center, but
currently it was a discount mall, and Rydell could go there  when
he  came  to  L.A.,  which  was going to be soon.  Turvey's girl-
friend, Jenni-Rae Cline, was bringing an intricately interlocking
set  of separate actions against Rydell, the Department, the City
of Knoxville, and the company in Singapore that owned her  apart-
ment building. About twenty million in total.  Rydell, having be-
come a cop in trouble, was glad to find that Cops in Trouble  was
right  there  for  him. They'd hired Aaron Pursley, for starters,
and of course Rydell knew who he was from the show. He  had  that
gray  hair,  those  blue eyes, that nose you could split kindling
with, and wore jeans, Tony Lama boots, and  plain  white  oxford-
cloth  pima cotton cowboy business shirts with Navajo-silver bob-
ties. He was famous and he defended cops like Rydell from  people
like  Turvey's  girlfriend  and  her  lawyer.   Jenni-Rae Cline's
lawyer maintained that Rydell shouldn't have been in  her  apart-
ment  at all, that he'd endangered her life and her children's by
so doing, and that he'd killed Kenneth Turvey in the process, Mr.
Turvey being described as a skilled craftsman, a steady worker, a
loving father-figure for little Rambo  and  Kelly,  a  born-again
Christian,  a recovering addict to 4-Thiobuscaline, and the fami-
ly's sole means of support.  16 Rydell looked at her. He  thought
about Los Angeles on television. 'Will I like it?'  Which was how
he wound up going to bed with a lawyer- one who  smelled  like  a
million  dollars,  talked dirty, slid all around, and wore under-
wear from Milan, which was in Italy.  He turned to Suhlett. 'Man,
you still haven't got your ass i8 vaccinated yet, you got nothin'
but stone  white-trash  ignorance  to  thank  for  it.'   Sublett
cringed.  'That's  worse than a live vaccine, man; that's a whole
'nother disease right there!'  Sublett shuddered. 'Reverend  Fal-
lon  always said-' Sublett's head seemed to draw down between his
high shoulders, giving him the look of a worried, steel-eyed buz-
zard.  'Ain't  all that simple,' he said. 'It's everything I been
brought up to be. Can't all be bullshit, can it?'  Rydell, glanc-
ing  over at him, took pity. 'Naw,' he said, 'I guess it wouldn't
have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it's just-' Rydell had to
think about it. 'Republican,' he said, finally.

Karen  Mendelsohn  had  seemed like the best of a whole string of
things Rydell felt he could get used to just  fine.  Like  flying
business-class  or  having a SoCal MexAmeriBank card from Cops in
Trouble.  That first time with her, in the  Executive  Suites  in
Knoxville,  not  having anything with him, he'd tried to show her
his certificates of vaccination (required by the Department, else
they  couldn't get you insured). She'd just laughed and said Ger-
man nanotech would take care of all of that. Then she showed  Ry-
dell  this  thing  through the transparent top of a gadget like a
little battery-powered pressure-cooker. Rydell  had  heard  about
them,  but  he  hadn't  ever  seen one; he'd also heard they cost
about as much as a small car. He'd read somewhere how they always
had  to  be kept at body temperature.  It looked like it might be
moving a little in there. Pale, sort of jellyfish thing. He asked
her  if  it was true they were alive. She told him it wasn't, ex-
actly, but it was almost, and the rest of it was Bucky balls  and
subcellular automata. And he wouldn't even know it was there, but
no way was she going to put it in in front of  him.   She'd  gone
into  the bathroom to do that. When she came back out in that un-
derwear, he got to learn where Milan was. And while it  was  true
he  wouldn't  have  known the thing was there, he did know it was
there, but pretty soon he forgot about it,  almost.   They  char-
tered  a  tilt-rotor  to  Memphis the next morning and got on Air
Magellan to LAX. Business-class mostly meant better gizmos in the
seatback  in  front of you, and Rydell's immediate favorite was a
telepresence set you could tune to servo-mounted mollies  on  the
outside  of the plane. Karen hated to use the little VirtuFax she
carried around in her purse, so she'd gotten on to her office  in
L.A.  and  had them download her morning's mail into her seatback
display. She got down to that fast, talking on the phone, sending
faxes,  and  leaving  Rydell  to ooh and ah at the views from the
mollies.  The seats were bigger than when he used to fly down  to
Florida  to  see  his father, the food was better, and the drinks
were free. Rydell had three or four of those,  fell  asleep,  and
didn't  wake up until somewhere over Arizona.  The air was funny,
at LAX, and the light was different. California was  a  lot  more
crowded  than  he'd  expected,  and louder. There was a man there
from Cops in Trouble, holding up a piece of wrinkled white  card-
board  that  said  2.0  MENDELSOHN  in red marker, only the S was
backward. Rydell smiled, introduced himself, and shook hands with
him. He seemed to like that; said his name was Sergei. When Karen
asked him where the fucking car was, he  turned  bright  red  and
said  it  would  just  take him a minute to get it. Karen said no
thanks, they'd walk to the lot with him as  soon  as  their  bags
turned  up,  no  way  was  she waiting around in a zoo like this.
Sergei nodded. He kept trying to fold up the sign and put it into
his  jacket pocket, but it was too big. Rydell wondered why she'd
suddenly gotten bitchy like that. Tired from the trip, maybe.  He
winked  at Sergei, but that just seemed to make the guy more ner-
vous.  After their bags came, Karen's two black leather ones  and
the softside blue Samsonite Rydell had bought with his new debit-
card, he and Sergei carried them out and across a kind of traffi-
cioop.  The  air  outside  was  about  the same, but hotter. This
recording kept saying that the white spaces were for loading  and
unloading  only.  There  were all kinds of cars jockeying around,
babies crying, people leaning on piles  of  luggage,  but  Sergei
knew  where  they  were going-over to this garage across the way.
Sergei's car was long, black, German, and  looked  like  somebody
had  just  cleaned it all over with warm spit and QTips. When Ry-
dell offered to ride shotgun, Sergei got rattled again  and  hus-
tled  him into the back seat with Karen. Which made her laugh, so
Rydell felt better.  As they were pulling out of the garage,  Ry-
dell  spotted  two cops over by these big stainless-steel letters
that said METRO. They wore  air-conditioned  helmets  with  clear
plastic visors. They were poking at an old man with their sticks,
though it didn't look like they had them turned on. The old man's
jeans  were  out  at  the knees and he had big patches of tape on
both cheekbones, which almost always  means  cancer.  He  was  SO
burned,  it  was hard to tell if he was white or what. A crowd of
people was streaming up the stairs behind the  old  man  and  the
cops,  under  the  METRO sign, and stepping around them.  21 They
had dinner that night in what  Karen  said  was  Hollywood,  with
Aaron  Pursley  himself,  in a Tex-Mex restaurant on North Flores
Street. It was the best Tex-Mex food Rydell had ever had. About a
month  later,  he  tried  to take Sublett there for his birthday,
maybe cheer him up with a down-home meal, but the man  out  front
just  wouldn't let them in.  Rydell could see plenty of empty ta-
bles through the window. It was early and there was  hardly  any-
body  in  there.  'How 'bout those,' Rydell said, pointing at all
the empty tables.  Sublett said spicy foods weren't really such a
good idea for him anyway.

What  he'd  come to like best, cruising with Gunhead, was getting
back up in the hills and canyons, particularly on a night with  a
good  moon.  Sometimes you saw things up there and couldn't quite
be sure you'd seen them or not. One full-moon  night  Rydell  had
slung  Gunhead  around  a  curve  and frozen a naked woman in the
headlights, the way a deer'll stop, trembling, on a country road.
Just a second she was there, long enough for Rydelb to think he'd
seen that she either wore silver horns or some kind of  hat  with
an  upturned crescent, and that she might've been Japanese, which
struck him right then as the weirdest thing about any of it. Then
she  saw  him-he  saw  her see him-and smiled. Then she was gone.
Sublett had seen her, too, but it only kicked him into some  kind
of  motormouthed  ecstasy  of  religious dread, every horrormovie
he'd ever seen tumbling over into Reverend Fallon's  rants  about
witches,  devil-worshippers,  and the living power of Satan. He'd
gone through his week's supply of gum, talk  ing  nonstop,  until
Rydell had finally told him to shut the fuck up.  Because now she
was gone, he wanted to think about her. How  she'd  looked,  what
she  might  have been doing there, and how it was she'd vanished.
With Sublett sulking in the shotgun seat, Rydell had tried to re-
member  just exactly how it was she'd managed to so perfectly and
suddenly not be there. And the funny thing was, he sort of remem-
bered it two ways, which was nothing at all like the way he still
didn't really remember shooting Kenneth Turvey, even though  he'd
heard  production  assistants  and  network lawyers go over it so
many times he felt like he'd seen it, or at  least  the  Cops  in
Trouble  version  (which  never aired). One way he remembered it,
she'd just sort of gone down the slope beside  the  road,  though
whether  she  was running or floating, he couldn't say. The other
way he remembered, she'd jumped-though that was such a poor  word
for  it-up  the  slope  above the other side of the road, somehow
clearing all that  dust-silvered  moonlit  vegetation,  and  just
flat-out  impossible  gone,  forty  feet if it was five.  And did
Japanese women ever have that kind of long curly hair? And hadn't
it  looked like the shadowed darkness of her bush had been shaved
into something like an exclamation point?  He'd wound  up  buying
Sublett  four  packs  of  the special gum at an all-night Russian
pharmacy on Wilshire, amazed at what the stuff  cost  him.   He'd
seen  other  things,  too, up the canyons, particularly when he'd
drawn a shift on deep graveyard. Mostly fires, small ones,  where
fires  couldn't be. And lights in the sky, sometimes, but Sublett
was so full of trailer-camp contactee shit that if Rydell  saw  a
light now, driving, he knew better than to mention it.  But some-
times, when he was up there, he'd think about  her.  He  knew  he
didn't  know  what  she was, and in some funny way he didn't even
care if she'd been human or not. But he hadn't ever felt like she
was  bad, just different.  2.3 So now he just drove, shooting the
shit with Sublett, on the night that would turn  out  to  be  his
very  last  night on patrol with IntenSecure. No moon, but a rare
clear sky with a few stars showing. Five minutes to  their  first
house  check,  then they'd be swinging back toward Beverly Hills.
They were talking about this chain of Japanese gyms  called  Body
Hammer.  Body  Hammer didn't offer much in the way of traditional
gym culture; in fact they went as far as possible in the opposite
direction,  catering  mostly  to kids who liked the idea of being
injected with Brazilian fetal tissue and having  their  skeletons
reinforced  with  what  the  ads  called 'performance materials.'
Sublett said it was the Devil's work.  Rydell said it was a Tokyo
franchise  operation.  Gunhead said: 'Multiple homicide, hostage-
taking in progress,  may  involve  subscriber's  minor  children.
Benedict  Canyon.  You  have  IntenSecure authorization to employ
deadly, repeat, deadly force.'  And the dash lit up like an  old-
time video arcade.

The way it had worked out, Rydell hadn't actually had time to get
used to Karen Mendelsohn, business-class seats, or  any  of  that
stuff.   Karen  lived, umpteen floors up, in Century City II, aka
the Blob, which looked sort of like a streamlined, semi-transpar-
ent  green  tit  and  was the third-tallest structure in the L.A.
Basin. When the light was  right,  you  could  see  almost  clear
through  it, and make out the three giant struts that held it up,
each one so big around you could stuff an ordinary skyscraper  up
it with room to spare. There were elevators up through these tri-
pod-things, and they ran at an angle; Rydell hadn't had  time  to
get used to that either.  The tit had a carefully corroded copper
nipple, like one of those Chinese hats, that could've  covered  a
couple  of football fields. That was where Karen's apartment was,
under there, along with an equally pricey hundred others, a  ten-
nis club, bars and restaurants, and a mall you had to pay to join
before you could shop there. She was right out on the edge,  with
big  curved windows set into the green wall.  Everything in there
was different shades of white, except for her clothes, which were
always  black,  her suitcases, which were black, too, and the big
terry robes she liked to wear, which were the color of  dry  oat-
meal.   Karen  said it was Aggressive Retro Seventies and she was
getting a little tired of it. Rydell saw how she  could  be,  but
figured it might not be polite to say so.  The network had gotten
him a room in a West Hollywood hotel that looked more like a reg-
ular  condo-building, but he never did spend much time there. Un-
til the Pooky Bear thing broke in Ohio, he'd mostly  been  up  at
Karen's.   The discovery of the first thirty-five Pooky Bear vic-
tims pretty much put paid to Rydell's career as a cop in trouble.
It hadn't helped that the officers who'd first reached the scene,
Sgt. China Valdez and Cpl. Norma  Pierce,  were  easily  the  two
best-looking  women  on  the  whole  Cincinnati force ('balls-out
telegenic,' one of the production assistants had said, though Ry-
dell  thought it sounded weird under the circumstances). Then the
count began to rise, ultimately going right off any known or  es-
tablished serial-killing scale. Then it was revealed that all the
victims were children. Then Sgt. Valdez  went  post-traumatic  in
stone  bugfuck  fashion, walking into a downtown tavern and clip-
ping both kneecaps off a known pedophile- this  amazingly  repul-
sive  character,  nickname  of  Jellybeans, who had absolutely no
connection with the Pooky Bear murders.  Aaron  Pursley  was  al-
ready  Learing it back to Cincinnati in a plane that had no metal
in it whatsoever, Karen had locked the goggles  across  her  eyes
and  was  talking nonstop to at least six people at once, and Ry-
dell was sitting on the edge of her big white  bed,  starting  to
get  the  idea  that something had changed.  2.5 When she finally
took the goggles off, she just sat  there,  staring  at  a  white
painting  on  a  white wall.  Karen looked over at him like she'd
never seen him before.  She came back five  minutes  later  in  a
fresh  black  outfit. 'Pack. I can't have you here now.' Then she
was gone, no kiss, no goodbye, and that was that.  He got up, put
a  television  on,  and  saw the Pooky Bear killers for the first
time. All three of them. They looked,  he  thought,  pretty  much
like everybody else, which is how people who do that kind of shit
usually do look on television.  He was sitting there  in  one  of
her  oatmeal  robes  when  a  pair of rentacops let themselves in
without knocking. Their uniforms were black and they were wearing
the  same  kind  of  black high-top SWAT-trainers that Rydell had
worn on patrol in Knoxville, the ones with the Kevlar insoles  in
case  somebody  snuck  up and tried to shoot you in the bottom of
the foot.  One of them was eating an apple. The other one  had  a
stun-stick  in  his  hand.   The one with the stick grinned. 'You
gonna get packing now?'  So Rydell did, picking up anything  that
wasn't black, white, or oatmeal and tossing it into his blue Sam-
sonite.  The rentacop with the stick watched him, while the other
one  wandered  around, finishing his apple.  The man shrugged.  A
day later, the network pulled the plug on his MexAmeriBank  card.

Hernandez  might be wrong about English SWAT-wagons, Rydell found
himself thinking, punching  the  Hotspur  Hussar  into  six-wheel
overdrive  and feeling Gunhead suck down on pavement like a twin-
engined, three-ton leech. He'd never really stomped on that thing
before.  Sublett yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automat-
ically, yanking him up out of his  usual  slouch.   Rydell  slung
Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing seventy
past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that.  Eye-
blink  of  a  woman passenger's horrified face, then Sublett must
have managed to slap the red plastic  plate  that  activated  the
strobes and the siren.  Straight stretch now. No cars at all. Ry-
dell straddled the centerline and floored it. Sublett was  making
a weird keening sound that synched eerily with the rising ceramic
whine of the twin Kyoceras, and it came to Rydell that the  Texan
had  snapped  completely under the pressure of the thing, and was
Singing in Some trailer-camp tongue known only to  the  benighted
followers of the Rev. Fallon.  But, no, when he glanced that way,
he saw Suhlctt, lips 2.7 moving, frantically scanning the client-
data as it seethed on the dash-screens, his eyes bugging like the
silver contacts might pop right out. But while  he  read,  Rydell
saw,  he was actually loading his worn-out, secondhand Gbock, his
long white fingers moving in the most matter-of-fact way  imagin-
able, as though he were making a sandwich or folding a newspaper.
And that was scary.  Sublett turned, snapping the  magazine  into
his  Gbock, his face so pale that it seemed to reflect the colors
of the dash-display as readily as did the blank steel  rounds  of
his  eyes.   Sublett touched a finger to his right ear. He looked
like he was about to scream. 'Down,' he  said.   Gunhead's  right
front  fender  clipped off somebody's circa-1943 fully-galvanized
Sears rural-route mailbox, no doubt acquired  at  great  cost  on
Melrose Avenue.  Sublett tugged the bead from his ear and offered
it to Rydell. 'Static's all . .  Rydell looked down at his  dash-
display.  Gunhead's cursor was a green spear of destiny, whipping
along a paler-green canyon road toward a chaste white circle  the
size of a ~eddingring. In the window immediately to the right, he
could read the vital-signs data on the subscriber's  three  kids.
Their  pulse  rates  were  up.  In  the window below, there was a
~idicubousty peaceful-looking infrared frame of the  subscriber's
front  gate. It looked solid. The read-out said it was locked and
armed.  Right then, probably, was when he decided just to go  for
it.

A  week  or  so later, when it had all been sorted out, Hernandez
was basically sympathetic about the whole thing. Not happy,  mind
you,  because  it  had happened over his shift, but he did say he
couldn't much blame Rydell under the circumstances.   IntenSecure
had  brought  in a whole planeload of people from the head office
in Singapore, Rydell had heard, to keep it all out of  the  media
and  work  out  some kind of settlement with the subscribers, the
Schonbrunns. He had no idea what that settlement might  have  fi-
nally  amounted  to,  but he was just as happy not to know; there
was no such program as KentaCops in Trouble, and the Schonbrunns'
front gate alone had probably been worth a couple of dozen of his
paychecks.  IntenSecure could replace that  gate,  sure,  because
they'd installed it in the first place. It had been quite a gate,
too, some kind of Japanese fiber-reinforced  sheeting,  thermoset
to  concrete, and it sure as hell had managed to get most of that
Wet Honey Sienna off Gunhead's front end.   Then  there  was  the
damage  to  the  house  itself, mostly to the living-room windows
(which he'd driven through) and the furniture (which he'd  driven
over).   But there had to be something for the Schonbrunns on top
of that, Hernandez explained. Something for  emotional  pain,  he
said,  pumping  Rydell  a  cup  of  old nasty coffee from the big
stainless thermos behind his desk. There was a  fridge-magnet  on
the  thermos  that  said  I'M NOT OKAY, YOU'RE NOT OKAY-BUT, hEY,
THAT'S OKAY.

It was two weeks since the night in question,  tell  in  the  2.9
morning,  and  Rydell  was wearing a five-day beard, a fine-weave
panama Stetson, a pair of baggy, faded orange trunks, a KNOXVILLE
POLICE  DEPARTMENT  t-shirt  that was starting to disintegrate at
the shoulder-seams, the black SWAT-trainers from his  IntenSecure
uniform,  and an inflated transparent cast on his left arm. 'Emo-
tional pain,' Rydell said.  Hernandez, who  was  very  nearly  as
wide as his desk, passed Rydell the coffee. 'You way lucky, all I
can say.'  Hernandez narrowed his eyes. 'You seen the pussy  over
there?'   Hernandez  sighed. 'Man, what happen with all that shit
coming down on you in Nashville?'

In the instant of putting  Gunhead  through  the  Schonbrunns  30
locked-and-armed  Benedict  Canyon gate, Rydell had experienced a
fleeting awareness of something very high, very puree  and  quite
clinically  empty; the doing of the thing, the not-thinking; that
weird adrenal exultation and the losing of every more troublesome
aspect  of self.  And that-he later recalled remembering, as he'd
fought the wheel, slashing through a Japanese  garden,  across  a
patio, and through a membrane of armored glass that gave way like
something in a dream-had been a lot like what he'd felt  as  he'd
drawn  his  gun and pulled the trigger, emptying Kenneth Turvey's
brain-pan, and most copiously, across a  seemingly  infinite  ex-
panse  of  white-primered wallboard that nobody had ever bothered
to paint.

Rydell went over to  Cedars  to  see  Sublett.   IntenSecure  had
sprung  for  a  private  cubicle, the better to keep Sublett away
from any cruising minions of the media. The Texan was sitting  up
in  bed,  chewing gum, and watching a little liquid-crystal disk-
player propped on his chest.  Rydell grinned. 'When'd  they  make
it?'   Sublett  looked at Rydell with his blank silver eyes. 'How
'bout yours, Berry?'  Rydell's arm started to  itch,  inside  the
inflated  cast.  He bent over and fished a plastic drinking-straw
from the little white wastebasket beside the bed.  He  poked  the
straw down inside the cast and wiggled it around. It helped some.
'I'm history, over there. They won't let me drive anymore.'  Sub-
lett was looking at the straw. 'You shouldn't ought to touch used
stuff, not in a hospital.'  31 Rydell dropped the straw back into
the basket. 'Well, I don't know. But I know I don't wanna do gat-
ed residential and I know I don't wanna do any  malls.'   Nothing
that  Gunhead  had logged that night, since leaving the car wash,
had been real. Someone had gotten into the Hotspur  Hussar's  on-
board computer and plugged a bunch of intricately crafted and ut-
terly spurious data into the communications bundle,  cutting  Ry-
dell  and  Sublett off from IntenSecure and the Death Star (which
hadn't, of course, been down). Rydell figured a few of those good
ol'  Mongol  boys  over  at  the car wash might know a little bit
about that.

And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead's crum-
pled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains 32.  of
a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Kenneth  Tur-
vey's  death finally real before him, Rydell had come to the con-
clusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of  Going  For  It,
was  maybe  something  that  wasn't  always  quite entirely to be
trusted.  Rydell dropped the chunker.  Rydeji grasped the Clock's
handle between thumb and forefinger, It came away, in its plastic
holster, with a tiny hut distinct skritch of Velcro, somehow  au-
dible through the drumming of the helicopter's combat-muffled en-
gine.  33



He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to.  The  left
one  was  broken.   They found Sublett fifteen feet from Gunhead.
His face and hands were swelling like bright  pink  toy  balloons
and he seemed to be suffocating, Schonbrunn's Bosnian housekeeper
having employed a product that contained xylene  and  chlorinated
hydrocarbons  to  clean  some crayon-marks off a bleached-oak end
table.  Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.  Rydell  remembered
the name of the movie he'd seen on television. 'Miracle Mile,' he
said.  Sublett squinted up at him. 'Never seen it,' Sublett said,
and fainted.

Mrs.  Schonbrunn  had been entertaining her Polish landscape gar-
dener that evening. The cops found her in  the  nursery.  Angered
beyond speech, she was cinched quite interestingly up in a couple
of thousand dollars worth of English latex, North Beach  leather,
and  a  pair of vintage Smith & Wesson handcuffs that someone had
paid to have lovingly buffed and redone in black chrome-the  gar-
dener  evidently having headed for the hills when he heard Rydell
parking Gunhead in the living room.          3       Not  a  nice
party



Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and
definitely not when she was pulling tags.  Except  this  one  bad
Monday  when  she  took this total asshole's sunglasses, but that
was because she just didn't like him.  How it was, she was stand-
ing  up there by this ninth-floor window, just looking out at the
bridge, past the gray shells of the big stores, when he'd come up
behind  her.  She'd  almost  managed  to make out Skinner's room,
there, high up in the old cables, when the tip of a finger  found
her  bare back. Under Skinner's jacket, under her t-shirt, touch-
ing her.  She wore that jacket everywhere, like some kind of  ar-
mor.  She  knew  that nanopore was the only thing to wear, riding
this time of year, but she wore Skinner's old  horsehide  anyway,
with  her bar-coded Allied badges on the lapels. The little ball-
chains on the zippers swinging as she spun to knock  that  finger
aside.   Bloodshot  eyes.  A  face  that looked as though it were
about to melt. He had a short little greenish cigar in his  mouth
but it wasn't lit. He took it out, swirled its wet end in a small
glass of clear liquor, then took a long suck on it.  Grinning  at
her around it. Like he knew she didn't belong here, not at a par-
ty like this and not in any old hut seriously expensive hotel  up
Over  Geary.   But it had been the last tag of the day, a package
for a lawyer, with ~Ienderloin's trash-fires burning so close by,
and  around  them, huddled, all those SO terminally luckless, ut-
terly 35 and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy  illumina-
tion  of the tiny glass pipes. Eyes canceled in that terrible and
fleeting satisfaction. Shivers, that gave her,  always.   Locking
and  arming her bike in the hollow sound of the Morrisey's under-
ground lot, she'd taken a service elevator to  the  lobby,  where
the security grunts tried to brace her for the package, but there
was no way. She wouldn't deliver to anyone at all except this one
very  specific  Mr.  Garreau  in 8o8, as stated right here on the
tag. They ran a scanner across the bar-code on her Allied  badge,
x-rayed  the package, put her through a metal-detector, and waved
her into an elevator lined with pink mirrors and trimmed in bank-
vault bronze.  So up she'd gone, to eight, to a corridor quiet as
the floor of some forest in a dream. She found Mr. Garreau there,
his  shirt-sleeves  white and his tie the color of freshly poured
lead. He signed the tab without making  eye-contact;  package  in
hand,  he'd  closed  the  door's  three brass digits in her face.
She'd checked her hair in the mirror-polished  italic  zero.  Her
tail  was  sticking  up okay, in back, but she wasn't sure they'd
got the front right. The spikes were still too long. Wispy,  sort
of. She headed back down the hail, the hardware jingling on Skin-
ner's jacket, her new SWAT-trainers sinking into freshly vacuumed
pile  the  color  of  rain-wet terracotta.  But when the elevator
doors opened, this  Japanese  girl  fell  out.  Or  near  enough,
Chevette  grabbing her beneath both arms and propping her against
the edge of the door.  The girl's eyes were all pupil, her  bangs
glossy  as  plastic.   So  Chevette, with a real glass wine-glass
full of real French wine in one hand, and the  smallest  sandwich
she'd  ever seen in the other, came to find herself wondering how
long she still had before the hotel's computer noticed she hadn't
yet  left the premises. Not that they were likely to come looking
for her 36 here, because someone had obviously put down good mon-
ey to have this kind of party.  Some really private kind, because
she could see these people in a darkened  bathroom,  smoking  ice
through  a  blown-glass dolphin, its smooth curves illuminated by
the fluttering bluish tongue of an  industrial-strength  lighter.
Not  just  one  room, either, but lots of them, all connected up.
And lots of people, too, the men mostly gotten up in those  suits
with the four-button jackets, stiff shirts with those choker col-
lars, and no tie but  a  little  jeweled  stud.  The  women  wore
clothes  Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to
be, and foreign, too.  Though  maybe  rich  was  foreign  enough.
She'd managed to get the Japanese girl horizontal on a long green
couch, where she was snoring now, and safe enough unless somebody
sat  on  her.   Looking around, Chevette had seen that she wasn't
the only underdressed local to have somehow  scammed  entry.  The
guy in the bathroom working the big yellow Bic, for starters, but
he was an extreme case. Then there were a couple of pretty  obvi-
ous  Tenderloin  working-girls,  too,  but maybe that was no more
than the accepted amount of local color  for  whatever  this  was
supposed to be.  But then this asshole's right in her face, grin-
ning his mean-ass drunken grin, and she's got her hand on a  lit-
tle folding-knife, something else she's borrowed from Skinner. It
has a hole in the blade that you can press the tip of your  thumb
into and snap it open, one-handed. That blade's under three inch-
es, broad as a soupspoon, wickedly serrated, and ceramic. Skinner
says  it's  a  fractal  knife, its actual edge more than twice as
long as the blade itself.  37 tobacco. She thinks of the smell of
the yellow-spined magazines up in Skinner's room, some so old the
pictures are only shades of gray, the way the city  looks,  some-
times, from the bridge.  And a funny pause crosses his face, like
something's gotten past his drunk, nudged  him.  Then  he  throws
back his head and laughs like it's the biggest joke in the world.
She gets a look at a lot of very  white,  very  expensive-looking
teeth. Rich people never have any metal in their teeth, Skinner's
told her.  The asshole wipes his eyes. 'But we have something  in
common,  you and I. ~.'  With the asshole gone, or anyway forgot-
ten she notices how much better these people  look  dancing.  She
finds herself opposite this girl in a leather skirt, little black
boots with jingling silver spurs. Chevette grins; the girl  grins
back.  38 friend' e1~, and for a second Chevette thinks she's be-
ing asked if she's a municipal messenger. The girl-woman-is older
than  she'd  thought;  late  twenties maybe, but definitely older
than Chevette. Good-looking without looking like it came out of a
kit;  dark  eyes, dark hair cut short. 'San Francisco?'  Chevette
nods.  The next tune's older than she  is;  that  black  guy  who
turned  white,  and then his face fell in, she guesses. She looks
down for her drink but they all look  alike.  Her  Japanese  doll
dances  past,  bangs  swinging, no recognition in her eyes as she
sees Chevette.  The woman raises her eyebrows.  'Our  host.'  But
she's still got her wide easy grin.          ''t, _1 ,i      . '

ou  uon  t nave to. Please. I only envy you the option. 'You Ger-
man?'

39 Chevette knows that's part of  what  used  to  be  Italy.  The
northern  part,  she thinks. 'Who's this Cody?'  The boy winks at
Chevette and moves on.  The grin widens. 'Really? It looks so ...
mysterious.  I'd  like  to  go there, but there are no tours, and
they say it's dangerous...'  dress up so much,  right?  But  it's
not dangerous, not even as much as the neighborhood around here.'
Thinking of the ones around the trash-fires. 'Just don't  go  out
on  Treasure Island. Don't try to go all the way to Oakland. Stay
over on the suspension side.'  The  woman  smiles.  'You're  very
lucky  then,  I think.'  40 They shake.  Settling the wide shoul-
ders of Skinner's jacket, Chevette nods to the  woman  Maria  and
begins to work her way through the crowd. Which is tighter now by
several degrees, like maybe this Cody's friends are still  arriv-
ing.  More  Japanese  here  now, she notices, all of them serious
suits; their wives or secretaries or  whatever  are  all  wearing
pearls.  But evidently this doesn't prevent them getting into the
spirit of the thing. It's gotten noisier,  too,  as  people  have
gotten  more  whacked.  There's that loud constant burr of party-
noise you get when the drinks kick in, and now she  wants  to  be
out  of there all that much faster.  She finds herself stuck near
the door to the bathroom where she'd seen  the  icers,  but  it's
closed  now.  A  bunch  of  French  people are talking French and
laughing and waving their hands around,  but  Chevette  can  hear
somebody  vomiting  in there. 'Coming through,' she says to a man
with a bowtie and a gray  crewcut,  and  just  pushes  past  him,
spilling  part  of  his  drink.  He  says  something after her in
French.  She feels really claustro now, like she does up  in  of-
fices  sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick some-
thing up, and she sees the office people walking back and  forth,
and  wonders  whether  it  all  means anything or if they're just
walking back and forth. Or maybe the wine's gotten to her, a lit-
tle,  because drinking isn't something she does much, and now she
doesn't like the taste of it in the back of her throat.  And sud-
denly there's her drunk, her Euro with his unlit 4' cigar, sweaty
brow too close to the dull-eyed, vaguely worried face of  one  of
the  Tenderloin girls. He's got her backed into a corner. And ev-
eryone's jammed so tight, this close to the door and the corridor
and  freedom,  that Chevette finds herself pressed up against his
back for a second, not that that interrupts  whatever  infinitely
dreary shit he's laying down for the girl, no, though he does jam
his elbow, hard, back into Chevette's ribs to  get  himself  more
space.   And Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out
of a pocket in the tobacco-colored leather.   Then  it's  in  her
hand,  down  the front of her bike-pants, she's out the door, and
the asshole hasn't even noticed.  In the sudden quiet of the cor-
ridor,  party  sounds receding as she heads for the elevator, she
wants to run. She wants to laugh, too, but now she's starting  to
feel  scared.   Walk.   Past the party's build-up of trays, dirty
glasses, plates.  Remembering the security grunts in  the  lobby.
The  thing  stuck down her pants.  Down a corridor that opens off
this one, she sees the doors of a service  elevator  spread  wide
now  and  welcoming.  A Central Asian kid with a paint-splattered
steel cart stacked up with flat rectangles  that  are  television
screens.  He gives her a careful look as she edges in beside him.
His face is all cheekbones, bright hooded eyes, his  hair  shaved
up  high  in one of those near-vertical dos all these guys favor.
He has a security badge clipped to the front of  his  clean  gray
workshirt  and  a  VirtuFax  slung around his neck on a red nylon
cord.  His fax buzzes. He raises it, pushes the button, peers in-
to the eyepiece. The thing in her bike-pants starts to feel huge.
Then he drops the fax back to his chest, blinks at her, and push-
es a button marked B-6. The doors rumble shut and Chevette closes
her eyes.  She leans hack against the big quilted  pads  hung  on
the  42.  walls and wishes she were up in Skinner's room, listen-
ing to the cables creak. The floor there's  a  layer  of  two-by-
fours laid on edge; the very top of the hump of the cable, riding
its steel saddle, sticks up through the middle, and Skinner  says
there are 17,464 strands of wire in that cable. Each one is about
as thick as a pencil. You can press your ear against it and  hear
the  whole bridge sing, when the wind's just right.  The elevator
stops at four for no reason at all. Nobody there  when  the  door
opens.  Chevette  wants  to press B-6 again but she makes herself
wait for the kid with the fax to do it. He does.  And B-6 is  not
the garage she so thoroughly wants now, but this maze of hundred-
year-old concrete tunnels, floored in cracked asphalt tile,  with
big old pipes slung in iron brackets along the ceiling. She slips
out while he's fiddling with one of the wheels on  his  cart.   A
century's-worth  of  padlocked  walk-in  freezers,  fifty  vacuum
cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls
of broadloom stacked like logs. More people in work clothes, some
in kitchen whites, but she's trying for tag-pulling attitude  and
looks, she hopes, like she's making a delivery.  She finds a nar-
row stairway and climbs. ,The air is hot and dead. Motion-sensors
click  the  lights for her at the start of each flight. She feels
the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.   But
her  bike  is  there, on B-i, behind a column of nicked concrete.
Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging
of  silver  duct-tape,  the  geometry of the paper-cored, carbon-
wrapped frame makes Chevette's thighs tremble. She slips her left
hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat. There's a lit-
tle double zik as the particle-brakes let go, then she's  up  and
Ofl  it.   43  It's  never  felt better, as she pumps up the oil-
stained ramp and out of there.  4 Career  opportunities  Rydell's
roommate,  Kevin  Tarkovsky,  wore  a  bone  through his nose and
worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just  Blow  Me.   Monday
morning, when Rydell told him he'd quit his job with IntenSecure,
Kevin offered to try to find  him  something  in  sales,  in  the
beach-culture line.  Kevin was the a)proxlmate color and sheen of
a pair of 45 mid-brown Cole-Haan loafers that Rydell's  aunt  had
given him for his fifteenth birthday. This had nothing to do with
either genetics or exposure to unfiltered sunlight, but  was  the
result  of  regular injections and a complicated regimen of pills
and lotions.  Rydell knew that Kevin didn't wind-surf, and  never
had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them
on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved,  and  Ry-
dell  had no doubt that Kevin could provide every bit of informa-
tion a prospective buyer might desire. And that all-important ex-
perience;  with  his  cordovan  tan, gym-tuned physique, and that
bone through his nose, he got a lot  of  attention.  Mainly  from
women,  though  it  didn't actually seem to do that much for him.
What Kevin sold, primarily, was  clothing.  Expensive  kind  that
supposedly  kept  the UV and the pollutants in the water off you.
He had two whole cartons full of  the  stuff,  stacked  in  their
room's  one closet. Rydell, who currently didn't have much in the
way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw through  there  and  borrow
whatever  took  his  fancy. Which wasn't a lot, as it turned out,
because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Gb, black nanopore, or
mirrorflex. A few of the jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW
ME logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly
shabby shape, as Rydell had discovered the last time he'd gone to
the farmers market.  He and Kevin were sharing one  of  two  bed-
rooms  in  a sixties house in Mar Vista, which meant Sea View but
there wasn't any. Someone had rigged up a  couple  of  sheets  of
drywall  down  the middle of the room. On Rydell's side, the dry-
wall was covered with those same big self-adhesive daisies and  a
collection  of  souvenir  bumper-stickers  from places like Magic
Mountain, Nissan County, I)isneyland, and Skywalker Park.  1'here
were  two other people sharing the house, three if 46 you counted
the Chinese girl out in the garage (but she had her own  bathroom
in  there).   Rydell  had  bought  a futon with most of his first
month's pay from IntenSecure. He'd bought it at this stall in the
market;  they  were cheaper there, and the stall was called Futon
Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty  funny.  The  Futon  Mouth
girl  had explained how you could slip the Metro guy on the plat-
form a twenty, then he'd let  you  get  on  the  train  with  the
rolled-up  futon, which came in a big green plastic sack that re-
minded Rydebl of a bodybag.  Lately, waiting  to  take  the  cast
off,  he'd spent a lot of time on that futon, staring up at those
bumper-stickers. He wondered if whoever had put  them  there  had
actually  bothered  to go to all those places. Hernandez had once
offered him work at Nissan County. IntenSecure had  the  rentacop
franchise  there. His parents had honeymooned at Disneyland. Sky-
walker Park was up in San Francisco; it had  been  called  Golden
Gate,  before, and he remembered a couple of fairly low-key riots
on television when they'd privatized it.  Rydell shook his  head.
Kevin  touched  the  bone  in his nose. 'Well, there's the rent.'
There was that. Rydelb put the helmet on.

47 Sonya nodded brightly. 'I see, Berry.'  Rydell  wondered  what
she  did  see. Or what the expert system that used her as a hand-
puppet could see. Or how it saw. What  did  someone  like  Rydell
look  bike  to  an  employment agency's computer system? Not like
much, he decided.  Rydell thought of the rocket-pods slung  under
the  LAPD chopper. Probably they'd had one of those CHAIN guns in
there, too. 'Yep,' he agreed.  Sonya beamed at Rydell  as  though
he'd  just  admitted,  shyly, to a congressional appointment or a
post-doctoral degree. 'Well, Berry,' she said,  'let  me  put  my
thinking  cap  on for just a second!' She winked, then closed her
big cartoon eyes.  Jesus, Rydebl  thought.  He  tried  to  glance
sideways,  but  Kevin's  helmet  didn't  have any peripherals, so
there was nothing there. Just Sonya, the empty rectangle  of  her
desk,  sketchy  details  suggesting an office, and the employment
agency's logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her  look  48
bike  the  anchorwoman  on a channel that only reported very good
news.  Sonya opened her  eyes.  Her  smile  became  incandescent.
'You're  from the South,' she said.  Fawk-? 'Huh?'  Kevin watched
as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address  and  telephone
number  on  the back of last week's People. The magazine belonged
to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she  always  got  hers
printed  out  so there was never any mention of scandal or disas-
ter, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly
anything to do with the British royal family.  Kevin fiddled with
his nose-bone. 'I can give you a lift,' he said.

There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window  of  Night-
mare  Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of
Christian vans parked beside shopping  centers.  Lots  of  bloody
car-wrecks  and  disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to
meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This
one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one
of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actual-
ly represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous
people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either  a
fifteen-year-old  or  an  old lady.  Kevin had let him off at the
corner of Sepulveda and he'd 49 walked back two  blocks,  looking
for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring
the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if  Ventura  had
had  real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular
now, people wanted them put in everywhere.  Ventura  was  one  of
those  Los  Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he
must've driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he
could  count,  but these streets looked completely different when
you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much  alone;  for
another,  you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the build-
ings were. Empty spaces behind dirty glass, with a yellowing pile
of  junk-mail  on  the  floor  inside  and maybe a puddle of what
couldn't be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. You'd
pass  a  couple of those, then a place selling sunglasses for six
times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista.
The  sunglasses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to
buzz you in.  Nightmare Folk Art was like  that,  sandwiched  be-
tween  a  dead  hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing
real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK
ART-SOUTHERN  GOTHIC,  the  letters  hand-painted  all  lumpy and
hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But  with
a  couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range
Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and  one  of
those  little  antique  Porsche two-seaters that always looked to
Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a
wide  berth;  cars  like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-
theft systems, not to  mention  hyper-aggressive.   There  was  a
rentacop  looking  at  him through the armored glass of the door;
not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed  a  pair
of  pressed  chinos  from  Kevin. They were a little tight in the
waist, hut they beat hell out of the orange trunks. He had  on  a
black  IntenSecure  uniform-shirt with the 50 patches ripped off,
his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasn't sure black really made
it  with khaki. He pushed the button. The rentacop buzzed him in.
The farmer didn't answer. State law said he couldn't have a  gun,
just the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic
holster, but he probably did anyway. One of those little  Russian
hold-outs  that chambered some godawful overheated caliber origi-
nally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks.  The  Rus-
sians,  never too safety-minded, had the market in Saturday-night
specials.  Rydell looked around. That  ol'  Rapture  was  big  at
Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his fa-
ther had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millen-
nium  had  up,  come,  and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here
they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett  and  his  folks
down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Rev-
erend Fallon-at least that had some kind of spin on it.  He tried
to  sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat
man, but she caught his eye and that wasn't good.  So  he  worked
his  way  deeper  into the shop, pretending to check out the mer-
chandise. There was a whole section of these  nasty-looking  spi-
dery  wreath-things,  behind  glass  in  faded  gilt  frames. The
wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old  hair.
There  were  tiny  little  baby coffins, all corroded, and one of
them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out
of  what Rydell supposed were 5 :i tombstones, old ones, the let-
tering worn down so faint you couldn't read it. He paused  beside
a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickaninny jock-
ey-boys it had been against the law  to  have  on  your  lawn  in
Knoxville. The jockey-boys had all been freshly-painted with big,
red-lipped, watermelon-eating grins. The bed was  spread  with  a
hand-stitched  quilt  patterned  like a Confederate flag. When he
looked for a price tag, all he found was a yellow  SOLD  sticker.
Rydell saw the fat man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deac-
tivate the Range Rover's defenses.  Shit, he thought,  go  ahead,
call  me  Berry.  'My father was, I guess. My mother's people are
from up around Bristol, mostly.'  Justine  (;ooper's  dark  eyes,
not  showing  much  white,  were  looking  right at him, hut they
didn't seem to be registering anything. He guessed she was  some-
where  in  her forties.  She gave a violent start, as though he'd
goosed her.  Good, Rydell thought,  get  her  talking  about  the
stock.  He  walked  over to the framed wreaths for a closer look.
'Looks like hair,' he said.  Damn. That talking head in the agen-
cy  display had been playing this shit back word for word.  There
it was again. 'Nope.'  Rydell  blinked.   Rydell  looked  at  the
rentacop,  hut  he  didn't  seem  to he listening to any of this.
Hell, he seemed to he asleep.  53 Her eyebrows shot up.  'There,'
she said.  Rydell had to think about that. He found himself look-
ing at the jockey-boy bed. 'Don't you ever get any  black  people
in  here,  complaining  about stuff like this?'  Now he'd have to
walk to whatever the nearest station was, take the  subway  home,
and  tell  Kevin  Tarkovsky  he hadn't been Southern enough.  The
rentacop was letting him out.  He was on the sidewalk,  the  door
closing  behind  him.  One of those big articulated German cargo-
rigs went by, the kind that burned canola oil. Rydell hated those
things.  The  exhaust  smelled like fried chicken.  The courier's
dreams are made of hot metal, shadows that scream and run,  moun-
tains  the  color  of concrete. They are burying the orphans on a
hillside. Plastic coffins, pale blue.  Clouds  in  the  sky.  The
priest's tall hat. They do not see the first shell coming in from
the concrete mountains. It punches  a  hole  in  everything:  the
hillside,  the sky, a blue coffin, the woman's face.  A sound too
vast to be any sound at all, but through it, somehow, they  hear,
arriving  only  now,  the distant festive pop-popping of the mor-
tars, tidy little clouds of smoke rising on  the  gray  mountain-
side.  He comes upright, alone in the wide bed, trying to scream,
and the words are in a language he no longer  allows  himself  to
speak.   His head throbs. He drinks flat water from the stainless
carafe on the nightstand. The room sways, blurs, comes back  into
focus.  He  forces  himself from the bed, pads naked to the tall,
old-fashioned windows. Fumbles the heavy drapes aside. San  Fran-
cisco. Dawn like tarnished silver. It is Tuesday. Not Mexico.  In
the white bathroom, wincing in the sudden light,  scrubbing  cold
water  into  his  numb  face.  The  dream  recedes,  hut leaves a
residue. He shivers, cold tile unpleasant beneath his bare  feet.
The  whores  at the party. ~I~his Harwood. I)ecadent. The courier
disapproves of decadence. His work brings him into  contact  with
real wealth, genuine power. He meets 55 5 Hay problemas people of
substance. Harwood is wealth without substance. He puts  out  the
bathroom light and gingerly returns to his bed, favoring the ache
in his head.  With the striped duvet drawn up to his chin, he be-
gins  to  sort  through  the  previous  evening.  There are gaps.
Overindulgence. He disapproves of overindulgence. Harwood's  par-
ty.  The  voice on the phone, instructing him to attend. He'd al-
ready had several drinks. He sees a  young  girl's  face.  Anger,
contempt.  Her  short  dark  hair twisted up in spikes.  His eyes
feel as if they are too large for their  sockets.  When  he  rubs
them,  bright sick flashes of light surround him. The cold weight
of the water moves in his stomach.  He remembers sitting  at  the
broad mahogany desk, drinking. Before the call, before the party.
He remembers the two cases open, in front of him,  identical.  He
keeps  her  in  one. The other is for that with which he has been
entrusted. Expensive, but then he has no doubt that the  informa-
tion  it contains is very valuable. He folds the thing's graphite
earpieces and snaps the case shut. Then he touches the case  that
holds  all  her mystery, the white house on the hillside, the re-
lease she offers. He puts the cases in the pockets of his jacket-
But  now he tenses, beneath the duvet, his stomach twisted with a
surge of anxiety.  He wore the jacket  to  that  party,  much  of
which  he cannot remember.  Ignoring the pounding of his head, he
claws his way out of the bed and finds the jacket crumpled on the
floor  beside  a chair.  His heart is pounding.  Here. That which
he must deliver. Zipped into the  inner  pocket.  But  the  outer
pockets  are  empty.   She  is  gone. lie roots through his other
clothing. On his hands and knees,  a  pulsing  agony  behind  his
eyes,  he peers under the chair. Gone.  But she, at least, can be
replaced, he reminds himself, still on his knees, the  jacket  in
his  hands.  He  will find a dealer in that sort of software. Re-
cently, he now admits, he had started to  suspect  that  she  was
losing resolution.  Thinking this, he is watching his hands unzip
the inner pocket, drawing out the case that contains his  charge,
their  property,  that which must be delivered. He opens it.  The
scuffed black plastic frames, the label on the cassette worn  and
unreadable,  the  yellowed  translucence  of the audio-beads.  He
hears a thin high sound emerge from the back of his throat.  Very
much  as  he  must have done, years ago, when the first shell ar-
rived.  Careful to correctly calculate  the  thirty-percent  tip,
Yamazaki  paid  the  fare and struggled out of the cab's spavined
rear seat. The driver, who knew that all Japanese  were  wealthy,
sullenly  counted  the  torn, filthy bills, then tossed the three
five-dollar coins into a cracked Nissan County thermos-mug  taped
to the faded dashboard. Yamazaki, who was not wealthy, shouldered
his bag, turned, and  walked  toward  the  bridge.  As  ever,  it
stirred  his  heart to see it there, morning light aslant through
all the intricacy of its secondary construction.   The  integrity
of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around
this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda.  This
had  occurred  piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imagin-
able technique and material. The result was something  amorphous,
startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by
recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval ener-
gy.  By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of
England's Brighton Pier, as though viewed  through  some  cracked
kaleidoscope  of vernacular style.  Its steel bones, its stranded
tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors,
gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines,
sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, un-
licensed  pawnbrokers,  herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of com-
merce, their locations generally  corresponding  with  the  decks
that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising
to the very peaks of 58 6 The bridge the cable towers, lifted the
intrica:ely  suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and
its zones of more private fantasy.  He'd first seen it by  night,
three  weeks before. He'd stood in fog, amid sellers of fruit and
ve:~etables, their goods spread out on blankets. He'd stared back
into  the cavern-mouth, heart pounding. Steam was rising from the
pots of soup-vendors, beneath a jagged arc of ;cavenged neon. Ev-
erything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence
had only hinted at the magic and singularity of  the  thing,  and
he'd walked slowly forward, into tha neon maw and all that patch-
work carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect  awe.  Fairyland.
Rain-silvered  plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten
banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted  can-
vas,  mirrors,  chrome  gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So
many things, too much for his reeling eye, and  he'd  known  that
his  journey  had  not  been  in vain.  In all the world, surely,
there was no more magnificent a Thomasson.  He  entered  it  now,
Tuesday  morning,  amid  a now-familiar stir-the carts of ice and
fish, t~e clatter of a machine that made tortillas-and found  his
~ay to a coffee shop whose interior had the texture of an ancient
ferry, dark dented varnish over plain heavy wood, as  if  someone
had sawn it, entire, from some tired public vessel. Which was en-
tirely possible, he thought, seating himself at the long counter;
toward  Oakland, past the haunted island, the wingless carcass of
a 747 housed the kitchens of nine Thai  restaurants.   The  young
woman  behind  the counter wore tattooed bracelets in the form of
stylized indigo lizards. He asked for coffee. It arrived in thick
heavy  porcelain.  No two cups here were alike. He took his note-
book from his bag, flicked it on, and jotted  down  a  brief  de-
scriptiDn  of  the  cup,  of the minute pattern of cracks iii its
glazed surface, like a white tile mosaic  in  miniature.  Sipping
his  coffee, he scrolled hack to the 59 previous day's notes. The
man Skinner's mind was remarkably like the bridge. Things had ac-
cumulated  there, around some armature of original purpose, until
a point of crisis  had  been  attained  and  a  new  program  had
emerged.  But what was that program?  He had asked Skinner to ex-
plain the mode of accretion resulting in the current state of the
secondary  structure.  What  were  the  motivations  of  a  given
builder, an individual builder? His  notebook  had  recorded  the
man's  rambling,  oblique  response, transcribing and translating
it.

There was this man, fishing. Snagged his tackle. Hauled up a  bi-
cycle.  All  covered  in  barnacles. Everybody laughed. Took that
bike and he built a place to eat. Clam broth,  cold  cooked  mus-
sels,  Mexican  beer. Hung that bike over the counter. Just three
stools in there and he slung his box out about eight  feet,  used
Super Glue and shackles. Covered the walls inside with postcards.
Like shingles. Nights, he'd curl  up  behind  the  counter.  Just
gone,  one morning. Broken shackle, some splinters still stuck to
the wall of a barber shop. You could look down, see the water be-
tween your toes. See, he slung it out too far.

Yamazaki  watched steam rise from his coffee, imagining a bicycle
covered in barnacles, itself a Thomasson of considerable potency.
Skinner  had  seemed curious about the term, and the notebook had
recorded Yamazaki's attempt to explain its origin and the meaning
of its current usage.

Thomasson  was  an  American baseball player, very handsome, very
powerful. He went to the Yomiyuri Giants in 1981, for a large sum
of  money. Then it was discovered that he could not hit the ball.
The writer and artisan Gempei Akasegawa appropriated his liame to
describe  certain  useless  and inexplicable monuments, pointless
yet 6o curiously art-like features of the  urban  landscape.  But
the  term  has  subsequently taken on other shades of meaning. If
you wish, I can access and translate today's definitions  in  our
Gendai  Yogo Kisochishiki, that is, The Basic Knowledge of Modern
Terms.

But Skinner-gray, unshaven, the whites of his blue eyes yellowed,
blotched  with  broken  veins,  had merely shrugged. Three of the
residents who had previously agreed to be interviewed  had  cited
Skinner as an original, one of the first on the bridge. The loca-
tion of his room indicated a certain status as well,  though  Ya-
mazaki  wondered  how  many would have welcomed a chance to build
atop one of the cable towers. Before the electric lift  had  been
installed,  the climb would have been daunting for anyone. Today,
with his bad hip, the old man was in effect an  invalid,  relying
on his neighbors and the girl. They brought him food, water, kept
his chemical toilet in operation. The girl, Yamazaki assumed, re-
ceived  shelter  in return, though the relationship struck him as
deeper somehow, more complex.  But if Skinner  was  difficult  to
read  because  of  age, personality, or both, the girl who shared
his room was opaque in that ordinary, sullen way Yamazaki associ-
ated  with  young Americans. Though perhaps that was only because
he, Yamazaki, was a stranger, Japanese, and  one  who  asked  too
many questions.  He looked down the counter, taking in the early-
morning profiles of the other customers. Americans. The fact that
he  was actually here, drinking coffee beside these people, still
struck a chord of wonder. How  extraordinary.  He  wrote  in  his
notebook, the pen ticking against the screen.

The  apartment  is  in  a tall Victorian house, built of wood and
very elaborately painted,  in  a  district  where  the  names  of
streets  honor  nineteenth-century American 6i politicians: Clay,
Scott, Pierce, Jackson. This morning, Tuesday, leaving the apart-
ment, I noticed, on the side of the topmost newel, indications of
a vanished hinge. I suspect that this must once have supported an
infant-gate.  Going along Scott in search of a cab, I came upon a
sodden postcard, face up on the sidewalk. The narrow features  of
the  martyr  Shapely,  the  AIDS saint, blistered with rain. Very
melancholy.

Yamazaki found himself blinking up at the  earnest  face  of  the
girl  behind  the  counter.  7 See you do okay Hernandez followed
Rydell into the kitchen of the house in  Mar  Vista.  He  wore  a
sleeveless powder-blue jumpsuit and a pair of those creepy German
shower-sandals, the kind with about a  thousand  little  nubs  to
massage  the soles of your feet. Rydell had never seen him out of
uniform before and it was kind of a shock. He had these  big  old
tattoos  on  his upper arms; roman numerals; gang stuff. His feet
were brown and compact and sort  of  bearlike.   It  was  Tuesday
morning.  There  was  nobody else in the house. Kevin was at Just
Blow Me, and the others were out doing whatever it was they  did.
Monica  might've  been  in her place in the garage, but you never
saw too much of her anyway.  Rydell got his bag of cornflakes out
of  the  cupboard  and  carefully unrolled it. About enough for a
bowl. He opened the fridge and  took  out  a  plastic,  snap-top,
liter  container  with  a  strip of masking-tape across the side.
He'd written MILK EXPERIMENT on the  masking-tape  with  a  heavy
marker.  63

Rydell  blotted  up  the milk and most of the flakes. He couldn't
imagine what Hernandez was doing here, but then he'd  never  have
imagined  that  Hernandez  drove a white Daihatsu Sneaker with an
animated hologram of a waterfall on  the  hood.   Rydell  chewed,
swallowed.  'Brakes  or  something?'   Rydell  finished his corn-
flakes.  64 Rydell carried the bowl, the spoon, the damp  wad  of
towels,  to  the  sini.  He rinsed the bowl and spoon, wiped them
with the towels, then stuck the towels as far  down  as  possible
behind  th  rest  of  the  garbage  in  the  bag  under the sink.
Straightening up, he looked at Hernandez. 'Something I can do for
you,  sup~r?'   Hernandez  narrwed  his  eyes  and shoved off the
counter, headed for the hung room. Rydell  thought  he  might  be
leaving, hut he wa~ only starting to pace. Rydell had seen him do
this a couple ol times in  his  office  at  IntenSecure.  Now  he
turned,  just as he was about to enter the living room, and paced
hack to Rydill.  65 You oughta stop and think maybe I'm trying to
help  you  a  little,  right?' Back toward the living room again.
Hernandez stopped, turned,  sighed.  'Never  been  up  to  NoCal,
right?  San  Francisco?  Anybody  know  you up there?'  66 Rydell
walked past him, into the living room, hearing the German shower-
sandals  come  squishing after him across the kitchen's dull tile
floor. Someone had been smoking tobacco in there  the  night  be-
fore.  He  could  smell it. It was in violation of the lease. The
landlord would give them hell about it. The landlord was  a  Serb
immigrant who drove a fifteen-year-old BMW, wore these weird fur-
ry Tyrolean hats, and insisted on  being  called  Wally.  Because
Wally  knew  that  Rydehl  worked for IntenSecure, he'd wanted to
show him the flashlight he kept clipped under  the  dash  in  his
BMW.  It  was about a foot long and had a button that triggered a
big shot of capsicum gas. He'd asked Rydell if Rydell thought  it
was 'enough.'  Rydell had lied. Had told him that people who did,
for instance, a whole lot of dancer, they actually liked a  blast
or two of good capsicum. Like it cleared their sinuses. Got their
juices flowing. They got off on it.  Now Rydell looked  down  and
saw  for  the first time that the living room carpet in the house
in Mar Vista was exactly the same stuff he'd  crawled  across  in
Turvey's  girlfriend's  apartment  in  Knoxville.  Maybe a little
cleaner, but the same stuff. He'd never noticed that before.   67
Monica's  copy  of People was on the couch, open to a story about
Gudrun Weaver, this actress in her forties who'd just  found  the
Lord,  courtesy  of the Reverend Wayne Fallon, in time to get her
picture in People. There was a full-page  picture  of  her  on  a
couch  in  her  living room, gazing raptly at a bank of monitors,
each one showing the same old movie.  Rydell saw himself  on  the
futon  from Futon Mouth, staring up at those big stick-on flowers
and bumper-stickers. 'Is it legal?'  Hernandez slapped  his  pow-
der-blue  thigh.  It  sounded  like a pistol shot. 'Legal? We are
talking IntenSecure Corporation here. We are talking major  shit.
I  am  trying  to  help you, man. You think I would ask you to do
something fucking illegal?'  Rydell picked up  Monica's  copy  of
People  and  found  a  picture  of Gudrun Weaver and the Reverend
Wayne Fallon. Gudrun Weaver looked like an actress  in  her  for-
ties.  Fallon  looked like a possum with hair-implants and a ten-
thousand-dollar tuxedo.  Rydell tossed the People back  onto  the
couch. 'Who they trying to find?'

Rydell  stood  in the warm shade of the carport, gazing down into
the shimmering depths of the animated waterfall on  the  hood  of
Flernandez's daughter's Sneaker, mist rising through green boughs
of rain forest. He'd once seen a Harley done up  so  that  every-
thing that wasn't triple-chromed was crawling, fast forward, with
life-sized bugs. Scorpions, centipedes, you  name  it.   Chevette
dreamed  she  was  riding Folsom, a stiff sidewind threatening to
push her into oncoming. Took a left on Sixth, caught that wind at
her  back, ran a red at Howard and Mission, a stale green at Mar-
ket, bopped the brakes and bunnied both sets of  tracks.   Coming
down  in a hard lean, she headed up Nob on Taylor.  Legs pumping,
the wind a strong hand in the small of her back,  sky  clear  and
beckoning  at  the top of the hill, she thumbed her chain up onto
some huge-ass custom ring, too big for her derailleur, too big to
fit  any frame at all, and felt the shining teeth catch, her ham-
mering slowing to a steady spin-but then she was losing it.   She
stood  up  and  started pounding, screaming, lactic acid slamming
through her veins. She was at the  crest,  lifting  off-  Colored
light  slanted  into  Skinner's room through the tinted pie-wedge
panes of the round window. Tuesday morning.  Two of  the  smaller
sections  of  glass  had  fallen  out; the gaps were stuffed with
pieces of rag, throwing shadows on the tattered  yellow  wall  of
National  Geographics.  Skinner was sitting up in bed, wearing an
old plaid shirt, blankets and sleeping-bag  pulled  high  up  his
chest.  His bed was an eightpanel oak door up on four rusty Volk-
swagen hubs, with a slab of foam on top of that.  Chevette  slept
on  the  floor,  on  a narrower piece of foam she rolled up every
morning and stuck 70 8 Morning after behind a long  wooden  crate
full  of  greasy  hand tools. The smell of tool grease worked its
way into her sleep, sometimes,  but  she  didn't  mind  it.   She
snaked  her arm out into the November chill and snagged a sweater
off the seat of  a  paint-caked  wooden  stool.  She  pulled  the
sweater  into  her  bag and twisted into it, tugging it down over
her knees. It hung to her knees when she stood up,  the  neckband
so  stretched  that  she  had  to  keep pushing it back up on her
shoulder. Skinner didn't say anything; he hardly ever did,  first
thing.   She  rubbed  her  eyes, went to the ladder bolted to the
wall and climbed the five rungs, undoing the catch on  the  roof-
hatch  without  bothering  to  look  at it. She came up here most
mornings now, started her day with the water and then  the  city.
Unless  it was raining, or too foggy, and then it was her turn to
pump the ancient Coleman, its red-painted tank like a toy  subma-
rine.  Skinner did that, on good days, but he stayed in bed a lot
when it rained. Said it got to his hip.  She climbed out  of  the
square hole and sat on its edge, dangling her bare legs down into
the room. Sun struggling to burn off the  silvery  gray.  On  hot
days it heated the tar on the roof's flat rectangle and you could
smell it.  Skinner had showed her pictures of the La Brea pits in
National  Geographic, big sad animals going down forever, down in
L.A. a long time ago. That was what tar was,  asphalt,  not  just
something  they  made  in  a  factory somewhere. He liked to know
where things came from.  His jacket, the  one  she  always  wore,
that  had  come from D. Lewis, Great Portland Street. That was in
London. Skinner liked maps. Some of the National Geographics  had
maps  folded  into  them,  and all the countries were big, single
blobs of color from one side to the other. And there hadn't  been
nearly  as  many of them. There'd been countries big as anything:
Canada, USSR, Brazil. Now there were lots of  little  ones  where
those had heen. Skinner said America had gone 71 that route with-
out admitting it. Even California had all  been  one  big  state,
once.   Skinner's  roof  was  eighteen feet by twelve. Somehow it
looked smaller than the room below, even though the walls of  the
room  were packed solid with Skinner's stuff. Nothing on the roof
but a rusty metal wagon, a kid's toy, with a couple of  rolls  of
faded tarpaper stacked in it.  She looked past three cable-towers
to Treasure Island. Smoke rose, there, from a fire on the  shore,
where  the low cantilever, cottoned down in fog, shot off to Oak-
land. There was a dome-thing, up on the farthest suspension  tow-
er,  honeycombed  into sections like new copper, but Skinner said
it was just Mylar, stretched over two-by-twos. They had an  plink
in  that,  something that talked to satellites. She thought she'd
go and see it one day.  A gray gull slid by, level with her eyes.
The city looked the same as ever, the hills like sleeping animals
behind the office towers she knew by their numbers. She ought  to
be  able  to see that hotel.  The night before grabbed her by the
back of the neck.  She couldn't believe  she'd  done  that,  been
that  stupid. The case she'd pulled out of that dickhead's pocket
was hanging up in Skinner's jacket, on the iron hook shaped  like
an  elephant's  head. Nothing in it but a pair of sunglasses, ex-
pensive-looking but so dark she hadn't  even  been  able  to  see
through  them  last  night.  The security grunts in the lobby had
scanned her badges when she'd gone in; as far as they knew, she'd
never come back down. Their computer would've started looking for
her, eventually. If they queried Allied, she'd  say  she  forgot,
blew the checkout off, took the service elevator down after she'd
pulled her tag at 8o8. No way had she  been  at  any  party,  and
who'd  seen  her there anyway? The asshole. And maybe he'd figure
she'd done him for his glasses. Maybe he'd felt  it.  Mayhe  he'd
remcmher,  when  he sobered up.  Skinner yelled there was coffee,
hut they were out of eggs.  72.  Chevette shoved off the edge  of
the  hole,  swung  down and in, catching the top rung.  The motor
whined and the big-toothed cog on the bottom  let  her  down  the
slope.  Skinner called the cherry-picker his funicular. He hadn't
built it, though; a black guy named Fontaine  had  built  it  for
him,  when  Skinner  had  started to have trouble with the climb.
Fontaine lived on the Oakland end, with a couple of women  and  a
lot of children. He took care of a lot of the bridge's electrical
stuff. He'd show up once in a while in a long tweed  overcoat,  a
toolbag in each hand, and he'd grease the thing and check it. And
Chevette had a number to call him at if it ever broke  down  com-
pletely,  but that hadn't happened yet.  It shook when it hit the
bottom. She climbed out onto the wooden walkway  and  went  along
the  wall of taut milky plastic, halogen-shadows of plants behind
it and the gurgle of hydroponics. Turned the corner and down  the
stairs  to the noise and morning hustle of the bridge. Nigel com-
ing toward her with one of his carts, a new one. Making a  deliv-
ery.   "Vette,'  with his big goofy grin. He called her that.  73
frame, the Taiwan-ese hubs  and  rims  beefed  up  with  fat  new
spokes.  Nigel  did  work for some of the other riders at Allied,
ones who still rode metal. He hadn't liked it when  Chevette  had
gone  for  a  paper  frame. Now she bent to run her thumb along a
specially smooth braise. 'Good one,' she agreed.  "S gonna. Bunny
down  too  hard,  it's  glass.'  Nigel shook his hair at her. The
faded wooden fishing-plug that hung from his left ear rattled and
spun.  'Too  late  then.'  He  shoved  his  cart  toward Oakland.
Chevette found the egg lady and bought three, twisted up that way
in  two  big  dry  blades  of  grass. Magic. You hated to take it
apart, it was so perfect, and you could never get it back togeth-
er or figure out how she did it. The egg lady took the five-piece
and dropped it into the little  bag  around  her  scrawny  lizard
neck.  She  had no teeth at all, her face a nest of wrinkles that
centered into that wet slit of a mouth.  Skinner was  sitting  at
the  table  when she got back. More like a shelf than a table. He
was drinking coffee out of a dented  steel  thermos-mug.  If  you
just  came  in  and saw him like that, it didn't strike you right
away how old he was; just big,  his  hands,  shoulders,  all  his
bones,  big.  Gray hair slicked back from his forehead's lifetime
collection of scars, little dents, a couple of  black  dots  like
tattoos,  where some kind of grit had gotten into a cut.  She un-
did the eggs, the egg lady's magic, and put  them  in  a  plastic
bowl.  Skinner heaved himself up from his creaking chair, wincing
as he took the weight with his hip. She handed him the  bowl  and
he  swung  over  to  the  Coleman.  The way he scrambled eggs, he
didn't use any butter, just a little water. Said he'd learned  it
from  a cook on a ship. It made good eggs but the pan was hard to
clean, and that was Chevette's job. While he broke the eggs,  she
went  to the jacket Ofl its hook, and took that case out.  74 You
couldn't tell what it was made  of,  and  that  meant  expensive.
Something dark gray, like the lead in a pencil, thin as the shell
of one of those eggs, but you could probably drive a  truck  over
it.  Like her bike. She'd figured out how you opened it the night
before; finger here, thumb there, it opened.  No  catch  or  any-
thing, no spring. No trademark, either; no patent numbers. Inside
was like black suede, but it gave like foam  under  your  finger.
Those  glasses, nested there. Big and black. Like that Orbison in
the poster stuck to Skinner's wall, black and white. Skinner said
the way to put a poster up forever was use condensed milk for the
glue. Kind that came in a can. Nothing much came  in  cans,  any-
more,  but  Chevette  knew what he meant, and the weird big-faced
guy with the black glasses was  laminated  solid  to  the  white-
painted  ply  of  Skinner's wall.  She pulled them from the black
suede, the stuff springing instantly back to a smooth  flat  sur-
face.   They  bothered  her. Not just that she'd stolen them, but
they weighed too much. Way too heavy for  what  they  were,  even
with  the  big earpieces. The frames looked as though they'd been
carved from slabs of graphite. Maybe they had, she thought; there
was  graphite  around the paper cores in her bike's frame, and it
was Asahi Engineering.  Rattle of the spatula as Skinner  swirled
the  eggs.  She put them on. Black. Solid black.  She pulled them
off. 'Huh?'  She picked up the lighter he kept beside  the  Cole-
man,  clicked  it,  held the flame behind one lens. Nothing.  She
put the glasses on  the  table.  'Can't  see  through  'em.  Just
black.'  She pulled up the backless maple chair and sat, 75 pick-
ing up the fork. She ate her eggs. Skinner sat, eating his, look-
ing  at her. 'Soviet,' he said, after a swallow from his thermos-
mug.  She looked at her coffee. 'Found 'em.' She picked it up and
drank.   He didn't answer. She bedded the glasses in black suede,
closed the case, got up,  took  the  dishes  to  the  wash-basin.
Looked  back  at  the case on the table.  She'd better toss them,
she thought.  Rydell took a CalAir tilt-rotor out of Burbank into
Tuesday's early evening. The guy in San Francisco had paid for it
from the other end; said call him Freddie.  No  seatback  fun  on
CalAir,  and the passengers definitely down-scale. Babies crying.
Had a window seat. Down there the spread of  lights  through  the
faint  glaze  of  some previous passenger's hair-oil: the Valley.
Turquoise voids of a few surviving pools, lit subsurface. A  dull
ache  in  his  arm.   He  closed  his eyes. Saw his father at the
kitchen sink of his mobile home in Florida, washing out a  glass.
At that precise moment the death no doubt already growing in him,
established fact, some line crossed. Talking about  his  brother,
Rydell's  uncle,  three  years younger and five years dead, who'd
once sent Rydell a t-shirt from Africa. Army stamps on  the  bub-
blepack  envelope. One of those old-timey bombers, B-5z, and WHEN
DIPLOMACY FAILS.

Opened his eyes to the lady leaning across him  to  peer  through
the  film of hair-oil. Like Mrs. Armbruster in fifth grade; older
than his father would be now.  She smiled at him,  settling  back
into   the   grip  of  the  narrow  seat.  Completely  like  Mrs.
Armhruster. Same weird conibinaUon of tweed, oxford-cloth,  Santa
Fe  blanket  coat. These old ladies with their bouncy thick-soled
shoes.  77 9 When diplomacy fails Rydell  found  the  button  and
discovered  that  CalAir's seats allowed a maximum recline of ten
centimeters.  Rydell's eyes opened. He tried to  think  of  some-
thing  to  say.   Rydell concentrated on the seatback in front of
him. A plastic blank. Gray. Not even  a  phone.   Rydell  glanced
sideways.  Found his gaze caught in hers: hazel eyes, mazed there
in the finest web of wrinkles.  Rydell opened his  mouth.  Closed
it.   78 Rydell wasn't sure what 'card-carrying' meant, but Cease
Upon the Midnight was mutual self-help euthanasia, and illegal in
Tennessee.  Though  they  did it there anyway, and someone on the
force had told him that they left milk and cookies  out  for  the
ambulance  crews.  Did  it eight or nine at a time, mostly. CUTM.
'Cut 'em,' the paramedics called it. Offed themselves with  cock-
tails of legally prescribed drugs. No muss, no fuss. Tidiest sui-
cides around.  Rydell closed his eyes, put  his  head  back,  and
stayed  that  way  until he felt the rotors tilting over into de-
scent-mode.

79 This Freddie extended a very soft hand and  Rydell  shook  it.
'You  got  luggage?' Freddie asked.  Rydell took the man in as he
approached the gate, handing his stub to the guard. He was  enor-
mous,  over six feet, but the thing that struck Rydell most was a
stillness about him, that and some kind of sorrow in his face. It
was  a  look he'd seen on the face of a black minister his father
had taken~to watching, toward the end there. You looked  at  that
minister's  face  and you felt like he'd seen every sad-ass thing
there was, 8o so maybe you could even believe what he was saying.
Or anyway Rydell's father had, maybe, at least a little bit.  Ry-
dell shook it, fingers curled over diamond and bullion.  'Pleased
to meet you, Mr. Warbaby.'  Warbaby wore a black Stetson set dead
level on his head, the brim turned up all  the  way  around,  and
glasses  with heavy black frames. Clear lenses, windowpane plain.
The eyes behind those lenses were Chinese or something;  catlike,
slanted,  a weird goldy brown. He was leaning on one of those ad-
justable canes you get at the hospital. There was a carbon  brace
clamped  around  his  left  leg, big midnight-blue nylon cushions
padding it. Skinny black jeans, brand new and never washed,  were
tucked  into  spit-shined  Texas  dogger boots in three shades of
black.  Freddie took Rydell's soft-side with obvious  reluctance,
as  though  it  wasn't  something he'd ordinarily care to be seen
with.  The hand with the knuckle-duster  came  down  on  Rydell's
shoulder.  Like the ring weighed twenty pounds. 'Juanito tell you
anything with regard to what we're doing up here?'  8i complicat-
ed, now.'  Warbaby sighed. 'Man who's missing it, he's dead now.'
Something else in those eyes. 'Dead hozi'?' Rydell asked, as  the
weight at last was taken from his shoulder.

Four-wheel  drive.  Ceramic  armor. Goodyear Streetsweepers you'd
need a serious gun to puncture. There was a cardboard  air-fresh-
ener,  shaped  like  a pine-tree, hanging in front of the heater-
vent.  A modem-bleep from the dash.  8z  Freddie,  in  the  plush
bucket  beside  Rydell,  whistled. 'Motherfuck,' he said, 'that's
nasty.'  Rydell swung back to watch as the  fax  emerged:  a  fat
man,  naked  on  sheets  solid with blood. Pools of it, where the
brilliance of the photographer's strobes lay  frozen  like  faint
mirages  of  the  sun.   Rydell heard the fax rattle in his hand.
Yamazaki sat on a low wooden stool, watching Skinner shave. Skin-
ner  sat  on  the  edge of his bed, scraping his face pink with a
disposable razor, rinsing the blade in a  dented  aluminum  basin
that  he cradled between his thighs.  Skinner looked at him, over
the plastic razor. 'Thing is, Scooter, they just  don't  get  any
duller,  after  a  while.'  He lathered and shaved his upper lip,
then paused. Yamazaki had been 'Kawasaki' for the  first  several
visits. Now he was 'Scooter.' The pale old eyes regarded him neu-
trally, hooded under reddish lids. Yamazaki sensed Skinner's  in-
ward  laughter.  Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting
to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for  the  group  of
dwellings  he  thought of as comprising Skinner's 'neighborhood.'
Widespread use of transparent five-inch hose had made this  quite
exciting,  like  some game devised for children, as he'd tried to
follow the course of a given boliis of waste  from  one  dwelling
down past the next. The hoses swoo~d down through the superstruc-
ture in graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet helow
the  lower  deck in a 10 The modern dance thousand-gallon holding
tank. When this was full to capacity, Skinner  had  explained,  a
mercury-switch  in a float-ball triggered a jet-pump, forcing the
accumulated sewage into a three-foot pipe that  carried  it  into
the municipal system.  He'd made a note to consider this junction
as an interface between the bridge's program and the  program  of
the  city, but extracting Skinner's story of the bridge was obvi-
ously more important. Convinced that Skinner somehow held the key
to  the  bridge's existential meaning, Yamazaki had abandoned his
physical survey of secondary construction in order  to  spend  as
much  time  as  possible in the old man's company. Each night, in
his borrowed apartment, he would send the day's  accumulation  of
material  to  Osaka University's Department of Sociology.  Today,
climbing to the lift that would carry him to Skinner's  room,  he
had  met  the  girl  on her way to work, descending, her shoulder
through the frame of her bicycle. She was a courier in the  city.
Was  it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who
earned her living at the archaic intersection of information  and
geography?  The offices the girl rode between were electronically
conterminous-in effect, a single desktop, the  map  of  distances
obliterated  by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communi-
cation. Yet this very seamlessness, which had  rendered  physical
mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity,
and as such created the need for the service the  girl  provided.
Physically  transporting  bits  of  information about a grid that
consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute secu-
rity  in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl's
bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise,  your  memo  was
nowhere,  perhaps  everywhere,  in  that  instant of transit.  He
found her attractive, Skinner's girl, in  an  odd,  foreign  way,
with  her hard white legs and her militant, upthrust tail of dark
hair.  85 Yamazaki nodded, watching the characters  of  Skinner's
translated  speech  scroll down the notebook.  86 didn't have the
money. So they put chain link, razor-wire, concrete  up  at  both
ends.  Then  the Germans came in, maybe two years later, sold 'em
on nanomech, how to build the new tunnel. Be  cheap,  carry  cars
and  a  mag-lev.  And  nobody believed how fast they could do it,
once they got it legislated past the Greens.  Sure,  those  Green
biotech  lobbies, they made 'em actually grow the sections out in
Nevada. Like pumpkins, Scooter. Then they hauled 'em out here un-
der  bulk-lifters  and sank 'em in the Bay. Hooked 'em up. Little
tiny machines crawling around in there, hard as diamonds; tied it
all together tight, and bam, there's your tunnel. Bridge just sat
there.'  Yamazaki held his breath, expecting Skinner to lose  the
thread,  as he so often had before-often, Yamazaki suspected, de-
liberately.  Yamazaki imagined the  two  spans  of  the  deserted
bridge  in  the  downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as
they climbed the wire fences, the  barricades,  in  such  numbers
that  the  chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers,
then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn
came,  survivors  clung  there, news helicopters circling them in
the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had  seen  this  many
times,  watching  the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.
87 Oakland. And we just started running. Cops falling  back,  and
what  were  they protecting, anyway? Mainly the crowd-orders they
had, keep people from getting together in the  street.  They  had
their choppers up in the rain, shining lights on us. Just made it
easier. I had this pair of pointy boots on. Ran up to that 'link,
it  was maybe fifteen feet tall. Just kicked my toes in there and
started climbing. Climb a fence  like  that  easy,  boots  got  a
point.  Up,  man, I was up that thing like I was flying. Coils of
razor at the top, but people behind me were pushing up  anything;
hunks  of  two-by-four,  coats,  sleeping-bags. To lay across the
wire. And I felt like . . . weightless . . .'  Yamazaki felt that
he was somehow close, very close, to the heart of the thing.  Ya-
mazaki swallowed. 'And then?'  slipping. Right  in  front  of  my
face. His foot kept coming back off the rung and I'd get his heel
in my eye, I didn't watch it Near to the top and both of 'em come
off  at  once.' Skinner fell silent, as if listening to some dis-
tant sound. Yamazaki held his breath.  Yamazaki shivered.

Yamazaki rode Skinner's lift down to where stairs began, its yel-
low  upright cup like a piece of picnicware discarded by a giant.
All around him, now, the rattle of  an  evening's  commerce,  and
from  a darkened doorway came the slap of cards, a woman's laugh-
ter, voices raised in  Spanish.  Sunset  pink  as  wine,  through
sheets  of  plastic  that  snapped like sails in a breeze scented
with frying foods, woodsmoke, a sweet  oily  drift  of  cannabis.
Boys  in ragged leather crouched above a game whose counters were
painted pebbles.  Yamazaki stopped. He stood very still, one hand
on  a wooden railing daubed with hyphens of aerosol silver. Skin-
ner's story seemed to radiate out, through the  thousand  things,
the  unwashed  smiles  and  the smoke of cooking, like concentric
rings of sound from some secret bell, pitched  too  iow  for  the
foreign,  wishful  ear.   We are come not only past the century's
closing, he thought, the millennium's turning, but to the end  of
something  else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.
89 Modernity was ending.  Here, on the bridge, it long since had.
He  would  walk  toward  Oakland now, feeling for the new thing's
strange heart.  11 Pulling tags



Tuesday, she just wasn't  on.  Couldn't  proj.  No  focus.  Bunny
Malatesta, the dispatcher, could feel it, his voice a buzz in her
ear.

Picked up, made it to 555 Cali, fifty-first floor. Pulled her tag
and  back down. The day gone gray after morning's promise.  Paus-
ing, her hand in the bike's recognition-loop.  'How  come?'   She
remembered  seeing  Ringer's  emblem  carved  into the inspection
plate in one of 456's passenger elevators. Fucking  Ringer.  He'd
defaced  more  elevators than anyone in history. Carried around a
regular toolkit to do it with.  456 sent her to i EC with a  car-
ton  wider  than  she  was  supposed to accept, hut that was what
racks and bungles were for, and why  give  the  cage-drivers  the
trade? l~unny buzzed 9' her on her way out and gave her ~o Beale,
the cafeteria on the second floor. She guessed that  would  be  a
woman's purse, done up in a plastic bag from the kitchen, and she
was right. Brown, sort of lizardskin,  with  a  couple  of  green
sprouts stuck in the corners of the bag. Women left their purses,
remembered, called up, got the manager to send for  a  messenger.
Good for a tip, usually. Ringer and some of the others would open
them up, go through  the  contents,  find  drugs  sometimes.  She
wouldn't do that. She thought about the sunglasses.  She couldn't
get a run today. There was no routing in effect  at  Allied,  but
sometimes  you'd  get  a  run by accident; pick up here, drop off
there, then something here. But it was rare. When you worked  for
Allied  you  rode  harder.  Her record was sixteen tags in a day;
like doing forty at a different company.  She took the  purse  to
Fulton  at Masonic, got two flyers after the owner checked to see
everything was there.  Bust her ass out there to get there,  then
she'd  pick  up and do it. But she couldn't get on top of it, to-
day.  The asshole's sunglasses...

Chevette had just pumped back from  Alabama  Street,  day's  last
tag. The woman on the little CNN flatscreen over the door to Bun-
ny's pit wore something black and stretchy pulled over her  face,
three  triangular  holes cut in it. Blue letters at the bottom of
the screen read FIONA  X-SPOKESPERSON-  SOUTH  ISLAND  LIBERATION
FRONT.  92.  The overlit fluorescent corridor into Allied Messen-
gers smelled of hot styrene, laser printers,  abandoned  running-
shoes,  and  stale bag lunches, this last tugging Chevette toward
memories of some unheated day-care basement in  Oregon,  winter's
colorless light slanting in through high dim windows. But now the
street door banged open behind her, a pair of  muddy  size-eleven
neon  sneakers  came pounding down the stairs, and Samuel Saladin
DuPree, his cheeks speckled with crusty gray commas of road-dirt,
stood  grinning  at  her, hugely.  Allied's best-looking thing on
two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon elec-
tricity  poured  over  a frame of such elegance and strength that
Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed,  a
quicksilver  armature.  Like  those old movies with that big guy,
the one who went into politics, after he'd got  the  meat  ripped
off  him.  Thinking  about Sammy Sal's bones made most girls want
him to jump theirs, but not  Chevette.  He  was  gay,  they  were
friends, and Chevette wasn't too sure how she felt about all that
anyway, lately.  "Cause Ringer's 'graved his tag in their  brass,
Sal, and their rosewood, too?"  and must begin, now, to systemat-
ically sabotage the workplace,' Fiona X said, 'or be  hranded  an
enemy  of  the  human race.'  93 The door to the dispatch-pit, so
thickly stapled with scheds, sub-charts, tattered Muni regs,  and
faxed  complaints  that Chevette had no idea what the surface un-
derneath might look like, popped open. Bunny extruded his scarred
and  unevenly  shaven head, turtle-like, blinking in the light of
the corridor, and glanced up automatically, his gaze attracted by
the  tone  of Fiona X's sound-bite. His expression blanked at the
sight of her mask, the mental channel-zap executed in  less  time
than  it had taken him to look her way. 'You,' he said, eyes back
on Chevette, 'Chevy. In here.'  Bunny Malatesta had  been  a  San
Francisco bike messenger for thirty years. Would be still, if his
knees and back hadn't given out on him. He was simultaneously the
best  and  the worst thing about messing for Allied. The best be-
cause he had a bike-map of the city hung behind his eyes,  better
than  anything a computer could generate. He knew every building,
every door, what the security was like.  He  had  the  mess  game
down,  Bunny  did,  and,  better still, he knew the lore, all the
history, the stories that made you know you were  part  of  some-
thing,  however crazy it got, that was worth doing. He was a leg-
end himself, Bunny, having Krypto'd the windshields of some seven
police  cars  in  the  course of his riding career, a record that
still stood. But he was the worst  for  those  same  reasons  and
more, because there wasn't any bulishitting him at all. Any other
dispatcher, you could cut yourself a little extra slack. But  not
Bunny.  He  just  knew.   Chevette followed him in. He closed the
door behind her. The goggles  he  used  for  dispatching  dangled
around  his  neck,  one  padded  eyepiece patched with cellophane
tape. There were no windows in the room and Bunny kept the lights
off  when  he  was  working. Half a dozen color monitors were ar-
ranged in a semicircle in front of a black swivel  armchair  with
Bunny's pink rubber Sacro-saver backrest strapped to it like some
kind of giant bulging larva.  94 Bunny rubbed his lower back with
the heels of his hands. 'Disk's killing me,' he said, not partic-
ularly to Chevette.  She watched as Bunny took the  goggles  off,
disconnected  them,  and  put them on top of one of the monitors.
'So how come you never checked back out? They call us on it,  say
you  went  in  to  make a delivery, they scanned your badges, you
never come back out. Look, I tell 'em, I  know  she's  not  there
now,  guys, 'cause I got her out Alabama Street on a call, okay?'
He was watchiag her.  Bunny sat down, wincing, in the chair  with
the  Sacro-saver.  He cupped each knee in a big-knuckled hand and
stared at her. Very un-Bunny. Like something was really bothering
him.  Not  just  security  grunts pissing because a mess blew the
check-out off. 'How late?'  95 Chevette saw the  asshole's  black
glasses, right where she'd left them. In their case, behind Skin-
ner's ~ Geographics. She tried to lift them  out  of  there  with
mind-power.  Right  up to the tar-smelling roof and off the edge.
Put those bastards in the Bay like she should've done this  morn-
ing.  But  no, they were there.  spun himself around in the chair
and began to shut  the  monitors  down.   Automatic.  'No.  No...
Thanks,  Bunny.'   He  grunted  in reply, neutral, ending it, and
Chevette was back in the corridor, her heart pounding under Skin-
ner's  jacket. Up the stairs, out the door, plotting the quickest
way home, running red lights in her head, gotta get  rid  of  the
glasses, gotta- Sammy Sal had Ringer braced up against a blue re-
cyc bin.  Worry was starting to  penetrate  Ringer's  rudimentary
view  of things. 'Didn't do nuthin to you, man.'  Chevette ducked
past them, heading for the bike-rack beneath the  mural  portrait
of Shapely. Someone had shot him in his soulful martyr's eye with
a condomful of powder blue paint, blue running all down his  hal-
lowed cheek.  She stuck her hand through the recognition-loop and
tried to pull her handlebars out of the rack's tangle of molybde-
num steel, graphite, and aramid overwrap. The other bikes' alarms
all went off at once, a frantic chorus of  ear-splitting  bleats,
basso  digital sirennioans, and OUC extended high-volume burst 97
of snake-hiss Spanish profanity, cunningly mixed  with  yelps  of
animal  torment.  She  swung  her bike around, got her toe in the
clip, and kicked for the street, almost going over as she  mount-
ed.  She  saw  Sammy Sal, out the corner of her eye, drop Ringer.
She saw Sammy Sal straddle his own bike, a pink  and  black-fleck
fat-tube with Fluoro-Rimz that ran off a hubgenerator.  Sammy Sal
was coming after her. She'd never wanted company less.  She  took
off.   Proj. Just proj.  Like her morning dream, but scarier.  12
Eye movement Rydell looked at these two San Francisco cops,  Svo-
bodov  and  Orlovsky,  and decided that working for Warbaby had a
chance of being interesting. These guys were the real, the super-
heavy thing. Homicide was colossus, any department anywhere.  And
here he'd been in Northern California all of forty-eight  minutes
and  he  was  sitting at a counter drinking coffee with Homicide.
Except they were drinking tea. Hot tea. In glasses. Heavy on  the
sugar.  Rydell  was at the far end, on the other side of Freddie,
who was drinking milk. Then Warbaby, with his hat still on,  then
Svobodov, then Orlovsky.  Svobodov was nearly as tall as Warbaby,
but it all seemed to be sinew and big knobs of bone. He had long,
pale hair, combed straight back from his rocky forehead, eyebrows
to match, and skin that was tight and shiny, like he'd stood  too
long  in front of a fire. Orlovsky was thin and dark, with a wid-
ow's peak, lots of hair on the backs of his  fingers,  and  those
glasses that looked like they'd been sawn in half.  They both had
that eye thing, the one that pinned you and  held  you  and  sank
right  in,  heavy  and inert as lead.  Rydell had had a course in
that at the Police Academy, but it hadn't really  taken.  It  was
called Eye Movement Desensitization & Response, and was taught by
this retired forensic psychologist named Bagley, from  Duke  Uni-
versity.  Bagley's  lectures  tended  to  wander off into stories
about serial killers he'd processed at I)uke, auto-erotic  stran-
gulation  fatalities, 99 stuff like that. It sure passed the time
between High Profile Felony Stops and  Firearms  Training  System
Scenarios.  But  Rydell  was usually kind of rattled after Felony
Stops, because the instructors kept asking him to take  the  part
of  the felon. And he couldn't figure out why. So he'd have trou-
ble concentrating, in Eye Movement. And if he did manage to  pick
up  anything useful from Bagley, a session of FATSS would usually
make him forget it. FATSS was like doing Dream  Walls,  but  with
guns, real ones.  When FATSS tallied up your score, it would drag
you right down the entrance wounds, your own or the other  guy's,
and  make  the  call  on  whether  the loser had bled to death or
copped to hydrostatic shock. There  were  people  who  went  into
full-blown  post-traumatic  heeb-jeebs after a couple of sessions
on FATSS, but Rydell always came out of it with this  shit-eating
grin.  It wasn't that he was violent, or didn't mind the sight of
blood; it was just that it was such a rush. And it  wasn't  real.
So  he  never had learned to throw that official hoodoo on people
with his eyes. But this Lt. Svobodov, he had the talent beaucoup,
and  his partner, Lt. Orlovsky, had his own version going, nearly
as effective and he did it over the sawn-off tops of those glass-
es. Guy looked sort of like a werewolf anyway, which helped.  Ry-
dell continued to check out  the  San  Francisco  Homicide  look.
Which  seemed  to be old tan raincoats over black flak vests over
white shirts and ties. The shirts were  button-down  oxfords  and
the  ties were the stripey kind, like you were supposed to belong
to a club or something. Cuffs on their  trousers  and  great  big
pebble-grain  wingtips  with cleated Vibram soles. About the only
people who wore shirts and ties and shoes like  that  were  immi-
grants,  people who wanted it as American as it got. But layering
it up with a bullet-proof and a worn-out London Fog,  he  figured
that  was some kind of statement. The streamlined plastic butt of
an N&K didn't exactly hurt, either,  and  Rydell  could  see  one
pecking  out  of Svobodov's open flak vest. Couldn't remember the
model number, but it looked like the one with the  magazine  down
the  top  of  the barrel. Shot that caseless ammo looked like wax
crayons, plastic propellant molded around alloy  flechettes  like
big nails.  Svobodov fixed her with a couple of thousand negative
volts of Cop Eye, tugged a black plastic badge-holder out of  his
flak vest, flipped it open in her direction, and let it fall back
on its nylon thong, against his chest. Rydell noticed  the  click
when  it  hit;  some kind of back-up armor under the white shirt.
Svobodov put the cigarette between his lips.  Warbaby's fist came
up,  clutching a lump of gold the size of a hand grenade.  He lit
the Russian's cigarette with it.  I0~ Orlovsky laughed.  Svobodov
shrugged.  'What you know, Warbaby?' Svobodov said, back to busi-
ness.  Svobodov squinted at Warbaby. 'We  don't  know  that,'  he
said.  Svobodov sucked on his cigarette, blew smoke in the gener-
al direction of the waitress. 'What you know, Warbaby?'  Svobodov
sat  there,  puffing on his Marlboro. Stubbed it out on the plate
in front of him, beside his untouched tuna  melt.  'Asshole.  Be-
lieve  it.'   Warbaby  sighed. 'Man had a jacket, Arkady?'  I 02.
Svobodov and Orlovsky looked at each other, then back to Warbaby.
'IntenSecure  brings in Lucius Warbaby because this guy loses his
sunglasses?'  Orlovsky put his hairy fingers together and cracked
his  knuckles.   Svobodov  grunted.  'Money.'   103  Now  it  was
Orlovsky's turn for show-and-tell. He produced a second  evidence
bag,  this  one from inside his black vest. 'Looked for software,
couldn't find it. Then we x-ray him. Somebody  shoved  this  down
his  throat.'  A  black  rectangle.  The  stick-on label worn and
stained. 'But before they cut him.'


104 Freddie reached up and touched one of his sneakers.  The  red
words  vanished.  'They're  having  the  real  conversation now.'
"We"?' Freddie whistled. 'You just drivin'.' He pulled  his  feet
back  and  sat  up. 'But it ain't exactly clas~ified: IntenSecure
and DatAmerica more or less the same thing.'   Rydell  remembered
the time he'd gone over to 'Big George' Kechakmadze's house for a
barbecue and the man had tried to sign him up  for  the  National
Rifle  Association.  'You  get a lot of Russians on the force, up
here?'  Svobodov and Orlovsky climbed into the gray  whale.  War-
bahy  walked to the Patriot, using his alloy cane. The police car
rcse up about six inches on hydraulics  and  began  to  moan  and
s~iiver, rain dancing on its long hood as Orlovsky revved the en-
gine.  105

Downtown San Francisco  was  really  something.  With  everything
hemmed in by hills, built up and down other hills, it gave Rydell
a sense of, well, he wasn't sure. Being somewhere.  Somewhere  in
particular.  Not  that he was sure he liked being there. Maybe it
just felt so much the opposite of L.A. and that feeling like  you
were  cut  loose  in a grid of light that just spilled out to the
edge of everything. Up here he felt like he'd come in from  some-
where, these old buildings all around and close together, nothing
more modern than that one big spikey one with the truss-thing  on
it  (and he knew that one was old, too). Co~ damp air, steam bil-
lowing from grates in the pavement. Peopfe on the  streets,  too,
and  not  just the usual kind; people with jobs and clothes. Kind
of like Knoxville, he tried to  tell  himself,  but  it  wouldn't
stick.  Another  strange  place.  106 scanned this stiff-shot the
Russian sent you before? Says he looks  like  Rainer  Fassbinder.
And  that's when he's dead, with his throat cut. This Fassbinder,
he musta been pretty rough-looking, huh?'  Warbaby sighed. 'Fred-
die...'   Freddie grunted, then Rydell heard his fingers clicking
over the little computer he carried everywhere.  Rydell took  the
left  he thought he was looking for. Combat zone. Ruins. Fires in
steel cans. Hunched dark figures, faces vampire white.  Something
came  spinning,  end  over end, out of the crow-shouldered coven,
splat against the windshield; clung, then fell  away,  leaving  a
smudge  of  filthy yellow. Hadn't it been gray and bloody, like a
loop of intestine?  Red at the intersection.  A light came on  as
Rydell  opened it. Windex, a roll of gray paper towels, and a box
of throwaway surgical gloves.  Rydell pulled a glove on, took the
Windex and the towels, got out. 'I)on't get any on you,' he said,
thinking of Sublett. He gave the yellow  smear  a  good  shot  of
Windex,  wadded  tip  107 three of the towels in his gloved hand,
wiped until the glass was clean. He skinned the glove down around
the wet wad, the way they'd shown him in the Academy, but then he
didn't know what to do with it.

Rydell saw a black-lacquered rectangle, perfectly plain, not even
a  knob.  Now  that he thought about it, it didn't match anything
else in sight. The rest of the place was polished  wood,  frosted
bronze, panels of carved glass. If Freddie hadn't told him it was
a door, exactly, he would have taken it  for  art  or  something,
some  kind  of  painting.  'Yeah? What about it?'  io8) They were
standing around by the security  desk  while  Warbaby  talked  to
somebody  on  a  house  phone. The three guys on duty at the desk
wore IntenSecure uniforms, but really fancy ones, with bronze lo-
go-buttons  on  their peaked caps.  Rydell had parked the Patriot
in an underground garage, floors down in the roots of the  place.
He  hadn't  seen  anything  like  that before: teams of people in
chef's whites putting together a hundred plates  of  some  skinny
kind  of  salad,  little  Sanyo vacuum-cleaners bleeping along in
pastel herds, all this back-stage stuff  you'd  never  guess  was
there if you were just standing here in the lobby.  The Executive
Suites, where he'd stayed in Knoxville with Karen Mendelsohn, had
had  these  Korean  robot  bugs  that cleaned up when you weren't
looking. They'd even had a special one  that  ate  dust  off  the
wallscreen,  but Karen hadn't been impressed. It just meant the)'
couldn't afford people, she  said.   Rydell  watched  as  Warbaby
turned,  handing the phone to one of the guys in the peaked caps.
Warbaby gestured for Freddie and Rydell. Leaned on  his  cane  as
they  walked toward him.  T09 Sometimes, when she rode hard, when
she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city,
her body, even time. That was the messenger's high, she knew, and
though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with,  the
clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some
hyperevolved alien tail she'd somehow extruded,  as  though  over
patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lex-
an-armored  tires,  near-frictionless  bearings,  and  gas-filled
shocks. She was entirely part of the city then, one wild-ass lit-
tle dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand  choices,
instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain
glinted on the streetcar tracks, how a secretary's mahogany  hair
fell  like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden
coat.  And she was starting to get that now, in spite  of  every-
thing;  if she just let go, quit thinking, let her mind sink down
into  the  machinery  of  bone  and  gear-ring  and  carbon-wound
Japanese  paper...   But  Sammy  Sal  swerved in beside her, bass
pumping from his bike's bone-conduction beatbox. She had to bunny
the  curb to keep from going over on a BART grate. Her tires left
black streaks as the particle-brakes caught, Sammy Sal braking in
tandem, his Fluoro-Rimz strohing, fading.  III 13 Tweaking He let
go of her arm. 'Why?'  She started  to  cough,  caught  it,  took
three  deep breaths. 'You ever steal anything, Sammy Sal? I mean,
when you were working?'  Sammy Sal looked at her. 'No,' he  said,
finally,  'but I been known to fuck the clients.'  Chevette shiv-
ered. 'Not me.'  Sammy Sal licked his lips.  'How  come  you  had
your  hand  in  his pocket? He somebody you know?'  She looked at
him. 'That's right.'  I 12.  Sammy Sal tilted his beautiful  head
to  one  side.  'What's  that  mean?'  She'd heard of it, but she
wasn't sure what it was. 'They expensive, Sammy Sal?'  She  shiv-
ered. 'Come back up to Skinner's with me, Sammy. Okay?'  113 Sam-
my Sal gave her the look he'd given her the night she'd asked him
to  get  her  on  at Allied. Then he grinned. Mean and funny. All
those sharp white teeth. 'Keep it between your legs,  then.  Come
on,  you  try  to keep up.'  He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-
Rimz flaring neonwhite when he came down pumping.  He  must  have
thumbed  Play  then, because she caught the bass throbbing as she
came after him through the traffic.  14 Loveless The woman behind
the  bar  had an intricate black tracery along either side of her
shaven skull, down to what Yamazaki took to be her natural  hair-
line. The tattoo's style combined Celtic knots and cartoon light-
ning-bolts. Her hair, above it, was like the pelt of some noctur-
nal  animal  that  had fed on peroxide and Vaseline. Her left ear
had been randomly pierced, perhaps a dozen  times,  by  a  single
length of fine steel wire. Ordinarily Yamazaki found this sort of
display quite interesting, but now he was  lost  in  composition,
his  notebook  open  before  him.  She opened a bottle of Mexican
beer, fragments of ice sliding down the side as she put  it  down
on  the  bar in front of him, and moved on to the customer to his
left. Yamazaki returned to his notebook.

Skinner has tried repeatedly to convey that there  is  no  agenda
here  whatever,  no underlying structure. Only the 115 bones, the
bridge, the Thomasson itself. When the Little Grande came, it was
not  Godzilla.  Indeed,  there is no precisely equivalent myth in
this place and culture (though this is perhaps not  equally  true
of Los Angeles). The Bomb, so long awaited, is gone. In its place
came these plagues, the slowest of cataclysms. But when  Godzilla
came  at last to Tokyo, we were foundering in denial and profound
despair. In all truth, we welcomed the  most  appalling  destruc-
tion.  Sensing,  even  as we mourned our dead, that we were again
presented with the most astonishing of opportunities.

The eyes, very pale and wide-set,  were  the  eyes  of  something
watching  from  beneath  still water. 'Yeah. Figured it was some-
thing like that.' An easy smile, pointed with archaic gold.

15 In 1015 There was a product called Kil'Z that Rydell had  got-
ten  to know at the Academy. It smelled, but faintly, of some an-
cient hair-tonic, flowery and cool, and you used it in situations
where  considerable bodily fluids had been spilled. It was an an-
ti-viral agent, capable of nuking HIV's i through ~, Crimean-Con-
go,  Mokola  fever,  Tarzana Dengue, and the Kansas City flu.  He
smelled it now, as  the  IntenSecure  man  used  a  blackanodyzed
passkey  to open the door into 1015.  Rydell glanced around. Old-
fashioned, expensive-looking. Clubby, sort of. The walls  covered
in  some  kind of shiny, white-and-green striped stuff like silk.
Polished wooden furniture. Chairs upholstered mossy green. A  big
brass  lamp with a dark green shade. A faded old picture in a fat
gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a
117

kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a
bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. 'Currier & Ives,' it said.
Rydell  wondered  which  one  was the horse. Then he saw a round,
brownish-purple splotch of dried  blood  on  the  glass.  It  had
crackled  up,  the  way mud does in a summer creek bed, but tiny.
Hadn't had any of that Kil'Z on it, either, by the look of it. He
stepped  back.  Freddie, in his big shorts and the shirt with the
pictures of pistols, had settled into one of the green chairs and
was  opening  his  laptop.  Rydell  watched him reel out a little
black cable and pop it into the jack  beside  the  telephone.  He
wondered  if  Freddie's  legs got cold, wearing shorts up here in
November. He'd noticed that some black people were  so  far  into
fashion,  they'd wear clothes like there wasn't any such thing as
weather.  Warbaby just stared at the  place  where  the  bed  had
been,  looking  sad  as  ever. 'Well?' he said.  Warbaby grunted.
Watching him, it looked to Rydell as though  the  lenses  of  his
black-framed  glasses  winked  black  for  a second. Trick of the
light. Then Rydell got this funny feeling, because  Warbaby  just
looked right through him, his traveling gaze fixed on some moving
something so keenly that Rydell himself was  turning  to  look-at
nothing.   He  looked  back  at  Warbaby. Warbaby's cane came up,
pointing at the space where the bed would have been,  then  swung
back  down  to  the carpet. Warbaby sighed.  Warbaby grunted. His
eyes were darting from side to side. Rydell thought of  tv  docu-
mentaries  about  voodoo, the priests' eyes rolling when the gods
got into them.  Freddie twirled the trackball under  his  finger.
'Prints,  hair, skin-flakes . . . You know what a hotel room is.'
Rydell couldn't stand it. He stepped  in  front  of  Warbaby  and
looked  him  in the eye. 'What the hell you doing?'  1 i8 Warbaby
saw him. Gave him a slow sad smile and removed his glasses.  Took
a  big,  navy  blue silk handkerchief from the side pocket of his
long coat and polished the glasses. He  handed  them  to  Rydell.
'Put  them  on.'   Rydell looked down at the glasses and saw that
the lenses were black now.  Rydell noticed the weight as he  slid
them  on.  Pitch  black.  Then  there was a stutter of soft fuzzy
ball-lightning, like what you saw when you rubbed  your  eyes  in
the  dark,  and  he  was looking at Warbaby. Just behind Warbaby,
hung on some invisible wall, were words, numbers, bright  yellow.
They  came into focus as he looked at them, somehow losing Warba-
by, and he saw that they were forensic stats.  And  the  bed  was
back, sodden with blood, the man's soft, heavy corpse splayed out
like a frog. That thing beneath his  chin,  blue-black,  bulbous.
Rydell's  stomach  heaved,  bile  rose  in his throat, and then a
naked woman rolled up from another bed, in a different room,  her
hair  like silver in some impossible moonlight- Rydell yanked the
glasses off. Freddie lay back in the chair, shaking  with  silent
laughter,  his  laptop  across his knees. 'Man,' he managed, 'you
oughta seen the look you had! Put parta the guy's porno on  there
from Arkady's evidence report...'  "9 Rydell. Rydell gave him the
glasses. Their  lenses  were  black  again.   Freddie  swallowed.
'Yessir,  Mr.  Warbaby.  Sorry.'  Warbaby wiped the glasses again
and put them back on. They were clear now. 'There are drivers  in
the  frames and lenses. They affect the nerves directly.'  Rydell
went to the drapes, pulled them  apart,  looked  down  into  some
night  street  in  this  other city. People walking there, a few.
Freddie nodded, did something with his computer.  Black into col-
or  into  full face and profile of this girl. Fingerprints. Image
of her right retina blown up to the  size  of  her  head.  Stats.
WASHINGTON,  CIIEVETTE-MARII.. Big gray eyes, long straight nose,
a little grin for the camera. I)ark hair cut  short  and  spikey,
except  for  this  crazy  ponytail stuck up from the crown of her
head.  12.0 Rydell couldn't figure what he was being  asked.  Fi-
nally he just said 'Cute.'  He heard Freddie snort, like that was
a dumb thing to say.  But Warbaby said 'Good. That way you remem-
ber.'   Sammy  Sal  lost  her, where Bryant stuttered out in that
jackstraw tumble of concrete tank-traps. Big as he was, he had no
equal when it came to riding tight; he could take turns that just
weren't possible; he could bongo and pull a three-sixty if he had
to,  and Chevette had seen him do it on a bet. But she had a good
idea where she'd find him.  She looked up, just  as  she  whipped
between  the  first  of  the slabs, and the bridge seemed to look
down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She'd  seen  pictures
of what it had looked like, before, when they drove cars back and
forth on it all day, but she'd never  quite  believed  them.  The
bridge  was  what  it  was,  and somehow always had been. Refuge,
weirdness, where she slept, home to however many  and  all  their
dreams.  She skidded past a fish-wagon, losing traction in shaved
ice, in gray guts the gulls would fight over in the morning.  The
fish  man  yelled  something  after her, but she didn't catch it.
She rode on, between stalls and stands  and  the  evening's  com-
merce,  looking  for  Sammy Sal.  Found him where she thought she
would, leaning on his bars beside an  espresso  wagon,  not  even
breathing hard. A Mongolian girl with cheekbones like honey-coat-
ed chisels was running him a cup. Chevette bopped  the  particle-
brakes  and  slid  in  beside him.  Her legs ached with trying to
keep up with him. 'You 12.2.  16  Sunflower  better,'  she  said,
with a glance toward the bridge, then she gestured to the girl to
run her one. She watched  the  steaming  puck  of  brown  grounds
thumped  out,  the  fresh  scoop,  the quick short tamp. The girl
swui~g the handle up and twisted the basket  back  into  the  ma-
chine.  Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.  it.,

Sammy Sal shrugged. 'I like to. Trouble comes down from that, I'm
up for it. But you  just  went  and  did  something,  no  reason.
Reached  through  the  membrane. Let your fingers do the walking.
Bad idea.'  Chevette blew on her coffee. 'I know.'   ~'Didn't  do
it. Don't know shit Never happened.~' He nodded, slow, hut he was
studying her. 'Uh-huh. Maybe. Maybe  not.  Somebody  wants  those
glasses  back,  they can lean on you real hard. Anther way to go:
we get 'em, ride back over to Allied, tell 'em ~ow it  happened.'
12.3 She drank the little cup off in a gulp. Wiped her mouth with
the back of her hand. 'Job's all I got, Sammy. You know that. You
got  it for me.'  Chevette put her empty cup down on the counter,
dug in the pockets of her jacket. Gave the girl fifteen  for  the
two  coffees  and  a  two-dollar tip. Squared her shoulders under
Skinner's jacket, the ball-chains rattling. 'No. Once that shit's
in  the Bay, nobody can prove I did anything.'  Sammy Sal sighed.
'You're an innocent.'  It sounded funny, like she didn't know you
could use the word that way. 'You coming, Sammy Sal?'

There'd  only  ever been three really good, that was to say seri-
ously magic, times in Chevette's life. Oue was the night

124 Sammy Sal had told her he'd tr~ to get her on at Allied,  and
he  had.  One  was  the day she'd paid cash money for her bike at
City Wheels, and rode right on out of there. And there'd been the
night  she  first met Lowell at Cognitive Dissidents-if you could
count that now as lucky.  Which was not to say  that  these  were
the  times she'd been luckiest, because those were all :imes that
had been uniformly and life-threateningly shitty, except for  the
part  where  the  luck  cut in.  She'd been lucky the night she'd
gone over the razor-wire and out of the Juvenile  Center  outside
Beaverton,  but  that  had  been one deeply shitty night. She had
scars on both palms to prove it.  And she'd been very  lucky  the
time  she'd  first  wandered out onto the bridge, the lower deck,
her knees wobbling with a fever she'd picked up on her  way  down
the  coast.  Everything  hurt her: the lights, every color, every
sound, her mind pressing out into the world like a swollen ghost.
She  remembered  the loose, flapping sole of her sneaker dragging
over the littered deck, how that hurt her, too, and how  she  had
to  sit down, finally, everything up and turning, around her, the
Korean man running out of his little store to yell  at  her,  get
up, get up, not here, not here. And Not Here had seemed like such
a totally good idea, she'd gor~e straight there, right over back-
ward, and hadn't even felt her skull slam the pavement.  And that
was where Skinner had found her, though  he  didn't  remember  or
maybe want to talk about it; she was never sure. She didn't think
he could've gotten her up to his room on his own; he needed  he.p
to  get  back  up there himself, with his hip and everything. But
there were still days when an energy got into him and  you  cculd
see how strong he must've been, once, and then he'd do things you
didn't think he could do, so she'd  never  he  sure.   The  first
thing  she'd  seen, opening her eyes, was the round church-window
with the rags stuck into the gaps, and sun 125 coming through it,
little  dots  and  blobs  of  colors she'd never seen before, all
swimming in her fevered eye like bugs in water.  Then  the  bone-
crack time, the virus wringing her like the old man had wrung the
gray towels he wrapped her head in.  When  the  fever  broke  and
rolled  away, out a hundred miles it felt like, back out to there
and over the rim of sickness, her hair fell out  in  dry  clumps,
stuck  to the damp towels like some kind of dirty stuffing.  When
it grew back, it came in darker, nearly black. So after that  she
felt  sort  of like a different person. Or anyway her own person,
she'd figured.  And she'd stayed with Skinner, doing what he said
to  get  them  food  and keep things working up in his room. He'd
send her down to the lower deck, where  the  junk-dealers  spread
their  stuff.  Send  her  down  with anything: a wrench that said
'BMW' on the side, a crumbling cardboard box of those flat  black
things  that  had  played music once, a bag of plastic dinosaurs.
She never figured any of it would be worth anything, but  somehow
it  always  was.  The wrench bought a week's food, and two of the
round things brought even more. Skinner  knew  where  old  things
came  from, what they'd been for, and could guess when somebody'd
want them. At first she was worried that she wouldn't get  enough
for the things she sold, but he didn't seem to care. If something
didn't sell, like the plastic dinosaurs, it just went  back  into
stock,  what  he  called the stuff ranged around the bases of the
four walls.  As she'd gotten stronger, and her new hair grew  in,
she'd  started ranging farther from the room on top of the tower.
Not into either city, at first, though she'd walked over to  Oak-
land  a  couple  of times, over the cantilever, and looked out at
it. Things felt different over there, though she was  never  sure
why.  But  where  she felt best was on the suspension bridge, all
wrapped in it, all the people hanging and hustling and doing what
they  did,  and  the way the whole thing grew a little, changed a
little, every day. There wasn't anything like that, not that  she
knew of, not up in Oregon.  At first she didn't even know that it
made her feel good; it was just this weird thing, maybe the fever
had  left  her  a little crazy, but one day she'd decided she was
just happy, a little happy, and she'd have to  get  used  to  it.
But  it turned out you could be sort of happy and restless at the
same time, so she started keeping  back  a  little  of  Skinner's
junk-money to use to explote the city. And that was plenty to do,
for a while. She found Haight Street and walked it all the way to
the wall around Skywalker, with the Temple of Doom and everything
sticking up in there, but she didn't try to go in. There was this
long  skinny  park  that  led up to it, called the Panhandle, and
that was 5till public. Way too public, she thought, with  people,
mostly  old  or  anyway  looking  that way, stretched out side by
side, wrapped in silvery plastic  to  keep  the  rays  off,  this
crinkly  stuff  that  glittered like those Elvis suits in a video
they'd showed them sometimes, up in Beaverton. It  kind  of  made
her  think of maggots, like if somebody rolled each one up in its
own little piece of foil. They had a way  of  moving  like  that,
just  a  little  bit, and it creeped her out.  The Haight sort of
creeped her out, too, even though there were stretches that  felt
almost  like  you  were on the bridge, nobody normal in sight anc
people doing things right out in public, like the cops were never
going  to come at all. But she wasn't ever scared, on the bridge,
maybe because there were always people around  she  knew,  people
who  lived  there  and knew Skinner. But she liked looking around
the Haight because there were a lot of little  shops,  a  lot  of
places  that sold cheap food. She knew this bagel place where you
could buy them a day old, and Skinner said they were better  that
way  anyway.  He said fresh bagels were the next thing to poison,
like they'd plug you up or something. He had a lot of ideas  like
that.  Most  of the shops, she could actually go into, if she was
quiet and smilci a little and kept her hands in her pockets.  [27
One day on Haight she saw this shop called Colored People and she
couldn't figure out what it sold. There was a curtain behind  the
window and a few things set out in front of that: cactus in pots,
big rusty hunks of metal, and  a  bunch  of  these  little  steel
things,  polished  and bright. Rings and things. Little rods with
round balls on the ends. They were hung on  the  needles  of  the
cactus and spread out on the rusted metal. She decided she'd open
the door and just look in, because she'd seen a couple of  people
going  in  and  out  and  knew it wasn't locked. A big fat guy in
white coveralls, with his head all shaved, coming out, whistling,
and  these two tall women, black-haired, like handsome crows, all
dressed in black, going in. She just wondered what it  was.   She
stuck  her  head  in there. There was a woman with short red hair
behind a counter, and every wall covered with these  bright  car-
toony  pictures,  colors that made your eyes jump, all snakes and
dragons and everything. So many pictures it was hard to  take  it
in,  so  it wasn't until the woman said come on, don't just block
the door, and Chevette had come in, that she saw this woman  wore
a  sleeveless flannel shirt, open all the way down, and her front
and arms all covered,  solid,  with  those  same  pictures.   Now
Chevette  had  seen  tattoos  in  the Juvenile Center, and on the
street before that, but those were the  kind  you  did  yourself,
with  ink  and  needles,  thread and an old ballpoint. She walked
over and took a good long look at the  colors  exploding  between
the  woman's  breasts-which, though she was maybe thirty, weren't
as big as Chevette's-and there was  an  octopus  there,  a  rose,
bolts  of  blue  lightning,  all  of it tangling together, no un-
touched skin at all.  Chevette blinked. 'No,' she  heard  herself
say,  'hut I was sort of wondering what those little metal things
arc, in the window.'  12.8 The  woman  swung  a  big  black  book
around  on  the  counter,  [ike a school binder except its covers
were chrome-studded black leather. Flipped it open  and  Chevette
was  looking  at this ~uy's thing, a big one, just hanging there.
There were two Little steel balls on either side  of  its  wedge-
shaped  head.  Chevette just sort of grunted.  Chevette looked up
at this black guy, his big white grin, all those teeth, a microp-
ore  filtration-mask pulled down under his chin, and that was how
she'd met Samuel Saladin DuPree.  Two  days  later  she  saw  him
again  in  Union Square, hanging with a bunch of bike messengers.
She'd already put messengers down as something to  watch  for  in
the  city.  They had clothes and hair like nobody else, and bikes
with neon and light-up wheels, handlebars carved up and over like
scorpion-tails.  Helmets with little radios built in. Either they
were going somewhere fast or they  were  just  goofing,  hanging,
drinking coffee.  He was standing there with his legs over either
side of the cross-tube of his bike, eating half a sandwich. Music
was  coming out of the black-flecked pink frame, mostly bass, and
he was sort of bopping to it. She edged up to get a  better  look
at  the  bike,  how  it was made, the intricacy of its brakes and
shifters pulling her straight in. Beauty.  129  They  were  Skin-
ner's,  old canvas sneakers, too long for her so she'd stuck some
paper in the toes.  He grinned. 'Sugawara frame,  Sugawara  rings
'n' 'railers, Zuni hydraulics. Clean.'  Chevette touched the han-
dlebars. Felt that music.  She did, and she did, and that was how
they got to talking.

Shouldering  their  bikes up the plywood stairs, Chevette telling
him about the Japanese girl, how she fell out of  that  elevator.
How  she,  Chevette, wouldn't even have been at that party if she
hadn't been standing right there, right then. Sammy grunting, his
Fluoro-Rimz gone dead opal now they weren't turning.  Remembering
that Maria. 'Cody.  Said  it  was  Cody's  party...'   Sammy  Sal
stopped,  his  brows lifting. 'Huh. Cody Harwood?'  She shrugged,
the paper bike next to weightless on her shoulder. 'Dunno.'   130
But  she  was  activating  the recognition-loop now, nt bothering
with the screamers from Radio Shack. Sammy's FluoroRimz pulsed as
he  set his bike down beside hers. 'I'll loop it to mine. Be okay
here anyway.'  She headed for the yellow lift,  glad  to  see  it
there,  where  she'd  left  it,  and not at the top of the track.
'Let's do this thing, okay?' Remembering she'd meant to buy Skin-
ner  some  soup  from Thai Johnny's wagon, that sweet-sour lemnon
one he liked.

When she'd told Sammy she wanted to mess, wanted  her  own  bike,
he'd  gotten  her  this  little  Mexican headset taught you every
Street lfl San Francisco. Three days and she had it down,  pretty
much,  even  though he said that wasn't like the map in a messen-
ger's head. You needed to know buildings, hcw to get  into  them,
how to act, how to keep your wheels fron getting stolen. But when
he'd taken her in to meet Bunny, :hat was magic.  Three weeks and
she'd  earned enough to buy her first serious bike. That was mag-
ic, too.  Somewhere around then she  started  hanging  out  after
work  with a couple of the other Allied girls, Tami Two and Alice
Maybe, and that was how she'd wound up at  Cognitive  Dissidents,
that night she'd met Lowell.

131  Chevette closed her eyes, saw a bunch of cops (whatever that
would look like) standing around Skinner's room. Opened her  eyes
and stuck her head up, eyes level with the floor.  Skinner was on
his bed, his little television propped on his chest, big old yel-
low  toenails  sticking  out of holes in his lumpy gray socks. He
looked at her over the television.  Skinner just stared  at  him,
colors from the little screen flicking across his face.  132 Then
she was up and out and into one of the weird pockets of stillness
you got up there sometimes. Usually the wind made you want to lie
down and hang on, but then there were these patches when  nothing
moved, dead calm. She heard Sammy Sal coming up the ladder behind
her. She had the case out,  was  moving  toward  the  edge.   She
raised  the  thing,  winding up to throw.  He plucked it from her
fingers.  She was facing the city when he did it. Financial  dis-
trict,  the Pyramid with its brace on from the Little Grande, the
hills behind that. 'Fuck a duck,' she said, these towers blooming
there,  buildings  bigger  than anything, a stone regular grid of
them, marching in from the hills. Each one maybe four  blocks  at
the  base,  rising  straight and featureless to spreading screens
like the colander she used  to  steam  vegetables.  Then  Chinese
writing filled the sky. 'Sammy.. .'  She felt him grab her as she
lost her balance.  The Chinese writing twisted into English.

SUNFLOWER CORPORATION


Sammy Sal pulled the glasses off and she  was  kneeling,  looking
down  through  the hatch at that Japanese nerd who came around to
see Skinner, the college boy or social worker or whatever he was.
But  he  looked  even more lost than usual. He looked scared. And
there was somebody with him.  Gold flashed up  at  Chevette  from
the  stranger's grin. 'Hi there,' he said, taking his hand out of
the side pocket of his long black raincoat. The gun  wasn't  very
big, but there was something too easy in the way he held it, like
a carpenter with a hammer. He was wearing surgical  gloves.  'Why
don't  you  come  on down here?'  Rydell looked at the card. Some
Dutch bank. If this was how they were going to pay him, up  here,
maybe  it  was  time he asked them what he'd actually be getting.
But maybe he should wait until Freddie  was  in  a  better  mood.
Freddie  said  this Container City place was a good quick bet for
clothes. Regular  clothes,  Rydell  hoped.  They'd  left  Warbaby
drinking herbal tea in some kind of weird coffee joint because he
said he needed to think. Rydell had gone out to the Patriot while
Warbaby  and Freddie held a quick huddle, there.  135 17 The trap
Container City turned out to be the biggest semi-roofed mall  Ry-
dell  had  ever seen, if you could call something a mall that had
ships parked in it, big ones. And the five-hundred-dollar guaran-
teed  purchase  didn't  seem  to have put anybody off; there were
more people in here than out on the street, it looked like. 'Hong
Kong  money,'  Freddie  said.  'Bought  'em  a hunk of the Embar-
cadero.'  Rydell looked around at Container City  as  they  rose.
'Crazier  than  anything  in  L.A.,' he said, admiringly.  Rydell
bought a burgundy nylon bomber, two pairs of black jeans,  socks,
underwear,  and  three black t-shirts. That came out to just over
five hundred. He used the debit-card to make up  the  difference.
Freddie  shrugged.  'Where  they  say  those  jeans made?' Rydell
checked the tag. 'African Union.'  136 white frozen  yogurt  into
his  mouth  with  a marked lack of enthusiasm.  Freddie looked at
Rydell over the rim of the pink plastic yogurt cup.  'You  trying
to  be  funny?'  Freddie winced, put his yogurt down, rattled the
ice in his paper cup of Evian and  drank  some.  'Hernandez,'  he
said,  'he  told  us  you were trainin' to be a cop, some redneck
place. . .'  Freddie raised his eyebrows. 'Shit. You almost kinda
technical,  aren't you, Rydell?'  You ever notice how it goes up,
underneath there?' Freddie nodded.  138 said, vaguely  recollect-
ing some documentary he'd seen in Knoxville, 'just sort of making
do.'  "Nitiations?"

They found Warbaby where they'd left him,  in  this  dark,  high-
ceilinged  coffee  place in what Freddie said was North Beach. He
was wearing those glasses again and Rydell wondered what he might
be seeing.  Rydell had brought his blue Samsonite in from the Pa-
triot, his bag from Container City. He went into the bathroom  to
change his clothes. There was just the one, unisex, and it really
was a bathroom because it had a bathtub in it. Not like 139  any-
body used it, because there was this mermaid painted full-size on
the inside, with a brown cigarette butted  out  on  her  stomach,
just  above  where  the  scales  started.  Rydell discovered that
Kevin's khakis were split up the ass. He wondered how  long  he'd
been  walking  around like that. But he hadn't noticed it back at
Container City, so he hoped it had happened in the car.  He  took
the  IntenSecure  shirt off, stuffed it into the wastebasket, put
on one of the black t-shirts. Then he unlaced  his  trainers  and
tried  to  figure out a way to change pants, socks, and underwear
without having to put his feet on the floor, which  was  wet.  He
thought  about doing it in the tub, but that looked sort of scum-
my, too. Decided you could manage it, sort of, by  standing  with
your feet on the top of your sneakers, and then sort of half-sit-
ting on the toilet. He put everything he took off into  the  bas-
ket.  Wondering how much the debit-card Freddie had given him was
still good for, he transferred his wallet to the right back pock-
et  of his new jeans. Put on his new jacket. Washed his hands and
face in a gritty trickle of water. Combed his  hair.  Packed  the
rest  of his new clothes into the Samsonite, saving the Container
City bag to keep dirty laundry in.  He wanted a  shower,  but  he
didn't  know  when he'd get one. Clean clothes were the next best
thing.  Warbaby looked up when Rydell  got  back  to  his  table.
'Freddie's  told  you a little about the bridge, has he, Rydell?'
Warbaby glowered at Freddie. 'Too colorfully  put,  perhaps,  but
all  too  painfully  close to the truth, Mr. Rydell. Not at all a
wholesome place. And effectively outside the reach  of  the  law.
You  won't  find  our friends Svobodov or Orlovsky out there, for
instance. Not in any official capacity.'  Rydell  caught  Freddie
start  to  grin  at that, but saw how it was pinched off by Warha
by's glare.  140 Warbaby  nodded,  sadly.  'Terrible,'  he  said,
'these people will do terrible things . . .'

When they got out to the car, he saw that he'd parked it right in
front of this mural of J. D. Shapely wearing a black leather bik-
er  jacket  and  no  shirt,  being carried up to heaven by half a
dozen extremely fruity-looking  angels  with  long  blond  rocker
hair.  There  were  these blue, glowing coils of DNA or something
spiraling out of Shapely's stomach and attacking what Rydell  as-
sumed  was  supposed  to  be an AIDS virus, except it looked more
like some kind of rusty armored space  station  with  mean  robot
arms.   It  made him think what a weird-ass thing it must've been
to be that guy. About as weird as it had ever been to be anybody,
ever, he figured. But it would be even weirder to be Shapely, and
dead like that, and then have to look  at  that  mural.   YET  HE
LIVES  IN  US NOW, it said under the painting, in foot-high white
letters, AND THROUGH HIM DO WE LIVE.  Which was, strictly  speak-
ing,  true, and Rydell had had a vaccination to prove it.  18 Ca-
pacitor Chevette's mother had had this boyfriend once named  Oak-
ley,  who  drank  part-time and drove logging trucks the rest, or
anyway he said he did. He was a long-legged  man  with  his  blue
eyes  set a little too far apart, in a face with those deep seams
down each cheek. Which made him  look,  Chevette's  mother  said,
like  a  real cowboy. Chevette just thought it made him look kind
of dangerous. Which he wasn't, usually,  unless  he  got  himself
around  a bottle or two of whiskey and forgot where he was or who
he was with; like particularly if he  mistook  Chevette  for  her
mother,  which he'd done a couple of times, but she'd always got-
ten away from him and he'd always been sorry about it  afterward,
bought  her  Ring-Dings and stuff from the Seven-Eleven. But what
Oakley did that she remembered  now,  looking  down  through  the
hatch at this guy with his gun, was take her out in the woods one
time and let her shoot a pistol.  And this one had a face kind of
like  Oakley's,  too, those eyes and those grooves in his cheeks.
Like you got from smiling a lot, the way he was now. But it  sure
wasn't  a  smile  that would ever make anybody feel good. Gold at
the corners of it.

The gun went off. Not very loud, but sharp, with this blue flash.
She  saw the Japanese guy sit down on the foor, like his legs had
gone out from under him, and she thoight the guy  had  shot  him.
Then  Sammy  Sal touched her on the back of ier neck, his finger-
tips urging her toward the hatch before  theywithdrew.   The  guy
might  not  even know Sammy Sal w~s up here at all. Sammy Sal had
the glasses. And one thing Chevette was sure of now, this guy was
no  cop.   She  thought  she  heard Sammy Sal step back acoss the
roof, away from her, but she didn't look back.  She  wasn't  sure
whether  she should try to close the hatch behini her or not. She
decided not to because the guy had only tolc her  to  come  down.
She'd  have to reach past the edge of th~ hole to get hold of the
hatch and it might look to him like ~.ie was going for a  gun  or
something.  Like  in  a  show.   She dropped down from the bottom
rung, tiying to keep her hands  where  he  could  see  them.   He
glanced  up,  the  gun staying right when it was. She didn't want
him to ask her if was she alone up here, because 143  the  answer
might  hang  in the air and tell him it was a lie. 'You know what
I'm here for.'  Skinner was sitting up on his bed,  back  against
the  wall,  looking  as  wide  awake  as she'd ever seen him. The
Japanese guy, who didn't look like he'd been shot after all,  was
sitting  on the floor, his skinny legs spread out in front of him
in a V.  Skinner looked like he was about to  say  something,  or
maybe laugh, but he didn't.  He looked up at the roof-hatch, like
he could hear what she was thinking.  144 breakfast. He stuck one
end  of  the red thing behind the angle-brace that held the table
up, then twisted it around the guy's other wrist. He took another
one  out  of  his  pocket  arid  shook  it out, like a toy snake.
Reached behind Skinner with it and did something with  his  hand.
'You  stay  on  that bed, old man,' touching the gun to Skinner's
temple. Skinner just looking at him.  He came back  to  Chevette.
'You're  climbing down a ladder. Need yours in front.'  The thing
was cool and slick and fused into itself as soon  as  he  had  it
around  her wrists. Flowed together. Moved y itself. Plastic ruby
bracelets, like a kid's toy. One of tho;e tricks with  molecules.
And she didn't doubt he would, if he could, but she was remember-
ing something Oakley had told her that d2y in the woods,  how  it
was  hard  to  hit  something if you had to shoot almost straight
down at it, even harder straight up. SD maybe the thing to do was
just proj when she hit the bottom. she'd only have to clear about
six feet from the ladder to be where he couldn't see her. But she
looked  at the gun's black and silver eye and it just didn't seem
like a good idea.  So she went to the hole in the floor  and  got
dowi  on her knees. It wasn't easy, with her hands tied that way.
Fe had to steady her, grabbing a handful of Skinner's jacket, but
she  got  her  feet down on the third rung and her fingers around
the top one, and worked her way down that way. She had to get her
feet  on  a  rung,  let go of the one she was holding, snatch the
next one down before she lost her balance, do it again.  But  she
got  to  think while she was doing it, and that helped her decide
to go ahead and try to do what she had in mind. It was  weird  to
he thinking that way, how quiet she felt, but it wasn't the first
time. She'd felt that way in Beaverton, the night she'd gone over
the  wire, and that without any more planning. And one time these
truckers had tried to drag her into  the  sleeper  in  the  back;
she'd made like she didn't mind, then threw a thermos of hot cof-
fee in one's face, kicked the other in the head, and  gotten  out
of  there.  They'd  looked for her for an hour, with flashlights,
while she squatted down in river-mud and let  mosquitos  eat  her
alive.  Lights  searching for her through that brush.  She got to
the bottom and backed off a step, holding her  bound  wrists  out
where  he  could  see them if he wanted to. He came down fast, no
wasted movement, not a sound. His long coat was made of something
black,  some  cloth that didn't throw back the light, and she saw
he was wearing black cowboy boots. She knew  he  could  run  just
fine  in  those, if he had to; people didn't always think so, but
you could.  Extra bits of gold. 'We  took  the  stairs.'   They'd
come  up  the  painter's ladder, bare steel rungs, soirne of them
rusted through. So she wouldn't hear  the  lift.  No  wonder  the
Japanese  guy  had looked scared. 'Well,' she said, 'you coming?'
He followed her over to the lift. She kept her eyes on the  deck,
so she wouldn't forget and look up to try and find Sammy, who had
to be there, somewhere. He wouldn't have had time to get down, or
else they would have heard him.  He held her shoulder again while
she swung her leg over and climbed in, then  got  in  after  her,
watching her the whole time.  146

She  moved  it  a  notch,  another, and the engine whined beneath
their feet, gearing them down the incline. There was a  patch  of
light at the bottom, under a bulb caged in corroded aluminum, and
she wondered what he'd do if somebody happened to  step  into  it
just  then,  say  Fontaine or one of the other people who came to
check the electrical stuff. Anybody. He'd shoot them, she  decid-
ed. Just pop them and roll them over into the dark. You could see
it in his face. It was right there.  He got out first, helped her
over.  A  wind was rising and you could feel the harmonics coming
up through your soles, the bridge starting to hum like a  muffled
harp.  She could hear people laughing, somewhere.  She pointed to
where her bike stood, cabled to Sammy Sal's. 'The pink and  black
one.'   He  gestured  with the gun.  She knew she had to do it in
one go, flip it sideways and over, just her thumb and  forefinger
on  the nonconductive rubber of the tire.  But it was really just
an accident that the frame hit his gun. She saw an inch of light-
ning arc between her bike and the pistol, hot purple and thick as
your finger, the particle-brake capacitors in the up-tube  empty-
ing their stored charge into the 147 anti-theft system worked in-
to the fake rust and the carefully frayed  silver  duct-tape.  He
went down on his knees, eyes unfocused, a single silver bubble of
spit forming and bursting between his half-open lips. She thought
she  saw steam curl from the gun in his hand.  Proj. she thought,
crouching to run, but then the black thing hit  him  and  knocked
him  flat,  flapping down out of the dark above them with a sound
like broken wings. A roll of tarpaper. She  made  out  Sammy  Sal
then,  standing  up  there  on a dark carbon cross-brace, his arm
around an upright. She thought she saw his white smile.   Because
the  little  pistol  made  a chewing sound then, blue pops like a
dozen backfires run together, and Sammy Sal  went  over  backward
off  the brace, just gone.  And then she was running.  ) Yamazaki
heard gunfire, where he knelt on the floor, his wrists joined  by
glistening  plastic  behind  the rough metal brace that supported
Skinner's wall-table. Or was it only the sound of some  hydraulic
tool?   There was a smell in the room, high and acrid. He thought
it must be the smell of his own fear.  His eyes were level with a
chipped  white plate, a smear of pulped avocado blackening on its
edge.  Yama~aki strained at the plastic bonds. Yelped as he  felt
them  tighten. Like something alive.  19 Superball out.' Yamazaki
watched as he began to work his toes through  the  holes  in  his
ragged  gray  socks.  'Not sure I can do shit with 'em, once I do
...' He stopped. Looked at Yamazaki. 'Better idea, but you  won't
like it.'  Discolored blobs of puddled welding-rod held the thing
together, but it looked sturdy enough. He counted the  mismatched
heads of nine screws. The diagonal brace itself seemed to be made
up of thin metal shims, lashed together top and bottom with rust-
ing  twists  of  wire.   Yamazaki's  fingertips moved over hidden
roughness.  Yamazaki froze. He looked back.  Yamazaki brought his
face close to the red restraint. It had a faint, medicinal smell.
He took a breath, set his teeth, and  sawed  furiously  with  his
wrists.  The  thing  began to shrink. Bands of iron, the pain hot
and impossible. He remembered Loveless's hand around  his  wrist.
The plastic parted with an absurdly loud pop, like some sound-ef-
fect in a child's cartoon. He was free and, for an ISO ) instant,
the  rec  band around his left wrist loosened, absorbing the rest
of the mass.  It tightened. He scrambled for the toolkit,  amazed
to see it open, as Skinner kicked it over with his heel, spilling
a hundred pieces of tooled  metal.   The  bolt-cu:ter  was  long,
clumsy,  its  handles wrapped in greasy blue tape. He saw the red
band narrowing, starting to sink below the level  of  his  flesh.
Fumbled  the  cutter  one-handed  from  the tangle, sank its jaws
blindly into his wrist and brought a.l his weight down on the up-
permost handle. A stab of pain. The detonation.  Skinner blew air
out between his lips, a long low sound  of  relief.  'You  okay?'
Yamazaki  looked at his wrists. There was a deep, bluish gouge in
the left one. It was starting to bleed, but no more than he woulc
have  expected.  The  other  had  been  scratched  by the saw. He
glanced around the floor, looking for  the  remains  of  the  re-
straint.   Yamazaki tested the action of the cutter, knelt behind
Skinner, slid one of the blades beneath the  plastic  around  the
old  man's  right wrist. The skin translucent there, blotched and
discolored, the veins swollen and  twisted.  The  plastic  parted
easily,  with  that same ridiculous noise, instantly whipping it-
self around 5kinner's other wrist, writhing like a live thing. He
severed  it before it could tighten, but this time, with the car-
toon pop, it simply vanished.  Yamazaki stared at the space where
the  restraint  had been.  Yamazaki scrambled across the floor on
hands and knees, dropped the hatch into place, and bolted it with
a flat device of dull bronze, something that might once have been
part of a ship. 'The girl,' he said,  looking  back  at  Skinner.
Yamazaki  didn't. He looked up at the ceiling-hatch, the one that
opened onto the roof. Open now.  Not knowing what or whom Skinner
was  talking  about,  Yamazaki climbed the ladder. A gust of wind
threw rain into his face as he thrust his  head  up  through  the
opening.  He  had  the sudden intense conviction that he was high
atop  some  ancient  ship,  some  black  iron  schooner  drifting
derelict  on  darkened  seas,  its plastic sails shredded and its
crew mad or dead, with Skinner its demented captain, shouting or-
ders  from  his  cell  below.  The rain came down in an explosive
sheet, hiding the lights of  the  city.   Yamazaki  withdrew  his
head, feeling for the hatch, and closed it above him. He fastened
the catch, wishing it were made of stronger stuff.  He  descended
the ladder.  Skinner was on his feet now, swaying toward his bed.
'Shit,' he said, 'somebody's broken my tv.'  He  toppled  forward
onto the mattress.  Yamazaki knelt beside the bed. Skinner's eyes
were closed, his breath shallow and rapid. His left hand came up,
fingers  spread,  and scratched fitfully at the tangled thatch of
white hair at the open collar of his  threadbare  flannel  shirt.
Yamazaki  smelled  the  sour  tang  of urine above the acrid edge
152.    ) of whatever explosive had propelled Loveless's  bullet.
He  looked at Skinner's jeans, blue gone gray with wear, wrinkles
sculpted permanently, shining faintly with grease, and  saw  that
Skinner had wet himself.  He stood there for several minutes, un-
certain of what he should do. Finally  he  took  a  seat  on  the
paint-splattered  stool  beside  the little table where he had so
recently been a prisoner. He ran his fingertips over the teeth of
the  saw  blades.  Looking down, he noticed a neat red sphere. It
lay on the floor beside his left foot.  He picked it up. A glossy
marble of scarlet plastic, cool and slightly yielding. One of the
restraints, either his or  Skinner's.   He  sat  there,  watching
Skinner and listening to the bridge groan in the storm, a strange
music emerging from the bundled cables. He wanted  tc  press  his
ear  against  them,  but some fear he couldn't name heli him from
it.  Skinner woke once, or seemed to, and struggled  to  sit  up,
calling,  Yamazaki  thought, for the girl.  Yamazaki held the red
sphere before the old man's eyes. 'Look, Skinner. See what it be-
came?'  20 The big empty



Chevette, with her eyes closed, felt the blunt back of the ceram-
ic knife press into her wrist; there was a sound like  an  inner-
tube  letting  go when you've patched it too many times, and then
that wrist was free.  Every wall in this narrow space racked with
metal,  debraised sections of old Reynolds tubing, dusty jam jars
stuffed with rusting spokes. Nigel's workshop, where he built his
carts,  did  what  shadetree  fixes he could to any bike came his
way. The salmon-plug that dangled from his  left  ear  ticked  in
counterpoint  to  his swiveling head, then jingled as he snatched
the thing in mid-bounce. A ball of red plastic.   Chevette  stood
up and shivered, this tremor running down through her like a live
thing, the way those red bracelets had moved.  How she felt, now,
was  just  the  way  she'd  felt  that day she'd come back to the
trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone.  No  message
there  hut  a can of ravioli in a pot on the Stove, with the can-
opener propped up beside it.  154 She hadn't eaten  that  ravioli
and she hadn't eaten any since and she knew she never would.  But
this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up  in-
side  it, so big you couldn't really prove it was there except by
an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she'd
moved  around  in it, whatever it was, from one point to another,
'til she'd wound up behind that wire in Beaverton, in a place  so
bad  it  was like a piece of broken glass to rub against that big
empty. And thereby growing aware of the thing that had  swallowed
the  world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong
glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of  gas,  something  she
could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and in-
ert in the rooms of her subsequent  passage.   For  a  long  time
she'd  wondered  if  maybe the fever hadn't burned it out, hadn't
accidentally fried whatever circuit in her it fed back on. But as
she'd  gotten  used  to the bridge, to Skinner, to messing at Al-
lied, it had just come to seem like the emptiness was filled with
ordinary  things, a whole new world grown up in the socket of the
old, one day rolling into the next-whether she danced  in  Dissi-
dents,  or  sat  up  all night talking with her friends, or slept
curled in her bag up in Skinner's room, where  wind  scoured  the
plywood walls and the cables thrummed down into rock that drifted
(Skinner said) like the slowest sea of all.  Now that was broken.
That  jumper she'd seen, a girl, hauled up and over the side of a
Zodiac with a pale plastic hook, white and  limp,  water  running
from  nose  and  mouth.  Every hone broken or dislocated, Skinner
said, if you hit just right. Ran through the bar naked and took a
header  off  some  tourist's  table  nearest the railing, out and
over, tangled in Haru's Day-Gb net and imitation Japanese fishing
floats.  And  didn't  Sammy Sal drift that way now, maybe already
clear of the dead zone that chased the fish off the years of tox-
ic  lead fallen there from uncounted coats of paint, out into the
current that sailed the bridge's dead, people said, past  Mission
Rock,  to  wash  up at the feet of the micropored wealthy jogging
the concrete coast of China Basin?  Chevette bent over and  threw
up, managing to get most of it into an open, empty paint can, its
lip thickly scabbed with the gray primer that Nigel used to  even
out  his  dodgier mends.  Sammy Sal dead, maybe Skinner, too. Him
and that grad student tied up up there with  the  plastic  worms.
He'd  put the coffee can down and was offering her an open can of
beer instead. She waved it aside, coughing.  Nigel shifted,  foot
to  foot,  then turned and peered through the triangular shard of
lucite that served as his one window. It was vibrating  with  the
wind.  'Stormin','  he  said,  like he was glad to note the world
outside continuing on any recognizable  course  at  all,  however
drastic.  'Stormin'  down  rain.'  Running from Skinner's and the
gun in the killer's hand, from his eyes and the gold in the  cor-
ners  of his smile, bent low for balance over her bound hands and
the case that held the asshole's glasses, Chevette had  seen  all
the  others  running, too, racing, it must have been, against the
breaking calm, the first slap of rain almost warm when  it  came.
Skinner  would've  r~6  known it was coming; hed have watched the
barometer in its corny wooden case like  tw  wheel  of  some  old
boat; he knew his weather, Skinner, pe:ched in his box on the top
of the bridge. Maybe the other; knew, too, but it was  the  style
to  wait  and  then  race it, biding out for a last sale, another
smoke, some bit of business. The hour before a storm was good for
that,  people naking edgy purchases against what was ordinarily a
bearahe uncertainty. Though a few were lost, if the storm was big
enough,  and  not  always the unestablished, the newconers lashed
with their ragged baggage to whatever freehold  they  might  have
managed  on the outer structure; sometimes a wiole patchwork sec-
tion would just let go, if the wind caught it right;  she  hadn't
seen  that  but there were stories. There was iothing to stop the
new people from coming in to the shelter cf the decks,  but  they
seldom  did.   She  wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and
took the beer from Nigel. Took a sip. It was warm. She handed  it
back  to  him.  He  took the toothpick from his mouth, started to
raise the can for a swallw, thought better of it, put it down be-
side  his  welding-torch.   She massaged her wrsts. Twin rings of
rash coming up, pink and moist, where t~~e  plastic  had  gripped
her.  Picked  up  the  ceramic knife and clesed it automatically.
What if you hit a b-bus? Bang into the back of it? You  got  more
m-mass  than  the  b-bike,  you  flip over and c-crack open crack
your.. .' His hands twisting, trying more accurately to frame the
physics of the accident he was seeing. Chevette looked up and saw
that he was trembling.  Nigel shook his hair back into his  eyes,
shy  and  pleased.  'You  had  that  knife.  Cuts  good.' Then he
frowned. 'You need a steel knife...'  Nigel dropped the bali like
it was poison. It bounced out of sight. He wiped his fingers down
the filthy front of his t-shirt.  The right hand pounced, came up
with its prize, blackhandled and slightly bent.  )

Baffled  by  the patchwork of plastic that roofed the upper deck,
the rain was following  waste-lines  and  power-cables,  emerging
overhead  at crazy angles, in random cascades, miniature Niagaras
rushing off corrugated iron and plywood.  From  the  entrance  to
Nigel's workshop, Chevette watched an awning collapse, gallons of
silver water splashing all at once from what had been a taut con-
cavity,  a  bulging  canvas  bathtub  that  gave way with a sharp
crack, instantly  becoming  several  yards  of  flapping,  sodden
cloth.  Nothing  here was ever planned, in any overall sense, and
problems of drainage were dealt with as  they  emerged.  Or  not,
more  likely.   Half the lights were out, she saw, but that could
be because people had shut them down, had pulled as many plugs as
possible.  But  then she caught the edge of that weird pink flash
you got when a transformer blew, and she heard it boom.  Out  to-
ward Treasure. That took care of most of the remaining lights and
suddenly she stood in near darkness. There was nobody  in  sight,
nobody  at  all.  Just  a  hundred-watt bulb in an orange plastic
socket, twirling around in the wind.  She moved out into the cen-
ter of the deck, trying to watch out for fallen wires. She remem-
bered the can in her hand and flung it sideways, hearing  it  hit
and  roll.   She thought of her bike lying there in the rain, its
capacitors drained. Somebody was going to take it, for sure,  and
Sammy  Sal's,  too.  It  was the biggest thing, the most valuable
thing she'd ever owned, and she'd earned every dollar  she'd  put
down  on  the  counter  at City Wheels. She didn't think about it
like it was a thing, more the  way  she  figured  people  thought
about  horses.  There  were messengers who named their bikes, but
Chevette never would have done that, and somehow because she  did
think  about it like it was something alive.  Proj, she told her-
self, they'll get you if you stay here. Her back to San  Francis-
co,  she  set  out  toward Treasure.  They who? That one with his
gun. He'd come for the glasses. Came for the glasses  and  killed
Sammy.  Had  those  people sent him, the ones who called up Bunny
and Wilson the owner? Rentacops. Security guys.  The case in  her
pocket.  Smooth. And that weird cartoon of the city, those towers
with their spreading tops. Sunflower.   To  Treasure,  where  the
wolf-men  and  the death-cookies hung, the bad crazies chased off
the bridge to haunt the woods there?  Been  a  Navy  base  there,
Skinner said, but a plague put paid to that just after the Little
Grande, something that turned your eyes to mush, then your  teeth
fell out. Treasure Island fever, like maybe something crawled out
of a can at that Navy place, after the earthquake. So nobody went
there  now,  nobody  normal.  You saw their fires at night, some-
times, and smoke in the daytime, and you walked straight over  to
the  Oakland span, the cantilever, and the people who lived there
weren't the same, really, as the people over here in the  suspen-
sion.  Or should she go back, try to get her bike? An hour's rid-
ing and the brakes would be charged again. She saw  herself  just
riding,  maybe  east,  riding  forever into whatever country that
was, deserts like you saw on television, then  flat  green  farms
where big machines came marching along in rows, doing whatever it
was they did. But she remembered the road down from  Oregon,  the
trucks  groaning past in the night like lost mad animals, and she
tried to picture herself riding down that. No, there  wasn't  any
place  out  on  a road like that, nothing human-sized, and hardly
ever even a light, in all the fields of  dark.  Where  you  could
walk  and  walk  forever  and  never come to anything, not even a
place to sit down. A bike wouldn't get her  anywhere  out  there.
Or  she  could go hack to Skinner's. Co up there and see- No. She
shut that down, hard.  i6o The empty rose out of the rain-rattled
shadws like a gas, and she held her breath, not to breathe it in.
How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only  knew  for
the  first time that you'd ever had them. Took a mother's leaving
for you to know she'd ever been there, because otherwise she  was
that place, everythin~, like weather. And Skinner and the Coleman
stove and the oil she had to drop into the little  hole  to  keep
its  leather  gasket soft so the pump would work. You didn't wake
up ever~' morning and say yes and yes to every little thing.  But
little  things  were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to
see, there, when you woke up. Or Lowell. When she'd had Lowel.-if
she  could  say she ever had, and she guessed she hadn't, really-
but while he'd been there, anyway, he'd been a little like  that-
'Chev?  That  you?'   And there he was. Lowell. Sitting up cross-
legged on top of a rusty cooler said  SHRIMP  across  the  froit,
smoking  a  cigarette  and watching rain run off the shrimp man's
awning. She hadn't seen him for three weeks  now,  and  the  only
thing  she could think of was how she really must look like total
shit. That skinhead boy they called Codes was sitting  up  beside
him, black hood of a sweatshirt pulled up and his hands hidden in
the long sleeves. Codes hadn't ever liked her.   But  Lowell,  he
was  grinning around the glow of that cigarette. 'Well,' he said,
'you gonna say "hi" 0: what?'   21  Cognitive  dissidents  Rydell
wasn't  too  sure  about  this  whole bridge thing, and less sure
about what Freddie had had to say about it, in Food Fair  and  on
the  way back from North Beach. He kept remembering that documen-
tary he'd seen in Knoxville and he was pretty sure  there  hadn't
been  anything  on that about cannibals or cults. He thought that
had to be Freddie wanting him to think that, because he,  Rydell,
was  the  one who had to go out there and get this girl, Chevette
Washington.  And now he was actually out on it,  watching  people
hurry to get their stuff out of the way of the weather, it looked
even less like what Freddie had said it was all about. It  looked
like  a  carnival, sort of. Or a state fair midway, except it was
roofed over, on the upper level, with crazy little shanties, just
boxes,  and  whole  house-trailers  winched up and glued into the
suspension with big gobs of adhesive, like grasshoppers in a spi-
der-web.  You could go up and down, between the two original deck
levels, through holes they'd cut in the upper deck, all different
kinds of stairs patched in under there, plywood and welded steel,
and one had an old airline gangway, just sitting there  with  its
tires  flat.  Down on the bottom deck, once you got in past a lot
of food-wagons, there were mostly bars, the smallest ones  Rydell
had  ever  seen,  some with only four stools and not even a door,
just a big shutter they could pull down and lock.  But none of it
done  to  any plan, not that he could see. Not like a mall, where
they plug a business into a slot and wait to r6z see  whether  it
works  or  not.  This  place  had just grcwn, it looked like, one
thing patched onto the next, until the whole span was wrapped  in
this  formless  mass  of  stuff, and io two pieces of it matched.
There was a different material anywhere you looked,  almost  none
of it being used for what it had originally been intended for. He
passed stalls faced with turquoise Formica, fake brick, fragments
of  broken tile vorked into swirls and sunbursts and flowers. One
place, dready shuttered, was covered with  green-and-copper  skbs
of  desoldered  component-board.  He found himself grinning at it
all, and at the peopli, none of them paying him the least  atten-
tion,  cannibaliitic  or  otherwise. They looked to be as mixed a
bunch a; their building materials: all ages, races,  colors,  and
all  &  them  rushing ahead of the storm that very definitely was
coming now, wind stiffening as he threaded his way past carts ~nd
old ladies lugging straw suitcases. A little kid, staggering with
his arms wrapped around a big red fire-extinguisher, bumped  into
his  legs. Rydell hadn't ever seen a little kid with tattons like
that. The boy said something in some other language aid  then  he
was gone.  Rydell stopped and got Warbaby's map out of his jacket
pocket. It showed where this girl lived and how to get up  there.
Right  up  on  the  roof  of the damned thing, in a little shanty
stuck to the top of one of the towers they hing the cables  from.
Warbaby  had  beautiful  handwriting,  really  graceful, and he'd
drawn this map out in the back of the patriot,  and  labelled  it
for  Rydell.  Stairs here, then you weni along this walkway, took
some kind of elevator.  Finding that first set of stairs was  go-
ing to be a bitch, though, because, now that he looked around, he
saw lots of narrow little stairways snaking up between stalls and
shattered  micro-bars,  and  no  pattern to it at all. He guessed
they all led up into the same rats-nest, hut there was no guaran-
tee  they'd all connect up.  163 Exhaustion hit him, then, and he
just wanted to know where and when he was supposed to sleep,  and
what was all this bullshit about, anyway? What had he let Hernan-
dez get him in for?  Then the rain hit, the wind upping  its  ve-
locity  a  couple  of notches and the locals diving seriously for
cover, leaving Rydell to hunch in the angle between a  couple  of
old-fashioned  Japanese  vending-machines. The overall structure,
if you could call it that, was porous enough  to  let  plenty  of
rain  in,  but  big  enough and clumsy enough to tangle seriously
with the wind. The whole thing started creaking and  popping  and
sort  of  groaning.  And  the lights started going out.  He saw a
burst of white sparks and a wire came down,  out  of  that  crazy
tangle.  Somebody yelled, but the words were pulled away into the
wind and he couldn't make them out. He looked down and saw  water
rising  around his SWAT shoes. Not good, he thought: puddles, wet
shoes, alternating current.  There was a fruitstand next  to  one
of  the  vending-machines,  knocked  together from scavenged wood
like a kid's fort. But it had a sort of shelf under it, raised up
six inches, and it looked dry under there. He hunched himself in,
on top of it, with his feet up out of the water. It smelled  like
overripe  tangerines, but it was ninety-percent dry and the vend-
ing-machine took most of the wind.  He zipped his jacket as  high
as  it went, balled his fists into the pockets, and thought about
a hot bath and a dry bed. He thought about his Futon Mouth futon,
down in Mar Vista, and actually felt homesick. Jesus, he thought,
be missing those stick-on flowers next.   A  canvas  awning  came
down,  its wooden braces snapping like toothpicks, spilling maybe
twenty gallons of rain. And right  then  was  when  he  saw  her,
Chevette  Washington,  right out in plain sight. Just like he was
dreaming. Not twenty feet away. Just standing there.  164  Rydell
had sort of had this girlfriend down in Florida, after his father
had moved down there  and  gotten  sick.  Her  name  was  Claudia
Marsalis and she was from Boston and her mother had her RV in the
same park as Rydell's father, right near Tampa Bay. Rydell was in
his first year at the Academy, but you got a couple of breaks and
his father knew ways to get a deal on plane tickets.   So  Rydell
would  go down there on breaks and stay with his father and some-
times at night he'd go out and ride around with Claudia  Marsalis
in  her  mother's  ~  Lincoln, which Claudia said had been cherry
when they brought it down but now the salt was starting to get to
it.  Evidently  up  in Boston she'd only ever taken it out on the
road in the summer, so the chemicals wouldn't eat it out. It  had
these blue-and-white MASS. HERITAGE plates on it because it was a
collector's item. They were the old-fashioned kind, stamped  met-
al,  and they didn't light up from inside.  It was kind of rough,
around that part of Tampa, with the street signs  all  chewed  up
for  target practice or the late-night demonstration of the choke
on somebody's shotgun. There were plenty of shotguns around to be
demonstrated,  too; a few in the window-rack of every pick-up and
4X4, and usually a couple of big old dogs. Claudia used  to  give
Rydell  a hard time about that, about these Florida boys in gimme
hats, riding around with their guns and dogs. Rydell told her  it
didn't  have  anything to do with him, he was from Knoxville, and
people didn't drive around Knoxville with their guns showing.  Or
shoot  holes  in street signs either, not if the Department could
help it. But Claudia was one of those people  thought  everything
south  of D.C. was all just the same, or maybe she just pretended
to to tease him.  But at night it smelled like salt and  magnolia
and  swamp, and they'd drive around in that Lincoln with the win-
dows down and listen to the radio. When it  got  dark  you  could
watch  the lights on ships, and on the big bulk-lifters that went
165 drumming past like the world's slowest UFOs. They'd maybe get
in a little listless boogy in the back seat, sometimes, but Clau-
dia said it just got you too sweaty in Florida and Rydell  tended
to  agree.  It  was  just they were both down there and alone and
there wasn't much else to do.  One night they were listening to a
country  station  out  of  Georgia and 'Me And Jesus'll Whup Your
Heathen Ass' came on,  this  hardshell  Pentecostal  Metal  thing
about  abortion  and  ayatollahs  and all the rest of it. Claudia
hadn't ever heard that one before and she about  wet  her  pants,
laughing.  She just couldn't believe that song. When she'd gotten
hold of herself and wiped the tears out of her eyes, she'd  asked
Rydell why he wanted to be a policeman anyway? And he'd felt kind
of uncomfortable about that, because it was like she thought  his
going to the Academy was funny, too, as funny as she thought that
dumb-ass song was. But also because it wasn't actually  something
he'd  thought  about, much.  The truth was, it probably had a lot
to do with how he and his father had always watched Cops in Trou-
ble  together, because that show seriously did teach you respect.
You got to see what kind of problems  the  police  were  flat  up
against.  Not just tooled-up slimeballs high on shit, either, but
the slimeballs' lawyers and the damn courts and  everything.  But
if  he  told  her it was because of a tv show, he knew she'd just
laugh at that, too. So he thought about it a while and  told  her
it  was  because he liked the idea of being in a position to help
out people when they were really in trouble. When he'd said that,
she  just  looked  at  him.  Driving, he glanced sideways at her.
'How come you know SO much about it, then?'

z66 ) But he'd thought about that, driving Gunhead  for  IntenSe-
cure,  because  that  was  like being a top except it wasn't. The
people you were there to help didn't even give enough of  a  shit
to  lie  to  you,  mostly,  because they were the ones paying the
bill.  And here he was, out on this bridge, craw~ing out from un-
der  a  fruitstand to follow this girl that ~Varbaby and Freddie-
who Rydell was coming to decide lie didn't trust  worth  a  rat's
ass-claimed  had  butchered  that German or whatever he was up in
that hotel. And stolen these glasses Rydell was supposed  to  get
back,  ones  like Wa:baby's. But if she'd stolen them before, how
come she'd gone back to kill the guy later? But the real question
was,  what did that have to do with anything, or even with watch-
ing Cops in Trouble all those times with his father? And the  an-
swer, he guessed, was that he, like anybody else in his position,
was just trying to make a living.  Solid  streams  of  rain  were
coming down cut of various points in all that jackstraw stuff up-
stairs, sphshing on the deck. There was a pink flash, like light-
ning,  off down the bridge. He thought he saw her fling something
t the side, but if he stopped to check it out he might lose  her.
She was moving now, avoiding the waterfalls.  Street-surveillance
technique wasn't something you  got  much  training  in,  at  the
Academy,  not  unless yu looked like such good detective material
that they streamlined you right into the Advanced CI courses. But
Rydell  bad gone and bought the textbook anyway. Trouble was, be-
cause of that he knew you pretty well needed at least one partnei
to  do  it  with,  and that was assuming you had a radio link anc
some citizens going about their business to  give  you  a  little
uver. I)oing it this way, how he had to do it now, about the best
you could hope for was just to sneak along behind  her.   167  He
knew  it  was her because of that crazy hair, that ponytail ;tuck
up in the back like one of  those  fat  Japanese  wrestlers.  The
wasn't  fat,  though.  Her  legs, sticking out of a big old biker
jacket that might've been hanging in  a  barn  for  a  couple  of
years,  looked  like  she  must work out a lot. They were covered
with some tight shiny black stuff, like Kevin's micropore outfits
from  Just  Blow  Me,  and  they went down into some kind of dark
boots or high-top shoes.  Paying that much attention to her,  and
trying to stay out of sight in case she turned around, he managed
to walk right under one of those waterfalls. Right down the  back
of his neck. Just then he heard somebody call to her, 'Chev, that
you?' and he went down on one knee in a puddle, behind this stack
of  salvaged  lumber, two-by-fours with soggy plaster sticking to
them. ID positive.  The waterfall behind him was making too  much
noise  for him to hear what was said then, but he could see them:
a young guy with a black leather jacket, a lot newer  than  hers,
and somebody else in something black, with a hood pulled up. They
were sitting up on a cooler or something, and the  guy  with  the
leather  was  dragging  on a cigarette. Had his hair combed up in
sort of a crest; good trick, in that rain.  The  cigarette  arced
out  and  winked  off in the wet, and the guy got down from there
and seemed to be talking to the girl. The one with the black hood
got  down, too, moving like a spider. It was a sweatshirt, Rydell
saw, with sleeves that hung down six inches past  his  hands.  He
looked  like  a floppy shadow from some old movie Rydell had seen
once, where shadows got separated from  people  and  you  had  to
catch  them and sew them back on. Probably Sublett could tell him
what that was called.  He worked hard  on  not  moving,  kneeling
there  in that puddle, and then they were moving, the two of them
on either side of her and the shadow glancing hack to  check  be-
hind them. He caught a fraction of white face and a pair of hard,
careful eyes.

i68 ) He counted: one, two, three. Then he got  up  and  followed
them.   He  couldn't  say  how far they'd gone before he saw them
drop, it looked like, straight out of sight. He wiped  rain  from
his eyes and tried to figure it, but then he saw that they'd gone
down a flight of stairs, this one cut into the lower deck,  which
was the first time he'd seen that. He could hear music as he came
up on it, and see this bluish glow. Which proved to be from  this
skinny  little neon sign that said, in blue capital letters: COG-
NITIVE DISSIDENTS.

He stood there for a second, hearing water sizzle off the  sign's
transformer,  and then he just took those stairs.  They were ply-
wood, stapled with that sandpapery no-slip stuff, but  he  almost
slipped anyway. By the time he'd gotten halfway to the bottom, he
knew it was a bar, because he could smell beer and  a  couple  of
different  kinds  of  smoke.  And it was warm, down there. It was
like walking into a steam bath. And  crowded.  Somebody  threw  a
towel at him. It was soaking wet and hit him in the chest, but he
grabbed it and rubbed at his hair and face  with  it,  tossed  it
back in the direction it had come from. Somebody else, a woman by
the sound, laughed. He went over to the bar and  found  an  empty
space  at  the  end.  Fished in his soggy pockets for a couple of
fives and clicked them down on the counter. 'Beer,' he said,  and
didn't  look  up  when  somebody put one down in front of him and
swept the coins out of sight. It was one of those brewed-in-Amer-
ica Japanese brands that people in places like Tampa didn't drink
much. He closed his eyes and drank about half of it at a  go.  As
he  opened  his  eyes  and  put it down, somebody beside him said
'Tumble?'  He looked over and saw  this  jawless  character  with
little  pink glasses and a little pink mouth, thinning sandy hair
comhed straight back and shining with  something  more  than  the
damp in the rooni.  169 The man blinked a couple of times, behind
his pink glasses.  The man just looked at him.  Still looking  at
him. 'Thought I saw you before ...' Doubt.  Rydell shook himself,
a weird automatic thing, like a wet dog, hut she was still there.
I  70  just  wanna see what they've got on you? Anybody else, you
got the right numbers-' The pink glasses tilted.   The  bartender
was a black guy with copper beads in his hair. He was grinning at
Rydell. 'Call him Eddie the Shit cause he ain't worth one,  don't
give  another. Hook your phone up to some box doesn't have a bat-
tery, push a few buttons, pass a dead chicken over it, take  your
money.  That's  Eddie.' He uncapped a beer and put it down beside
the other one.  Rydell looked back at  the  Japanese  woman.  She
hadn't  moved.  'I just came in out of the rain,' he said, all he
could think to say.  The bartender pointed. Rydell  looked  where
he  was  pointing. Saw a very fat woman in a wheelchair, her hair
the color and texture of coarse steel wool.  She  wore  brand-new
blue denim bib overalls and an XXL white sweatshirt, and both her
hands were hidden inside something that sat on  her  lap  like  a
snîooth gray plastic muff. Her eyes were closed, face expression-
less. He couldn't have said for sure that she wasn't asleep.

(71 horned crown, all silver. Her pubic hair, shaved like an  ex-
clamation point. This one didn't have either of those, but it was
her. It was.  Rydell saw a little black gizmo clamped to the  top
of  this Did illuminated sign. It looked kind of like an old cam-
era, the )ptical kind. He didn't know if NEC was a beer or  what.
The  whole  wall  was  covered  with  these  signs, all different
brands, md now he recognized a few of the names he  decided  they
were  ads for old electronics companies.  He looked at the gizmo,
back at the fat woman in the wheelchair,  and  felt  sad.  Angry,
too. Like he'd lost something. 'Not like I knew what I thought it
was,' he said to himself.  Rydeil thought about somebody  sitting
out  there by that valley road. Waiting for cars. Like he and his
friends would lie under the bushes down Jefferson Street and toss
cans  under  people's  tires. Sounded like a hubcap had come off.
See them get out and look, shake their heads. So what  he'd  seen
had  just been a version of that, somebody playing with an expen-
sive toy.

172 ) profile, and he was wasn't talking. Chevette Washington was
telling  something  to the other one and not looking happy.  Then
the music changed, these drums coming in, like  there  were  mil-
lions  of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and weird
waves of static riding in on that, failing back, riding in again,
and  women's  voices,  crying like birds, and none of it natural,
the voices dopplering past like sirens  on  a  highway,  and  the
drums, when you listened, made up of little snipped bits of sound
that weren't drums at all.  The Japanese woman-the hologram,  Ry-
dell  reminded himself-raised her arms and began to dance, a sort
of looping shuffle, timed not to the tempo of the  drums  but  to
the  waves of static washing back and forth across the sound, and
when Rydell thought to look he saw  the  fat  woman's  eyes  were
open,  her hands moving inside that plastic muff.  Nobody else in
the bar was paying it any attention at all, just Rydell  and  the
woman in the wheelchair. Rydell leaned there on the bar, watching
the hologram dance and wondering what he should do next.   Warba-
by's  shopping  list  went like this: best he got the glasses and
the girl, next best was the glasses, just the girl was definitely
third, but a must if that was all that was going.  J osie's music
slid out and away for the last time and the hologram's dance end-
ed.  There was some drunken applause from a couple of the tables,
Josie nodding her head a little like she was thanking them.   The
terrible  thing  about  it,  Rydell thought, was that there Josie
was, shoehorned into that chair, and she just wasn't much good at
making that thing dance. It reminded him of this blind man in the
park in Knoxville, who sat there all day strumming an antique Na-
tional  guitar.  There he was, blind, had this old guitar, and he
just couldn't chord for shit. Never seemed to get any  better  at
it, either. I)idn't seem fair.  Now some people got up from a ta-
ble near where Chevette Washington was  sitting.  Rydell  was  in
there  quick, bringing the beer he'd won for getting rid of Eddie
the Shit. He still wasn't close enough to pick out what they were
saying,  but  he  could  try.  He tried to think up ways to maybe
start up a conversation, but it seemed pretty hopeless. Not  that
he  looked  particularly out of place, because he had the impres-
sion that most of this crowd weren't regulars here, just a random
sampling,  come  in  out of the rain. But he just didn't have any
idea what this place was about. He couldn't figure out what 'Cog-
nitive  Dissidents'  meant;  it wouldn't help him figure out what
the theme, or whatever, was. And besides, whatever Chevette Wash-
ington  and her guy were discussing, it looked to be getting sort
of heated.  Her guy, he thought. Something there in her body-lan-
guage  that said Pissed-Off Girlfriend, and something in how hard
this boy was studying to show how little any of it bothered  him,
like maybe she was the Ex- All this abruptly coming to nothing at
all as every conversation died and Rydell looked up from his beer
to  see Lt. Orlovsky, the vampire-looking cop from SFPD Homicide,
stepping in from the stairwell in his London Fog,  some  kind  of
fedora  that looked like it was molded from flesh-colored plastic
on his head, and those scary half-frame glasses.  Orlovsky  stood
there,  little  streams  running off the hem of his rain-darkened
coat and pooling around his wingtips,  while  he  unbuttoned  the
coat  with one hand. Still had his black flak vest on underneath,
and now that hand came up to rest on the smooth,  injection-mold-
ed, olive-drab butt of his floating-breech H&K. Rydell looked for
the badge-case on the nylon neck-thong, but didn't see  it.   The
whole  bar  was  looking at Orlovsky.  Orlovsky looked around the
room, over the tops of his glasses, taking his time, giving  them
all  a  good dose of Cop Eye. The music, some weird hollow techie
stuff that sounded like bombs going off in echo-chambers, started
to  make  a  different  kind  of  sense.   Rydell  saw  Josie the
wheelchair woman looking at the Russian with an expression Rydell
couldn't  process.   Spotting  Chevette Washington in her corner,
Orlovsky walked over to her table, still taking his time,  making
the  rest of the room take that same time. His hand still on that
gun.  It seemed to Rydell like the Russian just might be about to
haul out and shoot her. Sure looked like it, but what kind of cop
would do that?  Now Orlovsky stopped in  front  of  their  table,
just  the  right  distance, too far for them to reach him and far
enough to allow room to pull that big gun if  he  was  going  to.
The  Boyfriend,  Rydell was somehow pleased to see, looked fit to
shit himself. Baldhead looked like he'd  been  cast  in  plastic,
just  frozen there, hands on the table. Between his hands, Rydell
saw a pocket phone.  Orlovsky locked the girl with his full  cur-
rent of Eye-thing, his face lined, gray in this light, unsmiling.
He jerked the brim of the plastic fedora, just this precise  lit-
tle  fraction,  and  said 'Get up.'  Rydell looked at her and saw
her trembling. There was never any question the Russian meant her
and  not  her  friends-Boyfriend  looking like he might faint any
second and Baldhead playing statue.   Chevette  Washington  stood
up, shaky, the rickety little wooden chair going over behind her.
Rydell heard his own knees creak with  tension.  He  was  leaning
forward, gripping the edges of the table. He could feel old dried
pads of gum under there.  The lights went out.

Much later, trying to explain to Sublett what it  had  been  like
when  Josie  whipped  her  hologram  on  Orlovsky, Rydell said it
looked sort of like the special effect at the end of  Raiders  of
175  the  Lost Ark, that part where those angels or whatever they
were came swirling out of that box and got all over those  Nazis.

But  it  had  all  been  happening  at once, for Rydell. When the
lights went, they all went, all those signs on the  wall,  every-
thing,  and  Rydell just tossed that table sideways, without even
thinking about it, and Went For where she'd  been  standing.  And
this  ball of light had shot down, expanding, from a point on the
wall that must've marked the upper edge of that NEC sign. It  was
the  color  of  the hologram's skin, kind of honey and ivory, all
marbled through with the dark of her hair and eyes, like a  fast-
forward  of  a satellite storm-system. All around that Russian, a
three-foot sphere around his head and shoulders, and as it  spun,
her  eyes  and mouth, open in some silent scream, blinked by, all
magnified. Each eye, for a fraction of a second, the size of  the
ball  itself,  and  the  white teeth big, too, each one long as a
man's hand.  Orlovsky swatted at it, and that kept him, for  some
very  little  while,  from getting his gun out.  But it also gave
off enough light to let Rydell see he was grabbing the  girl  and
not Boyfriend. Just sort of picking her up, forgetting everything
he'd ever been taught about comealongs and restraints,  and  run-
ning,  best he could, for the stairs.  Orlovsky yelled something,
but it must've been in Russian.  His uncle, the  one  who'd  gone
off to Africa in the Army, used to say, if he liked how a woman's
ass moved when she walked, that it looked like two  baby  bobcats
in  a  croker  sack. And that was the expression that popped into
Rydell's mind as he ran up those stairs with Chevette  Washington
held  out  in  front of him like a big bunch of groceries. But it
didn't have anything to do with sexy.   He  was  just  lucky  she
didn't get an eye or break any of his ribs.  ) 22 Rub-a-dub



Whoever  had  grabbed  her,  she  just kept kicking and punching,
right up the stairs, backward. But he had her held out so far  in
front of him that he almost fell on top of her.  Then she was out
on the deck, in what light there was, and looking at some kind of
plastic  machine gun, the color of a kid's army toy, in the hands
of another one of these big ugly raincoat guys, this one with  no
hat  and  his  wet hair slicked back from a face with the skin on
too tight.  Out.'

the stairs behind the guy who'd grabbed her. He  had  a  pair  of
night-vision  glasses  on,  that funny-looking center-tube poking
out from beneath the brim of his hat. He was holding up something
that  looked  like  a miniature aerosol can. He said something in
this language. Russian? He gestured with  the  little  can,  back
down  the  stairs.  The tight-faced man looked at him like he was
something crawled out from under a rock.  'You  drive,  yes?'  he
said,  gesturing  for the hat-man to put the thing away, whatever
it was.  Chevette caught the tight-faced  man's  glance  at  her,
like he hadn't liked her hearing his name. She wanted to tell him
she'd heard it Rub-a-Dub, how this  other  guy  talked,  so  that
couldn't really be it, could it?  The one with the hat was behind
her now, jerking her arm up in  a  hold.  'Lemme  go-'  Rub-a-Dub
whistled  softly.  'Fuckhead.'   Which produced a little snort of
exasperation from Rub-aDub.  178 And her arm twisted up so  she'd
go  with  them.  Svobodov had insisted on cuffing him to Chevette
Washington. They were Beretta cuffs, just like  he'd  carried  on
patrol  in  Knoxville. Svobodov said he and Orlovsky needed their
hands free in case any of these bridge people caught on they were
taking  the  girl  off.  But if they were taking her in, how come
they hadn't read her any Miranda, or even told her she was  under
arrest? Rydell had already decided that if it got to court and he
was called to witness, no way was he going to perjure himself and
say he'd heard any fucking Miranda. These Russians were balls-out
cowboys as far as he could see, just exactly the kind of officers
the  Academy had tried hard to train Rydell not to be.  In a way,
though, what they were reflected what a lot  of  people  more  or
less unconsciously expected cops to be and do, and that, this one
lecturer at the Academy had said, was because of mythology.  Like
what  they  called  the  Father  Mulcahy  Syndrome, in barricaded
hostage situations. Where somebody took a hostage  and  the  cops
tried  to decide what to do. And they'd all seen this movie about
Father Mulcahy once, so'd they'd say, yeah, I got it, I'll get  a
priest, I'll get the guy's parents, I'll lay down my gun and I'll
go in there and talk him out. And he'd go in there  and  get  his
ass  drilled  out  real  good. Because he forgot, and let himself
think a movie was how you really did it. And it  could  work  the
other  way, too, SO you gradually became how you saw cops were in
8o 23 Gone and done it movies and on television. They'd all  been
warned  about that. But people like Svobodov and Orlovsky, people
who'd come here from other  countries,  maybe  that  media  stuff
worked  even  stronger  on  them. Check how they dressed, for one
thing.  Man, he was going to have him a shower.  Hot  shower.  He
was going to stay in there until he couldn't stand it anymore, or
until the hot ran out. Then he was going to get out and towel off
and  put on all brand-new, totally dry clothes, in whatever hotel
room Warbaby had got for him. He was going to  send  down  for  a
couple  of club sandwiches and an ice-bucket with about four-five
of those long-neck Mexican beers like they drank in L.A. And he'd
sit there with a remote and watch some television. Maybe see Cops
in Trouble. Maybe he'd even call up Sublett, shoot the shit, tell
him  about  this wild-ass time up in Northern California. Sublett
always worked deep graveyard because he was  light-sensitive,  so
if  it  happened  to  be  his  night off, he'd be up watching his
movies.  She wouldn't look at him. But she just  didn't  look  to
Rydell  like  she'd sit down on some guy's chest with a razor and
haul his tongue out the hard way. Well, she did have that ceramic
knife,  when Svobodov shook her down, plus a pocket phone and the
damn glasses everybody was after. Those looked just  like  Warba-
by's, and had this case. The Russians were real happy about that,
and now they were tucked away safe in the inside pocket  of  Svo-
bodov's  flak vest.  She wasn't the right kind of scared, either,
something kept telling him. She wasn't giving off  that  vibe  of
perp  fear  that  you  got to know by about your third day on the
job. It was like victim fear, what it was, even though she'd  al-
ready flatout admitted to Orlovsky that she'd stolen those glass-
es. Said she'd done that up at a party in that hotel,  the  night
before.   i8i But neither of the Russians had said shit about any
homicide beef, or any Blix or  whatever  the  victim's  name  had
been. Or even larceny. And she'd said that about somebody killing
Sammy, whoever Sammy was. Maybe Sammy was  the  German.  But  the
Russians  had just dropped it, and shut Etydell up, and now she'd
clammed up except to bitch at him if he started to fall asleep on
his  feet.   The place was coming back to life, sort of, now that
the storm had quit, but it was God knows when in the morning  and
there  weren't  exactly a lot of people swarming out yet to check
the damage. Lights kept coming back on, here and there, and there
were  a few people sweeping water off decks and things, and a few
drunks, and this guy who looked like he was on dancer, talking to
himself  a  mile a minute, who kept following them until Svobodov
pulled out his H&K and spun around and said he'd  grease  him  to
fucking  catfood  if he didn't get his dancer ass to Oakland like
yesterday, fuckhead, and the guy did, naturally, his  eyes  about
to bug right out of his head, and Orlovsky laughing at him.  They
came out into some more lights, about where Rydell had first laid
his  eyes  on  Chevette Washington. Looking down to keep track of
his footing, Rydell saw she was wearing black SWAT trainers  just
like  his.  Lexan insoles.  And she just looked up at him like he
was crazy, and he saw tears running down her face.  And  Svobodov
jammed  the  muzzle of that H&K, hard, into the joint of Rydell's
jaw, just in front of his right ear,  and  said:  'Fuckhead.  You
don't  talk  to  her.'  Rydell looked at Svobodov, edgewise, down
the top of the barrel. Waited until he thought it was safe to say
okay.   After that, he didn't try to say anything to her, or even
look at her. When he thought he could get away with it, he looked
at  Svohodov.  When  they  took that cuff off, he just might deck
that SOfl of a hitch.

i8z ) But just after the Russian had pulled the gun  out  of  his
ear,  Rydell  had registered something behind him. Not registered
big-time, but it clicked for him later: this big bear of a  long-
hair,  blinking  out at them, where they stood in the light, from
this little doorway looked like it wasn't more than a foot  wide.
Rydell  didn't  have anything special going about black people or
immigrants or anything, not like a lot of people  did.  In  fact,
that  had  been  one  of  the things that had gotten him into the
Academy when he hadn't exactly had great grades from high school.
They'd  run  all these tests on him and decided he wasn't racist.
He wasn't, either, but not because he thought about  it  particu-
larly.  He just couldn't see the point. It just made for a lot of
hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was  going  to
go  back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they
did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn't be any Mongolian barbe-
cue and maybe we'd all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and any-
way the President was black.  He had to admit, though, as he  and
Chevette  Washington  walked  out  between those tank-trap slabs,
their cuffed wrists swinging in  that  stupid  prom-night  unison
that you get with handcuffs, that currently he was feeling a lit-
tle put upon by a few very specific blacks and immigrants. Warba-
by's tvpreacher melancholy had worn thin on him; he thought Fred-
die was, as his father would have put it, a jive-ass  motherfuck-
er;  Svobodov  and Orlovsky, they must be what his uncle, the one
who went in the army, had meant by stone pigs.  And here he could
see Freddie with his butt propped against the front fender of the
Patriot, bobbing his head to something on earphones,  the  lyrics
or whatever sliding around the edges of his sneakers, animated in
red LEDs. Must've sat out the rain in the car, because  his  pis-
tol-print  shirt  and  his  big shorts weren't even wet.  183 And
Warbaby there in his long quilted coat, his hat jammed down level
with those VL glasses. Looked like a refrigerator, if a refriger-
ator could lean on a cane.  And the Russians' gray tanker  of  an
unmarked,  pulled up nose to nose with the Patriot, armored tires
and that graphite mesh rhino-chaser screaming Cop Car at  anybody
who was interested. As indeed some were, Rydell saw, a thin crowd
of bridge-people watching from various perches  on  the  concrete
slabs and battened food-wagons. Little kids, a couple of Mexican-
looking women with hairnets like they worked in food-preparation,
some rough-looking boys in muddy workclothes and leaning on shov-
els and push-brooms there. Just looking,  their  faces  carefully
neutral,  the  way  people's faces got when they saw cops working
and were curious.  And somebody in  the  Russians'  car,  hunched
down knees-up in the shotgun seat.  The Russians closing in tight
on either side of Rydell and the girl, walking them  out.  Rydell
could  feel  them  responding  to  the  presence  of  the  crowd.
Shouldn't've left the car out there like  that.   Svobodov,  this
close, sort of creaked when he walked, and that was the armor un-
der his shirt that Rydell had noticed before, back in that greasy
spoon. Svobodov was smoking one of his Marlboro cigarettes, hiss-
ing out clouds of blue smoke. Had the gun out of sight now.   And
right  up  to  Warbaby, Freddie shining the whole scene on with a
grin that made Rydell want to kick him, but Warbaby  looking  sad
as ever.  Warbaby looked at Svobodov. 'You get it?'  Warbaby nod-
ded, looked at Chevette Washington, then at Rydell. 'Good  then.'
To Orlovsky: 'Take the cuffs off.'

184  )  Orlovsky  took  Rydell's wrist, slid a mag-strip into the
slot in the cuff.   Freddie  giggled.   Chevette  Washington  was
holding  her  wrist  up for Orlovsky, but he was putting the mag-
strip away.  The passenger-side door of the gray  car  opened.  A
man  got  out.  Black  cowboy  boots and a long black waterproof.
Sandy hair, no particular length. He had those deep smile-creases
down  his cheeks, like somebody had carved them there. Light-col-
ored eyes. Then he did smile, and it was about two-thirds gum and
a  third  teeth, with gold at the corners.  And that was when the
big longhair, the one in the dirty shirt, the one Rydell had  no-
ticed  back  on  the bridge, plowed this bicycle square into Svo-
bodov's back. Not any regular bicycle, either, but this  big  old
rusty  coaster-brake  number  with a heavy steel basket welded in
front of the bars. The bike and the  basket  probably  weighed  a
hundred  pounds between them, and there must've been another hun-
dred pounds of scrap metal piled up in the basket  when  Svobodov
got  nailed.  Put  him  face-down across the hood of the Patriot,
Freddie jumping like a scalded cat.  The longhair landed  on  top
of  Svobodov  and  all that junk like a bear with rabies, grabbed
him by the ears, and starting slamming his face  into  the  hood.
Orlovsky was pulling out his H&K and Rydell saw Chevette Washing-
ton bend down, tug something out of the top of one SWAT shoe. jab
it  into Orlovsky's hack. Looked like a screwdriver. Hit whatever
185 armor he was wearing, but it put him off-balance as he pulled
the trigger.  Nothing in the world ever sounded like caseless am-
munition, at full-auto, out of a floating breech. It  wasn't  the
sound  of  a  machine gun, but a kind of ear-shattering, extended
whoop.  The first burst didn't seem to  hit  anything,  but  with
Chevette  Washington  clawing  at  his gun arm, Orlovsky tried to
turn it on her. Second burst went in the general direction of the
crowd.  People  screaming, grabbing up kids.  Warbaby's mouth was
just open, like  he  couldn't  believe  it.   Rydell  was  behind
Orlovsky  when  he tried to bring the gun up again, and, well, it
was just one of those times.  He side-kicked  the  Russian  about
three  inches below the back of his knee, that third burst whoop-
ing almost straight up as Orlovsky went down.  Freddie  tried  to
grab  Chevette  Washington, seemed to see the screwdriver for the
first time, and just managed to bring his  laptop  up  with  both
hands. That screwdriver went right through it. Freddie yelped and
dropped it.  Rydell grabbed the loose cuff, the one that had been
around  his  wrist,  and  just pulled.  Opened the passenger-side
door of the Patriot and hauled her right in  after  him.  Getting
into  the driver's seat, he had a grandstand view of the longhair
pounding Svobodov's bloody face into the hood, all  these  pieces
of  rusty  junk jumping each time he did it.  Key. Ignition.  Ry-
dell saw Chevette Washington's phone and the  case  with  the  VL
glasses fall out of Svobodov's flak vest. Powered down the window
and reached around. Somebody shot the longhair off Svobodov, pop,
pop,  pop,  and  Rydell, stomping it in reverse, saw the man from
the cop car swinging a little gun around, two-handed.  just  like
they  taught  you  in FATSS. The back of the Patriot slammed into
something and Svohodov

i~6 ) flew off the hood in a cloud of rusty chain and odd lengths
of  pipe. Chevette Washington was trying to get out the passenger
door, so he had to hang on to the cuff and spin  the  wheel  one-
handed,  let  go  of her long enough to shove it into forward and
tromp on it, then grab her again.   The  passenger  door  slammed
shut  as  he took it straight for the man with the big smile, who
maybe got off one more before he had to get out of the way, fast,
The  Patriot  was  fishtailing  in about an inch of water, and he
barely missed clipping the back  of  a  big  orange  waste-hauler
pulled  up  beside  a  building  there.  He caught this one crazy
glimpse in the dash-mirror, out the back window: the bridge  tow-
ering  up  like something wrapped in seaweed, sky graying now be-
hind it, and Warbaby taking one stiff-legged step, another, rais-
ing  the  cane straight out from his shoulder, pointing it at the
Patriot like it was a magic wand  or  something.   Then  whatever
came out of the end of Warbaby's cane took out the Patriot's back
window, and Rydell hung a right so tight it  almost  tipped  them
over.  He didn't know, but hadn't he just gone and done it?  When
the lights went out, Yamazaki fumbled in the dark  for  his  bag.
Finding  it, he felt through it for his flashlight.  In the white
beam, Skinner slept slack-jawed beneath the blankets and a ragged
sleeping-bag.   Yamazaki  searched  the several shelves above the
table-ledge: small glass jars of spices, identical jars  contain-
ing  steel screws, an ancient Bakelite telephone reminding him of
the origin of the verb 'to dial,' rolls of many  different  kinds
and  colors of adhesive tape, twists of heavy copper wire, pieces
of what he took to be salt-water tackle, and, finally,  a  bundle
of dusty candle-stubs secured with a rotting rubber band. Select-
ing the longest of these, he found a  lighter  beside  the  green
campstove.  Standing the candle upright on a white saucer, he lit
it. The flame fluttered and went out.   Flashlight  in  hand,  he
moved to the window and tugged it more tightly into its deep cir-
cular frame.  Now the candle stayed lit, though the flame  pulsed
and swelled in drafts he could never hope to locate. Returning to
the window, he looked out. The  darkened  bridge  was  invisible.
Rain  was  driving  almost  horizontally against the window, tiny
droplets reaching his face through cracks in the glass  and  cor-
roded  segments  of the supporting lead.  It occurred to him that
Skinner's room might be made to function as a camera ohscura.  If
the  church  window's  tiny central hull's-eye pane were removed,
and the other panes covered, an inverted image would be  cast  on
the opposite wall.  i88 24 Song of the central pier Yamazaki knew
that the central pier, the bridge's center  anchorage,  had  once
qualified  as  one of the world's largest pinhole cameras. In the
structure's pitch-black interior, light shining in through a sin-
gle  tiny hole had projected a huge image of the underside of the
lower deck, the nearest tower, and the surrounding bay.  Now  the
heart  of  the  anchorage  housed  some  uncounted  number of the
bridge's more secretive inhabitants, and Skinner had advised  him
against  attempting  to go there. 'Nothin' like those Mansons out
in the bushes on Treasure, Scooter, but you don't want to  bother
'em  anyway. Okay people but they just aren't looking for anybody
to drop in, know what I mean?'  Yamazaki crossed  to  the  smooth
curve  of  cable  that interrupted the room's floor. Only an oval
segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula  barely
breaking  a  topological surface in a computer representation. He
bent to touch it, the visible segment polished  by  other  hands.
Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and sev-
enty-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some
million  pounds.  Yamazaki  felt something, some message of vast,
obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth  dorsal  hump.
The  storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable
mobility; it expanded and contracted  with  heat  and  cold;  the
great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the
Bay mud, bedrock that had  scarcely  moved  even  in  the  Little
Grande.  Godzilla. Yamazaki shivered, recalling television images
of Tokyo's fall. He had been in Paris, with his  parents.  Now  a
new  city  rose  there,  its buildings grown, literally, floor by
floor.  The candlelight showed him Skinner's  little  television,
forgotten  on  the  floor.  Taking it to the table, he sat on the
stool and examined it. There was no visible damage to the screen.
It had simply come away from its frame, on a short length of mul-
ticolored ribbon. He folded the ribbon into  the  frame  and  189
pressed  with  his thumbs on either side of the screen. It popped
back into place, but would it still function? He bent to  examine
the  tiny  controls.  ON.  Lime-and-purple diagonals chased them-
selves across the screen, then faded,  revealing  some  steadycam
fragment,  the  NHK  logo  displayed  in  the  lower left corner.
'-heir-apparent to the Harwood Levine public relations and adver-
tising fortune, departed San Francisco this afternoon after a ru-
mored stay of several days, declining comment on the  purpose  of
his  visit.'  A  long face, horselike yet handsome, above a rain-
coat's upturned collar. A large white smile. 'Accompanying  him,'
mid-distance  shot  down  an airport corridor, the slender, dark-
haired woman wrapped in something  luxurious  and  black,  silver
gleaming  at  the heels of her shining boots, 'was Maria Paz, the
Padanian media  personality,  daughter  of  film  director  Carlo
Paz-.' The woman, who looked unhappy, vanished, to be replaced by
infrared footage from  New  Zealand,  as  Japanese  peace-keeping
forces  in armored vehicles advanced on a rural airport. '-losses
attributed to the outlawed South Island Liberation  Front,  while
in Wellington-' Yamazaki attempted to change the channel, but the
screen only strobed its lime-and-purple, then framed  a  portrait
of Shapely. A BBC docu-drama. Calm, serious, mildly hypnotic. Af-
ter two more unsuccessful attempts at locating  another  channel,
Yamazaki  let the British voiceover blot out the wind, the groan-
ing of the cables, the creaking of the plywood walls. He  focused
his  attention on the familiar story, its outcome fixed, comfort-
ing-if only in its certainty.  James Delmore Shapely had come  to
the attention of the AIDS industry in the early months of the new
century. He was thirty-one years old, a prostitute, and had  been
HIVpositive  for twelve years. At the time of his 'discovery,' by
Dr. Kim Kutnik of Atlanta, Georgia, Shapely  was  serving  a  two
hundred  and fifty day prison term for soliciting. (His status as
HIV-positive, which would automatically have war- 190 ranted more
serious  charges,  had apparently been 'glitched.') Kutnik, a re-
searcher with the Sharman Group, an American subsidiary of Shiba-
ta Pl~armaceuticals, was sifting prison medical data in search of
individuals who had been HIV-positive for a decade or more,  were
asymptomatic,  and had entirely normal (or, as in Shapely's case,
above the norm) T-cell counts.  One of the  Sharmar  Group's  re-
search  initiatives  centered around the possibility of isolating
mutant strains of HIV. Arguing that viruses obey the laws of nat-
ural  selection, several Sharman biologists had proposed that the
HIV virus, in its then-current genetic  format,  was  excessively
lethal.  Allowed  to  range unchecked, argued the Sharman team, a
virus demonstrating ioo percent lethality must  eventually  bring
about  the  extinction  oF  the host organism. (Other Sharman re-
searchers countered Fy citing the long incubation period as  con-
tributing  to  the  suivival  of the host population.) As the BBC
writers were careful to make clear, the  idea  of  locating  non-
pathogenic  strains  )f HIV, with a view of overpowering and neu-
tralizing lethal strains, had been put forward  almost  a  decade
earlier,  though  the  'ethical'  implications of experimentation
with human subjects had impeded research. The core observation cf
the  Sharman  researchers dated from this earlier work: The %irus
wishes to survive, and cannot if it kills its host. The  Shariian
team, of which Dr. Kutnik was a part, intended to inject HIV-pos-
itive patients with blood extracted  from  individials  they  be-
lieved to be infected with nonpathogenic strains of the virus. It
was possible, they believed, that the nonçathogenic strain  would
overpower  the  lethal  strain.  Kim KutrLik was one of seven re-
searchers given the task of locating HIV-positive individuals who
might  be  harboring a nonpathogenic strain. She elected to begin
her search through a sectorof data concerned with current inmates
of  state  prisons  who were (a) in apparent good health, and (b)
had tested HIV-positive at least a decade before. Her initial 191
search  turned  up sixty-six possibles-among them, J. D. Shapely.
Yamazaki watched as Kutnik, played by a  young  British  actress,
recalled,  from  a  patio in Rio, her first meeting with Shapely.
'I'd been struck by the fact that his T-cell count that  day  was
over i,zoo, and that his responses to the questionnaire seemed to
indicated that 'safe sex,' as we thought of it then,  was,  well,
not exactly a priority. He was a very open, very outgoing, really
a very innocent character, and when I asked  him,  there  in  the
prison  visiting  room, about oral sex, he actually blushed. Then
he laughed, and said, well, he said he 'sucked cock like  it  was
going out of style' . . .' The actressKutnik looked as though she
were about to blush herself. 'Of course,'  she  said,  'in  those
days  we  didn't really understand the disease's exact vectors of
infection, because, grotesque as it now seems, there had been  no
real  research  into the precise modes of transmission. . .'  Ya-
mazaki cut the set off. Dr. Kutnik would  arrange  Shapely's  re-
lease  from  prison  as  an AIDS research volunteer under Federal
law. The Sharman Group's project would be hindered  by  fundamen-
talist  Christians  objecting  to  the injection of 'HIV-tainted'
blood into the systems of terminally ill AIDS  patients.  As  the
project  foundered, Kutnik would uncover clinical data suggesting
that unprotected sex with Shapely  had  apparently  reversed  the
symptoms  of several of her patients. There would be Kutnik's im-
passioned resignation, the flight  to  Brazil  with  the  baffled
Shapely,  lavish  funding  against  a backdrop of impending civil
war, and what could only be described as an  extremely  pragmatic
climate  for  research.   But it was such a sad story.  Better to
sit here by candlelight, elbows on the edge of  Skinner's  table,
listening  for  the  song of the central pier.  He kept saying he
was from Tennessee and he didn't need this shit. She kept  think-
ing she was going to die, the way he was driving, or anyway those
cops would be after them, or the one who shot  Sammy.  She  still
didn't know what had happened, and wasn't that Nigel who'd plowed
into that tight-faced one?  But he'd hung this right off  Bryant,
so she told him left on Folsom, because if the assholes were com-
ing, she figured she wanted the Haight, best place  she  knew  to
get lost, and that was definitely what she intended to do, earli-
est opportunity. And this Ford was just like the one Mr. Matthews
drove,  ran the holding facility up in Beaverton. And she'd tried
to stab somebody with a screwdriver. She'd  never  done  anything
like  that in her life before. And she'd wrecked that black guy's
computer, the one with the haircut. And this bracelet on her left
wrist,  the  other  half flipping around, open, on three links of
chain- He reached over and grabbed the loose cuff. Did  something
to  it  without taking his eyes off the street. He let go. Now it
was locked shut.  She rattled it at him. 'Take it off.'  25 With-
out a paddle cuffs. Real good cuffs.' He sounded like he was sort
of happy to have something to talk about,  and  his  driving  had
evened  out.  Brown eyes. Not old; twenties, maybe. Cheap clothes
like K-Mart stuff, all wet. Light brown hair cut  too  short  but
not  short  enough. She watched a muscle in his jaw work, like he
was chewing gum, but he wasn't.  He glanced over at her. 'Rydell.
Berry  Rydell.'   He  dug  a soggy-looking wallet out of his back
pocket and started pulling cards out of it.  Three  of  them.  'I
have  to  try  to get some cash,' he said. He looked at her. 'You
wanna jump out of this car and run,' he shrugged, 'then you  just
go  for  it.' Then he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out
the glasses and Codes's phone that she'd scooped when the  lights
went out in I)issidents. Because she knew from Lowell that people
in trouble need a phone, most times worse than 194  anything.  He
dropped  them  in  her  lap, the a;shole's glasses and the phone.
'Yours.'  Then he got out, walked over to the AT~v1, and  started
feeding it cards. She sat there, watching it e~nerge from its ar-
mor, the way they do, shy and cautious, its  ameras  coming  out,
too, to monitor the transaction. He stood tkre, drumming his fin-
gers on the side, his mouth like he was whistling but  he  wasn't
making  any  noise. She looked down at the case and the phone and
wondered why she didn't just jun~p out and  run,  like  he  said.
Finally  he  came  back, thumb-counting a fold of bills, stuck it
down in his front jeans pocket, and got in He sailed the first of
his  cards out the open window at th~ ATM, which was pulling back
into its shell like a crab. 'Don't know how they  cancelled  that
one so quick, after you put that thing through Freddie's laptop.'
Flicked another. Then the last one. They lay in front of the  ATM
as  its  lex2n shield came trundling down, their little holograms
win~ing up in the machine's halogen  floods.   The  handcuff  was
rubbing  on  the  rash  where the red worm had been. 'You a cop?'
Streetlight sliding across his face. Seemed like he was  thinking
about it. 'Up shit creek. Without a paddle.'  The first thing Ry-
dell saw when he got out of the Patriot, in the alley off  Haight
Street, was a one-armed, one-legged man on a skateboard. This man
lay on his stomach, on the board,  and  propelled  himself  along
with  a curious hitching motion that reminded Rydell of the limbs
of a gigged frog. He had his right arm and his left leg, which at
least allowed for some kind of symmetry, but there was no foot on
the leg. His face, as if by some weird osmosis, was the color  of
dirty  concrete,  and Rydell couldn't have said what race he was.
His hair, if he had any, was covered by a black knit cap, and the
rest of him was sheathed in a black, one-piece garment apparently
stitched from sections of heavy-duty rubber inner-tube. He looked
up, as he hitched past Rydell, through puddles left by the storm,
headed for the mouth of the alley, and said, or Rydell thought he
said:  'You  wanna  talk  to me? You wanna talk to me, you better
shut your fuckin' mouth...'  Rydell stood there,  Samsonite  dan-
gling,  and  watched  him go.  Then something rattled beside him.
The hardware on Chevette Washington's leather jacket. 'Come  on,'
she  said, 'don't wanna hang around back in here.'  Rydell looked
back at the Patriot. He'd locked it and left the  key  under  the
driver's  scat, because he hadn't wanted to 196 26 Colored people
make it look too easy, but he'd forgotten about that back window.
He'd  never been in the position before of actively wanting a car
to be stolen.  They'd just rounded the corner, onto the sidewalk,
when  Rydell heard the Patriot's engine start to rev. It gave him
goosebumps, like something in a ghost story, because there hadn't
been  anybody  back  in there at all, and now he couldn't see the
skateboard man anywhere.  Rydell concentrated on the toes of  his
black  SWATs. 'You hang out with car-thieves much?'  He heard the
Patriot wheel out of the alley and draw up  beside  them,  pacing
them. His toes were making little squelching noises, each time he
took a step, and what if the last thing you knew before you  died
was just some pathetic discomfort like that, like your shoes were
soaked and your socks were wet, and you weren't ever going to get
to  change  them?   Rydell heard the Patriot take off, the driver
fighting the unfamiliar American  shift-pattern.  He  started  to
look  up.  ~A chill. Where you hang.'  "You" who? This Lowell, he
hang there?' Yeah.'  You  too?'   ~No,'  she  said,  angry.   She
looked  at the Samsonite. 'You got a gun or something, in there?'
She looked up at him. 'I don't get you.'

Rydell's uncle, the one who'd gone to Africa with  the  army  and
hadn't  come back, had had a couple of tattoos. The best one went
right across his back, this big swirly dragon with horns and sort
of  a goofy grin. He'd gotten that one in Korea, eight colors and
it had all been done by a computer. He'd told Rydell how the com-
puter  had mapped his back and showed him exactly what it was go-
ing to look like when it was done. Then he had  to  lie  down  on
this  table  while this robot put the tattoo on. Rydell had imag-
ined a robot kind of like a vacuumcleaner, but with twisty chrome
arms  had needles on the end. But his uncle said it was more like
being fed through a dot- I 9~ matrix printer, and he'd had to  go
back eight times, one time for each color. It was a great dragon,
though, and lots brighter than the tattoos on his  uncle's  arms,
which were American eagles and a Harley trademark. When his uncle
worked out in the backyard with Rydell's set  of  Sears  weights,
Rydell would watch the dragon ripple.  This fat bald guy with the
weights through his nipples had  tattoos  everywhere  except  his
hands  and  his  head. Looked like he was wearing a suit of them.
They were all different, no American eagles or Harley  trademarks
either, and they sort of ran together. They made Rydell feel kind
of dizzy, so he looked up at the walls, which were  covered  with
more  tattoos,  like  samples  for you to pick from.  The fat man
shrugged.  man said. 'Lloyd put it on a graphics engine,  rotated
it  thirty degrees, heightened the perspective, and it's gorgeous
Now, were you interested in seeing some flash  for  yourself,  or
for your big friend here?'  The fat man smiled. 'That's romantic.
. .'  Rydell looked at her.  The fat man took them down a hallway
and into a little room with a couple of wallscreens and a leather
sofa. 'I'll just get your tea,' he said, and shuffled  out,  jin-
gling.   Rydell  put his Samsonite down and sat on the couch. 'So
we can stay here?'  She picked up a little remote and turned  one
of  the  waliscreens  on.  Started blipping through menus. Hi-rez
close-ups of tattooed skin. The fat man came back with  a  couple
of  big  rough  mugs of steaming tea Ofl a little tray. 'Yours is
green,' he said to Chevette Washington, 'and yours is Mormon,' he
said to Rydell, 'because you did ask for coffee. . .'  2.0 Rydell
decided it was too hot to drink now anyway. Put it  down  on  the
floor  beside  the couch. The girl on the wallscreen had a dragon
sort of like his uncle's, but on her left hip. Little tiny silver
ring  through the top edge of her belly button. Chevette Washing-
ton  flipped  it  to  a  big  sweaty  biker-arm  with   President
Milibank's  face  looking  out from it in shades of gray.  Rydell
struggled out of his damp jacket, noticing the  ripped  shoulder,
the  cheap  white  stuffing popping out. He dropped it behind the
couch. 'You got any tattoos?'  "Gigger"?' Rydell opened his  Sam-
sonite,  got  out  a pair of socks, and started unlacing his SWAT
shoes.  2.01 screens. He took his wet socks off, put them in  the
Container  City bag, and put the dry ones on. Thought about leav-
ing his shoes off for a while, but what if he had to leave  in  a
hurry?  He  put  them back on. He was lacing them up when she sat
down beside him.  She unzipped her jacket and  shrugged  it  off,
the  loose  Beretta cuff rattling. The sleeves of her plain black
t-shirt had been scissored off and her upper arms were smooth and
pale.  She  reached  over the end of the couch and put the jacket
down, sort of propped against the wall, the leather stiff  enough
that  it  just  stayed  there, its arms slumped down, like it was
asleep. Like Rydell wished he could be. Now she had the remote in
her hand.  She gave him a look like you might give a dog that had
just told you it was a good day to spend all your  money  on  one
particular kind of lottery ticket.  He thought about it. 'Because
youd be dead by now if I hadn't done the kind of dirt-stupid shit
I  just  did,  back  there.'  She thought about that. 'Okay,' she
said.  *




2.02.  ) Maybe there really was something in the fat man's Mormon
tea,  or  maybe  Rydell  had just crossed over into that point of
tiredness where it all flipped around for a while and you started
to feel like you were more awake, some ways, than you usually ev-
er were. But he wound up sipping that tea and listening  to  her,
and  when  she'd  get too deep into her story to remember to keep
flipping the tattoo-pictures on the wallscreen, he'd  do  it  for
her.  When you worked it around to sequential order, she was this
girl from Oregon, didn't have any family, who'd  come  down  here
and  moved  out  on  that  bridge with this old man, crazy by the
sound of it, had a bad hip and needed  somebody  around  to  help
him.  Then  she'd  gotten  her  a job riding a bicycle around San
Francisco, delivering messages. Rydell knew about messengers from
his  foot-patrol period in downtown Knoxville, because you had to
keep ticketing them for riding on the  sidewalk,  traffic  viola-
tion,  and  they'd  give  you a hard time about it. But they made
pretty good money if they worked at it. This Sammy she'd said was
shot,  murdered, he was another messenger, a black guy who'd got-
ten her on at Allied, where she worked.  And  her  story  of  how
she'd taken the glasses out of the guy's pocket at this big drunk
party she'd wandered into up in the Morrisey, that made  as  much
sense  to him as anything. And it wasn't the kind of story people
made up. Not like the glasses crawled into her hand or  anything,
she  just  flat-out stole them, impulse, just because the guy was
in her face and obnoxious. Nuisance crime, except  they'd  turned
out to be valuable.  But from her description he knew her asshole
up in the Morrisey had been the same one got  himself  the  Cuban
necktie,  your  German-born  Costa Rican citizen who maybe wasn't
either, star of that X-rated fax of Warhahy's and  the  one  Svo-
hodov  and  Orlovsky  had  been  investigating. If they had been.
2.03 The Russians were bent, and he knew that.  They  were  Homi-
cide, they were bent, and he'd bet dollars to donuts they weren't
even investigating the case. They could talk Warbaby's  way  onto
the crime-scene, tap their department's computer, but the rest of
it had just been window-dressing, for him, for Rydell, the  hired
help.  And  what was that that Freddie had said, about DatAmerica
and IntenSecure being basically your same company?  But  Chevette
Washington was on a roll of her own now, like sometimes when peo-
ple get started talking they just let it all hang  out,  and  she
was  saying how Lowell, who was the one with the hair and not the
skinhead, and who actually had, sort of, been her boyfriend for a
while,  was a guy who could (you know?) get things done with com-
puters, if you had the money, and that sort of scared her because
he  was  always  talking about the cops and how he didn't have to
worry about them.  Rydell nodded, automatically flipping  through
a couple more pictures of tattoos-lady there with these pink car-
nations sort of followed her bikini-line--but really he was  lis-
tening  to something going around in his own head. Like Hernandez
was IntenSecure, the Morrisey was IntenSecure,  Warbaby  was  In-
tenSecure,  Freddie said DatAmerica and IntenSecure were like the
same thing- '-Desire . . .'  Rydell  blinked.  Skinny  guy  there
with J. D. Shapely all mournful on his chest. But you'd be mourn-
ful, too, you had chest hair growing out your eyes. 'What?'  2.04
She  took the remote, blipped through a shaven head with a sun at
the very top, planets orbiting down to the top  of  the  ears,  a
hand  with a screaming mouth on the palm, feet covered with blue-
green creature-scales. 'I  said,'  she  said,  'Lowell  bullshits
about  that,  how he's connected up with this Republic of Desire,
how they can do anything they feel like with computers,  so  any-
body  messes  with  him  is gonna get it.'  "Cause they look like
lobsters and shit. Or some tv star. Anything. But  I  don't  know
why  I'm telling you.'  He told her how he was from Knoxville and
about getting into the Academy, about  how  he'd  always  watched
Cops in Trouble and then when he'd been a cop and gotten in trou-
ble, it had looked like he was going  to  be  on  the  show.  How
they'd  brought  him  out to Los Angeles because they didn't want
Adult Survivors of Satanism stealing their momentum, but then the
Pookey Bear murders had come along and they'd sort of lost inter-
est, and he'd had to get on with IntenSecure and  drive  Gunhead.
He  told her about Sublett and living with Kevin Tarkovsky in the
house in Mar Vista, and sort of skipped over the Republic of  De-
sire  and  the  night  he'd  driven Gunhead into the Schonbrunns'
place in Benedict Canyon.  2.05  About  how  Hernandez  had  come
over,  just  the  other morning but it seemed like years, to tell
him he could come up here and drive for this  Mr.  Warbaby.  Then
she  wanted  to know what it was that skip tracers did, so he ex-
plained what it was they were supposed to do, and what it was  he
figured  they probably did do, and she said they sounded like bad
news.  When he was done, she just  looked  at  him.  'That's  it?
That's  how  you  got  here  and what you're doing?'  There was a
knock at the door. It opened a crack, and somebody, not  the  man
who  jingled when he walked, said: 'You having any luck picking a
design? Henry's gone home...'  She reached over and got her jack-
et.  Got out the case with the glasses, the phone. Handed him the
glasses. The case was made  out  of  some  dark  stuff,  thin  as
eggshell, rigid as steel. He opened it. The glasses looked exact-
ly like Warbaby's. Big black frames, the lenses black  now.  They
had  a  funny  heft  to  them, weighed more than you thought they
would.  Chevette Washington had flipped open the phone's  keypad.
L06  He  popped thc case. Saw a tightly rolled mini-Ziploc wedged
in there beside tie battery. It had pushed the  contacts  out  of
alignment. He took it out and unrolled it. 'Stuff?'  He looked at
her. 'If this is 4-Thiobuscaline, it's a  controlled  substance.'
She  looked  at  the bag of grayish powder, then at him. 'But you
aren't a cop anymore.'  Thought ahoit it, then she took the phone
and  flipped  it  shut.  'Guess thee isn't anybody.'  2.07 Rydell
couldn't think of anything to say to that. He was  too  tired  to
flick  the  remote. Some guy's arm with a furled Confederate flag
on it. Just like home. He looked at her.  She  sure  didn't  look
anywhere near as tired as he was. That could just be being young,
he thought. He sure hoped she wasn't on any ice or dancer or any-
thing. Maybe she was in some kind of shock, still. Said this Sam-
my had been killed, two others she was worried  about.  Evidently
she'd  known  the guy plowed in Svobodov on that bicycle, but she
didn't know yet that he'd been shot. Funny what you  miss  seeing
in a fight. Well, he didn't see any reason to tell her, not right
now.  His eyes closed and his head hit the back of the  couch  so
hard  it  almost  woke him up.  Yamazaki raised his head from the
table. The room in darkness. Light  through  the  church  window.
Yamazaki's  buttocks  and lower back ached. 'The storm,' he said,
still half in his dream.  Yamazaki closed his mouth.  2.09 27 Af-
ter the storm Yamazaki stood up, wincing at the pain in his back,
and stumbled toward  the  green-painted  metal  box  Skinner  was
pointing at.

He  stood  on  Skinner's roof, pantlegs flapping in a breeze that
gave no hint of last night's  storm,  looking  out  at  the  city
washed  in  a  strange iron light, shreds of his dream still cir-
cling dimly ... Shapely had spoken to him, his voice the voice of
the  young  Elvis  Presley.  He  said  that  he  had forgiven his
killers.  Yamazaki stared at Transamerica's upright  thorn,  ban-
daged  with  the  brace  they'd  applied after the Little Grande,
half-hearing the dreamed voice. They just didn't know any better,
Scooter.   Skinner cursing, below, as he sponged himself with wa-
ter Yamazaki had warmed on the Coleman stove.   Yamazaki  thought
of  his thesis advisor in Osaka.  The whole city was a Thomasson.
Perhaps America itself was a Thomasson.  How  could  they  under-
stand this in Osaka, in Tokyo?  Yamazaki turned, saw a thin black
man atop the tangle of girders that braced the upper end of Skin-
ner's  lift.  He wore a thick tweed overcoat and a crocheted cap.
Yamazaki hesitated, remembering Loveless. If Skinner or the  girl
had enemies, how could he recognize them?  Skinner was struggling
into yellowed thermal underwear. 'Useless  bastard.  Still  don't
have any power...'  Yamazaki unlatched the hatch in the floor and
hauled it open. Fontaine eventually appeared at the bottom of the
ladder,  a  battered  canvas tool-bag in either hand. Putting one
down and slinging the other over his shoulder, he began to climb.
Yamazaki  poured the remaining coffee into the cleanest cup.  Ya-
mazaki  looked  at  Skinner.   211  Yamazaki  blinked.   Yamazaki
thought  of  his  borrowed  flat in the tall Victorian house, its
black marble bathroom larger than his bachelor apartment in  Osa-
ka.  He  looked  from Fontaine to Skinner, then back. 'I would be
honored, to stay with Skinner-san, if he wishes.'  2.11  Yamazaki
thought  of  Loveless.  Swallowed.  'You  gonna be okay up here?'
Fontaine asked. 'Yes,' Yamazaki said, 'yes, thank you.'  28 Rv It
was  ten-thirty  before  they  finally had to hit the street, and
then only because Laurie, who Chevette knew from that  first  day
she'd  ever come in here, said that the manager, Benny Singh, was
going to be showing up and they couldn't stay in  there  anymore,
particularly  not  with  her friend asleep like that, like he was
passed out  or  something.  Chevette  said  she  understood,  and
thanked her.  Chevette nodded, sad, and started shaking the guy's
shoulder. He grunted and tried to brush her hand away. 'Wake  up.
We  gotta  go.'   She  couldn't  believe  she'd told him all that
stuff, but she'd just had to tell somebody or she'd go crazy. Not
that  telling  it had made it make any more sense than it did be-
fore, and with this Rydell's side of it added on, it sort of made
even  less. The news that somebody had gone and murdered the ass-
hole just didn't seem real, but if it was, she supposed, she  was
in deeper shit than ever.  Chevette had been thinking about that.
'Cole, over by the Panhandle, there's places rent  rooms  by  the
hour.'   214  He  dug  behind  the couch for his jacket. 'Look at
that,' he said, sticking his fingers into the rip in  the  shoul-
der.  'Brand new last night.'  Neighborhoods that mainly operated
at night had a way of looking a lot worse in  the  morning.  Even
the  beggars  looked  worse  off  this time of day, like that guy
there with those sores, the one trying to  sell  half  a  can  of
spaghetti sauce. She stepped around him. Another block or two and
they'd start to hit the early crowd of  day-trippers  headed  for
Skywalker  Park;  more cover in the crowd but more cops, too. She
tried to remember if Skywalker's rentacops were IntenSecure, that
company  Rydell  talked about.  She wondered if Fontaine had gone
to Skinner's like he'd said he would. She hadn't  wanted  to  say
too  much over the phone, so at first she'd just said she was go-
ing away for a while, and would Fontaine  go  over  and  see  how
Skinner was doing, and maybe this Japanese student guy who'd been
hanging around lately. But Fontaine could tell she  sounded  wor-
ried, so he'd sort of pushed her about it, and she'd told him she
was worried about Skinner, how maybe there were some people gonna
go  up  there and hassle him.  215 there, and the lift. Watch for
strangers. People did that for each other,  on  the  bridge,  and
Fontaine  was  always owed a lot of favors, because he was one of
the main electricity men.  Now they were walking past this  bagel
place  had a sort of iron cage outside, welded out of junk, where
you could sit in there at little tables and have coffee  and  eat
bagels,  and  the  smell  of  the morning's baking about made her
faint from hunger. She was thinking maybe  they'd  better  go  in
there  and get a dozen in a bag, maybe some cream cheese, take it
with them, when Rydell put his hand on her shoulder.  She  turned
her  head  and  saw  this big shiny white RV had just turned onto
Haight in front of them, headed their way. Like  you'd  see  rich
old people driving back in Oregon, whole convoys of them, pulling
boats on trailers, little  jeeps,  motorcycles  hanging  off  the
backs  like lifeboats. They'd stop for the night in these special
camps had razor-wire around them,  dogs,  NO  TRESSPASSING  signs
that  really  meant  it.   Rydell  was staring at this RV like he
couldn't believe it, and now it was pulling up right beside them,
this  gray-haired  old  lady powering down the window and leaning
out the driver's side, saying 'Young man! Excuse me, but I'm Dan-
ica Elliott and I believe we met yesterday on the plane from Bur-
bank.'  Danica Elliott was this retired lady from Altadena,  that
was  down in SoCal, and she'd flown up to San Francisco, she said
on the same plane as Rydell, to get her husband moved to  a  dif-
ferent  cryogenic  facility.  Well, not her husband, exactly, but
his brain, which he'd had frozen  when  he  died.   Chevette  had
heard about people doing that, but she hadn't ever understood why
they did it, and evidently Danica Elliott  didn't  understand  it
either. But she'd come up here to throw good money after bad, she
said, and get her husband David's brain moved to this more expen-
sive  place  that  would keep it on ice in its Own private little
tank, and not just tumbling around in a big tank with a hunch  of
other people's frozen zi6 brains, which was where it had been be-
fore. She seemed like a really nice lady  to  Chevette,  but  she
sure  could  go on about this stuff, so that after a while Rydell
was just driving and nodding his head like he was listening,  and
Chevette,  who was navigating, was mostly paying attention to the
map-display on the RV's dash, plus keeping a lookout  for  police
cars.  Mrs. Elliott had taken care of getting her husband's brain
relocated the night before, and she said it had made her kind  of
emotional,  so she'd decided to rent this RV and drive it back to
Altadena, just take her time and enjoy the trip. Trouble was, she
didn't know San Francisco, and she'd picked it up that morning at
this rental place on sixth and gotten lost looking for a freeway.
Wound  up  driving  around  in the Haight, which she said did not
look at all like a safe neighborhood but was certainly  very  in-
teresting.   The loose handcuff kept falling out of the sleeve of
Skinner's jacket, but Mrs. Elliott was too busy  talking  to  no-
tice.  Rydell  was  driving, Chevette was in the middle, and Mrs.
Elliot was on the passenger side. The RV was  Japanese,  and  had
these  three  power-adjustable  buckets  up front, with headrests
with speakers built in.  Mrs. Elliot had told Rydell she was lost
and  did  he  know  the  city and could he drive her to where she
could get on the highway to  Los  Angeles?  Rydell  had  sort  of
gawked  at  her for a minute, then shook himself and said he'd be
glad to, and this was his friend Chevette, who knew the city, and
he  was  Berry  Rydell.   Mrs.  Elliot said Chevette was a pretty
name.  So here they  were,  headed  out  of  San  Francisco,  and
Chevette  had  a pretty good idea that Rydell was going to try to
talk Mrs. Elliott into letting them go along with her.  That  was
all she could think of to do, herself, and here they were off the
street and headed away from the guy who'd  shot  Sammy  and  from
that  Warbaby  and  those  Russian cops, which seemed like a good
idea to her, and aside from her 217 stomach feeling like  it  was
starting  to  eat itself, she felt a little better.  Rydell drove
past an In-and-Out Burger place and she remembered how  this  boy
she  knew  called  Franklin, up in Oregon, had taken a pellet-gun
over to an In-and-Out and shot out the B and the R,  so  it  just
said IN-AND-OUT URGE. She'd told Lowell about that, but he hadn't
thought it was funny. Now she thought about how she'd told Rydell
stuff  about  Lowell  that  Lowell  would go ballistic if he ever
found out about, and here Rydell was the next thing to a cop. But
it  bothered  her how Lowell had been, the night before. There he
was, all cool and heavy with his connections and everything,  and
she tells him she's in trouble and somebody's just shot Sammy Sal
and they're gonna be after her for sure, and him and  Codes  just
sit  there,  giving  each  other these looks, like they like this
story less by the minute, and then the big  motherfucker  cop  in
the  raincoat  walks  in  and  they're  about to shit themselves.
Served her right. She hadn't had a  single  friend  liked  Lowell
much,  and  Skinner  had  hated him on sight. Said Lowell had his
head so far up his ass, he might as well just climb in  after  it
and  disappear.  But  she just hadn't ever really had a boyfriend
before, not like that, and he'd been so nice to her at first.  If
he just hadn't started in doing that dancer, because that brought
the asshole out in him real fast, and then Codes, who hadn't ever
liked  her,  could get him going about how she was just a country
girl. Fuck that.  And Mrs. Elliott started making  a  fuss  about
how   Rydell  should  stop  immediately  and  get  something  for
Chevette, and how sorry she was she  hadn't  thought  to  ask  if
they'd  had  breakfast.   zi8 Sounded fine to Chevette. She undid
her harness and edged back between her seat and  Mrs.  Elliott's.
There  was  a  little door there and when she went through it the
lights came on. 'Hey,' she said, 'it's a whole little house  back
here...'   The  light  stayed  on when she closed the door behind
her. She hadn't ever seen the inside of one of these  things  be-
fore,  and  the first thing she thought of was that it had nearly
as much space as Skinner's room, plus it was about ten times more
comfortable.  Everything  was  gray, gray carpet and gray plastic
and gray imitation leather. And the fridge turned out to be  this
cute  little  thing  built  into  a  counter, with this basket in
there, wrapped up in plastic with a ribbon on  it.  She  got  the
plastic  off and there was some wine, little cheeses, an apple, a
pear, crackers, and a couple of chocolate bars. There was Coke in
the  fridge, too, and bottled water. She sat on the bed and ate a
cheese, a bunch of crackers, a chocolate bar  that  was  made  in
France,  and  drank a bottle of water. Then she tried out the tv,
which had twenty-three channels on downlink.  When she was  done,
she put the empty bottle and the torn paper and stuff in a little
wastebasket built into the wall, cut the tv  off,  took  off  her
shoes,  and  lay back on the bed.  It was strange, to stretch out
on a bed in a little room that was moving, she didn't know where,
and  she  wondered where she'd be tomorrow.  Just before she fell
asleep, she remembered that she still had Codes'  hag  of  dancer
stuck  down  in her pants. She'd better get rid of that. She fig-
ured there was enough there to go to jail for.  She thought about
how  it made you feel, and how weird it was that people spent all
that money to feel that way.  2.19 She sure wished Lowell  hadn't
liked to feel that way.  She woke up when he lay down beside her,
the RV moving but she knew it must've stopped before. The  lights
were  off.  He was close enough to her on the narrow bed that she
could feel it when he shrugged.  But he didn't answer, and  after
a  while  he  started to snore.  ftydell opened his eyes. Vehicle
not moving.  He held his Timex up in front of his face  and  used
the dial-light. 3:15 PM. Chevette Washington was curled up beside
him in her biker jacket. Felt like sleeping next to  a  piece  of
old  luggage.   He rolled over until he could find the shade over
the window beside him and raise it a little. As dark out there as
it  was  in  here.   He'd  been  dreaming about Mrs. Armbruster's
class, fifth grade at Oliver North Elementary. They were about to
be  let  Dut  because  LearningNet said there was too much Kansas
City flu around to keep the kids in  Virginia  and  Tennessee  in
school  that week. They were all wearing these molded white paper
masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning. Mrs.  Arm-
bruster had just explained the meaning of the word pandemic. Pop-
py Markoff, who sat next to him and already bad tits out to here,
had  told  Mrs.  Armbruster  that her daddy said the KC flu could
kill you in the time it took to walk out to the  bus.  Mrs.  Arm-
bruster,  wearing her own mask, the micropore kind from the drug-
store, started in about the word panic, tying that into  pandemic
because  of  the root, but that was where Rydell woke up.  He sat
up on the bed. He had a headache and the start of a cold.  Kansas
City  flu.  Maybe Mokola fever.  22.1 29 Dead mall But he sort of
had this feeling.  He got up and felt his way  to  the  front.  A
little  bit  of light there, coming from under the door. He found
the handle. Eased it open a crack.  Rydell opened  the  door  the
rest  of  the  way. 'She work for you?'  The man shrugged. Rydell
noticed that the gun didn't move at all when he did that. He  was
wearing surgical gloves, and that same long coat he'd had on when
he'd gotten out of the Russians' car, like an  Australian  duster
made out of black micropore.  The man looked at him over the bar-
rel of the gun. That small a bore, ordinarily, wouldn't mean much
damage,  so  Rydell figured the ammunition would be doctored some
way. 'I don't see what it's got to do with you,' he said.  Rydell
thought  about  it.  'I  saw a picture of it. You just don't look
that crazy.'  Uh-huh, Rydell thought, just like running a french-
fry  computer.  There was a fridge and sink Ofl the right side of
the 222 door, so he knew he couldn't move that way.  If  he  went
left,  he  figured  the  guy'd  just stitch through the bulkhead,
probably get the girl, too.  Rydell did  like  he  was  told.  He
couldn't  see  anything  outside.  Just dark, and the reflections
from the dome light. 'Where are we?' he asked.   Rydell  squeezed
the  foam  padding on the wheel.  Rydell heard him give the bulk-
head a kick with the heel of one boot. 'Miss Washington! Rise and
shine,  Miss  Washington! Do us the favor of your presence.'  Ry-
dell heard the double thump as she startled from sleep, tried  to
jump  up,  hit  her head, fell off the bed. Then he saw her white
face reflected in the windshield, there in the doorway.  Saw  her
see  the  man,  the gun.  Not the screaming kind. 'You shot Sammy
Sal,' she said.  223 She wound up next to Rydell, her legs on ei-
ther  side  of  the instrument console, facing backward. Like she
was riding some cafe-racer.  Gave him about a two-inch difference
of  arc  between  shooting  either one of them in the head.  When
she'd gotten it to where she could shrug it off her  left  shoul-
der, it fell over against the man's legs.  The hand put them back
in their case, closed it. 'Yes.'  The smile went  away.  When  it
did,  it  looked like he didn't have any lips. Then it came back,
wider and steeper.  2.24 She turned her head to look  at  Rydell,
eyes  big  with fear.  She got off the console and edged through,
into the back, there, but just by the door, where the fridge was.
He  made the sound again. 'Can.'  Rydell caught the expression on
her face, reflected in the black windshield, then saw how it went
sort  of  blank.  She bent, working the tight pants down.  Rydell
turned, saw her squatting there, her bare legs smooth and  muscu-
lar,  dead  white  in  the glow of the dome-light. The man took a
long swallow of Coke, watching Rydell around the rim. He put  the
can  down  on the dash-panel and wiped his mouth with the back of
his gloved hand. 'Not  bad,  huh,  Rydell?'  with  a  nod  toward
Chevette  Washington.  'Some potential there, I'd say.'  2.25 Ry-
dell looked at him.  Rydell didn't  answer.   The  man  made  the
sound  that  might've been a laugh. Drank some Coke. 'You think I
enjoyed having to mess that shitbag up the way  I  did,  Rydell?'
Rydell saw a shiver go through Chevette Washington's tensed white
thigh.  226 She was still as some sphinx, white fingers  deep  in
the  gray  fabric  of  the  center bucket.  22.7 His head sort of
whipped sideways, a little, when Rydell said that, and  his  eyes
unfocused  for  a  second,  but then they came back, clear as the
chromed rim around the muzzle of his gun. 'You know  who  started
the  havens,  Rydell?'   Sure  glad  it  worked,  Rydell thought.
'Warbaby, he work for the havens?'  A sweat had broken out on the
man's  forehead.  Now  he wiped it with the back of the hand that
held the gun, but Rydell saw the gun  click  back  into  position
like  it was held by a magnet.  "Cause you're dead if you don't.'
Rydell took his left hand off the wheel, clicked the lights, dou-
ble-clicked  them  to  high  beams. Two cones of light hit into a
wall of dead shops, dead signs, dust on plastic. The one in front
of  the left beam said THE GAP.  2.2.8 They were parked in a sort
of plaza, in a mall, the stores  all  boarded  or  their  windows
whitewashed.  Either  underground ~r else it was roofed over. 'So
she stole the glasses out of a hotel  had  IntenSecure  security,
they  brought  in Warbaby?' Rydell looked at Chevette Washington.
She looked like one of those chrome things on the nose of an  an-
tique  car, except she was getting goosebumps down her thigh. Not
exactly warm in here, which made Rydell think it might be  under-
ground after all.  Rydell watched the last of the three rats van-
ish ilto the place that had been called The  Gap.  In  through  a
locse  vent ~r something. A gap. 'Nope. Saw 'em.'  229 drive, you
wind up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-
stage  capitalism?'  2.30 purchase of real estate, Rydell?' Love-
less's chest, hairless and artificially pigmented,  was  gleaming
with  sweat.   Rydell thought about it. 'You looked, huh?'  Love-
less nodded. 'In Mexico City. He left them in his  room.  He  was
never,  ever  supposed  to do that.'  Loveless's skin was running
with sweat now, in spite of the cool. It was like his whole  lym-
bic system or whatever had just let loose. Kept blinking and wip-
ing it back from his eyes. 'I've done my job. Did my  job.  Jobs.
Years.  My  father,  too.  You  haven't  seen how they live, down
there. The compounds. People up here have no idea what money  can
do,  Rydell.  They  don't know what real money is. They live like
gods, in the compounds. Some of them are  over  a  hundred  years
old,  Rydell ...' There were flecks of white stuff at the corners
of Loveless' smile, and Rydell was back in Turvey's  girlfriend's
apartment,  looking into Turvey's eyes, and it just clicked, what
she'd done.  Dumped that whole bag of dancer into the Coke  she'd
brought  him.  She  hadn't  been able to pour it all in, so she'd
sloshed the Coke out onto the top of the can to wash it down, mix
it  around.   He  had  his shirt undone all the way now, the dark
fabric darker with sweat, and his  face  was  turning  red.   231
there  was something terrible fastened on him there, something he
had to kill. Each time the gun came down, it fired, blowing holes
in  the  carpeted  floorboard  the  size  of  five-dollar pieces.
Chevette Washington came off that console like she was on  rubber
bands, right over the top of the center bucket and into the cabin
in back.  Loveless froze, quivering, like every atom in  him  had
locked  down all at once, spinning in some tight emergency orbit.
Then he smiled, like maybe he'd killed the thing that  was  after
his  crotch,  screamed  again, and started firing out through the
windshield. All Rydell could remember was some instructor telling
them  that  an  overdose  of  dancer  made too much PCP look like
putting aspirin in a Coke. In a Coke.  And  Chevette  Washington,
she  was going just about that crazy herself, by the sound of it,
trying to beat her way out the back of the RV.  The bullets  came
out  of the little gun like the rubber cubes out of a chunker. By
the third one, Rydell had reached  over,  deactivated  the  door-
lock,  and  just  sort  of fallen out. Landed on his back on some
cans and what felt like foam cups. Rolled. Kept rolling  'til  he
hit  something.   Those  little  bullets blowing big holes in the
whitewashed glass of the dead stores. A whole section  fell  away
with  a crash.  He could hear Chevette Washington pounding on the
back door of the RV and he wished he could get her to stop.   The
shooting  stopped.   232  Chevette still pounding. Jesus.  On his
hands and knees, up against some low tiled  fountain  smelled  of
chlorine  and  dust, he saw Loveless scramble down from the driv-
er's side, his face and chest slick and shining. The man had been
trained  so  deeply,  it  occurred  to  Rydell,  that it even cut
through whatever the dancer was doing to him.  Because  he  still
moved the way they taught you to move in FATSS, the pistol out in
both hands, the half-crouch, the smooth swings through  potential
arcs of fire.  And Chevette, she was still trying to kick her way
out through the hexcel or whatever the back of the  RV  was  made
of.  Then Loveless put a couple of bullets into it and she all of
a sudden stopped.  At four o'clock Yamazaki descended  the  rungs
he'd  climbed  with  Loveless,  in  the  dark,  the night before.
Fontaine had gone, twenty minutes before the power returned, tak-
ing  with  him, against Skinner's protests, an enormous bundle of
washing. Skinner had spent the day  sorting  and  re-sorting  the
contents of the green toolkit, the one he'd overturned in his bid
for the bolt-cutters.  Yamazaki had watched the old  man's  hands
as  they  touched each tool in turn, imagining he saw some momen-
tary strength or purpose flow into them there,  or  perhaps  only
memories  of tasks undertaken, abandoned, completed. 'You can al-
ways sell tools,' Skinner had mused, perhaps to Yamazaki, perhaps
to himself. 'Somebody'll always buy 'em. But then you always need
'em again, exactly the one you sold.' Yamazaki  didn't  know  the
English  words  for  most  of the tools there, and many were com-
pletely unfamiliar. 'T-reamer,'  Skinner  said,  holding  up  his
fist, a rust-brown, machined spike of steel protruding menacingly
between his second and third fingers. 'Now that's about as  handy
a  thing  as  you  can  have, Scooter, but most people never seen
one.'  234 30 Carnival of souls

A procession was making its way toward San Francisco,  along  the
upper  deck,  and  Yamazaki  instantly  regretted having left his
notebook in Skinner's room. This was the first  evidence  he  had
seen  here  of  public ritual.  In the narrow, enclosed space, it
was impossible to view the procession as anything  other  than  a
succession  of participants, in their ones and twos, but it was a
procession nonetheless, and clearly funereal,  perhaps  memorial,
in  its  purpose.  First came children, seven by his hasty count,
one behind the other, in ragged, ash-dusted clothing. Each  child
wore  a  mask  of  painted plaster, clearly intended to represent
Shapely. But there was nothing funereal in their progress; sever-
al  were skipping, delighted with the attention they were receiv-
ing.  Yamazaki, on his way to purchase hot soup, had  halted  be-
tween  a bookseller's wagon and a stall hung with caged birds. He
felt awkward there, very much out of place, with the unaccustomed
shape  of the insulated canister under his 235 arm. If this was a
funeral, perhaps there was some required gesture,  some  attitude
he  might  be expected to assume? He glanced at the bookseller, a
tall woman in a greasy sheepskin vest, her gray hair  bound  back
into  a  knot  transfixed  by  two  pink plastic chopsticks.  Her
stock, which consisted primarily of yellowing paperbacks in vari-
ous  stages  of  disintegration, each in a clear plastic bag, was
stacked before her on her wagon. She had been crying  her  wares,
when  she  saw the children masked as Shapely; she'd been calling
out strange phrases that he supposed were titles: 'Valley of  the
dolls,  blood  meridian,  chainsaw savvy .. .'Yamazaki, struck by
the queer American poetry, had been on the verge of asking  after
Chainsaw Savvy. Then she'd fallen silent, and he too had seen the
children.  But there was nothing in her manner now that indicated
the procession required anything more of her than whatever degree
of her attention she might choose to afford it. She was automati-
cally  counting  her  stock,  he saw, as she watched the children
pass, her hands moving over the bagged books.  The keeper of  the
bird  stall,  a pale man with a carefully groomed black mustache,
was scratching his stomach, his expression mild and blank.  After
the  children came five dancers in the skeleton-suits of La Noche
de Muerte, though Yamazaki saw that several of the masks were on-
ly half-masks, micropore respirators molded to resemble the grin-
ning jaws of skulls. These were teenagers, evidently, and shaking
to some inner music of plague and chaos. There was a strong erot-
ic undercurrent, a violence, to the black,  bone-painted  thighs,
the  white cartoon pelvises daubed on narrow denimed buttocks. As
the bonedancers passed, one fixed Yamazaki with  a  sharp  stare,
blue  adolescent  eyes  above  the  black, molded nostrils of the
white respirator.  Then two tall figures, black men  in  an  ugly
beige  face-paint,  costumed as surgeons, in pale green gowns and
long gloves of 2.36 scarlet latex. Were they the doctors, predom-
inantly  white, who had failed to rescue so many, prior ~o Shape-
ly's advent, or did they somehow represent the Brazilian biomedi-
cal firms who had so successfully and lucratively overseen Shape-
ly's transformation, the illiterate prostitute become the  splen-
did  source? And after them, the first of the bodies, wrapped and
bound in layers of milky plastic, each one tiding  a  two-wheeled
cart  of  the kind manufactured here to transport baggage or bulk
foodstuffs. The carts, temporarily equipped with  narrow  pallets
of  plywood, were steered along, front and back, by men and women
of no special costume or demeanor,  though  Yamazaki  noted  that
they  looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed to make no
eye-contact with the onlookers.  Seven in all, each to its  cart,
and  then a man and a woman, in identical paper coveralls, carry-
ing between them a laminated lithograph of Shapely, one of  those
saccharine  portraits, large of eye and hollow of cheek, that in-
variably left Yamazaki  feeling  slightly  queasy.   But  then  a
small, red, capering figure. A tailless, hornless devil, perhaps,
dancing with an enormous gun, an ancient  AK-47,  its  bolt  long
gone, the curved magazine carved from wood, and all of it dipped,
once, into red enamel, worn now by hands,  by  processions.   And
Yamazaki  knew,  without  asking, that the red dancer represented
the way of Shapely's going, like  some  terrible  base  stupidity
waiting at the core of things.

Storm.'   237 Skinner nodded over his little television.  Skinner
grunted. Then, distantly: 'While since I saw one of those.'   Ya-
mazaki activated the notebook's transcription function.

Me, you know, I never even got it. Off him, I mean. That piece of
him in everybody now. Couldn't see the point at my age and anyway
I  never  held with medicine. Happened I never got the other kind
either, not that I didn't have  plenty  of  chances.  You're  too
young to remember how it felt, though. Oh, I know, I know you all
think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded  for
you,  it's  all  there to play back. Digital. That's all that is,
though: playback. You still don't remember  what  it  felt  like,
watching them pile up like that. Not here so much, bad as it was,
but Thailand, Africa, Brazil. Jesus, Scooter. That thing was just
romping  on  us.  But  slow, slow, slowmotion thing. Those retro-
viruses are. One man told me once, and he had the old  kind,  and
died  of  it,  how we'd lived in this funny little pocket of time
when a lot of people got to feel like a piece of ass wasn't going
to kill anybody, flot even a woman. See, they always had to worry
anyway, every time it's a chance, get knocked up  238  and  maybe
die  in  childbirth, die getting rid of it, or anyway your life's
not gonna be the same. But in  that  pocket,  there,  there  were
pills  for  that,  whatnot,  shots for the other things, even the
ones had killed people all over hell, before. That  was  a  time,
Scooter.  So  here  this  thing comes along, changes it back. And
we're sliding up on woo, shit's changing all over, got civil wars
in  Europe  already  and  this AIDS thing just kicking along. You
know they tried to say it was the gays, said it was the CIA, said
it was the U.S. Army in some fort in Maryland. Said it was people
cornholing green monkeys. I swear to God. You know what  it  was?
People.  Just  too  goddamn  many of 'em, Scooter. Flying all the
fuck over everywhere and walking around back in there.  Bet  your
ass  somebody's  gonna  pick  up a bug or two. Every place on the
damn planet just a couple of  hours  from  any  other  place.  So
here's  poor  fucking  Shapely  comes along, he's got this mutant
strain won't kill you. Won't do shit to you at all, 'cept it eats
the  old kind for breakfast. And I don't buy any of that bullshit
he was Jesus, Scooter. Didn't think Jesus was, either.

She didn't see that first bullet, but it must have hit a wire  or
something,  coming  through,  because the lights came on. She did
see the second one, or anyway the hole it blew  in  the  leather-
grain  plastic. Something inside her stopped, learning this about
bullets: that one second there isn't any hole,  the  next  second
there  is.  Nothing  in between. You see it happen, but you can't
watch it happening.  Then she got down on her hands and her knees
and  started  crawling. Because she couldn't just stand there and
wait for the next one. When she got up by the door, she could see
her  black  pants crumpled up on the floor there, beside a set of
keys on a gray, leather-grain plastic tab. There was  this  smell
from when he'd shot the gun into the floor. Maybe from the carpet
burning, too, because she could see that the edges of  the  holes
were  scorched  and  sort  of  melted.   Now  she  could hear him
yelling, somewhere outside,  hoarse  and  hollow  and  chased  by
echoes.  Held her breath. Yelling how they (who?) did the best PR
in the world, how they'd sold Hunnis Millbank,  now  they'd  sell
Sunflower.  If  she  heard  it right.  It was Rydell, the door on
that side standing open.  240 31 Driver side  She  edged  through
the door and between the buckets. Saw Rydell's head there, by the
open door. Grabbed the keys  and  threw  them  sideways,  without
looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could
she maybe fit in the fridge, if she folded her legs  up?   Rydell
must've gotten it lined up how he needed it, then, because he did
that thing boys did, up in Oregon,  with  their  brakes  and  the
transmission.   She  realized  then  that  she was screaming. Not
words or anything, just screaming.  Then they were in a turn that
almost  took  them  over, and she thought how these RV's probably
weren't meant to move  very  fast.  Now  they  were  moving  even
faster,  it  felt like, uphill.  * 2.41 She was back in Skinner's
room, reading National Geographic, about how Canada split  itself
into  five  countries.  Drinking  cold milk out of the carton and
eating saltines. Skinner in bed with  the  tv,  watching  one  of
those  shows he liked about history. He was talking about how all
his life these movies of history had been getting better and bet-
ter  looking.  How  they'd started out jumpy and black and white,
with the soldiers running around like  they  had  ants  in  their
pants,  and  this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of
scratches. How gradually they'd slowed down to how people  really
moved,  and  then  they'd been colorized, the grain getting finer
and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit,
he  said,  because  every  other  bit of it was an approximation,
somebody's idea of how it might have looked, the result of a par-
ticular  decision,  a  particular button being pushed. But it was
still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie  Holi-
day  without all that crackle and tin.  Billie Holiday was proba-
bly a guy like Elvis, Chevette  thought,  with  spangles  on  his
suit,  but like when he was younger and not all fat.  Skinner had
this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into plas-
tic. But she liked to show him she was listening when he told her
something, because otherwise he could go for days without  saying
anything. So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture
of girls waving blue and white flags in the Republic  of  Quebec,
and  it  was  her  mother sitting there, on the edge of Skinner's
bed, looking beautiful and sad and kind of  tired,  the  way  she
could  look  after she got off work and still had all her make-up
on.

242 Chevette started to cry.  Rydell's SWAT shoe crunched on lit-
tle squares of safety-glass every time he used the brake. If he'd
had time and a broom, he'd have swept it all out. As it was, he'd
had  to  bash out what was left of the windshield with a piece of
rusty rebar he found beside the road,  otherwise  Highway  Patrol
would've  seen  the  holes  and  hauled them over. Anyway, he had
those insoles. 'I worked with him in L.A.,' he said,  braking  to
steer  around  shreds of truck-trailer tires that lay on the two-
lane blacktop like the moulted skin of monsters.  Then this wood-
en  cross  seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet
high, with TUNE IN across the  horizontal  and  TO  HIS  IMMORTAL
DOWNLINI( coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv
nailed up where Jesus's head 244 32  Fallonville  ought  to  have
been.  Somebody'd  taken  a  .zz  to  the screen, it looked like.
Chevette Washington sort of grunted. Then she drank some  of  the
water  they'd gotten at the Shell station, and offered the bottle
to him.

When he'd crashed out of that mall, he'd felt like they were sure
to  be  right  by a major highway. From the outside, the mall was
just this low tumble of tan brick, windows bDarded up with sheets
of  that  really ugly hot-pressed recyc they ran off from chopped
scrap, the color of day-old vomit. He'd  gone  screeching  around
this big empty parking lot, just a few dead clunkers and old mat-
tresses to get in the way, until he'd found a way out through the
chain  link.   But  there wasn't any highway there, just some de-
serted four-lane feeder, and it looked like Loveless  had  put  a
bullet  into  the navigation hardware, because the map was locked
on downtown Santa Ana and just sat  there,  sort  of  flickering.
Where  he was had the feel of one of those fallen-in edge-cities,
the kind of place that went down when  the  Euro-money  imploded.
Chevette  Washington  was  curled  up by the fridge with her eyes
closed, and she wouldn't answer him. He was scared  Loveless  had
put  one through her, too, but he knew he couldn't afford to stop
until he'd put at least a little distance between  them  and  the
mall.  And  he couldn't see any bbod on her or anything.  Finally
he'd come to this Shell station. You could tell it had been Shell
because of the shape of the metal things up on the poles that had
supported the signs. The men's  room  door  was  ripped  off  the
hinges;  the women's chained and padlocked. ~omehody had taken an
automatic weapon to the pop machine, it looked like. He swung the
RV  around  to  the  back and saw this real old Airstream trailer
there, the same kind a 245 neighbor of his father's had lived  in
down  in  Tampa. There was a man there kneeling beside a hibachi,
doing something with a pot, and these two black Labradors  watch-
ing  him.   Rydell parked, checked to see Chevette Washington was
breathing, and got down out of the cab. He walked over to the man
beside  the hibachi, who'd gotten up now and was wiping the palms
of his hands on the thighs of his red coveralls. He had on an old
khaki  fishing  cap with about a nine-inch bill sticking straight
out. The threads on the embroidered Shell patch on his  coveralls
had  sort  of frayed and fuzzed-out.  The man spat on the ground.
'Welcome to the goddamn club, son. I was your age, it was all  of
this California, just like God meant it to be. Now it's Southern,
so they tell me, but you know what it really  is?'   2.46  Rydell
turned  and  saw  Chevette  Washington  leaning over the driver's
bucket, looking out at them.

PARADISE, SO. CALIFORNIA

A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

THREE MILES

NO CAMPING

CONCRETE PADS

FULL HOOKUPS

ELECTRIFIED SECURITY PERIMETER

FREE SWIMMING

LICENSED CHRISTIAN DAYCARE (STATE OF SO. CAL.)

327 CHANNELS ON DOWNLINK



And a taller cross rising beyond that, this one welded from rusty
railroad  track,  a  sort  of framework stuck full of old televi-
sions, their dead screens all looking out toward the road  there.
Chevette  Washington  was asleep now, so she missed that.  Rydell
thought about how he'd used Codes's phone to get through to  Suh-
lett's  number  in  L.A.,  and  gotten this funny ring, which had
nearly made him hang up right then, hut it 2.47 had turned out to
be call-forwarding, because Sublett had this leave to go and stay
with his mother, who was feeling kind of sick.  Sublett  had  ex-
plained  where it was while Rydell looked at the Shell man's map.
2.48 Now here came another sign, this one not nearly  as  profes-
sional  as the first one, just black spraypaint letters on a cou-
ple of boards.

R.U. READY FOR ETERNITY?

HE LIVES! WILL YOU?

WATCH TELEVISION



The security perimeter they advertised was just coils  of  razor-
wire  circling maybe an acre and a half. Rydell doubted if it ac-
tually was electrified, but he could see screamers hanging on it,
every  ten  feet  or  so, so it would be pretty effective anyway.
There was a sort of blockhouse-and-gate set-up where the road ran
in,  but  all  it  seemed  to  he  protecting  were ahout a dozen
campers, trailers, and semi-rigs, parked on  cement  beds  around
what  looked like an old-fashioned radio tower they'd topped with
a whole cluster of satellite dishes, those 2.49 little  expensive
ones  that  looked  sort of like giant gray plastic marshmallows.
Somebody had dammed a creek, to make a sort of pond for swimming,
but  the  creek  itself looked like the kind of industrial runoff
you wouldn't even find bugs around, let alone  birds.   Sure  had
the whole place lit up, though. He could hear the drumming of big
generators as they drove down the incline.  Rydell pulled  up  by
the blockhouse and powered his window down, glad it still worked.
A man in a blaze-orange fleece jacket and  a  matching  cap  came
out,  carrying  some kind of shotgun with a skeletal metal stock.
'Private property,' he said,  looking  at  where  the  windshield
should've been. 'What happened to your windshield there, mister?'
Chevette Washington sort of leaned across  Rydell  and  gave  the
guard  this  stare.  'I  don't know about you, brother, but we're
Aryan Nazarene, out of Eugene. We wouldn't want to even  come  in
there, say you got any mud people, any kind of race-mixing. Race-
traitors all over, these days.'  The guard looked  at  her.  'You
Nazarene,  how  come  you ain't skins?'  She touched the front of
her crazy haircut, the short  spikey  part.  'Next  thing  you're
gonna  tell me, Jesus was a Jew. Don't know what this means?'  He
looked more than maybe just a little worried,  now.   Rydell  saw
the  guard  hesitate,  swallow.   250  The man went back into the
blockhouse.

Dora, Sublett's mother, drank Coke and Mexican vodka. Rydell  had
seen people drink thai before, but never at room temperature. And
the Coke was flat, because she bought it and the vodka  in  these
big plastic supermarket bottles, and they looked as though they'd
already lasted her a while. Rydell decided he  didn't  feel  like
drinking  anyway.  The living room of Dora's trailer had a match-
ing couch and reclining lounger. Dora lay  back  in  the  lounger
with  her  feet  up,  for  her  circulation  she said, Rydell and
Chevette Washington sat side by side on the couch, which was more
a  loveseat, and Sublett sat on the floor, his knees drawn up al-
most under his chin. There was a lot of stuff on the  walls,  and
on  little  ornamental shelves, but it was all very clean. Rydell
figured that was because of Sublett's allergies. There sure was a
lot  of it, though: plaques and pictures and figurines and things
Rydell figured had to be those prayer hankies. There was  a  flat
type of hologram of Rev. Fallon, looking as much like a possum as
ever, but a possum that had gotten a tan and  maybe  had  plastic
surgery.  There was a life-size head of J. D. Shapely that Rydell
didn't like because the eyes seemed to follow you.  Most  of  :he
good  stuff  was sort of grouped around the television, which was
big and shiny but the old kind from before they  started  to  get
real  big  and  flat. It was on now, showing this black and white
movie, but the sound was off.  251 Sublett was wearing  brand-new
white  denim jeans, a white t-shirt, white cotton socks, and dis-
posable white paper  hospital  slippers.   Mrs.  Sublett  sighed.
'Yes, well, Joel, I know you young people want a chance to talk.'
She peered at Chevette Washington. 'That's  a  shame  about  your
hair,  honey.  You're  just  as pretty as can be, though, and you
know it'll just grow in so nice. I tried to light the broiler  on
this  gas range we had, down in Galveston, that was when Joel was
just a baby, he was so sensitive, and that stove about blew up. I
just  had had this perm, dear and, well . . .'  Chevette Washing-
ton didn't say anything.  Rydell watched  Sublett  lead  the  old
woman  off  to  bed.  Sublett came back, looked at the picture on
the tv, then sighed and shut it off. 'You know I'm  not  supposed
to  leave the trailer, Berry?'  LA.'  Suhlett looked embarrassed.
'Well, she's hecn sick, Rerry, 2.52 so when I came  here  I  told
'em  I  was  here to reconsider. Meditate on the box 'n' all.' He
wrung his long pale hands. 'Then they caught me  watching  Video-
drome.  You  ever see, uh, Deborah Harry, Rydell?' Sublett sighed
and sort of quivered.  Sublett ran his fingers back  through  his
dry,  straw-colored  hair.  'Hard to say, but I'd figure it's got
something to do with Reverend Fallon's tax problems. Most of what
he does, lately, it's about that. Didn't your job in San Francis-
co work out, Berry?'


He woke in the dark and listened to the sound of  her  breathing,
to the creak of stiff old leather from the jacket spread over her
shoulder.  Suhlett had listened to his story, nodding  sometimes,
asking  a question here and there, his mirrored contacts reflect-
ing tiny  253  convex  images  of  them  sitting  there  on  that
loveseat.  In the end he'd just whistled softly and said, 'Berry,
it sounds to me like you're really in trouble now. Bad  trouble.'
Really  in  trouble now.  Rydell slid his hand down, brushing one
of hers by accident as he did it, and touched the  bulge  of  his
wallet  in  his  back pocket. What money he had was in there, but
Wellington Ma's card was in there, too. Or what was left  of  it.
The  last  time he'd looked, it had broken into three pieces.  He
lay there, thinking, and after a while he  started  to  get  this
idea. About the craziest idea he'd ever had.

She  poured  milk on her cornflakes. It was the kind you mixed up
from powder. Had that thin chalky look. The only  kind  Sublett's
mother  had. Sublett was allergic to milk. 'Why?'  * 254 He could
hear Lowell draw on a cigarette. 'what did you say?' Lowell said.
Lowell  took another drag, shallower by the sound of it. 'Look, I
don't know what you-' Silence. 'I don't know what you're  talking
about.'   Lowell  coughed, a couple of times. Cleared his throat.
'This is a joke, right?'  255 "Them." "Them" okay?  Need  you  to
get  them  to  do  something for me.'  He pressed the button that
broke the connection. Give old Lowell  a  little  time  to  think
about  it;  maybe  look Orlovsky up on the Civil List, see he was
there and he was Homicide. He flipped the little phone  shut  and
went  back into the trailer. Sublett's mother kept the air-condi-
tioning up about two clicks too high.  Sublett was sitting on the
loveseat. His white clothes made him look sort of like a painter,
a plasterer or something, except he was  too  clean.  'You  know,
Berry,  I'm thinking maybe I better get back to Los Angeles.'  2.
helping to protect people from a few of the evils in this  world,
Berry,  but  now I know I'd just be working for a company with no
morals at all.'  Rydell walked over and had a closer look at  the
prayer-hankies.  He  wondered  which  one of them was supposed to
keep the AIDS off. 'No,' he said, finally, 'you go back to  work.
You  are  protecting  people. That part's real. You got to make a
living, Sublett.'  Rydell looked at Sublett, seeing him, somehow,
in  his full IntenSecure outfit, Glock and all, and suddenly that
big crazy idea-thing sort of up  and  shook  itself,  and  rolled
over,  revealing  all these new angles. But you can't get him in-
volved, Rydell told himself, it just wouldn't be fair.  33  Note-
book



rice scouring pads broom detergent liquid sleeping bag stove fuel
oil/gasket

He sleeps now. Rice with the curry  from  the  Thai  wagon.  Asks
where the girl has gone. Tell him Fontaine has heard from her but
does not know where she is or why. The pistol on the  shelf.  Re-
luctant  to touch it (cold, heavy, smelling of oil, the dark blue
finish worn to silver-gray down the sides of its  muzzle,  around
the  fluted  segments of the cylinder. ('SMITH & WESSON.' Thomas-
son.) Tonight he spoke again of Shapely.

How they did him like that, Scooter, that's just some sorry shit.
Same  shit all over. Always some of 'em, anyway, makes you wonder
how these damn religions last so long or what started it  in  the
first  place. Could be he'll be that himself one day, crazy fuck-
ers out killing people for him, or they'll say it's for him. Used
to be these Crucified Jesus people, they wouldn't talk at all ex-
cept Ofl Mondays, and that was the day they'd  go  and  dig  OflC
spadeful  of  dirt  out of their grave, Scooter. Every 258 little
while they'd get one of them thought he'd got the spirit  in  him
and they'd just do it, do it with these special chrome nails they
all carried, leather neck-pouch, see, it had to be  unborn  lamb-
skin. Hell, you'd have to say they were crazier than the ones got
him, Scooter. Put 'em all away, finally. Weren't any left at all,
after  about  1998.  z6o 34 Punching out of paradise Chevette let
the old lady talk. She could just sort of tune her out,  the  way
she  used to do with her own mother, sometimes. She wondered what
it was Rydell and Sublett were so worked up about.  Up  to  some-
thing;  whispering in the kitchen.  She watched a fly buzz around
the stuff on Mrs. Sublett's shelves. It looked slow,  like  maybe
the  air-conditioning was too much for it.  She wondered if maybe
she wasn't starting to fall for Rydell. Maybe it  was  just  that
he'd  showered  and  shaved  and  put  on  clean clothes from his
stupid-looking suitcase. The clothes were exactly the same as the
ones he'd been wearing before. Maybe he never wore anything else.
But she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. Sublett's
mother said he looked like a young Tommy Lee Jones. Who was Tommy
Lee Jones? Or maybe it was because she had the  idea  somehow  he
was  going  to do something mean to Lowell. She'd thought she was
still in love with Lowell,  or  something  anyway,  but  now  she
didn't  think so, not at all. If Lowell just hadn't started doing
dancer. She'd thought about how that Loveless had got when  she'd
dumped  all  that  dancer in his Coke. She'd asked Rydell if that
was enough to have killed him, and Rydell had said  no.  Said  it
was  enough  to keep him stone crazy for a while, and when he got
back together, he was going to be hurting. Then she'd  asked  Ry-
dell  why Loveless had done that, banging his gun into his crotch
that way. Rydell had sort of  scratched  his  head  and  said  he
wasn't  sure,  but he thought it had something to do with what it
did to your nervous system. Said he'd heard it induced  priapism,
for  one  thing.  She'd asked him what that was. Well, he'd said,
it's when the man is, like, overstimulated. She didn't know about
that,  but  it  had given Lowell these total brickbat boners that
just didn't want to go away. And that would've been just fine, or
anyway  okay,  except he got all mean with it, too, SO she'd wind
up all sore and then he'd he badmouthing her in  front  of  these
people  he hung out with, like Codes. Anyway, she 2.61 wasn't go-
ing to waste any time worrying about what Rydell  might  have  in
mind  for  Lowell,  no way. What she did worry about was Skinner,
whether he was okay, whether he was being taken care of. She  was
kind  of  scared  to  try phoning Fontaine now; every time Rydell
made a call out, she worried it might get traced  back  or  some-
thing.  And it made her sad to think about her bike. She was sure
somebody would've gotten it by now. She kind of  hated  to  admit
it, but that was starting to make her nearly as sad as Sammy get-
ting killed that way. And Rydell had said he thought maybe  Nigel
had  gotten  shot, too.  Rydell was sitting at the little plastic
table where she'd had breakfast. 'Well, you  can't  go,  Sublett,
because  of your apostasy. And I don't want to be in there by my-
self, not with my head stuck in one of those eyephone things. His
parents could walk in. He might listen.'  z6z

2.63  Buddy went out of his tiny bedroom, closing the door behind
him. It didn't look to Chevette like anybody  Buddy's  age  lived
there  at  all. Too neat, with these posters of Jesus and Fallon.
She felt sorry for him. It was close and hot and she missed  Sub-
lett's  mother's  air-conditioning.  She  took off that hat.  She
watched his index finger, in that glove, peck out something on  a
pad  that  wasn't  there. Then she listened to him talking to the
telephone company's computer about getting the time  and  charges
after  he was done.  Then his hand came up again. 'Here goes,' he
said, and started punching out this number  he  said  Lowell  had
given  him,  his finger coming down on the empty air. When he was
done, he made a fist, sort of wiggled it around, then lowered the
gloved hand to his lap.  He just sat there for a few seconds, the
helmet kind of swiveling around like he  was  looking  at  stuff,
then  it  stopped  moving.  Chevette felt the hair on the back of
her neck stand up.  Rydell had liked doing Dream Walls,  when  he
was  a  kid in high school. It was this Japanese franchise opera-
tion they set up in different kinds of spaces,  mostly  in  older
malls;  some  were  in  places that had been movie theaters, some
were in old department stores. He'd gone to one once that  they'd
put  into  an old bowling alley; made it real long and narrow and
the stuff sort of distorted on you if you tried to  move  it  too
fast.  There were a lot of different ways you could play with it,
the most popular one in Knoxville being gunfights, where you  got
these  guns and shot at all kinds of bad guys, and they shot back
and then you got the score. Sort of like FATSS  at  the  Academy,
but  only  about half the rez. And none of the, well, color.  But
the one Rydell had liked most was where you just went in and sort
of sculpted things out of nothing, out of that cloud of pixels or
polygons or whatever they were, and you could see what other peo-
ple  were  doing  at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff
together with theirs, if you both wanted to. He'd  been  kind  of
self-conscious  about  it,  because it seemed like something that
mostly girls did. And the girls were always doing these  unicorns
and  rainbows  and  things,  and Rydell liked to do cars, kind of
dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan somewhere  and  he
could  build  anything  he wanted. You could get these full-color
printouts when you were done, or a cassette,  if  you'd  animated
it.  There'd always he a couple of girls down at the far end, do-
ing i65 35 The republic of desire plastic surgery on pictures  of
themselves, fiddling around with their faces and hair, and they'd
get printouts of those if they did one they really liked.  Rydell
would  be up closer to the entrance, molding these grids of green
light around a frame he'd drawn, and  laying  color  and  texture
over  that  to see how different ones looked.  But what he remem-
bered when he clicked into the  Republic  of  Desire's  eyephone-
space was the sense you got, doing that, of what the space around
Dream Walls was like. And it was a weird thing,  because  if  you
looked  up from what you were doing, there really wasn't anything
there; nothing in particular, anyway. But when you were doing it,
designing  your  car  or whatever, you could get this funny sense
that you were leaning out, over the edge of the  world,  and  the
space  beyond that sort of fell away, forever.  And you felt like
you weren't standing on the floor of an old movie  theater  or  a
bowling  alley,  but  on  some  kind of plain, or maybe a pane of
glass, and you felt like it just stretched away behind you, miles
and miles, with no real end.  So when he went from looking at the
phone company's logo to being right  out  there  on  that  glassy
plain, he just said 'Oh,' because he could see its edges, and see
that it hung there, level, and around and above it this cloud  or
fog  or  sky that was no color and every color at once, just sort
of seething.  And then these  figures  were  there,  bigger  than
skyscrapers,  bigger  than anything, their chests about even with
the edges of the plain, so that Rydell got to feel like a bug, or
a  little  toy.   One of them was a dinosaur, this sort of T. Rex
job with the short front legs, except they ended in  something  a
lot more like hands. One was a sort of statue, it looked like, or
more like some freak natural formation,  all  shot  through  with
cracks and fissures, but it was shaped like a wide-faced man with
dreadlocks, the face relaxed and the lids  half-closed.  But  all
stone  and  moss, the dreadlocks somehow stacked from whole moun-
tains of shale.  L66 Then he looked and saw the third one  there,
and  just  said  This was a figure, too, and just as big, but all
made up of television, these moving images winding  and  writhing
together, and barely, it seemed, able to hold the form they took:
something that might either have been a man or a woman.  It  hurt
his  eyes, to try to look too close at any one part of it. It was
like trying to watch a million channels at once, and  this  noise
was  rushing  off  it  like a waterfall off rocks, a sort of hiss
that somehow wasn't a sound at all.  Rydell hesitated.  267  That
was  when  it dawned on Rydell that the dinosaur, or all of them,
could probably see all the records there were on him, right then,
anywhere.  It gave him a funny feeling. 'You're looking at all my
stuff,' he said.  The mountain  raised  its  eyebrows.  Windblown
scrub  shifting, rocks tumbling down. But just on the edge of Ry-
dell's vision. 'For what it's worth, that was not us, not  exact-
ly.  We  would've gone a more elegant route.'  husband, who I see
has since filed for divorce. On very solid  grounds,  it  seems.'
And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal
things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.   The  dinosaur  came
flickering  back.  'What  if  we  did?'  269 Now the mountain was
back, too. 'There's not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now...'
So Rydell did.

She had the hat back on, when he took the helmet off, but she was
holding those sunglasses in her hand. Just looking at him.   Then
he  got  the  time and charges on the call. It came to just about
all the money he had left.  She just put those  glasses  back  on
and slowly shook her head.  36 Notebook (z)



The  city  in sunlight, from the roof of this box atop the tower.
The hatch open. Sound of Skinner sorting and  resorting  his  be-
longings.  A  cardboard  box,  slowly filling with objects I will
take below, to the sellers of things, their goods spread on blan-
kets,  on  greasy  squares of ancient canvas. Osaka far away. The
wind brings sounds of hammering,  song.  Skinner,  this  morning,
asking if I had seen the pike in the Steiner Aquarium.  -No.  -He
doesn't move, Scooter.

Sure that's all Fontaine said? But he'd found her bike? That's no
good. Wouldn't go this long without that. Cost an arm and a fuck-
ing leg, that thing. Made of paper,  inside.  Japanese  construc-
tion-paper,  what's  it called? Useless, Scooter. Shit, it's your
language. Forgetting it faster than we are ... Tube of  that  pa-
per, then they wrap it with aramyd or something. No, she wouldn't
leave that. Day she brought  it  home,  three  hours  down  there
spraying  this fake rust on it, believe that? Fake rust, Scooter.
And wrapping it  with  old  rags,  innertubes,  anything.  So  it
wouldn't  look  new.  Well, it makes more sense than just locking
it, it really does. Know how you break a Kryptonite lock,  Scoot-
er?  With  a  Volvo jack. Volvo jack fits right in there, like it
was made for it. Give it a shove or two, zingo.  But  they  never
use  'em  anymore,  those 271 locks. Some people still carry 'em,
though. One of those up 'side the head, you'll notice  it  ...  I
just  found her one day. They wanted to cart her down to the end,
let the city have her. Said she'd be dead before they got her off
anyway.  Told  'em  they  could fuck off into the air. Got her up
here. I could still do that. Why? Hell. Because. See  people  dy-
ing, you just walk by like it was television?  37 Century city



Chevette  didn't  know  what  to  think  about  Los Angeles.  She
thought those palm trees were weird, though. On the way in,  Sub-
lett's  electric car had pulled up behind this big white trailer-
rig with A-LIFE INSTALLATIONS, NANOTRONIC VEGETATION  across  the
back  of it, and the heads of these fake palm trees sticking out,
all wrapped in plastic.  She'd seen it all on tv once, with Skin-
ner, how they were putting in these trees to replace the ones the
virus had killed, some Mexican virus. They were kind of like  the
Bay  maglev,  or like what Rydell and Sublett said that that Sun-
flower company was going to do in  San  Francisco;  these  things
that  kind  of  grew,  but  only because they were made up of all
these little tiny machines. One show  she'd  seen  with  Skinner,
they'd talked about how these new trees were designed so that all
kinds of birds and rats and things could nest in them, just  like
the ones that had died. Skinner told her that he'd run a Jeep in-
to a real palm tree, in L.A., once, and about ten rats had fallen
out,  landed on the hood and just sort of stood there, until they
got scared and ran away.  It sure didn't feel like San Francisco.
She  felt  kind of two ways about it. Like it was just this bunch
of stuff, all spread out pretty much at random, and then like  it
was  this  really big place, with mountains somewhere back there,
and all this energy flowing around in  it,  lighting  things  up.
Maybe  that  was  because they'd got there at night.  Sublett had
this little white Eurocar called a Montxo. She 273 knew that  be-
cause  she'd had to look at the logo on the dash all the way from
Paradise. Sublett said it rhymed with poncho.  It  was  built  in
Barcelona and you just plugged it into the house-current and left
it until it was charged. It wouldn't do much more than forty on a
highway,  but  Sublett didn't like to drive anything else because
of his allergies. She said he was lucky they had  electric  cars;
he'd  told her all about how he was worried about the electromag-
netic fields and cancer and stuff.  They'd left his  mother  with
this  Mrs.  Baker, watching Spacehunter on the tv. They were both
real excited about that because they said it was Molly Ringwald's
first  film.  They'd  get excited about just about anything, like
that, and Chevette never had  any  idea  who  they  were  talking
about.  Rydell was just spending more and more time on the phone,
and they'd~ had to stop and buy fresh  batteries  twice,  Sublett
paying.  It kind of bothered her that he didn't give her any more
attention. And they'd slept on the same bed again, in the room at
the  motel,  but  nothing  had  happened, even though Sublett had
slept out in the Montxo, with the seats tilted back.  All  Rydell
ever  did  now was talk to those Republic of Desire people Lowell
knew, but on the regular phone, and  try  to  leave  messages  on
somebody's  voicemail.  Mr.  Mom  or something. Ma. But he didn't
think anybody was getting them, so he'd called up the Desire peo-
ple  and  gone  on  and on about the whole story, everything that
happened to them, and they'd recorded it and they  were  supposed
to put it in this Mr. Ma's voicemail. Rydell said they were going
to stuff it there, so there wasn't  any  other  mail.  Said  that
ought  to  get  his attention.  When they'd got to L.A. and got a
room in a motel, Chevette had been kind of excited, because she'd
always wanted to do that. Because her mother had always seemed to
have real good times when she went to motels. Well, it had turned
out  to  be sort of like a trailer camp without the 274 trailers,
with these little concrete  buildings  divided  up  into  smaller
rooms,  and  there  were foreign people cooking barbecues down in
what had been the swimming pool. Sublett had gotten really  upset
about  that,  how  he couldn't handle the hydrocarbons and every-
thing, but Rydell had said it was just for the  one  night.  Then
Rydell  had  gone over to the foreign people and talked to them a
little, and came back and said they were Tibetans.  They  made  a
good barbecue, too, but Sublett just ate this drugstore food he'd
brought with him, bottled water and these yellow bars looked like
soap,  and  went  out  to sleep in his Montxo.  Now here she was,
walking into this place called Century City  II,  and  trying  to
look like she was there to pull a tag. It was this kind of green,
tit-shaped thing up on these three legs that ran up  through  it.
You could see where they went because the walls were some kind of
glass, mostly, and you  could  see  through.  It  was  about  the
biggest  thing around; you could see it forever. Rydell called it
the Blob.  It was real upscale, too, kind of  like  China  Basin,
with those same kind of people, like you mostly saw in the finan-
cial district, or in malls, or when you were pulling tags.  Well,
she  had her badges on, and she'd had a good shower at the motel,
but the place was starting to creep her  out  anyway.  All  these
trees  in  there,  up all through this sort of giant, hollow leg,
and everything under this weird filtered light  came  in  through
the  sides.  And here she was standing on this escalator, about a
mile long, just going up and up, and around her all these  people
who must've belonged there. There were elevators, Rydell said, up
the other two legs, and they ran at an angle, like the lift up to
Skinner's. But Sublett's friend had said there were more IntenSe-
cure people watching those, usually.  She knew that  Sublett  was
behind  her,  somewhere,  or anyway that was how they'd worked it
out before Rydell dropped them off at the entrance.  She'd  asked
him  where he was going 275 then, and he'd just said he had to go
and borrow a flashlight. She was starting to really like him.  It
sort of bothered her. She wondered what he'd be like if he wasn't
in a situation like this. She wondered what she'd be like if  she
wasn't  in a situation like this.  He and Sublett had both worked
for the company that did security for this building, IntenSecure,
and Sublett had called up a friend of his and asked him questions
about how tight it was. The way he'd put it, it was like he want-
ed  a  new  job with the company. But he and Rydell had worked it
out that she could get in, particularly if he was  following  her
to  keep  track.  What bothered her about Sublett was that he was
acting sort of like he was committing suicide or something.  Once
he'd  gotten with the program, Rydell's plan, it was like he felt
cut loose from things. Kept talking about his apostasy and  these
movies  he  liked, and somebody called Cronenberg. Had this weird
calm like somebody who knew for sure he was going  to  die;  like
he'd  sort  of  made  peace  with it, except he'd still get upset
about his allergies.  Green light. Rising up through it.   They'd
made  her up this package at the motel. What it had in it was the
glasses. Addressed to Karen Mendelsohn.   She  closed  her  eyes,
told  herself  Bunny  Malatesta  would  bongo  on her head if she
didn't make the tag, and pushed the button.  Silence. 'Nature  of
delivery?'   276  Chevette looked at the potted plants beside the
door. They were big, looked real, and she knew Sublett was stand-
ing  behind  them,  but  she couldn't see him. Somebody had put a
cigarette out on one, between its roots.  The door open, a crack.
'Yes?'   The  door  opened  a little more. Dark-haired woman in a
long pale terrycloth robe. Chevette saw her check the  badges  on
Skinner's jacket. 'I don't understand,' Karen Medelsohn said. 'We
do everything via GlobEx.'  Karen Mendelsohn was looking at  him.
'Emergency?'   co-operation.'   But he owned this house, where he
lived, with the baby-blue plastic siding that looked sort of like
painted wood, and one of those fake lawns that looked realer than
AstroTurf. And he had the house in Mar Vista and a couple of oth-
ers.  His  sister  had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come
himself, to get away from all the trouble over there.  Never  re-
gretted  it.  Said this was a fine country except they let in too
many immigrants.  278 38 Miracle mile Wally waved, shrugged, then
backed  into  his  house  and closed the door. Rydell hadn't ever
seen him not wear that Tyrolean hat before.  Rydell looked at the
flashlight,  figuring  out  where the safety was. It wasn't much,
but he felt like he had to have something. And it was  nonlethal.
Guns weren't that hard to buy, on the street, but he didn't real-
ly want to have to have one around today.  You  did  a  different
kind of time, if there was a gun involved.  Then he'd driven back
toward the Blob, taking it real easy at intersections and  trying
to keep to the streets that had designated lanes for electric ve-
hicles. He got Chevette's phone out and hit redial for the  node-
number in Utah, the one Godeater had given him, back in Paradise.
God-eater was the one who looked like  the  mountain,  or  so  he
said.  Rydell  had  asked  him what kind of a name that was. He'd
said he was a full-blood Blood Indian. Rydell sort of doubted it.
279  None  of  their  voices  were real, even; it was all digital
stuff. God-eater could just as well be a woman, or three  differ-
ent  people,  or  all  three of the ones he'd seen there might've
been  just  one  person.  He  thought  about  the  woman  in  the
wheelchair  in Cognitive Dissidents. It could be her. It could be
anybody. That was the spooky thing about these hackers. He  heard
the  node-number  ringing, in Utah. God-eater always picked up on
five,  in  mid-ring.   Fifty  thousand  dollars.  Rydell  winced.
'Okay,' he said, 'fair enough.'  I'll bet you got lots of friends
there, too, Rydell thought. 'How long you estimate the  response-
time,  from when I call?'  God-eater burped, long and deliberate.
'Quick. Ten, fifteen max. We've got it slotted the way we  talked
about.  Your  friends're  gonna  shit themselves. But really, you
don't wanna be in the way. This'll be like  something  you  never
saw before. This new unit they just got set up.'

He  gave  the  parking-attendant  Karen's apartment number. After
this, it really wasn't going to matter much. He  had  the  flash-
light  stuck  down  in the back of his jeans, under the z8o denim
jacket Buddy had loaned him. It was  probably  Buddy's  father's.
He'd told Buddy he'd help him find a place when he got to L.A. He
sort of hoped Buddy never did try that, because he imagined  kids
like Buddy made it about a block from the bus station before some
really fast urban predator got them, just a blur  of  wheels  and
teeth  and  no  more Buddy to speak of. But then again you had to
think about what it would be like to be him, Buddy, back there in
his three-by six-foot bedroom in that trailer, with those posters
of Fallon and Jesus, sneaking that VR when his daddy wasn't look-
ing.  If  you didn't at least try to get out, what would you wind
up feeling like? And that was why you had to give it to  Sublett,
because  he'd  gotten out of that, allergies and all.  But he was
worried about Sublett. Pretty crazy to be worried about  anybody,
in  a  situation like this, but Sublett acted like he was already
dead or something. Just moving from one thing to the  next,  like
it didn't matter. The only thing that got any kind of rise out of
him was his allergies.  And Chevette, too,  Chevette  Washington,
except  what  worried  him  there was the white skin of her back,
just above the waist of those  black  bike-pants,  when  she  was
curled on the bed beside him. How he keptwanting to touch it. And
how her tits stuck out against her t-shirt when she'd sit  up  in
the morning, and those little dark twists of hair under her arms.
And right now, walking up to this terracotta  coffee-module  near
the  base  of the escalator, the rectangular head of Wally's pep-
per-spray flashlight digging into his spine,  he  knew  he  might
never  get  another chance. He could be dead, in half an hour, or
on his way to prison.  He ordered a latte  with  a  double  shot,
paid  for it with just about the last of his money, and looked at
his Timex. Ten 'iii three. When he'd  called  Warbaby's  personal
portable  from  the motel, the night before, he'd told him three.
God-eater had gotten him that number. Cod-eater could get you any
number  ~t all.  Warbaby had sounded really sad to hear from him.
281 Disappointed, like. 'We never expected this of you,  Rydell.'
Chevette  Washington watching him, from the bed. 'In Los Angeles.
I figured I'd better get as far away from  those  Russians  as  I
could.'   A pause. Maybe Warbaby had put his hand over the phone.
Then, 'Well, I suppose I can understand your behavior, although I
can't  say  I approve...'  A longer pause. 'Well, Rydell,' sadly,
'I wouldn't want you to forget how disappointed I am in you, but,
yes,  I  could do that.'  Now he looked at his Timex. l'ook a sip
of coffee. Three o'clock. Sharp. He put the coffee  down  on  the
counter and got the phone out. Started punching in Warbaby's num-
ber.

It took them twenty minutes to get there. They came  in  two  282
cars,  from  opposite  directions; Warbaby and Freddie in a black
Lincoln with a white satellite-dish on top, Freddie  driving  it,
then Svobodov and Orlovsky in a metallic-gray Lada sedan that Ry-
dell took for a rental.  He watched them meet  up,  the  four  of
them, then walk in, onto the plaza under the Blob, past those ki-
netic sculptures, heading for the nearest elevator, Warbaby look-
ing  sad  as  ever and leaning on that cane. Warbaby had his same
olive coat on, his Stetson, Freddie was wearing a big shirt  with
a lot of pink in it, had a laptop under his arm, and the Russians
from Homicide had these gray suits on, about the color  and  tex-
ture of the Lada they were driving.  He gave it a while to see if
Loveless was going to turn up, then started keying in that number
in  Utah.   Rydell  stuck the phone in his jacket pocket, turned,
and headed, walking fast, for the escalator. The boy in the  cof-
feemodule  probably  thought  there was something wrong with that
lane.

God-eater and his friends, if they weren't just one  person,  say
some  demented old lady up in the Oakland hills with a couple 283
of million dollars' worth of equipment and a terminally bad atti-
tude,  had  struck  Rydell as being almost uniquely full of shit.
There was nothing, if you believed them, they couldn't do. But if
they  were all that powerful, how come they had to hide that way,
and make money doing crimes?  Rydell had gotten a couple of  lec-
tures  on  computer  crime at the Academy, but it had been pretty
dry. The history of it, how hackers used to be just these  smart-
ass  kids dicking with the phone companies. Basically, the visit-
ing Fed had said, any crime that was what once  had  been  called
white-collar  was going to be computer crime anyway, now, because
people in offices did everything with computers. But  there  were
other  crimes  you  could  still  call computer crimes in the old
sense, because they usually involved professional criminals,  and
these  criminals still thought of themselves as hackers. The pub-
lic, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of  hackers  as
some  kind  of  romantic bullshit thing, sort of like kids moving
the outhouse. Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of
people still didn't know there was an outhouse there to be moved,
not until they wound up in the shit. Rydell's class laughed duti-
fully.  But not today, the Fed said; your modern hacker was about
as romantic as a hit man from some ice posse or an enforcer  with
a  dancer  combine.  And  a  lot harder to catch, although if you
could get one and lean on him, you could usually count on landing
a few more. But they were set up mostly in these cells, the cells
building up larger groups, so that the most you could  ever  pop,
usually, were the members of a single cell; they just didn't know
who the members of the other cells were, and they made a point of
not finding out.  God-eater and his friends, however many of them
there were or weren't, must've been a cell like that, one of how-
ever  many  units in what they called the Republic of Desire. And
if they were really going to go ahead and do the thing  for  him,
he  figured  there were three reasons: they hated the idea of San
Francisco getting rebuilt hecause they  liked  an  infrastructure
2.84  with a lot of holes in it, they were charging him good mon-
ey-money he didn't have-and they'd figured out a way to do  some-
thing  that nobody had ever done before. And it was that last one
that had really seemed to get them going, once they'd decided  to
help  him  out.   And now, climbing the escalator, up through all
these kinds of people who lived or worked up here,  forcing  him-
self  not  to  break  into a run, Rydell found it hard to believe
that God-eater and them were doing what they'd  said  they  could
do.  And  if they weren't, well, he was just fucked.  No, he told
himself, they were. They had to be. Somewhere in Utah a dish  was
turning,  targeted  out  toward  the coast, toward the California
sky. And out of it,  fed  in  from  wherever  God-eater  and  his
friends  were,  were  coming these packages, no, packets, of sig-
nals. Packets, God-eater called them.  And somewhere, high  above
the  Blob, up over the whole L.A. Basin, was the Death Star.  Ry-
dell dodged past a silver-haired man in tennis whites and ran  up
the escalator. Came out under the copper tit. People going in and
out of that little mall there. A fountain with water sliding down
big  ragged  sheets  of green glass. And there went the Russians,
their wide gray backs heading toward the white walls of the  com-
plex  where  Karen's  apartment  was.  He couldn't see Warbaby or
Freddie.  3:32. 'Shit,' he said, knowing it hadn't  worked,  that
God-eater  had  fucked  him, that he'd doomed Chevette Washington
and Sublett and even Karen Mendelsohn and it was  one  more  time
he'd  just  gone for it, been wrong, and the last fucking time at
that.  And then these things came  through  a  long  gap  in  the
glass,  just  south  of  where  the  handball-courts were, and he
hadn't ever seen anything like them. There were a bunch of  them,
maybe  ten  or a dozen, and they were black. They hardly made any
sound at all, and they  were  sort  of  floating.  Just  skimming
along. The players on the courts stopped to watch them.  285 They
were helicopters, but too small to carry  anybody.  Smaller  than
the  smallest  micro-light.  Kind of dish-shaped. French Aerospa-
tiale gun-platforms, the kind you saw on  the  news  from  Mexico
City,  and  he  guessed they were under the control of ECCCS, the
Emergency Command Control  Communications  System,  who  ran  the
Death  Star.  One  of  them  swung by, about twenty feet over his
head, and he saw the clustered tubes of some kind of gun or rock-
et-launcher.   A  woman started screaming, from somewhere over by
the mall, over and over, like something mechanical.   And  mostly
they  did,  all  those faces; faces of the residents of this high
country, their jawlines firm, their soft  clothes  fluttering  in
the  dancing  downdrafts.   Rydell  started running.  He ran past
Svobodov and Orlovsky, who were looking at the three  helicopters
that  were  much lower now, and so clearly edging in on them. The
Russians' mouths were  open  and  Orlovsky's  half-frame  glasses
looked  like  they  were  about  to fall off.  But the residents,
slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with  racquets
in their hands, or dark glossy paper bags from the mall. Watching
the helicopters. Watching Rydell as he ran past them, their  eyes
mildly  curious and curiously hard.  He ran past Freddie, who was
flat down on the granite payers, doing what the helicopters said,
his  hands  above  his head and his laptop between them.  Then he
saw Warbaby, slouched back on a cast-iron bench  like  he'd  been
sitting there forever, just watching life go by. Warhahy saw him,
too.  2.86 His cane was beside him,  propped  on  the  bench.  He
picked  it  up,  lazy  and deliberate, and Rydell was sure he was
about to get blown away.  But Warbaby, looking sad as ever,  just
brought the cane up to the brim of his Stetson, like some kind of
salute.  The amplified voice of a SWAT cop, bunkered down in  the
hardened sublevels of City Hall East, working his little Aerospa-
tiale through a telepresence rig. Warbaby shrugged,  slowly,  and
tossed  the  cane  away.   Rydell kept running, right through the
open gates and up to Karen Mendelsohn's  door.  Which  was  half-
open,  Karen and Chevette Washington both there, their eyes about
to pop out of their heads.  They just gaped at him.  There were a
bunch of big plants beside the door, in a terracotta pot about as
high as his waist. He saw Loveless step around  it,  raising  his
little gun; Loveless had on a silvery sportscoat and his left arm
was in a sling; his face was  studded  with  micropore  dressings
that weren't quite the right shade, so he looked like he had lep-
rosy or something. He was smiling that smile.   Loveless  brought
the  gun  around,  about a foot from her head, and Rydell saw the
smile vanish. Without it, he noticed,  Loveless  sort  of  looked
like  he  didn't  have  any lips.  Loveless never even managed to
pull the trigger, which you had to admit was kind of  impressive.
What  that capsicum did, 287 it was kind of like when Sublett got
an allergic reaction, but a lot worse, and a lot quicker.

Rydell just sat there, in one of her white Retro Aggressive  arm-
chairs, listening to those helicopters yelling outside. Later on,
when it all came out, they'd find out that the Republic of Desire
had  set  Warbaby  and them up as these bomb-building mercenaries
working for the Sonoran Separatist Front, with enough high explo-
sives stored in Karen's place to blow that nipple off the tit and
clear to Malibu. And they'd also worked  in  this  hostage-taking
scenario,  to  guarantee the SWAT guys made a soft entry, if they
had to. But when the real  live  Counterterrorism  Squad  got  in
there,  it  would've  been pretty hairy, at least if Karen hadn't
been a lawyer for Cops in Trouble. Those were  some  angry  cops,
and  getting  angrier, at first, but then Pursley's people seemed
to have their ways to calm them down.  But the funny  thing  was,
they,  the  LAPD, never would, ever, admit to it that anybody had
hacked the Death Star. They kept saying it had  been  phoned  in.
And  they  stuck  to that, too; it was so important to them, evi-
dently, that they were willing, finally, to let a lot of the rest
of  it  just  go.   But  when  he was sitting there, listening to
Karen, and gradually getting the idea that, yeah, he was the kind
of crazy motherfucker she liked, he kept thinking about Nightmare
Folk Art, and whatever that woman's name  was,  over  there,  and
hoping  she was coping okay, because God-eater had needed an L.A.
number to stick into his fake data-packet, a z88 number where the
tip-off  was supposed to have come from. And Rydell hadn't wanted
to give them Kevin's number, and then he'd  found  the  Nightmare
number  in  his  wallet, on part of a People cover, so he'd given
God-eater that.  And then Chevette came over, with her  face  all
swollen  from  the  capsicum,  and asked him if it was working or
were they totally fucked? And he said it was, and  they  weren't,
and  then  the  cops  came  in and it wasn't okay, but then Aaron
Pursley turned up with about as many other lawyers as there  were
cops, and then Wellington Ma, in a navy blazer with gold buttons.
So Rydell finally got to meet him.  Rydell  remembered  God-eater
and  that fifty thousand, and hoped Ma and Karen and them weren't
going to be pissed about that. But he didn't  think  so,  because
Aaron  Pursley  had  already  said, twice, how it was going to be
bigger than the Pookey Bear thing,  and  Karen  kept  saying  how
telegenic Chevette was, and about the youth angle, and how Chrome
Koran would fall all  over  themselves  to  do  the  music.   And
Wellington  Ma had signed up Chevette, and Sublett, too, but he'd
had to pass the papers back  into  that  closet  because  Sublett
still  wouldn't come out.  Rydell could tell from what Karen said
that Chevette had told her pretty much the whole story while  she
and Sublett had kept her there, and kept her from hitting any In-
tenSecure panic-buttons. And Karen,  evidently,  knew  all  about
those  VL  glasses  and  how  to get them to play things back, SO
she'd spent most of the time doing that, and  now  she  knew  all
about  Sunflower  or  whatever  it  was  called. And she kept 289
telling Pursley that there was a dynamite angle here because they
could  implicate Cody fucking Harwood, if they played their cards
right, and was he ever due for it, the  bastard.   Rydell  hadn't
ever  even had a chance to see that stuff, on the glasses.  Purs-
ley looked at his big gold watch. It was set with diamonds around
the  dial,  and  had  a big lump of turquoise on either side. 'In
about five minutes. We're arranging to have the first  press-con-
ference around six. That suit you, or would you rather eat first?
We can have the caterers bring you something in.'  Chevette  said
jail sounded just fine to her, but please could she call somebody
in San Francisco named Fontaine?

290 ) Karen looked at Pursley. 'We'd better  get  Jackson  Gale,'
she said. Rydell wondered what for, because Jackson Gale was this
new young black  guy  who  acted  in  made-for-tv  movies.   Then
Chevette came over and hugged him, all of her pressing up against
him, and just sort of looking up at him from under that crazy-ass
haircut. And he liked that, even if her eyes were all red and her
nose was running.  On Saturday, the fifteenth  of  November,  the
morning after his fourth night with Skinner, Yamazaki, wearing an
enormous, cape-like plaid jacket, much  mended  and  smelling  of
candle-grease,  descended  in the yellow lift to do business with
the dealers in artifacts. He brought with him a cardboard  carton
containing  several  large  fragments of petrified wood, the left
antler of a buck deer, fifteen compact discs, a Victorian  promo-
tional  novelty in the shape of a fluted china mug, embossed with
the letters 'OXO,' and a damp-swollen copy of The Columbia Liter-
ary  History  of  the United States.  The sellers were laying out
their goods, the morning iron-gray and clammy, and he was  grate-
ful for the borrowed jacket, its pockets silted with ancient saw-
dust and tiny, nameless bits of hardware.  He  had  been  curious
about the correct manner in which to approach them, but they took
the initiative, clustering around him, Skinner's  name  on  their
lips.   The  petrified wood brought the best price, then the mug,
then eight of the compact discs. It all went, finally, except for
the  literary  history, which was badly mildewed. He placed this,
its blue boards warping in the salt air, atop a mound  of  trash.
With  the  money  folded in his hand, he went looking for the old
woman who sold eggs. Also, they needed coffee.  He was  in  sight
of  the place that roasted and ground coffee when he saw Fontaine
coming through the morning bustle, the collar of his  long  tweed
coat turned up against the fog.  292 39 Celebration on a gray day
Yamazaki blinked. 'No. I understand...'  "Ah" so,' Fontaine said.
'Some  kids  probably  found him first, took his wallet if he had
one. But he's a big healthy brother and somebody'll recognize him
eventually.  Hard  not  to,  with that bolt through his johnson.'
Fontaine looked around. 'Well, if you feel like  you  don't  need
it,  just  chuck  it for me. But I'll need that phone back, some-
time. How long you gonna be staying out here, anyway?'   293  Ya-
mazaki  walked  toward the coffee-vendor, remembering the funeral
procession, the dancing scarlet figure with its  red-painted  ri-
fle.  The symbol of Shapely's going.  Shapely's murder, some said
sacrifice, had taken place in Salt Lake City. His seven  killers,
heavily  armed  fundamentalists,  members  of a white racist sect
driven underground in the months following  the  assault  on  the
airport,  were  still  imprisoned in Utah, though two of them had
subsequently died of AIDS, possibly contracted in prison,  stead-
fastly  refusing  the  viral  strain  patented in Shapely's name.
They had remained silent during the trial, their  leader  stating
only  that the disease was God's vengeance on sinners and the un-
clean. Lean men with shaven heads  and  blank,  implacable  eyes,
they  were  God's  gunmen, and would stare, as such, from all the
tapes of history, forever.  But Shapely  had  been  very  wealthy
when  he had died, Yamazaki thought, joining the line for coffee.
Perhaps he had even been happy. He had seen the  product  of  his
blood  reverse  the  course of darkness. There were other plagues
abroad now, but the live vaccine bred from Shapely's variant  had
saved  uncounted  millions.   Yamazaki  promised  himself that he
would observe Shapely's birthday parade. He  would  rernemher  to
bring  his  notchook.  He stood in the smell of fresh-ground cof-
fee, awaiting his turn.

Acknowledgments

294 This book owes a very special debt to Paolo Polledri,  found-
ing  Curator of Architecture and Design, the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. Mr. Polledri commissioned, for the 1990 exhibition
Visionary San Francisco, a work of fiction which became the short
story 'Skinner's Room,' and also arranged for me  to  collaborate
with  the  architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts, whose redrawn
map of the city (though I redrew it once again) provided me  with
Skywalker Park, the Trap, and the Sunflower towers. (From another
work commissioned for this exhibition, Richard Rodriguez's power-
ful  'Sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype,' I appropriated Yamaza-
ki's borrowed Victorian and the sense of  its  melancholy.)   The
term  Virtual  Light  was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to de-
scribe a form of instrumentation that  produces  'optical  sensa-
tions  directly  in  the  eye  without the use of photons' (Mondo
2000).  Rydell's Los Angeles owes much  to  my  reading  of  Mike
Davis's City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observa-
tions regarding the privatization of public space.  I am indebted
to  Markus,  aka  Fur, one of the editors of Mercury Rising, pub-
lished by and for the San Francisco Bike  Messenger  Association,
who  kindly  provided  a  complete  file  of hack issues and then
didn't hear from me for a year or SO (sorry). Mercury Rising  ex-
ists  'to  inform,  amuse, piss off, and otherwise reinforce' the
messenger community. It provided 295

me with Chevette Washington's workplace and a good  deal  of  her
character.  Proj  on!  Thanks, too, to the following, all of whom
provided crucial assistance, the  right  fragment  at  the  right
time,  or  artistic support: Laurie Anderson, Cotty Chubb, Samuel
Delany,  Richard  Dorsett,  Brian  Eno,  Deborah  Harry,  Richard
Kadrey,  Mark Laidlaw, Tom Maddox, Pat Murphy, Richard Piellisch,
John Shirley, Chris Stein, Bruce Sterling, Roger Trilling,  Bruce
Wagner, Jack Womack.  Special thanks to Martha Millard, my liter-
ary agent, ever understanding of the  long  haul.   And  to  Deb,
Graeme,  and  Claire,  with  love, for putting up with the time I
spent in the basement.

Vancouver, B.C.  January 1993







































Thanks Sogho Ishii,  the  Japanese  director,  introduced  me  to
Kowloon Walled City via the photographs of Ryuji Miyamoto. It was
Ishiisan's idea that we  should  make  a  science  fiction  movie
there.  We  never did, but the Walled City continued to haunt me,
though I knew no more about it than I could gather  from  Miyamo-
to's  stunning images, which eventually provided most of the tex-
ture for the Bridge in my novel Virtual Light.

Architect Ken Vineberg drew my attention to an article about  the
Walled  City  in  Architectural Revieu~, where I first learned of
City of Darkness, the splendid record assembled  by  Greg  Girard
and Ian Lambrot (Watermark, London, 1993). From London, John Jar-
rold very kindly arranged for me to receive a copy.

Anything I know of the toecutting business, I owe to the criminal
memoirs  of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (Chopper from the inside,
Sly Ink, Australia, 1991). Mr. Read is a great deal scarier  than
Blackwell, and has even fewer ears.

Karl Taro Greenfeld's Speed Tribes (HarperCollins, New York,

1994) richly fed my dreams of Laney's jet lag.

Stephen  P.  ("Plausibility")  Brown  rode shotgun on the work in
progress for many months, commenting daily, sometimes more often,
and  always with a fine forbearance, as I faxed him a bewildering
flurry of disconnected fragments he was somehow expected  to  in-
terpret  as  "progress." His constant encouragement and seemingly
endless patience were absolutely essential to this book's comple-
tion.

My publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic, also demonstrated

great patience, and I thank them.


idoru


1.      Death  Cube  K  After Slitscan, Laney heard about another
job from Rydell, the night security man at  the  Chateau.  Rydell
was a big quiet Tennessean with a sad shy grin, cheap sunglasses,
and a walkie-talkie screwed permanently into one ear.

"Paragon-Asia Datafiow," Rydell said, around four in the morning,
the  two of them seated in a pair of huge old armchairs. Concrete
beams overhead had been hand-painted to  vaguely  resemble  blond
oak.  The chairs, like the rest of the furniture in the Chateau's
lobby, were oversized to the extent  that  whoever  sat  in  them
seemed built         to a smaller scale.     -

"Really?" Laney asked, keeping up the pretense that someone

like Rydell would know where he could still find work.

"Tokyo, Japan," Rydell said, and sucked iced latte through a

plastic  straw.  "Guy I met in San Francisco last year. Yamazaki.
He's

working for 'em. Says they need a serious netrunner,"

Netrunner. Laney, who liked to think of himself as a researcher,

suppressed a sigh. "Contract job?"

"Guess so. Didn't say."

"I don't think I'd want to live in Tokyo."

Rydell used his straw to stir the foam and ice remaining  at  the
bottom  of his tall plastic cup, as though he were hoping to find
a secret prize. "He didn't say you'd have to." He looked up. "You
ever been to Tokyo?"

"No."


"Must  be  an  interesting  place, after that quake and all." The
walkie-talkie ticked and whispered. "I gotta go on out and  check
the gate by the bungalows now. Feel like coming?"

"No," Laney said. "Thanks."

Rydell stood, automatically straightening the creases in his kha-
ki uniform trousers. He wore a black  nylon  web-belt  hung  with
various  holstered  devices,  all  of them black, a short-sleeved
white shirt, and a peculiarly immobile black tie. "I'll leave the
number in your box," he said.

Laney watched the security man cross the terra cotta and the var-
ious rugs, to vanish past the darkly polished panels of the  reg-
istration desk. He'd had something going on cable once, Laney had
gathered. Nice guy. Loser.

Laney sat there until dawn  came  edging  in  through  the  tall,
arched windows, and Taiwanese stainless could be heard to rattle,
but gently, from the darkened cave of the breakfast  room.  Immi-
grant  voices,  in some High Steppe dialect the Great Khans might
well have understood. Echoes woke from the tiled floor, from  the
high beams surviving from an age that must once have seen the ad-
vent of Laney's kind or predecessors, their ecology of  celebrity
and the terrible and inviolable order of that food chain.



Rydell left a folded sheet of Chateau notepaper in Laney's box. A
Tokyo number. Laney found it there the next afternoon, along with
an updated estimate of his final bill from the lawyers.

He  took them both up to the room he could no longer even pretend
to afford.



A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator's
goldveined mirror for this three-floor ascent of the aggressively
nondescript 0 My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube  K,
apparently  a  Franz Kafka theme bar.  Stepping from the.elevator
into a long space announced in acid-etched metal as The  Metamor-
phosis.  Where  salarimen  in white shirts had removed their suit
jackets and loosened their dark ties, and sat at a bar of artful-
ly corroded steel, drinking, the high backs of their chairs mold-
ed from some  brown  and  chitinous  resin.  Insectoid  mandibles
curved above the drinkers' heads like scythes.

He  moved forward into brown light, a low murmur of conversation.
He understood no Japanese. The walls, unevenly  transparent,  re-
peated  a  motif of wing cases and bulbous abdomens, spikey brown
limbs folded in at regular intervals. He increased his pace, aim-
ing  for a curving stairway molded to resemble glossy brown cara-
paces.

The eyes of Russian prostitutes followed him from tables opposite
the  bar,  flat  and  doll-like in this roach-light. The Natashas
were everywhere, working girls shipped in from Vladivostok by the
Kombinat.  Routine plastic surgery lent them a hard assembly-line
beauty. Slavic Barbies. A simpler operation implanted a  tracking
device for the benefit of their handlers.

The  stairway  opened into The Penal Colony, a disco, deserted at
this hour, pulses of silent red lightning marking  Laney's  steps
across the dance floor. A machine of some kind was suspended from
the ceiling. Each of its articulated arms, suggestive of  antique
dental  equipment, was tipped with sharp steel. Pens, he thought,
vaguely remembering Kafka's story. Sentence of guilt,  graven  in
the flesh of the condemned man's back. Wincing at a memory of up-
turned eyes unseeing. Pushed it down. Moved on.

A second stairway, narrow, more steep, and he entered The  Trial,
low-ceilinged  and  dark.  Walls  the  color of anthracite. Small
flames shivered behind blue glass. He hesitated,  nightblind  and
jet-lagged.

"Cohn Laney, is it?"

Australian.  Enormous. Who stood behind a little table, shoulders
sloping bearlike. Something strange about the shape of his shaven
head.  And  another, much smaller figure, seated there. Japanese,
in a long-sleeved plaid shirt buttoned up to its  oversized  col-
lar. Blinking up at Laney through circular lenses.  "Have a seat,
Mr. Laney," the big man said.

And Laney saw that this man's left ear was missing, sheared away,
leaving only a convoluted stump.



When  Laney  had  worked  for  Slitscan, his supervisor was named
Kathy Torrance. Palest of pale  blonds.  A  pallor  bordering  on
translucence,  certain  angles  of light suggesting not blood but
some fluid the shade of summer straw. On her left thigh the abso-
lute  indigo imprint of something twisted and multibarbed, an ex-
pensively savage pictoglyph. Visible each Friday, when  she  made
it her habit to wear shorts to work.

She complained, always, that the nature of celebrity was much the
worse for wear. Strip-mined, Laney gathered,  by  generations  of
her colleagues.

She  propped her feet on the ledge of a hotdesk. She wore meticu-
lous little reproductions of lineman's boots, buckled across  the
instep  and  stoutly  laced  to the ankle. He looked at her legs,
their taut sweep from wooly sock tops to the  sandpapered  fringe
of  cut-off  jeans. The tattoo looked like something from another
planet, a sign or message burned in from  the  depths  of  space,
left there for mankind to interpret.

He asked her what she meant. She peeled a mint-flavored toothpick
from its wrapper.  Eyes  he  suspected  were  gray  regarded  him
through mint-tinted contacts.

"Nobody's really famous anymore, Laney. Have you noticed that?"

"No."

"I mean really famous. There's not much fame left, not in the old
sense. Not enough to go around."

"The old sense?"

"We're the media, Laney. We make these assholes celebrities. It's
a  push-me, pull-you routine. They come to us to be created." Vi-
bram cleats kicked concisely off  the  hotdesk.  She  tucked  her
boots  in,  heels 4 William Gibson against denim haunches,~ white
knees hiding her mouth. Balanced there on  the  pedestal  of  the
hotdesk's articulated Swedish chair.

"Well," Laney said, going back to his screen, "that's still fame,
isn't it?"

"But is it real?"

He looked back at her.

"We learned to print money off this stuff," she  said.  "Coin  of
our  realm.  Now we've printed too much; even the audience knows.
It shows in the ratings."

Laney nodded, wishing she'd leave him to his work.

"Except," she said, parting her knees so he could see her say it,
"when we decide to destroy one."

Behind  her,  past  the  anodyzed chainlink of the Cage, beyond a
framing rectangle of glass that filtered out every tint of pollu-
tion,  the  sky over Burbank was perfectly blank, like a sky-blue
paint chip submitted by the contractor of the universe.



The man's left ear was edged with pink  tissue,  smooth  a~  wax.
Laney wondered why there had been no attempt at reconstruction.

"So I'll remember," the man said, reading Laney's eyes.

"Remember what?"

"Not to forget. Sit down."

Laney sat on something only vaguely chairlike, an attenuated con-
struction of black alloy rods and laminated Hexcel. The table was
round  and  approximately  the size of a steering wheel. A votive
flame licked the air, behind blue glass. The  Japanese  man  with
the plaid shirt and metal-framed glasses blinked furiously. Laney
watched the large man settle himself, another slender chair-thing
lost  alarmingly  beneath  a  sumo-sized bulk that appeared to be
composed entirely of muscle.

"Done with the jet lag, are we?"

"I took pills." Remembering the SST's silence, its lack of  appar
ent motion.  "Pills," the man said. "Hotel adequate?"

"Yes," Laney said. "Ready for the interview."

"Well  then,"  vigorously  rubbing  his face with heavily scarred
hands. He lowered his hands and stared at Laney, as if seeing him
for  the first time. Laney, avoiding the gaze of those eyes, took
in the man's outfit, some sort of nanopore exercise gear intended
to  fit loosely on a smaller but still very large man. Of no par-
ticular color in the darkness of the Trial. Open from  collar  to
breastbone.   Straining  against  abnormal  mass.  Exposed  flesh
tracked and crossed by an atlas of scars, baffling in their vari-
ety of shape and texture. "Well, then?"

Laney looked up from the scars. "I'm here for a job interview."

"Are you?"

"Are you the interviewer?"

"Interviewer'?" The ambiguous grimace revealing an obvious dental
prosthesis.

Laney turned to the Japanese in the round glasses. "Cohn  Laney."

"Shinya  Yamazaki," the man said, extending his hand. They shook.
"We spoke on the telephone."

"You're conducting the interview?"

A flurry of blinks. "I'm sorry, no," the man said. And  then,  "I
am a student of existential sociology."

"I  don't  get  it,"  Laney  said. The two opposite said nothing.
Shinya Yamazaki looked embarrassed. The one-eared man glowered.

"You're Australian," Laney said to the one-eared man.

"Tazzie," the man corrected. "Sided with the South in  the  Trou-
bles."

"Let's start over," Laney suggested. "Paragon-Asia Dataflow.' You
them?"

"Persistent bugger."

"Goes with the territory," Laney said. "Professionally, I  mean."

"Fair  enough." The man raised his eyebrows, one of which was bi-
sected by a twisted pink cable of scar tissue. "Rez,  then.  What
do you think of him?"  "You mean the rock sta~?" Laney asked, af-
ter struggling with a basic problem of context.

A nod. The man regarded Laney with utmost gravity.

"From Lo/Rez? The band?" Half Irish, half Chinese. A broken nose,
never repaired. Long green eyes.

"What do I think of him?"

In  Kathy  Torrance's  system  of things, the singer had been re-
served a special disdain. She had viewed him as a living  fossil,
an annoying survival from an earlier, less evolved era. He was at
once massively and meaninglessly famous, she maintained, just  as
he was both massively and meaninglessly wealthy. Kathy thought of
celebrity as a subtle fluid, a universal element, like the  phlo-
giston  of  the  ancients,  something  spread  evenly at creation
through all the universe, but prone now to accrete, under specif-
ic conditions, around certain individuals and their careers. Rez,
in Kathy's view, had simply  lasted  far  too  long.  Monstrously
long.  He  was  affecting the unity of her theory. He was defying
the proper order of the food chain. Perhaps there was nothing big
enough to eat him, not even Slitscan. And while Lo/Rez, the band,
still extruded product on an annoyingly regular basis, in a vari-
ety of media, their singer stubbornly refused to destroy himself,
murder someone, become active in politics, admit to an  interest-
ing  substance-abuse problem or an arcane sexual addiction-indeed
to do anything at all worthy of an opening segment  on  Slitscan.
He glimmered, dully perhaps, but steadily, just beyond Kathy Tor-
rance's reach. Which was, Laney had always assumed, the real rea-
son for her hating him so.

"Well,"  Laney  said,  after some thought, and feeling a peculiar
compulsion to attempt a truthful answer, "I remember buying their
first album. When it came out."

"Title?" The one-eared man grew graver still.

"Lo Rez Skyline," Laney said, grateful for whatever minute synap-
tic event had allowed the recall. "But I couldn't  tell  you  how
many  they've put out since."  "Twenty-six, not counting compila-
tions," said Mr. Yamazaki, straightening his glasses.

Laney felt the pills he'd taken, the ones that were  supposed  to
cushion  the  jet  lag, drop out from under him like some kind of
rotten pharmacological scaffolding. The walls of the Trial seemed
to grow closer.

"If  you  aren't going to tell me what this is about," he said to
the one-eared man, "I'm going back to the hotel. I'm tired."

"Keith Alan Blackwell," extending his hand. Laney allowed his own
to  be taken and briefly shaken. The man's palm felt like a piece
of athletic equipment. "Keithy.' We'll have a few  drinks  and  a
little chat."

"First  you  tell  me  whether  or not you're from Paragon-Asia,"
Laney suggested.

"Firm in question's a couple of lines of code in a machine  in  a
backroom  in  Lygon  Street,"  Blackwell  said. "A dummy, but you
could say it's our dummy, if that makes you feel better."

"I'm not sure it does," Laney said. "You fly me over to interview
for  a  job, now you're telling me the company I'm supposed to be
interviewing for doesn't exist."

"It exists," said Keith Alan Blackwell. "It's on the  machine  in
Lygon Street."

A  waitress  arrived. She wore a shapeless gray cotton boilersuit
and cosmetic bruises.

"Big draft. Kirin. Cold one. What's yours, Laney?"

"Iced coffee."

"Coke Lite, please," said the one who'd introduced himself as Ya-
mazaki.

"Fine,"  said the earless Blackwell, glumly, as the waitress van-
ished into the gloom.

"I'd appreciate it if you could explain to me  what  we're  doing
here," Laney said. He saw that Yamazaki was scribbling frantical-
ly on the screen of  a  small  notebook,  the  lightpen  flashing
faintly  in  the  dark.  "Are you taking this down?" Laney asked.
"Sorry, no. Making note of waitress' costume."

"Why?" Laney asked.

"Sorry," said Yamazaki, saving what he'd written and turning  off
the  notebook.  He  tucked the pen carefully into a recess on the
side. "I am a student of such things. It is my  habit  to  record
ephemera  of  popular  culture.  Her costume raises the question:
does it merely reflect the theme of this club, or does it  repre-
sent  some deeper response to trauma of earthquake and subsequent
reconstruction?"  9 2.      Lo Rez Skyline They met in  a  jungle
clearing.

Kelsey  had done the vegetation: big bright Rousseau leaves, car-
won orchids flecked with her idea of tropical colors  (which  re-
minded Chia of that mall chain that sold "organic" cosmetic prod-
ucts in shades utterly unknown to nature).  Zona,  the  only  one
telepresent who'd ever seen anything like a real jungle, had done
the audio, providing birdcalis, invisible but realistically dopp-
lering  bugs, and the odd vegetational rustle artfully suggesting
not snakes but some shy furry thing, soft-pawed and curious.

The light, such as there was, filtered down through high, green

canopies, entirely too Disneyesque for Chia-though there was no

real need for "light" in a place that consisted of nothing  else.

Zona, her blue Aztec death's-head burning bodiless, ghosts of her
blue hands flickering like strobe-lit doves: "Clearly, this dick-
less  whore, the disembodied, has contrived to ensnare his soul."
Stylized lightning zig-zags rose around the  crown  of  the  neon
skull in deliberate emphasis.

Chia wondered what she'd really said. Was "dickless whore" an

artifact of instantaneous on-line translation, or was that really
something you could or would say in Mexican?

"Waiting hard con-firm from Tokyo chapter," Kelsey reminded them.
Kelsey's  father  was a Houston tax lawyer, something of his par-
ticular species of biz-speak tending to enter his daughter around

meeting  time; also a certain ability to wait that Chia found ir-
ritating,


11 particularly as manifested by a saucer-eyed  nymph-figure  out
of  some  old anime. Which Chia was double damn sure Kelsey would
not look like realtime, were they ever to meet  that  way.  (Chia
herself was presenting currently as an only slightly tweaked, she
felt, version of how the mirror told  her  she  actually  looked.
Less nose, maybe. Lips a little fuller. But that was it. Almost.)

"Exactly," Zona said, miniature stone calendars whirling  angrily
in  her  eye-holes.  "We  wait. While he moves ever closer to his
fate. We wait. If my girls and I were to wait like this, the Rats
would  sweep  us  from  the  avenues." Zona was, she claimed, the
leader of a knife-packing chilanga girl gang. Not the meanest  in
Mexico  City,  maybe,  but serious enough about turf and tribute.
Chia wasn't sure she believed it, but it made for some  interest-
ing attitude in meetings.

"Really?"  Kelsey drew her nymph-self up with elvin dignity, bat-
ting manga-doe lashes in disbelief. "In that case, Zona Rosa, why
don't you just get yourself over to Tokyo and find out what's re-
ally going on? I mean, did Rez say that, that  he  was  going  to
marry  her, or what? And while you're at it, find out whether she
exists or not, okay?"

The calendars stopped on a dime.

The blue hands vanished.

The skull seemed to recede some infinite distance yet remain per-
fectly in focus, clear in every textural detail.

Old trick, Chia thought. Stalling.

"You know that I cannot do that," Zona said. "I have responsibil-
ities here. Maria Conchita, the Rat warlord, has stated that-"

"As if we care, right?" Kelsey launched herself straight up,  her
nymphness  a  pale blur against the rising tangle of green, until
she hovered just below the canopy, a beam of sunlight  flattering
one  impossible  cheekbone.  "Zona Rosa's full of shit!" she bel-
lowed, not at all nymphlike.

"Don't fight," Chia said. "This is important. Please."

Kelsey descended, instantly. "Then you go," she said.

"Me?"  "You," Kelsey said.

"I can't," Chia said. "To Tokyo? How could I?"

"In an airplane."

"We don't have your kind of money, Kelsey."

"You've got a passport. We know you do. Your mother  had  to  get
one  for  you  when  she was doing the custody thing. And we know
that you are, to put it delicately, 'between schools,' yes?"

"Yes-"

"Then what's the prob?"

"Your father's a big tax lawyer!"

"I know," Kelsey said. "And he flies back and forth, all over the
world, making money. But you know what else he earns, Chia?"

"What?"

"Frequent-flyer  points.  Big-ass  frequent-flyer  points. On Air
Magellan."

"Interesting," said the  Aztec  skull.  "Tokyo,"  said  the  mean
nymph. Shit, Chia thought.



The  wall  opposite  Chia's  bed  was decorated with a six-by-six
laser blowup of the cover of Lo Rez Skyline, their  first  album.
Not the one you got if you bought it today, but the original, the
group shot they'd done for that crucial first release on the  in-
die Dog Soup label. She'd pulled the file off the club's site the
week she'd joined, found a place near the Market that could print
it  out that big. It was still her favorite, and not just, as her
mother too frequently suggested, because they all still looked so
young.  Her  mother  didn't  like that the members of Lo/Rez were
nearly as old as she was. Why wasn't Chia into  music  by  people
her own age?

-Please, mother, who?

-That Chrome Koran, say.

-Gag, mother.

Chia suspected that her mother's perception of time differed

2 13 from her own in radical and mysterious ways. Not just in the
way that a month, to Chia's mother, was not a very long time, but
in  the way that her mother's "now" was such a narrow and literal
thing. News-governed, Chia believed. Cable-fed. A  present  honed
to whatever very instant of a helicopter traffic report.

Chia's  "now"  was  digital, effortlessly elastic, instant recall
supported by global systems she'd never have  to  bother  compre-
hending.

Lo  Rez  Skyline  had been released, if you could call it that, a
week (well, six days) before Chia had been  born.  She  estimated
that  no  hard  copies would have reached Seattle in time for her
nativity, but she liked to believe there had been listeners  here
even  then,  PacRim visionaries netting new sounds from indies as
obscure, even, as East Teipei's  Dog  Soup.  Surely  the  opening
chords  of  "Positron Premonition" had shoved molecules of actual
Seattle air, somewhere, in somebody's basement room, at the fate-
ful moment of her birth. She knew that, somehow, just as she knew
that "Stuck Pixel," barely even a song, just Lo  noodling  around
on  some  pawnshop  guitar, must have been playing somewhere when
her mother, who'd spoken very little English at that point, chose
Chia's  name from something cycling past on the Shopping Channel,
the phonetic caress of those  syllables  striking  her  there  in
Postnatal Recovery as some optimally gentle combination of sounds
Italian and English; her baby, red-haired even then, subsequently
christened  Chia  Pet McKenzie (somewhat, Chia later gathered, to
the amazement of her absent Canadian father).

These thoughts arriving in the pre-alarm dark,  just  before  the
infrared  winkie  on  her  alarm  clock stuttered silently to the
halogen gallery-spot, telling it  to  illuminate  Lo/Rez  in  all
their Dog Soup glory. Rez with his shirt open (but entirely iron-
ically) and Lo with his grin and a prototype mustache that hadn't
quite grown in.

Hi,  guys.  Fumbling  for  her  remote. Zapping infrared into the
shadows. Zap: Espressomatic. Zap: cubic space heater.

Beneath her pillow the unfamiliar shape of her passport,  like  a
vintage  game  cartridge,  hard  navy blue plastic, textured like
leatherette, with its stamped gold seal and eagle. The Air Magel-
lan

~  tickets  in  their  limp  beige plastic folder from the travel
agent in the mall.

Going now.

She took a deep breath. Her mother's house seemed to take one  as
well, but more tentatively, its wooden bones creaking in the win-
ter morning cold.



The cab arriving as scheduled, but magically nonetheless, and no,
it didn't honk, exactly as requested. Kelsey having explained how
these things were done. Just as Kelsey, briskly interviewing Chia
on  the  circumstances of her life, had devised the cover for her
impending absence: ten days in the San Juans  with  Hester  Chen,
whose well-heeled luddite mother so thoroughly feared electromag-
netic radiation that she lived phoneless, in a sod-roofed  castle
of  driftwood,  no electricity allowed whatever. "Tell her you're
doing a media fast, before your new school thing comes together,"
Kelsey  had said. "She'll like that." And Chia's mother, who felt
that Chia spent entirely too much time gloved and goggled, did.

Chia was actually fond of the gentle Hester, who  seemed  to  get
what  Lo/Rez  were  about,  though somehow without being quite as
fundamentally moved as could have been expected, and Chia had  in
fact  already  tried the pleasures of Mrs. Chen's island retreat.
But Hester's mother had made  them  both  wear  special  baseball
caps, sewn from some EMR-proof fabric, so that their young brains
might not be bathed quite so constantly in the invisible soup  of
bad media.

Chia  had  complained to Hester that the caps made them both look
like meshbacks.

-Don't be racist, Chia.

-I'm not.

-Classist, then.

-It's a matter of aesthetics.

And now in the overheated cab, her one  bag  beside  her  on  the
seat, she felt guilt at this deception, her mother sleeping there
be- 15 hind those darkened windows matted with frost,  under  the
weight  of  her thirty-five years and the flowered duvet Chia had
bought at Nordstrom's. When Chia had been small, her  mother  had
worn  her  hair  in a long braid, its tip skewered with turquoise
and abalone and carved bits of bone, like  the  magical  tail  of
some  mythical  animal,  swaying  there for Chia to grab. And the
house looked sad, too, as if  it  regretted  her  leaving,  white
paint  peeling  from the underlying gray of ninety-year-old cedar
clapboards. Chia shivered. What if she never came back?

"Where to?" the driver said, a black man in a puffy nylon  jacket
and a flat plaid cap.

"SeaTac," Chia said, and pushed her shoulders back into the seat.

Pulling out past the old Lexus the neighbors kept up on  concrete
blocks in the driveway.



Airports  were  spooky  places, early in the morning. There was a
hollowness that could settle on you there, something sad and emp-
ty.  Corridors and people moving away down them. Standing in line
behind people she'd never seen before and would never see  again.
Her  bag  over  her  shoulder  and her passport and ticket in her
hand. She wanted another cup of coffee. There was one back in her
room,  in  the  Espressomatic.  Which  she  should've emptied and
cleaned, because now it would go moldy while she was away.

"Yes?" The man behind the counter wore a  striped  shirt,  a  tie
with  the  Air  Magellan  logo repeated down it diagonally, and a
green jade labret stud. Chia wondered what his lower  lip  looked
like  when  he  took it out. She never would, she decided, if she
had one of those. She handed him her ticket. He  sighed  and  re-
moved  them  from the folder, letting her know that she should've
done that herself.

She watched him run a scanner over her ticket.

"Air Magellan one-oh-five to Narita, economy return."

"That's right," Chia said, trying to be helpful. He  didn't  seem
to appreciate that.  "Travel document."

Chia handed him her passport. He looked at it as though he'd nev-
er seen one before, sighed, and plugged it into a slot in the top
of  his  counter. The slot had beat-up aluminum lips, and someone
had covered these with transparent tape, peeling now  and  dirty.
The  man was looking at a monitor Chia couldn't see. Maybe he was
going to tell her she couldn't go. She thought about  the  coffee
in her Espressomatic. It would still be warm.

"Twenty-three D," he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a dif-
ferent slot. He pulled her passport out and  handed  it  to  her,
along  with  her  ticket  and the boarding pass. "Gate fifty-two,
blue concourse. Checking anything?"


"Passengers who've cleared security may be subject to noninvasive
DNA sampling," he said, the words all run together because he was
only saying it because it was the law that he had to.

She put her passport and ticket away in the special pocket inside
her parka. She kept the boarding pass in her hand. She went look-
ing for the blue concourse. She had to go downstairs to find  it,
and  take  one of those trains that was like an elevator that ran
sideways. Half an hour later she was through security, looking at
the  seals they'd put on the zippers of her carry-on. They looked
like rings of rubbery red candy. She hadn't expected them  to  do
that; she'd thought she could find a pay-station in the departure
lounge, link up, and give the club an update. They  never  sealed
her  carry-on  when she went to Vancouver to stay with her uncle,
but that wasn't really international, not since the Agreement.

She was riding a rubber sidewalk toward Gate 52 when she saw  the
blue light flashing, up ahead. Soldiers there, and a little barn-
cade. The soldiers were lining people up as  they  came  off  the
sidewalk.  They  wore  fatigues  and didn't seem to be much older
than the guys at her last school.

"Shit," she heard the woman in front of  her  say,  a  big-haired
blond  with  obvious  extensions  woven  in. Big red lips, multi-
level     o         2 mascara, padded shoulders out to here, tiny
little  skirt,  white  cowboy boots. Like that country singer her
mother liked, Ashleigh Modine Carter. Kind of a  meshback  thing,
but with money.

Chia  stepped  off  the  end  of the rubber sidewalk and took her
place in line behind the woman who looked  like  Ashleigh  Modine
Carter.

The soldiers were taking hair samples and slotting people's pass-
ports. Chia assumed that was to prove you  really  were  who  you
said  you were, because your DNA was there in your passport, con-
verted into a kind of bar code.

The sampler was a little silver wand that vacuumed the tips of  a
couple  of  strands  in and clipped them off. They'd wind up with
the world's biggest collection of split ends, Chia  thought.  Now
it  was  the blond's turn. There were two boy-soldiers there, one
to work the sampler and one to rattle  off  the  line  about  how
you'd  already agreed to this by coming this far, and please pro-
duce your passport.

Chia watched as the woman  handed  over  her  passport,  becoming
somehow  instantly and up-front sexy, like a lightbulb coming on,
with a big smile for the soldier that made him blink and  swallow
and nearly drop the passport. Grinning, he stuck the passport in-
to a little console attached to the barricade. The other  soldier
raised  his  wand.  Chia saw the woman reach up and choose one of
her hair-extensions, offering the end of this for  sampling.  The
whole  thing  taking maybe eight seconds, including the return of
her passport, and the first soldier was still smiling now that it
was Chia's turn.

The  woman  moved on, having just committed what Chia felt fairly
certain would be a federal offense. Should she tell the  soldier?

But  she didn't, and then they were handing back her passport and
Chia was on her way to Gate 53. Where she looked  for  the  woman
but didn't see her.

She watched the ads cycle by on the walls, until they were called
to board by rows.  Seat 23E remained empty  as  Chia  waited  for
takeoff,  sucking  on a peppermint the flight attendant had given
her. The only empty seat on the plane, she figured. If nobody ar-
rived  to take it, she thought, she'd be able to fold the armrest
away and curl up there. She tried putting out a  negative  mental
field,  a vibe that would keep anyone from getting on at the last
minute and sitting there. Zona Rosa was into that,  part  of  her
whole girl-gang martial arts thing. Chia didn't see how you could
seriously believe it would work.

And it didn't, because here came that blond down the  aisle,  and
wasn't   that   an  eye-click  of  recognition  Chia  saw  there?
3.      Almost a Civilian It had been a weeknight,  a  Wednesday,
when  Laney  had last seen Kathy Torrance, and her tattoo had not
been visible. She'd stood there in  the  Cage,  screaming  as  he
cleaned out his locker. She was wearing an Armani blazer cut from
gun-metal fustian, its matching skirt concealing  the  sign  from
outer  space.  A  single strand of pearls was visible at the open
throat of her white,  man-tailored  blouse.  Her  dress  uniform.
Called on the carpet for her subordinate's defection.

He  knew  that  she was screaming because her mouth was open, but
the syllables of her rage couldn't penetrate the seamless hissing
surf  of  the white-noise generator provided by his lawyers. He'd
been advised to wear the generator at all times, during this last
visit  to  the  Slitscan offices. He'd been instructed to make no
statements. Certainly he would hear none.

And later he would sometimes wonder exactly how  she  might  have
framed  her fury. Some restatement of her theory of celebrity and
the nature of its price, of Slitscan's place in that, of  Laney's
inability  to  function  there?  Or would she have focused on his
treason? But he hadn't heard;  he'd  only  put  these  things  he
didn't  really  want  into a corrugated plastic carton that still
smelled faintly of Mexican oranges. The notebook, screen  cracked
now,  useless,  that  he'd carried through college. Insulated mug
with the Nissan County logo peeling away. Notes he'd made on  pa-
per,  counter  to office policy. A coffeestained fax from a woman
he'd slept with in Ixtapa, someone whose




21

initials couldn't be deciphered now and whose name  he'd  forgot-
ten.  Pointless  pieces  of the self, destined for a cannister in
the building's parking lot. But  he'd  leave  nothing  here,  and
Kathy kept on screaming.

Now,  in  Death Cube K, he imagined that she'd told him that he'd
never work in that town again, and indeed it seemed he might not.
Disloyalty  to  one's  employers  being  a particularly difficult
notch on anyone's ticket, and perhaps particularly  so,  in  that
town, when the act itself had sprung from what Laney recalled had
once been called scruples.

The word itself striking him now as singularly ridiculous.

"You smiled." Blackwell staring at him from across the  tiny  ta-
ble.

"Seratonin depletion."

"Food," said Blackwell.

"I'm not really hungry."

"Need  to carbo-load," Blackwell said, standing. He took up a re-
markable amount of space.

Laney and Yamazaki got to their feet and followed Blackwell  down
out  of  Death Cube K, to descend the 0 My Golly Building itself.
Out of roach-light, into the chrome and neon  gulch  of  Roppongi
Don.  A  reek  of  putrid  fish and fruit even in this chill damp
night, though muted somewhat by  the  baking-sugar  sweetness  of
Chinese  gasohol  from the vehicles whirring past on the express-
way. But there was comfort in the steady voice  of  traffic,  and
Laney found it better to be upright, moving.

If  he  kept  moving,  perhaps he could puzzle out the meaning of
Keith Alan Blackwell and Shinya Yamazaki.

Blackwell leading the way across a pedestrian  overpass.  Laney's
hand  brushed  an  irregularity on the alloy rail. He saw that it
was an accidental fold or pucker in a bright  little  sticker;  a
bare-breasted  girl  smiling  up at him from a palm-sized silvery
hologram. As his angle of vision changed, she seemed  to  gesture
at  the telephone number above her head. The railing, end to end,
was dressed with these small ads, though there were precise  gaps
where a few had been peeled away for later perusal.

Blackwell's bulk parted the sidewalk crowd on the far side like a
freighter through a bobbing stream of pleasure  craft.  "Carbohy-
drates,"  he  said,  over a mountainous shoulder. He steered them
down an alley, a narrow maw of colored light, past  an  all-night
veterinary clinic in whose window a pair of white-gowned surgeons
were performing an operation on what Laney hoped was a cat. A re-
laxed  little  tableau of pedestrians paused here, observing from
the pavement.

Blackwell eased himself edgewise into a bright cave, where  steam
rose from cookers behind a counter of reconstituted granite.

Laney  and  Yamazaki  followed  him  in,  the  counterman already
ladling out fragrant messes of  broth-slick  beige  to  the  Aus-
tralian's order.

Laney watched Blackwell raise the bowl to his mouth and apparent-
ly inhale the bulk of his noodles, severing them from the remain-
der  with a neat snap of his bright plastic teeth. Muscles in the
man's thick neck worked mightily as he swallowed.

Laney stared.

Blackwell wiped his mouth with the back of one  vast  and  pinkly
jigsawed  hand.  He  belched. "Give us one of those baby tubes of
Dry     He downed the entire beer in a single  swallow,  absently
crushing  the  sturdy  steel  can  as though it were a paper cup.
"Similar," he said, rattling his bowl for the counterman.

Laney, suddenly ravenous in spite or because of  this  gluttonous
display,  gave  his  attention  to  his own bowl, where dyed pink
slices of mystery meat, thin as paper, basked atop a sargasso  of
noodles.

Laney  ate in silence, as did Yamazaki, Blackwell downing another
three beers to no apparent effect. As Laney drank off the remain-
ing broth, and put his bowl down on the counter, he noticed an ad
behind the counter for something called  Apple  Shires  Authentic
Fine  Fruit  Beverage.  Misreading it initially as Alison Shires,
once the object of his scruples.

"Taste the wet warm life in Apple Shires," the ad advised.


23 Alison Shires, glimpsed  first  as  animated  headshots,  five
months  into  his  time at Slitscan, had been a rather ordinarily
attractive girl murmuring her stats to  imagined  casting  direc-
tors, agents, someone, anyone.

Kathy  Torrance  had  watched his face, as he watched the screen.
"Babed out' yet, Laney? Allergic reaction to cute? First symptoms
are  a  sort  of underlying irritation, a resentment, a vague but
persistent feeling that you're being gotten at,  taken  advantage
of. .

"She isn't even as 'cute' as the last two."

"Exactly.  She's  almost  normal-looking.  Almost a civilian. Tag
her."

Laney looked up. "What for?"

"Tag her. He could get off pretending she's a waitress  or  some-
thing."

"You think she's the one?"

"You've  got  another three hundred in there easy, Laney. Picking
probables is a start."

"At random?"

"We call it 'instinct.' Tag her."

Laney cursor-clicked, the pale blue arrow resting  by  chance  in
the  shadowed  orbit  of  the girl's lowered eye. Marking her for
closer examination as the possible sometime  partner  of  a  very
publicly  married  actor, famous in a way that Kathy Torrance un-
derstood and approved of. One who must obey the dictates  of  the
food  chain.  Not  too big for Slitscan to swallow. But he or his
handlers had so far been very cautious. Or very lucky.

But no more. A rumor had reached Kathy, via one  of  those  "back
channels"  she  depended on, and now the food chain must have its
way.

"Wake up," Blackwell said. "You're falling asleep in  your  bowl.
Time  you  tell  us how you lost your last job, if we're going to
offer you another."  "Coffee," Laney said.

Laney was not, he was careful to point out, a voyeur.  He  had  a
peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medical-
ly documented concentration-deficit that he could  toggle,  under
certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This
made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch  of  Amos
'n'  Andes,  an extremely good researcher. (He made no mention of
the Federal Orphanage in Gainesville, nor of  any  attempts  that
might have been made there to cure his concentration-deficit. The
5-SB trials or any of that.)

The relevant data, in terms of  his  current  employability,  was
that  he  was  an intuitive fisher of patterns oi information: of
the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently  cre-
ated in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly
multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laney's  concen-
tration-deficit,  too slight to register on some scales, made him
a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program,  from
database  to  database,  from platform to platform, in a way that
was, well, intuitive.

And that was the catch, really, when it came to  finding  employ-
ment:  Laney  was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-
witch. He couldn't explain how he did what he did. He just didn't
know.

He'd come to Slitscan from DatAmerica, where he'd been a research
assistant on a project code named TIDAL. It said something  about
the  corporate  culture  of  DatAmerica that Laney had never been
able to discover whether or not TIDAL was an  acronym,  or  (even
remotely) what TIDAL was about. He'd spent his time skimming vast
floes of undifferentiated data, looking for "nodal  points"  he'd
been trained to recognize by a team of French scientists who were
all keen tennis players, and none of whom had had any interest in
explaining  these nodal points to Laney, who came to feel that he
served as a kind of native guide. Whatever the Frenchmen were af-
ter,  he  was  there  to  scare  it  up  for  them.  And  it beat
Gainesville, no contest. Until               25

TIDAL, whatever it was, had been cancelled, and there didn't seem
to  be anything else for Laney to do at DatAmerica. The Frenchmen
were gone, and when Laney tried  to  talk  to  other  researchers
about  what  they'd been doing, they looked at him as though they
thought he was crazy.

When he'd gone to interview for  Slitscan,  the  interviewer  had
been  Kathy  Torrance.  He'd had no way of knowing that she was a
department head, or that she would soon be his boss. He told  her
the truth about himself. Most of it, anyway.

She  was  the palest woman Laney had ever seen. Pale to the point
of translucence. (Later he'd learned this had a lot  to  do  with
cosmetics, and in particular a British line that boasted of pecu-
liar light-bending properties.)

"Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers  blue
oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?"

Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to. "Malaysia?"

"The  stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the
thread-tension."

"Oh."

"Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend  a
certain  frisson,  around  here.  You could lose the tie, though.
Definitely lose the tie. And keep  a  collection  of  felt-tipped
pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat
highliners, in a really nasty fluorescent shade."

"Are you joking?"

"Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Cohn?"

"Yes..

She never did call him "Cohn," then or ever.  "You'll  find  that
humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool.
You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly  oblique."

"How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?"

"Kathy.  I  mean  difficult  to quote effectively in a memo. Or a
court of law."

Yamazaki was a good listener. He'd blink,  swallow,  nod,  fiddle
with  the top button of his plaid shirt, whatever, all of it man-
aging to somehow convey that he was  getting  it,  the  drift  of
Laney's story.

Keith  Alan Blackwell was something else. He sat there inert as a
bale of beef, utterly motionless except when he'd raise his  left
hand and squeeze and twiddle the lobe-stump that was all that re-
mained of his left ear. He did this without hesitation or  embar-
rassment,  and  Laney formed the impression that it was affording
him some kind of relief. The scar tissue reddened slightly  under
Blackwell's ministrations.

Laney sat on an upholstered bench, his back to the wall. Yamazaki
and Blackwell faced him across the  narrow  table.  Behind  them,
over the uniformly black-haired heads of late-night Roppongi cof-
fee-drinkers, the holographic features of  the  chain's  namesake
floated  in  front  of a lurid sunset vista of snow-capped Andean
peaks. The lips of the 'toon-Amos were like inflated  red  rubber
sausages,  a racial parody that would've earned the place a fire-
bombing anywhere in the L.A. basin. He was holding up a  steaming
coffee  cup,  white  and smoothly iconic, in a big, white-gloved,
three-fingered urDisney hand.

Yamazaki coughed, delicately. "You are telling us, please,  about
your experiences at Slitscan?"



Kathy  Torrance  began  by  offering  Laney a chance to net-surf,
Slitscan style.

She checked a pair of computers out of the Cage, shooed four  em-
ployees  from  an  SBU,  invited  Laney  in, and closed the door.
Chairs, a round table, a large softboard on the wall. He  watched
as  she jacked the computers into dataports and called up identi-
cal images of a longhaired dirty-blond guy in  his  mid-twenties.
Goatee and a gold


27 earring. The face meant nothing to Laney. It might have been a
face he'd passed on the street an hour before, the face of a  mi-
nor  player in daytime soap, or the face of someone whose freezer
had recently been discovered to be packed with his victims'  fin-
gers.

"Clinton Hillman," Kathy Torrance said. "Hairdresser, sushi chef,
music journalist, extra in mid-budget hardcore.  This  headshot's
tweaked,  of course." She tapped keys, detweaking it. Clint Hill-
man's eyes and chin, on her screen, grew several clicks  smaller.
"Probably  did  it  himself.  With a professional job, there'd be
nothing to work back from."

"He acts in porno?" Laney felt obscurely sorry for  Hillman,  who
looked lost and vulnerable without his chin.

"It  isn't  the  size  of  his chin they're interested in," Kathy
said. "It's  mainly  motion-capture,  in  porno.  Extreme  close.
They're  all body-doubles. Map on better faces in post. But some-
body's still gotta get down in  the  trenches  and  bump  uglies,
right?"

Laney shot her a sideways look. "If you say so."

She  handed Laney an industrial-strength pair of rubberized Thom-
son eyephones. "Do him."

"Do?"

"Him. Go for those nodal points you've been telling me about. The
headshot's  a  gateway to everything we've got on him. Whole gigs
of sheer boredom. Data like a sea of tapioca, Laney.  An  endless
vanilla  plane.  He's  boring  as the day is long, and the day is
long. Do it. Make my day. Do it and you've got yourself a job."

Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen.  "You  haven't
told me what I'm looking for."

"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say,
Laney, anything that might be of interest to Shitscan's audience.
Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant,
perpetually hungry organism craving the  warm  god-flesh  of  the
anointed.  Personally  I  like to imagine something the size of a
baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives  by
itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.
It's covered 28 William Gib~t~n with eyes and it sweats constant-
ly.  The  sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has
no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its  mute  ex-
tremes  of  murderous  rage  and infantile desire by changing the
channels on a universal remote.  Or  by  voting  in  presidential
elections."





Yamazaki  had his notebook out, hightpen poised. Laney found that
he didn't mind. It made the man look so  much  more  comfortable.
"Strategic  Business  Unit,"  he  said. "A small conference room.
Shitscan's post office."

"Post office?"

"California plan. People don't have their own desks. Check a com-
puter and a phone out of the Cage when you come in. Hotdesk it if
you need more peripherals. The SBUs are for  meetings,  but  it's
hard  to  get  one  when  you need it. Virtual meetings are a big
thing there, better for sensitive topics. You  get  a  locker  to
keep  your  personal  stuff  in.  You  don't want them to see any
printouts~ And they hate Post-its."

"Why?"

"Because you might've written something down  from  the  in-house
net,  and  it  might  get out. That notebook of yours would never
have been allowed out of the Cage. If there was  no  paper,  they
had  a  record  of  every  call,  every  image  called  up, every
keystroke."

Blackwell nodded now, his  stubbled  dome  catching  the  red  of
Amos's inner-tube lips. "Security."

"And  you were successful, Mr. Laney?" Yamazaki asked. "You found
the. . . nodal points?"

29 4.      Venice Decompressed "Shut up now,~' the woman  in  23E
said,  and  Chia  hadn't said anything at all. "Sister's going to
tell you a story."

Chia looked up from the seatback screen, where she'd been working
her  way through the eleventh level of a lobotomized airline ver-
sion of Skull Wars. The blond was looking straight ahead, not  at
Chia.  Her  screen  was down so that she could use the back of it
for a tray, and she'd finished another glass of the  iced  tomato
juice  she  kept  paying  the flight attendant to bring her. They
came, for some reason, with squared-off pieces of celery stuck up
in them, like a straw or stir-stick, but the blond didn't seem to
want these. She'd stacked five of them in a square on  the  tray,
the  way a kid might build the walls of a little house, or a cor-
ral for toy animals.

Chia looked down at her thumbs on the disposable Air Magellan

touchpad. Back up at the mascaraed eyes. Looking at her now.

"There's a place  where  it's  always  light,"  the  woman  said.
"Bright,  everywhere.  No  place  dark.  Bright like a mist, like
something falling, always, every second. All the  colors  of  it.
Towers  you can't see the top of, and the light falling. Down be-
low, they pile up bars. Bars and strip clubs and discos.  Stacked
up  like  shoe  boxes, one on top of the other. And no matter how
far you worm your way in, no matter how many  stairs  you  climb,
how  many  elevators you ride, no matter how small a room you fi-
nally get to, the light still finds you. It's a light that  blows
in under the door, like powder. Fine, so fine.


31  Blows  in  under  your  eyelids,  if you find a way to get to
sleep. But you don't want to sleep there.  Not  in  Shinjuku.  Do
you?"

Chia  was suddenly aware of the sheer physical mass of the plane,
of the terrible unlikeliness of its passage through space, of its
airframe  vibrating thiough frozen night somewhere above the sea,
off the coast of Alaska now-impossible but true. "No," Chia heard
herself  say,  as  Skull Wars, noting her inattention, dumped her
back a level.

"No," the woman agreed, "you don't. I know. But  they  make  you.
They  make you. At the center of the world." And then she put her
head back, closed h~r eyes, and began to snore.

Chia exited Skull Wars and tucked the touchpad into the seat-back
pocket. She felt like screaming. What had that been about?

The  attendant came by, scooped up the corral of celery sticks in
a napkin, took the woman's glass, wiped the tray, and snapped  it
up into position in the seatback.

"My bag?" Chia said. "In the bin?" She pointed.

He opened the hatch above her, pulled out her bag, and lowered it
into her lap.

"How do you undo these?" She touched the loops of tough red jelly
that held the Zip-tabs together.

He  took  a small black tool from a black holster on his belt. It
looked like something she'd seen a vet use to trim a dog's nails.
He  held  his  other  hand  cupped, to catch the little balls the
loops became when he snipped them with the tool.

"Okay to run this?" She pulled a zip and showed him her Sand-ben-
ders, stuffed in between four pairs of rolled-up tights.

"You  can't  port back here; only in business or first," he said.
"But you can access wha: You've got. Cable to the  seatback  dis-
play, if you want."

"Thanks," she said. "Got gogs." He moved on.

The  blond's  snore  faltered  in  mid-buzz as they jolted over a
pocket of turbulence. Chia dug  her  glasses  and  tip-sets  from
their  nests of clean underwear, putting them beside her, between
her hip 32 William Gibson and the armrest. She pulled  the  Sand-
benders out, zipped the bag shut, and used her free hand and both
feet to wedge the bag under the seat in front of her. She  wanted
out of here so bad.

With  the  Sandbenders  across  her thighs, she thumbed a battery
check. Eight hours on miser mode, if she was lucky. But right now
she  didn't care. She uncoiled the lead from around the bridge of
her glasses and jacked it. The tip-sets were tangled,  like  they
always were. Take your time, she told herself. A torn sensor-band
and she'd be here all night with an Ashleigh Modine Carter clone.
Little  silver thimbles, flexy framework fingers; easy did it.. .
. Plug for each one. Jack and jack...

The blond said something in her sleep.  If  sleep  was  what  you
called it.

Chia picked up her glasses, slid them on, and hit big red.

-My ass out of here.

And it was.

There  on  the  edge  of  her  bed, looking at the Lo Rez Skyline
poster. Until Lo noticed. He stroked his half-grown mustache  and
grinned at .her.

"Hey, Chia."

"Hey." Experience kept it subvocal, for privacy's sake.

"What's up, girl?"

"I'm on an airplane. I'm on my way to Japan."

"Japan? Kicky. You do our Budokan disk?"

"I don't feel like talking, Lo." Not to a software agent, anyway,
sweet as he might be.

"Easy." He shot her that catlike grin, his eyes wrinkling at  the
corners,  and  became  a still image. Chia looked around, feeling
disappointed. Things weren't quite the right  size,  somehow,  or
maybe she should've used those fractal packets that messed it all
up a little, put dust in the corners and smudges around the light
switch. Zona Rosa swore by them. When she was home, Chia liked it
that the construct was cleaner than her room  ever  was.  Now  it
made  her  homesick;  made her miss the real thing.   0         2
        33 1 She gestured for the living room, phasing past  what
would've  been  the  door  to  her mother's bedroom. She'd barely
wireframed it, here, and there was no there there, no  interiori-
ty. The living room had its sketchy angles as well, and furniture
she'd imported from a Playmobil system that predated her Sandben-
ders.  Wonkily bitmapped fish swam monotonously around in a glass
coffee table she'd built when she was nine. The trees through the
front  window  were  older  still: perfectly cylindrical Crayola-
brown trunks, each supporting an acid-green cotton ball of undif-
ferentiated  foliage.  If  she  looked  at these long enough, the
Mumphalumphagus would appear outside, wanting  to  play,  so  she
didn't.

She  positioned  herself on the Playmobil couch and looked at the
programs scattered across the top of the coffee table. The  Sand-
benders system software looked like an old-fashioned canvas water
bag, a sort of canteen (she'd had to consult What Things Are, her
icon  dictionary,  to figure that out). It was worn and spectacu-
larly organic, with tiny beads of water bulging through the tight
weave  of  fabric.  If  you got in super close you saw things re-
flected in the individual droplets: circuitry that was like bead-
work or the skin on a lizard's throat, a long empty beach under a
gray sky, mountains in the rain, creek water over  different-col-
ored stones. She loved Sandbenders; they were the best. THE SAND-
BENDERS, OREGON, was screened faintly across the sweating canvas,
as  though  it  had  almost faded away under a desert sun. SYSTEM
5.9. (She had all the upgrades, to 6.3. People said 6.4 was  bug-
gy.)

Beside  the water bag lay her schoolwork, represented by a three-
ring binder suffering the indignities of artificial bit-rot,  its
wire-frame cover festered with digital mung. She'd have to refor-
mat that before she started her new school, she reminded herself.
Too juvenile.

Her  Lo/Rez  collection,  albums, compilations and bootlegs, were
displayed as the original cased disks. These were stacked up,  as
casually  as possible, beside the archival material she'd managed
to assemble since being accepted into the Seattle  chapter.  This
looked, thanks to a fortuitous file-swap with a member in Sweden,
like a litho 34 Witlian, Gibson graphed tin lunch box, Rez and Lo
peering  stunned  and  fuzzy-eyed from its flat, rectangular lid.
The Swedish fan had scanned the artwork  from  the  five  printed
surfaces  of  the  original,  then  mapped it over wireframe. The
original was probably Nepalese, definitely unlicensed,  and  Chia
appreciated  the reverse cachet. Zona Rosa coveted a copy, but so
far all she'd offered were a set of cheesy tv spots for the fifth
Mexico  Dome concert. They weren't nearly cheesy enough, and Chia
wasn't prepared to 5W~tp. There was a shadowy Brazilian tour doc-
umentary supposed to have been made by a public-access subsidiary
of Globo. Chia wanted that, and Mexico was the same direction  as
Brazil.

She ran a finger down the stacked disks, her hand wireframed, the
finger tipped with quivering mercury, and thought about  the  Ru-
mor.  There had been run~ors before, there were rumors now, there
would always be rumors. There had been the  rumor  about  Lo  and
that  Danish model, that they were going to get married, and that
had probably been true, ever~ though they never  did.  And  there
were  always rumors about Rez atid different people. But that was
people. The Danish model was people, as much as Chia thought  she
was a snotbag. The Rumor was Sottiething else.

What, exactly, she was O~ her way to Tokyo to find out.

She selected Lo Rez Skyline

The  virtual Venice her father had sent for her thirteenth birth-
day looked like an old dusty book with leather covers, the smooth
brown  leather  scuffed  in  places  mm a fine suede, the digital
equivalent of washing denim in a machine full of golf  balls.  It
lay  beside  the  featureless, textureless gray file that was her
copy of the divorce decree and the custody agreement.

She pulled the Venice tOward her, opened it. The  fish  flickered
out of phase, her system lauochmng a subroutine.

Venice decompressed.

The  Piazza in midwinter monochrome, its facades texturemapped in
marble, porphyry, polished granite, jasper, alabaster (the

rich mineral names scrolling at will in the  menu  of  peripheral
vi- 0


3E  sion).  This city of winged lions and golden horses. This de-
fault hour of gray and perpetual dawn.

She could be alone here, or visit with the Music Master.

Her father, phoning from Singapore to wish her a happy  birthday,
had  told  her  that Hitler, during his first and only visit, had
slipped away to range the streets  alone,  in  these  same  small
hours, mad perhaps, and trotting like a dog.

Chia,  who  had only a vague idea who Hitler might have been, and
that mainly from references in songs, understood  the  urge.  The
stones  of the Piazza flowed beneath her like silk, as she raised
a silvered finger and sped into the maze of bridges, water, arch-
es, walls.

She had no idea what this place was meant to mean, the how or why
of it, but i~ fit so perfectly into itself and the space it occu-
pied,  water  and  stone slotting faultlessly into the mysterious
whole.

The gnarliest piece of software ever, and here came  the  opening
chords of "Positron Premonition."  Clinton Emory Hiliman, twenty-
five: hairdresser, sushi chef, music journalist, porno extra, re-
liable  purveyor  of proscribed fetal tissue cultures to three of
the more endomorphic members of the decidedly meshbacked Dukes of
Nuke 'Em, whose "Gulf War Baby" was eighteen with a bullet on the
Billboard chart, in heavy rotation on I (heart) America, and  had
already  been the subject of diplomatic protests from several Is-
lamic states.

Kathy Torrance looked as though  she  might  be  prepared  to  be
pleased. "And the fetal tissue, Laney?"

"Well," Laney said, putting the 'phones down beside the computer,
"I think that might be the good part."

"Why?"

"It has to be Iraqi. They make a point of insisting on that. They
won't shoot up any other kind."

"You're hired."

"I am?"

"You  must  have correlated the calls to Ventura with the parking
charges from the garage in the Beverly Center. Although that run-
ning gag about 'Gulf War babies' would've been hard to miss."

"Wait a minute," Laney said. "You knew."

"It's  the  top segment on Wednesday's show." She closed the com-
puter without bothering to turn  off  Clint  Hiliman's  detweaked
chin. "But now I've had a chance to watch you work, Laney. You're
a nat ural. I could almost believe there might actually be  some-
thing to     0         2 37 5.      Nodal Points that nodal point
bullshit. ome o~ your moves made no logical sense  whatever,  but
I've  just  wached  3ou hone in, cold, on something it took three
experienced researchers a month to excavate. You did it  in  just
under half an hour."

"Some  of  that was illegal," Laney said. "You're tied into parts
of DatAmerican that you aren't supposed to be."

"Do you know what anondisclosure agreement is, Laney?"



Yamazaki looked up fromhis notebook. "Very good," he said, proba-
bly to Blackwell. "This i~ very good."

Blackwell shifted his veight, the chair's polycarbon frame creak-
ing faintly in protest. "But he didn't last there, did he?"

"A little over six morrhs," Laney said.



Six months could be a vety long time, at Slitscan.

He used most of his fi:st month's salary to lease a micro-batche-
lor  in a retrofitted parking structure on Broadway Avenue, Santa
Monica. He bought shirts he thought were more like the ones  peo-
ple  wore  at  Slitscan,  and kerr his l~alaysian button-downs to
sleep in. He bought an expensive pair of sunglasses and made sure
he  never  displayed  as  much  as a sirgle felt-pen in his shirt
pocket.

Life at Slitscan had a certair.  focused  quality.  Laney's  col-
leagues  limited themselves to a ~articular bandwidth of emotion.
A certain kind of humor, as Kathy had said,  was  highly  valued,
but  there was remarkably little laughter. 'Ihe expected response
was eye contact, a nod, the edge of a smile. Lives were destroyed
here,  and  sometimes re-created, careers crushed or made anew in
guises surreal and unexpected. Because  Slitscan's  business  ~as
the titual letting of blood, and the blood it let was an aichemi-
cal fluid: celebrity in its rawest, purest form.

Laney's ability to locate key data in apparently random wastes of
incidental  information  earned him the envy and grudging admira-
tion of more experiencec researchers. He became Kathy's favorite,
and was almost pleased when he discovered that a rumor had spread
that they were having an affair.

They weren't-except for that one time at  her  place  in  Sherman
Oaks,  and  that  hadn't been a good idea. Nothing either of them
wanted to repeat.

But Laney was still narrowing down, getting focused, pushing  the
envelope  of  whatever it was that manifested as this talent, his
touch. And Kathy liked that. With his eyephones on and Slitscan's
dedicated  landline  feeding him the bleak reaches of DatAmerica,
he felt increasingly at home. He went where  Kathy  suggested  he
go. He found the nodal points.

Sometimes, falling asleep in Santa Monica, he wondered vaguely if
there might be a larger system, a field of  greater  perspective.
Perhaps  the  whole of DatAmerica possessed its own nodal points,
info-faults that might be followed down to  some  other  kind  of
truth, another mode of knowing, deep within gray shoals of infor-
mation. But only if there were someone there to  pose  the  right
question.  He  had no idea at all what that question might be, if
indeed there were one, but he somthow doubted it  would  ever  be
posed from an SBU at Slitscan.

Slitscan was descended from "reality" programming and the network
tabloids of the late twentieth century, but it resembled them  no
more  than  some  large,  swift,  bipedal carnivore resembled its
sluggish, shallow-dwelling ancestors.  Slitscan  was  the  mature
form, supporting fully global franchises. Slitscan's revenues had
paid for entire satellites and built the building he worked in in
Burbank.

Slitscan was a show so popular that it had evolved into something
akin to the old idea of a network. It was flanked and buffered by
spinoffs  and peripherals, each designed to shunt the viewer back
to the crucial core, the familiar and reliably bloody altar  that
one of Laney's Mexican co-workers called Smoking Mirror.

It was impossible to work at Slitscan without a sense of part ic-
ipating in history, or else in what Kathy  Torrance  would  argue
had  re P aced history. Shtscan itself, Laney suspected, might be
one of those  0         2 larger nodal points he sometimes  found
himself  trying  to imagine, an informational peculiarity opening
into some unthinkably deeper structure.

In his quest for lesser nodal pouts, the sort that Kathy sent him
into DatAmerica to locate, Laney hid already affected the courses
of municipal elections, the market in pitent gene futures,  abor-
tion laws in the State of New Jersey, and the spin on an ecstatic
pro-euthanasia movement (or suicide cult, depending) called Cease
Upon The Midnight, not to mention the lives and careers of sever-
al dozen celebrities of various kinds.

Not always for the worst, either,in terms of what the show's sub-
jects  might  have  wished for themselves. Kathy's segment on the
Dukes of Nuke 'Em, exposing the band's exclusive predilection for
Iraqi  fetal  tissue,  had  sent their subsequent release instant
platinum (and had resulted in show-trials and public hangings  in
Baghdad, but he supposed life was hard there so begin with).

Laney had never been a Slitscan ~iewer, himself, and he suspected
that this had counted in his favor when he'd  applied  as  a  re-
searcher. He had no strong opinion of the show either way. He ac-
cepted it, to the extent that he'd thought of it atall, as a fact
of  life.  Slitscan  was  how  a  certain  kind of news was done.
Slitscan was where he worked.

Slitscan allowed him to do the one thing he possessed  a  genuine
talent  for,  so he'd managed to avoid thinking in terms of cause
and effect. Even now, attempting to e~plain himself to the atten-
tive Mr.Yamazaki, he found it difficult to feel any clear linkage
of responsibility. The rich and the famous, Kathy had once  said,
were  seldom  that  way by accident. It was possible to be one or
the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both,

Celebrities who were neither  v~ere  something  else  again,  and
Kathy viewed these as crosses she must bear: a mass-murderer, for
instance, or his most recent victim's parents.  No  star  quality
(though  she always held out hope for the murderers, feeling that
at least the potential was there).

It was the other kind that Kathy wanted, directing the  atten  au
~AIiiIi~.m flili~g~,.  tions of Laney and as many as thirty other
researchers to the more private aspects of the lives of those who
were deliberately and at least moderately famous.

Alison  Shires  wasn't  famous at all, but the man Laney had con-
firmed she was having an affair with was famous enough.

And then something began to come clear to Laney.

Alison Shires knew, somehow, that  he  was  there,  watching.  As
though  she  felt him gazing down, into the pool of data that re-
flected her life, its surface made of all the bits that were  the
daily  record  of her life as it registered on the digital fabric
of the world.

Laney watched a nodal point begin to form over the reflection  of
Alison Shires.

She was going to kill herself.

6.      DESH  (.~hia  had  programmed her Music Master to have an
affinity for bridges. He appeared in her virtual Venice  whenever
she  crossed one at moderate speed: a slender young man with pale
blue eyes and a penchant for long, flowing coats.

He'd been the subject oi a look-and-feel action, in his beta  re-
lease,  when  lawyers representing a venerable British singer had
protested that the Music Master's designers had scanned in images
of  their client as a much younger man. This had been settled out
of court, and all later versions,  including  Chia's,  were  much
more  carefully  generic. (Kelsey had told her that it had mainly
had to do with changing one of his eyes, but why only the one?)

She'd fed him into Venice on her second visit, to keep her compa-
ny and provide musical variety, and keying his appearances to mo-
ments when she crossed bridges had seemed like a good idea. There
were  lots of bridges in Venice, some of them no more than a lit-
tle arc of stone steps spanning the narrowest of waterways. There
was  the Bridge of Sighs, which Chia avoided because she found it
sad and creepy, and the Bridge of Fists, which she  liked  mainly
for  its  name, and so many others. And there was the Rialto, big
and humped and fantastically old, where her father said  men  had
invented  banking,  or  a particular kind of banking. (Her father
worked for a bank, which was why he had to live in Singapore.)

She'd slowed her rush through the city now, and was cruising at

a walking pace up the stepped incline of the  Rialto,  the  Music
Mas-


43  ter  striding elegantly beside her, his putty-colored trench-
coat Happing in the breeze.  "DESFI," he said, triggered  by  her
glance,  "the  I)iatonic  Elaboration  of  Static I larmony. Also
known as the Major Chord with I)escending Bassline.  Bach's  'Air
on  a  G  String,' 1730. Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale,'
1967." If she made eye contact now, she'd hear his  samples,  di-
rectionless  and  at just the right volume. Then more about DESH,
and more samples. She had him here for company, though,  and  not
for a lecture. But lectures were all there was to him, aside from
his iconics, which were about  being  blond  and  fine-boned  and
wearing  clothes  more  beautifully than any human ever could. He
knew everything there was to know about music, and  nothing  else
at all.  She didn't know how long she'd been in Venice, this vis-
it. It was still that minute-before-dawn that she liked best, be-
cause she kept it that way.  "Do you know anything about Japanese
music?" she asked.

"What sort, exactly7"

"What people listen to."

"Popular music?"

"I guess so."

He paused, turning, hands in his trouser pockets and the  trench-
coat swinging to reveal its lining.

"We  could  begin with a music called enka," he said, "although I
doubt you'd like it." Software agents did that, learned what  you
liked.  "The  roots of contemporary Japanese pop came later, with
the wholesale creation of something called 'group  sounds.'  That
was  a  copy-cat phenomenon, flagrantly commercial. Extremely wa-
tereddown Western pop influences. Very bland and monotonous."

"But do they really have singers who don't exist?"

"The idol-singers," he said, starting up the hump-backed  incline
of  the bridge. "The idoru. Some of them are enormously popular."

"Do people kill themselves over them?"

"I don't know. They could do, I suppose."  44 W~Uiam Gib~3on "l)o
people marry them?"

"Not that I know of."

"How  about  Rei  loei? Wondering if that was how you proflounced
it.

"I'm afraid I don't know her," he said,  with  the  slight  wince
that  came when you asked him about music that had come out since
his own release. This always made Chia feel sorry for him,  which
she knew was ridiculous.

"Never mind," she said, and closed her eyes.

She removed her glasses.

After  Venice, the plane felt even more low-ceilinged and narrow,
a claustrophobic tube packed with seats and people.

The blond was awake, watching her, looking a lot less  like  Ash-
leigh  Modine  Carter  now that she'd removed most of her makeup.
Her face only inches away.

Then she smiled. It was a slow smile, modular,  as  though  there
were  stages  to  it,  each one governed by a separate shyness or
hesitation.

"I like your computer," she said. "It looks like it was  made  by
Indians or something."

Chia  looked  down at her Sandbenders. Turned off the red switch.
"Coral," she said. "These are turquoise. The ones that look  like
ivory are the inside of a kind of nut. Renewable."

"The rest is silver?"

"Aluminum,"  Chia  said.  "They  melt old cans they dig up on the
beach, cast it in sand molds. These panels  are  micarta.  That's
linen with this resin in it."

"I  didn't  know  Indians  could make computers," the woman said,
reaching out to touch the curved edge  of  the  Sandbenders.  Her
voice was hesitant, light, like a child's. The nail on the finger
that rested on  her  Sandbenders  was  bright  red,  the  lacquer
chipped through and ragged. A tremble, then the hand withdrew.

"I  drank  too  much. And with tequila in them, too. 'Vitamin T,'
Eddie calls it. I wasn't bad, was I?"          45  1  Chia  shook
her head.

"1 can't always remember, if In bad."

"Do  you  know how much long it is to Tokyo?" Chia asked, all she
could think of to say.

"Nine hours easy," the blond sid,  and  sighed.  "Subsonics  just
suck,  don't  they?  Eddie had me bo~ed on a super, in full busi-
ness, but then he said something went wong with the ticket. Eddie
gets  all  the  tickets  from  this place in Os~a. We went on Air
France once, first class, and your seat turns into abed and  they
tuck  you  in with a little quilt. And they have an open hr right
there and they just leave the bottles out, and champagne and  ust
the best food." The memory didn't seem to cheer her up. "Aid they
give you perfume and makeup in its own  case,  from  Herm~.  Real
leather, too. Why are you going to Tokyo?"

"Oh," Chia said. "Oh. Well. Myfriend. To see my friend."

"It's so strange. You know2 Sinc the quake."

"But they've built it all back nov. Haven't they?"

"Sure,  but  they  did it all so fast,~nost1y with that nanotech,
that just grows? Eddie got in there befor the dust  had  settled.
Told  me you could see those towers growingat night. Rooms up top
like a honeycomb, and walls just sealing thmselves over, one  af-
ter another. Said it was like watching a candle rielt, but in re-
verse. That's too scary. Doesn't make a sound. Machins too  small
to see. They can get into your body, you know?"

Chia sensed an underlying edg of panic there. "Eddie?" she asked,
hoping to change the subject.

"Eddie's like a businessman, Hewent to Japan to make money  after
the  earthquake.  He  says the iifa, infa, the structure was wide
open, then. He says it took the spin4 out of it, sort of, so  you
could  come  in  and root around, quick, befre it healed over and
hardened up again. And it healed over arounaEddie, like  he's  an
implant or something, so now he's part of the ma, the infa-"

"Infrastructure."

"The  structure.  Yeah. So now hes plugged in, to all that juice.
46 William Gibson He's a landlord, and he OWfl5 these clubs,  and
has deals in music and vids and things."

Chia  leaned  over,  dragging  her  bag  from beneath the seat in
front, putting away the  Sandbenders.  "Do  you  live  there,  in
Tokyo?"

"Part of the time."

"Do you like it?"

"It's  .  . . I . . . well . . . Weird, right? It's not like any-
place. This huge thing happened there, then they  fixed  it  with
what was maybe even a huger thing, a bigger change, and everybody
goes around pretending it never happened, that nothing  happened.
But you know what?"

"What?"

"Look  at  a map. A map from before? A lot of it's not even where
it used to be. Nowhere near. Well, a few things are, the  Palace,
that  expressway, and that big city hall thing in Shinjuku, but a
lot of the rest of it's like they just made it  up.  They  pushed
all the quake-junk into the water, like landfill, and now they're
building that up, too. New islands."

"You know," Chia said, "I'm really sleepy. I think I'll try to go
to sleep now."

"My name's Maryalice. Like it's one word."

"Mine's Chia."

Chia  closed  her  eyes  and  tried to put her seat back a little
more, but that was as far as it could go.

"Pretty name," Maryalice said.

Chia thought she could hear the Music Master's  DESH  behind  the
sound  of  the engines, not so much a sound now as a part of her.
That whiter shade of something, but she could never quite make it
out.

7.      The  Wet,  Warm  Life in Alison Shires ~Shell try to kill
herself," Laney said.

"Why?" Kathy Torrance sipped espresso. A Monday afternoon in

the Cage.

"Because she knows. She can feel me watching."

"That's impossible, Laney."

"She knows."

"You aren't 'watching' her. You're examining the data she  gener-
ates, like the data all our lives generate. She can't know that."

"She does."

The white cup clicking down into its saucer. "Then  how  can  you
know that she does? You're looking at her phone records, what she
chooses to watch and when, the music she accesses. How could  you
possibly know that she's aware of your attention?"

The nodal point, he wanted to say. But didn't.

"I think you're working too hard, Laney. Five days off."

"No, I'd rather-"

"I  can't  afford to let you burn yourself out. I know the signs,
Laney. Recreational leave, full pay, five days."

She added a travel bonus. Laney was sent to  Slitscan's  in-house
agency and booked into a hollowed-out hilltop above Ixtapa, a ho-
tel with vast stone spheres ranged across the  polished  concrete
of its glass-walled lobby. Beyond the glass, iguanas regarded the
registration staff with an  ancient  calm,  green  scales  bright
against  dusty          brown  branches.           49 Laney met a
woman who said she edited lamps for a design house in  San  Fran-
cisco. Tuesday evening. I-Ie'd been in Mexico three hours. Drinks
in the lobby bar.

lie asked her what that meant, to edit lamps. Laney had  recently
noticed  that  the  only  people  who had titles that clearly de-
scribed their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have  wanted.  if  people
asked  him what he did, he said he was a quantitative analyst. He
didn't try to explain the nodal points, or Kathy Torrance's theo-
ries about celebrity.

The  woman  replied that her company produced short-run furniture
and accessories, lamps in particular.  The  actual  manufacturing
took place at any number of different locations, mainly in North-
ern California. Cottage industry. One maker might contract to  do
two  hundred  granite  bases, another to lacquer and distress two
hundred steel tubes in a very specific shade of blue. She brought
out  a  notebook  and  showed  him  animated sketches. All of the
things had a thin, spiky look that made him think of African  in-
sects he'd seen on the Nature Channel.

Did she design them? No. They were designed in Russia, in Moscow.
She was the editor. She selected the suppliers of components. She
oversaw manufacture, transport to San Francisco, assembly in what
once had been a cannery. If the design documents specified  some-
thing  that couldn't be provided, she either found a new supplier
or negotiated a compromise in material or workmanship.

Laney asked who they sold to. People who wanted things other peo-
ple didn't have, she said. Or that other people didn't like? That
too, she said. Did she enjoy it? Yes. Because she generally liked
the things the Russians designed, and she tended to like the peo-
ple who manufactured the components. Best of all, she  told  him,
she  liked  the feeling of bringing something new into the world,
of watching the sketches from Moscow finally  become  objects  on
the floor of the former cannery.

It's  there, one day, she said, and you can look at it, and touch
it, and know whether or not it's good.  50 William  Gibson  Laney
considered  this.  She  seemed very calm. Shadows lengthened with
almost visible speed across the floor of glossy concrete.

lie put his hand over hers.

And touch it, and know whether or not it's good



Just before dawn, the editor of  lamps  asleep  in  his  bed,  he
watched the curve of the bay from the suite's balcony, the moon a
milky thing, translucent, nearly gone.

In the night, in the Federal District, somewhere  east  of  here,
there  had been rocket attacks and rumors of chemical agents, the
latest act in one of those obscure  and  ongoing  struggles  that
made up the background of his world.

Birds  were  waking in the trees around him, a sound he knew from
Gainesville, from the orphanage and other mornings there.



Kathy Torrance announced herself satisfied with Laney's recupera-
tion. He looked rested, she said.

He  took  to  the  seas of DatAmerica without comment, suspecting
that another leave might prove permanent. She  was  watching  him
the way an experienced artisan might watch a valued tool that had
shown the first signs of metal-fatigue.

The nodal point was different now, though he had no  language  to
describe  the  change. He sifted the countless fragments that had
clustered around Alison Shires in his absence,  feeling  for  the
source  of  his  earlier conviction. He called up the music she'd
accessed while he'd been in Mexico, playing each song in the  or-
der  of  her selection. He found her choices had grown more life-
affirming; she'd moved to a new provider, Upful Groupvine,  whose
relentlessly  positive  product was the musical equivalent of the
Good News Channel.

Cross-indexing her charges against the  records  of  her  credit-
provider  and  its client retailers, he produced a list of every-
thing she'd purchased in the jMtst week. Six-pack, blides, Tokkai
carton  opener.  Did  she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he
remembered Kathy's advice, that this was the part of esearch most
prone to produce serious transference, the point at vhich the re-
searcher's intimacy  with  the  subject  could  lead  to  los  of
per;pective. "It's often easiest for us to identify at the retail
lev1, Lane3'. We're a shopping species. Find  yourself  buying  a
different  )rand  of  frozen peas because the subject does, watch
out."



The floor of Laney's apartment was terraed against  the  original
slope  of  the parking garage. He slept at thedeep erd, on an in-
flatable guest bed he'd ordered from the Shoppng Char~nel.  There
were  no  windows. Regulations required a ugh-pump, and reconsti-
tuted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel inthe ceiling, but  he
was seldom there during daylight hours.

He  sat  on  the slippery edge of the nflatable, picturing Alison
Shires in her Fountain Avenue  apartmen.  Larger  than  this,  he
knew,  but  not by much. Windows. Her rent vas paid, Slitscan had
finally determined, by her married actor. Via a  fain)  intricate
series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. "His reptiI~ fund," Kathy
called it.

He could hold Alison Shires' historyin his mind like a single ob-
ject,  like the perfectly detailed scale imdel of something ordi-
nary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus.
He'd  never  met her, or spoken to her, but he' come tD know her,
he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever ha~ or would. Husbands
didn't  know their wives this way, or wives ther husbands. Stalk-
ers might aspire to know the objects of their obession this  way,
but never. could.

Until  the night he woke after midiight, head throbbing. Too hot,
something wrong with the condiioning  again.  Florida.  The  blue
shirt  he slept in clinging to his back aid shoulders. What would
she be doing now?  52 William Gibsm~ Was she staring  up,  awake,
at  faint  bars  of reflecte(l light on the ceiling, listening to
Upful Groupvine?

Kathy suspected he might be cracking up. He looked at his  hands.
They  could be anybody's. lie looked at them as though he'd never
seen them before.

He remembered the 5-SB in the orphanage. The taste of  it  coming
while  it  was  still  being injected. Rotting metal. The placebo
brought no taste at all.

He got up. The Kitchen Korner, sensing him, woke. The fridge door
slid  aside.  A  single  ancient  leaf  of lettuce sagged blackly
through the plastic rods of one white shelf. A half-empty  bottle
of  Evian on another. He held his cupped hands above the lettuce,
willing himself to feel something radiating from its decay,  some
subtle  life  force,  orgones,  particles of an energy unknown to
science.

Alison Shires was going to kill herself. He knew  he'd  seen  it.
Seen it somehow in the incidental data she generated in her mild-
mannered passage through the world of things.

"Hey  there,"  the  fnidge   said.   "You've   left   me   open."
        Laney said nothing.  -

"Well, do you want the door open, partner? You know it interferes
with the automatic de-frost .

"Be quiet." His hands felt better. Cooler.

He stood there until his hands were  quite  cold,  then  withdrew
them and pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples, the
fnidge taking this opportunity to close  itself  without  further
comment.

Twenty minutes later he was on the Metro, headed for Hollywood, a
jacket over his sleep-creased Malaysian  oxford  shirt.  Isolated
figures  on station platforms, whipped sideways by perspective in
the wind of the train's passing.



"We're not talking conscious decision, here?"  Blackwell  kneaded
what was left of his right ear.  "No," Laney said, "I (lorit know
what I thought I was doing.

"You were trying to save her. The girl."

"It felt like something snapped. A  ruhher  hand.  It  felt  like
gravity."

"That's what it feels like," Blackwell said, "when you decide."



Somewhere  down  the  hill from the Sunset Metro exit he passed a
man watering his lawn, a rectangle perhaps twice the  size  of  a
pooltahie,  illuminated by the medicinal glow of a nearby street-
light. Laney saw the water beading on the perfectly  even  blades
of  bright  green  plastic. The plastic lawn was fenced back from
the street with welded  steel,  upright  prison  bars  supporting
bright  untarnished  coils  of  razor-wire.  The  man's house was
scarcely larger than his glittering lawn; a survival from  a  day
when  this slope to the hills had been covered with bungalows and
arbors. There were others like it, tucked between the  balconied,
carefully  varied  faces  of condos and apartment complexes, tiny
properties dating from before the area's incorporation  into  the
city. There was a hint of oranges in the air, but he couldn't see
them.

The waterer looked up, and Laney saw that he was blind, eyes hid-
den  by the black lozenges of video units coupled directly to the
optic nerve. You never knew what they were watching.

Laney went on, letting whatever drew him set his  course  through
these  sleeping  streets  and  the occasional scent of a blooming
tree. Distant brakes sounded on Santa Monica.

Fifteen minutes later he was in front of her building on Fountain
Avenue. Looking up. Fifth floor. 502.

The nodal point.



"You don't want to talk about it?"

Laney  looked  up  from  his  empty cup, meeting Blackwell's eyes
across the table.  WUhi~im (Uk "I've never really  told  this  to
anyone," he said, and it was true.

"Let's walk," Blackwell said, and stood, his hulk seeming to li't
effirtlessly, as though he were a heliLim  Parade  float.  l.aney
wondered what time it might be, here or in L.A. Yamazaki was tak-
ing care of the bill.

He left Amos 'n' Andes with them, out into a  falling  mist  that
wasn't quite rain, the sidewalk a bobbing stream of black umbrel-
las. Yamazaki produced a black object no larger than  a  business
card, slightly thicker, and flexed it sharply hetween his thumbs.
A black umbrella flowered. Yamazaki handed it to him.  The  curve
of the black handle felt dry and hollow and very slightly warm.

"How do you fold it?"

"You don't," Yamazaki said. "It goes away." He opened another for
himself. 1-lairless Blackwell, in his  micropore,  was  evidently
immune to rain. "Please continue with your account, Mr. Laney."

Through a gap between two distant towers, Laney glimpsed the side
of another, taller building. He saw vast faces there, vaguely fa-
miliar, contorted in inexplicable drama.



The nondisclosure agreement Laney had signed was intended to cov-
er any incidences of Slitscan using its connections with DatAmer-
ica  in  ways  that  might be construed as violations of the law.
Such incidences, in Laney's  experience,  were  frequent  to  the
point  of  being constant, at least at certain advanced levels of
research. Since DatAmerica had been Laney's previous employer, he
hadn't  found  any of this particularly startling. DatAmerica was
less a power than a territory; in many ways it was a law unto it-
self.



Laney's  protracted  survey of Alison Shires had already involved
any number of crjmiI~a1 violations, one of which had provided him
with the codes required to open the door into her building's foy-
er, activate the elevator, unlock the  door  of  her  fifth-floor
apartment, and


55  cancel  the  private  security alarm that would automatically
warrant an armed response if she did these things without  keying
in  two extra digits. This last was intended as insurance against
endemic home invasion, a crime in which residents  were  accosted
in  parking  garages and induced to surrender their codes. Alison
Shires' code consisted of her month, date,  and  year  of  birth,
something  any  security  service  strongly  advised against. Her
back-up code was 23, her age the year before, when she'd moved in
and become a subscriber.

Laney  softly reciting these as he stood before her building, its
eight-story facade feinting toward someone's idea  of  Tudor  Re-
vival.  Everything  looking  so  sharply  and comprehensively de-
tailed, in these first moments of an L.A. dawn.

23.



"So," Blackwell supposed, "you just walked  in.  Punched  up  her
codes  and  bang,  there  you were." The three of them waiting to
cross at an intersection.

-Bang.



No sound at all in the mirrored foyer. A sense of vacuum. A dozen
Laneys  reflected  there  as he crossed an expanse of new carpet.
Into an elevator smelling of something floral, where he used part
of  the  code  again. It took him straight to five. The door slid
open. More new carpet. Beneath a fresh coat of cream  enamel  the
corridor's  walls displayed the faint irregularities of old-fash-
ioned plaster.

502.

"What do you think  you're  doing?"  Laney  asked  aloud,  though
whether  to  himself  or to Alison Shires he did not nor would he
ever know.

The brass round of an antique security fish-eye regarded him from
the door, partially occluded by a cataract of pale paint.

The  key-pad was set flush with the door's steel frame, not quite
56 NiHiarn Gáb~on level with the fish-eye. I-Ic watched his  fin-
ger finding its way through the sequence.

23.

But  Alison  Shires, naked, opened the door before the code could
key, Upful  (iroupvine  soaring  joyfully  behind  her  as  Laney
grabbed her blood-slick wrists. And saw there in her eyes what he
took then and forever as a look of simple recognition,  not  even
of blame.

"This  isn't  working," she said, as though she were indicating a
minor appliance, and Laney heard  himself  whimper,  a  sound  he
hadn't  made  since childhood. He needed to see those wrists, but
couldn't, holding her. He was  walking  her  backward,  toward  a
wicker armchair he wasn't even aware he'd seen.

"Sit," he said, as if to a stubborn child, and she did. He let go
of her wrists. Ran for where he guessed the bathroom had  to  be.
Towels there and some kind of tape.

And  discovered  himself  kneeling  beside her where she sat, red
fingers curled in toward red  palms,  as  if  in  meditation.  He
rolled  a dark green hand towel around her left wrist and whipped
the tape around it, some rubbery beige product meant to mask spe-
cific  areas during the application of aerosol cosmetics. He knew
that from her product-purchase data.

Were her fingers turning blue, beneath  their  coat  of  red?  He
looked up. Into that same recognition. One cheekbone brushed with
blood.

"Don't," he said.

"It's slowing."

Laney wrapping her right forearm now, the tape-roll dangling from
his teeth.

"I missed the artery."

"Don't  move,"  Laney  said, and sprang up, tripping over his own
feet, crashing face-first into what he recognized, just before it
broke  his  nose,  as the work of the editor of lamps. The carpet
seemed  to  whip  up  and  smack  him  playfully  in  the   face.
        "Alison-"


57  Her ankle stepping past him, kitchenward. "Alison, sit down!"




Blackwell's shoulders heaved as he sighed, making  a  sound  that
Laney  heard  above  the  traffic, Yamazaki's glasses were filled
with jittering pastels, the walls here all neon, a glare to shame
Vegas, every surface lit and jumping.

Blackwell was staring at Laney. "This way," he said, finally, and
rounded a corner, into relative darkness and an  edge  of  urine.
Laney followed, Yamazaki behind him. At the far end of the narrow
passage, they emerged into fairyland.

No neon here at all. Ambient glow from the towers overhead.  Aus-
tere  rectangles of white frosted glass, the size of large greet-
ing cards, were daubed with black ideograms, each sign marking  a
tiny  structure  like  some  antique bathing cabin on a forgotten
beach. Crowded shoulder to shoulder down one side of the  cobbled
lane,  their  miniature facades suggested a shuttered sideshow in
some secret urban carnival. Age-silvered cedar, oiled paper, mat-
ting;  nothing  to  pin  the  place in time but the fact that the
signs were electric.

Laney stared. A street built by leprechauns.

"Golden Street," said Keith Alan Blackwell.

















58 William Gibson S Chia deplaned behind Maryalice, who'd  had  a
couple  of  those vitamin drinks and then tied up one of the toi-
lets for twenty minutes while she teased her extensions  and  put
on  lipstick  and mascara. Chia couldn't say much for the result,
which looked less like Ashleigh  Mo-dine  Carter  than  something
Ashleigh Modine Carter had slept on.

When  Chia stood up, she felt like she had to tell her body to do
every single thing she needed it to. Legs: move.

She'd gotten a few more hours sleep, somewhere back there.  She'd
packed  her  Sandbenders back in her bag, and now she was putting
one foot in front of the other, as Maryalice, in  front  of  her,
shuffle-swayed  along the narrow aisle in her white cowboy boots.

It seemed to take forever to get out of the plane, but then  they
were  breathing  airport  air in a corridor, under big logos that
Chia had known all her life, all those  Japanese  companies,  and
everything  crowded  and moving in one direction. "You check any-
thing?" Maryalice asked, beside her.


Maryalice let Chia go ahead  of  her  through  Passport  Control,
where Chia gave the Japanese policeman her passport and the Cash-
flow smartcard Zona Rosa had forced Kelsey to come  up  with  be-
cause  this was all Kelseys idea anyway. In theory, the amount in
the card represented the bulk of the Seattle chapter's  treasury,
but  Chia suspected Kelsey would wind up footing the bill for the
whole thing, and probably wouldn't even care.        0          2
59  3.      Narita  The  policeman pulled her passport out of the
counter-slot and handed it back to her.  He  hadn't  bothered  to
check the smartcard. "Two week maximum stay," he said, and nodded
her on.

Frosted glass slid open for her. It was crowded  here,  way  more
than  SeaTac.  So many planes mustve come in at once, to have all
these people waiting for their luggage. She edged aside to let  a
little  robot stacked with suitcases pass. It had dirty pink rub-
ber tires and big cartoon eyes that rolled morosely  as  it  made
its way through the crowd.

"Now,  that was easy," said Maryalice, behind her. Chia turned in
time to see her take a long deep breath, hold it, and let it out.
Maryalice's  eyes looked pinched, like she was having a headache.

"Do you know which way I should go to get the train?" Chia asked.
She  had  maps in her Sandbenders, but she didn't want to have to
get it out now.

"This way,' Maryalice said.

Maryalice worked her way between people, Chia following with  her
bag  under  her  arm.  Emerging in front of a carousel where bags
were sliding down a ramp, bumping, swinging past and away.

"Here's one," Maryalice said, snagging a black one  and  sounding
so  forcefully  cheerful  that it made Chia look at her. "And ...
two." Another one like it, except this one had a sticker  on  the
side  from  Nissan  County, the third largest gated attraction in
the Californias. "Would you mind carrying this for me, honey?  My
back goes our on long plane rides." Passing Chia the bag with the
sticker. It wasn't too heavy, like maybe it was only half-full of
clothes.  But  it  was too large for her; she had to lean over in
the opposite direction to keep it off the ground.

"Thanks," Maryalice said. "Here," and she handed Chia a  crumpled
square  of sticky-backed paper with a bar code on it. "That's the
check. Now we just want to go this way.

It was even harder getting through the  crowd,  lugging  Mary-al-
ice's  bag.  Chia  had to concentrate on not stepping on people's
feet, and not bumping them too hard with the bag,  and  the  next
thing she 60 William Gibson knew, shed lost Maryalice. She looked
around, expecting to  see  hair-  extensions  bobbing  above  the
crowd,  who were mostly shorter than Maryalice, but Maryalice was
nowhere in sight.

ALL ARRIVING PASSENGERS MUST EXIT THROUGH CUSTOMS.

Chia watched the sign twist itself up into Japanese letters, then
pop back out as English.

Well,  that  was the way to go. She got in line behind a man in a
red leather jacket that said Concept Collision" across  the  back
in gray chenille letters. Chia stared at that, imagining concepts
colliding, which she guessed was a concept in  itself,  but  then
she thought it was probably just the name of a company that fixed
cars, or one of those slogans the Japanese made  up  in  English,
the  ones  that  almost seemed to mean something but didn't. This
trans-Pacific jet lag thing was serious.


They were feeding Concept Collision's suitcase through a  machine
the  size  of  a double bed, but taller. There was an official of
some kind in a video-helmet, evidently reading feed off the scan-
ners,  and  another  policeman, to take your passport, slot it in
the machine, then put  your  bags  through.  Chia  let  him  take
Maryalice's  suitcase  and  flip  it  up, onto the conveyor. Chia
handed him her carry-on. "There's a computer in there. This  scan
okay  for that?" He didn't seem to hear her. She watched her car-
ry-on follow Maryalice's bag into the machine.

The man in the helmet, eyes hidden, was  bobbing  his  head  from
side to side as he accessed gaze-activated menus.

"Baggage  check," the policeman said, and Chia remembered she had
it in her hand. It struck her as strange, handing it  over,  that
Maryalice had thought to give her that. The policeman ran a hand-
scanner over it.

"You packed these bags yourself?" asked the man in the helmet.

He couldn't see her directly, but she assumed he  could  see  the
clips  stored  in  her passport, and he could probably see her on
live  feed  as 3  well.  Airports  were  full  of   cameras.    o
        2          01  "Yes,"  Chia  said, deciding it was easier
than trying to explain that it was Maryalice's bag, not hers. She
tried  to  read the expression on the helmeted man's lips, but it
was hard to say if he even had one.

"You packed this?"

"Yes    Chia said, not sounding nearly as certain this time.

The helmet bobbed.

"Next," he said.

Chia went to the other end of the machine and collected  her  bag
and the black suitcase,

Through another sliding wall of frosted glass: she was in a larg-
er hall, beneath a higher ceiling, bigger  ads  overhead  but  no
thinning  of  the  crowd,  Maybe  this wasn't so much a matter of
crowds as it was of Tokyo, maybe of Japan in general:  more  peo-
ple, closer together.

More  of  those robot baggage carts. She wondered what it cost to
rent one. You could lie down on top of your luggage, maybe,  tell
it  where you wanted to go, and then just go to sleep. Except she
wasn't sure she felt sleepy, exactly. She transferred Maryalice's
bag from her left to her right hand, wondering what to do with it
if she didn't find Maryalice inside the next, say, five  minutes.
She'd  had enough of airports and the space between them, and she
wasn't even sure where she was supposed to sleep tonight.  Or  if
it was night, even.

She  was  looking  up,  hoping to find some kind of time display,
when a hand closed around her right wrist. She looked down at the
hand,  saw  gold  rings and a watch to match, fat links of a gold
bracelet, the rings connected  to  the  watch  with  little  gold
chains.

"That's my suitcase."

Chia's eyes followed the hand's wrist to a length of bright white
cuff, then up the arm of a black jacket. To pale eyes in  a  long
face,  each  cheek  seamed vertically, as if with a modelling in-
strument. For a second she took him for her Music  Master,  loose
somehow  in this airport. But her Music Master would never wear a
watch like that, and this one's hair, a darker blond,  was  swept
back, long and wetlooking, from his high forehead. He didn't look
happy.

"Maryalice's suitcase," Chia said.  02 William Gibson  "She  gave
it to you? In Seattle?"  "She asked me to carry it."

"From Seattle?"

"No," Chia said. "Back there. She sat beside me on the plane."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know," Chia said.

He  wore a black, long-coated suit, buttoned high. Like something
from an old movie, but new and expensive-looking.  He  seemed  to
notice that he was still holding her wrist; now he let it go.

"I'll carry it for you," he said. "We'll find her."

Chia didn't know what to do. "Maryalice wanted me to carry it."

"You did. Now I'll carry it." He took it from her.

"Are  you  Maryalice's boyfriend? Eddie?" The corner of his mouth
twitched.

"You could say that," he said.



Eddie's car was a Daihatsu Graceland with the steering  wheel  on
the wrong side. Chia knew that because Rez had ridden in the back
of one in a video, except that that one had had  a  bath  in  it,
black  marble, big gold faucets shaped like tropical fish. People
had posted that that was an ironic take on money, on  the  really
ugly  things  you  could do with it if you had too much. Chia had
told her mother about that. Her mothet  said  there  wasn't  much
point  in worrying what you might do if you had too much, because
most people never even had enough. She said it was better to  try
to figure out what "enough" actually meant.

But  Eddie  had  one, a Graceland, all black and chrome. From the
outside it looked sort of like a cross between an RV and  one  of
those long, wedge-shaped Hummer limousines. Chia couldn't imagine
there'd be much of a Japanese market; the cars  here  all  looked
like  little  candy-colored  lozenges. The Graceland was meshback
pure and simple, designed to sell to the  kind  of  American  who
made a point of trying not to buy imports. Which, when it came to
cars, def initely narrowed your options.  (Hester  Chen's  mother
had  one of those really ugly Canadian trucks that cost a fortune
but were guaranteed to last for eighty-five years; that was  sup-
posed to be better for the ecology.)

Inside,  the Graceland was all burgundy velour, puffed up in dia-
monds, with little chrome nubs where the points of  the  diamonds
met.  It was about the tackiest thing Chia had ever seen, and she
guessed Maryalice thought so too, because Maryalice, seated  next
to  her,  was explaining that it was an "image" thing, that Eddie
had this very hot, very popular country-music club called Whiskey
Clone, so he'd gotten the Graceland to go with that, and he'd al-
so started dressing the way  they  did  in  Nashville.  Maryalice
thought that look suited him, she said.

Chia nodded. Eddie was driving, talking in Japanese on a speaker-
phone. They'd found Maryalice at a tiny little bar, just off  the
arrivals  area.  It  was the third one they'd looked in, Chia got
the feeling that Eddie wasn't very happy to  see  Maryalice,  but
Maryalice hadn't seemed to care.

It  was  Maryalice's  idea that they give Chia a ride into Tokyo.
She said the train was too crowded and it cost a lot anyway.  She
said  she  wanted to do Chia a &vor, because Chia had carried her
bag for her. (Chia had noticed that Eddie had put one bag in  the
Graceland's trunk, but kept the one with the Nissan County stick-
er up front, next to him, beside the driver's seat.)

Chia wasn't really listening to Maryalice now; it was  some  time
at  night and the jet lag was too weird and they were on this big
bridge that seemed to be made out  of  neon,  with  however  many
lanes  of  traffic  around  them, the little cars like strings of
bright beads, all of them shiny and new. There were screens  that
kept  blurring past, tall and narrow, with Japanese writing jump-
ing around on some of them, and people on others, faces,  smiling
as they sold something.

And  then a woman's face: Itei Toei, the idoru Rez wanted to mar-
ry. And gone.  04 William Gibson "Rice Daniels, Mr.  Lane>'.  Out
of control." Pressing a card of some kind to the opposite side of
the scratched plastic that walled the room called  Visitors  away
from  those who gave it its name. Laney had tried to read it, but
the attempt at focusing had driven an atrocious spike of pain be-
tween  his  eyes.  He'd  looked  at Rice Daniels instead, through
tears of pain: close-cropped dark hair, close-fitting  sunglasses
with  small oval lenses, the black frames gripping the man's head
like some kind of surgical clamp.

Nothing at all about Rice Daniels appeared to be out of  control.

"The  series,"  he said. "'Out of Control.' As in: aren't the me-
dia? Out of Control: the cutting  edge  of  counter-investigative
journalism."

Laney  had  gingerly tried touching the tape across the bridge of
his nose: a mistake. "Counter-investigative?"

"You're a quant, Mr. Laney." A quantitative analyst.  He  wasn't,
really,  but  that  was  technically  his  job  description, "For
Slitscan."

Laney didn't respond.

"The girl was the focus of intensive surveillance.  Slitscan  was
all  over  her.  You know why. We believe a case can be made here
for Slitscan's culpability in the death of Alison Shires."

Lane>' looked down at his running shoes, their laces  removed  by
the  Deputies.  "She  killed  herself," he said.          "But we
know why."   3         0         2         05 9.      Out of Con-
trol  "No,"  Laney said, meeting the black ovals again, "I don't,
Not exactly." The nodal point. Protocols of some other realm  en-
tirely.

"You're  going  to  need  help, Lane>'. You might be looking at a
manslaughter charge. Abetting a suicide. They'll want to know why
you were up there."

"I'll tell them why."

"Our producers managed to get me in here first, Lane>'. It wasn't
easy. There's a spin-control team from Slitscan  out  there  now,
waiting  to  talk  with you. If you let them, they'll turn it all
around. They'll get you off, because they have to,  in  order  to
cover  the  show. They can do it, with enough money and the right
lawyers. But ask yourself this: do you want to let them do it?"

Daniels still had his business card thumbed up against the  plas-
tic.  Trying  to  focus  on  it again, Laney saw that someone had
scratched something in from the other side, in small, uneven mir-
ror-letters, so that he could read it left to right:

I NO U DIDIT


"Our hour-long pilot is in production as we speak, Mr. Lane>'." A
measured pause. "We're all very excited."

"Why?"

"Out of Control isn't just a series. We think of it as an entire-
ly  new  paradigm.  A new way to do television. Your story-Alison
Shires' story-is precisely what we intend to get out  there.  Our
producers are people who want to give something back to the audi-
ence. They've done  well,  they're  established,  they've  proven
themselves; now they want to give something back-to restore a de-
gree of honesty, a new opportunity for  perspective."  The  black
ovals drew slightly closer to the scratched plastic. "Our produc-
ers are the producers of 'Cops in Trouble' and 'A Calm and Delib-
erate Fashion."

"A what?"

"Factual  accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion
industry."  06 ~AiEtha.n G~bsnn "Counter-investigative'?" Yamaza-
ki's pen hovered over the notebook.

"It was a show about shows like Slitscan," Laney explained. "Sup-
posed abuses." There were no stools at the bar, which might  have
been  ten feet long. You stood. Aside from the bartender, in some
kind of Kabuki drag, they had the place to themselves. By  virtue
of filling it, basically. It was probably the smallest freestand-
ing commercial structure Lane>' had ever seen, and it  seemed  to
have been there forever, like a survival from ancient Edo, a city
of shadows and minute dark lanes. The walls  were  shingled  with
faded postcards, gone a uniform sepia under a glaze of accumulat-
ed nicotine and cooking smoke.

"Ah," Yamazaki said at last, "a meta-tabloid.'"

The bartender was broiling two sardines on a doll's hotplate.  He
flipped them with a pair of steel chopsticks, transferred them to
a tiny  plate,  garnished  them  with  some  kind  of  colorless,
translucent pickle, and presented them to Laney.

"Thanks,"  Lane>' said. The bartender ducked his shaven eyebrows.

In spite of the modest decor, there were dozens of bottles of ex-
pensive-looking  whiskey arranged behind the bar, each one with a
hand-written brown paper sticker: the owner's name  in  Japanese.
Yamazaki had explained that you bought one and they kept it there
for you. Blackwell was on his second tumbler of the local  vodka-
analog,  on  the rocks, Yamazaki was sticking to Coke Lire. Laney
had an untouched shot of surrealistically expensive Kentucky  sr-
raight bourbon whiskey in front of him, and wondered vaguely what
it would do to his jet lag if he were actually to drink it.

"So," Blackwell said, draining the tumbler, ice clinking  against
his  prosthetic, "they get you out so they can have a go at these
other         bastards."      3         0         C -07 "That  wu
it,  basically,"  Laney said, They had their own Legal team wait-
ing, to do that, and another team to work  on  the  nondisclosure
agreement I'd signed with Slirscan."

"And the second team had the bigger job," Blackwell said, shoving
his empty glass toward the bartender, who swept it  smoothly  out
of  sight,  producing a fresh replacement just as smoothly, as if
from nowhere.

"That's true," Laney said. He'd had no idea, really, of what he'd
be  getting  into when he'd found himself agreeing to the general
outlines of Rice Daniels' offer. But there was something  in  him
that didn't want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that
one single shot from Alison Shires' kitchen. (Produced, the  cops
had  pointed  out,  by a Russian-made device that was hardly more
than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible
firing  mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclu-
sively in mind; there was no way to aim  them  at  anything  more
than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen
one before; for some itason, they  were  called  Wednesday  Night
Specials.)

And  Slitscan  would walk away, he knew; they'd drop the sequence
on Alison's actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole  thing
would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with
the world's steady accretion of data.

And Alison Shires' life, as he'd known it in all  that  terrible,
banal  intimacy,  would  lie there forever, forgotten and finally
unknowable.

But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospective-
ly  become  something  else, and he wasn't sure, exactly, sitting
there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be.

He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew  around  sunken  air-
craft  carriers;  perhaps  she'd  become something like that, the
buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of  suppo-
sition, or even of myth.

It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less
dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.


08 William Gibson 1~~ "Get me out of here," he said  to  Daniels,
who  smiled  beneath  his  surgical clamp, whipping the card tri-
umphantly away from the plastic.

"Steady," said Blackwell, laying his huge hand, with its silvery-
pink fretwork of scars, over Laney's wrist, "You haven't even had
your drink yet."



Lane>' had met Rydell when the Out of Control team installed  him
in  a  suite  at  the Chateau, that ancient simulacrum of a still
more ancient original, its quaint concrete eccentricities pinched
between  the twin brutalities of a particularly nasty pair of of-
fice buildings dating from the final year of the previous  centu-
ry.  These  reflected  all  the Millennial anxiety of the year of
their creation, while refracting it through some other, more mys-
terious, weirdly muted hysteria that seemed somehow more personal
and even less attractive.

Laney's suite, much larger than his apartment  in  Santa  Monica,
was like an elongated 1920s apartment following the long, shallow
concrete balcony that faced Sunset, this in  turn  overlooking  a
deeper balcony on the floor below and the tiny circular lawn that
was all that remained of the original gardens.

Lane>' thought it was a strange choice,  considering  his  situa-
tion.  He would have imagined they'd choose something more corpo-
rate, more fortified, more heavily wired, but  Rice  Daniels  had
explained  that  the Chateau had advantages all its own. It was a
good choice in terms of image, because  it  humanized  Laney;  it
looked  like  a  habitation,  basically, something with walls and
doors and windows, in which a guest could be imagined to be  liv-
ing something akin to a life-not at all the case with the geomet-
ric solids that were serious business hotels. It also had  deeply
rooted  associations with the Hollywood star system, and with hu-
man tragedy as well. Stars had lived here, in the heyday  of  old
Hollywood, and, later, certain stars had

died  here.  Out  of Control planned to frame the death of Alison
Shires 3 as a tragedy in a venerable Hollywood tradition, but one
that  had        0          C         a         09 t been brought
on by Slitscan, a very contemporary entity. Besides, Daniels  ex-
plained,  the  Chateau was far more secure than it might at first
look. And at this point Lane>' had been introduced to  Berry  Ry-
dell, the night security man.

Daniels  and  Rydell,  it  seemed to Laney, had known one another
prior to Rydell working at the Chateau, though how, exactly,  re-
mained  unclear. Rydell seemed oddly at home with the workings of
the infotainment industry, and at one point,  when  they'd  found
themselves  alone together, he'd asked Laney who was representing
him.

"How do you mean?" Lane>' had said.

"You've got an agent, don't you?"

Laney said he didn't.

"You better get one," Rydell had said. "Not that it'll necessari-
ly  come  out the way you'd wanted, but, hey, it's show business,
right?"

It was indeed show business, to an extent that very quickly  made
Laney wonder if he'd made the right decision. There had been six-
teen people in his suite, for a four-hour meeting, and he'd  only
been  out of the lock-up for six hours. When they'd finally gone,
Laney had staggered the length of the  place,  mistakenly  trying
several  closet  doors in his search for the bedroom. Finding it,
he'd crawled onto the bed and fallen asleep in the clothes they'd
sent Rydell to the Beverly Center to buy for him.



Which he thought he might well do right here, now, in this Golden
Street bar, thereby answering the question of  what  the  bourbon
was doing to his jet lag. But now, finishing the remainder of the
shot, he felt one of those tidal reversals begin, perhaps less to
do  with  the  drink than with some in-built chemistry of fatigue
and displacement.

"Was Rydell happy?" Yamazaki asked,

It seemed a strange question, to Lane>', but then he'd remembered
Rydell  mentioning  someone  Japanese,  someone he'd known in San
Francisco, and that, of course, had been Yamazaki.   70  Ahhtiapn
Gibson  "Well,"  Lariey said, "he didn't strike me as desperately
unhappy, but there was something sort  of  down  about  him.  You
could say that. I mean, I don't really know him well at all."

"It is too bad," Yamazaki said. "Rydell is a brave man."

"How about you, Laney," Blackwell said, "you think of yourself as
a brave man?" The wormlike scar that bisected his eyebrow writhed
into a new degree of concentration.

"No," Laney said, "I don't."

"But  you  went  up against Slitscan, didn't you, because of what
they did to the girl? You had a job, you  had  food,  you  had  a
place  to sleep. You got all that from Slitscan, but they did the
girl, so you opted to do 'em back. Is that right?"

"Nothing's ever that simple," Laney said.

When Blackwell spoke, Laney was  unexpectedly  aware  of  another
sort  of intelligence, something the man must ordinarily conceal.
"No," Blackwell said, almost gently, "it fucking well  isn't,  is
it?"  One large, pinkly jigsawed hand, like some clumsy animal in
its own right, began to root in the taut breast pocket of  Black-
well's  micropore.  Producing a small, gray, metallic object that
he placed on the bar.

"Now that's a nail," Blackwell said, "galvanized, one-and-a-half-
inch,  roofing,  I've  nailed men's hands to bars like this, with
nails like that. And some of them were right bastards." There was
nothing  at  all  of  threat  in  Blackwell's voice. "And some of
those, you nail their one hand, their other comes up with  a  ra-
zor, or a pair of needle-nose pliers." Blackwell's forefinger ab-
sently found an angry-looking scar  beneath  his  right  eye,  as
though  something  had entered there and been deflected along the
cheekbone. "To have a go, right?"

"Pliers?"

"Bastards," Blackwell said. "You have  to  kill  'em,  then,  Now
that's  one kind of 'brave,' Laney. What I mean is, how's that so
different from what you tried to do to Slitscan?"

"I just didn't want them to let it drop. To let her ... settle to
the  3  bottom.  Be  fotgotten.  I  didn't  really care how badly
Slitscan got

B 71 hurt, or even if they were damaged or not. I wasn't thinking
of revenge, as much as of a way of. . . keeping her alive?"

"There's  other  men, you nail their hand to a table, they'll sit
there and look at you. That's your true hard man, Laney.  Do  you
think you're one of those?"

Laney  looked  from Blackwell to the empty bourbon glass, back to
Blackwell; the bartender moved, as if to  refill  it,  but  Laney
covered it with his hand. "If you nail my hand to the bar, Black-
well," and here he spread his other hand, flat, palm down, on the
dark  wood, the drink-ringed varnish, "I'll scream, okay? I don't
know what any of this is about. You might be crazy.  But  what  I
most  definitely am not is anybody's idea of a hero. I'm not now,
and I wasn't back there in

L.A."

Blackwell and Yamazaki exchanged glances.  Blackwell  pursed  his
lips,  gave a tiny nod. "Good on you then," he said. "1 think you
just might be right for the job."

"No job," Laney said, but let the bartender  pour  him  a  second
bourbon.  "I don't want to hear about any job at all, not until I
know who's hiring me."

"I'm chief of security for Lo/Rez," Blackwell said,  "and  I  owe
that  silly bastard my life. The last five of which I'd've passed
in the punitive bowels of the State of fucking  Victoria.  If  it
hadn't been for him. Though I'd've topped myself first, no fear."

"The band? You're security for them?"

"Rydell spoke well of you, Mr. Laney." Yamazaki's neck bobbed  in
the collar of his plaid shirt,

"I  don't know Rydell," Laney said. "He was just the night watch-
man at a hotel I couldn't afford."

"Rydell has a good sense of people, I think," Yamazaki said.

To Blackwell: "LoJRez? They're in trouble?"

"Rez," Blackwell said. "He says he's  going  to  marry  this  Jap
twist  doesn't  fucking exist! And he knows she doesn't, and says
we've nofucking imagination! Now hear  me,"  and  Blackwell  pro-
duced, from some unspecific region of his clothing, a mirror-pol-
ished rectangle 72 William Gibson with a round hole  through  its
uppermost, leading corner. Something not much larger than a cash-
card, to see it in his big hand. "Someone's got to our boy, hear?
Got to him. Don't know how, don't know who. Though personally my-
self I'd bet on the fucking Kombinat. Those  Russ  bastards,  But
you,  my  friend,  you're going to do your nodal thing for us, on
our Rez, and you are going to find flicking out.  Who."  And  the
rectangle  came  down  with  a  concise  little thunk, to be left
standing, crosswise to the counter's grain, and Laney saw that it
was  a  very  small meat cleaver, with round steel rivets through
its tidy rosewood handle.

"And when you do," Blackwell said, "we shall sort them  well  and
fucking out."  3

0

73  10.     Whiskey  Clone  Eddie's  club was way up in something
like an offke building. Chia didn't think there were music  clubs
on  the  upper  floors of buildings like that in Seattle, but she
wasn't sure. She'd fallen asleep in the Graceland, and only  woke
up  as Eddie was driving into a garage entrance, and then up into
something vaguely like a Ferris wheel, or the cylinder of an old-
fashioned revolver, except the bullets were cars. She watched out
the windows as it swung them up and over, to  stop  at  the  top,
where  Eddie  drove  forward  into a parking garage that might've
been anywhere, except the cars were all  big  and  black,  though
none as big as the Graceland.

"Come on up with us and freshen up, honey," Maryalice said.


"I have to port," Chia said. "Find my friend I'm staying with..

"Easy  enough,"  Maryalice  said,  sliding  across the velour and
opening the door. Eddie got out the driver's side, taking the bag
with  the  Nissan  County  sticker with him. He still didn't look
very happy. Chia took her bag with her  and  followed  Maryalice.
They  all  got into an elevator. Eddie pressed his palm against a
hand-shaped outline on the wall and said something  in  Japanese.
The  elevator  said something back, then the door closed and they
were going up. Fast, it felt like, but they just kept going.

Being in the elevator didn't seem to be improving Eddie's mood.

He had to stand right up close to Maryalice, and Chia could see a
lit

0


75  tie  muscle working, in the hinge of his jaw, as he looked at
her. Maryalice just looked right back at him.  "You oughta light-
en up," Maryalice said. "It's done."

The  little  muscle went into overdrive. "That was not the deal,"
he said, finally. "That was not the arrangement,"

Maryalice lifted an eyebrow. 'You used to appreciate a little in-
novation."

Eddie  glanced  from  Maryalice  to  Chia,  then,  quick, back to
Maryalice. "You call that an innovation~"


Chia wasn't sure what she'd expected, but this definitely  wasn't
it.  A messy room jammed with shipping cartons, and a bank of se-
curity monitors. The low ceiling was made of those  fibery  tiles
that  were  hung  on  little metal rails; about half of them were
missing, with wires and cables looping  down  from  dusty-looking
shadow.  There were a couple of small desk lamps, one of them il-
luminating a stack of used instant-noodle containers and a  black
coffee  mug filled with white plastic spoons. A Japanese man in a
black meshback that said "Whiskey Clone"  across  the  front  was
sitting  in a swivel chair in front of the monitors, pouring him-
self a hot drink out of a big thermos with pink  flowers  on  the
side.

"Yo, Calvin," Maryalice said, or that was what it sounded like.

"Hey," the man said.

"Calvin's  from  Tacoma,"  Maryalice said, as Chia watched Eddie,
still carrying the suitcase, march  straight  through  the  room,
through a door, and out of sight.

"Boss  looks happy," the man said, sounding no more Japanese than
Maryalice. He took a sip from his thermos cup.

"Yeah," Maryalice said, "He's so glad to see me, he's beside him-
self."

"This  too  will pass." Another sip. Looking at Chia from beneath
76 William Gibson the  bill  of  the  meshback.  The  letters  in
"Whiskey  Clone"  were  the  kind  they'd use in a mall when they
wanted you to think a place was traditional.

"This is Chia," Maryalice said. "Met her in SeaTac," and Chia no-
ticed that she hadn't said she'd met her on the plane. Which made
her remember that business with the DNA sampling and the hair-ex-
tensions.

"Glad  to  hear  it's  still there," the man said. "Means there's
some way back out of this batshir."

"Now, Calvin," Maryalice said, "you know you love Tokyo."

"Sure. Had a place in Redmond had a  bathroom  the  size  of  the
whole  apartment I got here, and it wasn't even a big bathroom. I
mean, it had a shower, No tub or anything."

Chia looked at the screens behind him, Lots of people there,  but
she couldn't tell what they were doing.

"Looks like a good night," Maryalice said, surveying the screens.

"Just fair," he said. "Fair to middling."

"Quit talking like that," Maryalice said. "You'll have  me  doing
it."

Calvin grinned. "But you're a good old girl, aren't you, Mary-al-
ice?"

"Please," Chia said, "may I use a dataport?"

"There's one in Eddie's office," Maryalice said. "But he's proba-
bly  on  the  phone now. Why don't you go in the washroom there,"
indicating another door, closed, "and have a wash. You're looking
a  little  blurry.  Then  Eddie'll  be done and you can call your
friend."

The washroom had an old steel sink and a very new,  very  compli-
cated-looking  toilet with at least a dozen buttons on top of the
tank. These were labeled in Japanese. The polymer  seat  squirmed
slightly, taking her weight, and she almost jumped up again. It's
okay, she reassured herself, just foreign  technology.  When  she
was  done,  she  chose one of the controls at random, producing a
superfine spray of warm, perfumed water that made  her  gasp  and
jump back.

She  wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then stood well to
the side and tried another button. This  one  seemed  to  do  the
trick:  the toilet  flushed  with a jetstream sound that reminded
him of being on the plane.

As she washed her hands, and then her face, at  the  reassuringly
ordinary  sink,  using pale blue liquid soap from a pump-top dis-
penser shaped like a one-eyed dinosaur, she  heard  the  flushing
stop  and  another sound begin. She looked back and saw a ring of
purplish light oscillating, somewhere below the toilet seat.  UV,
she supposed, sterilizing it.

There  was  a  poster of the Dukes of Nuke 'Em taped on the wall,
this hideous 'roidhead metal band. They were  sweaty  and  blank-
eyed,  grinning, and the drummer was missing his front teeth. The
lettering was in Japanese. She wondered why anyone in Japan would
be into that, because groups like the Dukes were all about hating
anything that wasn't their idea of American.  But  Kelsey,  who'd
been  to  Japan lots, with her father, had said that you couldn't
tell what the Japanese would make of anything.

There wasn't anything here to dry your hands on.  She  got  a  t-
shirt  out of her bag and used that, although it didn't work very
well. As she was kneeling to stuff the shirt back in, she noticed
a  corner  of  something  she  didn't  recognize, but then Calvin
cracked the door behind her.

"Excuse me," he said.

"It's okay," Chia said, zipping the bag shut.

"It's not," he said, looking back over his shoulder, then back at
her. "You really meet Maryalice at SeaTac?"

"On the plane," Chia said.

"You're not part of it?"

Chia stood up, which made her feel kind of dizzy. "Part of what?"

He looked at her from beneath the brim of the  black  cap.  "Then
you really ought to get out of here. I mean right now."

"Why?" Chia asked, although it didn't strike her as a bad idea at
all.

"Nothing you want to know anything about."  There  was  a  crash,
somewhere  behind him. He winced. "It's okay. She's just throwing
things.They hven't gotten serious yet. Come  on,"and  he  grabbed
her bag by the shoulder strap 78 William Gibson ~       and lift-
ed it up. He was moving fast now, and she had to hustle  to  keep
up with him. Out past the closed door of Eddie's office, past the
bank of screens (where she thought she saw people line-dancing in
cowboy hats, but she was never sure).

Calvin slapped his hand on the sensor-plate on the elevator door.
"Take you to the garage," he said, as the sound of breaking glass
came  from  Eddie's  office.  "Hang  a  left,  about twenty feet,
there's another elevator. Skip the lobby; we got  cameras  there.
Bottom button gets you the subway. Get on a train." He passed her
her bag.

"Which one?" Chia asked.

Maryalice screamed. Like something really, really hurt.

"Doesn't matter," Calvin said,  and  quickly  said  something  in
Japanese  to  the elevator. The elevator answered, but he was al-
ready gone, the door closing, and then she  was  descending,  her
bag seeming to lighten slightly in her arms.

Eddie's  Graceland  was  still  there  when the door slid open, a
hulking wedge beside those other black can. She found the  second
elevator  Calvin  had  told  her  to take, its door scratched and
dented. It had regular buttons, and it didn't talk, and  it  took
her  down  to malls bright as day, crowds moving through them, to
escalators and platforms and mag-levs and the eternal logos teth-
ered overhead.

She was in Tokyo at last,

11.     Collapse  of  New Buildings Laney's room was high up in a
narrow tower faced with white ceramic tile. It was trapezoidal in
cross  section and dated from the eighties boomtown, the years of
the Bubble. That it had survived the great earthquake was  testi-
mony to the skill of its engineers; that it had survived the sub-
sequent reconstruction testified to an arcane tangle of ownership
and an ongoing struggle between two of the city's oldest criminal
organizations. Yamazaki had explained this in the cab,  returning
from New Golden Street.

"We were uncertain how you might feel about new buildings,"

he'd said.

"You mean the nanotech buildings?" Laney had been struggling

to keep his eyes open. The driver wore spotless white gloves.

"Yes.  Some people find them disturbing." "I don't know. I'd have
to see one."

"You can see them from your hotel, I think."

And he could. He knew their sheer brutality of  scale  from  con-
structs,  but  virtuality had failed to convey the peculiarity of
their apparent texture, a streamlined organicism. "They are  like
Giger's paintings of New York," Yamazaki had said, but the refer-
ence had been lost on Laney.

Now he sat on the edge of his bed, staring blankly out at these

miracles of the new technology, as banal and as sinister as  such
miracles  usually  were, and they were only annoying: the world's
largest

inhabited structures. (The Chernobyl  containment  structure  was
larger, but nothing human would ever live there.)

The  umbrella  Yamazaki had given him was collapsing into itself,
shrinking. Going away.

The phone began to ring. He couldn't find it.

"Telephone," he said. "Where is it?"

A nub of ruby light, timed to the rings, began to  pulse  from  a
flat  rectangle of white cedar arranged on a square black tray on
a bedside ledge. He picked it up. Thumbed a tiny square of  moth-
er-of-pearl.

"Hey," someone said. "That Laney?"

"Who's calling?"

"Rydell.  From  the Chateau. Hans let me use the phone." Hans was
the night manager. "1 get the time right? You having  breakfast?"

Laney  rubbed  his  eyes,  looked out again at the new buildings.
"Sure."

"I called Yamazaki," Rydell said. "Got your number."

"Thanks," Laney said, yawning, "but I-"

"Yamazaki said you got the gig."

"I think so," Laney said. "Thanks. Guess I owe-"

"Slitscan," Rydell said. "All over the Chateau,"

"No," Laney said, "that's over."

"You know any Katherine Torrance, Laney?  Sherman  Oaks  address?
She's up in the suite you had, with about two vans worth of sens-
ing gear. Hans figures they're trying to get a read on  what  you
were doing up there, any dope or anything."

Laney  stared out at the towers. Part of a facade seemed to move,
but it had to be his eyes.

"But Hans  says  there's  no  way  they  can  sort  the  residual
molecules out in those rooms anyway. Place has too much of a his-
tory."

"Kathy Torrance? From Slitscan?"

"Not like they said they were, but they've got all  these  techs,
and  techs  always t'alk too much, and Ghengis down in the garage
saw the decals on some of the cases, when  they  were  unloading.
There's  about  82  William  Gih,ion  twenty of 'em, if you don't
count the gophers. Got two suites and four singles. Don't tip."

"But what are they doing?"

"That sensor stuff. Trying to figure out what you got  up  to  in
the  suite. And one of the bellmen saw them setting up a camera."

The entire facade of one of the new buildings seemed  to  ripple,
to  crawl  slightly. Laney closed his eyes and pinched the bridge
of his nose, discovering a faint trace  of  pain  residing  there
from  the  break. He opened his eyes. "But I never got up to any-
thing."

"Whatever." Rydell sounded slightly hurt.  "I  just  thought  you
ought to know, is all."

Something  was  definitely  happening  to  that  facade. "I know.
Thanks. Sorry."

"I'll let you know if I hear anything," Rydell said.  "What's  it
like over there, anyway?"

Laney  was  watching  a point of reflected light slide across the
distant structure, a movement like osmosis or the sequential con-
traction of some sea creature's palps. "It's strange."

"Bet it's interesting," Rydell said. "Enjoy your breakfast, okay?
I'll keep in touch."

"Thanks," Laney said, and Rydell hung up.

Laney put the phone back on the lacquer tray and stretched out on
the  bed,  fully  clothed. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see
the new buildings. But they were still there, in the darkness and
the  light  behind  his lids. And as he watched, they slid apart,
deliquesced, and trickled away, down into the mazes of  an  older
city.

He slid down with them.  12.     Mitsuko Cliia used a public dat-
aport in the deepest level of the station. The  Sandbenders  sent
the  number  they'd given her for Mitsuko Mimura, the Tokyo chap-
ter's "social secretary" (everyone in  Tokyo  chapter  seemed  to
have  a formal title). A girl's sleepy voice in Japanese from the
Sandbenders' speakers. The translation followed instantly:

"Hello? Yes? May I help you?"

"It's Chia McKenzie, from Seattle."

"You are still in Seattle?"

"I'm here. In Tokyo." She upped the  scale  on  the  Sandbenders'
map. "In a subway station called Shinjuku."

"Yes. Very good. Are you coming here now?"

"I'd sure like to. I'm really tired."

The voice began to explain the route.

"It's  okay," Chia said, "my computer can do it. Just tell me the
station I have to get to." She found it on the map, set a marker.
"How

long will it take to get there?"

"Twenty to thirty minutes, depending on how crowded the

trains are. I will meet you there."

"You  don't  have  to do that," Chia said. "Just give me your ad-
dress."

"Japanese addresses are difficult."

"It's okay," Chia said, "I've got global positioning." The  Sand-
benders, working the Tokyo telco, was already showing her Mitsuko
Mimura's latitude and longitude. In Seattle, that only worked for
        business numbers.                         85 No," Mitsuko
said, "I must greet you. Jam the social secretary.'

Thanks," Chia said. "I'm on my way.'

With her bag over her shoulder, left partly unzipped so she could
follow  the  Sandbenders'  verbal prompts, Chia rode an escalator
up, two levels, bought a ticket with her cashcard, and found  her
platform.  It  was really crowded, as crowded as the airport, but
when the train came she let the crowd pick her up and squash  her
into the nearest car; it would've been harder not to get on.

As  they pulled out, she heard the Sandbenders announce that they
were leaving Shinjuku station.



The sky was like mother-of-pearl when Chia emerged from the  sta-
tion.  Gray  buildings,  pastel  neon,  a streetscape dotted with
vaguely unfamiliar shapes. Dozens of bicycles were parked  every-
where,  the fragile-looking kind with paper-tube frames spun with
carbon fiber. Chia took a step  back  as  an  enormous  turquoise
garbage truck rumbled past, its driver's white-gloved hands visi-
ble on the high wheel. As it cleared her held of vision, she  saw
a Japanese girl wearing a short plaid skirt and black biker jack-
et. The girl smiled. Chia waved.



Mitsuko's second-floor room was above the rear  of  her  father's
restaurant.  Chia  could hear a steady thumping sound from below,
and Mitsuko explained  that  that  was  a  food-prep  robot  that
chopped and sliced things.

The  room  was  smaller  than Chia's bedroom in Seattle, but much
cleaner, very near and organized. So was Mitsuko, who had  a  ra-
zor-edged  coppery  diagonal  bleached  into her black bangs, and
wore sneakers with double soles. She was thirteen, a year younger
than Chia.

Mitsuko  had  introduced  Chia  to  her father, who wore a white,
short-sleeved shirt, a tie,  and  was  supervising  three  white-
gloved  men  in  blue coveralls, who were cleaning his restaurant
with great 86 WUII;,n, Gibson energy and determination, Mitsuko's
father  had  nodded, smiled, said something in Japanese, and gone
back to what he was doing. On their way  upstairs,  Mitsuko,  who
didn't  speak  much English, told Chia that she'd told her father
that Chia was part of some cultural-exchange program,  short-term
homestay, something to do with her school.

Mitsuko  had the same poster on her wall, the original cover shot
from the Dog Soup album.

Mitsuko went downstairs, returning with a pot of tea and  a  cov-
ered,  segmented  box that contained a California roll and an as-
sortment of less familiar things. Grateful for the familiarity of
the  California roll, Chia ate everything except the one with the
orange sea-urchin goo on top. Mirsuko  complimented  her  on  her
skill  with chopsticks. Chia said she was from Seattle and people
there used chopsticks a lot.

Now they were both wearing wireless ear-clip headsets. The trans-
lation  was  generally  glitch-free,  except  when  Mitsuko  used
Japanese slang that was too new, or  when  she  inserted  English
words that she knew but couldnt pronounce.

Chia  wanted  to  ask  her about Rez and the idoru, but they kept
getting onto other things. Then  Chia  fell  asleep,  sitting  up
cross-legged  on the floor, and Mitsuko must have managed to roll
her onto a hard little futon-thing that she'd unfolded from some-
where, because that was where Chia woke up, three hours later.



A rainy silver light was at the room's narrow window.

Mitsuko  appeared  with another pot of tea, and said something in
Japanese. Chia found her ear-clip and put it on.

"You must have been exhausted,"  the  ear-clip  translated.  Then
Mitsuko  said  she was taking the day off from school, to be with
Chia.

They drank the nearly colorless tea from  little  nubbly  ceramic
cups.  Mitsuko explained that she lived here with her father, her
mother, and a brother, Masahikth Her mother  was  away,  visiting
a        0          2          87 relative in Kyoto. Mitsuko said
that Kyoto was very beautiful, and that Chia should go there.

"I'm here for my chapter," Chia said. "I can't do tourist things.
I have things to find out."


"So  is it true? Does Rez really want to marry a software agent?"

Mirsuko looked uncomfortable. "I am the  social  secretary,"  she
said. "You must first discuss this with Hiromi Ogawa."

"Who's she?'

"Hiromi is the president of our chapter."

"Fine," Chia said. "When do I talk to her?"

"We  are  erecting  a  site  for the discussion, It will be ready
soon." Mitsuko still looked uncomfortable.

Chia decided to change the subject. "What's  your  brother  like?
How old is he?"

"Masahiko  is  seventeen,"  Mitsuko said. "He is a 'pathological-
techno-.fetishist-with-social-deflcit,'" this last all strung to-
gether like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon
of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth run-
ning  it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions up-
dated automatically whenever she ported.

"A what?"

"Otaku," Mitsuko said  carefully  in  Japanese.  The  translation
burped its clumsy word string again.

"Oh," Chia said, "we have those, We even use the same word."

"I think that in America they are nor the same," Mitsuko said.

"Well," Chia said, "it's a boy thing, right? The otaku guys at my
last school were into, like, plastic anime babes, military  simu-
lations,  and  trivia.  Bigtime into trivia." She watched Mitsuko
listen to the translation.

88 William Gibson "Your brother's one?"

"Yes,' Mitsuko said. "He lives in Walled City."

"In where?"

"A multi-user domain. It is his obsession. Like a drug. He has  a
room  here.  He  seldom  leaves it, All his waking hours he is in
Walled City. His dreams, too, I think."



Chia tried to get more of a sense of  Hiromi  Ogawa,  before  the
noon  meeting,  but  with mixed results. She was older, seventeen
(as old as Zona Rosa) and had been in the club for at least  fIve
years.  She  was  possibly  overweight (though this had had to be
conveyed in intercultural girl-code, nothing overt)  and  favored
elaborate  iconics. But overall Chia kept running up against Mit-
suko's sense of her duty to her chapter, and of her own position,
and of Hiromi's position.

Chia  hated  club politics, and she was beginning to suspect they
might pose a real problem here.

Mitsuko was getting her computer out. It was one of  those  soft,
transparent Korean units, the kind that looked like a flat bag of
clear white jelly with a bunch of colored  jujubes  inside.  Chia
unzipped her bag and pulled her Sandbenders out.


"My computer."

Mitsuko was clearly impressed. "It is by Harley-Davidson?"

"It  was made by the Sandbenders," Chia said, finding her goggles
and gloves. "They're a commune, down on the Oregon coast. They do
these and they do software."

"It is American?"

"Sure."

"I had not known Americans made computers," Mitsuko said.

Chia  worked each silver thimble over the tips of her fingers and
thumbs, fastened the wrist straps.

"I'm ready for the meeting," she said.           Mirsuko  giggled
nervously.

                89  13.     Character Recognition Yamazaki phoned
just before noon. The day was dim and overcast. Laney had  closed
the  curtains  in order to avoid seeing the nanotech buildings in
that light.

He was watching an NHK  show  about  champion  top-spinners.  The
star,  he  gathered,  was  a little girl with pigtails and a blue
dress with an old-fashioned sailor's  collar.  She  was  slightly
cross-eyed,  perhaps  from  concentration.  The tops were made of
wood. Some of them were big, and looked heavy.


Laney watched a purple-and-yellow top blur  into  action  as  the
girl  gave the carefully wound cord an expert pull. The commenta-
tor held a hand mike near the top to pick up the hum it was  pro-
ducing, then said something in Japanese.


"It is being arranged for you to access the data that surrounds .

our friend. It is a complicated process, as this  data  has  been
protected  in  many different ways. There was no single strategy.
The ways in which his privacy has been  protected  are  complexly
incremental."

"Does 'our friend' know about this?"

There  was  a  pause. Laney watched the spinning top. He imagined
Yamazaki blinking. "No, he does not."

"I still don't know who I'll really be working for. For him? For

Blackwell?"




"Blackwell is employed by a privately held  corporation,  through
which  portions of our friend's income pass. In the course of our
friend's career, a structure has been erected  to  optimize  that
flow, to minimize losses. That structure now constitutes a corpo-
rate entity in its own right."

"Management," Laney said. "His  management's  scared  because  it
looks like he might do something crazy. Is that it?"

The  purple-and-yellow  top  was starting to exhibit the first of
the oscillations that would eventually bring it to a halt. "I  am
still  a  stranger to this business-culture, Mr. Laney. I find it
difficult to assess these things."

"What did Blackwell mean, last night, about Rez wanting to  marry
a Japanese girl who isn't real?"

"Idoru," Yamazaki said.

"What?"

"'Idol-singer.'  She is Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct,
a congeries of software agents, the creation  of  information-de-
signers. She is akin to what I believe they call a 'synthespian,'
in Hollywood."

Laney closed his eyes, opened them. "Then how can he marry  her?"

"I  don't  know,"  Yamazaki said. "But he has very forcefully de-
clared this to be his intention."

"Can you tell me what it is they've hired you to do?"

"Initially, I think, they hoped I would be able  to  explain  the
idotu  to them: her appeal to her audience, therefore perhaps her
appeal to him. Also, I think that, like  Blackwell,  they  remain
unconvinced  that  this is not the result of a conspiracy of some
kind. Now they want me to acquaint you with  the  cultural  back-
ground of the situation."

"Who  are  they?"   02  William Gibson "I cannot be more specific
now."

The top was starting to wobble. Laney saw something  like  terror
in the girl's eyes. "You don't think there's a conspiracy?"

"I  will  try to answer your questions this evening. In the mean-
time, while it is being arranged for  you  to  access  the  data,
please study these

"Hey,"  Laney protested, as his top-spinning girl was replaced by
an unfamiliar logo: a grinning cartoon bulldog with a spiked col-
lar, up to its muscular neck in a big bowl of soup.

"Two  documentary videos on Lo/Rez," Yamazaki said. "These are on
the Dog Soup label, originally a small independent based in  East
Taipei.  They  released  the band's first recordings LofRez later
purchased Dog Soup and used it to release less commercial materi-
al by other artists."

Laney  stared  glumly  at  the grinning bulldog, missing the girl
with pigtails. "Like documentaries about themselves?"

"The documentaries were not made subject to the band's  approval,
They are not Lo/Rez corporate documents."

"Well, I guess we've got that to be thankful for."

"You are welcome." Yamazaki hung up.

The  virtual  POV zoomed, rotating in on one of the spikes on the
dog's collar: in close-up, it was a shining  steel  pyramid.  Re-
flected  clouds whipped past in time-lapse on the towering trian-
gular face as the Universal Copyright Agreement warning  scrolled
into view.

Laney  watched  long enough to see that the video was spliced to-
gether from bits  and  pieces  of  the  band's  public  relations
footage,  "Art-warning,"  he  said, and went into the bathroom to
decipher the shower controls.

He managed to miss the first six minutes, showering and  brushing
his  teeth.  He'd  seen  things like that before, art videos, but
he'd never actually tried to pay attention to one. Putting on the
hotel's  white  terry  robe, he told himself he'd better try. Ya-
mazaki seemed capable of quizzing him on it later.  Why did  peo-
ple  make  things  like this? There was no narration, no apparent
structure; some of the same fragments kept repeating  throughout,
at different speeds.

In Los Angeles there were whole public-access channels devoted to
things like this, and home-made talkshows hosted by naked  Encino
witches,  who sat in front of big paintings of the Goddess they'd
done in their garages. Except you could watch that. The logic  of
these  cut-ups,  he  supposed,  was  that by making one you could
somehow push back at the medium. Maybe  it  was  supposed  to  be
something like treading water, a simple repetitive human activity
that temporarily provided at least an illusion of parity with the
sea. But to Laney, who had spent many of his waking hours down in
the deeper realms of data that underlay the worlds of  media,  it
only looked hopeless. And tedious, too, although he supposed that
that boredom was somehow meant to be harnessed, here, another way
of pushing back.

Why  else would anyone have selected and edited all these bits of
Lo and Rez, the Chinese guitarist and the half-Irish singer, say-
ing  stupid  things in dozens of different television spots, most
of them probably intended for translation? Greetings seemed to be
a  theme.  "We're happy to be here in Vladivostok, We hear you've
got a great new aquarium!" "We  congratulate  you  on  your  free
elections and your successftil dengue-abatement campaign!" "We've
always loved London!" "New York, you're ...pragmatic!"

Laney explored the remains of his breakfast, finding a half-eaten
slice of cold brown toast under a steel plate cover. There was an
inch of coffee lefr in the pot. He didn't want to think about the
call  from Rydell or what it might mean. He'd thought he was done
with Slitscan, done with the lawyers .

"Singapore, you're beautiful!"  Rez  said,  Lo  chiming  in  with
"Hell-o, Lion City!"

He picked up the remote and hopefully tried the last-forward, No.
Mute? No. Yamazaki was having this stuff piped in for his bene 94
William  Gibson fit. He considered unplugging the console, but he
was afraid they'd be able to tell.

It was speeding up now, the cuts more frequent,  the  whole  more
content-free,  a  numbing  blur.  Rez's grin was starting to look
sinister, something with an agenda of its  own  that  jumped  un-
changed from one cut to the next,

Suddenly  it  all  slid away, into handheld shadow, highlights on
rococo gilt. There was a clatter of glassware. The  image  had  a
peculiar flattened quality that he knew from Slitscan: the small-
est lapel-cameras did that, the ones disguised as flecks of lint.

A  restaurant? Club? Someone seated opposite the camera, beyond a
phalanx of green bottles. The darkness and the bandwidth  of  the
tiny  camera  making  the  features  impossible to read. Then Rez
leaned forward, recognizable in the new depth of focus.  He  ges-
tured toward the camera with a glass of red wine.

"If  we could ever once stop talking about the music, and the in-
dustry, and all the politics of that, I think I'd  probably  tell
you  that  it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens
of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love  and
loyalty of the people closest to us."

Someone,  a  woman,  said something in French. Laney guessed that
she was the one wearing the camera.

"Ease up, Rozzer. She doesn't  understand  half  you're  saying."
Laney sat forward. The voice had been Blackwell's.

"Doesn't  she?" Rez receded, out of focus. "Because if she did, I
think I'd tell her about the loneliness of  being  misunderstood.
Or  is it the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be
understood?"

And the frame froze on the singer's  blurred  face.  A  date  and
time-stamp. Two years earlier. The word "Misunderstood" appeared.

The phone rang.

"Yeah?"

"Blackwell says there is a window of  opportunity.  The  schedule
has been moved up. You can access now." It was Yamazaki.

0  2  95  "Good," Laney said. "I don't think I'm getting very far
with this first video."

"Rez's quest for renewed artistic meaning? Don't worry;  we  will
screen it for you again, later."

"I'm relieved," Laney said. "Is the second one as good?"

"Second  documentary  is more conventionally structured. In-depth
interviews, biographical detail, BBC, three years ago."

"Wonderful."

"Blackwell is on his way to the hotel. Goodbye."  96 William Gib-
son  The  site  Mitsuko's chapter had erected for the meeting re-
minded Chia ofJapanese prints she'd seen on a school trip to  the
museum  in Seattle; there was a brownish light that seemed to ar-
rive through layers of ancient varnish. There were hills  in  the
distance  with  twisted  trees,  their  branches like quick black
squiggles of ink. She came vectoring in, beside Mitsuko, toward a
wooden house with deep overhanging eaves, its shape familiar from
anime. It was the sort of house that ninjas  crept  into  in  the
dark, to wake a sleeping heroine and tell her that all was not as
she thought, that her uncle was in league with the evil  warlord.
She  checked how she was presenting in a small peripheral window;
put a nudge more depth into her lips.

Nearing the house, she saw that everything had been worked up out
of club archives, so that the whole environment was actually made
of Lo/Rez material. You noticed it first  in  the  wood-and-paper
panels  of  the  walls,  where faint image-fragments, larger than
life, came and went with the organic randomness  of  leaf-dappled
sun and shadow: Rez's cheekbone and half a pair of black glasses,
La's hand chording the neck of his  guitar.  But  these  changed,
were  replaced  with a mothlike flicker, and there would be more,
all the way down into the site's finest resolution,  its  digital
fabric.  She  wasn't sure if you could do that with enough of the
right kind of fractal packets, or if you needed some kind of spe-
cial  computer. Her Sandbenders man aged a few effects like that,
but  mainly  in  its  presentation  of  Sand-   3  benders  soft-
ware.       0          9         97 14.     Tokyo Chapter Screens
slid aside as she and Mitsuko, seated  crosslegged,  entered  the
house. Coming to a neat halt side by side, still seated, floating
about three inches off the tatami (which Chia avoided focusing on
after she'd seen that it was woven from concert-footage; too dis-
tracting). It was a nice way to make  an  entrance.  Mitsuko  was
wearing the kimono and the wide belt-thing, the whole traditional
outfit, except there was some low-key animation going on  in  the
weave  of  the  fabric.  Chia  herself  had downloaded this black
Silke-Marie KoIb blousonand-tights set,  even  though  she  hated
paying for virtual designer stuff that they wouldn't even let you
keep or copy. She'd  used  Kelsey's  cashcard  number  for  that,
though, which had made her feel better about it.

There  were seven girls waiting there, all in kimonos, all float-
ing just off the tatami. Except the one sitting  by  herself,  at
the  head  of the imaginary table, was a robot. Not like any real
robot, but a slender,  chrome-skinned  thing  like  mercury  con-
strained  within  the  form  of a girl. The fice was smooth, only
partially featured, eyeless, with twin  straight  rows  of  small
holes where a mouth should have been. That would be Hiromi Ogawa,
and Chia immediately decided to believe that she was  overweight.

Hiromi's  kimono  was  crawling  with animated sepia-tone footage
from band interviews.

The introductions took a while, and everyone there definitely had
a title, but Chia had stopped paying attention after Hiromi's in-
troduction, except to bow when she thought she was  supposed  to.
She didn't like it that Hiromi would turn up that way for a first
meeting. It was rude, she thought, and it had to  be  deliberate,
and the trouble they'd gone to with the space just seemed to make
it more deliberate.

"We are honored to welcome you, Chia McKenzie. Our chapter  looks
forward  to  affording you every assistance. We are proud to be a
part of the ongoing global appreciation of  Lo/Rez,  their  music
and their art."

"Thank you," Chia said, and sat there as a silence lengthened.


93  William Gibson S.  Mitsuko quietly cleared her throat. Uh-oh,
Chia thought. Speech time. "Thank you for offering to help," Chia
said.  "Thanks  for your hospitality. If any of you ever comes to
Seattle, we'll find a way to put you up. But mainly  thanics  for
your  help,  because  my chapter's been really worried about this
story that Rez claims he wants to marry  some  kind  of  software
agent,  and  since he's supposed to have said it when he was over
here, we thought-" Chia had had the feeling that she  was  moving
along  a  little  too abruptly, and this was confirmed by another
tiny throat-clearing signal from Mitsuko.

"Yes," Hiromi Ogawa said, "you are welcome, and now Tomo  Oshima,
our  chapter's historian, will favor us with a detailed and accu-
rate account of our chapter's story, how we came, from simple but
sincere  beginnings,  to  be the most active, the most respectful
chapter in Japan today."

Chia couldn't believe it.

The girl nearest Hiromi, on Chia's right, bowed and began to  re-
cite  the  chapter's  history in what Chia immediately understood
would be the most excruciatingly boring detail. The two boarding-
school roommates, best friends and the most loyal of buddies, who
discovered a copy of the Dog Soup album in a  bin  in  Akihabara.
How  they  returned  to school with it, played it, were immediate
converts. How their schoolmates mocked them, at  one  point  even
stealing  and  hiding  the precious recording.. . And on, and on,
and Chia already felt like screaming, but there was  nothing  for
it  but  to  sit there. She pulled up a clock and stuck it on the
mirrored robot's face, where the eyes should  have  been.  Nobody
else could see it, but it made her feel a little better.

Now they were into the first Japanese national Lo/Rez convention,
snapshots flashing on the white  paper  walls,  little  girls  in
jeans and t-shirts drinking Coca-Cola in some function room in an
Osaka airport hotel, a few obvious parents standing around in the
background.

Forty-five minutes later, by the red read-out stuck to Hiromi

Ogawa's  blank  metallic  face,  Tomo  Oshima concluded: "Which 3
brings us to the present, and the historic visit of  Chia  McKen-
zie, the

9  99  representative  of  our  sister chapter in Seattle, in the
State of Washington. And now I hope that she will honor us by re-
counting  the history of her own chapter, how it was founded, and
the many activities it has  undertaken  to  honor  the  music  of
Lo/Rez

There  was  a soft burst of applause. Chia didn't join in, uncer-
tain whether it was for her or for Tomo Oshima.

"Sorry," Chia said. "Our historian put all that together for you,
but  it  got corrupted when they ran my computer through that big
scanner at the airport."

"We are very sorry to hear that," the silver robot said. "How un-
fortunate."

"Yeah,"  Chia said, "but I guess it gives us more time to discuss
what brings me here, right?"

"We had hoped-"

"To help us understand this whole  Rez  thing,  right?  We  know.
We're  glad  you  do. Because we're all really worried about this
rumor. Because it seems like it started here, and this Rei Toei's
a  local product, so if anybody can tell us what's going on, it's
you."

The silver robot said nothing. It was expressionless as ever, but
Chia took the clock away just to be sure,

"That's  why  I'm  here," Chia said. "To find out if it's true he
wants to marry her."

She sensed a general uneasiness. The six girls  were  looking  at
the  texture-mapped tatami, unwilling to meet her eye. She wanted
to look at Mitsuko, but it would have been too obvious.

"We are an official chapter," Hiromi said. "We have the honor  of
working  closely  with actual employees of the band. Their publi-
cists are also concerned with the rumor  you  mention,  and  they
have  requested  that we assist them in seeing that it not spread
further."

"Spread? It's been on the net for a week!"

"It is rumor only."

"Then they should issue a denial."

"Denial would add weight to the rumor."

"The posting said that Rez had announced that he was in love with
100 William Gibson Rd Toe~, that he was going to marry her. There
was a long quote." Chia was definitely starting to get the  feel-
ing  that  something was wrong here. This was not what she'd come
all this physical distance for; she might as well have been  sit-
ting in her bedroom in Seattle.

"We  think  that the original posting was a hoax. It would not be
the first."

"You think? Doesn't that mean you don't know?"

"Our sources within the organization assure us there is no  cause
for concern,"

"Spin control," Chia said.

"You imply that Lo/Rez employees are lying to us?"

"Look,"  Chia  said, "I'm as into the band as anybody. I came all
this way, right? But the people who work for them are just people
who  work for them. If Rez gets up in a club one night, takes the
mike, and announces that he's in love with this idoru and  swears
he's  going to marry her, the PR people are going to say whatever
they think they have to say."

"But you have no evidence that any  of  this  occurred.  Only  an
anonymous  posting, claiming to be a transcription of a recording
made in a club in Shinjuku."

"Monkey Boxing.' We looked it up; it's there."

"Really? Perhaps you should go there."

"Why?"

"There is no longer a club called Monkey Boxing."

"There isn't?"

"Clubs in Shinjuku are extremely short-lived. There is no  Monkey
Boxing."  All  of  Hiromi's smug satisfaction came through in the
Sandbenders' translation.

Chia stared at the smooth silver Ece. Stonewalling bitch. What to
do?  What  would  Zona Rosa do if she were in Chia's place? Some-
thing symbolically violent, Chia decided.  But  that  wasn't  her
style,

"Thank you," Chia said. "We just wanted to make sure it wasn't

happening. Sorry I hit on you that way, but we had to be certain.
If 3 you say it's not happening, we'll accept that. We  all  care
about Rez   0         a         101 and the rest of the band, and
we know you do too." Chia added a bow of her own, one that seemed
to take Hiromi off guard.

Now it was the robot's turn to hesitate. She hadn't expected Chia
to just roll over that way. "Our friends in the Lo/Rez  organiza-
tion  are  very concerned that this pointless hoax not affect the
public's perception of Rez. You are aware that there  has  always
been  a  tendency  to  portray him as the most creative but least
stable member of the band."

This last, at least, was true, though Rez's style of  instability
was  fairly  mild,  compared  with most of his pop-cultural fore-
bears. He had never been arrested, never spent a night  in  jail.
But  he was still the one most likely to get into trouble. It had
always been part of his charm.

"Sure," Chia said, playing along, relishing the  uncertainty  she
was sure she was causing Hirorni. "And they try to make Lo out as
some kind of boring techie, the practical one, but we  know  that
isn't true either." She tagged it with a smile.

"Yes,"  Hiromi said, "of course. But you are satisfied, then? You
will explain to your chapter that this was all the result of some
prank, and that all is well with Rez?"

"If  you say so," Chia said, "absolutely. And if that settles it,
then I've got three more days to kill in Japan."

"To kill?"

"Idiom," Chia said. "Free time. Mitsuko says I ought to  see  Ky-
oto.',

"Kyoto is very beautiful.

"I'm on my way," Chia said. "Thanks for putting this site togeth-
er for our meeting. It's really great, and if you'll save it, I'd
love  to  access  it  later with the rest of my chapter. Maybe we
could all get together here when I'm back in  Seattle,  introduce
our chapters."

"Yes    Hiromi definitely didn't know what to make ofChia's atti-
tude.

So worry about it, Chia thought.  102 William Gibson "You  knew,"
Chia said. "You knew she'd do that."

Mitsuko  was blushing, bright red. Looking at the floor, her jel-
ly-bag computer on her lap. "I am sorry. It was her decision."

"They got to her, right? They told her to get rid of me, hush  it
up.

"She  communicates with the Lo/Rez people privately. It is one of
the privileges of her position."

Chia still had her tip-sets on. "I have to talk with  my  chapter
now.  Can  you  give  me a few minutes alone?" She felt sorry for
Mitsuko, but she was still angry. "I'm not angry with you, okay?"

"I will make tea," Mitsuko said.

When  Mitsuko  had  closed the door behind her, Chia checked that
the Sandbenders was still ported, put the goggles  back  on,  and
selected the Seattle chapter's main site.

She  never  got  there.  Zona  Rosa  was  waiting to cut her out.
15.     Akihabara Low gray cloud pressing down on the sheer  gray
city.  A glimpse of new buildings, through the scaled-down limo's
tinted, lace-curtained windows.

They passed an Apple Shires ad, a cobbled lane leading away  into
some  hologram  nursery  land, where smiling juice bottles danced
and sang. Laney's jet lag was  back,  in  some  milder  but  more
baroque  format.  Something  compounded  of  a pervasive sense of
guilt and a feeling of physical distance from his  own  body,  as
though  the  sensory signals arrived stale, after too long a pas-
sage, through some other country that he himself was never  privy
to.

"I  thought  we'd  done with all of that when we got rid of those
Siberian neuropaths," Blackwell said. He was dressed entirely  in
black,  which  had the effect of somewhat reducing his bulk. I-Ic
wore a soft, smocklike garment sewn from very black denim, multi-
ple  pockets around its wide hem. Laney thought it looked vaguely
Japanese, in some medieval way. Something a carpenter might wear.
"Bent  as  a dog's hind legs. Picked them up touring the Kombinat
states."

"Neuropaths?"

"Filling Rez's head with their garbage. He's vulnerable to influ-
ences,  touring.  Combination of stress and boredom. Cities start
to look the same. One hotel room after another. It's a  syndrome,
is  what  itis."           "Where are we going?"            105 P
"Akihbara"

Where?'

Where we're going." Blackwell consulted an enormous,  elaborately
dialed, steel-braceleted chronometer that looked as though it had
been designed to do double duty as brass knuckles. "Took a  month
before  they'd  let me have a go, do what was needed. Then we got
him over to a clinic in Paris and they told us  what  those  bas-
tards  had been feeding him had made a pig's breakf~st of his en-
docrine system. Put him right, in the end, but  it  needn't  have
happened, none of it."

But  you  got  rid of them?" Laney had no idea what Blackwell was
talking about, but it seemed best to keep up the illusion of con-
versation.

"Told them I was thinking about putting them face-first through a
little  Honda  tree-shredder  I'd  purchased,  just  on  the  off
chance,"  Blackwell said. "Not necessary. Showed them it, though.
In the end, they were sent along with no  more  than  a  moderate
touch-up.'

Laney  looked  at  the  back of the driver's head. The right-hand
drive worried him. He felt like there was nobody in the  driver's
seat. "How long did you say you'd worked for the band?'

"Five years."

Laney  thought  of  the  video, Blackwell's voice in the darkened
club. Two years ago. "Where are we going?"

"Be there, soon enough."

They entered an area of narrower streets, of featureless, vaguely
shabby  buildings  covered  with  unlit, inactivated advertising.
Huge representations of media platforms Laney  didn't  recognize.
Some  of the buildings revealed what he assumed was quake damage.
Head-sized gobs of a btownish, glasslike substance protruded from
cracks  that  ran  diagonally across one facade, like a cheap toy
repaired badly by a clumsy giant. The limo pulled to the curb.

"'Electric Town,'" Blackwell said. "I'll page you,"  he  said  to
the  driver,  who  nodded in a way that struck Laney as being not
particularly Japanese. Blackwell opened the door and got out with
that  same  106 William Gibson unlikely grace Laney had noted be-
fore, the car  bucking  noticeably  with  the  departure  of  his
weight.  Laney,  sliding  across the gray velour seat, felt tired
and wooden.



The building with the cracks and the brown, saplike knobs  opened
into  a  white-and-pastel  sea of kitchen appliances. The ceiling
was low, laced with temporary-looking pipes and  conduits.  Laney
followed  Blackwell  down  a  central  aisle. A few figures stood
along other aisles to either side, but he had no way  of  knowing
whether these were salespeople or potential customers.

An  old-fashioned  escalator was grinding away, at the end of the
central aisle, the rectilinear steel teeth at the edges  of  each
ascending  step  worn  sharp  and bright. Blackwell kept walking.
Levitated ahead of Laney, climbing, his feet  barely  seeming  to
move. Laney mounted hard behind him.

They  rose  up to a second level, this one displaying a less con-
sistent range of goods: wallscreens, immersion consoles, automat-
ed rediners with massage-modules bulging from their cushions like
the heads of giant mechanical grubs.

Along an aisle walled with corrugated plastic cartons,  Blackwell
with  his  scarred  hands tucked deep in the pockets of his ninja
smock. Into a maze of bright blue plastic tarps, slung from pipes
overhead. Unfamiliar tools. A worker's dented thermos standing on
a red toolkit that spanned a pair of aluminum  sawhorses.  Black-
well holding a final tarp aside. Laney ducked, entering.

"We've  been holding it open for the past hour, Blackwell," some-
one said. "Not an easy thing."

Blackwell let the tarp fall into place behind him. "Had  to  col-
lect him from the hotel."

The  space,  walled  off  with the blue rarps on three sides, was
twice the size of Laney's hotel room but considerably more crowd-
ed.  A lot of hardware was assembled there: a collection of black
consoles   o         2         107  were  cabled  together  in  a
white  swamp  of Styrofoam packing-forms, 1 torn corrugated plas-
tic, and crumpled sheets of bubble-pack. Two  men  and  a  woman,
waiting.  It was the woman who had spoken. As Laney shuffled for-
ward, ankle-deep through the packing materials, the stuff creaked
and popped, slippery under the soles of his shoes.

Blackwell kicked at it. "You might have tidied up.'

"We aren't set-dressers," the woman said. She sounded to Laney as
though she was from Northern California. She had short brown hair
cut  in bangs, and something about her reminded him of the quants
who worked at Slitscan. Like the other two, men, one Japanese and
one red-haired, she wore jeans and a generic nylon bomber jacket.

"Hell of a job on short notice," the redhead said.

"No notice," the other corrected, and he was definitely from Cal-
ifornia.  His  hair  was pulled straight back, fastened high in a
little samurai ponytail.

"What you're paid for," Blackwell said.

"We're paid to tour," the redhead said.

"If you want to tour again, you'd better hope that  these  work.'
Blackwell looked at the cabled consoles.

Laney  saw  a folding plastic table set up against the rear wall.
It was bright pink. There was a gray computer there,  a  pair  of
eye-phones.  Unfamiliar  cables  ran to the nearest console: flat
ribbons candy-striped in different colors. The  wall  behind  was
plastered  with  an overlay of old advertising; a woman's eye was
directly behind the pink table, a yard  wide,  her  laser-printed
pupil the size of Laneys head.

Laney  moved toward the table, through the Styrofoam, sliding his
feet, a motion not unlike cross-country skiing.

"Let's do it," he said. "Let's see what you've got."  108 William
Gibson  Zona Rosa kept a secret place, a country carved from what
once had been a corporate website.

It was a valley lined with ruined swimming pools, overgrown  with
cactus  and red Christmas flowers. Lizards posed like hieroglyphs
on mosaics of shattered tile.

No houses stood in that valley, though sections  of  broken  wall
gave  shade, or rusting rectangles of corrugated metal set aslanr
on weathered wooden uprights. Sometimes there  were  ashes  of  a
cooking fire.

She kept it early evening there.

"Zona?"

"Someone is trying to find you." Zona in her ragged leather jack-
et over a white t-shirt. In that place she presented as  a  quick
collage,  fragments  torn  from films, magazines, Mexican newspa-
pers:

dark eyes, Aztec cheekbones, a dusting of acne scars,  her  black
hair  tangled like smoke. She kept the resolution down, never let
herself come entirely into focus.

"My mother?"

"No. Someone with resources. Someone who knows that  you  are  in
Tokyo."  The  narrow  toes  of her black boots were pale with the
dust of the valley. There were copper zips down the  outer  seams
of  her  faded  black jeans, waist to ankle. "Why are you dressed
that way?"

Chia remembered that she was still presenting in the Silke-Marie

0 2 109 16.     Zona KoIb outfit. "There was a meeting. Very for-
mal. Major butt-pain. I got this with Kelsey's cashcard."

"Where were you ported, when you paid for it?"

"Where I'm ported now. Mitsuko's place."

Zona frowned. "What other purchases have you made?"

"None."

"Nothing?"

"A subway ticket."

Zona  snapped  her  fingers  and a lizard scurried from beneath a
rock. It ran up her leg and into her waiting hand. As she stroked
it  with  the fingers of the other hand, the patterns of its col-
oration changed. She tapped its head and the lizard ran down  her
leg, vanishing behind a crumpled sheet of rusted roofing. "Kelsey
is frightened, frightened enough to come to me."

"Frightened of what?"

"Someone contacted her about your ticket.  They  were  trying  to
reach  her  father,  because  the points used to purchase it were
his. But he is traveling. They spoke with Kelsey instead. I think
they threatened her."

"With what?'

"I  don't know. But she gave them your name and the number of the
cashcard."

Chia thought about Maryalice and Eddie.

Zona Rosa took a knife from her jacket pocket and squatted  on  a
shelf  of  pinkish  rock.  Golden  dragons swirled in the shallow
depths of the knife's pink plastic handles. She thumbed a  button
of  plated tin and the dragon-etched blade snapped out, its spine
sawtoothed and merciless. "She has no balls, your Kelsey."

"She's not my Kelsey, Zona."

Zona picked up a length of green-barked branch and began to shave
thin  curls  from it with the edge of the switchblade. "She would
not last an hour, in my world." On a previous visit,  she'd  told
Kelsey  stories  of the war with the Rats, pitched battles fought
through the garbage-strewn  playgrounds  and  collapsing  parking
garages of vast 110 William Gibson housing projects. How had that
war begun? Over what? Zona never said.

"Neither would I."

"So who is looking for you?"

"My mother would be, if she knew I was here

"That was not your mother, the one who put the fear into Kelsey."

"If  someone  knew  my seat number on the flight over, they could
get a ticket number and trace it back, right?"

"If they had certain resources, yes. It would be illegal."

"From there, they could go to Kelsey-"

"From there they are in the frequent-flyer files of Air Magellan,
which implies very serious resources."

"There  was  a woman, on the plane... She had the seat beside me.
Then I had to carry her suitcase, and she and her boyfriend  gave
me a ride into Tokyo.

"You carried her suitcase?"

"Yes."

"Tell  me this story. All of it. When did you first see this wom-
an?"

"In the airport, SeaTac. They were doing noninvasive DNA  samples
and  I  saw  her  do  this weird thing    Chia began the story of
Maryalice and the rest of it, while Zona Rosa sat and peeled  and
sharpened her stick, frowning.



"Fuck  your  mother,"  Zona Rosa said, when Chia had finished her
story. The translation rendered her tone as either  amazement  or
disgust, Chia couldn't tell.

"What?" Chia's confusion was absolute.

Zona  looked at her along the length of the peeled stick. "An id-
iom. Idioma. Very rich and complicated. It has nothing to do with
your  mother."  She  lowered  the  stick and did something to her
knife, folding the blade away with a  triple  click.  The  lizard
she'd adjusted 0

111  earlier  came  scurrying  low across a narrow ledge of rock,
clinging so close as to appear two-dimensional. Zona picked it up
and stroked it into yet another color-configuration.

"What are you doing?"

"Harder  encryption,"  Zona said, and put the lizard on the lapel
of her jacket, where it  clung  like  a  brooch,  its  eyes  tiny
spheres  of  onyx.  "Someone is looking for you. Probably they've
already found you. We must try to insure that our conversation is
secure."

"Can you do that, with him?" The lizards head moved.

"Maybe.  He's new. But those are better." She pointed up with the
stick. Chia squinted into the evening sky, dark cloud tinted with
streaks  of sunset pink. She thought she saw a sweep of wings, so
high. Two things flying. Big. Not  planes.  But  then  they  were
gone.  "Illegal,  in  your  country.  Colombian.  From  the data-
havens." Zona put the pointed end of her stick on the ground  and
began  to  twirl  it  one way, then the other, between her palms.
Chia had seen a rabbit make -fire that way, once, in  an  ancient
cartoon. "You are an idiot."

"Why?"

"You carried a bag through customs? A stranger's bag?"

"Yes -

"Idiot!"

"I am not."

"She is a smuggler. You are hopelessly naive."

But  you  went along with sending me here, Chia thought, and sud-
denly felt like crying. "But why are they looking for me?"

Zona shrugged. "In the District, a cautious  smuggler  would  not
let a mule go free.

Something silvery and cold executed a tight little flip somewhere
behind and below Chia's navel, and with  it  came  the  unwelcome
recollection  of the washroom at Whiskey Clone, and the corner of
something she hadn't recognized. In her bag. Stuffed down between
her t-shirts. When she'd used one to dry her hands.

"What's wrong?"  112 William Gibson I       "I better go. Mitsuko
went to make tea. . . Talking too quickly, biting off the  words.

"Go? Are you insane? We must-"

"Sorry.  'Bye."  Pulling  off  the  goggles and scrabbling at the
wrist-fasteners.

Her bag there, where she'd left it.

113 17.     The Walls of Fame








"We had no time to do this right," the woman said, handing  Laney
the eyephones. He was sitting on a child-sized pink plastic bench
that matched the table. "If there is a way to do it right."

There are areas we could not arrange access to," said the

Japanese-American with the ponytail. "Blackwell said  you've  had
experience with celebrities."

"Actors," Laney said. "Musicians, politicians .

"You'll  probably find this different. Bigger. By a couple oi de-
grees of magnitude.'

"What cant you access?" Laney asked, settling the 'phones over

his eyes.

We don't know," he heard the woman say. "You'll get  a  sense  of
the  scale  of things, going in. The blanks might be accountancy,
tax-law stuff, contracts . . . We're just tech  support.  He  has
other  people  someone pays to make sure parts of it stay as pri-
vate as possible."

"Then why not bring them in?" Laney asked.

He felt Blackwell's hand come down on his shoulder like a bag of

sand. "I'll discuss that with you later. Now  get  in  there  and
have a

look. What we pay you for, isn't it?"



In the week following Alison Shires' death, Laney had used Out of

Control's DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her person-
al

data.  The  nodal  point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction
had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a  folding
in.

But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer gen-
erating data. There  was  no  credit  activity.  Even  her  Upful
Groupvine  account had been canceled. As her estate was executed,
and various business affairs terminated, her data began  to  take
on  a  neat  rectilinearity.  Laney  thought  of the dead bundled
squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins  and  cairns,  of  the
long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had
been afforded their own real estate.

The nodal point had formed where she had  lived,  while  she  had
lived,  in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the
ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was  no  longer
an interface.

He'd  looked,  but  only  briefly,  and  very  cautiously, to see
whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of  his
own.  Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would
have set a more careful watch on that.

Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its
core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the ex-
ecution of her estate.



A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of  a  guest-
house  in  Ireland.  A subcatalog of the products provided in the
seventeenth-century walnut commode at bedside there:  toothbrush,
toothpaste, analgesic tablets, tampons, razor, shaving gel. Some-
one would check these periodically,  restock  to  the  inventory.
(The  last  guest  had  taken  the gel but not the razor.) In the
first catalog, there was a powerful pair of Austrian  binoculars,
tripod-mounted, which also functioned as a digital camera.

Laney  accessed  its memory, discovering that the recording func-
tion had been used exactly once, on the  day  the  manufacturer's
warranty  had  been  activated.  The  warranty was now two months
void, 116 William Gibson the single recorded image a view from  a
white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the
Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink
fence,  a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse
of grayish-btown beach, and then the gray and silver sea.  Closer
to  the  sea,  partially cut off by the image's border, there ap-
peared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated  tower.
Its stones were the color of the beach.

Laney  tried  to quit the bedroom, the guesthouse, and found him-
self  surrounded  by  archaeologically  precise  records  of  the
restoration of five vast ceramic stoves in an apartment in Stock-
holm. These were like giant chess pieces, towers of  brick  faced
with  elaborately  glazed,  lavishly molded ceramic. They rose to
the fourteen-foot ceilings, and several people could easily  have
stood upright in one. There was a record of the numbering, disas-
sembly, cleaning, restoration, and reassembly of  each  brick  in
each stove. There was no way to access the rest of the apartment,
but the proportions of the stoves led Laney to assume that it was
very  large.  He clicked to the end of the stove-record and noted
the final price of the work; at current rates it  was  more  than
several times his former annual salary at Slitscan.

He  clicked back, through points of recession, trying for a wider
view, a sense of form, -but there were only walls, bulking masses
of  meticulously  arranged  information, and he remembered Alison
Shires and his apprehension of het data-death.



"The lights are on," Laney said,  removing  the  eyephones,  "but
there's nobody home." He checked the computer's clock: he'd spent
a little over twenty minutes in there.

Blackwell regarded him dourly,  settled  on  an  injection-molded
crate like a black-draped Buddha, the scars in his eyebrows knit-
ted into new configurations of  concern.  The  three  technicians
looked  carefully  blank,  hands in the pockets of their matching
jackets.

"How's that, rheni" Blackwell asked.

"I'm not sure," Laney said. 'He doesn't  seem  to  do  anything."
"He  doesn't  bloody  do  anything  but do things," Blackwell de-
clared, "as you'd know if you were orchestrating his bloody secu-
rity!"

"Okay,"  Laney  said, "then where'd he have breakfast?" Blackwell
looked uncomfortable. "In his suite."

"His suite where?'

"Imperial Hotel." Blackwell glared at the technicians. "Which em-
pire, exactly?"

"Here. Bloody Tokyo"

"Here? He's in Tokyo?"

"You  lot,"  Blackwell  said,  "outside,'  The brown-haired woman
shrugged, inside her nylon jacket, and went kicking  through  the
Styrofoam,  head  down, the other two following in her wake. When
the tarp dropped behind them,  Blackwell  rose  from  his  crate.
"Don't think you can try me on for size.

"l'm  telling  you that I don't think this is going to work. Your
man isn't in there."

"How did he pay for his breakfast?"

"Signed to the suite."

"Is the suite in his name?"

"Of course not."

"Say he needs to buy something, during the course of the day?"

"Someone buys it for him, don't they?"

"And pays with?"

"A card," "But not in his name."

"Right."

"So if anyone were looking at the transaction data, there'd be no
way to connect it directly to him, would there?"

"No."

"Because you're doing your job, right?"

"Yes."

"Then  he's  invisible. To me. I can't see him. He isn't there. I
can't do what you want to pay me to do.  It's  impossible."   118
William Gihsoo "But what about all the rest of it?"

Laney  put  the eyephones down on the keyboard "That isn't a per-
son. That's a corporation."

"But you've got it all! His bloody houses! His fiats!  Where  the
gardeners put the bloody flowers in the rock wall! All of it!"

"But  I  don't  know  who he is. I can't make him out against the
rest of it, He's not leaving the traces that make the patterns  I
need."

Blackwell  sucked in his upper lip and kept it there. Laney heard
the dislodged prosthesis click against his teeth.

"I have to get some idea of who he really is," Laney said.

The lip re-emerged, damp and gleaming. "Christ," Blackwell  said,
"that~r a poser."

"I have to meet him."

Blackwell  wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "His music,
then?" He raised his eyebrows hopefully. "Or there's video-"

"I've got video, thanks. It really might help  if  I  could  meet
him."

Blackwell  touched his ear-stump. "You meet him, you think you'll
be able to get his nodes, nodal, do that thing Yama's on  about?"

"I don't know," Laney said. "I can try."

"Bloody  hell,"  Blackwell said. He plowed through the Styrofoam,
swept the tarp aside with his arm, barked for the waiting techni-
cians,  then turned back to Laney. "Sometimes I'd as soon be back
with my mates in Jika Jika. Get things sorted, in  there,  they'd
bloody  stay that way." The woman with the brown bangs thrust her
head in, past the edge of the tarp. "Collect this business in the
van," Blackwell told her. "Have it ready to use when we need it."

"We don't have a van, Keithy," the woman said.

"Buy one," Blackwell said.  18.     The Otaku Something rectangu-
lar, yielding to the hrst touch but hard inside, as she tugged it
free. Wrapped in a blue and yellow plastic bag  from  the  SeaTac
duty-free,  crookedly sealed with wrinkled lengths of slick brown
tape. Heavy. Compact.

"Hello."

Chia very nearly falling backward, where she crouched  above  her
open  bag,  at  the  voice and the sight of this boy, who in that
first instant she takes to be an  older  girl,  side-parted  hair
falling past her shoulders.

"I  am Masahiko." No translator. He wore a dark, oversized tunic,
vaguely military, buttoned to  its  high,  banded  collar,  loose
around  his neck. Old gray sweatpants bagging at the knees. Grub-
by-looking white paper slippers.

"Mitsuko made tea," indicating the tray, the stoneware pot, two

cups. "But you were pcrted."

"Is she here?" Chia pushed the thing back down into her bag.

"She went out," Masahiko said. "May I look at your computer?"

"Computer?" Chia stood, confused.

"It is Sandbenders, yes?"

She poured some of the tea, which was still steaming. "Sure.  You
want tea?"

"No," Masahiko said. "I drink coffee only." He squatted on the

tatami, beside the low table, and ran an admiring fingertip along
the

edge of the Sandbenders' cast aluminum. "Beautiful. I have seen a
small disk player by the same maker. It is a cult, yes?"

"A commune. Tribal people. In Oregon."

The  boy's  black  hair was long and glossy and smoothly brushed,
but Chia saw there was a bit of noodle caught in  it,  the  thin,
kinky kind that came in instant ramen bowls.

"I'm  sorry  I  was ported when Mitsuko came back. She'll think I
was rude."

"You are from Seattle." Not a question.


"Yes. Why are you here?" His eyes large and dark, his  face  long
and pale.

"Your sister and I are both into Lo/Rez."

"You have come because he wants to marry Rei Toei?"

Hot tea dribbled down Chia's chin. "She told you that?"

"Yes,"  Masahiko said. "In Walled City, some people worked on her
design." He was lost in his study of her Sandbenders, turning  it
over in his hands. His fingers were long and pale, the nails bad-
ly chewed.

"Where's that?"

"Netside,' he said, flipping the weight of his  hair  back,  over
one shoulder.


"Original concept. Almost radical.' He stroked the keys. "This is
very beautiful

"You learned English here?"

"In Walled City."

Chia tried another sip of tea, then put the cup down.  "You  have
any coffee?"

"In my room," he said.



Masahiko's  room,  at  the  bottom  of a short flight of concrete
stairs, to the rear of the  restaurant's  kitchen,  had  probably
been a storage 122 William Gibson closet. It was a boy-nightmare,
the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers  of  friends,
its  floor  and  ledgelike  bed  long  vanished  beneath unwashed
clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers.
A  tower  of empty foam ramen bowls in one corner, their hologram
labels winking from beyond a single cone of halogen.  A  desk  or
table  forming a second, higher ledge, cut from some recycled ma-
terial that looked as though it had been laminated from  shredded
juice  cartons.  His  computer there, a featureless black cube. A
shallower shelf of the juice-carton board supported a  pale  blue
microwave, unopened ramen bowls, and half a dozen tiny steel cans
of coffee.

One of these, freshly microwaved, was hot  in  Chia's  hand.  The
coffee was strong, sugary, thickly creamed. She sat beside him on
the lumpy bed ledge, a padded jacket wadded up behind her  for  a
cushion.

It  smelled  faintly  of  boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he
seemed very clean, now that she was this close,  and  she  had  a
vague  idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn't they love
to bathe? The thought made her want a shower.

"1 like this very much." Reaching to touch the Sandbenders again,
which  he'd brought from upstairs and placed on the work surface,
in front of his black cube, sweeping aside a  litter  of  plastic
spoons, pens, nameless bits of metal and plastic.

"I-low  do  you see to work yours?" Gesturing toward his computer
with the miniature can of coffee.

He said something in Japanese. Worms and dots of pastel neon  lit
the faces of the cube, crawling and pulsing, then died.

The  walls, from floor to ceiling, were thickly covered with suc-
cessive layers of posters, handbills, graphics  files.  The  wall
directly  in  front  of her, above and behind the black computer,
was hung with a large scarf, a  square  of  some  silky  material
screened  with a map or diagram in red and black and yellow. Hun-
dreds of irregular blocks or rooms, units of some kind,  pressing
in around a central vacancy, an uneven vertical rectangle, black.

2 123 "Walled City," he said, following her eye. He  leaned  for-
ward,  fingertip finding a particular spot. 'This is mine. Eighth
level.'

Chia pointed to the center of the diagram. "What's this?"

"Black hole. In the original, something  like  an  airshaft."  He
looked at her. "Tokyo has a black hole, too. You have seen this?"


"The Palace. No lights. From a tall building, at night, the Impe-
rial  Palace  is  a  black  hole.  Watching,  once, I saw a torch
flare."

"What happened to it in the earthquake?"

He raised his eyebrows. "This of course would not be  shown.  All
now  is  as  before. We are assured of this." He smiled, but only
with the corners of his mouth.

"Where did Mitsuko go?" He shrugged.

"Did she say when she'd be back?" "No."

Chia thought of Hiromi Ogawa, and then  of  someone  phoning  for
Kelsey's  father. Hiromi? But then there was whatever it was, up-
stairs in her bag in Mitsuko's  room.  She  remembered  Maryalice
yelling  from  behind  the door to Eddie's office. Zona had to be
right.

"You know a club called Whiskey Clone?"

"No." He stroked the buffed aluminum edges of her Sand-benders.

"How about Monkey Boxing?" He looked at her, shook his head.

"You probably don't get out much, do you?" He held her gaze.  "In
Walled City."

"I  want to go to this club, Monkey Boxing. Except maybe it isn't
called that anymore. It's in a place called Shinjuku.  I  was  in
the station there, before."

"Clubs are not open, now."

"That's  okay.  I just want you to show me where it is. Then I'll
be able to find my own way back."

"No. I must return to Walled City. I have responsibilities.  Find
124  William  Gibson the address of this place and I will explain
to your computer where to go."

The Sandbenders could find its own way there, but Chia had decid-
ed she didn't want to go alone. Better to go with a boy than Mit-
suko, and Mitsuko's allegiance to her chapter could be a  problem
anyway.  Mainly,  though,  she  just  wanted  to get out of here.
Zona's news had spooked her. Somebody knew she was here. And what
to do about the thing in her bag?

"You like this, right?" Pointing at her Sandbenders.

"Yes," hesaid.

"The  software's  even  better.  I've  got  an  emulator in there
that'll install a virtual Sandbenders in your computer.  Take  me
to Monkey Boxing and it's yours."



"Have  you  always lived here?" Chia asked, as they walked to the
station. "In this neighborhood, I mean?"

Masahiko shrugged. Chia thought the street  made  him  uncomfort-
able.  Maybe  just being outside. He'd traded his gray sweats for
equally baggy black cotton pants, cinched at the ankle with elas-
tic-sided  black  nylon gaiters above black leather workshoes. He
still wore his black tunic, but with the  addition  of  a  short-
billed  black  leather  cap that she thought might have once been
part of a school uniform. If the tunic was too big for  him,  the
cap  was  too  small. He wore it perched forward at an angle, the
bill riding low. "I live in Walled City," he said.

"Mitsuko told me. That's like a multi-user domain,"

"Walled City is unlike anything."

"Give me the address when I give you the emulator. I'll check  it
out."  The  sidewalk  arched over a concrete channel running with
grayish water. It reminded her of her  Venice.  She  wondered  if
there had been a stream there once.

"It has no address," he said.

"That's impossible," Chia said, He said nothing.

She  thought  about what she'd found when she'd opened the SeaTac
duty-free bag. Something flat and rectangular, dark  gray.  Maybe
made from one of those weird plastics that had metal in them. One
end had rows of little holes, the other had  complicated  shapes,
metal,  and  a different kind of plastic. There didn't seem to be
any way to open it, no visible seams. No markings. Didn't  rattle
when  she  shook  it. Maybe What Things Are, the icon dictionary,
would recognize it, but she hadn't had time.  Masahiko  had  been
downstairs  changing  when she'd slit the blue and yellow plastic
with Mitsuko's serially numbered, commemorative Lo/Rez Swiss Army
knife.  She'd  glanced around the room for a hiding place. Every-
thing too neat and tidy.

Finally she'd put it back in her bag, hearing him coming  up  the
stairs  from  the kitchen. Which was where it was now, along with
her Sandbenders, under her arm,  as  they  entered  the  station.
Which was probably not smart but she just didn't know.

She used Kelsey's cashcard to buy them both tickets.  126 William
Gibson There was a fax ftom Rydell waiting for Laney when  Black-
well  dropped him at the hotel. It had been printed on expensive-
looking gray letterhead that contrasted drastically with the body
of  the fax itself, which had been sent from a Lucky Dragon twen-
ty-four-hour convenience store on Sunset. The smiling Lucky Drag-
on,  blowing smoke from its nostrils, was centered just below the
hotel's silver-embossed logo, something Laney thought of  as  the
Droopy  Evil Elf Hat. Whatever it was supposed to be, the hotel's
decorators were very fond of it. It formed a repeating  motif  in
the lobby, and Laney was glad that it didn't seem to have reached
the guest rooms yet.

Rydell had hand-printed his fax with a medium-width fiber-pen  in
scrupulously  neat block capitals. Laney read it in the elevator.

It was addressed to C. LANEY, GUESt


I THINK THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. SHE AND THE

DAY MANAGER HAD COFFEE IN THE LOBBY AND HE

KEPT LOOKING AT ME. HE COULD'VE CHECKED THE

PHONE LOG EASY. WISH I HADN'T CALLED YOU THERE.

SORRY. ANYWAY, THEN SHE AND THE OTHERS CHECKED

OUT FAST, LEFT THE TECHS TO PACK UP. A TECH

TOLD GHENGIS IN THE GARAGE THAT SOME OF THEM

WERE ON THEIR WAY TO JAPAN AND HE WAS GLAD HE

WASN'T, WATCH OUT, OKAY? RYDELL

0 2 127 19.     Arleigh "Okay," Laney said,  and  remembered  how
he'd  walked  to the Lucky Dragon one night, against Rydell's ad-
vice, because he couldn't sleep. There were scary-looking  bionic
hookers  posted  every  block or so, but otherwise it hadn't felt
too dangerous. Someone had  painted  a  memorial  mural  toJ.  D.
Shapely  on  one side of the Lucky Dragon, and the management had
had the good sense to  leave  it  there,  culturally  integrating
their  score  into the actual twenty-four-hour life of the Strip.
You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests
for  various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send fax-
es. It had occurred to Laney that  this  was  probably  the  only
store  for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really need-
ed; the others all sold things  that  he  couldn't  even  imagine
wanting.

He re-read the fax, walking down the corridor, and used the card-
key to open his door.

There was a shallow wicker basket on the bed, spread  with  white
tissue and unfamiliar objects. On closer inspection, these proved
to be his socks and underwear, freshly laundered and arranged  in
little  paper  holders  embossed  with the Elf Hat. He opened the
narrow, mirrored closet door, activating a  built-in  light,  and
discovered  his  shirts  arranged  on hangers, including the blue
button-downs Kathy Torrance had made fun of.  They  looked  brand
new.  He  touched  one  of  the  lightly  starched cuffs. "Stitch
count," he said. He looked down at Rydell's folded fax. He  imag-
ined  Kathy  Torrance headed straight for him, on an SST from Los
Angeles. He discovered that he  couldn't  imagine  her  sleeping.
He'd  never seen her asleep and somehow it didn't seem like some-
thing she'd willingly do. In the weird vibrationless quiet of su-
personic  flight,  she'd be staring at the gray blank of the win-
dow, or at the screen of her computer.

Thinking of him.

The screen behind him came on with a soft chime  and  he  jumped,
four  inches,  straight  up.  He  turned  and  saw  the BBC logo.
Yarnazaki's second video.


128 %Niflia.n Gibson He was a third of the way  through  it  when
the  door  chimed.  Ret was strolling along a narrow trail in the
jungle somewhere, wearing sun-bleached khakis and rope-soled san-
dals.  He  was  singing  something  as he went, a wordless little
melody, over and over, trying different tones and  stresses.  His
bare  chest shone with sweat, and when the open shirt swung aside
you'd catch a corner of his I Ching tattoo. He had  a  length  of
bamboo,  and  swung  it as he walked, swatting at dangling vines.
Laney had a sneaking suspicion that the wordless melody had  sub-
sequently turned into some global billion-seller, but he couldn't
place it yet. The door chimed again.

He got up, crossed to  the  door,  thumbed  the  speaker  button.
"Yes?"

"Hello?" A woman's voice.

He touched the card-sized screen set into the doorframe and saw a
dark-haired woman. Bangs. The tech from the appliance  warehouse.
He unlocked the door and opened it.

"Yamazaki thinks we should talk," she said.

Laney  saw  that she was wearing a black suit with a narrow skin,
dark stockings.

"Aren't you supposed to be shopping for a van?" He  stepped  back
to let her in.

"Got  one," closing the door behind her. "When the Lo/Rez machine
decides to throw money at a problem, money will be thrown. Usual-
ly  in  the wrong direction." She looked at the screen, where Rez
was still swinging along, swatting flies from his neck and chest,
lost in composition. "Homework?"


"Arleigh  McCrae,'  she  said,  taking  a card from a small black
purse and handing it to him. Her name there, then four  telephone
numbers and two addresses, neither of them physical. "Do you have
a card, Mr. Laney?"

"Cohn. No. I don't."

"They can make them up for you at the desk. Everyone has a card 3
here,"


129  He  put the card in his shirt pocket. "Blackwell didn't give
me one. Neither did Yamazaki."

"Outside the Lo/Rez organization, I mean. It's  like  not  having
socks."

"I have socks," Laney said, indicating the basket on the bed. "Do
you feel like watching a BBC documentary on Lo/Rez?"

"No."  "I don't think I can turn it off. He'll know."

"Try lowering the volume. Manually." She demonstrated.

"A technician," Laney said.

"With a van. And umpti-million yen worth of equipment that didn't
seem  to  do much for you." She sat down in one of the room's two
small armchairs, crossing her legs.

Laney took the other chair. "Not your fault. You got me in  there
just fine. But it's not the kind of data I can work with."

"Yamazaki  told  me  what  you're supposed to be able to do," she
said. "I didn't believe him."

Laney looked at her. '1 can't help you there." There  were  three
smiling suns, like black woodblock prints, down the inside of her
left calf.

"They're woven into the stockings. Catalan."

Laney looked up. "I hope you're not going to ask  me  to  explain
what  it  is people think they pay me to do," he said, "because I
can't. I don't know."

"Don't worry," she said. "I just work here. But  what  I'm  being
paid  to do, right now, is determine what it is we could give you
that would allow you to do whatever it is that you're alleged  to
be able to do."

Laney  looked  at  the  screen.  Concert footage now, and Rez was
dancing, a microphone in  his  hand.  "You've  seen  this  video,
right?  Is he serious about that 'Sino-Celtic' thing he was talk-
ing about in that interview?"

"You haven't met him yet, have you?"

"No."          130     William Gibson I-  "Its  not  the  easiest
thing, deciding what Re2 is serious about."

"But  how  can  there be 'Sino-Celtic mysticism' when the Chinese
and the Celts don't have any shared history?"

"Because Rez himself is half  Chinese  and  half  Irish.  And  if
there's one thing he's serious about

"Yes?"

"It's Rez."

Laney stared glumly at the screen as the singer was replaced by a
close-up of Lo's playing, his hands on the  black-bodied  guitar.
Earlier,  a  venerable  British guitarist in wonderful tweeds had
opined as how they hadn't really expected  the  next  Hendrix  to
emerge from Taiwanese Canto-pop, but then again they hadn't actu-
ally been expecting the first one, had they?

"Yamazaki told me the story. What happened to you,"  Arleigh  Mc-
Crae said. "Up to a certain point."

Laney closed his eyes.

"The  show  never  aired,  Laney. Out of Control dropped it. What
happened?"



He'd taken to having break&st beside  the  Chateau's  small  oval
pool, past the homely clapboard bungalows that Rydell said were a
later addition. It was the one time of the day that felt like his
own,  or did until Rice Daniels arrived, which was usually toward
the bottom of a three-cup pot of coffee, just prior to  his  eggs
and bacon.

Daniels  would  cross  the  tern cotta to Laney's table with what
could only be described as a spring in his step. Laney  privately
wished  to  ascribe  this to drug-use, of which he'd seen no evi-
dence whatever, and indeed Daniels's most  potent  public  indul-
gence  seemed  to  be  multiple cups of decaf espresso taken with
curls of lemon peel. He favored loosely  woven  beige  suits  and
collarless  shirts.           This  particular  morning, however,
Daniels had not been alone,        3 and  Laney  had  detected  a
lack   of   temper   in   the   accustomed  spring;  a          0
                2                 131 certain jangled brittleness
there,  and  the painful-hooking glasses seeming to grip his head
even more tightly than usual. Beside him came a  gray-haired  man
in  a  dark brown suit of Western cut, hawk-faced and wind-burnt,
the blade of his impressive nose protruding  from  a  huge  black
pair of sunglasses. He wore black alligator roping-boots and car-
ried a dusty-looking briefcase of age-darkened tan  cowhide,  its
handle mended with what Laney supposed had to be baling wire.

"Laney,"  Rice  Daniels had said, arriving at the table, "this is
Aaron Pursley."


"You're the lawyer," Laney said. "On television."

"In the flesh as well, son." Pursley was on  "Cops  in  Trouble,"
and before that he'd been famous for defending celebrity clients.
Daniels hadn't taken a seat, and stood behind Pursley now with  a
hunched,  uncharacteristic posture, hands in his trouser pockets.
"Here we are," Pursley said. He drew out a sheaf of  blue  paper.
"Don't let your eggs get cold."

"Have  a  seat," Laney said to Daniels. Daniels winced behind his
glasses.

"Now," Pursley  said,  "you  were  in  a  Federal  Orphanage,  in
Gainesville, it says here, from age twelve to age seventeen."

Laney looked at his eggs. "That's right."

"During  that  time, you participated in a number of drug trials?
You were an experimental subject?"


132 William Gibson S.  "Yes," Laney said, his eggs looking  some-
how farther away, or like a picture in a magazine.

"This was voluntary on your part?"

"There were rewards."

"Voluntary," Pursley said. "You get on any of that 5-SB?"

"They  didn't  tell  us  what  they  were giving us," Laney said.
"Sometimes we'd get a placebo instead."

"You don't mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son,  but  I  think  you
know that."

Which was true, but Laney just sat there.

"Well?" Pursley removed his big heavy glasses. His eyes were cold
and blue and set into an intricate topography of wrinkles.

"I probably had it," Laney said.

Pursley slapped the blue papers on his thigh.  "Well,  there  you
are.  You  almost  certainly  did. Now, do you know how that sub-
stance eventually affected many of the test subjects?"

Daniels unclamped his glasses and began to knead  the  bridge  of
his nose. His eyes were closed.

"Stuff  tends  to  turn  males  into fixated homicidal stalkers,"
Pursley said, putting his glasses back on and stuffing the papers
into  his  case. "Comes on years later, sometimes. Go after media
faces, politicians. . . . That's why it's now one of the most il-
legal  substances,  any  damn country you care to look. Drug that
makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians, well, boy,  it'll
get to be." He grinned dryly.

"I'm not one," Laney said. "I'm not like that."

Daniels opened his eyes. "It doesn't matter," he said. "What mat-
ters is that Slitscan can counter all our material by raising the
possibility, the merest shadow, however remote, that you are."

"You  see, son," Pursley said, "they'd just make out you got into
your line of work because you were predisposed to that, spying on
famous people. You didn't tell them about any of it, did you?"

"No,"  Laney  said,  "I  didn't."   "There you go," said Purshey.
"They'll say they hired you because 3 you were good  at  it,  but
you  just  got  too  damn  good at it."    0         133 "But she
wasn't &mous," Laney said.

"But he is," Rice Daniels said, "and they'll say you  were  after
him.  They'll  say  the  whole thing was your idea. They'll wring
their hands about responsibility. They'll talk  about  their  new
screening  procedures  for  quantitative  analysts.  And  nobody,
Laney, nobody at a/l will be watching us."

"That's about the size of it," Pursley said, standing. He  picked
up the briefcase. 'That real bacon there, like off a hog?"

"They say it is," Laney said.

"Damn,"  Pursley said, "these Hollywood hotels are fast-lane." He
stuck out his hand. Laney shook it. "Nice meeting you, son."

Daniels didn't even bother to say goodbye. And  two  days  later,
going  over  the printout of his charges, Laney would notice that
it all began, the billing in his own name, with a  large  pot  of
coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, and a 15-percent tip.



Arleigh McCrae was staring at him.

"Do they know that?" she asked. "Does Blackwell?"

"No,"  Laney said, "not that part, anyway." He could see Rydell's
fax, folded on the bedside stand. They didn't  know  about  that,
either.

"What happened then? What did you do?"

"I found out I was paying for at least some of the lawyers they'd
gotten for me. I didn't know what to do. I sat out there  by  the
pool  a lot. It was sort of pleasant, actually. I wasn't thinking
about anything in particular. Know what I mean?"

"Maybe," she said.

"Then I heard about this job from one of the security  people  at
the hotel."

She slowly shook her head.

"What?" he said.

"Never mind," she said. "You make about as much sense as the rest
of it. Probably you'll fit right in."

"Into what?"  134 William Gibson She looked at her watch,  black-
faced  stainless on a plain black nylon band. "Dinner's at eight,
but Rez will be late. Come out for a walk and a drink.  I'll  try
to tell you what I know about it."

"If you want to," Laney said.

"They're paying me to do it," she said, getting up. "And it prob-
ably beats wrestling large pieces of high-end electronics up  and
down escalators."


20.     Monkey Boxing








Between  stations  there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of
the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if par-
ticulate  matter  were being vibrated there at some crucial rate,
just prior to the emergence of a new order of being.

Chia and Masahiko had found two seats, between a trio  of  plaid-
skirted  schoolgirls  and  a  businessman  who  was reading a fat
Japanese comic. There was a woman on the cover with  her  breasts
bound up like balls of twine, but conically, the nipples protrud-
ing like the popping eyes of a cartoon victim. Chia noticed  that
the  artist  had devoted much more time to drawing the twine, ex-
actly how it was wrapped and knotted, than to drawing the breasts
themselves.  The  woman  had sweat running clown her face and was
trying to back away from someone or something cut off by the edge
of the cover.

Masahiko  undid  the  top two buttons of his tunic and withdrew a
six-inch square of something black and rigid, no thicker  than  a
pane of glass. He brushed it purposefully with the fingers of his
right hand, beaded lines of colored light appearing at his touch.
Though  these were fainter here, washed out by the train's direc-
tionless fluorescents, Chia recognized the square as the control-
face of the Computer she'd seen in his room.

He  studied the display, stroked it again, and frowned at the re-
suIt. "Someone pays attention to my address," he  said,  'and  to
Mitsukos         "The restaurant?"  137 "Our user addresses,"

"I do not know. We are not linked."

-Except by me.

"Tell  me about Sandbenders," Masahiko said, putting the control-
face away and buttoning his tunic.

"It started with a woman who was  an  interface  designer,"  Chia
said,  glad  to  change the subject. "Her husband was a jeweller,
and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing,  before  they  saw
how  to  fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the
way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips  and
boards  inside  these plastic shells. The shells were just point-
of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in  the  landfill
if  nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got
sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the  designer's,  and  put
the  real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a
solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony  inlays,  carve  the
control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It
weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that,
like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something
that felt like it was there. . . . And people liked touching  all
that  stuff:  metal,  a  smooth stone. . . . And once you had the
case, when the manuEcturer brought out a new model, well, if  the
electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and
put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same  object,
just with better functions."  Masahiko's eyes were closed, and he
seemed to be nodding slightly, though perhaps only with  the  mo-
tion of the train.

"And  it  turned out some people liked that, too, liked it a lot.
He started getting commissions to make these things. One  of  the
first  was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of
an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he
got sick . .

Masahiko's  eyes  opened,  and  she saw that not only had he been
listening, but that he was impatient br more.

"So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking 138
William Gibson about all that, and how she wanted to do something
that took what he'd been doing into something else. So she cashed
out  her  stock  in  all  the companies she'd worked for, and she
bought some land on the coast, in Oregon-"

And the train pulled into Shinjuku, and everyone stood up,  head-
ing  for  the  doors,  the businessman closing his breast-bondage
comic and tucking it beneath his arm.



Chia was leaning back to look at the strangest building she'd ev-
er  seen. It was shaped like the old-fashioned idea of a robot, a
simplified human figure, its  legs  and  upraised  arms  made  of
transparent plastic over a framework of metal. Its torso appeared
to be of brick, in red, yellow and blue, arranged in simple  pat-
terns.  Escalators, stairways, and looping slides twisted through
the hollow limbs, and puffs of white smoke emerged at regular in-
tervals  from the rectangular mouth of the thing's enormous face.
Beyond it the sky all gray and pressing down.

"Tetsujin  Building,"  Masahiko  said.  "Monkey  Boxing  was  not
there."

"What is it?"

"Osaka  Tin Toy Institute," he said. "Monkey Boxing this way." He
was consulting the swarming squiggles  on  his  control-face.  He
pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called Cali-
fornia Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm  tree
against  one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had
drawn on their hands in her class on European history. Which  had
pissed  the  teacher off totally, but Chia couldn't remember them
drawing any palm trees. Then two of them had gotten into a  fight
over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the
cross, pointing left or pointing  right,  and  one  of  them  had
zapped the other with a stungun, the kind they were always making
out of those disposable flashcameras, and the teacher had to call
the  police.          "Ninth floor, Wet Leaves Fortune Building,"
he said. He set off o                 2                 139  down
the  crowded  pavement. Chia followed, wondering how long jet lag
lasted, and how you were supposed to separate it from just  being
tired.

Maybe what she was feeling now was what her civics program at her
last school had called culture shock. She felt  like  everything,
every little detail of Tokyo, was just different enough to create
a kind of pressure, something that built up against her eyes,  as
though  they'd  grown  tired  of having to notice all the differ-
ences: a little sidewalk tree that was dressed up in  a  sort  of
woven  basketwork jacket, the neon-avocado color of a payphone, a
serious-looking girl with round glasses  and  a  gray  sweatshirt
that  said  "Free Vagina." She'd been keeping her eyes extra-wide
to take all these things in, like they'd be processed eventually,
but  now her eyes were tired and the differences were starting to
back up. At the same time, she felt that if she squinted,  maybe,
just  the right way, she could make all this turn back into Seat-
tle, some downtown part she'd walked  through  with  her  mother.
Homesick.  The  strap  of  her bag digging into her shoulder each
time her left foot came down.

Masahiko turned a corner. There  didn't  seem  to  be  alleys  in
Tokyo,  not  in  the sense that there were smaller streets behind
the big streets, the places where they put out the  garbage,  and
there weren't any stores. There were smaller streets, and smaller
ones behind those, but you couldn't guess what you'd find  there:
a  shoe-repair  place,  an expensive-looking hair salon, a choco-
late-maker, a magazine stand where she noticed  a  copy  of  that
same creepy comic with the woman all wrapped up like that.

Another  corner  and they were back on what she took to be a main
street. Cars here, anyway. She watched one turn  into  a  street-
level  opening  and vanish. Her scalp prickled. What if that were
the way up to Eddie's club, that Whiskey Clone?  That  was  right
around  here, wasn't it? How big was this Shinjuku place, anyway?
What if the Graceland pulled up beside her?  What  if  Eddie  and
Maryalice were out looking (hr her?

They  were  passing the opening the car had disappeared into. She
140 William Gibson looked in and saw chat it was a  kind  of  gas
station. "Where is it?" she asked.

"Wet Leaves Fortune," he said, pointing up.

Tall  and narrow, square signs jutting out at the corners of each
floor. It looked like almost all the others, but she thought  Ed-
die's had been bigger. "How do we get up there?"

He led her into a kind of lobby, a ground-floor arcade lined with
tiny stall-like shops. Too many lights, mirrors, things for sale,
all  blurring  together.  Into a cramped elevator that smelled of
stale smoke. He said something in Japanese and the  door  closed.
The  elevator sang them a little song to tinkling music. Masahiko
looked irritated.

At the ninth floor the door opened on a dust-covered man  with  a
black  headband  sagging  over  his  eyes. He looked at Chia. "If
you're the one from the magazine," he said,  "you're  three  days
early."  He  pulled  the headband off and wiped his face with it.
Chia wasn't sure if he was Japanese or not, or what age he  might
be.  His  eyes  were  brown,  spectacularly  bloodshot under deep
brows, and his black hair, pulled straight back  and  secured  by
the band, was streaked with gray.

Behind  him  there  was  a  constant  banging  and confusion, men
yelling in Japanese. Someone pushing a high-sided orange  plastic
cart crammed with folded, plaster-flecked cables, shards of plas-
tic painted with gold gilt and Chinese red. Part of  a  suspended
ceiling  let  go  with a twanging of wires, crashed to the floor.
More cries.

"I'm looking for Monkey Boxing," Chia said.

"Darling," the man said, "you're a bit late." He wore a black pa-
per  coverall, its sleeves torn off at the elbows, revealing arms
tracked with blobby blue lines and circles, some  kind  of  faux-
primitive decoration. He wiped his eyes and squinted at her. "You
aren't from the magazine in London?"

"No," Chia said.

"No,"  he  agreed.  "You  seem  a  bit  young  even  for   them."
        "This   is   Monkey   Boxing?"       o                  2
                141 L Another section of ceiling came  down.  The
dusty man squinted at her. "Where did you say you were from?"

"Seattle."

"You heard about Monkey Boxing in Seattle?"

"Yes

He  smiled wanly. "That's fin: heard about it in Seattle   You're
on the club scene yourself, dear?'

"I'm Chia McKenzie-"

"Jun. I'm called Jun, dear. Owner, designer, DJ. But  you're  too
late.  Sorry.  All  that's  left  of Monkey Boxing's going out in
these gomi-carts. Landfill now. Like every  other  broken  dream.
Had  a  lovely  run while it lasted, better part of three months.
You heard about our Shaolin Temple theme? That whole warrior-monk
thing?" He sighed extravagantly. "It was heaven. Every instant of
it. The Okinawan bartenders shaved their heads, after  the  first
three  nights,  and started to wear the orange robes. I surpassed
myself, in the booth. It was a vision, you understand? But that's
the  nature of the floating world, isn't it? 'We are in the water
trade, after all, and one tries to be philosophical. But  who  is
your friend here? 1 like his hair.

"Masahiko Mimura," Chia said.

"I  1~ke  that black-clad boho butch bedsit thing," the man said.
"Mishima and Dietrich on the same halfshell, if it's done right."

Masahiko frowned.

"If Monkey Boxing is gone," Chia said, "what will you do now?"

Jun  retied  his headband. He looked less pleased. "Another club,
but I won't be designing. They'll say I've sold  out.  Suppose  I
have.  I'll  still be managing the space, very nice salary and an
apartment along with it, but the concept .." He shrugged.

"Were you here the night Rez told them he  wanted  to  marry  the
idoru?"

His  brow  creased,  behind  the  headband. "I had to sign agree-
ments," he said, "You aren't from the magazine?"

"No."

"If he hadn't come in that night, I suppose we might still be up


142 William Gibson and running. And really he wasn't the sort  of
thing  we'd  cried  to  be  about. We'd had Maria Paz, just after
she'd split up with her boyfriend, the public relations  monster,
and  the press were thick as flies. She's huge here, did you know
that? And we'd had Blue Ahmed from Chrome  Koran  and  the  press
scarcely  noticed.  Rez  and his friends, though, press was not a
problem. Sent in this big minder who looked as though  he'd  been
using  his  face  as a chopping block. Came up to me and said Rez
had heard about the place and was about to drop  in  with  a  few
friends,  and could we arrange a table with a bit of privacy. . .
. Well, really, I had to think: Rez  who?  Then  it  clicked,  of
course,  and I said fine, absolutely, and we put three tables to-
gether in the back, and even borrowed a purple  cordon  from  the
gumi boys in the hostess place upstairs."

"And he came? Rez?"

"Absolutely.  An hour later, there he is. Smiling, shaking hands,
signing things if you asked him to, though there wasn't too burn-
ing a demand, actually. Four women with him, two other men if you
didn't count the minder. Very nice black  suit.  Yohji.  Bit  the
worse  for wear. Rez, I mean. Been out to dinner, it looked like.
Had a few drinks with it. Certain amount of laughter, if you fol-
low  me.' He turned and said something to one of the workmen, who
wore shoes like two-toed black leather socks.

Chia, who had no idea what Monkey Boxing had actually been about,
imagined  Rez  at a table with some other people, behind a purple
rope, and in the foreground a  crowd  of  Japanese  people  doing
whatever Japanese people did at a club like that. Dancing?

"Then  our  boy gets up, he's going to the toilet. The big minder
makes as if he's getting up to go too,  but  our  boy  waves  him
back.  Big laugh from the table, big minder not too happy. Two of
the women start to get up, like they're  going  with  him;  he'll
have  none  of it, waves 'em back, more laughter. Not that anyone
else was paying him that much attention, I  was  going  into  the
booth in five minutes, with a set of extremely raw North African;
had to judge the crowd, get

on it with them, know just when to drop it in. But there he went,
0

2  143 -right through them, and only one or two even noticed, and
they

didn't stop dancing.'

What kind of club was it, where nobody  would  stop  dancing  for
Rez?

"So  I  was  thinking about my set, the order of it, and suddenly
he's right in front  of  me.  Big  grin.  Eyes  funny,  though  I
wouldn't  swear  it  was  anything he'd done in the toilet-if you
know what I mean."

Chia nodded her head. What did he mean?

"And would I mind, he said, hand on my shoulder, if he just spoke
briefly to the crowd? Said he'd been thinking about something for
a long time, and now he'd made up his mind and he wanted to  tell
people.  And  the  big minder just materialized there, wanting to
know was there any problem? None at  all,  Rez  says,  giving  my
shoulder a squeeze, but he was just going to have a word with the
crowd."

Chia looked at Jun's shoulders,  wondering  which  one  had  been
squeezed by Rca's actual hand. "So he did," Jun said.

"But what did he say?" Chia asked.

"A  load of bollocks, dear. Evolution and technology and passion;
man's need to find beauty in the emerging order; his own  burning
need  to get his end in with some software dolly wank toy. Balls,
Utter." He pushed his headband up with his  thumb,  but  it  fell
back. "And because he did that, opened his mouth up himy club, Lo
slash bloody Rez bought my club. Bought  me  as  well,  and  I've
signed  agreements  that  I won't talk to any of you about any of
that. And now if you and your charming  friend  will  excuse  me,
darling,  I have work to do."  144 William Gibson There was a man
on stilts at the intersection nearest the hotel. He wore a hooded
white  paper  suit,  agas  mask,  and a pair of rectangular sign-
boards. Messages scrolled down  the  boards  in  Japanese  as  he
shifted  his  weight  to  maintain balance. Streams of pedestrian
traffic flowed around and past him.

"What's that?" Laney asked, indicating the man on stilts.

"A sect," Arleigh McCrae said. "New Logic.' They  say  the  world
will end when the combined weight of all the human nervous tissue
on the planet reaches a specific figure."

A very long multi-digit number went scrolling down.

"Is that it?" Laney asked.

"No," she said, "that's their latest estimate of the current  to-
tal  weight."  She'd gone back to her room for the black coat she
now wore, leaving Laney to change into clean socks, underwear,  a
blue  shirt.  He didn't have a tie, so he'd buttoned the shirt at
the collar and put his jacket back on. He'd wondered if  everyone
who worked for Lo/Rez stayed in that same hotel.

Laney  saw  the  man's eyes through the transparent visor as they
passed. A look of grim patience. The stilts were the kind workers
wore  to  put  up  ceilings, articulated alloy sprung with steel.
"What's supposed to happen when there's enough nervous tissue?"

"A new order of being. They don't talk about it.  Rez  was  inter
ested  in  them, apparently. He tried to arrange an audience with
the   3 hunder."        0         9         145 21.     Standower
Man "And?"


"Rez was unhappy?"

"Not  according  to  Blackwell. Blackwell said it seemed to cheer
him up a little."

"He's not cheerful, ordinarily?" Laney sidestepped to avoid a bi-
cycle someone was wheeling in the opposite direction.

"Let's say that the things that bother Rez aren't the things that
bother most people."

Laney noticed a dark green van  edging  along  beside  them.  Its
wraparound  windows were mirrored, its neon license plates framed
with animated tubes of mini-Vegas twinklers. "I think we're being
followed," he said.

"We'd  better  be.  I wanted the kind with the weird chrome curb-
feelers that make them look like silverfish, but I had to  settle
for  custom  license-plate trim. Where you go, it goes. And park-
ing, around here, is probably more of a challenge  than  anything
you'll be expected to do tonight. Now," she said, "down here."

Steep,  narrow  stairs,  walled  with  an alarming pink mosaic of
glistening tonsil-like nodules. Laney hesitated, then saw a sign,
the  letters  made up of hundreds of tiny pastel oblongs: LE CHI-
CLE. Stepping down, he lost sight of the van.

A chewing-gum theme-bar, he thought, and then:  I'm  getting  too
used  to  this.  But he still avoided touching the wall of chewed
gum as he followed her down.

Into  powdery  pinks  and  grays,  but  these  impersonating  the
unchewed  product,  wall-wide slabs of it, hung with archaic sig-
nage from the nation of his birth. Screen-printed  steel,  Framed
and  ancient  cardboard, cunningly lit. Icons of gum. Bazooka Joe
featured centrally, a figure unknown to Laney but surely no  more
displaced.

"Come  here often?" Laney asked, as they took stools with bul 146
William Gibson I       bous cushions in a particularly lurid bub-
ble-gum pink. The bar was laminated with thousands of rectangular
chewing-gum wrappers.

"Yes," she said, "but mainly because  it's  unpopular.  And  it's
nonsmoking, which is still kind of special here."

"What's  'Black  Black'?" Laney asked, looking at a framed poster
depicting a stylized l940s automobile hurtling through the  faint
suggestion of city streets. Aside from "Black Black," it was let-
tered in a sort of Art Deco Japanese.

"Gum. You can still buy it," she said. "The cab drivers all  chew
it. Lots of caffeine."

"In gum?"

"They sell pick-me-ups here full of liquid nicotine."

"I think I'll have a beer instead."

When  the  waitress,  in tiny silver shorts and a prehensile pink
angora top, had taken their orders, Arleigh opened her purse  and
removed a notebook. "These are linear topographies of some of the
structures you accessed earlier  today."  She  passed  Laney  the
notebook. "They're in a format called Realtree 7.2."

Laney clicked through a series of images: abstract geometrics ar-
ranged in vanishing linear perspective. "I don't know how to read
them," he said.

She poured her sake. "You really were trained by DatAmerica?"

"I was trained by a bunch of Frenchmen who liked to play tennis."

"Realtree's from DatAmerica. The best quantitative analysis soft-
ware  they've  got."  She closed the notebook, put it back in her
purse.

Laney poured his beer. "Ever hear of something called TIDAL?"

"Tidal'?"

"Acronym. Maybe."

"No." She lifted the china cup and blew,  like  a  child  cooling
tea.

"It  was  another  DatAmerica  tool, or the start of one. I don't
think it reached the market. But that was how I learned  to  find
the nodal points."  I 0

2  147  L  "Okay,'  she said."What are the nodal points?" I Laney
looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. "It's like see-
ing things in clouds," Laney said. "Except the things you see are
really there."

She put her sake down. "Yamazaki promised me you weren't  crazy."

"It's  not crazy It's something to do with how I process low-lev-
el, broad-spectrum input. Something to do  with  pattern-recogni-
tion."

"And Slitscan hired you on the basis of that?"

"They  hired me when I demonstrated that it works, But I can't do
that with the kind of data you showed me today"

"Why not?"

Laney raised his beer. "Because it's like trying to have a  drink
with  a  bank.  It's  not  a person. It doesn't drink. There's no
place for it to sit." He drank. "Rez doesn't generate patterns  I
can  read, because everything he does is at one remove. It's like
looking in an annual report for the personal habits of the chair-
man  of  the board. It's not going to be there. From the outside,
it just looks like that Realtree stuff. If  I  enter  a  specific
area,  I don't get any sense of how the data there relates to the
rest of it, see? It's got to be relational." He drummed his  fin-
gers on the laminated gum wrappers. "Somewhere in Ireland. Guest-
house with a beach view. Nobody there. Records of how it was kept
stocked: stuff for the bathroom, toothpaste, shaving foam.

"I've  been there," she said. "That's on an estate he bought from
an older musician, an Irishman. It's beautiful. Like Italy, in  a
way."

"You  think  he'll  take  this  idoru  back  there, when they get
hitched?"

"Nobody has any idea what he's talking  about  when  he  says  he
wants to 'marry' her."

"Then  an  apartment in Stockholm. Huge. Great big stoves in each
room, made of glazed ceramic bricks."

"I don't know that one. He has places all over, and some of  them
are  kept  very quiet. There's another country place in the south
of 148 William Gibson France, a house in  London,  apartments  in
New  York, Paris, Barcelona. . . . I was working out of the Cata-
lan office, reformatting all their stuff  and  Spain's  as  well,
when this idoru thing hit, I've been here ever since."

"But you know him? You knew him before?"

"He's  the navel of the world I work in, Laney. That has a way of
making people unknowable."

"What about Lo?"

"Quiet. Very. Bright. Very." She frowned at her  sake.  "I  don't
think  any  of  it's ever really gotten to Lo. He seems to regard
their entire career as some freak  event  unrelated  to  anything
else."

"Including his partner deciding to marry a software agent?"

"Lo  cold  me a story once, about a job he'd had. He worked for a
soup vendor in Hong Kong, a wagon on the sidewalk.  He  said  the
wagon had been in business for over fifty years, and their secret
was that they'd never cleaned the kettle. In fact,  they'd  never
stopped  cooking  the  soup.  It was the same seafood soup they'd
been selling for fifty years, but it was never the same,  because
they  added  fresh  ingredients  every day, depending on what was
available. He said that was what  his  career  as  musician  felt
like, and he liked that about it. Blackwell says if Rez were more
like Lo, he'd still be in prison."

"Why?"

"Blackwell was serving a nine-year  sentence,  in  an  Australian
maximum-security  prison,  when  Rez talked his way in. To give a
concert. Just Rez. Lo and the others thought it was  too  danger-
ous.  They'd been warned that it could turn into a hostage-taking
situation. The prison authorities refused to take  any  responsi-
bility,  and  they wanted it in writing. Rez signed anything they
put in front of him. His security people resigned on the spot. He
went  in  with two guitars, a wireless mike, and a very basic am-
plification system. During the concert, a riot broke out.  Appar-
ently  it  was  orchestrated by a group of Italian prisoners from
Melbourne. Five of them took Rez into the prison  laundry,  which
they'd chosen because it was windowless and easily defended. They
informed Rez they were going to kill 0 -140 him if they  couldn't
negotiate  their release in exchange for his. They discussed cut-
ting off at least one of his fingers  to  demonstrate  that  they
meant  business. Or possibly some more intimate part, though that
may simply have been to make him more anxious. Which it did." She
signaled  the  pink  angora  waitress for more sake. "Black-well,
who'd evidently been extremely irritated at the  interruption  of
the concert, which he'd been enjoying enormously, appeared in the
laundry approximately forty minutes after Rez was taken prisoner.
Neither  Rez  nor  the  Italians saw him arrive, and the Italians
definitely hadn't been expecting him."  She  paused.  "He  killed
three  of  them,  with  a  tomahawk. Put the end of it into their
heads: one, two, three, Rez says, like that. No fuss whatever."


"Sort of narrow-bladed hatchet, with a spike opposite the  blade.
Extends  the reach, imparts terrific force, and with practice can
be thrown with considerable accuracy. Blackwell swears by it. The
other  two  fled, although they both seem to have died in the af-
termath of the  riot.  Personally,  I'm  sure  Blackwell  or  his
'mates' killed them, because he was never charged with the murder
of the other three. The sole  surviving  witness  was  Rez,  whom
Blackwell escorted to the barricade the guards had erected in the
exercise yard." Her sake arrived. "It took  Rez's  lawyers  three
months  to  get  Blackwell's sentence reversed on a technicality.
They've been together ever since."

"What was Blackwell in for?"

"Murder," she said. "Do you know what a standover man is?"

"No."

"It's a peculiarly Australian concept. I'm tempted  to  think  it
could  only  have  grown  out of a culture comprised initially of
convicts, but my Australian friends don't buy that. The standover
man  is  a  loner, a predator who preys on other, more prosperous
criminals, often extremely dangerous ones. He captures  them  and
'stands over' them. To extort money."

"What's that mean?"

"He  tortures  them until they tell him where their money is. And
150 William Gibson these are often fhirly serious operators, with
people  paid  to  take care of them, specifically to prevent this
sort of thing

"Tortures them?"

"'Toe-cutter' is a related term. When they tell him what he needs
to know, he kills them."

And Blackwell was suddenly and noiselessly and simply there, very
black, and matte, in an enormous waxed-cotton drover's coat.  Be-
hind  him  the faded American advertising and the grays and pinks
of gum. Flis fretted scalp concealed by the waxed-cotton crown of
a broad black hat.

"Arleigh, dear, you wouldn't take the name in vain, would you?"

But he smiled at her.

"I'm  explaining your earlier career to Mr. Laney, Blackwell. I'd
only just gotten up to the massage parlor, and now you've  ruined
it."

"Never  mind.  Dinner's  been  moved  up,  at  the request of his
Rozzer. I'm here to take you. Change of venue as well.  Hope  you
don't mind."

"Where?" Arleigh asked, as if not yet prepared to move.

"The Western World," said Blackwell.

"And me in my good shoes," she said.  22.     Gomi Boy








The trains more crowded now, standing room only, everyone pressed
in tight, and somehow the eye-contact rules were different  here,
but  she wasn't sure how. Her hag with the Sandbenders was jammed
up against Masahiko's back. He was looking  at  the  control-face
again,  holding  it up the way a commuter woLild hold a strategi-
cally folded newspaper.

On their way back to Mitsuko's father's restaurant, and then  she
didn't  know what. She'd done the thing that Hiromi hadn't wanted
her to do. And gotten nothing for it  but  a  vaguely  unpleasant
idea  of Rez as someone capable of being boring. And where did it
leave her? She'd gone ahead and used Kelsey's  cashcard,  to  pay
for  the  train,  and  floW another train back. And Zona had said
somebody was looking for her; they could track her when she  used
the cashcard. Maybe there was a way to cash it in, but she doubt-
ed it.

None of this had gone the way she'd tried to imagine it, back in

Seattle, hut then you couldn't be expected to imagine anyone like

Marya[ice, could you? Or Eddie, or even Hiromi.

Masahiko frowned at the control-face. Chia saw the dots and

squiggles changing.

That  thing  Maryalice had stuck in her bag. Right here under her
arm. She should've left it at Mitsuko's. Or thrown it  away,  but
then  what would she say if Eddie or Maryalice showed up? What if
it was full of drugs?

In Singapore they hung people, right in the mall, for that. Her


153 father didn't like it and he said that was one of the reasons
he  never  invited  her there. They put it on television, too, so
that it was really hard to avoid seeing it, and  he  didn't  want
her to see it. Now she wondered how far Singapore was from Tokyo?
She wished she could go there and keep her eyes closed until  she
was  in her father's apartment, and never turn the rv on, just be
there with him and smell his  shaving  smell  and  put  her  face
against  his  scratchy  wool shirt, except she guessed you didn't
wear those in Singapore because it was hot there. She'd keep  her
eyes  closed anyway, and listen to him talk about his work, about
the arbitrage  engines  shuttling  back  and  forth  through  the
world's  markets  like  invisible dragons, fast as light, shaving
fragments of advantage for traders like her father

Masahiko turned, accidentally knocking  her  bag  aside,  as  the
train  stopped  at  a  station-not  theirs. A woman with a yellow
shopping bag said something in  Japanese.  Masahiko  took  Chia's
wrist and pulled her toward the open door.

"This isn't where we get off-"

"Come!  Come!"  Out  onto  the  platform. A different smell here;
something chemical and sharp. The walls not so clean, somehow.  A
broken tile in the ceramic ceiling.

"What's the matter? Why are we getting off?"

He pulled her into the corner formed by the tiled wall and a huge
vending machine. "Someone is at the restaurant, waiting for you."
He  looked  down  at  her wrist, as if amazed to find that he was
holding it, and instantly released her.

"How do you know?"

"Walled City. There have been inquiries, in the last hour."

"Who?"

"Russians."

"Russians?"

"There are many from the Kombinat  here,  since  the  earthquake.
They forge relationships with the gumi."

"What's gumi?'

"Mafia, you call it Yakuza. My father has arrangement with lo 154
William Gibson cal gumi. Necessary, in order to  operate  restau-
rant. GuS representatives spoke about you to my father.'

Your neighborhood mafia is Russian?" Behind his head, on the side
of the machine, the  animated  logo  of  something  called  Apple
Shires.

"No.  Yamaguchi-gumi  franchise.  My father knows these men. They
tell my father Russians ask about you, and this is not good. They
cannot guarantee usual safety. Russians not reliable."

"I don't know any Russians," Chia said.

"We go now."

"Where?"

He led her along the crowded platform, its pavement wet from hun-
dreds of furled umbreUas. It must be raining  now,  she  thought.
Toward an escalator.

"When  Walled City saw attention was being paid to our addresses,
my sister's and mine, a friend was sent to remove my computer.

"Why?"

"Because I have responsibility. For Walled City. Distributed pro-
cessing."

"You've got a MUD in your computer?"

"Walled  City is not anywhere," he said, as they stepped onto the
escalator. "My friend has my computer. And he knows about men who
are waiting for you."



Masahiko said his friend was called Gomi Boy.

He was very small, and wore an enormous, balloon-bottomed pair of
padded fatigue pants covered with at least a dozen pockets. These
were  held up with three-inch-wide Day-Gb orange suspenders, over
a ratty cotton sweater with the cuffs rolled back. His shoes were
pink,  and  looked like the shoes babies wore, but bigger. He was
perched on an angular aluminum  chair  now  and  the  baby  shoes
didn't quite touch the floor. His hair looked as though it had

-166 been sculpted with a spatula, gleaming swirls and dips, like
your hand might stick there if you touched it.  It  was  the  way
they painted

J.  D. Shapely's hair on those murals in Pioneer Square, and Chia
knew from school that that had something to do  with  that  whole
Elvis thing, though she couldn't remember exactly what.

He  was  talking  with  Masahiko  in  Japanese, over the crashing
sound-surf of this gaming arcade. Chia wished she was  wearing  a
translator,  but  she'd  have to open her bag, find one, turn the
Sand-benders on. And Gomi Boy looked like he'd be just  as  happy
knowing she couldn't understand him.

He was drinking a can of something called Pocari Sweat, and smok-
ing a cigarette. Chia watched the blue smoke settling out in lay-
ers  in  the air, lit by the glare of the games. There was cancer
in that, and they'd arrest you in Seattle if  you  did  it.  Gomi
Boy's cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a per-
fect white tube with a brown tip he put to  his  lips.  Chia  had
seen  those  in  old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn't gone
through  yet  to  digitally  erase  them,  but  the  only   other
cigarettes she'd seen were the twisted-up paper ones they sold on
the street in Seattle, or you could buy a little  baggie  of  the
tobacco  stuff  and  the white squares of paper to roll it up in.
Meshbacks in school did it.

The rain was still coming down. Through  the  arcade's  streaming
window  she could make out another arcade, across the street, one
of the ones with the machines the silver  balls  poured  through.
The  neon and the rain and the silver balls ran all together, and
she wondered what Masahiko and Gomi Boy were talking about.

Gomi Boy had Masahiko's computer in  a  plaid  plastic  carry-bag
with  quilted  pink International Biohazard symbols on the sides.
It was sitting on the little  table  beside  the  can  of  Pocari
Sweat.  What  was a Pocari? She imagined a kind of wild pig, with
bristles, turned-up tusks, like she'd seen on the Nature Channel.

Gomi Boy sucked on his cigarette, making the end glow. He squint-
ed through the smoke at Masahiko  and  said  something.  Masahiko
shrugged.  There  was  a fresh mini-can of microwaved 156 William
Gibson espresso in front of him, and Chia had another Coke  Lire.
In  Tokyo  there  was nowhere to sit down unless you bought some-
thing, and it was quicker to buy a drink than something  to  eat.
And  it  cost  less. Except she wasn't paying for these. Gomi Boy
was, because he and Masahiko didn't  want  her  to  use  Kelsey's
cashcard.

Gomi  Boy  spoke  again.  "He  wishes to talk with you," Masahiko
said.

Chia bent over, unzipped her bag, found the ear-clips.  She  only
had the two, so she handed one to Gomi Boy, put the other on her-
self, and hit power. He put his on. "I am from Walled  City,"  he
said. "You understand?"

"A MUD, right? Multi user domain."

"Not  in  the sense you mean, but approximately, yes. Why are you
in Tokyo?"

"To gather information about Rez's plan to marry the  idotu,  Rei
Toei."

Gomi  Boy nodded. Being an otaku was about caring a lot about in-
formation; he understood being a fan. "Do you have dealings  with
the  Combine?" Chia knew he had said Kombinat, and the translator
had covered it. He meant that mafia government in Russia.

"No," Chia said.

"And you came to be at Masahiko's because. . .

"Mitsuko's the social secretary  of  the  Tokyo  chapter  of  the
Lo/Rez group I belong to in Seattle."

"How many times did you port, from the restaurant?"

"Three  times."  The  Silke-Marie  KoIb outfit. The meeting. Zona
Rosa. "I paid for presentation software, Mitsuko and  I  did  the
meeting, I linked home."

"You paid for the software with your cashcard?"

"Yes."  She  looked from Gomi Boy to Masahiko. Between and behind
them, the rain. The endless racketing cascade of the little  sil-
ver  balls,  through the glass across the street. Players hunched
there on  integral  stools,  manipulating  the  flood  of  metal.
Masahiko's  expression told her nothing at all.  "Masahiko's com-
puter maintains certain aspects of Walled City," Gomi  Boy  said.
"Contingency  plans were in place for its removal to safety. When
it became obvious that both Masahiko's and his sister's user  ad-
dresses  were  attracting unusual attention, I was sent to secure
his machine. We frequently exchange hardware. I am  a  dealer  in
second-hand  equipment.  That is why I am called Gomi Boy. I have
my own keys to Masahiko's room. His father knows I am allowed  to
enter.  His  tither  does not care. I came and took the computer.
Nearby is a small civic recreation area. The restaurant is  visi-
ble from it. Seeing Oakland Overbombers, I crossed the street and
spoke with them."

"Seeing what?"

"A skateboard group. They are named  for  the  California  soccer
club.  I asked them if there had been unusual activity. They told
me they had seen a very large vehicle, an hour before .

-A Graceland.

"A Daihatsu Graceland. There are fewer here than  in  America,  I
think."

Chia  nodded.  Her  stomach  did  that cold flip-thing again. She
thought she might throw up.

Gomi Boy leaned sideways with his cigarette, which was short now,
and  mashed  the  lit end into a little chrome bowl that was fas-
tened to the side of a game console. Chia wondered what this  was
actually  used  for, and why he did that, but she supposed he had
to put it somewhere or it would burn his fingers. "The  Graceland
parked near the restaurant. Two men got out .

"What did they look like?'

"Gumi representatives."

"Japanese?"

"Yes.  They went into the restaurant. The Graceland waited. After
fifteen minutes, they returned, got into the Graceland, and left.
Masahiko's father appeared. He looked in all directions, studying
the street. He took his phone from  his  pocket  and  spoke  with
someone.   168  William Gibson He went back into the restaurant."
Gomi Boy looked at the carry-bag. "I did not want  to  remain  in
the  recreation  area with Masahiko's computer. I told the leader
of the Overbombers I would give him a better telephone, later, if
he would remain there and phone me if more activity occurred. The
Overbombers do nothing anyway, so he agreed. I  left.  He  phoned
twenty  minutes  later  to report a gray Honda van. The driver is
Japanese, but the other three are foreigners. He thinks they  are
Russian."

"Why?"

"Because  they are very large, and dress in a style he associates
with the Combine. They are still there."

"How do you know?"

"If they leave, he must call me. He wants his new phone."

"Can I port from here? I have to talk to Air Magellan right  away
about  changing  my  reservations.  I want to go home," And leave
Maryalice's package in that trash cannister she could see  behind
Gomi Boy.

"You  must  not port," Masahiko said. "You must not use the cash-
card. If you do, they will find you."

"But what else am I supposed to do?" she said,  startled  by  her
own  voice, which sounded like someone else's. "I just want to go
home!"

"Let me see the card," Gomi Boy said. It was in her  parka,  with
her  passport  and her ticket home. She took it out and handed it
to him. He opened a pocket on his fatigue pants and  took  out  a
small  rectangular  device  that  seemed to be held together with
multiple layers of fraying silver tape.  He  swiped  Chia's  card
along  a slot and peered into a peephole reader like the one on a
fax-beeper. "This is nontransferable and cannot be used to obtain
cash. It is also very easy to trace."

"My  friend's  pretty  sure  they've got the number anyway," Chia
said, thinking of Zona.

Gomi Boy began to tap the edge of the cashcard on the rim of  his
can of Pocari Swear. 'There is a place where you can use this and
not be traced," he said, Tap tap. "Where  Masahiko  could  access
Walled City." Tap tap. "Where you could phone home."

"Where's that?"

"A love hotel." Tap. "Do you know what that is?"

"No,"  Chia  said. Tap.  160 William Gibson Emerging from Le Chi-
cle's pink mosaic gullet into the start of rain, Laney  saw  that
the  stilt-walking  New Logic disciple was still at his post, his
animated  sandwich-board  illuminated  against  the  evening.  As
Blackwell  held the door of a mini-limo for Arleigh, Laney looked
back at the scrolling numerals and wondered how much the planet's
combined  weight  of  human  nervous  tissue  had increased while
they'd been in the bar.

Laney got in after her, noticing those Catalan  suns  again,  the
three  of them, decreasing in size down her inner calf. Blackwell
thunked the door behind him, then opened  the  front,  should've-
beeri driver's side door and seemed to pour himself into the car,
a movement that simultaneously suggested the sliding of a ball of
mercury  and  the  settling  of hundreds of pounds of liquid con-
crete. The car waddled and swayed as its shocks adjusted  to  ac-
commodate his weight.

Laney saw how the brim of Blackwell's black-waxed hat drooped low
in back, but not far enough to conceal a  crisscrossing  of  fine
red welts decorating the back of his neck,

Their  driver,  to judge by the back of his head, might have been
the same one who'd driven them to Akihabara. He pulled  out  into
the  mirror-image traffic. The rain was running and pooling, tug-
ging reflected neon out of the perpendicular and spreading it  in
wriggly lines across sidewalk and pavement.

Arleigh McCrae was wearing perfume, and it made Laney wish

2  161  23.     Here  at  the Western World that Blackwell wasn't
there, and that they were on their way somewhere other than wher-
ever  it  was  they were going now, and in another city, and that
quite a lot of the last seven months of Laney's life hadn't  hap-
pened  at  all, or had happened differently, or maybe even as far
back as DatAmerica and the Frenchmen, but as it became more  com-
plicated, it became depressing.

"I'm not sure you're going to enjoy this place," she said.

"How's that?"

"You don't seem like the type."

"Why not?"

"I  could  be wrong. Lots of people do enjoy it. I suppose if you
take it as a very elaborate joke

"What is it?"

"A club. Restaurant. An environment. If we turned up there  with-
out  Blackwell,  I  doubt  they'd  let  us in. Or even admit it's
there."

Laney was remembering the Japanese restaurant in  Brentwood,  the
one Kathy Torrance had taken him to. Not Japanese Japanese. Owned
and operated. Its theme an imaginary  Eastern  European  country.
Decorated  with  folk  art  from  that  country, and everyone who
worked there wore native garb from that country, or else  a  sort
of metallic-gray prison outfit and these big black shoes. The men
who worked there all had  these  haircuts,  shaved  high  on  the
sides, and the women had big double braids, rolled up like wheels
of cheese. Laney's entrée had had all kinds of  different  little
sausages  in  it,  the  smallest he'd ever seen, and some kind of
pickled cabbage on the side, and it hadn't  tasted  like  it  had
come  from  anywhere in particular, but maybe that was the point.
And then they'd gone back to her apartment, decorated like a sort
of deluxe version of the Cage at Slitscan. And that hadn't worked
out either, and sometimes he wondered whether that had  made  her
even angrier, when he'd gone over to Out of Control.

"Laney?"

"Sorry   This place-Rez likes it?"  162 William Gibson Past ambi-
ent forests of black umbrellas, waiting to cross at an  intersec-
tion.

"I think he just likes to brood there," she said.



The Western World occupied the top two floors of an office build-
ing that hadn't quite survived the  quake.  Yamazaki  might  have
said  that it represented a response to trauma and subsequent re-
construction. In the days (some said hours) immediately following
the  disaster,  an impromptu bar and disco had come into being in
the former offices of a firm that had brokered  shares  in  golf-
club  memberships.  The  building, declared structurally unsound,
had been sealed by emergency workers at the ground floor, but  it
was  still possible to enter through the ruined sublevels. Anyone
willing to climb  eleven  flights  of  mildly  fissured  concrete
stairs  found  the  Western World, a bizarrely atypical (but some
said mysteriously crucial) response to  the  upheaval  that  had,
then,  so  recently  killed  eighty-six  thousand of the region's
thirty-six million inhabitants. A Belgian journalist,  struggling
to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between
a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen
subcultures  unheard  of  before  the  disaster, the black market
cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assum-
ing  Goya  had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine,
which along with endless quantities  of  alcohol  was  the  early
Western  World's  substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said,
as though the city, in its convulsion and grief, had spontaneous-
ly  and  necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the
soul, its few unbroken windows painted  over  with  black  rubber
aquarium  paint.  There would be no view of the ruptured city. As
the reconstruction began around  it,  it  had  already  become  a
benchmark  in  Tokyos  psychic  history, an open secret, an urban
legend.

But now, Arleigh was explaining, as they  climbed  the  first  of
those  eleven flights of stairs, it was very definitely a commer-
cial op

0 2 163 eration, the damaged building owing  its  continued  sur-
vival  to  the  unlicensed penthouse club that was its sole occu-
pant. If in fact it continued to be unlicensed, and she  had  her
doubts  about  that. "There isn't a lot of slack here," she said,
climbing, "not for things like that. Everybody knows the  Western
World's  here, I think there's a very quiet agreement, somewhere,
to allow them to operate the place as though it were still  unli-
censed. Because that's what people want to pay for."

"Who owns the building?" Laney asked, watching Blackwell float up
the stairs in front of them, his arms, in the matte black sleeves
of  the  drover's coat, like sides of beef dressed for a funeral.
The stairwell was lit with irregular loops of faintly biolumines-
cent cable.

"Rumor has it, one of the two groups who can't quite agree on who
owns our hotel."

"Mafia?"

"Local equivalent, but only very approximately  equivalent.  Real
estate  was  baroque,  here, before the quake; now it's more like
occult."

Laney, glancing down as they passed one of the glowing loops, no-
ticed,  on  the  treads of the stairs, hardened trickles of some-
thing that  resembled  greenish  amber.  "There's  stuff  on  the
stairs," he said.

"Urine," Arleigh said.

"Urine?"

"Solidified, biologically neutral urine."

Laney  took the next few steps in silence. His calves were start-
ing to ache. Urine?

"The plumbing didn't work, after  the  quake,"  she  said.  "They
couldn't  use  the  toilets.  People just started going, down the
stairs. Pretty horrible, by all accounts,  although  some  people
actually get nostalgic about it."

"It's solid?"

"There's  a product here, a powder, looks like instant soup. Some
kind of enzyme. They sell it mainly to mothers with  young  kids.
The  kid has to pee, you can't get them to a toilet in time, they
pee in a pa- 164 William Gibson per cup, an empty juice box.  You
drop  in  the  contents  of  a  handy, purse-sized sachet of this
stuff, zap, it's a solid. Neutral, odorless, completely hygienic.
Pop it in the trash, it's landfill."

They passed another loop of light and Laney saw miniature stalac-
tites suspended from the edges of a step. "They used that  stuff.

"Lots  of it. Constantly. Eventually they had to start sawing off
the build-up.

"They still ... ?"

"Of course not. But they kept the Grotto." Another flight. Anoth-
er  loop  of  ghostly undersea light. "What did they do about the
solids?" he asked. "I'd rather not know."



Winded, his ankles sore, Laney emerged from the  Grotto.  Into  a
black-walled  and  indeterminate  space defined by blue light and
the uprights of gilded girders. After chemically frozen  frescoes
of  piss,  the  Western World disappointed. A gutted office block
dressed with mismatched couches and nondescript  bars.  Something
looming  in  the middle foreground. He blinked. A tank. American,
he thought, and old.

"How did they get that up here?" he asked Arleigh, who was  pass-
ing  her  black  coat  to  someone. And why hadn't the floor col-
lapsed?

"It's resin," she said. "Membrane sculpture. Stereo  lithogtaphy.
Otaku thing: they bring them in in sections and glue them togeth-
er."

Blackwell had given up his drover's coat, exposing a garment that
resembled  a  suit  jacket  but  seemed  to  have been woven from
slightly tarnished aluminum. Whatever this fabric was, there  was
enough  of  it  there  for  a double bedspread. He moved forward,
through the maze of couches and low tables, with  that  same  ef-
fortless  determination,  Laney  and  Arleigh  drawn along in his
wake.


0 S

166 didn't seem ro have heard him, But then she'd probably  never
played  with  CD-ROMs,  either, Time in a Federal Orphanage had a
way of acquainting you with dead media platforms.

If Arleigh were right, and the Western World were being  kept  on
as  a  kind  of tourist attraction, Laney wondered what the crowd
would have been like in the early days, when the sidewalks  below
were buried in six feet of broken glass.

These  people  on  the  couches, now, hunched over the low tables
that supported their drinks, seemed unlike any crowd he'd seen so
far  in  Tokyo. There was a definite edged-out quality there, and
prolonged eye-contact might have been interesting in some  cases,
dangerous in others. Distinct impression that the room's combined
mass of human nervous tissue would have been found to be freight-
ed  with the odd few colorants. Or else these people were somehow
preselected for a certain combination of  facial  immobility  and
intensity of glance?

"Laney,"  Blackwell said, dropping a hand on Laney's shoulder and
twirling him into the gaze of a pair of long green eyes, "this is
Rez. Rez, Cohn Laney. He's working with Arleigh."

"Welcome  to  the Western World," smiling, and then the eyes slid
past him to Arleigh. "Evenin', Miz MacCrae."

Laney noticed something then that he  knew  from  his  encounters
with  celebs at Slitscan: that binary flicker in his mind between
image and reality, between the mediated face and the  face  there
in  front  of you. He'd noticed how it always seemed to speed up,
that alternation, until the two  somehow  merged,  the  resulting
composite  becoming  your  new  idea  of  the person. (Someone at
Slitscan had told him that it had  been  clinically  proven  that
celebrity-recognition  was  handled by one particular area in the
brain, but he'd never been sure whether or not they were joking.)

Those  had  been tame celebrities, the ones Kathy had already had
her way with. In the building (but never the Cage) to have  vari-
ous  aspects  of their public lives scripted, per whatever agree-
ments were already in place. But Rez wasn't tame, and was a  much
bigger deal in 166 WIlliam Gibson his own way, although Laney had
only been aware of his later career because Kathy had  hated  him
so.

Rez had his arm around Arleigh now, gesturing with the other into
the relative darkness beyond the Sherman tank,  saying  something
Laney couldn't hear.

"Mr.  Laney,  good  evening."  It  was Yamazaki, in a green plaid
sportscoat that sat oddly on his  narrow  shoulders.  He  blinked
rapidly,

"Yamazaki."

"You  have met Rez, yes? Good, very good. A table is prepared, to
dine." Yamazaki put two fingers inside  the  oversized,  buttoned
collar  of  his  cheap-looking  white  dress shirt and tugged, as
though it were far too tight. '1 understand initial  attempts  to
identi~' nodal points did not meet with success." He swallowed,

"I  can't pull a personal fix out of something textured like cor-
porate data. He's just not there."

Rez was moving in the direction of whatever lay beyond the  tank.

"Come,"  Yamazaki  said,  then lowered his voice. "Something exr-
raordinary. She is here. She dines with Rez. Rei Toei."

The idoru.  24.     Hotel Di In this tiny cab now  with  Masahiko
and Gomi Boy, Masahiko up front, on what should've been the driv-
er's side, Gomi Boy beside her in the back. Gomi Boy had so  many
pockets in his fatigue pants, and so many things in them, that he
had trouble getting comfortable. Chia had never  been  in  a  car
this small, let alone a cab. Masahiko's knees were folded up, al-
most against his chest. The driver had white cotton gloves and  a
hat  like  the  hats cab drivers wore in 1940s movies. There were
little covers made of starched white lace fixed to all the  head-
rests with special clips.

She guessed it was such a small cab because Gomi Boy was going to
be paying, cash money, and he made it clear he didn't have a  lot
of that.

Somehow  they  had  ascended out of the rain into this crazy, im-
pressive, but old-fashioned-looking  multilevel  expressway,  its
steel  bones  ragged  with  bandages of Keviar, and were whipping
past the middle floors of  tall  buildings--maybe  that  Shinjuku
again,  because  there  went  that Tin Toy Building, she thought,
glimpsed through a gap, but far away and from another  direction-
and here, gone so fast she was never sure she'd seen him, through
one window like all the rest, was a naked man, crosslegged on  an
office  desk,  his  mouth  open  as  wide as possible, as if in a
silent scream.

Then she began to notice other buildings, through sheets of rain,
and  these  were  illuminated to a degree excessive even by local
stan



169 dards, like Nissan County attractions  in  a  television  ad,
isolated theme-park elements thrusting up out of a strata of more
featureless structures, unmarked and unlit. Each bright  building
with its towering sign: HOTEL KING MIDAS with its twinkling crown
and scepter,  FREEDOM  SHOWER  BANFE  with  blue-green  mountains
flanking  a waterfall of golden light. At least six more in rapid
succession, then Gomi Boy said something in Japanese. The drivers
shiny black bill dipped in response.

They  swung  onto an off-ramp, slowing. From the ramp's curve, in
the Hat, ugly flare of sodium floods, she saw  a  rainy,  nowhere
intersection,  no  cars in sight, where pale coarse grass lay wet
and dishevelled up a short steep slope. No place at  all,like  it
could  as  easily have been on the outskirts of Seattle, the out-
skirts of anywhere, and the homesickness made her gasp.

Gomi Boy shot her a sidewise glance, engaged in the excavation of
something from another of his pockets, this one apparently inside
his pants. From somewhere well below the level of his  crotch  he
fished up a wallet-sized fold of paper money, secured with a wide
black elastic band. In the passing glare of  another  road  light
Chia saw him snap the elastic back and peel off three bills. Big-
ger than American money, and on one she made out the comfortingly
familiar  logo  of a company whose name she'd known all her life.
He tucked the three bills into the sleeve of his sweater and  set
about replacing the rest wherever it was he kept it.



They  took  a  right and stopped, alL around them a strange white
fairy glow, falling with the rain to oil-stained conctete  neatly
painted  with two big white arrows, side by side, pointing in op-
posite directions. The one pointing in the  direction  they  were
headed indicated a square opening in a featureless, white-painted
concrete wall. Five-inch-wide ribbons of shiny pink plastic  hung
from  its  upper  edge  to 170 William Gibson the concrete below,
concealing whatever was behind and reminding Chia of streamers at
a  school dance. Gomi Boy gave the driver the three bills. He sat
patiently, waiting for change.

Her legs cramping, Chia reached for the door handle, but Masahiko
quickly reached across from the front, stopping her. "Driver must
open," he said. "If you open, mechanism breaks, very  expensive."
The  driver gave Gomi Boy change. Chia thought Gomi Boy would tip
him, but he didn't. The driver reached down  and  did  something,
out of sight, that made the door beside Chia open.

She  climbed  out  into the rain, dragging her bag after her, and
looked up at the source of the white glow: a building like a wed-
ding  cake,  HOTEL DI spelled out in white neon script edged with
clear twinkling bulbs. Masahiko beside her now, urging her toward
the pink ribbons. She heard the cab pull away behind her. "Come."
Gomi Boy with the plaid bag, ducking through the wet ribbons.

Into an almost empty parking area, two small cars, one gray,  one
dark  green,  their  license  plates  concealed  by rectangles of
smooth black plastic. A glass door sliding aside as Gomi Boy  ap-
proached.

A  disembodied  voice  said  something  in Japanese. Gomi Boy an-
swered. "Give him your card," Masahiko said. Chia  took  out  the
card and handed it to Gomi Boy, who seemed to be asking the voice
a series of questions. Chia  looked  around.  Pale  blues,  pink,
light  gray.  A  very small space that managed to suggest a hotel
lobby without actually offering a place to sit down. Pictures cy-
cling  past  on  wallscreens:  interiors  of very strange-looking
rooms. The voice answering Gomi Boy's questions.

"He asks for a room with optimal porting capacity," Masahiko said
quietly.

Gomi  Boy  and  the  voice  seemed to reach agreement. He slotted
Chia's card above something that looked like a small  pink  water
fountain.  The voice thanked him. A narrow hatch opened and a key
slid down into the pink bowl. Gorni Boy picked it up  and  handed
it  to  Masahiko.  Chia's  card  emerged  from the slot; Gomi Boy
pulled it



171 out and passed it to Chia. He handed Masahiko the plaid  bag,
turned, and walked out, the glass door hissing open for him.

"He isn't coming with us?"

"Only  two  people  allowed in room. He is busy elsewhere. Come."
Masahiko pointed toward an  elevator  that  opened  as  they  ap-
proached.

"What  kind of hotel did you say this is?" Chia got into the ele-
vator. He stepped in behind her and the door closed.

He cleared his throat. "Love hotel," he said.

"What's that?" Going up.

"Private rooms. For sex. Pay by the hour."

"Oh," Chia said, as though that explained everything. The  eleva-
tor  stopped and the door opened. He got out and she followed him
along a narrow corridor  lit  with  ankle-high  light-strips.  He
stopped  in front of a door and inserted the key they'd been giv-
en. As he opened the door, lights came on inside.

"Have you been to one of these before?" she asked, and felt  her-
self blush. She hadn't meant it that way.

"No,"  he  said.  He  closed the door behind her and examined the
locks. He pushed two buttons. "But people who come here sometimes
wish  to  port.  There  is a reposting service that makes it very
hard to trace. Also for phoning, very secure."

Chia was looking at the round pink frirry bed. It  seemed  to  be
upholstered  in  what they made stuffed animals out oil The wall-
to-wall was shaggy and white as snow, the  combination  reminding
her  of  a  particularly nasty-looking sugar snack called a Ring-
Ding.

Velcro made that ripping sound. She turned to see Masahiko remov-
ing  his  nylon gaiters. He took off his black workshoes (the toe
was out, in one of his thin gray socks) and slid  his  feet  into
white paper sandals. Chia looked down at her own wet shoes on the
white shag and decided she'd better do the same. "Why  does  this
place  look  the  way  it  does?" she asked, kneeling to undo her
laces.

Masahiko shrugged. Chia noticed that  the  quilted  International
172  William  Gibson Biohazard symbol on the plaid bag was almost
exactly the color of the fur on the bed.

Spotting what was obviously the bathroom through  an  open  door,
she  carried her own bag in there and closed the door behind her.
The walls were upholstered with something black  and  shiny,  and
the  floor  was checkered with black and white tiles. Complicated
mood-lighting came on and she was surrounded by ambient birdsong.
This  bathroom was nearly as big as the bedroom, with a bath like
a miniature black swimming pool and something else that Chia only
gradually recognized as a toilet. Remembering the one back in Ed-
die's office, she put her bag down and approached the thing  with
extreme  caution.  It  was  black, and chrome, and had arms and a
back, sort of like a chair at the stylist's. There was a  display
cycling,  on a little screen beside it, with fragments of English
embedded in the Japanese. Chia watched as "(A) Pleasure" and "(B)
Super Pleasure" slid past. "Uh-uh," she said.

After  studying  the seat and the ominous black bowl, she lowered
her pants, positioned  herself  strategically  over  the  toilet,
squatted  carefully, and urinated without sitting down. She'd let
someone else flush that one, she decided, while  she  washed  her
hands at the basin, but then she heard it flush itself.

There was a glossy pink paper bag beside the basin with the words
"Teen Teen Toiletry Bag" printed on it in swirly white script. It
was sealed at the top with a silver stick-on bow. She removed the
bow and looked inside. Lots of different little give-away cosmet-
ics  and  at least a dozen different kinds of condoms, everything
packaged to look more or less like candy.

There was a shiny black cabinet to the left of the  mirror  above
the  basin,  the  only  thing in the toom that looked Japanese in
that old-fashioned way. She opened it; a light  came  on  inside,
revealing  three glass shelves arranged with shrink-wrapped plas-
tic models of guy's dicks, all different sizes of them, molded in
weird colors. Other

objects she didn't recognize at all: knobby balls, something that
3



173 looked like a baby's  pacifier,  miniature  inner-tubes  with
long  rubbery  whiskers.  In  the middle of it all stood a little
black-haired doll in a pretty kimono made  of  bright  paper  and
gold cloth. But when she tried to pick it up, the wig and the ki-
mono came off in one piece, revealing yet another  shrink-wrapped
replica,  this one with delicately painted eyes and a Cupid's-bow
mouth. When she tried to put the wig and kimono back on, it  fell
over,  knocking  over  everything on its shelf, so she closed the
cabinet, Then she washed her hands again.

Back in the Ring-Ding room, Masahiko was cabling his computer  to
a  black  console on a shelf full of entertainment gear. Chia put
her bag on the bed. Something chimed softly, twice, and then  the
surface  of the bed began to ripple, slow osmotic waves centering
in on the bag, which began to rise slightly, and fall .

"Ick," she said, and pulled the bag off  the  bed,  which  chimed
again and began to subside.

Masahiko  glanced  in her direction, but went back to whatever he
was doing with the equipment on the shelf.

Chia found that the room had a window, but it was hidden  be-hind
some kind of softscreen. She tried the clips that held the screen
in place until she got the one that  let  her  slide  the  screen
aside  on  hidden  tracks. The window looked out on a chainlinked
parking lot beside a low, beige building  sided  with  corrugated
plastic. There were three trucks parked there, the first vehicles
she'd seen in Japan that weren't new  or  particularly  clean.  A
wet-looking  gray  cat emerged from beneath one of the trucks and
sprang into the shadow beneath another. It was still raining.

"Good," she heard Masahiko say, evidently satisfied.  "We  go  to
Walled  City."   174  William Gibson      IIiIlllsl__ "How do you
mean, she's 'here'?" Laney asked Yamazaki, as  they  rounded  the
rear of the Sherman tank. Clots of dry clay clung to the segments
of its massive steel treads.

"Mr. Kuwayama is here," Yamazaki whispered. "He represents her-"

Laney saw that several people were already seated at a low table.

Two men. A woman. The woman must be Rei Toei.

If  he'd  anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-
strength synthesis of Japan's last three dozen top  female  media
faces.  That  was  usually  the way in Hollywood, and the formula
tended  to  be  even  more  rigid,  in  the  case   of   software
agents-.eigenheads,  their  features algorithmically derived from
some human mean of proven popularity.

She was nothing like that.

Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale  bare  shoul-
ders  as  she  turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her
lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something  white,
leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.

And now her eyes met his.

He  seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in
geometries of underlying bone, lay coded  histories  of  dynastic
flight,  privation,  terrible  migrations.  He saw stone tombs in
steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A  line  of
shaggy  pack  ponies,  their  breath  white with cold, followed a
trail above a canyon.  25.     The Idoru The curves of the  river
below  were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked
in the blue dusk.

Laney shivered. In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.

The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met  his.
"We're  here." Arleigh beside him, hand at his elbow. She was in-
dicating two places at the table. "Are you all right?" she asked,
under her breath. "Take your shoes off."

Laney  looked  at  Blackwell, who was staring at the idoru, some-
thing like pain in his face, but the expression vanished,  sucked
away behind the mask of his scars.

Laney did as he was told, kneeling and removing his shoes, moving
as if he were drunk, or dreaming, though he knew he was  neither,
and the idoru smiled, lit from within.

"Laney?"

The  table  was set above a depression in the floor. Laney seated
himself, arranging his feet beneath the table  and  gripping  his
cushion with both hands. "What?"

"Are you okay?"

"Okay?"

"You looked.., blind."

Rez  was taking his place now at the head of the table, the idoru
to his right, someone else-Laney saw that it was  I.o,  the  gui-
tarist-to  his  left. Next to the idoru sat a dignified older man
with rimless glasses, gray hair  brushed  back  from  his  smooth
forehead.  He  wore a very simple, very expensive-looking suit of
some lusterless black material, and a high-collared  white  shirt
that  buttoned  in a complicated way. When this man turned to ad-
dress Rei Toei, Laney quite clearly saw the light of her face re-
flect for an instant in the almost circular lenses.

Arleigh's sharp intake of breath. She'd seen it too.

A hologram. Something generated, animated, projected. He felt his
grip relax slightly, on the edges of the cushion,

But then he remembered the stone tombs,  the  river,  the  ponies
with their iron bells.

Nodal.  176 William Gibson Laney had once asked Gerrard Delouvri-
er, the most patient of the tennis-playing  Frenchmen  of  TIDAL,
why  it was that he, Laney, had been chosen as the first (and, as
it would happen, the only) recipient of the peculiar ability they
sought  to impart to him. He hadn't applied for the job, he said,
and had no reason to believe the position had  even  been  adver-
tised.  He  had applied, he told Delouvrier, to be a trainee ser-
vice rep.

Delouvrier, with short, prematurely gray hair and a suntable tan,
leaned  back  in  his articulated workstation chair and stretched
his legs. He seemed to be studying his crepe-soled  suede  shoes.
Then  he  looked  out the window, to rectangular beige buildings,
anonymous landscaping, February snow. "Do you not see? How we  do
not teach you? We watch. We wish to learn from you."

They were in a DatAmerica research park in Iowa. There was an in-
door court for Delouvrier and his colleagues, but they complained
constantly about its surface.

"But why me?"

Delouvrier's  eyes  looked  tired. "We wish to be kind to the or-
phans? We are an unexpected warmth at the heart  of  DatAmerica?"
He rubbed his eyes. "No. Something was done to you, Laney. In our
way, perhaps, we seek to redress  that.  Is  that  a  word,  're-
dress'?"

"No," Laney said.

"Do  not  question good fortune. You are here with us, doing work
that matters. It is winter in this Iowa, true, but the work  goes
on."  He  was  looking at Laney now. "You are our only proof," he
said.

"Of what?"

Delouvrier closed his eyes. "There was a man, a  blind  man,  who
mastered  echo-location. Clicks with the tongue, you understand?"
Eyes closed, he demonstrated. "Like a bat. Fantastic," He  opened
his eyes. "He could perceive his inirnediate environment in great
detail, Ride a bicycle in traffic. Always making  the  :1k,  :1k.
The  ability was his, was absolutely real. And he could never ex-
plain it, never teach it to another    He wove his  long  fingers
together and cracked his knuckles. "We must hope that this is not
the case with you."



Don't think of a purple  cow.  Or  was  it  a  brown  one?  Laney
couldn't  remember.  Don't  look  at the idoru's face. She is not
flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg,  no,  an
Antarctica,  of information. Looking at her face would trigger it
again: she was some unthinkable volume of  information.  She  in-
duced  the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it
as narrative.

He could watch her hands. Watch the way she ate.

The meal was elaborate, many small courses served  on  individual
rectangular plates. Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei,
and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was si-
multaneously  veiled  with  a  flawless copy, holo food on a holo
plate.

Even the movement of her chopsticks brought on peripheral  flick-
ers of nodal vision. Because the chopsticks were information too,
but nothing as dense as her features, her gaze. As  each  "empty"
plate was removed, the untouched serving would reappear.

But when the flickering began, Laney would concentrate on his own
meal, his clumsiness with his own chopsticks, conversation around
the  table.  Kuwayama,  the man with the rimless glasses, was an-
swering something Rez had asked, though Laney hadn't been able to
catch  the question itself. "-the result of an array of elaborate
constructs that we refer to as 'desiring machines."  Rez's  green
eyes,  bright and attentive. "Not in any literal sense," Kuwayama
continued, "but please envision aggregates of subjective  desire.
It was decided that the modular array would ideally constitute an
architecture of articulated longing    The man's voice was  beau-
tifully modulated, his English accented in a way that Laney found
impossible to place.

Rez smiled then, his eyes going to the face of the idoru. As  did
Laney's as well, automatically.

He  fell  through  her eyes. He was staring up at a looming cliff
face that seemed to consist entirely of  small  rectangular  bal-
conies,  178  William  Gibson none set at quite the same level or
depth. Orange sunset off a tilted, steel-framed window.  Oilslick
colors crawling in the sky.

He  closed  his  eyes,  looked  down,  opened them. A fresh plate
there, more food.

"You're really into your meal," Arleigh said.

A concentrated effort with the chopsticks and he managed to  cap-
ture  and swallow something that was like a one-inch cube of cold
chutney omelet. "Wonderful. Don't want any of that  fugu  though.
Blowfish with the neurotoxins? Heard about that?"

"You've  already  had seconds," she said. "Remember the big plate
of raw fish arranged like the petals of a chrysanthemum?"

"You're kidding," Laney said.

"Lips and tongue feel faintly numb? That's it."

Laney ran his tongue across his lips. Was she kidding?  Yamazaki,
seated  to his left, leaned close. "There may be a way around the
problem you face with Rez's data. You are aware of Lo/Rez  global
fan activity?"

"Of what?"

"Many fans. They report each sighting of Rez, Lo, other musicians
involved. There is much incidental detail."

Laney knew from his day's video education that Lo/Rez were  theo-
retically  a  duo,  but that there were always at least two other
"members," usually more. And Rez had been adamant from the  start
about  his dislike of drum machines; the current drummer, "Blind"
Willy Jude, seated opposite Yamazaki,  had  been  with  them  for
years.  He'd  been  turning  his  enormous  black  glasses in the
idoru's direction throughout the meal; now  he  seemed  to  sense
Laney's  glance.  The  black  glasses, video units, swung around.
"Man," Jude said, "Rozzer's sittin' down there makin' eyes  at  a
big aluminum thermos bottle."

"You can't see her?"

"Holos  are  hard,  man,"  the drummer said, touching his glasses
with a fingertip "Take my kids to Nissan County, I'll call ahead,
get         2         179 funny frequency or something. All I can
see's the projector and this  kinda,  kinda  ectoplastic,  right?
Glow, like,"

The man seated between Jude and Mr. Kuwayama, whose name was Oza-
ki, bobbed apologetically injude's  direction.  "We  regret  this
very much. We regret deeply. A slight adjustment is required, but
it cannot be done at this time,"

"Hey," Jude said, "no big problem. I seen her already. I get  all
the  music  channels  with  these.  That one where she's a Mongol
princess or something, up in the mountains.

Laney lost a chopstick.

"The most recent single," Ozaki said.

"Yeah," Jude said, "that's pretty good. She wears that gold mask?
Okay  shit."  He  popped  a  section  of  maki into his mouth and
chewed.






























180 William Gibson L Chia and Masahiko sat facing one another  on
the  white  carpet.  The  room's only chair was a fragile-looking
thing with twisted wire legs and a heart-shaped seat  upholstered
in pink metal-flake plastic. Neither of them wanted to sit on the
bed. Chia had her Sandbenders across her knees  and  was  working
her  fingers  into  her  tip-sets. Masahiko's computer was on the
carpet in front of him; he'd put its  control-face  back  on  and
peeled  a  very  compact  pair of tip-sets out of the back of the
cube, along with two small black oval cups on fine lengths of op-
tical cable. Another length of the cable ran from his computer to
a small open hatch at the back of the Sandbenders.

"Okay," Chia said, settling the last of her tips, "let's go. I've
got to get hold of somebody.

"Yes,"  he said. He picked up the black cups, one in either hand,
and placed them over his eyes. When he let go, they stayed there.
It looked uncomfortable.

Chia  reached  up  and pulled her own glasses down, over her eyes
"What do I-"

Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in  mutually
impossible directions. It wasn't even like porting. Software con-
flict? Faint 'impression of light through a fluttering of rags.

And then the thing before her: building or biomass or cliff  face
looming  there,  in  countless unplanned strata, nothing about it
even or regular. Accreted patchwork of shallow random  balconies,
thousands  of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles
of fog.  26.     HakNani Stretching either way to  the  periphery
of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a
black (hr of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth  of
cable.  And past this scribbled border a sky where colors crawled
like gasoline on water.

"flak Nam," he said, beside her.

"What is it?"

"'City of darkness.' Between the walls of the world."

She remembered the scarf she'd  seen,  in  his  room  behind  the
kitchen,  its  intricate  map of something chaotic and compacted,
tiny irregular segments of red and black  and  yellow.  And  then
they  were  moving forward, toward a narrow opening. "It's a MUD,
right?" Something like a larger, permanent version  of  the  site
the  Tokyo  chapter  had erected for the meeting, or the tropical
forest Kelsey and Zona had put up. But  people  played  games  in
MUDs;  they made up characters for themselves and pretended. Lit-
tle kids did it, and lonely people.

"No," he said, "not a game." They were inside now,  smoothly  ac-
celerating,  and the squirming density of the thing was continual
visual impact, an optical drumming.  "Tai  Chang  Street."  Walls
scrawled  and crawling with scrolling messages, spectral doorways
passing like cards in a shuffled deck.

And they were not alone:  others  there,  ghost-figures  whipping
past, and everywhere the sense of eyes .

Fractal filth, bit-rot, the corridor of their passage tented with
crazy swoops of faintly flickering  lines  of  some  kind.  "Alms
House  Backstreet." A sharp turn. Another. Then they were ascend-
ing a maze of twisting stairwells, still accelerating,  and  Chia
took  a deep breath and closed her eyes. Retinal fireworks burst-
ing there, but the pressure was gone.

When she opened her eyes, they were in  a  much  cleaner  but  no
larger  version of his room behind the kitchen in the restaurant.
No empty ramen bowls, no piles of clothing. He was beside her  on
the  sleeping ledge, staring at the shifting patterns on his com-
puter's control-face. Beside it on the work-surface, her Sandben-
ders. The 182 William Gibson texture-mapping was rudimentary, ev-
erything a little too smooth and glossy. She looked at him, curi-
ous  to  see how he'd present. A basic scan job, maybe a year out
of date: his hair was shorter. He wore the same black tunic.

On the wall behind the computers was an animated version  of  the
printed  scarf, its red, black, and yellow bits pulsing slightly.
A bright green line traced a route in from the  perimeter;  where
it  ended,  bright green, concentric rings radiated from one par-
ticular yellow square.

She looked back at him, but he was still staring at the  control-
face.

Something  chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a
particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and  saw  a  small
white  rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight
toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge.
She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate,
up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming  to  a  halt
when  it  was in optimum position to be read. It was in that same
font they'd used at Whiskey Clone, or one just like it.  It  said
"Ku  Klux  Klan  Kollectibles," and then some letters and numbers
that didn't look like any kind of address she knew.

Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray  blur
scoot  from  under  it.  Flat, whirling, &st. It was on the white
rectangle now, something like the shadow of  a  crab  or  spider,
two-dimensional  and  multi-legged. It swallowed it, shot for the
door.

"I have completed responsibility to Walled City," Masahiko  said,
turning from the control-face.

"What were those things?" Chia asked him.

"What things?"

"Like  a  business  card,  Crawled  under  the door. Then another
thing, like a gray cut-out crab, that ate it."

"An advertisement,"  he  decided,  "and  a  sub-program  that  of
        fered  criticism." 3              "It didn't offer criti-
cism; it ate it."  o                 2         183

1.  "Perhaps the person who wrote the sub-program dislikes adver-
tising.  Many do. Or dislikes the advertiser. Political, aesthet-
ic, personal reasons, all are possible."

Chia looked around at the reproduction of  his  tiny  room.  "Why
don't  you have a bigger site?" Instantly worried that it was be-
cause he was Japanese, and maybe they were just used to that. But
still  it was about the smallest virtual space she could remember
having been in, and it wasn't like a bigger one  cost  more,  not
unless you were like Zona and wanted yourself a whole country.

"The  Walled City is a concept of scale. Very important. Scale is
place, yes? Thirty-three thousand people inhabited original. Two-
point-seven hectares. As many as fourteen stories,"

None of which made any sense to Chia. "I have to port, okay?"

"Of course," he said, and gestured toward her Sandbenders.

She  was  braced  for  that  two-directions-at-once thing, but it
didn't happen. The bit-mapped fish were swimming  around  in  the
glass coffee table. She looked out the window at the crayon trees
and wondered where the Mumphalumpagus was. She hadn't seen it for
a  while.  It  was something her father had made for her when she
was a baby, a big pink dinosaur with goof~y eyelashes.

She checked the table for mail, but there was nothing new.

She could phone from here. Call her mother. Sure.

-Hi, I'm in Tokyo. In a "love hotel." People are after me because
somebody  put  something  in  my bag. So, uh, what do you think I
should I do?

She tried porting to Kelsey's address instead, but  all  she  got
was  that  annoying  marble anteroom and the voice, not Kelsey's,
that said that Kelsey Van Troyer wasn't in at  the  moment.  Chia
exited  without leaving a message. The next address she tried was
Zona's, but Zona's provider was down. That  happened  a  lot,  in
Mexico,  and  particularly  in Mexico City, where Zona lived. She
decided to try Zona's secret place, because it was on a mainframe
in  Arizona and it was never down. She knew Zona didn't like peo-
ple just showing up there, because Zona didn't want  the  company
that  had built the original 184 William Gibson website, and then
forgotten about it, to discover that Zona had gotten in  and  set
up her own country.

She  asked  the Sandbenders where she was porting from now and it
said Helsinki, Finland. So that re-porting capability at the  ho-
tel was working, at least.

Just  before  twilight  at  Zona's, like always. Chia scanned rhe
floor of a dry swimming pool, looking for Zona's lizards, but she
didn't  see them. Usually they were right there, waiting for you,
bur not this rime. "Zona?"

Chia looked up, wondering if she'd see those spooky condor-things
that  Zona kept. The sky was beautiful but empty. Originally that
sky had been the most important part of this place,  and  no  ex-
pense  had  been  spared. Serious sky: deep and clean and a crazy
Mexican shade like pale turquoise. They'd brought people here  to
sell  them airplanes, corporate jets, when the jets were still in
the design phase. There'd been a white  concrete  landing  strip,
but  Zona  had folded it up into a canyon and mapped over it. All
the local color was Zona's stuff: the cooking fires and the  dead
poois and the broken walls. She'd imported landscape files, maybe
even real stuff she knew from somewhere in Mexico. "Zona?"

Something rattled, up the nearest ridge, like pebbles on a  sheet
of metal.

-It's  okay.  One of the lizards. She's just not here now. A twig
snapped. Closer.

-Don't hick around, Zona.

But she exited.

The bit-mapped fish swam back and forth.

That had been very creepy. She wasn't sure why, exactly,  but  it
had  been. Still was, kind of. She looked at the door to her bed-
room and found herself wondering what she'd  find  there  if  she
gestured for it. The bed, her Lo Rez Skyline poster, the agent of
Lo greeting her in his mindless friendly way.  But  what  if  she
found something else?

Something  waiting. Like she could still hear that rattle, up the
slope. Or what if she went to  the  wire-framed  door  where  her
mother's  room  would  have  been?  What if she opened it and her
mother's room was there after all, and not her  mother,  waiting,
but something else?

She  was  creeping  herself  out, that was all. She looked at her
stack of Lo/Rez albums beside the  lithographed  lunch  box,  her
virtual Venice beside that. Even her Music Master would seem like
company now. She opened it, watching the Piazza  decompress  like
some  incredibly intricate paper pop-up book on fast-forward, fa-
cades and colonnades springing up around her, with the  hour  be-
fore a winter's dawn for backlight.

Turning  from the water, where the prows of black gondolas bobbed
like marks in some lost system of musical  notation,  she  lifted
her  finger  and  shot forward into the maze, thinking as she did
that this place had been as strange, in its  way,  as  Masahiko's
Walled City, and what was that all supposed to be about anyway?

And  it was only as she crossed her third bridge that she noticed
that he wasn't there.

-Hey.

She stopped. A shop window displayed the masks of  Carnival,  the
really ancient ones. Black, penis-nosed leather, empty eye-holes.
A mirror draped with yellowed crepe.

Checking the Sandbenders to make sure she hadn't turned him  off.
She hadn't.

Chia  closed her eyes and counted to three. Made herself feel the
carpeted floor she sat on in the Hotel Di. She opened her eyes.

At the end of  the  narrow  Venetian  street,  down  the  tilted,
stepped  cobbles,  where  it  opened  out  into a small square or
plaza, an unfamiliar figure stood beside the central fountain.

She pulled the goggles off without bothering to close Venice

Masahiko sat opposite her,  his  legs  crossed,  the  black  cups
sucked  up  against his eyes. His lips were moving, silently, and
his hands, on his knees, in their  black  tip-sets,  traced  tiny
fingerpatterns in the air.

Maryalice  was  sitting  on  the  furry  pink  bed  with an unlit
cigarette in her mouth. She had a little square gray gun  in  her
hand, and 188 William Gibson

Chia saw how the freshly glossed red of her nails contrasted with
the pearly plastic of the handle.


187 27.     That Physical Thing Laney was at a black rubber  uri-
nal  in the Men's when he noticed the Russian combing his hair in
the mirror.

Ar least it looked like black rubber, with sort of flOPPY  edges.
They  obviously  had  the  plumbing working, but he wondered what
they'd say if you asked to make  your  own  contribution  to  the
Grotto?  On  his  way  here he'd noticed that one of the bars was
topped with a slab of something murky green and translucent,  lit
from below, and he'd hoped they hadn't made that from what they'd
sawn our of the stairwell.

Dinner was over and he'd probably had too mLich sake with it.  He
and Arleigh and Yamazaki had watched Rez meeting this new version
of the idoru, the one Willy Jude saw as a big silver thermos. And
Blackwell  was  having to get used to that, because Laney guessed
that the bodyguard hadn't had any idea she'd be here,  not  until
he'd walked in and Rez had told him.

Arleigh  had talked with Lo through most of it, mainly about real
estate. Different properties he owned around the world. Laney had
listened to more of Yamazaki's ideas about accessing this teenage
fan-club sruff~ and there might actually be  something  to  that,
but  they'd have to try it to 6nd oLit. Blackwell hadn't said two
words to anybody, drinking lager instead of sake and packing  his
food away as though he were trying to plug something, some gap in
security that could be taken care of if you stuffed  it  methodi-
cally with enough

sashimi. The Australian was an ace with chopsticks; he could pro-
ba-


189 r bly stick one in your eye at fifty paces. But the main show
had  been  Rez  and  the  idoru, and to a lesser extent Kuwayama,
who'd carried on long conversations with  them  both.  The  other
one, Ozaki, seemed to be the guy they brought along in case some-
one had to change the batteries in the silver thermos. And  Willy
Jude  was  amiable  enough, but in about as content-free a way as
possible.

Techs were supposed to be an easy source of whatever  passed  for
gossip  in  a given company, so Laney had tried a few openings in
that direction, but Ozaki hadn't said any more than he'd had  to.
And  since Laney couldn't get Rei Toei within his field of vision
without starting to slide over into nodal mode, he'd had to  con-
duct  his  evening's  eavesdropping with whatever pick-up visuals
were available. Arleigh wasn't too bad for that. There was  some-
thing  about  the line of her jaw that he particularly liked, and
kept coming back to.

Laney zipped up and went to wash his hands,  the  basin  made  of
that  same  floppy-looking black stuff, and noticed that the Rus-
sian was still combing his hair. Laney had no way of  knowing  if
the  man was literally Russian or not, but he thought of him that
way because of the black patent paratrooper boots with  contrast-
ing  white  stitching,  the pants with the black silk ribbon down
the side, and the white leather evening jacket. Either Russian or
one  of those related jobs, but very definitely Kombinat-infiect-
ed, that mutant commiemafioso thing.

The Russian was combing his hair with a total concentration  that
made Laney think of a fly grooming itself with its front feet, He
was very large, and had a large head, though it was mainly in the
vertical,  quite tall from the eyebrows up, seeming to taper very
slightly toward the crown. For all the attention being  given  to
the  combing,  the man didn't actually have much hair, not on top
anyway, and Laney had thought these guys  all  went  in  for  im-
plants.  Rydell  had told him Kombinat types were all over Tokyo.
Rydell had seen a documentary about it, how they were  so  singu-
larly and surrealistically brutal that nobody wanted to mess with
them. Then Rydell had started to tell him about two Russians, San
Francisco cops of some


190  William  Gibson kind, who he'd had some sort of run-in with,
but Laney had to take a meeting with Rice Daniels and  a  make-up
artist, and never heard the end of it.

Laney  checked  to  see that he didn't have anything stuck in his
teeth from dinner.

As he went out, the Russian was still combing.

He saw Yamazaki, blinking and looking lost. "It's back there," he
said.

"What is?"

"The can."

"Can'?"

"Men's. The toilet."

"But I was looking for you."

"You found me."

"I  observed, as we ate, that you avoided looking directly at the
idoru."

"Right."

"I surmise that density of information  is  sufficient  to  allow
nodal apprehension

"You got it."

Yamazaki  nodded. "Ah. But this would not be the case with one of
her videos, or even with a 'live' performance."

"Why not?" Laney had started back in the direction of  their  ta-
ble.

"Bandwidth,"  Yamazaki  said,  "The version here tonight is high-
bandwidth prototype."

"Are we compensated for beta-testing?"

"Can you describe the  nature  of  nodal  apprehension,  please?"
"Like  memories,"  Laney  said, "or clips from a movie. But some-
thing the drummer said made me think I was just seeing her latest
video."

Someone  shoved  Laney  out  of the way, from behind, and he fell
across the nearest table, breaking a glass.  He  felt  the  glass
shatter  under him and found himself staring straight down, for a
second, into

2 191 the taut gray latex lap of a woman who screamed explosively
just  before  the  table  gave way. Something, probably her knee,
clipped him hard in the side of the head.

He managed to get to his knees, holding his head, and found  him-
self  recalling  an  experiment  they'd  done in Science, back in
Gainesville. Surface tension. You sprinkled pepper over the water
in a glass. Brought the tip of a needle close to the film of pep-
per. Watched it spring back from the needle like  a  live  thing.
And  he saw that happening here, his head ringing, but instead of
pepper it was the crowd in the Western World, and  he  knew  that
the needle must be pointed at Rez's table.

The back of a white leather evening jacket. . . . But then he saw
the Sherman tank come unmoored on the shoulders of the  recoiling
crowd,  spinning  toward him, huge and weightless, and the lights
went out.

The crowd had been screaming anyway, but  the  dark  twisted  the
communal  pitch  up  into  something  that had Laney covering his
ears. Or trying to, because someone stumbled into him and he went
over, backward, instinctively curling into a tight fetal knot and
clamping his hands across the back of his neck.

"Hey," said a voice, very close to his ear, "get on up. You gonna
get  stepped  on."  It was Willy Jude, "I can see." A hand around
his wrist. "Got infrared."

Laney let the drummer pull him to his feet. "What is  it?  What's
happening?"

"Dunno,  but  come on. Gonna get worse-" As if on cue, a terrible
squeal of raw animal pain cut through the  frenzied  crowd-noise.
"Blackwell  got  one,"  Willy Jude said, and Laney felt the drum-
mer's hand grip his belt. He stumbled as  he  was  pulled  along.
Someone ran into him, shouted in Japanese. After that he kept his
hands up, trying to protect his face, and went where the  drummer
pulled him,

Suddenly  they were in a cove or pocket of relative quiet. "Where
are we?" Laney asked.

"This way     Something clipped Laney across the shins.  192 WiI-
Ii~in.  Gibson  "Stool,"  Willy Jude said. "Sorry." Glass snapped
beneath Laney's shoes.

A curve of greenish light, broken cursive hanging  in  the  dark.
Another few steps and he saw the Grotto. Willy Jude let go of his
belt. "You can see here, right? That bioluminescent stuff?"

"Yeah," Laney said. "Thanks,"

"It doesn't register on my glasses. I get infrared off warm  bod-
ies,  but  I  can't  make  out  the steps. Walk me down." He took
Laney's hand. They started down the stairs together. A black-clad
trio  of  Japanese  shot past them, leaving a high-heeled pump on
the encrusted stairs, and  vanished  around  the  landing.  Laney
kicked the shoe out of Willy Jude's way and kept going.

When they rounded the corner at the landing, Arleigh was there, a
green champagne bottle cocked over  her  shoulder.  There  was  a
smear  of  blood at the corner of her mouth, darker than her lip-
stick. When she saw Laney, she lowered the  bottle.  "Where  were
you?" she said.

"The Men's," Laney said.

"You missed the show."

"What happened?"

"Damn it," she said, "my coat's up there."

"Keep  moving,  keep  moving," Willy Jude said, More stairs, more
landings, the rippling walls of the Grotto  giving  way  to  con-
crete.  People  kept  rushing down, past them, knots and singles,
taking the stairs too fast. Laney rubbed his ribs where he'd come
down on the glass. It hurt, but somehow he hadn't been cut.

"They  looked  like  Kombinat," Arleigh said. "Big ugly guys, bad
outfits. I couldn't tell if they were after  Rez  or  the  idoru.
Like they just thought they could walk in and do it."

"Do what?"

"Don't know," she said. "Kuwayama had at least a dozen of his own
security people at the two closest tables. And Blackwell probably
prays for a scene like that every night before he goes to bed. He
reached into hi~ jacket,  then  the  lights  went  out."        0
        2          193  "He  put 'em out," Willy Jude said. "Some
kinda remote. He can see better in the dark than I can with these
infrareds. Dunno how that is, but he can."

"How'd you get out?" Laney asked Arleigh.

"Flashlight. In my purse."

"Laney-san

Looking  back to see Yamazaki, one sleeve of his green plaid coat
pulled free at the shoulder, his glasses missing a lens.  Arleigh
had  taken  a  phone from her purse and was cursing softly as she
tried to get it to work.

Yamazaki caught up with them at the next  landing.  The  four  of
them continued down togerher, Laney still holding the blind drum-
mer's hand.

When they reached the street, the Western World's sullen crew  of
doorpeople were nowhere in sight. A single policeman with a plas-
tic rain-cover on his cap was muttering frantically into a micro-
phone  clipped  to  the front of his rain-cape. He was walking in
tight circles as he did this, gesturing dramatically with a white
baton at nothing in particular. Several kinds of alien siren were
converging on the Western World, and Laney thought he could  hear
a helicopter.

Willy Jude dropped Laney's hand and adjusted his video-goggles to
the street's light-level. "Where's my car?"

Arleigh lowered her phone,  which  apparently  was  working  now.
"You'd  better come with us, Willy. Some kind of tactical unit is
on the way.

"Nothing like it," Rez said, and Laney turned, to see the  singer
emerging  from  the  Western World, brushing something white from
his dark jacket. "That physical thing. Too much time in the  vir-
tual,  we  forget  that,  don't we? You're Leyner?" Extending his
hand.

"Laney," Laney said, as Arleigh's dark green van pulled up beside
them.






194 William Gibson

j  Maryalice  opened a curved drawer that was built into the pink
bed's headboard. She was wearing a black skin-suit with  big  red
Ashleigh Modine Carter-style sequin roses on the lapels. She took
out a little blue glass dish and balanced it on her knee. "I hate
these  places," she said. "There's lots of ways to make sex ugly,
but it's kind of hard to  make  it  look  this  ridiculous."  She
knocked  the  gray  end  off her cigarette, into the blue saucer.
"How old are you, anyway?"

"Fourteen," Chia said.

"About what 1 told 'em. You're fourteen, fifteen, for  real,  and
no way you were on to me. I was on to you, right? It was my move.
I planted on you. But they don't believe me. Say you're some kind
of  operator,  say  I'm just stupid, say that Rez guy sent you to
SeaTac to get the stuff. Say you're a set-up and I'm crazy to be-
lieve  a  kid  couldn't  do  that."  She sucked on the cigarette,
squinting. "Where is it?" She looked down at Chia's bag, open  on
the white carpet. "There?"

"I didn't mean to take it. I didn't know it was there."

"I  know  that," Maryalice said. "What I told 'em. I meant to get
it back off you at the club."

"I don't understand any of this," Chia said. "It just scares me."

"Sometimes  I  bring  stuff  back for Eddie. Party favors for the
club. It's illegal, but it's not all that illegal, you know?  Not
hard  stuff, really. But this time he was doing something else on
the side, something with the Russians,  and  I  didn't  like  it.
That's what scares me, that stulf Like its alive."

-195 28.     A Matter of Credit "What stuff?"

"That. Assemblers, they're called."

Chia  looked  at her bag. "That thing in my bag is a nanotech as-
sembler?"

"More like what you start with. Kind of an egg, or a little  fac-
tory. You plug that thing into another machine that programs 'em,
and they start building themselves out of whatever's  handy.  And
when  there's  enough of 'em, they start building whatever it was
you wanted them to. There's some kind of law against selling that
stuff  to the Kombinat, so they want it bad. But Eddie worked out
a way to do it. I met these two creepy German guys in the  SeaTac
Hyatt.  They'd  flown  in  there  from  wherever, I figured maybe
Africa." She mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the  little
blue  dish, making it smell even worse. "They didn't want to give
it to me, because they were expecting  Eddie.  Lot  of  back  and
forth on the phone. Finally they did. I was supposed to put it in
the suitcase with the other stuff, but it made me  nervous.  Made
me  wanna self-medicate." She looked around the room. She put the
blue dish with the crushed cigarette on a square black side table
and  did  something  that made the front of it open. It was a re-
frigerator, filled with  little  bottles.  Maryalice  bent  over,
peering  in  there.  The  pistol-shaped lighter slid off the pink
bed. "No tequila," Maryalice said. "You  tell  me  why  anybody'd
name a vodka 'Come Back Salmon'     Removing a little square bot-
tle with a fish on its side. "Japanese would, though." She looked
down  at  the  lighter.  "Like  a  Russian would make a cigarette
lighter that looks like a pistol."

Chia saw that Maryalice didn't have her hair-extensions  in  any-
more.  "When they were taking DNA samples, in SeaTac," Chia said,
"you stuck the end of your extension in there.

Maryalice cracked the seal  on  the  little  bottle,  opened  it,
drained  it in a single gulp, and shivered. "Those extensions are
all my own hair," she said. "Grew 'em out when I was on sort of a
health  diet,  understand? They catch people doing recreationals,
when they take 196 William  Gibson      C:  those  hair  samples.
Some  recreationals, they stay in your hair a long time." Maryal-
ice put the empty bottle down beside the blue  dish.  "What's  he
doing?" Pointing at Masahiko.

"Porting,"  Chia  said, unable to think of a quick way to explain
the Walled City.

"I can see that. You came here 'cause  these  places'll  re-post,
right?"

"But you found us anyway."

"I  got  connections with a cab company. I figured it was worth a
try. But the Russians'll think of it, too, if  they  haven't  al-
ready."

"But how'd you get in? It was all locked."

"I know my way around these places, honey. 1 know my way entirely
too well."

Masahiko removed the  black  cups  that  covered  his  eyes,  saw
Maryalice, looked down at the cups, then back up at Chia.

"Maryalice," Chia said.



Gomi  Boy  presented like a life-size anime of himself, huge eyes
and even taller hair. "Who drank the vodka?" he asked.

"Maryalice," Chia said. "Who's Maryalice?"

"She's in the room at the hotel," Chia said.

"That was the equivalent of twenty  minutes  porting,"  Gomi  Boy
said. "How can there be someone in your room at the Hotel Di?"

"It's  complicated," Chia said. They were back in Masahiko's room
in the Walled City. They'd just clicked back, none of that  maze-
running  like  the  first  time. Past an icon reminding her she'd
left her Venice open, but too late for that. Maybe once you  were
in  here,  you  got  back  fast. But Masahiko'd said they had to,
quick, there was trouble. Maryalice had said she didn't mind, but
Chia  didn't  like  it at all that Maryalice was in the room with
them while they were porting.

a a 197 "Your cash card is good for twenty-six  more  minutes  of
room-time,"  Gomi Boy said. "Unless your friend hits the mini-bar
again. Do you have an account in Seattle?"

"No," Chia said, "just my mother.

"We've already looked at that,"  Masahiko  said.  "Your  mother's
credit would not sustain rental of the room plus porting charges.
Your father-"

"My father?  "Has an expense account with his employer in  Singa-
pore, a merchant bank-"

"How do you know that?"

Gomi  Boy  shrugged.  "Walled City. We find things out. There are
people here who know things."

"You can't tap into my father's account," Chia  said.  "It's  for
his job."

"Twenty-five minutes remaining," Masahiko said.

Chia  pulled her goggles off. Maryalice was taking another minia-
ture bottle from the little fridge. "Don't open that!"

Maryalice gave a guilty little shriek  and  dropped  the  bottle.
"Just maybe some rice crackers," she said.

"Nothing,"  Chia  said. "It's too expensive! We're running out of
money!"

"Oh," Maryalice said, blinking. "Right. I don't have any, though.
Eddie's  cut  my  cards  off, for sure, and the first time I plug
one, he'll know exactly where I am.'

Masahiko spoke to Chia without removing  the  eyecups.  "We  have
your father's expense account on line.

Maryalice smiled. "What we like to hear, right?"

Chia  was  pulling  off  her tip-sets. "You'll have to take it to
them," she said to Maryalice, "the nano-thing. I'll  give  it  to
you  now,  you take it to them, give it to them, tell them it was
all a mistake." She scooted on her hands and knees over to  where
her  bag  sat open on the floor. She dug for the thing, found it,
held it out to Maryalice in what was left of the blue and  yellow
bag from the SeaTac duty-free. The William Gibson dark gray plas-
tic and the rows of little holes made it look like some  kind  of
deformed designer pepper grinder. "Take it. Explain to them. Tell
them it was just a mistake."

Maryalice cringed. "Put it back, okay?" She swallowed. "See,  the
problem  isn't  whether  or not there's been a mistake. The prob-
lem's they'll kill us now anyway, because we know about  it.  And
Eddie, he'll let 'em. 'Cause he has to. And 'cause he's just sort
of generally fed up with me, the ungrateful little  greasy  shit-
head  motherfucker    Maryalice shook her head sadly. "It's about
the end of our relationship, you ask me."

"Account accessed," Masahiko said. "Join us here now, please. You
have another visitor."

I 99

29.     Her Bad Side Arleigh's van smelled of long-chain monomers
and warm electronics. The rear seats had  been  removed  to  make
room  for  the  collection of black consoles, cabled together and
wedged into place with creaking wads of bubble-pack.

Rez rode up front, beside the  driver,  the  ponytailed  Japanese
Californian  from Akihabara. Laney squatted on a console, between
Ar-leigh and Yamazaki, with Willy Jude and  the  red-haired  tech
behind  them.  Laney's ribs hurt, where he'd come down on the ta-
ble, and that seemed to be getting worse.  He'd  discovered  that
the  top  of  his  left sock was sticky with blood, but he wasn't
sure where it had come from or even if it was his own.

Arleigh had her phone pressed to her  ear.  'Option  eight,"  she
said,  evidently  to  the  driver, who touched the pad beside the
dashboard map. Laney glimpsed Tokyo grid-segments  whipping  past
on the screen. "We're taking Rez back with us."

"Take me to the Imperial," Rez said.

"Blackwell's orders," Arleigh said.

"Let me talk to him." Reaching back for the phone.

They  swung left, into a wider street, their lights picking out a
small crowd speedwalking away from the Western World, all of them
trying  to look as though they just happened to be there, out for
a brisk stroll. The neighborhood was nondescript and  generically
urban  and, aside from the guilty-looking speedwalkers, quite de-
serted.          "Keithy," Rez said, "I want to go  back  to  the
hotel."  The  terrible                     201 white daystar of a
police helicopter swept over them, carbon-black shadows  speeding
away actoss concrete. Rez was listening to the phone. They passed
an all-night noodle wagon, its interior ghostly  behind  curtains
of  yellowed  plastic. Images flicking past on a small screen be-
hind the counter. Arleigh nudged Laney's knee, pointed past Rez's
shoulder. A trio of white armored cars shot through the approach-
ing intersection, blue lights flashing on their rectangular  tur-
rets, and vanished without a sound. Rez turned, handing the phone
back to her. "Keithy's being his para self. He wants me to go  to
your hotel and wait for him."

Arleigh took the phone. "Does he know what it was about?

"Autograph-hunters?" Rez started to turn back around in his seat.

"What happened to the idoru?" Laney asked.

Rez peered at him. "If you  kidnapped  that  new  platform-and  I
thought it was wonderful-what exactly would you have?"

"I don't know."

"Rei's only reality is the realm of ongoing serial creation," Rez
said. "Entirely process; infinitely more than the combined sum of
her various selves. The platforms sink beneath her, one after an-
other, as she grows denser and more  complex     The  long  green
eyes  seemed to grow dreamy, in the light of passing storefronts,
and then the singer turned away.

Laney watched Arleigh dab at the cut corner of her mouth  with  a
tissue.

"Laney-san     Yamazaki,  a  whisper.  Putting something into his
hand. A cabled set of eyephones.  "We  have  global  fin-activity
database

His ribs hurt. Was his leg bleeding? "Later, okay?"



Arleigh's  suite  was at least twice as large as Laney's room. It
had its own miniature sitting room, separated  from  the  bedroom
and  bath  202  William Gihson with gilded French doors. The four
chairs in the sitting room had very tall, very narrow backs, each
one  tapering  to a rendition of the elf hat, done in sandblasted
steel. These chairs were quite amazingly uncomfortable, and Laney
was hunched forward on one now, in considerable pain, hugging his
bruised ribs. The blood in his sock had turned out to be his own,
from  a  skinned  patch  on his left shin. He'd plastered it over
with rnicropore from the professional-looking  first-aid  kit  in
Arleigh's  bathroom.  He doubted there was anything there for his
ribs, but he was wondering if some kind of elastic bandage  might
help.

Yamazaki was on the chair to his right, reattaching the sleeve of
his plaid jacket with bright gold safety pins from  an  Evil  Elf
Hat  emergency  sewing  kit. Laney had never actually seen anyone
use a hotel room's emergency sewing kit  for  anything.  Yamazaki
had  removed  his damaged glasses and was working with the jacket
held close to his face. This made him  look  older,  and  somehow
calmer.  To  Yamazaki's right, the red-haired technician, who was
called Shannon, was sitting up very straight and reading  a  com-
plimentary style magazine.

Rez  was sprawled on the bed, propped up on the maximum available
number of pillows, and Willy Jude sat at its foot,  channel-surf-
ing  with  his video units. The panic at the Western World appar-
ently hadn't made the news yet, although the  drummer  said  he'd
caught an oblique reference on one of the clubbing channels.

Arleigh  was  standing  by  the window, pressing an ice cube in a
white washcloth against her swollen lip.

Did he give you any idea of when he might turn up?" Rez, from the
bed.

"No," Arleigh said, "but he made it clear he wanted you to wait."

Rez sighed.

"Let the people take care of you, Rez," Willy  Jude  said.  "It's
what they're paid for."

0 0 -203 Laney had taken it for granted that all of them were ex-
pected to wait, along with Rez, for Blackwell. Now he decided  to
try to return to his room. All they could do was stop him.

Blackwell  opened the door from the corridor, pocketing something
black, something that definitely wasn't your standard-issue hotel
key.  There was a pale X of micropore across his right cheek, the
longest arm reaching the tip of his chin.

"Evening, Keithy," Rez said.

"You really mustn't piss off  like  that,"  the  bodyguard  said.
"Those  Russians  are a serious crew. Massive triers, those boys.
Wouldn't do if they got hold of  you,  Rozzer.  Not  at  an.  You
wouldn't like it."

"Kuwayama and the platform?"

"Have  to tell you, Rez." Blackwell stood at the foot of the bed.
"I've seen you go with women I wouldn't take to a shit-fight on a
dark  night, but at least they were human. Hear what I'm saying?"

Ł~J do, Keithy," the singer said. "I know how you feel about her.
But  you'll  come around. It's the way of things, Keithy. The new
way. New world."

"I don't know anything about that. My old dad was a  Painter  and
Docker; had a docky's brief Broke his heart I turned out the sort
of crim I did. Died before  you'd  got  me  out  of  B  Division.
Would've liked him to see me assume responsibility, Rez. For you.
For your safety. But now I don't know. Might not impress him  so.
Might  tell  me  I'm  just minding a fool with a bloated sense of
himself"

Rez came up off the bed, surprising Laney with his speed, a  per-
former's  grace, and then he was in front of Blackwell, his hands
on the huge shoulders. "But you don't think that, do you, Keithy?
You didn't in Pentridge. Not when you came for me. And not when I
came back for you."

Blackwell's eyes glistened. He was about to  say  something,  but
Yamazalci  suddenly  stood  up, blinking, and put his green plaid
sportscoat on. He craned his neck, peering nearsightedly  at  the
pins



204  William  Gihson he'd used to mend it, then seemed to realize
that everyone in the suite was looking at him.  He  coughed  ner-
vously and sat back down.

A silence followed. "Out of line, I was, Rozzer," Blackwell said,
breaking it.

Rez clapped the bodyguard's shoulder, releasing him. "Stressed. I
know." Rez smiled. "Kuwayama? The platform?"

"Had his own team there,"

"And our crashers?"

"That's  a  bit  odd,"  Blackwell said, "Kombinat, Rez. Say we've
stolen something of theirs. Or at least  that's  all  the  one  I
questioned knew."

Rez  looked puzzled, but seemed to put whatever it was out of his
mind. "Take me back to the hotel," he said.

Blackwell checked his huge steel watch.  "We're  still  sweeping,
there. Another twenty minutes and I'll check with them."

Laney took this as his opportunity, standing up and stepping past
Blackwell to the door. "I'm going to take a hot shower," he said.
"Cracked  my  ribs  up there." No one said anything. "Call if you
need me." Then he opened the door, stepped out, closed it  behind
him,  and limped in what he hoped was the direction of the eleva-
tor.

It was. In it, he leaned against the mirrored  wall  and  touched
the button for his floor.

It said something in a soothing tone, Japanese.

The door closed. He shut his eyes.

He  opened  his  eyes as the door opened. Stepped out, turned the
wrong way, then the right way. Fishing for his wallet, where he'd
put  his  key. Still there. Bath, hot shower, these concepts more
theoretical as he approached his room. Sleep. That  was  it.  Un-
dress and lie down and not be conscious.

He swiped the key down the slot. Nothing. Again. Click.

Kathy  Torrance,  sitting  on  the edge of his bed. She smiled at
him. Pointed at the moving figures on the screen. One of whom was
Laney, naked, with a larger erection than he recalled ever having
had. 3



205 The girl vaguely familiar, but whoever she was, he didn't re-
member doing that with het

"Don't just stand there," Kathy said. "You have to see this."

"That's not me," Laney said.

"I know," she said, delighted. "He's way too big. And I'd love to
see you try to prove it."







































200 William Gibson -4 Chia worked the tips  back  on,  regoggled,
let  Masahiko take her co his room. That same instant transition,
the virtual Venice icon strobing. . . . Gomi Boy was  there,  and
someone  else,  though  at  first she couldn't see him. Just this
glass tumbler on the work-surface that hadn't been there  before,
mapped  to a higher resolution than the rest of the room: filthy,
chipped at the rim, something crusted at the bottom.

"That woman," Gomi Boy began, but someone coughed. A strange  dry
rattle.

"You  are  an  interesting  young woman," said a voice unlike any
Chia had heard, a weird, attenuated rasp  that  might  have  been
compiled  from  a library of faint, dry, random sounds. So that a
word's long vowel might be wires in the wind, or the click  of  a
consonant the rattle of a dead leaf against a window. "Young wom-
an," it said again, and then there was  something  indescribable,
which she guessed was meant as laughter.

"This  is  the  Etruscan,"  Masahiko said. "The Etruscan accessed
your father's expense account for us. He is most skilled."

Something there for a second. Skull-like. Above the dirty  glass.
The mouth drawn and petulant. "It was nothing, really.

She told herself it was all presentation. Like when Zona present-
ed, you could never quite focus on her. This was like  that,  but
more  extreme.  And  a  lot  of  work put into the audio. But she
didn't          I   like   it.        0           C           207
30.     The Etruscan "You brought me here to meet him?" she asked
Masahiko.

"Oh, no," said the Etruscan, the Oh a polyphonic chorale, "I just
wanted a look, dear." The thing like laughter.

"The woman," Gomi Boy said. "Did you arrange for her to meet you,
at Hotel Di?"

"No," Chia said. "She checked the taxi cabs,  so  you  aren't  as
smart as you think."

"Well  put."  The p#: the sound of a single pebble falling into a
dry marble fountain. Chia focused on the glass. A huge  centipede
lay  curled at its bottom, a thing the color of dead cuticle. She
saw that it had tiny, pink hands- The glass  was  gone.  "Sorry,"
Masahiko said. "He wished only to meet you."

"Who is the woman in Hotel Di?" Gomi Boy's anime eyes were bright
and eager, but his tone was hard.

"Maryalice," Chia said. "Her boyfriend's with those Russians. The
thing they're after's in my bag there."

"What thing?" "Maryalice says it's a nano-assembler." "Unlikely,"
Gomi Boy said, "Tell it to the Russians." "But you  have  contra-
band? In the room?" "I've got something they want." Gomi Boy gri-
maced, vanished. "Where'd he go?"

"This changes the situation," Masahiko said. "You did not tell us
you have contraband."

"You didn't ask! You didn't ask why they were looking for me.

Masahiko shrugged, calm as ever. "We were not certain that it was
you they were interested in. The Kombinat would be very eager for
the  skills of someone like the Etruscan, for instance. Many peo-
ple know of Hak Nam, but few know how to  enter.  We  reacted  to
protect the integrity of the city."  208 William Gibson "But your
computer's in the hotel room. They can just come  there  and  get
it."

"It  no longer matters," he said. "I am no longer engaged in pro-
cessing. My duties are assumed by others. Gomi Boy  is  concerned
now for his safety outside, you understand? Penalties for posses-
sion of contraband are harsh. He is particularly vulnerable,  be-
cause he deals in second-hand equipment."

"I  don't  think  it's  the police you want to worry about, right
now. I think we want to call the  police.  Maryalice  says  those
Russians'll kill us, if they find us."

"The  police  would not be a good idea. The Etruscan has accessed
your father's account in Singapore. That is a crime."

"I think I'd rather get arrested than killed."

Masahiko considered that. "Come with me," he said. "Your  visitor
is waiting."

"Not the centipede," Chia said. "Forget it."

"No," he said, "not the Etruscan. Come."

And  they  were out of his room, fast-forward through the maze of
Hak  Nam,  up  twisted  stairwells  and  through  corridors,  the
strange, compacted world flickering past    What is this place? A
communal site, right? But what are you so worried about? Why's it
all a secret?"

"Walled  City  is  of  the  net, but not on it. There are no laws
here, only agreements."

"You can't be on the net and not be on the net,"  Chia  said,  as
they shot up a final flight of stairs.

"Distributed processing," he said. "Interstitial, It began with a
shared killfile-"

"Zona!"  There  across  this  uneven  roofscape,  overgrown  with
strangeness.

"Touch  nothing. Some are traps. I come to you." Zona, presenting
in that quick, fragmentary way, moved forward.

To Chia's right, a kind of ancient car lay tilted in a  drift  of
tan- 3



209  dom  textures,  something like a Christmas tree growing from
its unbroken windshield. Beyond that.

She guessed that the rooftops of the Walled City were its dumping
ground, but the things abandoned there were like objects out of a
dream, bit-mapped fantasies discarded by  their  creators,  their
jumbled shapes and textures baffling the eye, the attempt to sort
and decipher them inducing a kind of vertigo. Some were moving.

Then a movement high in the gasoline sky caught her  eye.  Zona's
bird-things?

"I went to your site," Chia said. "You weren't there, something-"

"I know. Did you see it?" As Zona passed the Christmas tree,  its
round,  silver  ornaments  displayed  black  eye-holes, each pair
turning to follow her.

"No. I thought I heard it."

"I do not know what it is." Zona's presentation was even  quicker
and  more Jumpy than usual. "I came here for advice. They told me
that you had been to my site, and that now you were here .

"You know this place?"

"Someone here helped me establish my site. It  is  impossible  to
come  here without an invitation, you understand? My name is on a
list. Although I cannot go below, into the city itself,  unaccom-
panied."

"Zona,  I'm in so much trouble now! We're hiding in this horrible
hotel, and Maryalice is there-"

"This bitch who made you her mule, yes? She is where?"

"In the room at this hotel.  She  said  she  broke  up  with  her
boyfriend, and it's his, the nano-thing-"

"The what?"

"She says it's some kind of nano-assembler thing."

Zona  Rosa's  features  snapped  into focus as her heavy eyebrows
shot up. "Nanotechnology?"

"This is in your bag?" Masahiko asked.

"Wrapped in plastic."


210 William Gibson

"Who is that?" Zona asked.

"Masahiko. Mitsuko's brother. He lives here."

"Where did he go?"

"Back to the hotel we're porting from,"

"This shit you are in, it is crazy," Zona said.

"Please, Zona, help me! I don't think I'll ever get home!"

Masahiko reappeared, the thing in his hand  minus  the  duty-free
bag. "I scanned it," he said. "Immediate identification as Rodel-
van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C-slash-7A.  This
is  a  lab  prototype. We are unable to determine its exact legal
status, but the production model, C-slash-9E,  is  Class  1  nan-
otechnology,  proscribed  under  international law. Japanese law,
conviction of illegal possession of Class 1 device carries  auto-
matic life sentence."

"Life?" Chia said.

"Same for thermonuclear device," he said, apologetically, "poison
gas, biological weapon" He held up the scanned object for  Zona's
inspection.

Zona  looked at it. "Fuck your mother," she said, her tone one of
somber respect.

211 31.     The Way Things Work








"See how things work, Laney? 'What goes around,  comes  around  7
You  can run, but you can't hide'? Know those expressions, Laney?
How some things get to be c1ich~s because they touch  on  certain
truths, Laney? Talk to me, Laney."

Laney  lowered  himself into one of the miniature armchairs, hug-
ging his ribs.

"You look like shit, Laney. Where have yOU been?"

"The Western World," he said. He didn't like watching himself  do
those  things  on the screen, but he found he couldn't look away.
He knew that wasn't him, there. They'd mapped his face onto some-
one  else.  But  it was his face. He remembered hearing something
someone had said about mirrors, a long time ago, that  they  were
somehow unnatural and dangerous.

"So you're trying your hand at the Orient now?"

She  hadn't  understood,  he thought, which meant she didn't know
where he'd been, earlier. Which meant they hadn't  been  watching
him here. "That's that guy," he said, "that Hillman. From the day
I met you. My job interview. He was a porno extra."

"Don't you think he's being awfully rough with her?"

"Who is she, Kathy?"

"Think back. If you can remember Clinton Hiliman, Laney . .

Laney shook his head.

"Think actor, Laney. Think Alison Shires . . ."

"His daughter," Laney said, no doubt at all.


"I definitely think that's  too  rough.  That  borders  on  rape,
Laney. Assault. I think we could make a case for assault."


"Let's hear the soundtrack, Laney. See what you're saying, there.
Cast some light on motive.



He almost fell, coming up out of the chair. He couldn't find  the
manual  controls. Wires back there. He pulled out the first three
he found. Third did it.

"Put it on the Lo/Rez tab, Laney? Rock and roll lifestyle? Aren't
you supposed to throw them out the window, though?"

"What's it about, Kathy? You want to just tell me now?"

She  smiled  at him. Exactly the smile he remembered from his job
interview. "May I call you Cohn?"

"Kathy: fuck you."

She laughed. "We may have come full circle, Laney."

"How's that?"

"Think of this as a job interview."

"I've got a job."

"We're offering you another, Laney. You can moonlight."

Laney made it back to the chair. Lowered himself in as slowly  as
possible. The pain made him gasp.

"What's wrong?"

"Ribs.  Hurt." He found a way to settle back that seemed to help.

"Were you in a fight? Is that blood?"

"I went to a club."

"This is Tokyo, Laney. They don't have fights in clubs."

"That was really her, the daughter?"

"It certainly is. And she'll be more than happy to talk about  it
on  Slitscan, Laney. Seduced into sadistic sex games by a stalker
obsessed 214 William Gibson with her famous, her loving dad.  Who
has come around, by the way. Who is one of ours now."


"Because,"  Kathy  said,  looking  at him as though she were con-
cerned that he might have sustained brain damage as well,  "she's
an  aspiring  actress in her own right, Laney." She looked at him
hopefully, as though he might suddenly start to process. "The big
break."

"That is going to be her big break?"

"A  break,"  Kathy Torrance said, "is a break. And you know some-
thing? I'm trying, I'm trying really hard, to give  you  one  in-
stead. Right now. And it wouldn't be the first, would it?"

The  phone  began  to  ring.  "You'd better take this," she said,
passing him the white slab of cedar.

"Yes?"

"The fan-activity data-base." It was Yamazaki. "You  must  access
it now."

"Where are you?"

"In hotel garage. With van."

"Look, I'm in kind of rough shape, here. Can it wait?"

"Wait?" Yamazaki sounded horrified.

Laney  looked  at Kathy Torrance. She was wearing something black
and not quite short enough to  show  her  tattoo.  Her  hair  was
shorter  now.  "I'll be down when I can. Keep it open for me." He
hung up before Yamazaki could reply.

"What was that about?"

"Shiatsu."

"You're lying."

"What do you want, Kathy? What's the deal?"

"Him, I want him. I want a way in. I want to know what  he's  do-
ing.  I want to know what he thinks he's doing, trying to screw a
piece of Japanese software,"

"Marry," Laney said.

Her smile vanished. "You don't correct me, Laney."           "You
want    me   to   spy   on   him."       0                      -
                215 L "Research."

"Balls.'

"You wish."

"If I got anything you could use, you'd want me to ser  him  up."
The smile returned. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"And lget?"

"A  life.  A  life in which you haven't been branded an obsessive
stalker who preyed on the attractive daughter of  the  object  of
your  obsession. A life in which it isn't public knowledge that a
series  of  disastrous  pharmaceutical  trials  permanently   and
hideously rewired you. Fair enough?"

"What  about her? The daughter. She do all that with the Hill-man
guy for nothing?"

"Your call, Laney. Work for us, get me what I  need,  she's  shit
out of luck."

"That  easy? She'd go along with that? After what she had to do?"
"If she wants even the remotest hope of having a career eventual-
ly-yes."

Laney  looked  at  her.  "That isn't me. It's a morph. If I could
prove it was a morph, I could sue you."

"Really? You could afford that, could you? It  takes  years.  And
even then, you might not win. We've got a lot of money and talent
to throw at problems like that, Laney. We do it  all  the  time."
The door chimed. "That'll be mine," she said. She got up, went to
the door, touched the security screen. Laney glimpsed part  of  a
man's  face.  She opened the door. It was Rice Daniels, minus his
trademark sunglasses. "Rice is with us  now,  Laney,"  she  said.
"He's been a terrific help with your backgrounder."

"Out of Control didn't work out?" Laney asked Daniels.

Daniels  showed  Laney  a  lot  of very white teeth. "I'm sure we
could work together, Laney. I hope  you  don't  have  any  issues
around what happened."

"Issues," Laney said.

Kathy  walked  back,  handed  Laney a blank white card with a 210
William Gibson pencilled number. "Call me. Before nine  tomorrow.
Leave a message. Yes or no."

"You're giving me a choice?"

"It's  more  fun  that  way.  I  want you to think about it." She
reached down and flicked the collar of  Laney's  shirt.  "Stitch-
count," she said. Turned and walked out, Daniels pulling the door
shut behind them.

Laney sat there, staring at the closed door, until the phone  be-
gan to ring.

It was Yamazaki.


































217

32.     The Uninvited










his voice betrayed his tension. "Who will you attack?"

"We will find a way to carry the fight to the enemy," Zona Rosa

said, gravely. "Passivity is death."

Something that looked to Chia like a bright orange drink coaster

came  gliding  in under Masahiko's door and across the floor, but
the

shadow-thing gobbled it before she could get a closer look.

"You.' said Gomi Boy to Zona Rosa, "are in Mexico City. You are

not physically or legally endangered by any of this!"

"Physically?" said Zona Rosa, snapping back into a  furious  ver-
sion of her previous presentation. "You want physically, son of a
bitch? I'll fucking kill you, physically! You think  I  can't  do
that?  You think you live on Mars or something? I fly here Aeron-
aves direct with my girls, we find  you,  we  cut  your  Japanese
balls  offl  You think I can't do that?" The saw-toothed, dragon-
handled switchblade was out now,  quivering,  in  front  of  Gomi
Boy's face.

"Zona, please," Chia begged. "He hasn't done anything so far hut

help me! Don't!"

Zona snorted. The blade reversed, vanishing. "You don't push



219  I  me," she said to Gomi Boy. "My friend, she is in some bad
shit, and I have some ghost-bastard thing on my site

"It's in the software on my Sandbenders, too,' Chia said. "I  saw
it in Venice."

"You saw it?" The fractured images cycling faster.

"I saw something-"

What? You saw what?"

"Someone.  By  the fountain at the end of a street. It might have
been a woman. I was scared. I bailed. I left my Venice open-"

"Show me," Zona said. "In my site I could not see it. My  lizards
could  not  see it eithet, but they grew agitated. The birds flew
lower, but could find nothing. Show me this thing!"

"But Zona-"

"Now!" Zona said. "It is part of this shit you are  in.  It  must
be."



"My  God," Zona said, staring up at St. Mark's. "Who wrote this?"

"It's a city in Italy," Chia said. "It used to be a country. They
invented  banking.  That's St. Mark's. Thete's a module where you
can see what they do at Easter, when the Patriarch brings out all
these bones and things, set into gold, parts of saints."

Zona Rosa crossed herself. "Like Mexico ... this is where the wa-
ter comes up to the bottoms of the doors, and the  streets,  they
are water?"

"I think a lot of this is under water now," Chia said.

"Why is it dark?"

"I  keep  it  that way    Chia looked away, searching the shadows
beneath archways. "That Walled City, Zona, what is that?"

"They say it began as a shared killfile. You know  what  a  kill-
file is?"  "No."  "It is an old expression. A way to avoid incom-
ing messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those  mes-
sages  never  existed.   220  VViPIian. Gibson They never reached
you. This was when the net was new, understand?"

Chia knew that when her mother was born, there had been no net at
all,  or  almost none, but as her teachers in school were fond of
pointing out, that was hard to imagine. "How could that become  a
city? And whys it all squashed in like that?"



"This  is  not  how they did it," Zona said impatiently, "this is
the story. How they did it, I don't know. But that is the  story,
how  they  tell it. They went there to get away from the laws- To
have no laws, like when the net was new."


"That I know," Zona said. "The woman who came to help me build my
country, she told me. There was a place near an airport, Kowloon,
when Hong Kong wasn't China, but there had been a mistake, a long
time  ago,  and that place, very small, many people, it still be-
longed to China. So there was no law there. An outlaw place.  And
more  and  more  people  crowded in; they built it up, higher. No
rules, just building, just  people  living.  Police  wouldn't  go
there.  Drugs  and  whores  and gambling. But people living, too.
Factories, restaurants. A city. No laws."

"Is it still there?"

"No," Zona said, "they tore it down before it all became China

C


221 again. They made a park with concrete. But these people,  the
ones  they  say  made a hole in the net, they found the data. The
history of it. Maps. Pictures. They built it again."

"Why?"

"Don't ask me. Ask them. They are all crazy." Zona  was  scanning
the  Piazza. "This place makes me cold ..."Chia considered bring-
ing the sun up, but then Zona pointed. "Who is that?"

Chia watched her Music Master, or something that looked like him,
stroll toward them from the shadows of the stone arches where the
cafes were, a dark greatcoat flapping to reveal a lining the col-
or of polished lead.

"I've got a software agent that looks like that," Chia said, "but
he isn't supposed to be there unless I  cross  a  bridge.  And  I
couldn't find him, when I was here before."

"This is not the one you saw?"

"No," Chia said.

An aura bristled around Zona, who grew taller as the spikey cloud
of light increased in resolution.  Shifting,  overlapping  planes
like ghosts of broken glass. Iridescent insects whirling there.

As  the figure in the greatcoat drew toward them across the Piaz-
za's patchworked stone, snow resolved behind it;  it  left  foot-
prints.

Zona's  aura  bristled  with  gathering  menace, a thunderhead of
flickering darkness forming above the shattered sheets of  light.
There  was  a sound that reminded Chia of one of those blue-light
bug-zappers popping a particularly juicy one, and then vast wings
cut  the air, so close: Zona's Colombian condors, things from the
data-havens. And gone. Zona spat a stream of Spanish  that  over-
whelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.

Behind the advancing figure of her Music Master, Chia saw the fa-
cades of the great square  vanish  entirely  behind  curtains  of
snow.

Zona's switchblade seemed the size of a chainsaw now, its toothed
spine rippling, alive. The golden dragons from the  plastic  han-
dles  chased their fire-maned double tails around her brown fist,
222 William Gibson through miniature clouds  of  Chinese  embroi-
dery.  dijill take you out," Zona said, as if savoring each word.

Chia saw the world of snow that had swallowed her Venice abruptly
contract,  shrinking,  following  the line of footprints, and the
features of the Music Master became those of Rei Toei, the idoru.

"You already have," said the idoru.



































223 33.     Topology Arleigh was waiting for him by the elevator,
on the fifth and lowest of  the  hotel's  parking  levels.  She'd
changed  back  into  the work clothes he'd first seen her in. De-
spite the patch of micropore on her swollen lip,  the  jeans  and
nylon  bomber  jacket made her look wide-awake and competent, two
things Laney felt he might never be again.

"You look terrible," she said.

The ceiling here was very low, and flocked  with  something  drab
and  wooly,  to  reduce noise. Lines of bioluminescent cable were
bracketed to it, and the unmoving air was heavy with  the  sugary
smell of exhausted gasohol. Spotless ranks of small Japanese cars
glittered like bright wet candy. "Yamazaki seemed to feel it  was
urgent," Laney said.

"If you don't do it now," she said, "we don't know how long it'll

take to get it all up and running again."

"So we'll do it."

"You don't look like you should even be walking."

He started walking, unsteadily, as if by  way  of  demonstration.
"Where's Rez~"

"Blackwell's  taken  him back to his hotel. The sweep team didn't
find anything. This way." She led him along a line of  surgically
clean  grills  and  bumpers. He saw the green van parked with its
front to the wall, its hatch and doors open. It was fenced behind
orange  plastic          barricades,  and surrounded by the black
modules. Shannon, the red-                     225  haired  tech,
was doing something to a red and black cube centered on a folding
plastic table.

"What's that?" Laney asked.

"Espresso," he said, his hand inside the housing,  "but  I  think
the gasket's warped."

"Sit  here, Laney," Arleigh said, indicating the van's front pas-
senger seat. "It reclines."

Laney climbed up into the seat. "Don't try  it,"  he  said.  "You
might not be able to wake me up."

Yamazaki  appeared,  over Arleigh's shoulder, blinking. "You will
access the Lo/Rez data as before, Laney-san, but you will  simul-
taneously  access  the  fan-activity base. Depth of field. Dimen-
sionabty. The fan-activity data providing the degree of personal-
ization you requite. Parallax, yes?"

Arleigh  handed Laney the eyephones. "Have a look," she said. "If
it doesn't work, to hell with  it."  Yamazaki  flinched.  "Either
way, we'll go and find you the hotel doctor, after.'

Laney  settled  his  neck against the seat's headrest and put the
'phones on.

Nothing. He closed his eyes. Heard the 'phones power  up.  Opened
his  eyes  to those same faces of data he'd seen earlier, in Aki-
habara. Characterless. Institutional in their regularity.

"Here comes the fan club," he heard Arleigh say, and  the  barren
faces were suddenly translucent, networked depths of postings and
commentary revealed there in baffling organic complexity.

"Something's-" he started to say, but then he  was  back  in  the
apartment  in Stockholm, with the huge ceramic stoves. But it was
a place this time, not just  a  million  tidily  filed  factoids.
Shadows  of  flames  danced  behind  the narrow mica panes of the
stove's ornate iron door.

Candlelight. The floors were wooden planks, each one as broad  as
Laney's  shoulders,  spread  with  the soft tones of old carpets.
Something directed his point of view into the next room,  past  a
leather  sofa  spread  with more and smaller rugs, and showed him
the black 220 William Gibson window beyond the open drapes, where
snowflakes, very large and ornate, fell with a deliberate gravity
past the frosted panes.

"Getting anything?" Arleigh. Somewhere far away.

He didn't answer, watching as his view reversed. To be maneuvered
down  a  central  hallway, where a tall oval mirror showed no re-
flection as he passed. He thought of CD-RUMs he'd explored in the
orphanage: haunted castles, monstrously infested spacecraft aban-
doned in orbit. . , . Click here. Click there. And  somehow  he'd
always  felt  that  he  never found the central marvel, the thing
that would have made  the  hunt  worthwhile.  Because  it  wasn't
there, he'd finally decided; it never quite was, and so he'd lost
interest in those games.

But the  central  marvel  here-click  on  bedroom-was  Rei  Toei.
Propped  on white pillows at the head of a sea of white, her head
and gowned shoulders showing above eyelet lace and  the  glow  of
fine cottons.

"You  were  our guest tonight," she said. "I wasn't able to speak
with you. I am sorry. It ended badly, and you were injured."

He looked at her, waiting for the mountain valleys and the bells,
but  she  only  looked back, nothing came, and he remembered what
Yamazaki had said about bandwidth.

A stab of pain in his side. "How do you  know?  That  I  was  in-
jured?"

"The  preliminary Lo/Rez security report. Technician Paul Shannon
states that you appeared to have been injured."

"Why are you here?" ("Laney," he  heard  Arleigh  say,  "are  you
okay?")

"I found it," the idoru said. "Isn't it wonderful? But he has not
been here since the renovations were completed. So, realty,  he's
never  been  here.  But  you've  been here before, haven't you? I
think that's how I found it." She smiled. She was very  beautiful
here,  floating  in this whiteness. He hadn't been able to really
look at her in the Western World.

"I accessed it earlier," he said, "but it wasn't like  this."   a
-227  "But then it. . . rounded out, didn't it? It became so much
better. Because one of the artisans who  reassembled  the  stoves
had  made a record of it all, when it was done. Just for herself,
for her friends, but you see what it's done. It was in  the  data
from the fan club." She gazed in delight at a single taper, band-
ed horizontally in cream and indigo, that burned in a candlestick
of  burnished  brass.  Beside it on the bedside table were a book
and an orange. "I feel very close to him, here."

"I'd feel closer to him if you'd put me back, outside."

"In the street? It's snowing. And I'm not certain the  street  is
there."

"In the general data-construct, Please. So I can do my job

"Oh,"  she  said,  and smiled at him, and he was staring into the
tangled depths of the data-faces.

"Laney?" Arleigh said, touching his shoulder. "Who are you  talk-
ing to?"

"The idoru," Laney said.

"In nodal manifestation?" Yamazaki.

"No.  She  was  there in the data, I don't know how. She was in a
model of his place in Stockholm. Said she got there  because  I'd
cruised it before. Then I asked her to put me back out here.

"Out where?" Arleigh asked.

"Where  I  can  see,"  Laney  said, staring down into intricately
overgrown canyons, dense with branchings that reminded him of Ar-
leigh's  Realtree 7.2, but organic somehow, every segment thickly
patched with commentary. "Yamazaki was right. The fan stuff seems
to do it."



He heard Gerrard Delouvrier, back in the TIDAL labs, urge him not
to focus. What you 4 it is opposite of the concentration, but  we
will  learn  to  direct it.  Drift. Down through deltas of former
girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood,  personal
sightings of Rez or Lo together 228 William Gibson with whichever
woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the
importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This be-
ing for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspec-
tive  in  which  these two loomed. Human in every detail but then
not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate,  probably,
but  always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He
could see celebrity here, not like Kathy's idea of a primal  sub-
stance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of
the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated  here  by
the

        band's  fans  was  much  greater than everything the band
themselves had ever generated. And their actual  art,  the  music
and the videos,

        was the merest fragment of that.

"But this is my favorite," Laney heard the idoru say, and then he
was watching Rez mount a low stage in  a  crowded  club  of  some
kind,  everything  psychedelic Korean pinks, hypersaturated tints
like cartoon versions of the flesh of  tropical  melons.  "It  is
what  we feel." Rez raised a microphone and began to speak of new
modes of being, of something he called "the alchemical marriage."

And  somewhere  Arleigh's  hand  was on his arm, her voice tense.
"Laney? Sorry. We need you back here now. Mr. Kuwayama is  here."
34.     Casino








Chia  looked  out between the dusty slats, to the street where it
was raining. The idoru had done that.  Chia  had  never  made  it
rain, in Venice, but she didn't mind the way it looked. It seemed
to fit. It was like Seattle.

The idoru said this apartment was called a casino. Chia had  seen
casinos  on television and they hadn't looked anything like this.
This was a few small rooms with flaking plaster  walls,  and  big
old-fashioned furniture with gold lion-feet. Everything worked up
with fractals so you could almost smell it. It  would've  smelled
dusty,  she  thought,  and also like perfume. Chia hadn't been to
many of these modules, the insides of her  Venice,  because  they
were all sort of creepy. They didn't give her the feeling she got
in the streets.

Zona's head, on the lion-footed table, made that  bug-zap  sound.
She'd reduced herself to that, Zona: this little blue neon minia-
ture of her Aztec skull, about the size of a small apple. Because
Chia  had  told  her to shut up and put the switchblade away. And
that had pissed her off, and maybe hurt her  feelings,  but  Chia
hadn't  known  what  else to do. Chia had wanted to hear what the
idoru had had to say, and Zona's I'm-dangerous act totally got in
the way. And that was all it was, just acting out, because people
couldn't really hurt each other when they were ported. Not physi-
cally,  anyway.  And  that  had always been a problem, with Zona.
That whole swelling-up         thunderhead  macho  thing.  Kelsey
and  the others would make fun of      ~         it, hut Zona was
fierce  enough,  verbally,  that  they'd  only  do   it   behind
        231  her  back. Chia had never known what to make ofiq it
was like Zona's personality wasn't together, around  acting  like
that.

Now  Zona  wasn't talking, just making the bug-zap sound every so
often, to remind Chia she was still there and still pissed off.

The idoru was talking, though,  telling  Chia  the  old  Venetian
meaning  of  the  word  casino, not some giant sort of malt place
where people went to gamble and watch shows, but  something  that
sounded  more like what Masahiko had said about love hotels. Like
people had houses where they lived, but these casinos, these  se-
cret  little apartments, hidden around town, were where they went
to be with other people. But they  hadn't  been  too  comfortable
there,  not  to  judge  by  this  one, even though the idoru kept
adding more and more candles. The idoru said she loved candles.

The idoru had the Music Master's haircut now; it  made  her  look
like a girl pretending to be a boy. She seemed to like his great-
coat, too, because she kept turning on her heel-his heel-to twirl
the hem out. "I've seen so many new places," she said, smiling at
Chia, "so many different people and things"

-So have I, but .

"He told me it would be this way, but I  had  no  idea,  really."
Twirl.  "Having  seen all this, I'm so much more ... Does it feel
like that for you, when you travel?"

The death's-head emitted a burst of blue light and a sound like a
short,  sharp  fart.  "Zona!" Chia hissed. Then all in a rush, to
the idoru, "I haven't traveled much and so far I  don't  think  I
like  it,  but we just came here to see what you were, because we
didn't know, be-cause you're in my software, and maybe in  Zona's
site,  too, and that bothers her because it's supposed to be pri-
vate."

"The country with the beautiful sky?"

"Yeah," Chia said. "You aren't really supposed to be able  to  go
there unless she asks you."

"I  didn't  know.  I'm sorry." The idoru looked sad. "I thought I
could go anywhere-except where you come from."

"Seattle?"  232 William Gibson "The Walled City?" It had  to  be,
because  that was where she and Zona were coming from now. 'We're
only ported through. Zona's in Mexico City and I'm in this hotel,
okay?  And  we  really  better  go  back now, 'cause I don't know
what's happening-"

The blue skull expanded and went Zonaform, grim and sullen,  "Fi-
nally  you  say  something worthwhile. Why do you speak with this
thing? She is nothing, only a mote expensive version of this  toy
of yours she's stolen and taken over. Now that I have seen her, I
can only think that Rez is crazy, pathetically deluded

"But he isn't crazy," the idoru said. "It is what we feel togeth-
er.  He has told me that we will not be understood, not at first,
and there will be resistance, hostility. But we mean no harm, and
he believes that in the end only good can come from our union."

"You  synthetic  bitch,"  Zona said. "You think we don't see what
you're doing? You aren't real! You aren't as real as this  imita-
tion  of  a drowned city! You're a made-up thing, and you want to
suck what's real out of him!" Chia saw the thunderhead, the aura,
starting  to build. "This girl crossed the ocean to find you out,
and now her uS is in danger, and she is too stupid  to  see  that
you are the cause!"

The idoru looked at Chia. "Your life?"

Chia  had  to  swallow.  "Maybe,"  she  said.  "I don't know. I'm
scared."

And the idoru was gone, draining from Chia's Music Master like  a
color  that  had  no  name. He stood there in the light of twenty
candles, his expression unreadable. "I'm sorry,"  he  said,  "but
what exactly was it we were discussing?"

"We  weren't," said Chia, then her goggles were lifted away, tak-
ing the Music Master and the room in Venice and Zona  with  them,
and  two  of  the  fingers  of the hand that held the goggles was
ringed with gold, each ring linked  to  a  gold  watch's  massive
bracelet with its own fine length of chain. Pale eyes looked into
hers.


233 Eddie smiled.  Chia drew her breath in to scream, and another
hand, not Eddie's, but large and white, smelling of metallic per-
fume, covered her mouth and nose. And a  hand  on  her  shoulder,
pressing down, as Eddie stepped back, letting the goggles fall to
the white carpet.

Holding her gaze, Eddie raised one finger to  his  lips,  smiled,
and  said "Shhhh." Then stepped aside, turning away, so that Chia
saw Masahiko sitting there on the floor, the black cups over  his
eyes, his fingers moving in their tip-sets.

Eddie  took  something black from his pocket and reached Masahiko
in two silent, exaggerated steps. He did something to  the  black
thing and bent down with it. She saw it touch Masahiko's neck.

Masahiko's muscles all seemed to jerk at once, his legs straight-
ening, throwing him sideways, where he lay on the  white  carpet,
twitching,  his  mouth  open. One of the black cups had come off.
The other still covered his right eye.

Eddie turned back, looking at her.

"Where is it?" he said.






















234 William Gibson

j Shannon offered Laney a tall foam cup with half an inch of very
hot,  very black coffee in it. Beyond him, past the orange barri-
cades, was a long white Land-Rover with integral  crash-bars  and
green-tinted windows. Kuwayama waited there, in a dark gray suit,
his rimless glasses glinting in the greenish light from the cable
overhead. A black-suited driver stood beside him.

"What's  he want?" Laney asked Arleigh, tasting Shannon's espres-
so. It left grit on his tongue.

"We don't know," said Arleigh, "But apparently Rez told him where
to find us."


"That's what he said."

Yamazaki  appeared  at Laney's elbow. His glasses had either been
repaired or replaced, but two of the pins holding the  sleeve  of
his  green  jacket  had  come undone. "Mr. Kuwayama is Rei Toei's
creator, in a sense. He is the founder and chief executive  offi-
cer  of Famous Aspect, her corporate entity. He was the initiator
of her project. He asks to speak with you."

"I thought it was so urgent that I access the combined  data  for
you."

"It  is,  yes," said Yamazaki, "but I think you should speak with
Kuwayama now, please."

Laney followed him through the black modules and past the  barri-
cades, and watched as the two exchanged bows. "This is Mr. Cohn


235  35.     The  Testhed of Futurity Laney," Yamazaki said, "our
special researcher." Then, to Laney: "Michio Kuwayama, Chief  Ex-
ecutive Officer of Famous Aspect."

No  one  would have guessed that Kuwayama had so recently been up
there in the dark at the Western World,  the  crowd  heaving  and
screaming  around him. How had he gotten out, Laney wondered, and
wouldn't the idoru have been lit up like a Christmas tree?  Blood
had  seeped  down  into  Laney's  shoe; it was sticky between his
toes. How much had the combined weight of all the  human  nervous
tissue  on the planet increased since he and Arleigh had left the
bubble-gum bar with Blackwell? He felt like  he'd  acquired  more
himself,  all of it uncomfortable. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't
have a card."

"It doesn't matter," Kuwayama said, in his precise, oddly accent-
ed  English.  He  shook  Laney's  hand. "I know that you are very
busy. We appreciate your taking the time to meet  with  us."  The
plural caused Laney to glance at the driver, who wore the kind of
shoes that Rydell had worn at the Chateau, flexible-looking black
lace-ups  with  cleated,  rubbery  soles,  but  it didn't seem as
though the driver was the other half of that "we." "Now," Kuwaya-
ma  said  to  Yamazaki,  "if you will excuse us    Yamazaki bowed
quickly and walked back toward the van, where Arleigh, pretending
to  be  doing something to the espresso machine, was watching out
of the corner of her eye. The driver opened the Land-Rover's rear
door  for Laney, who got in. Kuwayama got in from the other side.
When the door closed behind him, they were alone.

Something that looked like a  large  silver  thermos  bottle  was
mounted between the two seats, in a rack with padded clamps.

"Yamazaki  tells  us  that you had band-width difficulties during
the dinner," Kuwayama said.

"That's true," Laney said.

"We have adjusted the band-width ,.."And the idoru  appeared  be-
tween  them, smiling. Laney saw that the illusion even provided a
seat for her, melding the two buckets in which  he  and  Kuwayama
sat into a third.



236  William  Gibson  a  "Did you find what you were looking for,
when you left me in Stockholm, Mr, Laney?"

He looked into her eyes. What sort of computing power did it take
to create something like this, something that looked back at you?
He remembered phrases from Kuwayama's conversation with Rez:  de-
siring machines, aggregates of subjective desire, an architecture
of articulated longing...."I started to," he said.

"And what was it that you saw, that made you unable  to  look  at
me, during our dinner?"

"Snow,"  Laney  said,  and  was startled to feel himself begin to
blush. "Mountains    But I think  it  was  only  a  video  you've
made."

"We  don't 'make' Rei's videos," Kuwayama said, "not in the usual
sense, They emerge directly from her ongoing  experience  of  the
world. They are her dreams, if you will."

"You  dream as well, don't you, Mr. Laney?" the idoru said. "That
is your talent. Yamazaki says it is  like  seeing  faces  in  the
clouds,  except that the faces are really there. I cannot see the
faces in clouds, but Kuwayama-san tells me that one day  I  will.
It is a matter of plectics.

Yamazaki  says?  "I  don't understand it," Laney said. "It's just
something I can do."

"An extraordinary talent," Kuwayama said. "We are most fortunate.
And  we  are fortunate as well in Mr. Yamazaki, who, though hired
by Mr. Blackwell, has an open mind."

"Mr. Blackwell is not too pleased about Rez and.,."  Nodding  to-
ward  her.  "Mr. Blackwell might be unhappy that I'm talking with
you."

"Blackwell loves Rez in his own way," she said.  "It  is  concern
that  he feels. But he does not understand that our union has al-
ready taken place. Our 'marriage' will be  gradual,  ongoing.  We
wish  simply  to grow together. When Blackwell and the others can
see that our union is best for both of us, all will be well.  And
you can do that for us, Mr. Laney."

0 2 237 "I can?"


But  you're  just information yourself, Laney thought, looking at
her. Lots of it, running through God knows how many machines. But
the  dark  eyes looked back at him, filled with something for all
the world like hope. "Will you do it, Mr. Laney?  Will  you  help
us?"

"Look,"  Laney  said,  "I  only work here. I'll do it if Yamazaki
tells me to. If he takes the responsibility. But I  want  you  to
tell me something, okay?"

"What is it that you wish to know?" asked Kuwayama.

"What  is  all  this  about?"  The  question surprised Laney, who
hadn't quite known what it was he was about to ask.

Kuwayama's mild eyes regarded him through the rimless lenses. "It
is about fliturity, Mr. Lane>'."

"Futurity?"

"Do  you  know  that  our  word  for  'nature' is of quite recent
coinage? It is scarcely a hundred years old. We have never devel-
oped a sinister view of technology, Mr. Laney. It is an aspect of
the natural, of oneness. Through our  efforts,  oneness  perfects
itself"  Kuwayama smiled. "And popular culture," he said, "is the
testbed of our futurity."



Arleigh made a better espresso than Shannon. Laney, squatting  in
the  back  of  the  green  van, on popping shreds of bubble-pack,
watched Yamazaki over the rim of a foam cup with a  fresh  double
shot. "What do you think you're doing, Yamazaki? You want us both
to wind up wearing smaller shoes, or  what?  Blackwell  likes  to
nail  people's  hands to tables, and you're making deals with the
idoru and her 238 William Gibson boss?" Laney had  insisted  that
they  climb  in back here for privacy. Yamazaki squatted opposite
him, blinking.  "I am not the one making deals,"  Yamazaki  said.
"Rez  and Rei Toei are in almost constant contact now, and recent
improvements allow her new degrees of freedom. Rez let  her  into
the data, all that you first tried to access. He did this without
informing Blackwell." He shrugged. "Now she accesses the fan data
as well. And what they propose may well allow us to bring this to
a conclusion. Blackwell is more than ever convinced there is some
conspiracy. The attack in the nightclub.

"Which was about?"

"1 do not know. An attempted kidnapping? They wished to harm Rez?
To abduct the idoru's peripheral? It  was  handled  with  amazing
clumsiness,  but Blackwell says that is the earmark of the Kombi-
nat. . . . Is that the word, 'earmark'?"

"I don't know," Laney said.  "Hallmark'?"

"You don't think Blackwell's going to cut our toes off, if we  do
this?"

"No.  We  are  employed by a Lo/Rez shell corporation-" "Paragon-
Asia?"

"--but Blackwell is employed by the Lo/Rez  Partnership.  If  Rez
tells us to do something, we must do it,"

"Even if Blackwell thinks it endangers Rez's security?"

Yamazaki shrugged. Past his shoulder, through the van's rear win-
dow, Lane>' could see Shannon trundling the  gray  module  they'd
unloaded from the rear of Kuwayama's Land-Rover. It was twice the
size of the black ones that Arleigh used.

He  watched  Shannon  push  it  past   the   orange   barricades.
        .       239 36.     Maryalice "Not yelling, please," said
the one who held her, and then he took his  hand  away  from  her
mouth.

"Where is it?" Eddie's pale eyes.

"There,"  Chia  said,  pointing. She could see the ragged edge of
blue and yellow plastic sticking up out of her open bag. Then she
saw  that  Maryalice  was asleep on the pink bed, cLirled up with
her high-heeled shoes still on, clutching a pillow to  her  face.
The  top  of  the little fridge was covered with empty, miniature
bottles.

Eddie took a black-and-gold pen from his coat pocket and went

to the bag. He bent over it and used his pen as a  probe,  moving
the

plastic aside so he could see. "It's here," he said.

"Is there?" The other hand was still holding Chia's shoulder

down, where she sat on the carpet.

"This is it," Eddie said.


"Jesus, Yevgeni . .

The man in the tan suit straightened up, looked at Maryalice,

bent  to  pull  the pillow away from her face. "How is your woman
        sleeping    on    bed    in    this    room,     Eddie?"
                241  Eddie  saw that it was Maryalice. "Fuck," he
said.


Eddie looked from Maryalice to the man-he  must  be  Russian-  to
Chia.  "What  the flick is this bitch doing here?" Like it had to
be Chia's fault.


"No,' said the Russian, "we know somebody at cab company. Is  too
much incident."

"We've  got it, okay?" Eddie said. 'Why do you want to complicate
things?"

The Russian rubbed his cheek, as though the birthmark might  come
off  on  his hand. "Please consider," he said. "We are giving you
isotope. You want to know is isotope, you can test. You are  giv-
ing  us this." He poked the sharp toe of his cowboy boot into the
side of Chia's bag. "How are we sure?"

"Yevgeni," Eddie said, very calmly, "you  must  know  that  deals
like this require a certain basis of trust.'

The  Russian considered that. "No," he said, "basis not good. Our
people trace this girl to big rocker band. What  is  she  working
for,  Eddie? Tonight we send people to talk to them, they fall on
us like fucking wolfs. One man I am still losing."

"I don't work for Lo/Rez!" Chia said.  "I'm  just  in  the  club!
Maryalice  put  that  thing  in  my  bag when I was asleep on the
plane!"

Masahiko groaned, sighed, and seemed  to  go  back  under.  Eddie
still  had the stungun in his hand. "You ready for another jolt?"
he asked Masahiko, super-tense and angry.

"Eddie,' Maryalice said from the bed, "you  ungrateful  piece  of
shit     Sitting  up  on  the  edge of the bed with her cigarette
lighter held in both hands, pointing it straight at Eddie.

Eddie stiffened. You could see something run through him,  freez-
ing him there.


242 William Gibson J "Some basis," said the Russian.

"Jesus, Maryalice," Eddie said. "Whered you get that? You got any
idea how illegal that is, here?'

"Off a Russian boy," she said. "Exit-holes the size of grapefruit
Maryalice  didn't  sound  drunk, exactly, but something about the
look in her reddened eyes told Chia she was. Some very scary kind
of  drunk.  "You think you can just use people up, Eddie? Use 'em
up and throw 'em away?" She used the toe of one shoe to  get  the
other off, then used her toe to get the first shoe off. She stood
up in her stocking feet, swaying just a little bit, but the  gun-
shaped  lighter  stayed  straight out from her shoulders, the way
cops did it on television.

Eddie still had the stungun in his hand.  "Make  him  throw  that
black thing away, Maryalice!" Chia urged.

"Drop  it," Maryalice said, and it seemed to give her pleasure to
say it, something she'd been hearing people say on shows all  her
life, and now she was getting to say it herself, and mean it. Ed-
die dropped it. "Now kick it away.'

That's the other half of the line, Chia thought.

The stungun wound up a few feet from Chia's knee, beside her gog-
gles,  which  were upside down on the carpet, still cabled to her
Sandbenders. She could see the twin flat rectangles on the opaque
lens-faces,  simple  video  units; if Zona went to Chia's systems
software and activated those, now, she'd get a bug's-eye view  of
Mary-alice's  stocking  feet, Eddie's shoes, the Russian's cowboy
boots, and maybe the side of Masahiko's head.

"Ungrateful," Maryalice said. "Ungrateful shit. Get in that bath-
room."  She  came around so the lighter was pointing at Eddie and
the Russian, but with the open bathroom door behind them.

"I know you're upset-"

"Shit. Shit goes in the toilet, Eddie Get in the bathroom."

Eddie took a step backward, his palms  up  in  what  he  probably
thought  looked  like an appeal to reasonableness and understand-
ing.  The Russian took a  step  back  too.         0            9
        243  "Seven  flicking years," Maryalice said. "Seven. You
weren't shit when I met you.  God.  You  and  that  uppity-mobile
talk. You make me sick. Who paid the fucking rent? Who bought the
meals? Who bought you your fucking clothes,  you  vain  piece  of
shit?  You  and  your  uppity-mobile and your image and you gotta
have a smaller fucking  phone  than  the  next  guy  because  I'm
telling  you,  honey, you sure as fuck don't have a bigger dick!"
Maryalice's hands were shaking now, but  really  just  enough  to
make the lighter look even more dangerous.

"Maryalice,"  Eddie said, "you know I know everything you've done
for me, everything you've contributed to my  career.  It  doesn't
leave  my mind for a minute, baby, believe me, it never does, and
all of this is a misunderstanding, baby, just a  rough  patch  on
the  highway  of  life,  and  if you will only just put down that
flicking gun and have a nice drink like a civilized person-"

"Shut the fuck up!" Maryalice screamed, at the top of her  lungs,
the words all run together.

Eddie's mouth snapped shut like a puppet's.

"Seven flicking years," Maryalice said, making it sound like some
children's charm, "seven fucking years and two of 'em  here,  Ed-
die,  two of 'em here, and flying back and fucking forth for you,
Eddie, and coming back. And  it's  always  light,  here     Tears
came,  streaking  Maryalice's makeup. "Everywhere. Couldn't sleep
for all the light, like a fog over the city. . .  .  Get  in  the
bathroom." Maryalice taking a step forward, Eddie and the Russian
taking one back.

Chia reached over and picked up the stungun, she wasn't sure why.
It  had  a  pair  of blunt chrome fangs on one end, a red, ridged
stud on one edge. She was surprised at how little it weighed. She
remembered  the  ones  the boys at her school had made from those
disposable flash-cameras.



244 William Gibson Eddie was half back through the  doorway  now,
the Russian behind him, actually in the bathroom, and Chia didn't
like that because she couldn't see the Russian's hands. She heard
the  ambient  birdsong  start as the bathroom sensed the Russian,
"And you put me there, Eddie. That Shinjuku.  You  put  me  where
that light could get me, and I could never get away."

And then Maryalice pulled the trigger.

Eddie  screamed,  a weird shrill sound bouncing off the black and
white tiles. That must've covered the click of the lighter, which
hadn't even produced a flame.

Maryalice didn't panic.

She held her aim and calmly pulled the trigger again.

She got a light, that time, but Eddie, with a howl of rage, swat-
ted the lighter aside,  grabbed  Maryalice  by  the  throat,  and
started  pounding her in the face with his fist, the howl resolv-
ing into "Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!" in sync with each blow.

And that was when Chia, without really thinking about it, came up
from  where  she'd  been sitting for so long that, she found, her
legs were asleep, and didn't work, so that she had  to  turn  her
lunge  into  a  roll,  and  roll  again, before she could jam the
chrome tips of the stun-gun against Eddie's ankle  and  push  the
red stud.

She  wasn't  sure it would work on an ankle, or through his sock.
But it did. Maybe because Eddie wore those really thin socks.

But it got Maryalice, too, so that they seemed to jerk  together,
toppling into each other's arms.

And  the  dark  blur  that  flew past Chia then was Masahiko, who
pulled the door shut on the Russian, grabbed the knob  with  both
hands and jumped up, jamming one paper-slippered foot against the
wall, the other against the door, and hung there. "Run," he said,
his arms and legs straining. Then his hands slipped off the round
chrome knob and he landed on his ass.

Chia saw the knob start to turn.

She put the fangs of the stungun against the doorknob and  pushed
the  stud.  And  kept pushing it.  37.     Work E~cperience Laney
sat in the van's front passenger seat again, the 'phones  on  his
lap,  waiting  for  Arleigh to connect Kuwayama's gray module, He
looked through the windshield at  the  concrete  wall.  His  side
didn't  hurt quite as much now, but the meeting with Kuwayama and
the idoru, and then his huddle in the van with Yamazaki, had left
him  more confused than ever. If Rez and Rei Toei were making de-
cisions in tandem, and if Yamazaki had decided to go  along  with
them,  where  did  that leave him? He couldn't see that Blackwell
was going to wake up to find some  innate  wonderfulness  in  the
idea  of Rez and Rei together. As far as Blackwell was concerned,
Rez was still just trying to marry a software agent-whatever that
might turn out to mean.

But  Laney  knew now that the idoru was more complex, more power-
ful, than any Hollywood  synthespian.  Particularly  if  Kuwayama
were  telling  the truth about the videos being her "dreams." All
he knew about artificial intelligence came from work he'd done on
a  Slitscan episode docLimenting the unhappy personal life of one
of the field's leading researchers, but he knew that true Al  was
assumed never to have been achieved, and that current attempts to
achieve it were supposed to be in directions quite  opposite  the
creation of software that was good at acting like beautiful young
women.

If there were going to be genuine Al, the argument ran, it was

most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with  pretend-
ing to

be  human.  Laney  remembered  screening  a  lecture in which the
Slitscan episode's subject had suggested that Al might be created
accidentally,  and  that  people might not initially recognize it
for what it was.

Arleigh opened the door on the driver's side and  got  in.  Sorry
this is taking so long," she said.

"You weren't expecting it," Laney said.

"It  isn't the software, it's an optical valve. A cable-tip. They
use a different gauge, one the French use." She curled her  hands
around  the  top  of  the  wheel and rested her chin on them. "So
we're dealing with these huge volumes of information, no problem,
but we don't have the right cable to pour it through."

"Can you fix it?"

"Shannon's  got  one in his room, Probably on a porno outfit, but
he won't admit it." She looked at him sideways. "Shannon's got  a
friend  on  the  security  team.  His  friend says that Blackwell
'questioned' one of the men who tried to grab Rez tonight."

"That's who they were after? Rez?"

"Seems like it. They're Kombinat, and they claim Rez has hijacked
something of theirs."

"Hijacked what?"

"He didn't know." She closed her eyes.

"What  do  you  think  happened  to  him, the one Blackwell ques-
tioned?"

"I don't know," She opened her eyes, straightened up. "But  some-
how I don't think we'll find out."

"Can he do that? Torture people? Kill them?"

She  looked  at Laney. "Well," she said, finally, "he does have a
certain advantage, making us think he might. It's an  established
fact that he did that in his previous line of work. You know what
scares me most about Blackwell?"


"Sometimes I find myself getting used to him."  248 William  Gib-
son  Shannon  rapped  on the door beside her. Held up a length of
cable.

"Ready when you are," she said to Laney,  opening  the  door  and
sliding from behind the wheel.

Laney  looked  through the tinted windshield at the concrete wall
and remembered policing the steps outside the Municipal Court  in
Gainesville with Shaquille and Kenny, two others from the orphan-
age. Shaquille had gone  on  to  the  drug-testing  program  with
Laney,  but  Kenny had been transferred to another facility, near
Denver. Laney had no idea what had become of either of them,  but
it  had  been  Shaquille who'd pointed out to Laney that when the
injection had the real stuff in it,  your  mouth  filled  with  a
taste  like  corroded  metal,  aluminum  or something. Pl-ceeb-o,
Shaquille had said, don't taste. And it was true. You could  tell
right away.

The  three  of  them  had  had Work Experience there, five or six
times, picking up the offerings people left before their  day  in
court. These were considered to be a health hazard, and were usu-
ally carefully hidden, and you often found them by the smell,  or
the  buzzing  of  flies. Parts of chickens, usually, tied up with
colored yatn. What Shaquille said was the head of a  goat,  once.
Shaquille  said  the people who left these things were drug deal-
ers, and they did it because it was their religion. Laney and the
others  wore  pale green latex gloves with orange Kevlar thimbles
on the tips that gave you heat rash. They put the offerings in  a
white  snap-top bucket with peeling Biohazard stickers. Shaquille
had claimed to know the names of some of the  gods  these  things
were  offered  up  to,  but  Laney  hadnt  been fooled. The names
Shaquille made up, like O'Gunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously  just
that, and even Shaquille, dropping a white ball of chicken feath-
ers into the bucket, had said an extra lawyer or two was probably
a  better  investment.  'But they do it while they waitin'. Hedge
they bet.' Laney had actually preferred this to Work  Experiences
at  fast-food  franchises,  even  though  it meant they got body-
searched for drugs when they got back.

0 2 249

L He'd told Yamazaki and  Blackwell  about  knowing  that  Alison
Shires  was  going  to  try  to commit suicide, and now they must
think he could see the future. But  he  knew  he  couldn't.  That
would  be  like  those  chicken  parts the dealers hid around the
courthouse steps changing what was going to  happen.  What  would
happen  in  the  future came out of what was happening now. Laney
knew he couldn't predict it, and something about  the  experience
of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal
points seemed to form when something might be  about  to  change.
Then  he  saw  a place where change was most likely, if something
triggered it. Maybe something as small as  Alison  Shires  buying
the  blades for a box-cutter. But if an earthquake had come, that
night, and pitched her apartment down into Fountain Avenue. . . .
Or  if  she'd  lost  the  pack of blades, . . . But if she'd used
credit to buy that Wednesday Night Special, which she couldn't do
because  it was illegal, and required cash, then it would've been
obvious to anybody what she might be on the verge of doing.

Arleigh opened the passenger door. "You okay?"

"Sure," Laney said, picking up the eyephones.

"Sure?"

"Let's do it." He looked at the 'phones.

"It's up to you." She touched his arm, "We'll get you  a  doctor,
after, okay?"

"Thanks,"  Laney said, and put the 'phones on, the taste flooding
his mouth- The Lo/Rez data, translucent and intricately interpen-
etrated by

the  archives  of the band's fan-base, was crawling with new tex-
tures, maps  that  resolved,  when  he  focused  on  them,  into-
Shaquille, in his federal-issue sweats, showing Laney the goat's

head. It had been skinned, and nails had been driven into it, and
Shaquille had pried open the jaw to show where the missing tongue
had  been  replaced with a blood-soaked piece of brown paper with
writing on  it,  That  would  be  the  name  of  the  prosecutor,
Shaquille had explained.


250 William Gibson Laney shut his eyes, but the image remained.

He  opened  them on the idoru, her features rimmed with flit. She
was looking at him. She wore some kind of embroidered,  fur-lined
hat,  with  earfiaps,  and snow was swirling around her, but then
she flattened, dwindling into  the  texture-maps  that  ran  down
through  the  reef  of data, and he let himself go, go with that,
and he felt himself pass through the core of it, the very center,
and out the other side.

"Wait-" he said, and there seemed to be a lag before he heard his
own voice.

"Perspective," the idoru said. "Yamazaki's  parallax."  Something
seemed  to turn him around, so that he looked directly at the da-
ta, but from some new angle, and from a great distance.  And  all
around it, there was . . . nothing at all.

But  through  the data, like some infinitely more complex version
of Arleigh's Realtree, ran two vaguely  parallel  armatures.  Rez
and  the  idoru. They were sculpted in duration, Rez's beginning,
at the far end of it all, as  something  very  minor,  the  first
hints  of his career. And growing, as it progressed, to something
braided, multistranded. . . . But then it began  to  get  smaller
again,  Laney saw, the strands loosening. . . . And that would be
the point, he thought, where the singer began to become the thing
that  Kathy  hated,  the one who took up celebrity space just be-
cause he was a celebrity, because he was of a  certain  order  of
magnitude .

The  idoru's  data  began  somewhere  after that, and it began as
something smoothly formed, deliberate,  but  lacking  complexity.
But  at the points where it had swerved closest to Rez's data, he
saw that it had begun to acquire a sort of complexity. Or random-
ness, he thought. The human thing. That's how she learns.

And  both  these armatures, these sculptures in time, were nodal,
and grew more so toward the point, the present, where they inter-
twined , .

He  stood beside the idoru on the beach he'd seen recorded on the
binoculars in the bedroom of the guesrhouse  in  Ireland.  Brown-
ish-       g


251  green sea flecked with whitecaps, stiff wind catching at the
earfiaps of her hat. He couldn't feel that  wind,  but  he  could
hear  it,  so  loud  now that he had trouble hearing her over it.
"Can you see them?" she shouted.

"See what?"

"The faces in the clouds! The nodal points! I  can  see  nothing!
You must indicate them to me!"

And  she  was gone, the sea with her, Laney staring into the data
again, where the digitized histories of Rez and Rei Toei mingled,
on  the verge of something else. If he had tried, in Los Angeles,
would the box-cutter blade have emerged from Alison Shires' nodal
point?

He tried.

He  was  looking  out across a fuzzy, indistinct white plain. Not
snow. To where a pair of  vast  and  very  ornate  brown-on-brown
Western boots swung past against a cliff-like backdrop of violent
pink. Then the image was gone, replaced by the rotating  form  of
a. three-dimensional object, though Laney had no idea what it was
supposed to be. With no clues as to scale, it looked vaguely like
a Los Angeles bus with the wheels removed.

"Suite 17," the idoru said. "Hotel Di."

"Die?" Bus vanished, apparently taking boots with it.

"What is a 'love hotel'?"


"Love. Hotel."

"Where people go to make love-I think.

"What  is  'Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module
C-slash-7A'?"

"I don't know," Laney said.

"But you have just shown it to me! It is our union, out intersec-
tion, that from which the rest must unfold!"

"Wait," Laney said, "wait, you've got another one here; they sort
of overlap-" The trying made his side hurt, but there were  hills
in  the  distance,  twisted  trees,  the low roofline of a wooden
house- But the idoru was gone, and the house,  its  fabric  eaten
from  252 William Gibson within, wu shimmering, folding. And then
a glimpse of something towering, mismatched windows and a  twist-
ing, moire sky.

Then  Arleigh pulled the 'phones off. "Stop screaming," she said.
Yamazaki was beside her. "Stop it, Laney."

He took a long, shuddering breath, braced his palms  against  the
padded  cowling  of  the  dash,  and closed his eyes. He felt Ar-
leigh's hand against his neck.


"Go where?"

"Suite 17   We'll be late, for the wedding . . 38.      Star








When the stungun quit making that zapping sound, Chia dropped it.
The  doorknob  wasn't turning. No sound from the bathroom but the
faint recorded cries  of  tropical  birds.  She  whipped  around.
Masahiko  was  trying to get his computer into the plaid carrier-
bag. She dived for her Sandbenders, grabbed it up, still trailing
her goggles, and turned to the pink bed. Her bag was beside it on
the floor, with the blue and yellow SeaTac plastic  showing.  She
pulled that out, the thing still in it, and tossed it on the bed.
She bent to shove her Sandbenders into her bag, but glanced  back
at the bathroom door when she thought she heard something.

The knob was turning again.

The  Russian opened the door. When he let go of the knob, she saw
that his hand was inside something that looked like a Day-Gb pink
hand-puppet.  One  of the sex toys from the black cabinet. He was
using it as insulation. He peeled it off his fingers  and  tossed
it  back  over  his shoulder. The bird sounds faded as he stepped
out.

Masahiko, who'd been trying to get one of his feet  into  one  of
his

black shoes, was looking at the Russian too. He still had a paper
slipper on the other foot.

"You are going?" the Russian said.

"It's on the bed," Chia said. "We didn't have anything to do

with it."

The Russian  noticed  the  stungun  on  the  carpet,  beside  the
        pointed  toe  of his boot. He raised the boot and brought
his heel                         255 down. Chia heard the plastic
case  crack. "Artemi, my friend of Novokuznetskaya, is doing him-
self great indignity with this." He prodded the fragments of  the
stungun  with  his  toe.  "Is  wearing  very tight jeans, Artemi,
leather, is fashion. Putting in front pocket, trigger is pressing
accident.  Artemi  is  shocking  his manhood." The Russian showed
Chia his large, uneven teeth. "Still we are laughing, yes?"

"Please," Chia said. "We just want to go."

The Russian stepped past Eddie and Maryalice, who lay tangled  on
the  carpet.  "You  are accident like Artemi to his manhood, yes?
You are only happening to this owner of fine nightclub." He indi-
cated  the  unconscious Eddie. "Who is smuggler and other things,
very complicated, but you, you are only accident?"

"That's right," Chia said.

"You are of LoIRez." It sounded like Lor-ess. He  stepped  closer
to  Chia and looked down into the bag. "You are knowing what this
is."

"No," Chia lied. "I'm not."

The Russian looked at her. "We are not liking accident, ever. Not
allowing accident." His hands came up, then, and she saw that the
back of the third joint of each of  his  fingers  was  pink  with
those  dots,  each  one  the  size of the end of a pencil eraser.
She'd seen those at her last school and knew they meant  a  laser
had recently been used to remove a tattoo.

She  looked  up at his face. He looked like someone who was about
to do something that he might not want to do, but that he knew he
had to.

But  then  she  saw  his  eyes slide past her, narrowing, and she
turned in time to see the door to the corridor  swing  inward.  A
man  wider  than  the doorway seemed to flow into the room. There
was a big X of flesh-colored tape across one side of  his  f~tce,
and  he  was wearing a coat the color of dull metal. Chia saw one
huge, scarred hand slip into his coat; the other  held  something
black that ended in a mag-strip tab.

"Yob tvoyu mat," said the RUSSIan, soft syllables of surprise.

The  stranger's  hand  emerged,  holding something that looked to
Chia like a very large pair of chrome-plated scissors,  but  then
Un-  256  William  Gibson  folded,  with  a series of small sharp
clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glitter-
ing,  skeletal  axe,  its  leading edge hawk-like and lethal, the
head behind it tapering like an icepick.

"My mother?" said the stranger, who  sounded  somehow  delighted.
"Did  you  say  my  mother?" His face was shiny with scar tissue.
More scars crisscrossed his shaven, stubbled skull.

"Ah, no," the Russian said, lifting his hands so that  the  palms
showed. "Figuring of speech, only."

Another man stepped in, around the man with the axe, and this one
had dark hair and wore a loose black suit. The headband of a mon-
ocle-rig  crossed  his forehead, the unit covering his right eye.
The eye she could see was wide and bright and green, but still it
took a second before she recognized him.

Then she had to sit down on the pink bed.

"Where  is  it?"  this  man who looked like Rez asked. (Except he
looked thicker, somehow, his cheeks unhollowed.)

Neither the Russian nor the man with the axe  answered.  The  man
with the axe closed the door behind him with his heel.

The  green eye and the video-monocle looked at Chia. "Do you know
where it is?"

"What?"

"The biomech primer module, or whatever it is you call it...." He
paused,  touching  the phone in his right ear, listening. "Excuse
me:  'Rodel-van  Erp  primary  biomolecular  programming   module
Cslash-7A.' Ilove you."

Chia stared.

"Rei  Toei,"  he  explained,  touching the headband, and she knew
that it had to be him.

"It's here. In this bag."

He reached into the blue and yellow plastic and  drew  the  thing
out, turning it over in his hands. "This? This is our future, the
medium of our marriage?"

"Excuse, please," the Russian said, 'hut you must  know  this  is
helonging to mc." Lie sounded genuinely sorry.         0
0         257 Rez looked up, the nanotech unit held  casually  in
his  hands. "It's yours?" Rez tilted his head, like a bird, curi-
ous. "Where did you get it?"

The Russian coughed. "An exchange. This gentleman on floor."

Rez saw Eddie and Maryalice. "Are they dead?"

"Volted, yes? Being most-time nonlethal. Your girl on bed."

Rez looked at Chia. "Who are you?"

"Chia Pet McKenzie," she said automatically. "I'm  from  Seattle.
I'm. . . I'm in your fan club." She felt her face burning.

The  brow  above the green eye went up. He seemed to be listening
to something. "Oh," he said, and paused. "She did? Really? That's
wonderful." He smiled at Chia. "Rei says you've been totally cen-
tral to everything, and that we have a great deal  to  thank  you
for."

Chia swallowed. "She does?"

But  Rez  had  turned  to the Russian. "We have to have this." He
raised the nanotech unit. "We'll negotiate now. Name your price."

"Rozzer," the man at the door said, "you can't do that. This bas-
tard's Kombinat."

Chia saw the green eye close, as if Rez were making  a  conscious
effort to calm himself. When it opened, he said: "But they're the
government, aren't they, Blackwell? We've negotiated with govern-
ments before."

"It's for the legals," the scarred man said, but now there was an
edge of worry in his voice.

The Russian seemed to hear it too. He slowly lowered  his  hands.
"What were you planning to do with this?" Rez asked him. The Rus-
sian looked down at the thing in Rez's hands, as if  considering,
then  raised  his  eyes.  A  muscle was jumping, in his cheek. He
seemed to come to a decision. "We are developing ambitious public
works project," he said.

"0  jesus,"  Maryalice  said from the carpet, so hoarsely that at
first Chia couldn't identify the source. "They must've put  some-
thing  in  that.  They did. I swear to God they did. And then she
threw up.  258 Wiiliani Gibson Yamazaki lost his balance  as  the
van shot up the narrow ramp, out of the hotel. Laney, holding Ar-
leigh's phone to the dashboard map, toning the number of the  Ho-
tel  Di,  heard  him  crash down on the shredded bubble-pack. The
display bleeped as  Laney  completed  the  number;  grid-segments
clicked across the screen. "You okay, Yamazaki?"

"Thank you," Yamazaki said. "Yes." Getting to his knees again, he
craned around the headrest of Laney's seat. "You have located the
hotel?"

"Expressway,"  Arleigh  said,  glancing  at  the display, as they
swung right, up an entrance ramp. "Hit speed-dial three.  Thanks.
Gimme."  She  took  the phone. "McCrae. Yeah. Priority? Fuck you,
Alex. Ring me through to him." She  listened.  "Di?  Like  D,  I?
Shit. Thanks." She clicked off.

"What is it?" Laney asked, as they swung onto the expressway, the
giant  bland  brow  of  an  enormous  articulated  freight-hauler
pulling  up  behind  and  then past them, quilted stainless steel
flashing in Laney's peripheral vision. The van  rocked  with  the
big truck's passage.

"I tried to get Rez. Alex says he left the hotel, with Blackwell.
Headed the same place we are."

"When?"

"Just about the time you were having your S( reaming fit, when

0

9 259 39.     Trans you had the 'phones on,"  Arleigh  said.  She
looked grim. "Sorry," she said.

Laney  had had to argue with her for fifteen minutes, back there,
before she'd agreed to this. She'd kept saying she wanted him  to
see  a  doctor.  She'd  said that she was a technician, not a re-
searcher, not security, and that her first responsibility was  to
stay with the data, the modules, because anyone who got those got
almost the entire Lo/Rez  Partnership  business  plan,  plus  the
books, plus whatever Kuwayama had entrusted them with in the gray
module. She'd only given in after Yamazaki had sworn to take Full
responsibility for everything, and after Shannon and the man with
the ponytail had promised not to leave the modules. Not even, Ar-
leigh  said,  to  piss. "Go against the wall, God damn it," she'd
said, 'and get half a dozen of Blackwell's boys down here to keep
you :ompany."

"He knows," Laney said. "She told him it's there."

"What  is there, Laney-san?" asked Yamazaki, around the headrest.

"I don't know. Whatever it is, they think it'll facilitate  their
marriage."

"Do you think so?" Arleigh asked, passing a string of bright lit-
tle cars.

"I guess it must be capable of it," Laney said, as something  un-
der her seat began to clang, loudly and insistently. "But I don't
think that means it'll  necessarily  happen.  What  the  hell  is
that?"

"I'm  exceeding  the  speed  limit,"  she said. "Every vehicle in
Japan is legally required to be equipped with one  of  these  de-
vices. You speed, it dings."

Laney turned to Yamazaki. "Is that true?"

"Of course," Yamazaki said, over the steady clanging.

"And people don't just disconnect them?"

"No," Yamazaki said, looking puzzled. "Why would they?"

Arleigh's  phone  rang. "McCrae. Willy?" Silence as she listened.
260 William Gibson Then Laney felt  the  van  sway  slightly.  It
slowed  until  the  clanging  suddenly  stopped.  She lowered the
phone.  "'What is it?" Laney asked.  "Willy Jude," she said. "He.
.  . He was just watching one of the clubbing channels. They said
Rez is dead. They said he was dead. In a love hotel."




40.     The Business When nobody did anything to help  Maryalice,
Chia  got up from the bed, squeezed past the Russian and into the
bathroom, triggering the ambient bird track.  The  black  cabinet
was  open, its light on, and there were Day-Gb penis-things scat-
tered across the black and white tile floor.  She  took  a  black
towel  and  a  black washcloth from a heated chrome rack, wet the
washcloth at the black and chrome basin, and went back to Maryal-
ice.  She  folded  the  towel,  put it down over the vomit on the
white carpet, and handed Maryalice the washcloth.

Nobody said anything, or tried to stop her. Masahiko had sat back
down  on  the  carpet,  with  his  computer between his feet. The
scarred man, who seemed to take up as much space as  anything  in
the  room,  had  lowered  his axe. He held it down, along a thigh
wider than Chia's hips, with the spike jutting  from  beside  his
knee.

Maryalice, who'd managed to sit up now, wiped her mouth with

the  cloth,  taking  most  of  her  lipstick  with  it. When Chia
straightened up, a whiff of the Russian's cologne made her  stom-
ach heave.

"You're  a developer, you say?" Rez still held the nanotech unit.

"You are asking many questions," the Russian said. Eddie

groaned, then, and the Russian kicked him. "Basis," the Russian

said.

"A public works project?" Rez raised his eyebrow. "A  water  fil-
tration plant, something like that?"

The Russian kept his eye on the big man's axe. "In Tallin," he

said,  "we  soon are building exclusive mega-mall, affluent gated
sub-


urbs, plus world-class pharmaceutical manufakura. We are unfairly
denied most advanced means of production, but we are desiring one
hundred percent modern operation."

"Rez," the man with the axe said, "give it up. This boon and  his
mates need that thing to build themselves an Estonian drug facto-
ry. Time I took you back to the hotel."

"But wouldn't they be more interested in . .  .  Tokyo  real  es-
tate?"

The  big  man's eyes bulged, the scars on his forehead reddening.
One of the upper arms of the micropore X had come loose,  reveal-
ing  a  deep  scratch. "What bulishit is that? You don't have any
real estate here!"

"Famous Aspect," Rez said. "Rei's management company. They invest
for her."

"You  are  discussing  nanotech exchanged for Tokyo real estate?"
The Russian was looking at Rez.

"Exactly," Rez said.

"What kind real estate?"

"Undeveloped landfill in the Bay. An island. One of two. Off  one
of  the  old  'Toxic  Necklace' sites, but that's been cleaned up
since the quake."

"Wait a minute," Maryalice said, from the floor. "I know you. You
were  in  that  band, the one with the skinny Chinese, the guitar
player, wore the hats. I know you. You were huge."

Rez stared at her.

"I think is not good, here to discuss the business," the  Russian
said,  rubbing his birthmark. "But I am Starkov, Yevgeni." He ex-
tended his hand, and Chia  noticed  the  laser-scars  again.  Rez
shook it.

Chia thought she heard the big man groan.

"I  used  to  watch  him  in  Dayton," Maryalice said, as if that
proved something.

The big man took a small phone from  his  pocket  with  his  free
hand,  squinted at the call-display, and ptit it to his left ear.
Which Chia flOW saw was missing. He listened. "Ta," he said,  and
lowered  the  ihone.  lie  moved  to the window, the one Chia had
found behind 264 William Gibson the waliscreen, and stood looking
out. "Better have a look at this, Rozzer," he said.

Rez joined him. She saw Rez touch the monocle. "What are they do-
ing, Keithy? What is it?"

"It's your funeral," the big man said.   41.     ~andIeIight  and
Tears  Office  windows  flickered  past,  very  close, beyond the
earthquake-bandaged uprights of the expressway. Taller  buildings
gave  way  to a lower sprawl, then something bright in the middle
distance: HOTEL KING MIDAS. The dashboard map began to bleep.

"Third exit right," Laney said, watching the cursor. He felt her

accelerate and heard the speed-limit  warning  kick  in.  Another
glittering sign: FREEDOM SHOWER BANFF.

"Laney-san," Yamazaki asked, around the headrest. "Did you appre-
hend any suggestion of Rez's death or other misfortune?"

"No, but I wouldn't, not unless there was a degree of  intention-
ality that would emerge from the data. Accidents, actions by any-
one who isn't represented. .  ."  The  clanging  stopped  as  she
slowed,  approaching  the  exit  indicated on the map. "But I saw
their data as streams,  merging,  and  whatever  it  was  merging
around seemed to be where we're going."

Arleigh  made  the  exit. They were on the off-ramp now, swinging
through a curve, and Laney saw three  young  girls,  their  shoes
clumped with mud, descending a sharp slope planted with some kind
of pale rough grass. One of them seemed to be  wearing  a  school
uniform:  kneesocks  and a short plaid skirt. They looked unreal,
in the harsh sodium light of the intersection, but  then  Arleigh
stopped the van and Laney turned to see the road in front of them
completely blocked by a silent, unmoving crowd.          "Jesus,"
Arleigh said. "The fans."                267




4U.     The  Business When nobody did anything to help Maryalice,
Chia got up from the bed, squeezed past the Russian and into  the
bathroom,  triggering  the  ambient bird track. The black cabinet
was open, its light on, and there were Day-Gb penis-things  scat-
tered  across  the  black  and white tile floor. She took a black
towel and a black washcloth from a heated chrome  rack,  wet  the
washcloth at the black and chrome basin, and went back to Maryal-
ice. She folded the towel, put it down  over  the  vomit  on  the
white carpet, and handed Maryalice the washcloth.

Nobody said anything, or tried to stop her. Masahiko had sat back
down on the carpet, with  his  computer  between  his  feet.  The
scarred  man,  who seemed to take up as much space as anything in
the room, had lowered his axe. He held it  down,  along  a  thigh
wider  than  Chia's  hips, with the spike jutting from beside his
knee.

Maryalice, who'd managed to sit up now, wiped her mouth with

the cloth, taking  most  of  her  lipstick  with  it.  When  Chia
straightened  up, a whiff of the Russian's cologne made her stom-
ach heave.

"You're a developer, you say?" Rez still held the nanotech  unit.

"You are asking many questions," the Russian said. Eddie

groaned, then, and the Russian kicked him. "Basis," the Russian

said.

"A  public  works project?" Rez raised his eyebrow. "A water fil-
tration plant, something like that?"

The Russian kept his eye on the big man's axe.  "In  Tallin,"  he
        said, "we soon are building exclusive mega-mall, affluent
gated sub-   o                 0         263  urbs,  plus  world-
class  pharmaceutical manufakura. We are unfairly denied most ad-
vanced means of production, but we are desiring one hundred  per-
cent modern operation."

"Rez,"  the man with the axe said, "give it up. This hoon and his
mates need that thing to build themselves an Estonian drug facto-
ry. Time I took you back to the hotel."

"But  wouldn't  they  be  more interested in . . . Tokyo real es-
tate?"

The big man's eyes bulged, the scars on his  forehead  reddening.
One  of the upper arms of the micropore X had come loose, reveal-
ing a deep scratch. "What bulishit is that? You  don't  have  any
real estate here!"

"Famous Aspect," Rez said. "Rei's management company. They invest
for her."

"You are discussing nanotech exchanged for  Tokyo  real  estate?"
The Russian was looking at Rez.

"Exactly," Rez said.

"What kind real estate?"

"Undeveloped  landfill in the Bay. An island. One of two. Off one
of the old 'Toxic Necklace' sites, but  that's  been  cleaned  up
since the quake."

"Wait a minute," Maryalice said, from the floor. "I know you. You
were in that band, the one with the skinny  Chinese,  the  guitar
player, wore the hats. I know you. You were huge."

Rez stared at her.

"I  think is not good, here to discuss the business," the Russian
said, rubbing his birthmark. "But I am Starkov, Yevgeni." He  ex-
tended  his  hand,  and  Chia  noticed the laser-scars again. Rez
shook it.

Chia thought she heard the big man groan.

"1 used to watch him in  Dayton,"  Maryalice  said,  as  if  that
proved something.

The  big  man  took  a  small phone from his pocket with his free
hand, squinted at the call-display, and put it to his  left  ear.
Which  Chia  now  saw was missing. I-Ic listened. "Ta," lie said,
and lowered the phone. He moved to the window, the  one  (ha  had
found  behind 204 WiIIi~im Gibson the waliscreen, and stood look-
ing out. "Better have a look at this, Rozzer," he said.

Rez joined him. She saw Rez touch the monocle. "What are they do-
ing, Keithy? What is it?"

"It's your funeral," the big man said.



205  41.     Candlelight and Tears Office windows flickered past,
very close, beyond the earthquake-bandaged uprights  of  the  ex-
pressway. Taller buildings gave way to a lower sprawl, then some-
thing bright in the middle distance: HOTEL KING MIDAS. The  dash-
board map began to bleep.

"Third exit right," Laney said, watching the cursor. He felt her

accelerate  and  heard  the  speed-limit warning kick in. Another
glittering sign: FREEDOM SHOWER BANFF.

"Laney-san," Yamazaki asked, around the headrest. "Did you appre-
hend any suggestion of Rez's death or other misfortune?"

"No,  but I wouldn't, not unless there was a degree of intention-
ality that would emerge from the data. Accidents, actions by any-
one  who  isn't  represented.  .  ."  The clanging stopped as she
slowed, approaching the exit indicated on the  map.  "But  I  saw
their  data  as  streams,  merging,  and  whatever it was merging
around seemed to be where we're going."

Arleigh made the exit. They were on the  off-ramp  now,  swinging
through  a  curve,  and  Laney saw three young girls, their shoes
clumped with mud, descending a sharp slope planted with some kind
of  pale  rough  grass. One of them seemed to be wearing a school
uniform: kneesocks and a short plaid skirt. They  looked  unreal,
in  the  harsh sodium light of the intersection, but then Arleigh
stopped the van and Laney turned to see the road in front of them
completely blocked by a silent, unmoving crowd.          "Jesus,"
Arleigh said. "The fans."                267 If there  were  boys
in the crowd, Laney didn't see them. It was a level sea of glossy
black hair, every girl facing the white building that rose there,
with  its white, brilliantly illuminated sign framed by something
meant to represent a coronet: HOTEL DI. Arleigh powered down  her
window and Laney heard the distant wail of a siren.

"We'll  never  get through," Laney said. Most of the girls held a
single candle, and the  combined  glow  danced  among  the  tear-
streaked  faces. They were so young, these girls: children. Kathy
Torrance had particularly loathed  that  about  Lo/Rez,  the  way
their  fan-base  had  refreshed itself over the years with a con-
stant stream of pubescent recruits, girls who fell in  love  with
Rez  in  the  endless present of the net, where he could still be
the twenty-year-old of his earliest hits.

"Pass me that black case," Arleigh said, and Laney heard Yamazaki
scrabbling  through  the bubble-pack. A flat rectangular carrying
case appeared between the seats. Laney took it.  "Open  it,"  she
said.  Laney undid the zip, exposing something flat and gray. The
Lo/Rez logo on an oblong sticker.  Arleigh  pulled  it  from  its
case,  put  it  on  the  dashboard, and ran her finger around its
edge, looking for a switch. LO/REZ, mirror-reversed in large, lu-
minous  green letters, appeared on the windshield. **TOuR SUPPORT
VEHICLE**. The asterisks began to flash.

Arleigh let the van roll forward a few inches. The girls directly
in front turned, saw the windshield, and stepped aside. Silently,
gradually, a few feet at a time, the crowd parted for the van.

Laney looked out across the black,  center-parted  heads  of  the
grieving  fans  and  saw  the  Russian,  the one from the Western
World, still in his  white  leather  evening  jacket,  struggling
through the crowd. The girls' heads came barely to his waist, and
he looked as though he were wading through black hair and candle-
glow. The expression on his face was OflC Of confusion, almost of
terror, but when he saw Laney at the window of the green van,  he
grima'ed  and  changed  course,  heading  straight for them.  268
WillIam Gibson Chia looked out and saw that the rain had stopped.
Beyond  the  chainlink  fence, the parking lot was full of small,
unmoving figures holding candles. A few of them were standing  on
the  tops of the trucks parked there, and there seemed to be more
on the roof of the low building behind.  Girls.  Japanese  girls.
All of them seemed to be staring at the Hotel Di.

The  big man was telling Rez that someone had announced that he'd
died, that he'd been found dead in this hotel, and it was out  on
the net and was being treated like it had really happened.

The  Russian  had  produced  his own phone now and was talking to
someone in Russian. "Mr. Lor-ess," he said, lowering  the  phone,
"we  are  hearing  police  come. This nanotech being heavily pro-
scribed, is serious problem."

"Fine," Rez said. "We have a car in the garage."

Someone nudged Chia's elbow. It was  Masahiko,  handing  her  her
bag.  He'd  put her Sandbenders in it and zipped it up; she could
tell by the weight. He had his computer in the  plaid  bag.  "Put
your shoes on now," he said. His were already on.

Eddie  was  curled into a knot on the carpet; he'd been like that
since the Russian had kicked him. Now the Russian took a step to-
ward  him  again and Chia saw Maryalice cringe, where she sat be-
side Eddie on the carpet.

"You are lucky man," the Russian said to Eddie. "We are honor

0 0

269 42.     Checking Out ing our agreement. Isotope to be  deliv-
ered. But we are wanting no more the business with you."

There  was  a click, and another, and Chia watched as the big man
with no left ear folded his axe, collapsing it smoothly into  it-
self without looking at it. 'That thing you're holding is a heavy
crime, Rozzer. Your fan-club turnout's bringing the police.  Bet-
ter let me be in possession."

Rez looked at the big man. "I'll carry it myself, Keithy."

Chia  thought  she  saw  a  sudden sadness in the big man's eyes.
"Well then," he said. "Time to go." He slipped the folded  weapon
inside  his  jacket. "Come on, then. You two." Gesturing Chia and
Masahiko toward the door.  Rez  followed  Masahiko,  the  Russian
close  behind  him,  but Chia saw that the room key was on top of
the little fridge. She ran over and grabbed it. Then she stopped,
looking down at Maryalice.

Maryalice's mouth, with her lipstick gone, looked old and sad. It
was a mouth that must've been hurt a  lot,  Chia  thought.  "Come
with us," Chia said.

Maryalice looked at her.

"Come on," Chia said. "The police are coming."

"I can't," Maryalice said. "I have to take care of Eddie."

"Tell  your  Eddie,"  Blackwell said, reaching Chia in two steps,
"that if he whines to anyone about any of this, he'll be  grabbed
and his shoe size shortened."

But Maryalice didn't seem to hear, or if she did, she didn't look
up, and the big man pulled Chia out of the room, closed the door,
and  then  Chia  was following the back of the Russian's tan suit
down the narrow corridor, his fancy cowboy boots  illuminated  by
the ankle-high light-strips.

Rez  was stepping into the elevator with Masahiko and the Russian
when the big man caught his shoulder. "You're staying  with  me,"
he said, shoving Chia into the elevator.

Masahiko pushed the button. "You are having vehicle?" the Russian
asked Masahiko.  270 William Gibson "No," Masahiko said.

The Russian grunted. His cologne was making Chia's  stomach  turn
over.  The  door  opened  on the little lobby. The Russian pushed
past her, looking around. Chia and Masahi~o followed. The  eleva-
tor door closed. "Looking for vehicle," the Russian said. "Come."
They followed him through the sliding glass door, into the  park-
ing area, where Eddie's Graceland seemed to take up at least half
the available space. Beside it was a silver-gray Japanese  sedan,
and  Chia wondered if that was Rez's. Someone had put black plas-
tic rectangles over the license plates of both cars.

She heard the glass door hiss open again and turned  to  see  Rez
coming out, the nanotech unit tucked beneath his arm like a foot-
ball. The big man was behind him.

Then a really angry man in a shiny white tuxedo burst through the
pink  plastic strips that hung down across the entrance. He had a
smaller man by the collar of his jacket, and the smaller man  was
trying  to  get  away.  Then  the  smaller man saw them there and
shouted "Blackwell!" and actually managed to slip  right  out  of
his  jacket, but the man in the white tuxedo reached out with the
other hand and caught him by the belt.

The Russian was yelling in Russian now and the man in  the  white
tuxedo  seemed  to  see  him for the first time. He let go of the
other man's belt.

"We've got the van," the other man said.

The big man with the missing ear stepped up really close  to  the
man  in the white tuxedo, glared at him, and took the other man's
jacket. "Okay, Rozzer," he said, turning to Rez.  "You  know  the
drill  this one. Old hat. Same as leaving that house in St. Kilda
with the bastard Melbourne tabs outside, right?"  He  draped  the
jacket  over  Rez's head and shoulders, slapped him encouragingly
on the upper arm. He walked over to the pink strips and drew  one
aside,  looking out. "Fucking hell," he said. "Right then, all of
you. It's move fast, stay together, Rez in the center,  and  into
the  van.  On my count of three."          271 43.     Toecutters
Breakfast "You aren't eating," Blackwell said, after he'd cleared
his second plate of links and eggs. He'd appropriated this dining
room on one of the Elf Hat's executive floors, and insisted Laney
join  him. The view was similar to the one from Laney's room, six
floors below, and sunlight was glinting from the distant parapets
of the new buildings.

"Who put out the word that Rez was dead, Blackwell? The

idoru?"

"Her? Why d'you think she would?" He was using the edge of a

triangle of toast to squeegee his plate.

"I  don't know," Laney said, "but she seems to like to do things.

And they aren't necessarily that easy to understand."

"It wasn't her," Blackwell said. "We're checking it out. Looks as
though  some  fan of his in Mexico went berserk; used some fairly
drastic sort of 'ware-weapon on the Tokyo  club's  central  site.
Took  that  over from a converted corporate website in the States
and issued the bulletin. Called on every fan local  to  Tokyo  to
get  up  immediately  and  go  to that love hotel." He popped the
toast into his mouth, swallowed, and wiped his lips with a  thick
white napkin.

"But Rez was there," Laney said.

Blackwell  shrugged.  "We're  looking  into it. We have more than
enough on our hands, now. Have to  dissociate  Lo/Rez  from  this
death  hoax, reassure his audience. Legal's flying in from London
and New York for talks with Starkov and his  people.  Her  people
too," he         added. "Going to be busy."               273


"Who  were  those kids?" Laney asked. "The little redhead and the
Japanese hippie?"

"Rez says they're okay. Have 'em here  in  the  hotel.  Arleigh's
sorting it out."

"Where's the nanotech unit?"

"You  didn't  say that," Blackwell said. "Now don't say it again.
The official truth of the night's events is currently being  for-
mulated, rnd that will never be a part of it. Am I understood?"

Laney  nodded.  He  looked out at the new buildings again. Either
the angle of light  had  changed  or  that  parapet  had  shifted
slightly.  He  looked at Blackwell. "Is it my imagination, or has
your attitude on all  this  undergone  some  kind  of  change?  I
thought  you  were adamantly opposed to Rez and the idoru getting
together."

Blackwell sighed. "I was. But it's starting to  look  like  some-
thing  of a done deal now, isn't it? De facto relationship, real-
ly. I suppose I'm old-fashioned, but  I'd  hoped  that  he  might
eventually  wind up with a bit of the ordinary. Someone to polish
his gun, pick up his socks, have a baby or two. But it isn't  go-
ing to happen, is it?"

"I guess not."

"In  which  case,"  Blackwell said, "I have two options. Either I
leave the silly bastard to his own resources, or I stay and I  do
my  job  and try to adjust to whatever it is this is going to be-
come. And at the end of the bloody day, Laney, regardless, I have
to  remember  where  I'd be if he hadn't come behind the walls at
Pentridge to give that solo concert.  Aren't  you  going  to  eat
that?" Looking at the scrambled eggs going cold on Laney's plate.

"My job's done," Laney said. "It didn't  work  out  the  way  you
wanted it to, but I did it. Agreed?"

"No question."

"Then I'd better go. Get me paid off, I'm out of here today."

Blackwell looked at him with new interest. "That fast, eh? What's
your hurry? Don't find us agreeable?'

"No," Laney said. "It's just that that way's better all round.

"Not what Yama's saying. Rez either. Not to  mention  her  other-
274  William  Gibson  ness, who no doubt will voice an opinion in
that regard. I'd say you were set to become the court  prognosti-
cator,  Laney.  Unless,  of  course, that whole business with the
Kombinat turns out to be absolute bollocks, and  it's  discovered
that you simply make that nodal nonsense up-which I for one would
actually find quite amusing. But no, your services are very  much
desired  now,  you  might even say required, and none of us would
currently be happy to see you go."

"I have to," Laney said. "I'm being blackmailed."

This brought Blackwell's lids to half-mast.  He  leaned  slightly
forward.  The  pink  worm of scar tissue squirmed in his eyebrow.
"Are you?" he said softly, as though Laney had just  ventured  to
confess some unusual sexual complication. "And may I ask who by?"

"Slitscan. Kathy Torrance. It's sort of personal, for her."

"Tell me about it. Tell me all about it. Do."

And Laney did, including the 5-SB trials  and  their  record  for
eventually  turning  the  participants into homicidal stalkers of
celebrities. "I didn't want to  bring  that  up,  before,"  Laney
said, "because I was afraid you might think I was at risk. That I
might go that way."

"Not that I haven't had  experience  with  the  type,"  Blackwell
said.  "We  have a young man in Tokyo right now who is the author
of all of the songs Lo and Rez have ever written, not to  mention
Blue Ahmed's complete output for Chrome Koran. And he's an explo-
sives expert. Watch him closely. But we have that  capacity,  you
see.  So  the  safest  place  for you, Laney, in the event you go
werewolf on us, would be right here, at the watchful heart of our
security apparatus."

Laney thought about it. It almost made sense. "But you won't want
me around if Slitscan runs that  footage.  I  won't  want  myself
around.  I  don't  have any family, nobody else for it to damage,
but I'm still going to have to live with it."

"And how do you propose to do that?"

"I'll go somewhere where people don't watch that shit."

"Well," said I4lackwell, "when you find that fair land, I will go

there  with  you  myself.  We'll live Ofl fruit and nuts, commune
with o


275 all that's left of bloody nature. But 'til then,  Laney,  I'm
going to have a conversation with your Kathy Torrance. I will ex-
plain certain things to her. Nothing complicated. Simple,  simple
protocols  of cause and effect. And she will never allow Slitscan
to run that footage of your doppelganger."

"Blackwell," Laney said, "she dislikes me, she has her motive for
revenge,  but  she wants, she needs, to destroy Rez. She's a very
powerful woman in a very  powerful,  fully  global  organization.
Some  simple  threat of violence on your part isn't going to stop
her. It'll only up the ante; she'll go to her security people-"

"No," said Blackwell, "she won't, because that would be a  viola-
tion  of  the  very personal terms I will have established in our
conversation. That's the key word here,  Laney,  'personal.'  'Up
close,  and.'  We  will not meet, we will not carve out this deep
and meaningful and bloody unforgettable episode of  mutual  face-
time  as representatives of our respective faceless corporations.
Not at all. It's one-on-one time for your Kathy and I, and it may
well prove to be as intimate, and I may hope enlightening, as any
she ever had. Because I will bring a new certainty into her life,
and  we  all  need  certainties. They help build character. And I
will leave your Kathy with the deepest possible  conviction  that
if she crosses me, she will die-but only after she's been made to
desire that, absolutely." And Black-well's  smile,  then,  giving
Laney  the  full  benefit  of his dental prosthesis, was hideous.
"Now how was it exactly you were supposed to contact her, to give
her your decision?"

Laney  found  his  wallet,  produced the blank card with the pen-
cilled number. Blackwell took it. "Ta." He stood  up.  "Shame  to
waste  a good breakfast that way. Ring the hotel doctor from your
room and get yourself sorted. Sleep. I'll  deal  with  this."  He
tucked the card into the breast pocket of his aluminum jacket.

And  as  Blackwell  left the room, Laney noticed, centered on the
bodyguard's squeegeed plate and standing  upright  on  its  broad
flat  head,  a  one-and-a-half-inch galvanized roofing-nail.  270
William Gibson U U U Laney's ribs, an ugly patchwork  of  yellow,
black,  and  blue,  were  sprayed  with  various cool liquids and
tightly bound with micropore. He took the hypnotic the doctor had
offered, showered at great length, climbed into bed, and was sug-
gesting the light turn itself off when a fax was delivered.

It was addressed to C. LANEY, GUEST:


DAY MANAGER GAVE ME MY WALKING  PAPERS.  "FRATERNIZING."  ANYWAY,
I'M SECURITY HERE AT THE LUCKY DRAGON,

MIDNITE ON, YOU CAN GET ME FAX, E-MAIL, PHONE'S BIZ

ONLY BUT THE PEOPLE ARE OKAY. HOPE YOU'RE OKAY. FEEL

RESPONSIBLE. HOPE YOU'RE ENJOYING JAPAN, WHATEVER.

RYDELL



"Good  night," Laney said, putting the fax on the bedside module,
and fell instantly and very deeply asleep.

And stayed that way until Arleigh phoned from the lobby  to  sug-
gest  a drink. Nine in the evening, by the blue clock in the cor-
ner of the module-screen. Laney put on freshly  ironed  underwear
and  his  other  blue  Malaysian  button-down. He discovered that
White Leather Tuxedo had sprung a few seams in his  only  jacket,
but  then the boss Russian, Starkov, hadn't let the man come with
them in the van, so Laney figured they were even.

Crossing  the  lobby,  he  encountered  a  frantic-looking   Rice
Daniels,  so  tense that he'd reverted to the black head-clamp of
his Out of Control days. "Laney! Jesus! Have you seen Kathy?"

"No. I've been asleep."

Daniels did a strange little jig of anxiety, rising on  the  toes
of his brown calfskin loafers. "Look, this is too fiicking weird,
but I swear- I think she's been abducted."

"1 lave you called the police?"

0


277 "We did, we did, but it's all  flicking  Martian,  all  these
forms  they  tick through on their notebooks, and what blood type
was she. . . . You don't know what blood type  she  is,  do  you,
Laney?"

"Thin," Laney said. "Sort of straw-colored."

But  Daniels  didn't seem to hear. He seized Laney's shoulder and
showed him teeth, a rictus intended somehow to  indicate  friend-
ship.  "I  have real respect for you, man. How you don't have any
issues."

Laney saw Arleigh wave to him from the entrance  to  the  lounge.
She was wearing something short and black.

"You  take care, Rice." Shaking the man's cold hand. "She'll turn
up. I'm sure of it."

And then he was walking toward Arleigh, smiling, and he saw  that
she  was  smiling  back.  278 William Gibson Chia was on the bed,
watching television. It made her feel more normal. It was like  a
drug, that way. She remembered how much television her mother had
watched, after her father had left.

But this was Japanese television, where girls who could have been
Mitsuko, only a little younger, wearing sailor-suit dresses, were
spinning huge wooden tops at a long table. They could really spin
them,  too;  keep  them up forever. It was a contest. The console
could translate, but it was even more relaxing not to  know  what
they  were saying. The most relaxing parts of all were the close-
ups of the tops spinning.

She'd used the translation to check out the NHK coverage  of  the
death  hoax on the net and the candlelight vigil at the Hotel Di.

She'd seen a very satisfyingly pudgy  Hiromi  Ogama  denying  she
knew who had nuked her chapter's site and then issued the call to
mourning from its ruins. It had not been a member  of  the  club,
Hiromi had stressed, either locally or internationally. Chia knew
Hiromi was lying, because it had  to  have  been  Zona,  but  the
Lo/Rez  people would be telling her what to say. Arleigh had told
Chia the whole thing had been launched out of a  disused  website
that  belonged  to  an  aerospace company in Arizona. Which meant
that Zona had blown her country, because now she wouldn't be able
to go back there. (Nice as Arleigh seemed to be, Chia hadn't told
her anything about Lona.)

And she'd seen the helicopter shots of the  vigil,  afld  of  the
baf- 0


279  S4.  La  Puirissima fled tactical squads facing an estimated
twenty-five hundred tearyeyed girls. The injury  count  was  low,
everything  fairly  minor  except  for one girl who'd slid down a
freeway embankment and broken both her ankles. The  real  problem
had been getting everyone out of there, because a lot of them had
arrived five or six to a cab, and had no  way  of  getting  home.
Some had taken the family car and then abandoned it in their hur-
ry to reach the vigil, and that had created another kind of mess.
There had been a few dozen arrests, mostly for trespassing.

And  she'd  seen the message Rez had recorded, assuring people he
was alive and well, and regretting  the  whole  thing,  which  of
course  he'd  had nothing to do with. He wasn't wearing the mono-
cle-rig, for this, but he had on the same black suit and t-shirt.
He looked thinner, though; someone had tweaked it. He'd played it
light, at first, grinning, saying he'd never been to the Hotel Di
and  in  fact  had  never  visited a love hotel, but now maybe he
should. Then he'd turned serious and said how sorry he  was  that
people  had  been inconvenienced and even hurt by someone's irre-
sponsible prank. And he'd capped it, smiling, by saying that  the
whole  thing  had been quite uniquely moving for him, because how
often do you get to watch your own funeral?

And she'd seen the people who owned and managed the Hotel Di, ex-
pressing  their  regret.  They had no idea, they said, how any of
this had happened. She got the feeling that expressing regret was
a  big  thing  here, but the owners of the Di had also managed to
explain how there was no on-site staff at their hotel, in the in-
terest  of  the  guests' greater privacy. Arleigh, watching this,
had said that that was the commercial, and that she bet the place
was  going to be booked solid for the next two months. It was fa-
mous, now.

All in all, the coverage seemed to treat the whole thing as  some
kind  of  silly-season item that might have had serious repercus-
sions if the police hadn't acted as calmly and as  skillfully  as
they  eventually had, bringing in electric buses from the suburbs
to ferry the girls to collection-points around the city.

Arleigh was from San l~ranc1sc() and she worked  for  Lo/Rez  and
280 William Gibson knew Rez personally, and she was the one who'd
driven the van out through the crowd. And then she'd lost  a  po-
lice  helicopter  by doing something completely crazy on that ex-
pressway, a kind of u-turn right over the  concrete  bumper-thing
down the middle.

She'd  brought  Chia  and Masahiko to this hotel, and put them in
these adjoining rooms with weirdly  angled  corners,  where  they
each  had  a  private  bath. She'd asked them both to please stay
there, and not to port or use the phone without telling her,  ex-
cept for room service, and then she'd gone out.

Chia  had  had  a shower right away. It was the best shower she'd
ever had, and she felt  like  she  never  wanted  to  wear  those
clothes  again as long as she lived. She didn't even want to have
to look at them. She found a plastic bag you were supposed to put
your clothes in to be laundered, and she put them in that and put
it in the wastebasket in the bathroom.  Then  she'd  put  on  all
clean  clothes  from  her bag, everything kind of wrinkled but it
felt great, and she'd blow-dried her hair with the machine  built
into  the  bathroom  wall. The toilet didn't talk and it only had
three buttons to figure out.

Then she lay down on the bed and fell asleep, but not for long.

Arleigh kept popping in to make sure Chia was okay,  and  telling
her  news, so that Chia felt like she was part of it, whatever it
was. Ar-leigh said Rez was back at his own hotel  now,  but  that
he'd come later to spend some time with her and thank her for all
she'd done.

That made Chia feel strange. Now she'd seen  him  in  real  life,
somehow  that  had taken over from all the other ways she'd known
him before, and she felt kind of funny about him. Confused.  Like
all  of  this  had  pegged  him in realtime for her, and she kept
thinking of her mother complaining that Lo and Rez were nearly as
old as she was.

And  there  was  something  else  to it, too, that came from what
she'd seen when she was crouched down in the back  of  that  van,
between  the  little  Japanese  guy with the sleeve of his jacket
hanging down, and Masahiko: she'd looked out the window and  seen
the faces, as the van inched away. None of them knowing that that
was        0         281 Rez hunched down in there, under a jack-
et,  but  maybe sensing it somehow. And something in Chia letting
her know she'd never quite be like that again. Never as  comfort-
ably  a face in that crowd. Because now she knew there were rooms
they never saw, or even dreamed of, where crazy things,  or  even
just  boring  things, happened, and that was where the stars came
from. And it was something like that that worried  her  now  when
she  thought of Rez coming to see her. That and how he really was
her mother's age.

And all of that made her wonder what she was going  to  tell  the
others,  back  in  Seattle.  How  could  they  understand it? She
thought Zona would understand. She really  wanted  to  talk  with
Zona,  but Arleigh had said it was better not to try to reach her
now.

The longest-running top was starting to  teeter,  and  they  were
cutting from that to the eyes of the girl who'd spun it.

Masahiko opened the door that connected their rooms.

The  top gave a last wobble and kicked over. The girl covered her
mouth with her hands, her eyes filled with the pain of defeat.

"You must come with me to Walled City now," Masahiko said.

Chia used the manual remote to turn the television off.  "Arleigh
asked us not to port."

"She  knows,"  Masahiko  said.  "I've been there all day." He was
wearing the same clothes but  everything  had  been  cleaned  and
pressed,  and  the  legs  of his baggy black pants looked strange
with creases in them. "And on the phone with my father."

"Is he pissed off at you because those gumi guys came?"

"Arleigh McCrae asked Starkov to have someone speak with our gumi
representative.  They  have  apologized to my father. But Mitsuko
was arrested near Hotel Di. That has caused him embarrassment and
difficulty."

"Arrested?"

"l~or  trespassing.  She  went  to  take  part  in the vigil. She
climbed a fence, triggering an alarm. She could  not  climb  back
out before the police came."

"Is she okay?  282 William Gibson "My father has arranged her re-
lease. But he is not pleased."

"I feel like it's my fault," Chia said.

He shrugged and went back through the door.

Chia got up. Her Sandbenders was beside her bag  on  the  luggage
rack,  with her goggles and tip-sets on top of it. She carried it
into the other room.

It was a mess. Somehow he'd managed to  turn  it  into  something
like  his  room  at  home.  The  sheets  were tangled on the bed.
Through the open bathroom door, she saw towels crumpled up on the
tiled  floor,  a  spilled bottle of shampoo on the counter beside
the sink. He'd set up his computer on the desk, with his  student
cap  beside  it.  There  were opened mini-cans of espresso every-
where, and at least three room-service trays with half-empty  ce-
ramic bowls of ramen.

"Has  anyone there seen Zona?" she asked, shoving a pillow and an
open magazine aside on the foot of the bed. She sat down with her
Sandbenders on her lap and started putting her tip-sets on.

She thought he gave her a strange look, then. "I don't think so,"
he said.

"Take me in the way you did the first time," she said. "I want to
see it again."



Hak Nam. Tai Chang Street. The walls alive with shifting messages
in the characters of every written  language.  Doorways  flipping
past, each one hinting at its own secret world. And this time she
was more aware of the countless watching ghosts. That must be how
people  presented  here, when you weren't in direct communication
with them. A city of ghost-shadows. But this time  Masahiko  took
another route, and they weren't climbing the twisted labyrinth of
stairs but winding in at what would have been ground level in the
original  city, and Chia remembered the black hole, the rectangu-
lar vacancy he'd pointed out on the printed scarf in his room  at
the restaurant.

"I must leave you now," he said, as they burst from the maze into
that vacancy. "They wish  privacy."       0          283  He  was
gone,  and  at first Chia thought there was nothing there at all,
only the faint grayish light filtering down from  somewhere  high
above.  When she looked up at this, it resolved into a vast, dis-
tant skylight, very far above her, but littered with a compost of
strange and discarded shapes. She remembered the city's rooftops,
and the things abandoned there.

"It is strange, isn't it?" The idoru stood before her in  embroi-
dered  robes,  the  tiny bright patterns lit from within, moving.
"Ho!low and somber. But he insisted we meet you here."

"Who insisted? Do you know where Zona is?"

And there was a small table or four-legged stand in front of  the
idoru,  very old, its dragon-carved legs thick with flaking, pale
green paint. A single dusty glass stood centered there, something
coiled inside it. Someone coughed.

"This  is  the  heart  of  Hak Nam," the Etruscan said, that same
creaking voice assembled  from  a  million  samples  of  dry  old
sounds. "Traditionally a place of serious conversation."

"Your  friend is gone," the idoru said. "I wished to tell you my-
self. This one," indicating the glass, "volunteers details  I  do
not understand."

"But  they've  only  shut down her website," Chia said. "She's in
Mexico City, with her gang."

"She is nowhere," the Etruscan said.

"When you were taken from her," the idoru said, "taken  from  the
room  in Venice, your friend went to your system software and ac-
tivated the video units in your goggles. What she saw there indi-
cated  to  her  that  you  were in grave danger. As I believe you
were. She must then have decided on a plan. Returning to her  se-
cret  country, she linked her site with that of the Tokyo chapter
of the Lo/Rez group. She ordered  Ogawa,  the  president  of  the
group,  to  post  the message announcing Rez's death at Hotel Di.
She threatened her with a weapon that  would  shatter  the  Tokyo
chapter's site. .

"The knife," Cliia said. "It was real?"

"And  extremely  illegal," the Etruscan said.  284 William Gibson
"When Ogawa refused," the  idoru  said,  "your  friend  used  her
weapon.

"A  serious  crime,"  the Etruscan said, "under the laws of every
country involved."

"She then posted her message through  what  remained  of  Ogawa's
website," the idoru said. "It seemed official, and it had the ef-
fect of quickly surrounding Hotel Di with a sea of potential wit-
nesses."

"Whatever  the  next  stage of her plan," the Etruscan said, "she
had exposed her presence in her website. The original owners  be-
came  aware of her. She abandoned her site. They pursued her. She
was forced to discard her persona."

"What 'persona'?" Chia felt a sinking feeling.

"Zona Rosa," said the Etruscan,  "was  the  persona  of  Mercedes
Purissima  Vargas-Gutierrez.  She is twenty-six years old and the
victim of an environmental syndrome occurring most frequently  in
the  Federal  District  of  Mexico." His voice was like rain on a
thin metal roof now. "Her father is an extremely successful crim-
inal lawyer."

"Then I can find her," Chia said.

"But she would not wish this," the idoru said. "Mercedes Punssima
is severely deformed by the syndrome, and has lived for the  past
five years in almost complete denial of her physical self."



Chia  was  sitting  there crying. Masahiko removed the black cups
from his eyes and came over to the bed.

"Zona's gone," she said.

"I know," he said. He sat down beside her.  "You  never  finished
telling  me  the story of the Sandbenders," he said. "It was very
interesting story."

So she began to tell it to him.



285

45.     Lucky "Laney," he heard her say, her voice  blurred  with
sleep. "What are you doing?"

The illuminated face of the cedar telephone. "I'm calling the

Lucky Dragon, on Sunset."

"The what?"

"Convenience store. Twenty-four hours."

"Laney, it's three in the morning .

"Have  to  thank Rydell, tell him the job worked out. She groaned
and rolled over, pulling the pillow over her  head.  Through  the
window  he  could see the translucent amber, the serned cliffs of
the new buildings, reflecting the lights of the city.  0

2 287 46.     Fables of the Reconstruction








Chia dreamed of a beach pebbled with crushed  fragments  of  con-
sumer  electronics; crab-things scuttling low, their legs striped
like antique resistors. Tokyo Bay, shrouded in fog  from  an  old
movie,  a  pale  gray  blanket meant to briefly conceal first-act
terrors: sea monsters or some alien armada.

Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with  a  dream's
logic  it grew no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles.
The Walled City is growing. Being grown. From the fabric  of  the
beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before things changed. Un-
thinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and  bulk-lifter  in  the
course  of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-
van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies  that  are
sleeping rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver
rectangles back against the fog. A thing of random  human  accre-
tion,  monstrous  and superb, it is being reconstituted here, re-
translated from its later incarnation as a  realm  of  consensual
fantasy.

The  alarm's infrared stutter. Sunbright halogen illuminating the
printed scarf, at its center the rectangle representing an empti-
ness,  an  address  unknown:  the kilifile of legend. Zapping the
Espressomatic to life with her remote, she curls  back  into  the
quilt's  dark, waiting for the building hiss of steam. Most morn-
ings, now, she checks into the City, hears the gossip  in  a  fa-
vorite barbershop in Sai Shing Road. The Etruscan is there, some-
times, with Klaus and the         Rooster and the other ghosts he
hangs  with,  and  they  tolerate her.                        289
She's proud of that, because they'll clam up around Masahiko. Are
they old, incredibly ancient, or do they just act that way? What-
ever, they tend to know things first, and she's learned to  value
that.  And  the Etruscan has been hinting at a vacancy, something
really small, but with a window. Looking  down  into  what  would
have been Lung Chun Road.

He  likes her, the Etruscan. It's weird. They say he doesn't like
anybody, really, but he fixed her father's  credit,  even  though
she'd  forgotten to leave the key. (She keeps the key to Suite 17
in a watered-silk cosmetics case they gave her on the JAL  flight
home:  it's  made  of  white plastic, molded to look like an old-
fashioned mechanical key, with a mag-strip down the long part and
the  flat  thing shaped like the crown a princess wears. She gets
it out and looks at it sometimes, but it just looks like a  cheap
white piece of plastic.)

The  Etruscan  and  the  others  spy on the Project all the time.
That's what they call it.  Through  them,  Chia  knows  that  the
idoru's  island  isn't finished yet. It's there but it isn't sta-
ble; something they have to do it before they  build,  even  with
nanotech,  in case another earthquake comes. She wonders what the
Russians will do with theirs, and  sometimes  she  wonders  about
Maryalice,  and  Eddie,  and Calvin, the guy at Whiskey Clone who
got her out of there, for no reason  other  than  he  thought  he
should.  But  it  seems  like a long time ago, between the Walled
City and school.

She figures her mother knows by now that she wasn't with  Hester,
but  her mother's never said anything about it, except to talk to
her twice about contraceptives and safe  sex.  And,  really,  she
wasn't  there  much  more  than  forty-eight hours, if you didn't
count the travel-time, because Rez hadn't been able  to  make  it
over  to thank her, and Arleigh had said that, all in all, it was
better if she got home before anybody started  asking  any  ques-
tions, but they'd send her first class on Japan Air Lines. So Ar-
leigh had driven her back out to Narita that night,  but  not  in
her green van because she said it was a writeoff. And she'd still
felt SO bad about Zona, and it made' her feel SO stupid,  because
she  felt  like  her  friend  was dead, but her friend hadn't !90
William Gib9on even really existed, and there was this other girl
in  Mexico  City,  with  terrible  problems,  and so she wound up
telling all that to Arleigh and just cryin~g.

And Arleiigh said she should just wait. Because that girl in Mex-
ico  City,  more  than anything else, needed to be somebody else.
And it didn't matter that she hadn't  been  Zona,  because  she'd
made Zona up, and that was just as real. Just wait, Arleigh said,
because somebody else would turn up, somebody new, and  it  would
be like they already knew you. And Chia had sat and thought about
that, beside Arleigh in heir fast little car.

-But I c:ouldn't ever tell her I knew?

-That would spoil it.

When they'd gotten to the airport, Arleigh checked her in at JAL,
found  somebody to take her to the lounge (which was sort of like
a cross between a bar and really fancy business office), and gave
her  a  bag  with  a  roadie-grade  Lo/Rez tour jacket in it. The
sleeves were made of  transparent  rayon,  and  the  lining  that
showed  through  that looked like liquid mercury. Arleigh said it
was really tacky, but maybe she had a friend who'd  like  it.  It
was  from  their Kombinat tour, and it had all the tour dates em-
broidered on the back in three different languages.

She hadn't ever worn it, and she'd never really shown it to  any-
body  either.  It  was  hanging  in  her closet, under a piece of
drycleaner's plastic. She hadn't really been that active  in  the
chapter lately. (Kelsey had dropped right out.) Chia didn't real-
ly feel that anybody in the chapter would get it, if she tried to
tell  them  what  had  happened, plus there were all the bits she
couldn't tell them anyway.

But mainly it was the City taking up her time,  because  Rez  and
Rei  were  there,  shadows  among the other shadows but still you
could tell. Working on their Project.

Plenty there who didn't like the idea, but plenty  who  did.  The
Erruscan  did.  He  said  it  was the craziest thing since they'd
turned that first kilifile inside out.

Sometimes Chia wondered if they all weren't just joking, because


291 it just seemed impossible that anyone  could  ever  do  that.
Build that, on an island in Tokyo Bay.

But the idoru said that that was where they wanted to live, now

that they were married. So they were going to do it.

And  if  they do, Chia thought, hearing the hiss of the Espresso-
matic, I'll go there.  292 William Gibson


All Tomorrow's Parties

By

William Gibson


1.      CARDBOARD CITY THROUGH this evenings tide of faces unreg-
istered,  unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrel-
las, the crowd descending like a single organism  into  the  sta-
tions  airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped
beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest  but  moderately
successful marine species.

Evolved  to  cope  with jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shopping
bags, ruthless briefcases, Yamazaki and his small burden  of  in-
formation  go down into the neon depths. Toward this tributary of
relative quiet, a tiled corridor connecting parallel  escalators.

Central  columns,  sheathed  in  green ceramic, support a ceiling
pocked with dust-furred ventilators, smoke  detectors,  speakers.
Behind  the columns, against the far wall, derelict shipping car-
tons huddle in a ragged train, improvised shelters constructed by
the  city's  homeless. Yamazaki halts, and in that moment all the
oceanic clatter of commuting feet washes in, no longer held  back
by  his  sense  of mission, and he deeply and sincerely wishes he
were elsewhere.  He winces, violently, as a fashionable young ma-
tron,  features  swathed in Chanel micropore, rolls over his toes
with an expensive three-wheeled stroller. Blurting  a  convulsive
apology,  Yamazaki glimpses the infant passenger through flexible
curtains of some pink-tinted plastic, the glow of a video display
winking  as  its  mother  trundles  determinedly  away.  Yamazaki
sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters. He  won-
ders  briefly  what  the passing commuters will think, to see him
enter the carton fifth from the left. It is scarcely  the  height
of his chest, longer than the others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap
of thumb-smudged white corrugate serving as  its  door.   Perhaps
the~~  will  not see him, he thinks. Just as he himself has never
seen anyone enter or exit one of these  tidy  hovels.  It  is  as
though  their  inhabitants are rendered invisible in the transac-
tion that allows such structures to exist in the context  of  the
station. lie is a student of

existential  sociology,  and such transactions have been his par-
ticular con- cern.  And now he hesitates, fighting  the  urge  to
remove  his shoes and place them beside the rather greasy-looking
pair of yellow plastic sandals arranged beside the entrance  flap
on  a  carefully  folded sheet of Parco gift wrap. No, he thinks,
imagining himself waylaid within, struggling with  faceless  ene-
mies in a labyrinth of cardboard. Best he not be shoeless.  Sigh-
ing again, he drops to his knees, the notebook clutched  in  both
hands.  He  kneels  for  an instant, hearing the hurrying feet of
those who pass behind him. Then he places the notebook on the ce-
ramic  tile of the station's floor and shoves it forward, beneath
the corrugate flap, and follows it on his hands  and  knees.   He
desperately hopes that he has found the right carton.  He freezes
there in unexpected light and  heat.  A  single  halogen  fixture
floods  the  tiny room with the frequency of desert sunlight. Un-
ventilated, it heats the space like a reptile's cage.  "Come in,"
says  the old man, in Japanese. "Don't leave your ass hanging out
that way." He is naked except for a sort of  breechclout  twisted
from  what may once have been a red T-shirt. He is seated, cross-
legged, on a ragged, paint-flecked tatami mat. He holds a bright-
ly  colored toy figure in one hand, a slender brush in the other.
Yamazaki sees that the thing is a model of some kind, a robot  or
military  exoskeleton.  It glitters in the sun-bright light, blue
and red and silver. Small tools are spread on the tatami: a razor
knife, a sprue cutter, curls of emery paper.  The old man is very
thin, clean-shaven but in need of a haircut. Wisps of  gray  hair
hang  on  either  side  of his face, and his mouth is set in what
looks to be a permanent scowl of disapproval.  He  wears  glasses
with heavy black plastic frames and archaically thick lenses. The
lenses catch the light.  Yamazaki creeps obediently into the car-
ton,  feeling  the  door  flap drop shut behind him. On hands and
knees, he resists the urge to try to bow.   "He's  waiting,"  the
old  man says, his brush tip poised above the figure in his hand.
"In there." Moving only his head.  Yamazaki sees that the  carton
has  been reinforced with mailing tubes, a system that echoes the
traditional post-and-beam architecture of Japan, the tubes lashed
together with lengths of salvaged poly-ribbon. There are too many
objects here, in this tiny space. Towels and blankets and cooking
pots  on  cardboard  shelves.  Books.  A  small  television.  "In
there?" Yamazaki indicates what he takes to be another door, like
the entrance to a hutch, curtained with a soiled square of melon-
yellow, foam-cored blanket, the sort of blanket one  finds  in  a
capsule hotel. But the brush tip dips to touch the model, and the
old man is lost in the concentration  this  requires,  soYamazaki
shuffles  on  hands  and knees across the absurdly tiny space and
draws the section of blanket aside. Darkness.  "Laney-San?"  What
seems  to be a crumpled sleeping bag. He smells sickness- "Yeah?"
A croak. "In here."  Drawing a deep breath, Yamazaki  crawls  in,
pushing  his  notebook  before him. When the melon-yellow blanket
falls across the entrance, brightness glows through the synthetic
fabric  and  the thin foam core, like tropical sunlight seen from
deep within some coral grotto.  "Laney?"   The  American  groans.
Seems  to  turn,  or sit up. Yamazaki can't see. Something covers
Laney's eyes. Red wink of a diode. Cables. Faint gleam of the in-
terface,  reflected  in  a  thin line against Laney's sweat-slick
cheekbone.  "I'm deep in, now," Laney says, and coughs.  "Deep in
what?"   "They didn't follow you, did they?"  "I don't think so."
"I could tell if they had."  Yamazaki feels  sweat  run  suddenly
from  both  his armpits, coursing down across his ribs. He forces
himself to breathe. The air here is foul, thick. He thinks of the
seventeen known strains of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis

Laney draws a ragged breath. "But they aren't looking for me, are
they?"

3 I "No," Yamazaki says, "they are looking for her."

"They won't find her," Laney says. "Not here. Not  anywhere.  Not
now.',

"Why did you run away, Laney?"

"The  syndrome,"  Laney says and coughs again, and Yamazaki feels
the smooth, deep shudder of an incoming maglev, somewhere  deeper
in  the station, not mechanical vibration but a vast pistoning of
displaced air. "It finally kicked in. The 5-SB. The  stalker  ef-
fect."  Yamazaki  hears feet hurrying by, perhaps an arm's length
away, behind the cardboard wall.

"It makes you cough?" Yamazaki blinks,  making  his  new  contact
lenses swim uncomfortably.

"No,"  Laney  says  and  coughs  into his pale and upraised hand.
"Some bug. They all have it, down here."

"I was worried when you vanished. They began to look for you, but
when she was gone-"

"The shit really hit the fan."

"Shit?"

Laney  reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones.
Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting  light
from  the  display reveals Laney's hollowed eyes. "It's all going
to change, Yamazaki. We're coming up on the mother of  all  nodal
points. I can see it, now. It's all going to change."

"I don't understand."

"Know  what  the  joke  is? It didn't change when they thought it
would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I've been  looking  at
history,  Yamazaki.  I  can see the nodal points in history. Last
time we had one like this was 1911."

"What happened in 1911?"

"Everything changed."

"How?"

"It just did. That's how it works. I can see it now"

"Laney," Yamazaki says, "when you told me about the  stalker  ef-
fect,  you  said  that the victims, the test subjects, became ob-
sessed with one particular media figure."  "Yes."

"And you are obsessed with her?"

Laney stares at him, eyes lit by a backwash  of  data.  "No.  Not
with her. Guy named Harwood. Cody Harwood. They're coming togeth-
er, though. In San Francisco. And someone else. Leaves a sort  of
negative  trace;  you  have to infer everything from the way he's
not there.

"Why did you ask me here, Laney? This is a terrible place. Do you
wish  me  to  help  you  to  escape?" Yamazaki is thinking of the
blades of the Swiss Army knife in his pocket. One of them is ser-
rated;  he could easily cut his way out through the wall. Yet the
psychological space is powerful, very  powerful,  and  overwhelms
him.  He feels very far from Shinjuku, from Tokyo, from anything.
He smells Laney's sweat. "You are not well."

"Rydell," Laney says, replacing the eyephones.  "That  rent-a-cop
from  the  Chateau.  The  one you knew. The one who told me about
you, back in LA."

"Yes?"

"I need a man on the ground, in San Francisco.  I've  managed  to
move  some  money.  I don't think they can trace it. I dcked with
DatArnerica's banking sector. Find Rydell and  tell  him  he  can
have it as a retainer."

"To do what?"

Laney  shakes  his  head. The cables on the eyephones move in the
dark like snakes. "He has to be there, is all. Something's coming
down. Everything's changing."

"Laney, you are sick, Let me take you-"

"Back  to  the  island? There's nothing there. Never will be, now
she's gone."

And Yamazaki knows this is true.

"Where's Rez?" Laney asks.

"He mounted a tour of the Kombinat states, when  he  decided  she
was gone."

Laney nods thoughtfully, the eyephones bobbing mantis-like in the
dark. "Get Rydell, Yamazaki. I'll tell you how  he  can  get  the
money"

5 "But why?"

"Because he's part of it. Part of the node."


LATER  Yamazaki stands, staring up at the towers of Shinjuku, the
walls of animated light, sign and signifier twisting  toward  the
sky  in  the  unending  ritual of commerce, of desire. Vast faces
fill the screens, icons of a beauty at once terrible and banal.

Somewhere below his feet, Laney huddles and coughs in  his  card-
board shelter, all of DatAmerica pressing steadily into his eyes.
Laney is his friend, and his friend is unwell. The American's pe-
culiar  talents  with data are the result of experimental trials,
in a federal orphanage in Florida, of a substance known as  5-SB.
Yamazaki  has seen what Laney can do with data, and what data can
do to Laney.

He has no wish to see it again.

As he lowers his eyes from  the  walls  of  light,  the  mediated
faces,  he  feels his contacts move, changing as they monitor his
depth of focus. This still unnerves him.

Not far from the station, down a side street bright  as  day,  he
finds the sort of kiosk that sells anonymous debit cards. He pur-
chases one. At another kiosk, he uses  it  to  buy  a  disposable
phone good for a total of thirty minutes, Tokyo-LA.

He asks his notebook for Rydell's number.  0        2.      Lucky
Dragon

Durius had finished sweeping up. He held the big industrial dust-
pan  carefully, headed for the inbuilt hospital-style sharps con-
tainer, the one with the barbed biohazard symbol. That was  where
they put the needles, when they found them.

They  averaged  five  or  six  a  week. Rydell had never actually
caught anyone shooting anything up, in  the  store,  although  he
wouldn't  have  put  it  past  them.  It  just seemed like people
dropped used needles on the floor, usually back by the cat  food.
You  could  find  other  things, sweeping up in the Lucky Dragon:
pills, foreign coins, hospital identification bracelets, crumpled
paper money from countries that still used it. Not that you want-
ed to go poking around in that dustpan. When Rydell swept up,  he
wore  the same Kevlar gloves that Durius was wearing now, and la-
tex underneath that.

He supposed Durius was right though, and it made you wonder:  all
the  new substances around to abuse, but people didn't forget the
ones that had been around forever. Make cigarettes illegal,  say,
and  people  found a way to keep smoking. The Lucky Dragon wasn't
allowed to sell rolling papers, but they did  a  brisk  trade  in
Mexican  hair-curler  papers  that  worked just as well. The most
popular brand was called Biggerhair, and Rydell wondered if  any-
one  had  ever  actually used any to curl their hair. And how did
you curl your hair with little rectangles of tissue paper anyway?

"Ten  minutes  to,"  Durius said over his shoulder. "You wanna do
the curb check?"

At four o'clock, one of them got to take a ten-minute break,  out
back.  If  Rydell did the curb check, it meant he got to take his
break first, then let Durius take one. The curb check  was  some-
thing  that Lucky Dragon's parent corporation, back in Singapore,
had instituted on the advice of an in-house team of American cul-
tural anthropologists. Mr.

7  I Park, the night manager, had explained this to Rydell, tick-
ing off points on his notebook. He'd tapped each paragraph on the
screen  for  emphasis,  sounding  thoroughly bored with the whole
thing, hut Rydell had supposed it was part of the  job,  and  Mr.
Park  was  a  definite  stickler. "'In order to demonstrate Lucky
Dragon's concern with  neighborhood  safety,  security  personnel
will  patrol  curb in front of location on a nightly basis.'" Ry-
dell had nodded. "You not out of store too long," Mr. Park added,
by  way  of  clarification.  "Five  minute.  Just before you take
break." Pause. Tap. "Lucky Dragon security presence will be high-
profile, friendly, sensitive to local culture.'"

"What's that mean?"

"Anybody sleeping, you make them move. Friendly way. Hooker work-
ing there, you say hello, tell joke, make her move."

"I'm scared of those old girls," Rydell said,  deadpan.  "Christ-
mastime, they dress up like Santa's elves."

"No hooker in front of Lucky Dragon."

"'Sensitive to local culture'?"

"Tell joke. Hooker like joke."

"Maybe  in Singapore," Durius had said, when Rydell had recounted
Park's instructions.

"He's not from Singapore," Rydell had said. "He's from Korea."

"So basically they want us to show ourselves, clear the  sidewalk
back a few yards, be friendly and sensitive?"

"And tell joke."

Durius  squinted.  "You know what kinda people hang in front of a
convenience store on Sunset, four in the morning? Kids on dancer,
tweaked  off their dimes, hallucinating monster movies. Guess who
gets to be the monster? Plus there's your more mature sociopaths;
older, more complicated, polypharmic .

"Say what?"

"Mix their shit," Durius said. "Get lateral."

"Gotta be done. Man says."

Durius  looked  at  Rydell. "You first." He was from Compton, and
the only person Rydell knew who had actually been born in Los An-
geles.

"You're bigger."  8 "Size ain't everything."

"Sure," Rydell had said.


ALL  that summer Rydell and Durius had been night security at the
Lucky Dragon, a purpose-built module that had been coptered  into
this  former car-rental lot on the Strip. Before that, Rydell had
been night security at the Chateau, just up the Street,  and  be-
fore  that  he'd  driven  a  wagon for IntenSecure. Still farther
back, briefly and he tried not to think about it too often,  he'd
been  a  police  officer  in  Knoxville,  Tennessee. Somewhere in
there, twice, he'd almost made the cut for Coiis  in  Trouble,  a
show he'd grown up on but now managed never to watch.

Working  nights at the Lucky Dragon was more interesting than Ry-
dell would have imagined. Durius said that was because it was the
only place around, for a mile or so, that sold anything that any-
one actually needed, on a regular basis or  otherwise.  Microwave
noodles,  diagnostic  kits  for most STDs, toothpaste, disposable
anything, Net access, gum, bottled water. . .  There  were  Lucky
Dragons all over America, all over the world for that matter, and
to prove it you had your trademark Lucky Dragon  Global  Interac-
tive  Video Column outside. You had to pass it entering and leav-
ing the store, so you'd see whichever  dozen  Lucky  Dragons  the
Sunset  franchise  happened  to be linked with at that particular
moment: Paris or Houston or  Brazzaville,  wherever.  These  were
shuffled,  every  three minutes, for the practical reason that it
had been determined that if the  maximum  viewing  time  was  any
more, kids in the world's duller suburbs would try to win bets by
having sex on camera. As it was, you  got  a  certain  amount  of
mooning and flashing. Or, still more common, like this shit-faced
guy in downtown Prague, as Rydell made his exit to  do  the  curb
check, displaying the universal finger.

"Same  here,"  Rydell said to this unknown Czech, hitching up the
neon-pink Lucky Dragon fanny pack he was contractually  obligated
to  wear on duty. He didn't mind that though, even if it did look
like shit: it was bulletproof, with a pull-up Kevlar baby bib  to
fasten around your neck if the going got rough. A severely later-
al customer with a ceramic

9 switchblade had tried to stab Rydell through the  Lucky  Dragon
logo  his  second  week on the job, and Rydell had sort of bonded
with the thing after that.

He had that switchblade up in  his  room  over  Mrs.  Siekevitz's
garage.  They'd  found it below the peanut butter, after the LAPD
had taken the lateral one away. It had a black blade that  looked
like  sandblasted glass. Rydell didn't like it; the ceramic blade
gave it a weird balance, and it was so sharp  that  he'd  already
cut  himself with it twice. He wasn't sure what he should do with
it.

Tonight's curb check looked dead simple.  There  was  a  Japanese
girl  standing  out there with a seriously amazing amount of legs
running down from an even more amazingly small amount of  shorts.
Well, sort of Japanese. Rydell found it hard to make distinctions
like that in LA. Durius said hybrid vigor was the  order  of  the
day,  and  Rydell  guessed  he  was right. This girl with all the
legs, she was nearly as tall  as  Rydell,  and  he  didn't  think
Japanese people usually were. But then maybe she'd grown up here,
and her family before her, and  the  local  food  had  made  them
taller.  He'd  heard  about  that happening. But, no, he decided,
getting closer, the thing was, she wasn't actually a girl.  Funny
how  you got that. Usually it wasn't anything too obvious. It was
like he really wanted to buy into everything she was doing to  be
a  girl,  but some subliminal message he got from her bone struc-
ture just wouldn't let him.

"Hey," he said.

"You want me to move?"

"Well," Rydell said, "I'm supposed to."

"I'm supposed to stand out here convincing a jaded  clientele  to
buy blow jobs. What's the difference?"

Rydell  thought about it. "You're freelance," he decided, "I'm on
salary. You go on down the street for  twenty  minutes,  nobody's
going  to  fire you." He could smell her perfume through the com-
plicated pollution and that ghostly hint of oranges you  got  out
here  sometimes.  There  were orange trees around, had to be, but
he'd never found one.

She was frowning at him. "Freelance."

"That's right."

She swayed expertly on her stacked heels, fishing a box  of  Rus-
sian  10  Marlboros from her pink patent purse. Passing cars were
already honking at the sight of the  Lucky  Dragon  security  man
talking  to  this six-foot-plus boygirl, and now she was deliber-
ately doing something illegal. She opened the  red-and-white  box
and  pointedly  offered  Rydell  a  cigarette.  There were two in
there, factory-made filter tips, but one  was  shorter  than  the
other and had blue metallic lipstick on it.

"No thanks."

She  took  out  the shorter one, partially smoked, and put it be-
tween her lips. "Know what I'd do  if  I  were  you?"  Her  lips,
around  the tan filter tip, looked like a pair of miniature water
beds plastered with glittery blue candy coat.

"What?"

She took a lighter from her purse. Like the  ones  they  sold  in
those tobacciana shops. They were going to make that illegal too,
he'd heard. She snapped it and lit her  cigarette.  Drew  in  the
smoke, held it, blew it out, away from Rydell. "I'd fuck off into
the air."

He looked into the Lucky Dragon and saw Durius say  something  to
Miss  Praisegod  Satansbane, the checker on this shift. She had a
fine sense of humor, Praisegod, and he guessed you had to, with a
name  like  that.  Her  parents  were  some particularly virulent
stripe of SoCal NeoPuritan, and had taken the name Satansbane be-
fore  Praisegod  had been born. The thing was, she'd explained to
Rydell, nobody much knew what "bane" meant, so if she told people
her  last name, they mostly figured she was a Satanist anyway. So
she often went by the surname Proby, which had been her  father's
before he'd gotten religion.

Now  Durius  said  something  else,  and Praisegod threw back her
shoulders and laughed. Rydell  sighed.  He  wished  it  had  been
Durius' turn to do curb check.

"Look,"  Rydell  said,  "I'm  not telling you you can't stand out
here. The sidewalk's public property. It's just that there's this
company policy."

"I'm  going  to  finish  this cigarette," she said, "and then I'm
calling my lawyer."

"Can't we just keep it simple?"

"Uh-uh." Big metallic-blue, collagen-swollen smile.

Rydell glanced over and saw Durius making hand signals at him.

11 Pointing to Praisegod, who held a phone. He hoped they  hadn't
called

LAPD.  He  had  a  feeling  this  girl  really did have herself a
lawyer, and

Mr. Park wouldn't like that.

Now Durius came out. "For you," he called. "Say it's Tokyo."

"Excuse me," Rydell said, and turned away. "Hey," she said.

"Hey what?" He looked back. "You're cute."   12  3.      DEEP  IN
LANEY hears his piss gurgle into the screw-top plastic liter bot-
tle. It's awkward kneeling here, in the dark, and he doesn't like
the way the bottle warms in his hand, filling. He caps it by feel
and stands it upright in the corner that's farthest from his head
when  he sleeps. In the morning, he'll carry it under his coat to
the Men's and empty it. The old man knows he's too  sick  now  to
crawl  out,  to  walk the corridor every time, but they have this
agreement. Laney pisses in the bottle and takes it  out  when  he
can.

He  doesn't know why the old man lets him stay here. He's offered
to pay, but the old man just keeps building his models. It  takes
him  a day to complete one, and they're always perfect. And where
do they go when he finishes them? And where do the  unbuilt  kits
come from?

Laney  has a theory that the old man is a sensei of kit-building,
a national treasure, with  connoisseurs  shipping  in  kits  from
around  the  world,  waiting anxiously for the master to complete
their vintage Gundams with his unequaled yet weirdly casual  pre-
cision,  his  Zen  moves,  perhaps leaving each one with a single
minute and somehow perfect flaw, at  once  his  signature  and  a
recognition  of  the  nature of the universe. How nothing is per-
fect, really. Nothing ever finished. Everything is process, Laney
assures  himself, zipping up, settling back into his squalid nest
of sleeping bags.

But the process is all a lot stranger than he ever bargained for,
he  reflects,  bunching a fold of sleeping bag to pillow his head
against the cardboard, through which he can feel  the  hard  tile
wall of the corridor.

Still,  he  thinks,  he ,weds to be here. If there's any place in
Tokyo Rez's people won't find him, this is  it.  He's  not  quite
sure  how  he got here; things got a little fuzzy around the time
the syndrome kicked in. Some kind of state  change,  some  global
shift  in  the  nature  of  his  perception. Insufficient memory.
Things hadn't stuck.

Now he wonders if in fact he did make some deal with the old man.
Maybe he's already covered this, the rent, whatever. Maybe that's
why

13 I the old man gives him food and bottles of flat mineral water
and  tolerates the smell of piss. He thinks that might be it, but
he isn't sure.

It's dark in here, but he sees colors, faint flares  and  swathes
and  stipplings,  moving.  Like the afterimages of the DatAmerica
flows are permanent now, retinally ingrained. No light penetrates
from  the  corridor outside-he's blocked every pinhole with black
tape-and the old man's halogen is off. He  assumes  the  old  man
sleeps  there,  but  he's  never  seen him do it, never heard any
sounds that might indicate a transition  from  model-building  to
sleep. Maybe the old man sleeps upright on his mat, Gundam in one
hand, brush in the other.

Sometimes he can hear music from the adjacent cartons,  but  it's
faint, as though the neighbors use earphones.

He  has  no  idea  how many people live here in this corridor. It
looks as though there might be room for six, but he's seen  more,
and  it  may  be  that  they  shelter  here in shifts. He's never
learned much Japanese, not after eight months,  and  even  if  he
could  understand,  he  guesses,  these people are all crazy, and
they'd only talk about the things crazy people talk about.

And of course anyone who could see him here now, with  his  fever
and  his  sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port
and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too.

But he isn't. He knows he isn't, in spite of everything.  He  has
the  syndrome  now,  the thing that came after every test subject
from that Gainesville orphanage, but he  isn't  crazy.  Just  ob-
sessed.  And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own
texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can  differen-
tiate,  so  he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on
it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn't him. It reminds him of
having  a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love
and didn't want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth,  or
how  he'd always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the
beloved.

But the syndrome wasn't like that. It was separate from  him  and
had nothing to do with anyone or anything he, Laney, was even in-
terested in. When he'd felt it starting, he'd taken it for grant-
ed  that  it would be about her, about Rei Toei, because there he
was, close to her, or as close 14 as you could get to anyone  who
didn't  physically exist. 'I~hey'd tasked almost every day, Laney
and the idoru.

And at first, he considered now, maybe it had been about her, hut
then  it was as though he'd been following something hack through
the data flows, doing it without really thinking  about  it,  the
way  your  hand will find a thread on a garment and start pulling
at it, unraveling it.

And what had unraveled was the way he'd thought the world worked.
And behind that he'd found Harwood, who was famous, but famous in
that way of being famous for being famous. Harwood who they  said
had elected the president. Harwood the PR genius, who'd inherited
Harwood Levine, the most powerful PR firm in the world,  and  had
taken  it  somewhere  seriously else, into a whole other realm of
influence, But who'd managed somehow never to become prey to  the
mechanism  of celebrity itself. Which grinds, Laney so well knew,
exceedingly fine, Harwood who, maybe, just maybe, ran it all, but
somehow  managed  never to get his toe caught in it. Who managed,
somehow, to be famous without seeming  to  be  important,  famous
without being central to anything. Really, he'd never even gotten
much attention, except when he'd split with Maria Paz,  and  even
then  it  had  been the Padanian star who'd made the top of every
sequence, with Cody Harwood smiling from a  series  of  sidebars,
embedded  hypertext lozenges: the beauty and this gentle-looking,
secretive, pointedly uncharismatic billionaire.

"Hello," Laney says, his fingers finding the handle of a mechani-
cal  flashlight  from  Nepal,  a  crude thing, its tiny generator
driven by a mechanism like a pair of spring-loaded pliers.  Pump-
ing  it to life, he raises it, the faintly fluctuating beam find-
ing the cardboard ceiling. Which is plastered, inch by inch, with
dozens of stickers, small and rectangular, produced to order by a
vending machine inside the station's west entrance:  each  one  a
different shot of the reclusive Harwood.

He  can't remember going to the machine, executing a simple image
search for Harwood, and paying to have these printed out, but  he
supposes  he  must have. Because he knows that that is where they
are from. But neither can he remember peeling the adhesive  back-
ing  from each One and sticking them up on the ceiling. But some-
one did. "I see you," Laney says and relaxes  his  hand,  letting
the dim beam brown and vanish.

15 4.      FORMAL ABSENCES OF PRECIOUS THINGS


IN  Market Street, the nameless man who haunts Laney's nodal con-
figuration has just seen a girl.

Drowned down three decades, she steps fresh as creation from  the
bronze  doors  of  some  brokerage. And he remembers, in that in-
stant, that she is dead, and he is not, and that this is  another
century,  and  this quite clearly another girl, some newly minted
stranger, one with whom he will never speak.

And passing this one now, through a faint chromatic mist  of  in-
coming  night, he bows his head some subtle increment in honor of
that other, that earlier passing.

And sighs within his long coat, and the harness he wears  beneath
that:  a taking in and giving up of one resigned breath, thronged
around by the traders descending from their various places of em-
ployment.  Who continue to emerge into the October street, toward
drink or dinner or whatever home, whatever sleep, awaits them.

But now the one with whom he will not speak is gone as well,  and
he  awash in some emotion, not loss exactly but a very particular
awareness of his own duration in the world and in its cities, and
this one most of all.

Beneath  his  right arm, reliably concealed, depends a knife that
sleeps head down, like a vampire bat, honed to that edge required
by surgeons, when surgeons cut with steel.

It  is  secured  there  with  magnets set within a simple hilt of
nickel silver. The blade's angled tip, recalling a wood  carver's
chisel, inclines toward the dark arterial pulse in the pit of his
arm, as if reminding him that he too is  only  ever  inches  from
that place the drowned girl went, so long ago, that timelessness.
That other country, waiting.

He is by trade a keeper of the door to that country.

Drawn, the black blade becomes a key. When he holds it, he  holds
the wind in his hand.  16 The door swings gently open.

But  he  does  not  draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-
haired man, wolfishly professorial, in a coat of  grayish  green,
the  color  of  certain  lichens, who blinks behind the fine gold
rims of his small round glasses and raises his  hand  to  halt  a
passing  cab.  Though  somehow they do not, as they easily might,
rush to claim it as their own, and the man steps past  them,  his
cheeks  seamed  vertically  in deep parentheses, as though it has
been his habit frequently to smile. They do not see him smile.


THE Tao, he reminds himself, mired in traffic on Post Street,  is
older than God.

He  sees  a  beggar  seated beneath a jeweler's windows. In those
windows are small empty pedestals, formal  absences  of  precious
things, locked away now for the night. The beggar has wrapped his
legs and feet in brown paper tape, and the effect is  startlingly
medieval,  as though someone has partially sculpted a knight from
office materials. The trim calves, the tapered toes, an  elegance
calling  out  for  ribbons.  Above the tape, the man is a blur, a
spastic scribble, his being abraded by concrete  and  misfortune.
He  has  become  the  color  of  pavement, his very race in ques-
tion.       -

The cab lurches forward. The man in the loden coat reaches within
it  to  adjust the knife against his ribs. He is left-handed, and
he has thought often about such subtle polarities.

The girl who drowned so long ago has settled now, swept down in a
swirl  of  toffee  hair  and  less hurtful memories, to where his
youth turns gently, in its accustomed tides, and he is more  com-
fortable that way.

The past is past, the future unformed.

There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

And  now he leans forward, to rap, once, upon the driver's tinted
safety shield.

He asks to be taken to the bridge.


THE cab draws up before a rain-stained tumble  of  concrete  tank
traps,  huge rhomboids streaked with rust, covered with the styl-
ized initials of forgotten lovers.

This spot has a certain place in the local mythology  of  romance
and has been the subject of any number of popular ballads.

"Pardon  me, sir," says the cab driver, through several layers of
protective plastic and digital translation, "but do you  wish  me
to  leave you here? This neighborhood is dangerous. I will be un-
able to wait for you." The question  is  rote,  required  by  law
against the possibility of litigation.

"Thank  you.  I  will  be in no danger." His English as formal as
that of the translation program. He hears a musical  rattle,  his
words  rendered  in some Asian language he doesn't recognize. The
driver's brown eyes look back at  him,  mild  and  dispassionate,
through goggles, shield; multiple layers of reflection.

The driver releases a magnetic lock.

The  man opens the door and steps from the cab, straightening his
coat. Above him, beyond the tank traps, lift the ragged, swooping
terraces,  the  patchwork  superstructure  in which the bridge is
wrapped. Some aspect of his mood lifts: it is a famous  sight,  a
tourist's postcard, the very image of this city.

He closes the door, and the cab pulls away, leaving behind it the
baking-sugar sweetness of exhausted gasohol.

He stands looking up at the bridge, at the  silvered  plywood  of
uncounted  tiny  dwellings, it reminds him of the favelas of Rio,
though the scale of the parts is different, somehow. There  is  a
fairy  quality  to the secondary construction, in contrast to the
alternating swoop and verticality of the core structure's  poetry
of  suspension. The individual shelters-if in fact they are shel-
ters-are very small, space being at an absolute premium.  He  re-
members  seeing  the  entrance  to the lower roadway flanked with
guttering torches, though now, he knows,  the  residents  largely
cooperate with the city's air-pollution measures.

"Dancer?"

In concrete shadow she palms the tiny vial. Feral grimace intend-
ed to facilitate commerce.  This  drug  causes  the  user's  gums
steadily  to recede, producing in those few who survive its other
rigors a characteristic and terrible smile.

He replies with his eyes, the force of his gaze punching  through
her  intent as if through paper. Briefly in her eyes the light of
panic, then she is gone.

Toffee hair swirls in the depths.

He looks down at the toes of his shoes. They are black  and  very
precise, against the random mosaic of impacted litter.

He  steps  over  an empty can of King Cobra and walks between the
nearest rhomboids, toward the bridge.

These are not kindly shadows through which he moves, the legs  of
his narrow trousers like the blades of a deeper darkness. This is
a lurking place, where wolves come down to wait  for  the  weaker
sheep.  He  has  no fear of wolves, nor of any other predator the
city might field, tonight or any other night. He simply  observes
these things, in the moment.

But  now  he  allows  himself to anticipate the sight that awaits
him, past the last rhomboid: the bridge's mad maw, the gateway to
dream  and  memory,  where  sellers of fish spread their wares on
beds of dirty ice. A perpetual bustle, a coming and  going,  that
he honors as the city's very pulse.

And  steps  out,  into  unexpected light, faux-neon redline glare
above a smooth sweep of Singaporean plastic. -

Memory is violated.

Someone brushes past him, too close, unseeing,  and  very  nearly
dies,  the magnets letting go with that faint click that he feels
more than hears. But he does not draw the blade  fully,  and  the
drunk staggers on, oblivious.

He reseats the hilt and stares bleakly at this latest imposition:

LUCKY DRAGON swirling in bland script up a sort of fin  or  pylon
whose base seems comprised of dozens of crawling video screens.

19 5.      MARIACHI STATIC

"Production  coordinator,"  Rydell  said, wishing the vodka would
put his passenger, whose  name  was  Buell  Creedmore,  to  sleep
again.  The  man  had spent the better part of their drive up the
coast asleep, snoring lightly, and  Rydell  hadn't  minded  that.
Creedmore  was  a  friend,  or  maybe more of an acquaintance, of
Durius Walker's. Durius had been a drug dealer before,  in  South
Central, and had gotten addicted to the stuff. Now that he'd got-
ten his recovery, he spent a lot of time with  other  people  who
had  drug  problems,  trying  to  help them. Rydell assumed Buell
Creedmore was one of those, though as far he could  see  the  man
was just basically a drunk.

"Bet  that  one  burned  your ass," Creedmore said, his eyes slit
with spirits. He was a small man, lightly built, but  roped  with
the  sort  of whipcord muscle that had never seen the inside of a
gym. Ditchdigger muscle. What Rydell took to be several layers of
artificial tan were wearing off over an inherent pallor. Bleached
hair with dark roots was slicked straight back with some  product
that  kept  it looking like he'd just stepped out of a shower. He
hadn't, though, and he was sweating in spite  of  the  air-condi-
tioning.

"Well," Rydell said, "I figured it's her call."

"What  kind  of bleeding-ass liberal bullshit is that?" Creedmore
asked. He pulled the bottle from his waistband and eyed  the  re-
maining liquor narrowly, as though he were a carpenter checking a
level. It seemed to fail to meet his standards just then,  so  he
returned  it  to  its  20  place behind the commemorative plaque.
"What kind of man are you, anyway?"

Rydell briefly entertained the idea of pulling over on  the  mar-
gin,

beating  Creedmore  senseless, then leaving him there at the side
of the five, to get up to San Francisco as best he could. But  he
didn't and, in fact, said nothing.

"Pussy-assed attitude like that, that's what's wrong with America
today."

Rydell thought about illegal choke holds,  brief  judicious  con-
striction  of  the  carotid artery. Maybe Creedmore wouldn't even
remember if Rydell put one on him. But it wouldn't keep  him  un-
der,  not that long anyway, and they'd taught Rydell in Knoxville
that you couldn't count on how a drunk would react to anything.

"Hey, Buell," Rydell asked, "whose car is this anyway?"

Creedmore fell silent. Grew, Rydell felt, restive.

Rydell had wondered from the  start  if  the  car  might  not  be
stolen.  He  hadn't  wanted  to think about it really, because he
needed the ride up to NoCal. A plane ticket would've had to  come
out  of  his severance from the Lucky Dragon store, and he had to
be extra careful with that until he  determined  whether  or  not
there  was  anything  to this story of '~mazaki's, that there was
money for him to earn, up in San Francisco.

Yamazaki was deep, Rydell told himself. He'd never actually  fig-
ured  out  what  it  was  that  Yamazaki did. Sort of a freelance
Japanese anthropologist who studied Americans, as near as  Rydell
could  tell. Maybe the Japanese equivalent of the Americans Lucky
Dragon hired to tell them they needed a curb check. Good man, Ya-
mazaki,  but  not  easy to say where he was coming from. The last
time he'd heard from Yamazaki, he'd wanted Rydell to find  him  a
netrunner,  and Rydell had sent him this guy named Laney, a quan-
titative researcher who'd just quit Slitscan, and had been moping
around  the  Chateau,  running up a big bill. Laney had taken the
job, had gone over to Tokyo, and Rydell had  subsequently  gotten
fired for, they called it, fraternizing with the guests. That was
basically how Rydell had wound up working  night  security  in  a
nience store, because he'd tried to help Yamazaki.
 21  Now  he  was driving this Hawker-Aichi roadster up the Five,
very definitely the designated driver, no idea what  was  waiting
for  him  up  there, and halfway wondering if he weren't about to
transport a stolen vehicle across a state line. And  all  because
Yamazaki said that that same Laney, over in Tokyo, wanted to hire
him to do some fieldwork.  That  was  what  Yamazaki  called  it,
"fieldwork."

And  that, after he'd talked with Durius, had been enough for Ry-
dell.

The Lucky Dragon had been starting to  get  old  for  Rydell.  He
hadn't  ever  gotten  along with Mr. Park too well, and when he'd
take his break, out back, after the  curb  check  every  morning,
he'd  started  to feel really down. The patch of ground the Lucky
Dragon had been set down on was sort of scooped out of  the  foot
of the hillside there, and at some point the exposed, nearly ver-
tical cut had been quake-proofed with some kind of  weird,  gray,
rubbery  polymer,  a perpetual semi-liquid that knit the soil be-
hind it together and  trapped  whatever  was  thrown  or  pressed
against  it  in  a  grip like summer tar. The polymer was studded
with hubcaps, because the place had been a car lot once.  Hubcaps
and  bottles and more nameless junk. In the funk that had started
to come over him, out back there on his breaks,  he'd  collect  a
handful  of  rocks  and stand there, throwing them, as hard as he
could, into the polymer. They didn't make much of  a  noise  when
they  hit,  and  in  fact  they  vanished  entirely.  Just ripped
straight into it and then it sealed over behind them, like  noth-
ing had happened. And Rydell had started to see that as emblemat-
ic of broader things, how he was like those rocks, in his passage
through  the  world,  and  how the polymer was like life, sealing
over behind him, never leaving any trace at all  that  he'd  been
there.

And  when  Durius  would come back to take his own break and tell
Rydell it was time to get back out front, sometimes he'd find Ry-
dell that way, throwing those rocks.

"Hit  you  a hubcap, man," Durius would advise, "break you a bot-
tle."

But Rydell hadn't wanted to.

And when Rydel! had told Durius about Yamazaki and Laney and some
money, maybe, to be made up in San Francisco, Durius had listened
carefully, asking a few questions, then advised Rydell to go  for
it.  22 "What about job security?" Rydell had asked. "Job securi-
ty? Doing this shit? Are you  crazy?"  "Benefits,"  Rydell  coun-
tered.

"You  tried  to  actually  use the medical coverage they give you
here?

Gotta go to Tiajuana to get it."  "ll," Rydell had said, "I don't
like to just quit."

"That's  'cause  you got fired from every last job you ever had,"
Durius had explained. "I seen your résumé."

So Rydell had given Mr. Park written notice,  and  Mr.  Park  had
promptly  fired  him,  citing numerous violations of Lucky Dragon
policy on Rydell's part, up to and including offering medical aid
to  the victim of a one-car collision on Sunset, an act which Mr.
Park insisted could have involved Lucky Dragon's parent  corpora-
tion in costly insurance litigation.

"But she walked in here under her own power," Rydell had protest-
ed. "All I did was offer her a bottle of iced tea  and  call  the
traffic cops."

"Smart lawyer claim ice tea put her in systemic shock."

"Shock my butt."

But  Mr.  Park  had known that if he fired Rydell, the last. pay-
check would be smaller than if Rydell quit.

Praisegod, who could get all emotional if  someone  was  leaving,
had  cried  and  given  him a big hug, and then, as he'd left the
store, she'd slipped him a pair of Brazilian GPS sunglasses, with
inbuilt  phone  and  AM-FM  radio,  about the most expensive item
Lucky Dragon carried. Rydell hadn't wanted to take them,  because
he knew they'd turn up missing on the next inventory.

"Fuck the inventory," Praisegod had said.

Back  in  his  room over Mrs. Siekevitz's garage, six blocks away
and just below Sunset, Rydell had stretched out on his narrow bed
and  tried to get the radio in the glasses to work. All he'd been
able to get, though, was  static,  faintly  inflected  with  what
might have been mariachi music.

He'd done a little better with the GPS, which had a rocker keypad
built into the right temple. The fifteen-channel receiver  seemed
to have really good lock-on, but the tutorial seemed to have been
translated                 23 badly, and all Rydell could do  was
zoom  in  and out of what he quickly realized was a street map of
Rio, not LA. Still, he'd thought, taking the  glasses  off,  he'd
get the hang of it. Then the phone in the left temple had beeped,
so he'd put the glasses back on.

"Yeah?"

"Rydell, hey."

"Hey, Durius."

"You want a ride up to NoCal tomorrow in a nice new car?"

"W/ho's going?"

"Name of Creedmore. Knows a guy I know in the program."

Rydell had had an uncle who was a Mason, and this program  Durius
belonged  to  reminded  him  of  that. "Yeah? Well, I mean, is he
okay?"

"Prob'ly not," Durius had said, cheerfully, "so he needs a  driv-
er.  This  three-week-old  'lectric needs to get ferried up there
though, and he says it's fine to drive. You used to be a  driver,
didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it's free. This Creedmore, he'll pay for the charge."

Which was how Rydell came to find himself, now, driving a Hawker-
Aichi two-seater, one of those low-slung  wedges  of  performance
materials  that probably weighed, minus its human cargo, about as
much as a pair of small motorcycles. There didn't seem to be  any
metal  involved at all, just streamlined foam-core sandwiches re-
inforced with carbon fiber. The motor was in the  back,  and  the
fuel  cells were distributed through the foam sandwiches that si-
multaneously passed for chassis and bodywork. Rydell didn't  want
to  know  what  happened if you hit something, driving a rig like
this.

It was damn near silent though,  handled  beautifully,  and  went
like  a  bat  once you got it up to speed. Something about it re-
minded Rydell of a recumbent bicycle he'd once ridden, except you
didn't have to pedal.

"You never did tell me whose car this is," Rydell reminded Creed-
more, who'd just downed the last two fingers of his vodka.

"This friend of mine," Creedmore said, powering down  the  window
on  his  side and tossing out the empty bottle.  24 "Hey," Rydell
said, "that's a ten-thousand-dollar fine, they catch  you:  "They
can  kiss  our  asses  good-bye,  is what they can do," Creedmore
said. "Sons of bitches," he  added,  then  closed  his  eyes  and
slept.

Rydell  found himself starting to think about Chevette again. Re-
gretting he'd ever let the singer get him on the topic.  He  knew
he didn't want to think about that.

Just drive, he told himself,

On a brown hillside, off to his right, a wind farm's white masts.
Late afternoon sunlight.

Just drive.

25 6.      SJLENC)O SILENCIO gets to carry. lie's  the  smallest,
looks  almost  like  a  kid. He doesn't use, and if the cops grab
him, he can't talk. Or anyway about the stuff.

Silencio has been following Raton and Playboy around for a  while
now,  watching them use, watching them get the money they need in
order to keep using. Raton gets mean when he's  needing  to  use,
and  Silencio's  learned to keep back from him then, out of range
of feet and fists.

Raton has a long, narrow skull and wears contacts  with  vertical
irises,  like  a  snake. Silencio wonders if Raton is supposed to
look like a rat who's eaten a snake, and now maybe the  snake  is
looking out through its eyes. Playboy says Raton is a pinche Chu-
pacabra from Watsonville and they all look this way.

Playboy is the biggest, his bulk wrapped in a long,  formal  top-
coat  worn  over  jeans and old work boots. He has a Pancho Villa
mustache, yellow aviator glasses, a black fedora. He is kinder to
Silencio,  buys him burritos from the stalls, water, cans of pop,
one time a big smooth drink made from fruit.

Silencio wonders if maybe Playboy is his father. He doesn't  know
who his father might be. His mother is crazy, back in los projec-
tos. He doesn't think Playboy is his father  really,  because  he
remembers  how he met Playboy in the market on Bryant Street, and
that was just an accident, but sometimes he wonders anyway,  when
Playboy buys him food.

Silencio  sits  watching  Raton and Playboy use, here behind this
empty stall with its smell of apples. Raton has a  little  flash-
light  in  his  mouth  so  he can see what he is doing. It is the
black tonight, and Raton is cutting the little plastic tube  with
the special knife, its handle longer than its short curved blade.
The three of them are sitting on plastic crates.

Raton and Playboy use the black two, maybe three times in  a  day
and  a  night. Three times with the black, then they must use the
white 26 as well. The white is more expensive, hut too much black
and  they  start  to  talk  fast and maybe see people who are not
there. "Speaking with Jesus," Playboy calls that, hut  the  white
he  calls  "walking  with the king." But it is not walking: white
brings stillness, silence,  sleep.  Silencio  prefers  the  white
nights.

Silencio  knows that they buy the white from a black man, but the
black from a white man, and he assumes this is  the  mystery  de-
picted  in  the picture Raton wears on the chain around his neck:
the black and the  white  teardrops  swirling  together  to  make
roundness;  in  the white teardrop a small round of black, in the
black a small round of white.

To get the money they talk to people, usually in dark places,  so
the people are frightened. Sometimes Raton shows them a different
knife, while Playboy holds their arms so they  cannot  move.  The
money  is  in  little  tabs of plastic printed with pictures that
move. Silencio would like to keep these when the  money  is  gone
out  of  them, but this is not allowed. Playboy throws them away,
after wiping them carefully. He drops them down the slots  beside
the  street. He does not want his fingers to leave marks on them.
Sometimes Raton hurts the people, so  that  they  will  tell  the
charms  that make money come from the moving pictures. The charms
are names, letters, numbers. Silencio knows every charm that  Ra-
ton  and  Playboy  have learned, but they do not know this; if he
told them, they might be angry.

The three of them sleep in a room in the Mission.  Playboy  pulls
the  mattress  from  the  bed  and  puts it on the floor. Playboy
sleeps there, Raton on the other part of the bed. Silencio sleeps
on the floor.

Now  Raton  has  cut the tube and puts half of the black on Play-
boy's finger. Playboy has licked his finger  so  the  black  will
stick.  Playboy  puts  the finger in his mouth and rubs the black
against his gums. Silencio wonders what it tastes  like,  but  he
does  not ever wish to speak with Jesus. Now Raton is rubbing his
own gums with black, the flashlight forgotten in his other  hand.
Raton  and  Playboy look foolish doing this, but it does not make
Silencio laugh. Soon they will want to use again, and  the  black
gives them energy to get the money they will need. Silencio knows
there is now no money, because they have not eaten Since  yester-
day.

27  Usually  they  find people in the dark places between the big
shapes at the foot of Bryant Street, but now Raton thinks the po-
lice  are watching those places. Raton has told Silencio that the
police can see in the dark. Silencio has looked at  the  eyes  of
the  police, passing in their cars, and wondered how they can see
in the dark.

But tonight Raton has led them out, onto the bridge where  people
live,  and he says they will find money here. Playboy has said he
does not like the bridge, because the bridge people  are  pinche;
they  do  not  like  outsiders  working here. Raton says he feels
lucky.

Raton tosses the empty vial into the darkness, and Silencio hears
it hit something, a single small click.

Raton's snake-eyes are wide with the black. He runs his hand back
through his hair and gestures. Playboy and Silencio follow him.


SILENCID passes the bodega for the second time, watching the  man
in  his long coat, where he sits at his small white table, drink-
ing coffee.

Raton says it is a fine coat. See the old man's glasses, says Ra-
ton:

they  are  made  of gold. Silencio supposes Playboy's are made of
gold too, but Playboy's have yellow glass. The man's  are  plain.
He  has gray hair cut very short and deep lines in his cheeks. He
sits alone, looking at the smallest cup of  coffee  Silencio  has
ever seen. A doll's cup.

They  have followed the old man here. He has walked in the direc-
tion of Treasure Island. This part  of  the  bridge  is  for  the
tourists,  Playboy says. There are bodegas, shops with glass win-
dows, many people walking.

Now they are waiting to see which way the old man  goes  when  he
finishes  his  little coffee. If he walks back, toward Bryant, it
will be difficult. If he goes  on,  toward  Treasure,  Baton  and
Playboy will be happy.

It is Silencio's job to tell them when the man leaves.

Silencio feels the man's eyes on him as he passes, but the man is
only watching the crowd.


SILENCIO watches Raton and Playboy follow the man toward Treasure
Island.

They  are  in  the  bridge's  lower level now, and Silencio keeps
looking 28 up to see the bottom of  the  upper  deck,  its  paint
peeling. It reminds him of a wall in los projectos. There are on-
ly a few bridge people here. Only a few  lights.  The  man  walks
easily.  He  does not hurry. Silencio feels the man is only walk-
ing; he has nowhere to go. Silencio feels the man needs  nothing:
he  is  not looking for money, to eat or to use. This must be be-
cause he already has the money he needs to eat  or  to  use,  and
this  is  why Raton and Playboy have chosen him, because they see
he has the money they need.

Raton and Playboy keep pace with the man,  but  they  hang  back.
They  do  not walk together. Playboy has his hands in the pockets
of his big coat. He has taken off his yellow glasses and his eyes
are  dark-circled with the look of those who have used the black.
He looks sad when he is going to get the money to use.  He  looks
like he is paying very close attention.

Silencio  follows them, looking back sometimes. Now it is his job
to tell them if someone comes.

The man stops, looking into the window of a shop. Silencio  steps
behind  a  cart piled with rolls of plastic, as he sees Raton and
Playboy

step behind other things, in case the man  looks  back.  The  man
doesn't,  but  Silencio wonders if the man is watching the street
in the glass. Silencio has done this himself.

The man does not look back. He stands with his hands in the pock-
ets of his long coat, looking into the glass.

Silencio  unbuttons  his  jeans  and  quietly waters the rolls of
plastic, careful that it makes no sound. As he buttons his jeans,
he  sees  the  man step away from the window, still moving toward
Treasure, where Playboy says there are people who live like  ani-
mals.  Silencio, who knows only dogs and pigeons and gulls, has a
picture in his head of dog-toothed men with wings. When  Silencio
has a picture in his head, the picture doesn't go away.

Stepping  from  behind the cart, as Raton and Playboy step out to
follow the man, Sjlencio sees the man turn right. Gone.  The  man
is  gone.  Silencio  blinks,  rubs his knuckles against his eyes,
looks again. Raton and Playboy are walking faster now.  They  are
not  trying to hide. Silencio walks faster too not to be lost and
amves at the place where the man


29

turned. Baton's narrow back goes around that corner, after  Play-
boy, and is gone.

Silencio  stops. Feels his heart beating. Steps forward and looks
around the corner.

It is a space where a shop is meant to be, but there is no  shop.
Sheets  of  plastic  hang  down  from above. Pieces of wood, more
rolls of plastic. He sees the man.

The man stands at the back of the space and looks from Playboy to
Raton  to  Silencio. Looks through the round pieces of glass. Si-
lencio feels how still the man is.

Playboy is walking toward the man, his boots  stepping  over  the
wood,  the  plastic. Playboy says nothing. His hands are still in
the pockets of his coat. Raton is not moving but is ready to, and
then  he  takes  the  knife  from where he keeps it and opens it,
flicking his wrist that way he practices, letting the man see it.

The  man's face does not change when he sees it, and Silencio re-
members other faces, how  they  changed  when  they  saw  Raton's
knife.

Now  Playboy steps down from the last of the wood, his hands com-
ing out to take the man by the arms and spin him. That is how  it
is done.

Silencio sees the man move but only, it seems, a little.

Everything stops.

Silencio  knows  that  he has seen the man's left hand reach into
the long coat, which was buttoned before  but  now  is  not.  But
somehow  he  has not seen that hand return, and still it has. The
man stands with his fist against Playboy's  chest,  just  at  the
center.  Pressing  the thumb of his closed fist against Playboy's
coat. And Playboy is not moving. His hands have  stopped,  almost
touching the man, fingers spread, but he is not moving.

And  then  Silencio sees Playboy's fingers close, on nothing, and
open. And the man's right hand comes up to push Playboy back, and
the thin black thing is pulled out of Playboy's chest, and Silen-
cio wonders how long it could have been hidden there, and Playboy
falls back over the wood and the rolls of plastic.

Silencio  hears  someone say pinche madre and this is Raton. When
Raton uses the black and fights, he is very fast and you  do  not
know  30 what he will do; he hurts people and then shakes, laugh-
ing, sucking air through his mouth. Now he comes over  the  rolls
of plastic like he is flying, with his knife shining in his hand,
and Silencio sees the picture of a man with dog teeth and  wings,
and  Raton's  teeth  are like that, his snake eyes wide.  And the
black thing, like a long wet thumb, goes  through  Raton's  neck.
And everything stops again.

Then Raton tries to speak, and blood comes on his lips. He swings
his knife at the man, but the knife cuts only  air,  and  Raton's
fingers can no longer hold it.

The man pulls the black thing from Raton's throat. Raton sways on
loose knees, and Silencio thinks of how it is when Raton uses too
much  white, then tries to walk. Raton puts his hands up to cover
his throat on both sides. His mouth moves, but no words come out.
One  of  Raton's snake eyes falls out. The eye behind it is round
and brown.

Raton falls down on his  knees,  with  his  hands  still  on  his
throat.  His  snake eye and his brown eye look up at the man, and
Silencio feels they look from different distances, seeing differ-
ent things.

Then Raton makes a small, soft sound in his throat and falls over
backward, still on his knees, so that he lies on  his  back  with
his  knees  spread  wide  and his legs twisted back, and Silencio
watches Raton's gray pants go dark between his legs.

Silencio looks at the man. Who is looking at him.

Silencio looks at the black knife, how  it  rests  in  the  man's
hand.  He  feels that the knife holds the man. That the knife may
decide to move.

Then the man moves the knife. Its point is  almost  square,  like
the  real point has been snapped off. It only moves a little. Si-
lencio understands this means he must move.

He steps sideways, so the man can see him.

The point moves again. Silencio understands.

Closer.          ALL TOMORROW S PARTIES  31 I 7.      SHAREHOUSE


LEAVE a house empty in Malibu, Tessa told Chevette, and  you  get
the  kind of people come down from the hills and barbecue dogs in
your fireplace.

Hard to get rid of, those kind of people, and locks wouldn't keep
them  out.  That was why the people who used to live here, before
the Spill, were willing to rent them out to students.

Tessa was Australian, a media sciences student  at  USC  and  the
reason Chevette was out here now, couching it.

Well,  that and the fact that she, Chevette, didn't have a job or
any money, now she'd split with Carson.

Tessa said Carson was a piece of work.

And look where it had all gotten her, Chevette  thought,  pumping
her  way  up  the trainer's illusion of a Swiss mountain road and
trying to ignore the reek of moldy laundry from the other side of
the  drywall  partition.  Someone  had left a wet load in the ma-
chine, probably last Tuesday, before the fire,  and  now  it  was
rotting in there.

Which  was  too bad, because that made it hard to get into riding
the trainer. You could configure it for a dozen different  bikes,
and  as  many terrains, and Chevette liked this one, an old-fash-
ioned steel-frame ten-speed you could take up this mountain road,
wildflowers  blurring  in  your  peripheral vision. Her other fa-
vorite was a balloon-tired cruiser you rode along a beach,  which
was  good  for  Malibu because you couldn't ride along the beach,
not unless you wanted to climb over rusty razor wire  and  ignore
the biohazard warnings every hundred feet.

But  that  gym-sock  mildew reek kept catching in the back of her
sinuses, nothing alpine meadow about it at all, telling  her  she
was  broke and out of work and staying in a sharehouse in Malibu.

The house was right on the beach, with the wire about thirty feet
out  from  the  deck.  Nobody  knew  exactly what it was that had
spilled, because the government wasn't telling. Something  off  a
freighter,  some  people  said, and some said it was a bulklifter
that had come down in  a  32  storm.  The  government  was  using
nanobots  to  clean  it  up though; everybody agreed on that, and
that was why they said you shouldn't walk out there.

Chevette had found the trainer her second  day  here,  and  she'd
ride two or three times a day or, like now, late at night. Nobody
else seemed to be interested in it or ever to come into this lit-
tle  room  off the garage, next to the laundry room, and that was
fine with her. Living on the bridge, she'd been  used  to  people
being  around,  but  everybody  had always had something to do up
there. The sharehouse was full of USC  media  sciences  students,
and  they  got on her nerves. They sat around accessing media all
day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.

She felt sweat run between the headband of  the  interface  visor
and her forehead, then down the side of her nose. She was getting
a good bum on now; she could feel groups of  muscles  working  in
her back, ones that didn't usually get it.

The  trainer  did  a  better job on the bike's chartreuse lacquer
than on the shift levers, she noticed. They  were  sort  of  car-
toony,  with  road  surface blurring past beneath them in generic
texture map. The clouds would be generic too, if she  looked  up;
just basic fractal stuff.

She  was  definitely  not  too happy with being here, or with her
life in general at this point.  She'd  been  talking  with  Tessa
about that after dinner. Well, arguing about it.

Tessa wanted to make this documentary. Chevette knew what a docu-
mentary was because Carson had worked for a  channel,  Real  One,
that  only  just ran those, and Chevette had had to watch about a
thousand of them. As a result, she thought, she now knew a  whole
lot  about nothing in particular, and nothing in particular about
whatever it was she was actually supposed to know. Like  what  to
do now that her life had gotten her to this place.

Tessa  wanted  to take her back up to San Francisco, but Chevette
had mixed feelings. The documentary  Tessa  wanted  to  make  was
about interstitial communities, and Tessa said Chevette had lived
in one, because Chevette had lived on  the  bridge.  Interstitial
meant  in  between  things, and Chevette figured that that made a
kind of sense, anyway.
 33 And she did miss it up there, miss the people, but she didn't
like  thinking  about  it.  Because  of how things had gone since
she'd come down here, and because she hadn't kept in touch.

Just pump, she told herself, cresting the  illusion  of  a  rise.
Shift again. Pump harder. The road surface started to look glassy
in places, because she was  overtaking  the  simulator's  refresh
rate.

"Zoom in." Tessa's voice, in miniature.

"Shit," Chevette said. Flipping up the visor.

The  camera  platform, like a helium-filled cushion of silver My-
lar, at eye level in the open  doorway.  Kid's  toy  with  little
caged  propellers, controlled from Tessa's bedroom. Ring of light
reflected in the lens housing as it extruded, zooming.

The propellers blurred to gray, brought it  forward  through  the
door,  stopped;  blurred  to gray again, reversing. Rocked there,
till it steadied on the ballast of the underslung  camera.  God's
Little Toy, Tessa called her silver balloon. Disembodied eye. She
sent it on slow cruises through the house, mining for image frag-
ments.  Everyone  who  lived  here was constantly taping everyone
else, except lain, and lain  wore  a  motion-capture  suit,  even
slept in it, and was recording every move he ever made.

The  trainer,  performance machine that it was, sensed Chevette's
loss of focus and sighed, slowing, complex  hydraulics  beginning
to  deconfigure.  The  narrow  wedge  of  seat between her thighs
widened, spreading to support her butt in  beach-bike  mode.  The
handlebars  unfolded, upward, raising her hands. She kept on ped-
aling, but the trainer was winding her down now.

"Sorry." Tessa's voice from the tiny speaker. But  Chevette  knew
she wasn't.

"Me  too," Chevette said, as the pedals made a final arc, locking
for dismount. She swung the bars up and stepped down, batting  at
the platform, spoiling Tessa's shot.

"Une petite problemette. Concerns you, I think."

"What?"

"Come into the kitchen and I'll show you." Tessa reversed one set
of props, turning the platform on its axis. Then two forward  and
it  sailed  back  through  the doorway, into the garage. Chevette
followed it, pulling a towel from a nail driven  into  the  door-
jamb.  Closing  the door behind her. Should've had it closed when
she was riding, but she'd forgotten. God's  Little  Toy  couldn't
open  doors.   The  towel  needed  washing. A little stiff but it
didn't smell bad. She used it to wipe sweat  from  her  pits  and
chest.  She  overtook  the  balloon, ducked under it, entered the
kitchen.

Sensed roaches scurrying for cover. Every  flat  surface,  except
the  floor,  was  solid  with unwashed dishes, empties, pieces of
recording equipment. They'd had a party, the day before the fire,
and nobody had cleaned up yet.

No  light  here  now but a couple of telltales and the methodical
flicker as the security system flipped from one  external  night-
vision camera to the next. 4:32 A.M. showing in the corner of the
screen. They kept maybe half the security shut down because  peo-
ple  were in and out all day, and there was always someone there.

Whir of the platform as Tessa brought it up behind her.

"What is it?" Chevette asked.


Chevette moved closer to the screen The deck, slung out over  the
sand...

The  space between the house and the next one. The driveway. With
Carson's car sitting there.

"Shit," Chevette said, as the Lexus was  replaced  with  the  be-
tween-houses  view  on  the other side, then a view from a camera
under the deck.

"Been there since 3:24."

Thedeck,..

"How'd he find me?"

Between houses...

"Web search, probably. Image matching. Someone was uploading Pic-
tures  from  the  party. You were in some of them."  The Lexus in
the driveway. Nobody in it.

"Where is he)

Between the houses...
 35 Under the deck...

"No idea," Tessa said.

"Where are you?"

Deck again. Watch this and you start to see  things  that  aren't
there. She looked down at the mess on the counter and saw a foot-
long butcher knife lying in what was left of  a  chocolate  cake,
the blade clotted with darkness.

"Upstairs," Tessa said. "Best you come up."

Chevette felt suddenly cold in her bike shorts and T-shirt. Shiv-
ered. Left the kitchen for the living room. Pre-dawn gray through
walls  of  glass.  English  lain stretched, snoring lightly, on a
long leather couch, a red LED on his motion-capture suit  winking
over  his  sternum. The lower half of Lain's face never seemed to
be in focus to Chevette; teeth uneven, different colors, like  he
was  lightly  pixilated.  Mad,  Tessa said. And never changed the
suit he slept in now; kept it laced corset-tight.

Muttered in his sleep, turning his back to her as she passed.

She stood with her face a few inches from the glass, feeling  the
chill  that  radiated  from it. Nothing on the deck but a ghostly
white chair, empty beer cans. Where was he?

The stair to the second floor was a spiral, wedge-shaped sections
of  very  thick  wood  spun out from an iron shaft. She took that
now, the carbon-fiber pedal clips set into the soles of her shoes
clicking with each step.

Tessa  waited  at  the  top, slim blonde shadow bulked in a puffy
coat Chevette knew  was  burnt-orange  in  daylight.  "The  van's
parked next door," she said. "Let's go."

"Where?"

"Up  the  coast.  My grant came through. I was up talking to Mum,
telling her that, when the boyfriend arrived."

"Maybe he just wants to talk," Chevette said.  She'd  told  Tessa
about him hitting her that time. Now she half regretted it.

"I  don't  think  that's  a  chance you want to take. We're away,
right? See? I'm packed." Bumping  her  hip  against  the  bulging
rectangle of a gear bag slung from her shoulder.

"I'm  not,"  Chevette  said.   36 "You never unpacked, remember?"
Which was true. "We'll go out over the deck, go 'round past  Bar-
bara's, get in the van: we're gone."

"No,"  Chevette  said, "let's wake everybody up, turn on the out-
side lights. What can he do?"  "I don't know what he can do.  But
he  can  always  come  back.  He knows you're here now. You can't
stay."  "I don't know for sure he'd try to hurt me, Tessa."

"Want to be with him?"


"Did you invite him here?"

"No."


"Then get your bag." Tessa pushed past,  leading  with  the  gear
bag. "Now," she said, over her shoulder, descending.

Chevette  opened  her  mouth  to  say  something, then closed it.
Turned, felt her way along the corridor, to the door to her room.
A closet, this had been, though bigger inside than some houses on
the bridge. A frosted dome came on in the ceiling when you opened
the door. Someone had cut a thick slab of foam so that it fit the
floor, down half the length of the narrow, windowless space,  be-
tween an elaborate shoe rack of some pale tropical hardwood and a
baseboard of the same stuff. Chevette  had  never  seen  anything
made of wood that was put together that well, The whole house was
like that, under the sharehouse dirt, and  she'd  wondered  who'd
lived  in  it  before, and how they'd felt about having to leave.
Whoever it was, to judge by the rack, had  had  more  shoes  than
Chevette had owned in her life.

Her  knapsack  sat  at the end of the narrow foam bed. Like Tessa
had said, still packed. Open, though. The mesh bag with her  toi-
let  stuff  and makeup beside it. Skinner's old biker jacket hung
above it, shoulders set broad and confident  on  a  fancy  wooden
hanger.  Black once, its horsehide had gone mostly gray with wear
and time. Older than she was, he'd said.  A  pair  of  new  black
jeans  were  draped over the rod beside it. She pulled these down
and worked her feet out of the riding shoes.  Got  the  Jeans  on
over her shorts. A black sweatshirt from the open mouth of the

37  knapsack.  Smell  of  clean  cotton as she pulled it over her
head; she'd washed everything, at Carson's,  when  she'd  decided
she  was leaving. She crouched at the foot of the foam, lacing up
lug-soled high-tops, no socks. Stood and  took  Skinner's  jacket
from  the  hanger.  It was heavy, as if it retained the weight of
horses. She felt safer in it. Remembering how she'd always ridden
with it in San Francisco, in spite of the weight. Like armor.

"Come on." Tessa, calling softly from the living room.

Tessa had come over to Carson's with another girl, South African,
the day they'd first met, to interview him about his work at Real
One.  Something  had clicked; Chevette smiling back at the skinny
blonde whose features were all a little too big for her face; who
looked great anyway and laughed and was so smart.

Too smart, Chevette thought, stuffing the mesh bag into the knap-
sack, because now she was on her way to San Francisco  with  her,
and she wasn't sure that was such a good idea.

"Come on."

Bent to stuff the mesh bag into the knapsack, buckle it. Put that
over her shoulder. Saw the riding shoes. No time now. Stepped out
and closed the closet door.

Found  Tessa  in  the  living room, making sure the alarms on the
sliding glass doors were deactivated.

lain grunted, thrashing out at something in a dream.

Tessa tugged one of the doors open, just wide enough to get  out,
its  frame scraping in the corroded track. Chevette felt cold sea
air. Tessa stepped out, reached back through to pull her gear bag
out.

Chevette  stepped  through,  knapsack rattling against the frame.
Something brushed her hair, Tessa reaching out to  capture  God's
Little  Toy  there. She handed the inflated platform to Chevette,
who took it by one of the propeller cages; it felt weightless and
awkward  and  too  easy to break. Then she and Tessa both grabbed
the door handle one-handed, and  together  they  pulled  it  shut
against the friction of the track.

She  straightened, turned, looked out at the lightening gray that
was all she could see of the ocean now, past the black  coils  of
razor wire, and felt a kind of vertigo, as though for just a sec-
ond she stood at the very 38 edge of  the  turning  world.  She'd
felt  that  before,  on  the  bridge, up on the roof of Skinner's
place, high up over everything; just standing there in a fog that
socketed the bay, throwing every sound back at you from a new and
different distance.

Tessa took the four steps down to the beach, and  Chevette  heard
the sand squeak under her shoes. It was that quiet. She shivered.
Tessa crouched, checking under the deck. Where was he?

And they never saw him, not there and not then, as  they  trudged
through the sand, past old Barbara's deck, where the wide windows
were all blanked with quilted foil and sun-faded cardboard.  Bar-
bara was an owner from before the Spill, and not often seen. Tes-
sa had tried to cultivate her, wanted her in her documentary,  an
interstitial  community  of  one,  become  a hermit in her house,
holed up amid  sharehouses.  Chevette  wondered  if  Barbara  was
watching  them  go,  past her house and around between it and the
next, back to where  Tessa's  van  waited,  almost  cubical,  its
paintwork scoured with windblown sand.

All  this more dreamlike somehow with each step she took, and now
Tessa was unlocking the van, after checking  through  the  window
with  a  flashlight  to  see  he  wasn't  waiting there, and when
Chevette climbed

up the passenger side and settled in the creaking  seat,  blanket
laced  over  ripped  plastic  with bungee cord, she knew that she
'was going.

Somewhere.

And that was okay with her.
 39 8.      THE HOLE DRIFT.

Laney is in drift.  That is how he does it. It is  a  matter,  he
knows, of letting go. He admits the random.  The danger of admit-
ting the random is that the random may admit the Hole.  The  Hole
is  that  which  Laney's being is constructed around. The Hole is
absence at the fundamental core. The Hole is that into  which  he
has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information.

Mainly.-lately-information.

Information. This flow. This. . . corrosion.

Drift.


ONCE, before he'd come to Tokyo, Laney woke in the bedroom of his
suite in the Chateau.

It was dark, only a shush of tires up from Sunset; muffled  drum-
ming of a helicopter, hunting the hills behind.

And the Hole right there, beside him in the lonely queen-size ex-
panse of his bed.

The Hole, up close and personal.  40 9.      SWEEP SECOND  pRIGHT
pyramids  of  fruit, beneath buzzing neon.          He watches as
the boy drains a second liter of the pulped drink. swallowing the
entire  contents  of  the tall plastic cup in an unbroken stream,
with no apparent effort.

"You should not drink cold things so quickly."  The boy looks  at
him.  There  is  nothing between the boy's gaze and his being: no
mask. No personality. He is not, apparently, deaf, because he has
understood the suggestion of the cold drink. But there is no evi=
dence, as yet, that he is capable of speech.  "Do you speak Span-
ish?"  This  in  the language of Madrid, unspoken for many years.
The boy places the empty cup beside the first one  and  looks  at
the  man  There  is  no fear in him Nothing at all Older, the man
guesses, than his emotional age. Touches of  razored  stubble  at
the  corners of his upper lip Brown eyes clear and placid The boy
looks at the two empty plastic cups on the worn steel Counter. He
looks  up  at the man.  The man signals to the Italian behind the
counter He turns back ~: to the boy.

Do you have a name?"  Nothing Nothing moves in the brown eyes The
boy  regards  him as calmly as might some placid dog.  The silver
pulping machine chugs briefly amid the stacked fruit  Shaved  ice
whirs into the pulp. The Italian transfers the drink to a plastiC
cup  and  places  it  before  the  boy  The  boy  looks   at   it
                41  The  man  shifts on the creaking metal stool,
his long coat draped like resting wings. Beneath his  arm,  care-
fully  cleaned now, the knife in its magnetic sheath swings free,
sleeping.  The boy raises the cup, opens his mouth, and pours the
thick  sludge  of ice and fruit pulp down his throat.  Defective,
the man thinks. Syndromes of the city's tragic womb.  The  signal
of  life  distorted by chemicals, by starvation, by blows of for-
tune. Yet he, like everyone else, like the man himself, is exact-
ly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the
Tao: darkness within darkness.  The boy places the empty cup  be-
side  the  other two.  The man straightens his legs, stands, but-
toning his coat.  The boy reaches  out.  Two  fingers  touch  the
watch  the  man wears on his left wrist. He opens his mouth as if
to speak.

"The time?"  Something moves in the affectless  brown  depths  of
the  boy's eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a special-
ist dealer in a fortified arcade in  Singapore.  It  is  military
ordnance.  It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day.
It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure,  and
that  only  the moment matters, matters absolutely.  The enlight-
ened warrior rides into battle as if to a  loved  one's  funeral,
and  how  could  it be otherwise?  The boy leans forward now, the
thing behind his eyes seeing only the watch.

The man thinks of the  two  he  leaves  tonight  on  the  bridge.
Hunters  of sorts, now they will hunt no more. And this one, fol-
lowing them. To pick up scraps.

"You like this?"

Nothing registers. Nothing breaks the concentration, the link be-
tween  that which has surfaced behind the boy's eyes and the aus-
tere black face of the watch.

The Tao moves.

The man unfastens the steel buckle that  secures  the  strap.  He
hands the watch to the boy. He does this without thought. He does
this 42 with the same unthinking certainty with  which,  earlier,
he  killed. He does this because it fits, is fitting; because his
life is alignment with the Tao.  There is no need  to  say  good-
bye.

He  leaves  the  boy lost in contemplation of the black face, the
hands.  He leaves now. The moment in balance.

43 I 10.     AMERICAN ACROPOLIS


RYD ELI managed to get part of the  San  Francisco  grid  on  the
Brazilian  glasses  coming  in,  but he still needed Creedmore to
tell him how to get to the garage where  they  were  leaving  the
Hawker-Aichi.  Creedmore,  when  Rydell woke him for that, seemed
uncertain as to who Rydell was, but did a fairly good job of cov-
ering it up. He did know, after consulting a folded business card
he took from the watch pocket of his jeans,  exactly  where  they
should go.

It  was an old building, in the kind of area where buildings like
that were usually converted to residential, but the frequency  of
razor  wire suggested that this was not yet gentrified territory.
There were a couple of Universal square badges controlling entry,
a  firm  that mostly did low-level industrial security. They were
set up in  an  office  by  the  gate,  watching  Real  One  on  a
flatscreen  propped up on a big steel desk that looked like some-
one had gone over every square inch of it with a ball  peen  ham-
mer.  Cups  of take-out coffee and white foam food containers. It
all felt kind of homey to Rydell, who figured they'd be going off
shift  soon,  seven in the morning. Wouldn't be a bad job, as bad
jobs went.

"Delivering a drive-away," Rydell told them.

There was a deer on the flatscreen. Behind it the familiar shapes
of the derelict skyscrapers of downtown Detroit. The Real One lo-
go in the lower right corner gave him the context: one  of  those
nature shows.

They  gave him a pad to punch in the reservation number on Creed-
more's paper, and it came up paid.  Had  him  sign  on  the  pad,
there.  Told  him  to  put it in slot twenty-three, level six. He
left the office, got back into the Hawker, swung up the ramp, wet
tires squealing on concrete.

Creedmore  was conducting a grooming operation in the illuminated
mirror behind the passenger-side sun  visor.  This  consisted  of
running his fingers repeatedly back through his hair, wiping them
on his jeans, then rubbing his eyes. He considered  the  results.
"Time  for  a  drink," he said to the reflection of his bloodshot
eyes.  ~& "Seven in the morning," Rydell said.

"What I said," Creedmore said, flipping the visor back up. Rydell
found the number twenty-three painted on the concrete,

between  two  vehicles shrouded in white dustcovers. He edged the
Hawker carefully in and started shutting it down. He was able  to
do this without having to go to the help menu.  Creedmore got out
and went over to urinate on somebody's tire.

Rydell checked the interior to see they hadn't left anything, un-
did

~-      the  harness, leaned over to pull the passenger-side door
shut, popped the trunk, opened the driver-side door, checked that
he had the keys,

~       got out, closed the door.

"Hey, Buell. Your friend's gonna pick this up, right?" Rydell was
pulling his duffel  out  of  the  Hawker-Aichi's  weirdly  narrow
trunk,  a  space  suggestive of the interior of a child's coffin.
There was nothing else in there,  so  he  assumed  Creedmore  was
traveling without luggage.

"No,"  Creedmore  said,  "they  gonna  leave  it  up here get all
dusty."

He was buttoning his fly.

"So I give the keys to those Universal boys dowstairs?"

"No," Creedmore said, "you give 'em to me."

"I signed," Rydell said.

"Give 'em to me."

"Buell, this vehicle is my responsibility now. I've signed it  in
here."

He closed the trunk, activated the security systems.

"Please  step  back," said the I-Iawker-Aichi. "Respect my bound-
aries as I respect yours." It had a beautiful, strangely  gender-
less voice, gentle but firm.

Rydell took a step back, another.


-       Řve  'em  to  him."  Creedmore rested his hand on the big
roper's buckle like it was the wheel  of  his  personal  ship  of
state,  but he looked uncertam, as though his hangover were lean-
ing on him.

"Just tell him the keys'll be here. That's how you do  it.  Safer
all

~       glad  to be stretching his legs. He looked back at Creed-
more. "See you ~       'round, Buell."

45 "Son of a bitch," Creedmore said, though Rydell took it to  be
more  a reference to the universe that had created Rydell than to
Rydell himself. Creedmore looked lost and disconnected, squinting
under  the  greenish-white  strip lighting.  Rydell kept walking,
down the battered concrete spiral of  the  parking  garage,  five
more  levels, till he came abreast of the office at the entrance.
The Universal guards were drinking coffee, watching  the  end  of
their  nature  show.  Now  the deer moved through snow, snow that
blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of  Detroit's
dead  and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up
to vanish in the white sky.  They made  a  lot  of  nature  shows
there.  He went out into the street, looking for a cab or a place
that made breakfast. Smelling how San Francisco was  a  different
place  than  Los  Angeles, and feeling that was fine by him. He'd
get something to eat, use the Brazilian glasses to  phone  Tokyo.
Find out about that money.  48 WILLtAM GIBSON 11.     OTHER GUY


CHEVETTE  had  never  driven  a  standard, so it fell to Tessa to
drive them up to San Francisco. Tessa didn't seem  to  mind.  She
had  her  head  full of the docu they were going to make, and she
could work it out as she drove, telling Chevette about  the  dif-
ferent  communities  she wanted to cover and how she was going to
cut it all together. All Chevette had to do was listen,  or  look
like  she  was  listening, and finally just fall asleep. She fell
asleep as Tessa was telling her about a place called  the  Walled
City,  how there'd actually been this place, by Hong Kong, but it
had been torn down before Hong Kong went back to  being  part  of
China.  And  then these crazy net people had built their own ver-
sion of it, like a big communal website, and they'd turned it in-
side  out,  vanished  in  there. It wasn't making much sense when
Chevette nodded out, but it left pictures in  her  head.  Dreams.
        "What  about  the  other  guy?"  Tessa  was  asking, when
Chevette woke from those dreams.  Chevette  blinked  out  at  the
Five,  the  white  line  that  seemed to reel up beneath the van.
"What other guy?"  "Rydell," Chevette said.  "So why didn't  that
work?"  Tessa  asked.  Chevette didn't really have an answer. "It
just didn't."  "So you  had  to  hook  up  with  Carson?"   "No,"
Chevette  said, "I didn't have to." What were those white things,
so many of them, off in a field there?  Wind  things:  they  made
electricity. "It just seemed like the thing to do."

"I've  done  a  few of those myself," Tessa said.  ALL TOMORROW~S
PARTIES 47 12.     EL PRIMERO FONTAINE'S first glimpse of the boy
comes  as  he starts to lay out the morning's stock in his narrow
display window: rough dark hair above a forehead pressed  against
the armored glass.

Fontaine  leaves  nothing of value in the window at night, but he
dislikes the idea of an entirely empty display.

He doesn't like to think of someone passing  and  glimpsing  that
vacancy. It makes him think of death. So each night he leaves out
a few items of relatively little value,  ostensibly  to  indicate
the  nature  of  the shop's stock, but really as a private act of
propitiatory magic.

This morning the window contains three  inferior  Swiss  mechani-
cals,  their  dials flecked with age, an IXL double penknife with
jigged bone handles and shield, fair condition, and an East  Ger-
man military field telephone that looks as though it has been de-
signed not only to survive a nuclear explosion  but  to  function
during one.

Fontaine,  still  on  the  morning's  first  coffee, stares down,
through the glass, at the matted, spiky hair.  Thinking  this  at
first  a  corpse, and not the first he's discovered this way, but
never propped thus, kneeling, as in attitude of prayer.  But  no,
this one lives: breath fogs Fontaine's window.

In Fontaine's left hand: a 1947 Cortebert triple-date moon phase,
manual wind, gold-filled case, in very nearly  the  condition  in
which it left the factory. In his right, a warped red plastic cup
of black Cuban coffee. The shop  is  filled  with  the  smell  of
Fontaine's coffee, as burnt and acrid as he likes it.

Condensation  slowly pulses on the cold glass: gray aureoles out-
line the kneeler's nostrils.

Fontaine puts the Cortebert back in the tray with the rest of his
better  stock,  narrow  divisions of faded green velour holding a
dozen watches. He sets the tray  aside,  on  the  counter  behind
which  he stands when he does business, transfers the red plastic
cup to his left hand, and with his right reassures himself of the
Smith  &  Wesson  .32-.22 Kit Gun in the right side pocket of the
threadbare trench coat that serves him as a dressing gown.

The little gun is there, older than some of his  better  watches,
its  worn  walnut grip comforting and familiar. Probably intended
to be kept in a freshwater fisherman's tackle  box,  against  the
dispatching  of  water  snakes  or the decapitation of empty beer
bottles, the Kit Gun is Fontaine's considered choice: a  six-shot
rimfire revolver with a four-inch barrel. He doesn't want to kill
anyone, Fontaine, though if truth be  known,  he  has,  and  very
probably  could  again. He dislikes recoil, in a handgun, and ex-
cessive report, and distrusts semi-automatic weapons.  He  is  an
anachronist,  a  historian:  he  knows  that the Smith & Wesson's
frame evolved for a .32-caliber center-fire round, long  extinct,
that  was  once the standard for American pocket pistols. Recham-
bered for the homely .22, it survived, in this model,  well  into
the middle of the twentieth century. A handy thing and, like most
of his stock, a rarity.

He finishes the coffee, places the empty cup on the  counter  be-
side the tray of watches.

He is a good shot, Fontaine. At twelve paces, employing an archa-
ic one-handed duelist's stance, he has been  known  to  pick  the
pips from a playing card. -

He hesitates before unlocking the shop's front door, a complicat-
ed process. Perhaps the kneeler is not alone.  Fontaine  has  few
enemies  on  the bridge proper, but who is to say what might have
drifted in from either end, San  Franciso  or  Oakland?  And  the
wilds of Treasure Island traditionally offer a more feral sort of
crazy.

But still.

He throws the last hasp and draws the pistol.

Sunlight falls through the bridge's wrapping of  scrap  wood  and
plastic  like some strange benison. Fontaine scents the salt air,
a source of Corrosion.

"You," he says, "mister." The gun in  his  hand,  hidden  by  the
folds of the trench coat.

Under  the  trench  coat, which is beltless, open, Fontaine wears
faded plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved white ther-
mal  undershirt rendered ecru by the vagaries of the laundry pro-
cess Black
 49 shoes, sockless and unlaced, their gloss gone  matte  in  the
deeper creases.  Dark eyes look up at him, from a face that some-
how refuses to come into focus.

"What you doing there?"

The boy cocks his head, as if  listening  to  something  Fontaine
cannot hear.

"Get away from my window."

With  a  weird  and  utter lack of grace that strikes Fontaine as
amounting to a species of grace in itself, this  person  gets  to
his feet. The brown eyes stare at Fontaine but somehow do not see
him, or do not recognize him, perhaps, as another being.

Fontaine displays the Smith & Wesson, his finger on the  trigger,
but  he does not quite point it at the boy. He never points a gun
at anyone he is not yet  entirely  willing  to  shoot,  a  lesson
learned long ago from his father.

This  kneeler,  this breather on his glass, is not of the bridge.
It would be difficult for Fontaine to explain how he knows  this,
but  he  does. It is a function of having lived here a long time.
He doesn't know everyone on the bridge, nor would he want to, but
he  nonetheless  distinguishes  bridge  dwellers from others, and
with absolute certainty.

This one, now, has something  missing.  Something  wrong;  not  a
state  bespeaking  drugs, but some more permanent mode of not-be-
ing-there. And while the population of the bridge  possesses  its
share  of  these,  they are somehow worked into the fabric of the
place and not inclined to appear thus, so randomly, as to disturb
mercantile ritual.

Somewhere high above, the bay wind whips a loose flap of plastic,
a frenzied beating, like the idiot  wing  of  some  vast  wounded
bird.

Fontaine,  looking into brown eyes in the face that still refuses
to come into focus (because, he thinks now, it is incapable), re-
grets  having  unlocked  his door. Salt air even now gnaws at the
bright metal vitals of his stock. He gestures with the barrel  of
his pistol: go.

The boy extends his hand. A watch.

"What?  You  want to sell that?"  50 T The brown eyes register no
language.

Fontaine, motivated by something  he  recognizes  as  compulsion,
takes  a step forward, his finger tightening on the pistol's dou-
ble-action trigger. The chamber beneath the firing pin is  empty,
for safety's sake, but a quick, long pull will do the trick.

Looks like stainless. Black dial.

Fontaine  takes  in  the  filthy  black jeans, the frayed running
shoes, the faded red T-shirt hiked above a  paunch  that  betrays
the characteristic bloat of malnutrition.

"You want to show that to me?"

The  boy  looks down at the watch in his hand, then points to the
three in the window.

"Sure," Fontaine says, "we got watches. All kinds.  You  want  to
see?"  Still pointing, the boy looks at him.

"Come  on,"  Fontaine  says,  "come  on in. Cold out here." Still
holding the gun, though his finger has relaxed, he steps back in-
to the shop. "You coming?"  After a pause, the boy follows, hold-
ing the watch with the black dial as though it were a small  ani-
mal.   Be  nothing,  Fontaine  thinks. Army Waltham with the guts
rusted out. Bullshit. Bullshit he's let this freak in here.   The
boy  stands,  staring,  in  the  center  of the shop's tiny floor
space. Fontaine closes the door, locks it once only, and retreats
behind his

counter.  All  this done without lowering the gun, getting within
grabbing distance, or taking his eyes off his visitor.

The boy's eyes widen as he  sees  the  tray  of  watches.  "First
things first," Fontaine says, whisking the tray out of sight with
his free hand.


The boy seems to understand. He places  the  watch  on  the  pad.
~       Fontaine  sees  the black beneath the ragged nails as the
hand withdraws.

"Shit," Fontaine  says.  Eyes  acting  up.  "Back  up,  there,  a
minute," ~r' he says, gently indicating direction with the barrel
of the Smith & '~ Wesson. The boy takes a step back.
 51 I Still watching the boy, he digs in the left side pocket  of
the  trench coat and comes up with a black loupe, which he screws
into his left eye. "Don't you move now, okay? Don't want this gun
to go off..

Fontaine  picks  up  the  watch,  affords  himself a quick squint
through the loupe. 'Whistles in spite of himself. "Jaeger LeCoul-
tre."  He  unsquints,  checking;  the  boy  hasn't moved. Squints
again, this time at the ordnance markings on the caseback. "Royal
Australian  Air  Force,  1953," he translates. "Where'd you steal
this?"

Nothing.

"This is near mint." Fontaine feels, all at once, profoundly  and
unexpectedly lost. "This a redial?"

Nothing.

Fontaine squints through the loupe. "All original?"

Fontaine wants this watch.

He puts it down on the green pad, atop the worn symbol of a gold-
en crown, noting that the black calf band is  custom-made,  hand-
sewn  around  bars  permanently fixed between the lugs. This work
itself, which he takes to be either Italian or Austrian, may have
cost  more  than some of the watches in his tray. The boy immedi-
ately picks it up.

Fontaine produces the tray. "Look here. You want to trade?  Gruen
Curvex  here.  Tudor  'London,' 1948; nice original dial. Vulcain
Cricket here, gold head, very clean."

But already he knows that his conscience will never allow him  to
divest this lost soul of this watch, and the knowledge hurts him.
Fontaine has been trying all his life  to  cultivate  dishonesty,
what  his  father  called  "sharp  practices,"  and he invariably
fails.

The boy is leaning forward over the tray, Fontaine forgotten.

"Here," Fontaine says, sliding the tray aside  and  replacing  it
with  his  battered  notebook.  He opens it to the pages where he
shops for watches. "Just push this, then push  this,  it'll  tell
you  what  you're  looking  at." He demonstrates. A Jaeger with a
silver face.

Fontaine presses the second key. "1945 Jaeger chronometer, stain-
less  steel,  original  dial,  engraving  on case back," says the
notebook.

"Case," the boys says. "Back."

"This," Fontaine shows the boy the  stainless  back  of  a  gold-
filled  52  Tissot  tank.  "But  with writing on, like 'Joe Blow,
twenty-five years with Blowcorp, congratulations."

The boy looks blank. Presses a key. Another watch appears on  the
screen.  He  presses  the  second key. "A 1960 Vulcain jump-hour,
chrome, brassing at lugs, dial very good."

"'Very good,' "Fontaine advises.  "Not  good  enough.  See  these
spots  here?"  Indicating  certain darker flecks scattered across
the scan. "If it were 'very fine,' sure."

"Fine," says the boy, looking up at Fontaine. He presses the  key
that produces the image of another watch.

"Let  me  see  that watch, okay?" Fontaine points at the watch in
the boy's hand. "It's okay. I'll give it back."   The  boy  looks
from the watch to Fontaine. Fontaine puts the Smith & Wesson away
in its pocket. Shows the boy his  empty  hands.   "I'll  give  it
back."

The boy extends his hand. Fontaine takes the watch.

"You gonna tell me where you got this?"

Blank.

"You want a cup of coffee?"

Fontaine gestures back, toward the simmering pot on the hotplate.
Smells its bitter brew, thickening.

The boy understands.

He shakes his head.

Fontaine screws the loupe into his eye and settles  into  contem-
plation.

Damn. He wants this watch.


LATER  in  the day, when the bento boy brings Fontaine his lunch,
the Jaeger LeCoultre military is in the pocket of Fontaine's gray
tweed   SlaCks,   high-waisted  and  extravagantly  pleated,  but
Fontaine knows that the watch is not his. The boy has been put in
the  back of the shop, in that cluttered little zone that divides
Fontaine's business from his private life, and Fontaine  has  be-
come aware of the fact that he can, yes, smell his visitor; under
the morning's coffee smell a definite and insistent reek  of  old
sweat and unwashed clothes.

53  As  the  bento boy exits to his box-stacked bicycle, Fontaine
undoes the clips on his own box. Tempura today, not his  favorite
for  bento,  because it cools, but still he's hungry. Steam wafts
from the bowl of miso as he un5naps its plastic lid. He pauses.

"Hey" he says, back into the space behind  the  shop,  "you  want
some miso?" No reply. "Soup, you hear me?"

Fontaine  sighs,  climbs  off  his  wooden stool, and carries the
steaming soup into the back of the shop.

The boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, the notebook open on
his  lap.  Fontaine  sees  the image of a large, very complicated
chronometer floating there on  the  screen.  Something  from  the
eighties, by the look of it.

"You want some miso?"

"Zenith,"  says  the boy. "El Primero. Stainless case. Thirty-one
jewels, 3O19PHC movement.  Heavy  stainless  bracelet  with  flip
lock.  Original ;crewdown crown. Crown dial and movement signed."

Fontaine stares at him.  13.     SECONDHAND DAYLIGHT


YAMAZAKI returns with  antibiotics,  packaged  foods,  coffee  in
self-heating  tins. He wears a black nylon flight jacket and car-
ries these things, along with his notebook, in a blue mesh bag.

He descends into the station through a  crowd  of  only  ordinary
density well before the evening rush hour. He has found it diffi-
cult to sleep, his dreams haunted by  the  perfect  face  of  Rei
Toei,  who  is  in a sense his employer, and who in another sense
does not exist.

She is a voice, a face, familiar to millions. She  is  a  sea  of
code,  the ultimate expression of entertainment software. Her au-
dience knows that she does not walk among them; that she  is  me-
dia, purely. And that is a large part of her appeal.

If  not for Rei Toei, Yamazaki considers, Laney would not be here
now. It was the attempt to understand her,  to  second-guess  her
motivation,  that  had  originally brought Laney to Tokyo. In the
employ of Rez's management team, the singer Rez  having  declared
his  intention  to many her. And how, they asked, was that to be?
How could any human, even one so  thoroughly  mediated,  marry  a
construct,  a  congeries of software, a dream?  And Rez, the Chi-
nese-Irish singer, the pop star, had tried. Yamazaki knows  this.
He  knows  as  much  about  this  as  any  living  human,  includ
        ing Rez, because Rei Toei has discussed it with  him.  He
understands          that  Rez exists as thoroughly, in the realm
of the digital, as it is possible ~       for a living  human  to
exist.  If  Rez-the-man  were to die, today, Rez-the         icon
would certainly live on. But Rez's yearning was to go there, lit-
erally          to  go  where Rei Toei is. Or was, she having now
effectively vanished.

The singer had sought to join her in some realm of the digital or
in some not-yet-imagined borderland, some intermediate state. And
had

failed.  But has she gone there now? And why had  Laney  fled  as
well?

Rez  tours the Kombinat states now. Insists on traveling by rail.
 55 Station to station, Moscow hts goal, rumors of madness flick-
ering  in  the  band's  wake.   It  is a dark business, Yaivazaki
thinks and wonders, taking the stairs to the cardboard city, what
exactly Laney is about here. Speaking of nodal points in history,
of son-te emerging pattern in the texture of  things.  Of  every-
thing changing.  Laney is a sport, a mutant, the accidental prod-
uct of covert clinical trials of a drug  that  induced  something
oddly  akin  to  psychic  abilities in a small percentage of test
subjects. But Laney isn't  psychic  in  any  non-rational  sense;
rather  he  is able, through the organic changes wrought long ago
by 5-SB, this drug, tj somehow perceive change emerging from vast
flows  of data.  And now Rei Toei is gone, her management claims,
and how can that be? Yamazaki suspects that Laney may  know  why,
or  where,  and  that is a factor in Yamazaki's having decided to
return here and find him. He has been extremely careful to  avoid
being  followed,  but  he  also  knows that that can mean next to
nothing.  The smell of the Tokyo 5ubway, familiar as the smell of
his  mother's  apartment, comforts him now. It is a smell at once
utterly distinctive and impossible to describe It is the smell of
Japanese humanity, of which he very much feels himself a part, as
manifested in this singular environment, this world of tubes,  of
white  corridors, of whispering silver trains.  He finds the pas-
sageway between the two escalators, the tiled  columns.  He  half
suspects  that the shelters will be gone.  But they are here, and
when he dons  a  white  micropore  mask  and  enters  the  model-
builder's  brightly lit hutch, nothing has changed except the kit
the old man concentrates on now:  a  multi-headed  dinosaur  with
robotic  hind lmbs in navy and silver. The brush tip works in the
eye of one  reptilian  head.  The  old  man  does  not  look  up.
"Laney?"  Nothing from behind the square of melon-yellow blanket.
Yamazaki nods to the old man and crawls past on hands and  knees,
pushing  his  mesh  bag  of  supplies  before  him.  "Laney?"  56
"Hush," Laney says, from the narrow fetid dark.  "He's  talking."
"Who is talking?" Pushing the bag past the limp, foam-filled fab-
ric, its touch on his face reminding him of nursery  school.   As
Yamazaki  enters,  Laney activates a projector in the clumsy eye-
phones: the images he sees splay across Yamazaki,  blinding  him.
Yamazaki twists to avoid the beam. Sees figures framed in second-
hand daylight. "-magine he does this on a regular  basis?"  Hand-
held  but  digitally  stabilized. "Something to do with phases of
the moon?"  Zooms in on one of the figures, lean and male, as all
are.  Mouth  obscured  by  a dark scarf. Stiff black hair above a
high white forehead. "No  evidence  of  that.  Opportunistic.  He
waits  for  them  to come to him. Then he takes them. These," and
the camera swings smoothly to frame the face and bare chest of  a
dead  man, eyes staring, "are jackers. This one had dancer in his
pocket." There is a dark comma on the dead man's pale chest, just
below the sternum. "The other one was stabbed through the throat,
but somehow he managed to miss the arteries."  "He  would,"  says
the unseen man.  "Of course I do."

But  hes  interesting  isn t he~ The wound in close up is a small
unsmiling mouth The blood reads black. "Not to me."  But you aren
t interesting are you~

No  and the camera pans up light catching a sharp cheekbone above
the black scarf, "and you don't want me to be, do you?"

There is a faint chime as the transmission is  terminated.  Laney
throws  back  his  head  the  image  of the man with the scarf in
freeze frame across the ceiling of the carton too bnght distorted
and  Yamazaki sees that the cardboard there is shingled with tiny
self
 57 adhesive printouts, dozens of different images  of  a  bland-
looking man, oddly familiar. Yamazaki blinks, his contacts shift-
ing, and misses his glasses. He feels  incomplete  without  them.
"Who was that man, Laney?"

"The help," Laney says.

"'Help'?"

"Hard to get good help these days." Laney kills the projector and
removes the massive eyephones. In the sudden gloom, his  face  is
reduced  to  a  child's drawing, smudged black eyeholes against a
pallid smear. "The man who was taking that call-"  "The  one  who
spoke?"

"He owns the world. Near as anyone does."

Yamazaki frowns. "I have brought medicine-"

"That was from the bridge, Yamazaki."

"San Francisco?"

"They followed my other man there. They followed him, last night,
but they lost him. They always do. This morning they found  those
bodies.

"Followed who?"

"The man who isn't there. The one I'm having to infer."

"These  are pictures of Harwood? Of Harwood Levine?" Yamazaki has
recognized the face replicated on the stickers.

"Spooks are his. Best money can buy, probably, but they can't get
close to the man who isn't there."

"What man?"

"I think he's someone Harwood ... collected. Collects people. In-
teresting people. I think he might've worked for  Harwood,  taken
commissions.  He  doesn't  leave  a  trace,  none at all. When he
crosses someone's path, they're just gone. Then  he  erases  him-
self."

Yamazaki  fumbles  the  antibiotics  from his bag. "Will you take
these, Laney? Your cough-"

"Where's Rydell, Yamazaki? He's supposed to be up there now. It's
all coming together."

"What is?"

"I  don't  know,"  Laney says, leaning forward to dig through the
con- 58 tents of the bag. He finds a  coffee  and  activates  it,
tossing it from hand to hand as it heats. Yamazaki hears the pop,
the vacuum hiss, as Laney opens it. Smell of coffee.  Laney  sips
from the steaming can.

"Something's  happening,"  Laney  says  and coughs into his hand,
slopping hot creamed coffee on Yamazaki's wrist. Yamazaki flinch-
es.

"Everything's  changing.  Or  it's  not,  really. How I see it is
changing. But since I've been able to see it the new  way,  some-
thing  else has started. There's something building up. Big. Big-
ger than big. It'll happen soon, then there'll be a  cascade  ef-
fect.

"What will happen?"

"I  don't  know."  Another  fit  of coughing requires that he set
aside the coffee. Yamazaki has opened the antibiotics  and  tries
to offer them. Laney waves them aside. "Have you been back to the
island? Do they have any idea where she is?"

Yamazaki blinks. "No. She is simply not present."

Laney smiles, faint gleam of teeth against the  darkness  of  his
mouth.  "That's  good. She's in it too, Yamazaki." He reaches for
the coffee. "She's in it too."

59 14.     BREAKFAST, COOKING RYDELL found  a  place  in  one  of
those  buildings  that  had  clearly  been a bank, when banks had
needed to have buildings. Thick walls. Someone had turned it into
an  all-day breakfast-special place, and that was what Rydell was
after. Actually it looked like it had been some kind of  discount
store before that, and who knew what else before, but it had that
eggs.and-grease smell, and he was hungry.

There were a couple of  size-large  construction  types,  covered
with white drywall dust, waiting for a table, but Rydell saw that
the counter was empty, so he went over there and  took  a  stool.
The  waitress was a distracted-looking woman of indeterminate an-
cestry, acne scars  sprinkled  across  her  cheekbones,  and  she
poured  his coffee and took his order without actually indicating
she understood English. Like the whole operation could  be  basi-
cally  phonetic,  he thought, and she'd have learned the sound of
"two eggs over easy" and the rest. Hear  it,  translate  it  into
whatever she wrote in, then give it to the cook.

Rydell  got  the Brazilian glasses out, put them on, and scrolled
for the number Yamazaki had given him in Tokyo. Someone picked up
on  the third ring, but the glasses didn't map a location for the
answering phone. Probably meant another mobile.

Silence on the line, but it had a texture.



When Laney came back on, he sounded strangled. "Sorry. Where  are
you?"


"I know that," Laney said.


"Never mind," Laney said. Sounded tired. What time would it be in
60 Tokyo? That would be in the phone menu, if he could  find  it.
"What matters is you're there."

"Yamazaki said you had something for me to do up here."

"I  do,"  said Laney, and Rydell remembered his cousin's wedding,
Clarence having sounded just about as happy, saying that.

"You want to tell me what it is?"

"No," said Laney, "but I want to put you on  retainer.  Money  up
front for as long as you're up there."

"Is it legal, Laney, what you want done?"

There was a pause. "I don't know," Laney said. "Some of it hasn't
ever been done before probably, so it's hard to say."


"You could say it's a missing person," Laney said  after  another
pause. "Name?"

- ~-    "Doesn't have one. Probably has a few thousand, more like
it. Listen you like cop stuff nght~?

What s that supposed to mean?

No offense, you told me cop stones when I met you remember~  Okay
so  this  person  m  looking for is very very good at not leaving
traces Nothing ever turns up  not  in  the  deepest  quantitative
analysis  Laney  meant  netsearch stuff that was what he did He s
just a physi

cal presence

How do you know he s a physical presence  if  he  doesn  t  leave
traces~

Because people die Laney said

And  just  then  there were people taking seats on either side of
him ~j and a sharp reek of vodka- Get back  to  you  Rydell  said
thumbing the pad and pulling the

~       glasses off

Creedmore gnnning on his left Howdy said Creedmore This heresMar-
jane
 61 "Maryalice." On the stool to Rydell's right, a big old blonde
with  most of the top of her strapped up into something black and
shiny, the unstrapped part forming  a  cleavage  where  Creedmore
could easily have wedged one of those pint bottles. Rydell caught
something deep in her tired eyes, some combination of fear,  res-
ignation,  and  a  kind  of blind and automatic hope: she was not
having a good morning, year, or  life  probably,  but  there  was
something  there that wanted him to like her. Whatever it was, it
stopped Rydell from getting up with  his  bag  and  walking  out,
which was really what he knew he should be doing.

"Ain't you gonna say hi?" Creedmore's breath was toxic.

"Hey,  Maryalice,"  Rydell  said. "Name's Rydell. Pleased to meet
you.

Maryalice smiled, about a decade's wear lifting, just for a  sec-
ond, from her eyes. "Buell here tells me you're from Los Angeles,
Mr. Rydell." -

"Does he?" Rydell looked at Creedmore.

"Are you in the media down there, Mr. Rydell?" she asked.

"No," Rydell said, fixing Creedmore  with  the  hardest  look  he
could muster, "retail."

"I'm  in the music business myself," Maryalice said. "My ex and I
operated one of the  most  successful  country  music  venues  in
Tokyo.  But  I  felt  the  need to get back to my roots. To God's
country, Mr. Rydell."

"You talk too much," said Creedmore, across Rydell, as the  wait-
ress brought Rydell's breakfast.

"Buell," Rydell said, with something approximating a tone of even
good cheer, "shut the fuck up." Rydell started cutting the  hard-
ened edges off his eggs.

"Beer me," Buell said.

"Oh,  Buell," Maryalice said. She hauled a big plastic zip bag up
off the floor, some kind of advertising  giveaway,  and  rummaged
inside. Came up with a tall sweaty can of something she passed to
Creedmore over Rydell's lap, under the counter. Creedmore  popped
it,  held  it to his ear, as if admiring the hiss of carbonation.
a, t.iii a a~ emma.  "Sound of breakfast cooking," he said,  then
drank. Rydell sat there, chewing his leathery eggs.  so you go to
this site," Laney was saying, "give  them  my  name,  'Cohnspace-
Laney,' cap C, cap L, first four digits of this phone number, and
'Berry' That's your nickname, right?"

"Actually it's my name," Rydell said. "Family name on my mother's
side." He was seated in a capacious but none too clean cubicle in
the former bank's restroom. He'd gone  there  to  get  away  from
Creedmore  and  company,  and  so he could ring Laney back. "S0 I
give them that. What'll they give me?" Rydell looked  up  at  his
bag,  where he'd hung it on the sturdy chrome hook on the cubicle
door. He hadn't wanted to leave it out in the restaurant.


Something about being in there made Rydell feel like  he  was  in
one  of those old-fashioned submarine movies, the part where they
shut off the engines  and  wait,  really  quiet,  for  the  depth
charges  they  know  are  on  the way. It was that quiet in here,
probably because the bank was so solidly built;  the  only  sound
was the running of the toilet tank, which alone."

not be."  he thought added to the illusion.

"Okay,"  Rydehl  said, "assuming all that works, who is it you're
looking for, and what was that you said about people dying?"

"European male, mid to late  fifties,  probably  has  a  military
background but that was a long time ago."

"That  narrows  it to maybe a million probables, up here in NoCal
"How this is going to work, Rydell, is he'll find you. I'll  tell
you  where  to  go and what to ask for, and one thing and another
will bring you to his attention."  "Sounds too easy."

"Coming to his attention will be easy. Staying alive once you  do
will
 63  Rydell considered. "So what am I supposed to do for you when
he finds me?"

"Ask him a question."


"I don't know yet," Laney said, "I'm working on it."

"Laney," Rydell said, "what's this all about?"

"If I knew that," Laney said, and suddenly he sounded very tired,
"I wouldn't have to be here." He fell silent. Clicked off.

"Laney?"

Rydehl  sat  listening  to  the toilet run. Eventually he got up,
took his bag down from the  hook,  and  exited  the  cubicle.  He
washed his hands in a trickle of cold water that ran into a black
imitation marble sink crusted with yellowish industrial soap  and
made his way back along a corridor made narrow by cartons of what
he took to be janitorial supplies.

He hoped that Creedmore and the country music mamma would've for-
gotten about him, gone away. -

Not  so.  The  woman  was working on her own plate of eggs, while
Creedmore, his beer clipped between his denim thighs, was staring
balefully  at  the two enormous, gypsum-dusted construction work-
ers.

"Hey," Creedmore said, as Rydell walked past, carrying his bag.

"Hey, Buell," Rydell said, heading for the door to the street.

"Hey, where you going?"

"To work," RydeIl said.

"Work," he heard Creedmore say and "shit,"  but  the  door  swung
shut behind him, and he was on the street.  64 15. BACK UP HERE



CHEVETTE  stood beside the van, watching Tessa release God's Lit-
tle Toy. The camera platform, like a Mylar muffin or an  inflated
coin,  caught  the  day's watery light as it rose, wobbling, then
leveled out, swaying, at fifteen feet or so.

Chevette felt very strange, being here, seeing this: the concrete
tank  traps,  beyond  them the impossible shape of the bridge it-
self. Where she

had lived, though it now seemed a dream, or someone else's  life,
atop  the nearest cable tower. Way up in a cube of plywood there,
sleeping

while the wind's great hands shoved and twisted and  clawed,  and
she'd  heard  the  tendons  of  the bridge groan all in secret, a
sound carried up the  twisted  strands  for  only  her  to  hear,
Chevette with her ear pressed

against  the graceful dolphin back of cable that rose through the
oval hole sliced for it through Skinner's plywood floor.

Now Skinner was dead, she knew. He'd gone while she  was  in  Los
Angeles, trying to become whoever it was she'd thought she wanted
to be. She hadn't come up. The bridge people weren't big  on  fu-
nerals,  and  possession,  here,  was most points of the law. She
wasn't Skinner's daughter, and even if  she  had  been,  and  had
wanted to hold his place atop the cable tower, it would've been a
matter of staying there for as long as  she  intended  it  to  be
hers. She hadn't wanted that.

But she'd had no way to grieve him in Los Angeles, and now it all
came up, came back, the time she'd lived with  him.  How  he  had
found  her,  too  sick  to  walk, and taken her home, feeding her
soups he bought from the Korean vendors until she was well.  Then
he'd left her alone,

asking  nothing,  accepting her there the way you'd accept a bird
on a windowsill, until she'd learned to ride  a  bicycle  in  the
city and become a

messenger.  And soon the roles had reversed: the old man failing,
needing help, and she the one to go for soup,  bring  water,  see
that  coffee  was made. And that was how it had been, until she'd
gotten herself into the trouble that had resulted  in  her  first
having met Rydell.

"Wind'll  catch  that,"  she  cautioned Tessa, who had put on the
glasses that let her watch the feed from the floating camera.

"I've got three more in the car," Tessa said, pulling  a  sleazy-
looking black control glove over her right hand. She experimented
with the touch pads, revving the platform's miniature  props  and
swinging it through a twenty-foot circle.

"We've  got to hire someone to watch the van," Chevette said, "if
you want to see it again."

"Hire someone? Who?"

Chevette pointed at a thin black child with dusty  dreadlocks  to
his waist. "You. What's your name?"

"What's it to you?"

"Pay you watch this van. We come back, chip you fifty. Fair?" The
boy regarded her evenly. "Name Boomzilla," he said.

"Boomzilla," Chevette said, "you take care of this van?"

"Deal," he said.

"Deal," Chevette said to Tessa. -

"Lady," Boomzilla said, pointing up at God's Little Toy, "I  want
that."

"Stick around," Tessa said. "We'll need a grip."

Tessa  touching fingers to black-padded palm. The camera platform
executing a second turn and gliding out of sight, above the  tank
traps.  Tessa smiling, seeing what it saw. "Come on," she said to
Chevette and stepped between the nearest traps.

"Not that way," Chevette said. "Over here." There was a path  you
followed  if you were just walking through. To take another route
indicated either ignorance or the desire to do business.

She showed Tessa the way. It stank of urine between the  concrete
slabs. Chevette walked more quickly, Tessa behind her.

And emerged again into that wet light, but here it ran not across
the stalls and vendors of memory, but  across  the  red-and-white
front of a modular convenience store, chunked down front and cen-
ter across the entrance to the bridge's two levels, LUCKY  DRAGON
and the shudder of video up the trademark tower of screens.

"Fucking hell," said Tessa, "how interstitial is that?"

Chevette   stopped,  stunned.  "How  could  they  do  that?"   66
        "It's what they do," Tessa said. "Prime location."

"But it's like . . . like Nissan County or something."

"'Gated attraction.' The community's a tourist draw, right?"

"Lots of people won't go where there's no police."

"Autonomous zones are their own draw," Tessa  said.  "This  one's
been  here long enough to become the city's number-one postcard."

"God-awful," Chevette said. "It . . . ruins it."

"Who do you think Lucky Dragon Corp is  paying  rent  to?"  Tessa
asked, swinging the platform around for a pan across the store.

"No  idea," Chevette said. "It's right in the middle of what used
to be the street."

"Never mind," Tessa said, moving on, into the pedestrian  traffic
flowing  to and from the bridge. "We're just in time. We're going
to document the life before it's theme-parked."

Chevette followed, not knowing what it was exactly that she felt.


THEY  ate lunch in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.  Chevette
didn't remember it from before, but places changed  V       names
on  the  bridge. They changed size and shape too. You'd get these
        strange mergers, a hair place and an oyster bar  deciding
to  become a         bigger place that cut hair and sold oysters.
Sometimes it worked: one of         the longest-running places on
the San Francisco end was an old-style,

manual  tattoo  parlor that served breakfast. You could sit there
over a

plate of eggs and bacon and watch somebody get needled with some

kind of hand-drawn flash.  But Dirty Is God was just Mexican food
and Japanese music, a

pretty   straightforward   proposition.   Tessa  got  the  huevos
rancheros and

- - Chevette got a chicken quesadilla. They both  had  a  Corona,
and  Tessa  parked the camera platform up near the tented plastic
ceiling. Nobody

noticed it up there apparently, so  Tessa  could  do  documentary
while she ate.

Tessa  ate  a  lot.  She said it was her metabolism: one of those
people who never gains any weight regardless of how much she ate,
but she needed to do it to keep her energy up. Tessa put away her
huevos before Chevette was halfway through  her  quesadilla.  She
drained her glass
 67 bottle of Corona and started fiddling with the wedge of lime,
squeezing it, working it into the neck.

"Carson," Tessa said. "You worried about him?"

"What about him?"

"He's an abusive ex, is what about him. That was his car back  in
Malibu, wasn't it?"

"I think so," Chevette said.

"You think so? You aren't sure?"

"Look,"  Chevette  said, "it was early in the morning. It was all
pretty strange. It wasn't my idea to come up here, you  know?  It
was your idea. You want to make your movie."

The  lime  popped  down  into  the empty Corona bottle, and Tessa
looked at it as though she'd just lost a private wager. "You know
what  I  like  about  you?  I mean one of the things I like about
you?"

"What?" Chevette asked.

"You aren't middle class. You just aren't. You move in with  this
guy, he starts hitting you, what do you do?"

"Move out."

"That's  right.  You move out. You don't take a meeting with your
lawyers."

"I don't have any lawyers," Chevette said.

"I know. That's what I mean."

"I don't like lawyers," Chevette said.

"Of course you don't. And you don't have any  reflex  to  litiga-
tion."

"Litigation?"

"He beat you up. He's got eight hundred square feet of strata-ti-
tle loft. He's got a job. He beats you up, you don't automatical-
ly order a surgical strike; you're not middle class."

"I just don't want anything to do with him."

"That's what I mean. You're from Oregon, right?"

"More or less," Chevette said.

"You  ever  think  of  acting?"  Tessa  inverted  the bottle. The
squashed lime wedge fell down into the neck. A few drops of  beer
fell  on the scratched black plastic of the table. Tessa inserted
the little finger of her right hand and tried to  snag  the  lime
wedge.  68 "No."

"Camera  loves  you.  You've  got a body makes boys chew carpet."
'Get off Chevette said

Why do you think they were putting those party shots of you up on
the website back in Malibu?"


Tessa hooked the lime wedge what was left of it out of the bottle
"Right on all three she said but the main reasons your looks

Behind Tessa on one of Dirty Is Gods recycled wall screens a very
beautiful  Japanese  girl  had appeared Look at her Chevette said
"That s looks, right~

Tessa looked over her shoulder That s Rei Toei she said 'So she s
beautiful She is

"Chevette,"  Tessa said, "she doesn't exist. There's no live girl
there at all. She's code. Software."

No way Chevette said



 - - percent unreal."

- - -   "Then that's what people want," Chevette  said,  watching
Rei Toei

--  ~-   swan through some kind of retro Asian nightclub, "not ex
bicycle messengers from San Francisco."

No Tessa said you ye got it exactly backwards People don  t  know
what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is
a found object. Traditionally, anyway."

Chevette looked at Tessa across the  two  empty  Corona  bottles.
"What are you getting at, Tessa?"


"Forget it."

"No.  I've  got vision thing working big-time on this. I need you
for the focus. I need narrative traction. I need  Chevette  Wash-
ington."

Chevette  was  actually starting to feel a little scared. It made
her
 69 angry. "Don't you have a grant  to  do  this  one  particular
project you've been talking about? These innersitual things-"

"Look,"  Tessa  said, "if that's a problem, and I'm not saying it
is, it's my problem. And it's not a problem, it's an opportunity.
It's a shot. My shot."

"Tessa,  there  is  no way you are going to get me to act in your
movie. None. You understand?'

"'Acting' isn't in it, Chevette. All you have to do is  be  your-
self.  And that will involve finding out who you really are. I am
going to make a film about you finding out who you really are."

"You are not," said Chevette, getting up and actually bumping in-
to  the  camera platform, which must have descended to level with
her head while they were talking. "Stop that!" Swatting at  God's
Little Toy.

The  other  four  customers in Dirty Is God just looking at them.
70 16. SUB-ROUTINES



THAT Hole at the core of Laney's being, that underlying  absence,
he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of
the self.

Something has happened to him since his descent  into  the  card-
board city. He has started to see that previously he had, in some
unthinkably literal way, no self.

But what was there, he wonders, before?

Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspir-
ing  to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be,
Laney. And he has never known this before, although he knows that
he  has always, somehow, been aware of something having been des-
perately and utterly wrong.

Something tells him this. Something in the core and totality,  it
seems, of DatAmerica. How can that be?

But  now he lies, propped in sleeping bags, in darkness, as if at
the earth's core, and beyond cardboard walls are  walls  of  con-
crete,  sheathed  in ceramic tile, and beyond them the footing of
this country, Japan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of
tectonic forces, the shifting of continent-wide plates.

Somewhere  within  Laney,  something  else  is shifting. There is
move-ment, and potential for greater movement still, and he  won-
ders why he

is no longer afraid.

And  all  of  this  is somehow a gift of the sickness. Not of the
cough, the fever, but of that underlying dis-ease that  he  takes
to  be the product of the 5-SB he ingested so long ago in the or-
phanage in Gainesville.

We -were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the  eyephones
and  follows  his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data,
plunging down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded  of
fractally  differentiated  fields  of  information he has come to
suspect of hiding some power or intelligence beyond  his  compre-
hension.

Something at once noun and verb.

While  Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of informa
                71 tion, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a
Laney-colored  smear,  meaningless without context. A microscopic
cog in some catastrophic plan. But positioned,  he  senses,  cen-
trally.

Crucially.

And  that is why sleep is no longer an option.  72 17.     ZODIAC
THEY take Silencio, naked, the black man with the long  face  and
the fat

white  man with the red beard, into a room with wet wooden walls.
Leave him. Hot rain falls from holes in the black  plastic  pipes
above. Falls

harder, stings.

They  have taken his clothes and shoes away in a plastic bag, and
now the fat man returns, gives him soap. He knows soap. He remem-
bers  the warm rain falling from a pipe in los projectos but this
is better, and he is alone in the tall wooden room.

V       Silencio with his belly full, soaping himself repeatedly,
because that is what they want. He rubs the soap into his hair.

He  closes  his eyes against the burning of the soap and sees the
watches arrayed beneath greenish, randomly  abraded  glass,  like
fish  from  some  warmer  season  frozen hard in lake ice. Bright
highlights off steel and gold.

He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended:  the  multifold
fact  of  these  potent  objects,  their endless differentiation,
their individual specificities. Infinite variety arising from the
expression of dial,

        hands,  numerals, hour markers.. . He likes the warm rain
but he needs desperately to return, to  see  more,  to  hear  the
words.

He has become the words, what they mean.

Breguette  hands.  Tapestry  dial.  Bombay  lugs.  Original stem.
Signed.

The rain slows, stops. The fat man, who  wears  plastic  sandals,
brings Silencio a thick dry cloth.

The  fat  man  peers at him. "Watches, you say he likes?" the fat
man asks the black man. "Yes," the black man says, "he  seems  to
like watches."

The  bearded  man  drapes  the towel around Silencio's shoulders.
"Does he know how to tell time?"

"I don't know," says the black man.

"Well," says the fat man, stepping back, "he doesn't know how to

use  a  towel."                   73  Silencio  feels   confused,
ashamed. He looks down.

"Leave  him  alone,  Andy,"  the  black  man  says. "Get me those
clothes I brought."


THE black man's name: Fontaine. Like a word in  the  language  of
los projectos, a meaning about water. The warm rain in the wooden
room.

Now Fontaine leads him through the upper level, where some people
call out, selling fruit, past others selling old things spread on
blankets, to where a thin dark man stands waiting beside a  plas-
tic crate. The crate is upturned, its bottom padded with foam and
ragged silver tape, and this man wears a striped cloth thing with
pockets  down  his  front,  and  in the pockets are scissors, and
things like the thing Raton liked to run  endlessly  through  his
hair, when he had balanced the black perfectly with the white.

Silencio  is wearing the clothes Fontaine has given him: they are
large, loose, not his own, but they smell good. Fontaine has giv-
en  him shoes made of white cloth. Too white. They hurt his eyes.

The soap and the warm rain have made Silencio's hair  strange  as
well, and now Fontaine tells Silencio to sit upon the crate, this
man will cut his hair.

Silencio sits, trembling, as the thin dark man flicks at his hair
with one of the Raton-things from his pockets, making small nois-
es behind his teeth.

Silencio looks at Fontaine.

"It's okay," Fontaine says, unwrapping a  small  sharp  stick  of
wood  and  inserting  it into the corner of his mouth, "you won't
feel a thing."

Silencio wonders if the stick is like the black or the white, but
Fontaine  does  not change. He stands there with the stick in his
mouth, watching the thin dark man snip away Silencio's hair  with
the  scissors. Silencio watches Fontaine, listens to the sound of
the scissors, and to the new language in his head.

Zodiac Sea Wolf. Case  very  clean.  Screw-down  crown.  Original
bezel.

"Zodiac Sea Wolf," Silencio says.

"Man,"  says  the  thin  dark man, "you deep."  74 18.     SELWYN
TONG


RYDELL had a theory about virtual real estate.  The  smaller  and
cheaper  the  physical  site of a given operation, the bigger and
cheesier the web site. According to this theory Selwyn F.X. Tong,
notary  public,  of  Kowloon,  was  probably  operating  out of a
rolled-up newspaper.

Rydeil couldn't figure out a way to skip  the  approach  segment,
which  was monolithic, vaguely Egyptian, and reminded him of what
his buddy Sublett,  a  film  buff,  had  called  "corridor  meta-
physics." This was

-  -     one  long-ass corridor, and if it had been physical, you
could've driven a

- -     very large truck  down  it.  There  were  baroque  sconce
lights,  virtual  scar-let  wall-to-wall, and weird tacky texture
mapping that tended to gold-

flecked marble.

Where had Laney found this guy?

Eventually Rydell did manage to kill the music, something vaguely
classical  and  swelling,  but  it still seemed to take him three
minutes to

get to Selwyn F.X. Tong's doors. Which were tall, very tall,  and
mapped to resemble some genenc idea of tropical hardwood

Teak my ass said Rydell

"Welcome,"  said  a breathless, hyper-feminine voice, "to the of-
fices of Selwyn FX Tong notary public'

The doors swung open Rydell figured that if he hadn t killed the

~       music, it would be peaking about now.

Virtually, the notary's office was about the size of  an  Olympic
pool  but  scarce  on  detail.  Rydeli used the rocker-pad on his
glasses to scoot

his POV right up to the desk, which was about the size of a  pool
table,  and mapped in that same ramped-down wood look. There were
a cou

-- -    pie of nondescript, metallic-looking objects on it and  a
few pieces of virtual paper.

"What's the 'F.X.' stand for?" Rydell asked.    -

Francis  Xavier  said Tong who presented as a sort of deadpan car
toon of a small Chinese man in a white shirt black tie black suit
His



A
 75  black  hair  and the black suit were mapped in the same tex-
ture, a weird effect and one Rydell took to be unintentional.

"1 thought you might be in video" Rydell said, "like it's a nick-
name:

FX, 'effects,' right?"

"I am Catholic," Tong said, his tone neutral.

"No offense," Rydell said.

"None taken," said Tong, his plastic-looking face as shiny as his
plastic-looking eyes.

You always forgot, Rydell reflected,  just  how  bad  this  stuff
could look if it hadn't been handled right.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Rydeil?"

"Laney didn't tell you?"

"Laney?"

"Cohn," Rydell said. "Space. Laney."

"And . . . ?"

"Six," Rydell said. "Zero. Four. Two."

Tong's plastic-looking eyes narrowed.

"Berry."   Tong pursed his lips. Behind him, through a broad win-
dow, at a different rate of resolution, Rydell could see the sky-
line of Hong Kong.

"Berry" Rydell repeated.

"Thank  you,  Mr. Rydell," the notary said. "My client has autho-
rized me to give you this seven-digit identification  number."  A
gold fountain pen appeared in Tong's right hand like a continuity
error in a student film. It was a  very  large  pen,  elaborately
mapped  with  swirling dragons, their scales in higher resolution
than anything else in the site. Probably a gift, Rydell  decided.
Tong  wrote  the seven digits on one of the sheets of virtual pa-
per, then reversed it on the desktop so that  Rydell  could  read
it.  The  pen  had  vanished,  as unnaturally as it had appeared.
"'Please don't repeat this number aloud," Tong said.

Why not?"

"Issues of encryption," Tong said obscurely. "You have as long as
you like to memorize the number."

Rydell looked at the seven digits and began to work out a mnemon-
ic. He finally arrived at one based on his birthday,  the  number
of  states when he was born, his father's age when he'd died, and
a mental image of two cans of 7-Up. When he was certain that he'd
be  able  to recall the number, he looked up at Tong. "Where do I
go to get the credit chip?"

"Any automated teller. You have photo identification?"

"Yes," Rydell said. "Then we are finished." "One  thing,"  Rydell
said. "What is that?"

"Tell  me  how  I  get out of here without having to go back down
that corridor of yours. I just want a straight exit, right?"

Tong regarded him blandly. "Click on my face."

Rydell did, using the rocker-pad to summon a cursor shaped like a
neon  green  cartoon hand, pointing. 'Thanks," he said, as Tong's
office folded.

He was in the corridor, facing back the way he had come.  "Damn,"
Rydell said.

The music began. He worked the rocker-pad, trying to remember how
he'd killed it before. He wanted to get a GPS fix on the  nearest
ATM, though, so he didn't unplug the glasses.

He clicked for the end of the corridor.

-  -     The  click  seemed  to trigger a metastatic surge of bit
rot, every bland

texture map rewritten in some weirder hand: the red  carpet  went
gray-green, its knap grown strange and unevenly furry, like some-
thing at the                 bottom of a month-old cup of coffee,
while the walls went from whore                 house marble to a
moist fish belly pallor the sconce lights glowing  dim          -
-     as  drowned  corpse  candles.  Tong's  fake-classical theme
cracked and

hollowed, weird bass notes rumbling in just above  the  threshold
of the subsonic.

It  all  took  about a second to happen, and it took Rydell maybe
another second to get the idea that someone wanted his undivided

attention.

"Rydell." It was one of those voices that they fake up from found
        -       audio:  speech  cobbled from wind down skyscraper
canyons, the creak                 ing of Great  Lakes  ice  tree
frogs clanging in the Southern night Rydell
 77  had  heard  them  before. They grated on the nerves, as they
were meant to, and conveniently disguised the voice of the speak-
er. Assuming the speaker had a voice in the first place.

"Hey," Rydell said, "I was just trying to click out."

A virtual screen appeared in front of him, a round-cornered rect-
angle whose dimensions were meant to invoke the cultural paradigm
of  twentieth-century  video  screens.  On  it,  an oddly angled,
monochromatic view of some vast shadowy  space,  dimly  lit  from
above. Nothing there. Impression of decay, great age.

"I have important information for you." The vowel in you suggest-
ed a siren dopplering past, then gone.

"Well," said Rydell, "if your middle name is 'F. X.,'you're  sure
going to some trouble."

There  was  a  pause, Rydell staring at the dead, blank space de-
picted or recorded on the screen. He was waiting for something to
move  there; probably that was the point of it, that nothing did.

"You'd better take this information very seriously, Mr.  Rydell."

"I'm serious as cancer," Rydell said. "Shoot."

"Use  the  ATM  at  the  Lucky  Dragon,  near the entrance to the
bridge. Then present your identification at the GlobEx  franchise
at the rear of the store."

"Why?"

"They're holding something for you."

"Tong," Rydell said, "is that you?"

But  there  was  no answer. The screen vanished, and the corridor
was as it had been.

Rydell reached up and disconnected  the  rented  cable  from  the
Brazilian glasses.

Blinked.

A coffee place near Union Square, the kind that had potted plants
and hotdesks. An early office crowd was starting to line  up  for
sandwiches.

He got up, folded the glasses, tucked them into the inside pocket
of  his  jacket,  and  picked  up  his   bag.            78
19.     INTERSTITIAL


CHEVETTE  moves  past  the colorless flame of a chestnut vendor's
charcoal fire, powdery gray burning itself down in the  inverted,
V-nosed hood of some ancient car.

She  sees  another fire, in memory: coke glow of a smith's forge,
driven by the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. Beside her the old man
held  the  drive  chain of some extinct motorcycle, folded neatly
into a compact mass and fastened with a twist of rusty  wire.  To
be  taken in the smith's tongs and placed within the forge. To be
beaten, finally, incandescent, into a billet of  their  strangely
grained  Damascus, ghosts of those links emerging as the blade is
forged, quenched, shaped, and polished on the wheel.   Where  did
that  knife  go?  she wonders.  She'd watched the maker craft and
braise a hilt of brass, rivet slabs of  laminated  circuit  board
and  shape  them  on  a  belt grinder. The rigid, brittle-looking
board, layers of fabric trapped in green phenolic resin, was  ev-
erywhere  on  the  bridge,  a common currency of landfills-. Each
sheet mapped  with  dull  metallic  patterns  suggesting  cities,
streets.  When  they  came  from the scavengers they were studded
with components, easily stripped with a torch, melting  the  gray
solder. The components fell away, leaving the singed green boards
with their inlaid foil maps of imaginary cities, residue  of  the
second  age of electronics. And Skinner would tell her that these
boards were immortal, inert as stone, proof against moisture  and
ultraviolet  and  every form of decay; that they were destined to
litter the planet, hence it was good to  reuse  them,  work  them
when  possible  into  the fabric of things, a resource when some-
thing needed to be durable.  She knows she needs to be alone now,
so she's left Tessa on the lower level, collecting visual texture
with God's Little Toy. Chevette can't hear  any  more  about  how
Tessa's  film  has  to be more personal, about her, Chevette, and
Tessa hasn't been able to shut up about that,                  79
or take no for an answer. Chevette remembers Bunny Malatesta, her
dispatcher when she rode here, how he'd say  "and  what  part  of
'no'  is  it  that you don't understand?" But Bunny could deliver
lines like that as though he were a force of nature, and Chevette
knows she can't, that she lacks Bunny's gravity, the sheer crunch
required to get it across.

So she's taken an escalator, one she doesn't remember, to the up-
per  level,  and is making her way, without really thinking about
it, to the foot of their tower, the wet light having turned to  a
thin and gusting rain, blowing through the bridge's tattered sec-
ondhand superstructure. People  are  hauling  their  laundry  in,
where  they've  hung  it,  draped on lines, and there's a general
pre-storm bustle that she knows will fade if the weather changes.

And  so  far,  she thinks, she's not seen a single face she knows
from before, and no one has greeted her, and  she  finds  herself
imagining the bridge's entire population replaced in her absence.
No, there went the bookstall woman, the one with the ivory  chop-
sticks thrust into her dyed black bun, and she recognizes the Ko-
rean boy with the bad leg, rumbling his father's soup wagon along
as though it should have brakes.

The  tower  she'd ascended each day to Skinner's plywood shack is
bundled in subsidiary construction, its iron buried at  the  core
of an organic complex of spaces appropriated for specific activi-
ties. Behind taut, wind-shivered sheets of milky plastic, the un-
earthly light of a hydroponics operation casts outsize leaf shad-
ows. She hears the snarl o~ an electric saw from the  tiny  work-
shop  of  a furniture-maker, whose assistant sits patiently, rub-
bing wax into a small bench collaged from paint-flecked oak scav-
enged  from  the  shells  of older houses. Someone else is making
jam, the big copper kettle heated by a propane ring.

Perfect for Tessa, she  thinks:  the  bridge  people  maintaining
their  interstices.  Doing  their little things. But Chevette has
seen them drunk. Has seen the drugged and the mad dive  to  their
deaths  in  the  gray and unforgiving chop. Has seen men fight to
the death with knives. Has seen  a  mother,  dumbstruck,  walking
with  a  strangled  child  in her arms, at dawn. The bridge is no
tourist's fantasy. The bridge is real, and to  live  here  exacts
its own price.

It  is a world within the world, and, if there be such places be-
tween 80 the things of the world, places built in the gaps,  then
surely  there  are  things  there,  and  places between them, and
things in those places too.

And Tessa doesn't know this, and it is not  Chevette's  place  to
tell her.

She ducks past a loose flap of plastic, into moist warmth and the
spectrum of grow lamps. A reek of chemicals. Black  water  pumped
amid  pale  roots.  These are medicinal plants, she supposes, but
probably not

- -     drugs in the street sense. Those are  grown  nearer  Oak-
land, in a sector

somehow  allotted  for  that,  and  on warm days there the fug of
resin hangs

- -     narcotic in the air, bringing an almost perceptible buzz,
faint alteration of perception and the will.

"Hey. Anybody here?"

Gurgle  of  liquid through transparent tubing. A silt-slimed pair
of

- -     battered yellow waders dangle nearby, but no sign of  who
hung  them  there.  She  moves  quickly, her feet remembering, to
where corroded aluminum rungs protrude from fist-sized  blobs  of
super-epoxy.

The  ball-chain  zip  pulls on Skinner's old jacket jingle as she
climbs. These rungs are a back way, an emergency exit if  needed.

Climbing past the sickly greenish sun of a grow lamp, housed in a
corroded industrial fixture, she pulls herself up the  last  alu-
minum rung and through a narrow triangular opening.

It is dark here, shaded by walls of rain-swolkin composite.

        Shadowed where she remembers light, and she sees that the
bulb,

-       above, in this enclosed space, is missing.  This  is  the
lower end of

-       Skinner's "funicular," the little junkyard elevator trol-
ley, built for him by a black man named Fontaine, and it was here
that  she'd  lock her bike in her messengering days, after shoul-
dering it up another, less covert ladder.

She studies the cog-toothed track of  the  funicular,  where  the
grease  shows  dull  with accumulated dust. The gondola, a yellow
municipal

recycling bin, deep enough to stand in and grasp the  rim,  waits
where it should. But if it is here, it likely means that the cur-
rent resident of the cable tower is not. Unless the car has  been
sent  in  expectation  of a visitor, which Chevette doubts. It is
better to be up there with the car up. She knows that feeling.

Now she climbs wooden rungs, a cruder ladder of two-by-fours,



until her head clears the ply and she wirces in wind and  silvery
light.  Sees a gull hang almost stationary in the air, not twenty
feet away, the towers of the city as backdrop.

The wind tugs at her hair, longer now han when  she  lived  here,
and  a  feeling  that she can't name comes hile something she has
always known, and she has no interest in  climbirg  farther,  be-
cause  she  knows  now  that  the  home she remembers is n longer
there. Only its shell, humming in the wind, where  once  she  lay
wrapped  in  blankets, smelling machinist's grease and coffee and
fresh-cat wood.

Where, it comes to her, she was sometimes happy, in the sense  of
being  somehow  complete,  and  ready  for what another day might
bring.

And knows she is no longer that,  md  that  while  she  was,  she
scarcely knew it.

She  hunches  her shoulders, drawing her neck down into the cara-
pace of Skinner's jacket, and imagines heiself crying, though she
knows   she   won't,  and  climbs  back  down.           82
-:      20. BOOMZILLA



BOOMZILLA sitting on the curb, beside the truck these two bitches
say

-  -     they  pay  him to watch. They don't come back, he'll get
some help and strip it. Wants that robot balloon the blonde bitch
had. That's fine. Fly

- -     that shit around.  Other bitch kind of biker-looking, big
old coat looked like she got it off a  dumpster.  That  one  kick
your ass, looked like.

Where  they  gone?  Hungry  now,  wind  blowing grit in his face,
splashes of rain.

"Have you seen this girl?" Movie-looking white man, face  painted
dark  like  they  do down the coast. How they dress when they had
time to think about coming here, everything worn out just  right.
Leather jacket like he's left his old airplane around the corner.
Blue jeans. Black T.

Boomzilla, he'd puke, anybody try to put him in that shit. Boomz-
ihla know how he going to dress, time he get his shit together.

Boomzilla  looking  at  the  printout the man holds out. Sees the
biker-looking bitch, but dressed better.

Boomzilla looks up at the tinted face. See how pale the blue eyes
look  against  it. Something say: cold. Something say: don't fuck
with me.

Boomzilla thinks: he don't know it's they truck.

"She's lost," the man says.

You ass is, Boomzilla thinks. "Never seen her."  Eyes lean  in  a
little  closer.  "Missing, understand? Trying to help her. A lost
child."  Thinks: child my ass; bitch my momma's  age.   Boomzilla
shakes  his  head. How he does it serious, just a little, side to
side. Means: no.  The blue eyes swing away, looking for  somebody
else  to  show  the  picture  to;  swing right past the truck. No
click.  Man moving off, toward a clutch of  people  by  a  coffee
stand, holding the picture.  Boomzilla watches him go.

A lost child himself, he has every intention of staying that way.
 83 21.     PARAGON ASIA SAN Francisco  and  Los  Angeles  seemed
more  like different planets than different cities. It wasn't the
NoCal-SoCal thing, but something that went down to the roots. Ry-
dell  remembered sitting with a beer somewhere, years ago, watch-
ing the partition ceremonies on CNN, and it hadn't impressed  him
much even then. But the difference, that was something.

A  stiff  gust of wind threw rain into his face, as he was coming
down Stockton toward Market. Office girls held their skirts  down
and  laughed,  and Rydell felt like laughing too, though that had
passed before he'd crossed Market and started down 4th.

This was where he'd met Chevette, where she'd lived.

She and Rydehl had had their adventure up here, had  met  in  the
course of it, and the end of it had taken them to LA.

She hadn't liked LA, he always told himself, but he knew that re-
ally wasn't why it had gone the way it had.

They had moved down there, the two of them, while Rydell  pursued
the  mediation of what they'd just gone through together. Cops in
Trouble was interested, and Cops in Trouble had  been  interested
in Rydell once before, back in Knoxville.

Fresh  out of the academy, back then, he'd used deadly force on a
stimulant abuser who was trying to kill his, the abuser's,  girl-
friend's  children.  The girlfriend had subsequently been looking
to sue the department, the city, and Rydehl, so Cops  in  Trouble
had  decided  Rydell might warrant a segment. So they'd flown him
out to SoCal, where they were based. He'd gotten an agent and ev-
erything, but the deal had fallen apart, so he'd taken ajob driv-
ing armed response for IntenSecure. When he'd managed to get him-
self  fired  from  that, he wound up going up to NoCal to do temp
work, off the record, for the local IntenSecure operation  there.
That was what had gotten him into the trouble that introduced him
to Chevette Washington.  84 So when Rydell turned up back  in  LA
with  a  story  to tell, and Chevette on his arm, Cops in Trouble
had perked right up. They were moving into  a  phase  where  they
tried  to spin individual segments off into series for niche mar-
kets, and the demographics people liked it that Rydell was  male,
not  too  young,  not too educated, and from the South. They also
liked it that he wasn't racist, and they really liked it that  he
was  with  this  really cute alt-dot kind of girl, one who looked
like she could crush walnuts between her thighs.

Cops in Trouble had installed them in a small stealth hotel below
Sunset, and they had been so happy, the first few weeks, that Ry-
dehl could barely stand to remember it.

Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history
than  love.  The  suite was like a little apartment, with its own
kitchen and a gas fire, and they'd roll  around  at  night  on  a
blanket on the floor, in front of the fire, with the windows open
and the lights out, blue flame flickering low and  LAPD  gunships
drumming  overhead,  and  every time he'd crawl into her arms, or
she'd put her face down next to his, he'd known it was good  his-
tory, the best, and that everything was going to be just fine.

But it hadn't been.

Rydell  had  never  thought about his looks much. He looked, he'd
thought, okay. Women had seemed to like him well enough,  and  it
had  been  pointed out to him that he resembled the younger Tommy
Lee Jones, Tommy Lee Jones being a twentieth-century movie  star.
And because they'd told him that, he'd watched a few of the guy's
movies and liked them, though the resemblance people saw  puzzled
him.

He guessed he'd started to worry though, when Cops in Trouble had
assigned a skinny blonde intern named Tara-May Ahlenby to  follow
him around, grabbing footage with a shoulder-mounted steadicam.

Tara-May had chewed gum and fiddled with filters and had general-
ly put Rydell's teeth on edge. He'd known she was feeding live to
Cops  in  Trouble,  and he'd started to get the idea they weren't
too happy with what was coming through. Tara-May  hadn't  helped,
explaining  to  Rydehl  that  the camera added an apparent twenty
pounds to anybody's looks,
 85 but that, hey, s1re liked him just the way h~ was, ~lI  beefy
and  solid. But she'd kept sugesting he try working out more. Why
not go with that girlfriend of yurs, she'd say, she's so buff, it
hurs.

But  Che~tte  had never seen the in;ide of a gym in her life; she
owed her buf~ess to her genes and a few years she'd spent  pound-
ing  up and down ~an Francisco hills on a conpetitiom-grade moun-
tain bike, its frame rollel from epoxy and Japanese  constriction
paper.

So  now Hydell sighed, coming up on the co-ner of 4th and Bryant,
and on Bryanl turning toward the bridge The bag on  his  shoulder
was starting to demonstrate its weight, its cohIusi(n with gravi-
ty.  Rydeli  stopped,  sightd  again,  readjusted  the  bag.  Put
t~oughts of the past out of his mind.

Just walk


NO trouble at all finding that branch of Lucky Uragon.

Couldn't  miss  it,  smack in what hal been the middle of Bryant,
dead center as you approached the  entrance  to  the  bridge.  He
hadn't  been  able to s~e it, coming along Bryant, ~ecaus~ it was
behind the jumble of old coirrete tank traps they'd dropped thore
after the quake, but once you got past those, there it was.

He  coulc  see,  walking up to it, that it was m newer model than
the one he'd worled in on Sunset. It had fev~er corrers, so there
was  less to chip off or med repair. He supposed that designing a
Lucky Dragon module was ~bout designing something that would hold
up under millions of uncaing and even hostile hanth. Ultirrately,
he thought, you'd wind up witFsomething hike a seashell, hard and
smooth.

The  storton  Sunset had had a finish that a:e graffiti. The gang
kids would come and tag it;  twenty  minute~  later  these  flat,
dark,  vaguely  crab-like pat:hes of dark blue would come gliding
around the corner. Rydell had mver understood  how  they  'vorke4
and  Durius  said they'd been deve1o~ed in Singapore. They seemed
to be embedded, a few millimeters dowi into  the  surface,  which
seas a scrt of non-glossy gel-coat affair, but abe to move around
under there. Smart material, he'd heard that called.  And  they'd
glide  up  to  the  tag, ~vi-iatever artfully abstract scrawl had
been sprayed there to declare fealty or mark territory  or  swear
86  revenge  (Durius  had been able to read these things and con-
struct a narrative out of them) and start eating it. You couldn't
actually  see the crablegs move. They just sort of nuzzled in and
gradually the tag started

to unravel, de-rez, molecules of paint sucked down into the  blue
of the Lucky Dragon graffiti-eaters.

And  once  someone  had  come  with  a smart tag, a sort of decal
they'd somehow adhered to the wall, although neither  RydelI  nor
Durius had

been able to figure how they'd done it without being seen. Maybe,
Dunus said, they'd shot it from a distance. It was the tag  of  a
gang called

the  Chupacabras,  a fearsome spiky thing, all black and red, in-
sectoid

- -' and menacing and, Rydell thought, kind of good-looking,  ex-
citing-looking.  He'd seen it worn as a tattoo, in the store. The
kids who wore it favored those contacts, the kind gave you pupils
like  a  snake's.  When  the  graffiti-eaters  came  out after it
though, it had moved.

They'd edge up to it, and it would sense them and move away.  Al-
most too slow to see it happening, but it moved. Then the graffi-
ti-eaters would move again. Durius and  Rydell  watched  it,  the
first  night, get all the way around to the back of the store. It
was starting to work its way back around toward  the  front  when
they went off shift.

Next  shift  it  was still there, and a couple of standard spray-
bomb tags as well. The graffiti-eaters were locked on  the  smart
tag and not

taking care of business. Durius showed it to Mr. Park, who didn't
like it that they hadn't told him before. Rydell showed him where
they'd logged

it  in  the  shift  record  when they clocked off, which had just
pissed Mr. Park off more.

About an hour later, two men in white Tyvek coveralls  showed  up
in  an unmarked, surgically clean white van and went to work. Ry-
dell would've liked to watch them get  the  smart  tag  off,  but
there  was  a  run of shoplifters that night and he didn't get to
see what they did to it. They didn't use scrapers or solvents, he
knew  that. They used a notebook and a couple of adhesive probes.
Basically, he guessed, they  reprogrammed  it,  messed  with  its
code,  and  after  they  left,  the graffiti-eaters were back out
there, slurping down the latest Chupacabra iconography.

This Lucky Dragon by the bridge was smooth and  white  as  a  new
china plate, Rydell observed, as he came up to it. It looked like
a piece                 87 of some different dream, fallen  here.
The  entrance to the bridge had a werd unplanned drama to it, and
Rydell wondered if there'd been a lot of Ileetings, back in  Sin-
gapore,  about whether or not to put this unit here. Lucky Dragon
had some units on prime tourist real estate, and Rydell knew that
from  watching  the  Global  Interactive Video Column back in LA;
there was one in the mall under  Red  Square,  that  fancy  KDatn
branch  in  Berlin,  the  big-ass  one in Piccadilly, London, but
putting one here struck him as a strange, or  strangely  deliber-
ate, move.

The bridge was a dodgy place, safe enough but not "tourist safe."
There was a walk-on tourist contingent, sure, and a big one, par-
ticularly  on this end of the bridge, but no tours, no guides. If
you went, you went on your own. Chevette had told  him  how  they
repelled evangelicals, and the Salvation Army and any other orga-
nized entity, in no untertain terms. Rydell figured that in  fact
that  was part of the draw of the place, that it was unregulated.

Autonomous zone, Durius called that. He'd told Rydell that Sunset
Strip had started out as one of those, a place between police ju-
risdictions, and somehow that had set  the  DNA  of  the  street,
which  was why, sas you still got hookers in elf hats there, come
Christmas.

But maybe Lucky Dragon knew something people didn't, he  thought.
Things could change. His father, for instance, used to swear that
Times Square had been a really dangerous place.

Rydell made his way through the crowd  flowing  on  and  off  the
bridge  and past the Global Interactive Video Column, daydreaming
as he did that he'd look up and see the Sunset branch there, with
Praisegod beaming sunnily at him from out in front.

What  he got was some skater kid in Seoul shaking his nuts at the
camera.

He went in, to be immediately stopped by a very large man with  a
very  broad  forehead  and pale, almost invisible eyebrows. "Your
bag," said the security man, who was wearing a pink Lucky  Dragon
fanny  pack exactly like the one Rydell had worn in LA. As a mat-
ter of fact, Rydell's was in the very duffel the guy was  demand-
ing.

"Please," Rydell said, handing the bag over. Lucky Dragon securi-
ty 88 were supposed to say that: please. It  was  on  Mr.  Park's
notebook,  and  anyway when you asked somebody for their bag, you
were admitting you

thought they might shoplift, so you might as well be polite about
it.  The security man narrowed his eyes. He put the bag in a num-
bered cubicle behind his station and handed Rydehl a Lucky Dragon
logo  tag  that  looked  like an oversized drink coaster with the
number five on the back. It was the size it was, Rydell knew, be-
cause  it  had  been determined that this size made the tags just
that much too big to fit into most ~ pockets, thereby  preventing
people  from  pocketing,  forgetting,  and $~ wandering away with
them. Kept costs down. Everything about Lucky

Dragon was worked out that way. You sort of had to admire them.


walked up to it pulling his wallet from his back pocket

-- -    "I'm here to get a chip issued," he said.

Identify yourself please Lucky Dragon  ATMs  all  had  this  same
voice a weird uptight strangled little castrato voice and he won-
dered why that was But you could be sure they  d  worked  it  out
probably it

kept  people from standing around, bullshitting with the machine.
But Rydell knew that you didn't want to do that  anyway,  because
the  suck-  -  -  ers would pepper-spray you. They were plastered
with notices to that effect too, although he doubted anyone  ever
actually read them. What the notices didn't say, and Lucky Dragon
wasn't telling, was that if you tried seriously to dick with one,
drive a crowbar into the money slot, say,

the  thing  would  mist  you  and itself down with water and then
electrify itself.

"Berry Rydell," he said, taking his  Tennessee  driver's  license
from  his  wallet  and  inserting the business end into the ATM's
reader.

"Palm contact."

Rydell pressed his hand within the outline of a  hand.  He  hated
the way that felt. Bad cootie factor with those palm-scan things.
Hand grease.

He wiped his palm on his trousers.

"Please enter your personal identification code."
 89 Rrdell did, working through his mremonic to the two  cans  of
7-Up.

"brocessing  credit request," the thng said, sounding as if some-
one were queezing its balls.

l4,rdell looked around and saw thathe was pretty  much  the  only
customei  aside  from  a  woman  with gray lair and black leather
pants, who was 'iving the checker a hard time in what sounded  to
Rydehl like Gernan.

"Iransaction completed," the ATN said. Rydell turned back in time
to se~ a Lucky Dragon credit chip em~ge from the  chip  slot.  He
shoved  it  parway  back  in,  to see the availablecome up on the
screen. Not bad. Not a~l at all. He pocketed  the  chip  put  his
wallet  away,  and  turned towad the GlobEx concession, whid also
doubled as the local USPO. Likethe ATM, this was another purpose-
built  node  or swelling in the sam plastic wall. They hadn't ha~
one of these on Sunset, and Prai.egod had had to double as GlobEx
clerk  and/or  USPO employee, the litter causing her occasionally
tofrown, as her parents' sect identified ill  things  federal  as
aspects of Sitan.

tIe  who  hesitates, RydelI's father had taught him, is safe, and
Rydell had tried hard, in the course of his ife, to practice that
sort  of  benign  prOcrastination. Just about everythin8 that had
ever landed him in deep shit he knew, had been the result of  not
hesitating.  There was in him, he udn't know why, that which sim-
ply went for it, and somehow at the wort possible time.

Look before you leap. Considerconsequences. Think about it.

He thought about it. Someone had taken advantage of his brief but
unvilling sojourn in Selwyn Tong's VR corridor to convey the sug-
gestior that he should pick up his credit chip from this particu-
lar  ATM,  anc then check GlobEx. This couk most easily have been
Tong him-sell, speaking as it were through a hack channel, or  it
might  have  been  soneone, anyone, else, hacking intowhat Rydell
supposed was scarcely a world-class secure site. The hook of  the
change  that  had  been wrought for Rydell's benefit, though, had
~ad hacker written all over it. In Rylell's  experience,  hackers
just  couldn't  resist  showing  off,  and they terded to get all
arty. And, he kne~w, they could get your ass in trouble an usual-
ly did.


~~~LLIAM~BSON He looked at the GlobEx bulge there.

Went for it.

It took him less time than it had to get the credit chip, to show
his license and get the hatch open. It was a bigger package  than
he'd  expected,  and it was heavy for its size. Really heavy. Ex-
pensive-hooking foam-core stuff, very precisely sealed with  gray
plastic  tape,  and  covered with animated GlobEx Maximum Express
holograms, customs stickers. He studied the waybill. It had  come
from  Tokyo,  looked  like,  but  the billing was to Paragon-Asia
Dataflow, which was on Lygon Street, Melbourne, Australia. Rydell
didn't  know  anybody  in  Australia, but he did know that it was
supposed to be impossible, and definitely was  illegal,  to  ship
anything  internationally  to  one  of these GlobEx pickups. They
needed an address, private or business. These pickup points  were
only for domestic deliveries.

Damn.  Thing  was  heavy. He got it under his arm, maybe two feet
long and six inches on a side, and went back to get his bag.

Which he saw now was open, on the little counter there,  and  the
guard  with  the  pale  eyebrows  was holding Rydell's pink Lucky
Dragon fanny pack.

"What are you doing with my bag?"

The guard looked up. "This is Lucky Dragon property."

"You aren't supposed to open people's bags," Rydell  said,  "says
so on the notebook."

"I  have  to  treat this as theft. You have Lucky Dragon property
here."

Rydehl remembered that he'd put the ceramic  switchblade  in  the
fanny  pack, because he hadn't been able to think what else to do
with it. He tried to remember whether or not that was illegal  up
here. It was in SoCal, he knew, but not in Oregon.

"That's  my  property," Rydehl said, "and you're going to give it
to me right now"

"Sorry," the man said deliberately.

"Hey, Rydell," said a familiar voice, as the door was  opened  so
forcefully  that  Rydell  distinctly  heard something snap in the
closing mechanism. "Son of a bitch, how they hangin'?"

Rydehl was instantly engulfed   in a  fog  of  vodka  and  errant
testos  91 terone. He turned and saw Creedmore grinning fiercely,
quite visibly free of the human condition. Behind  him  loomed  a
larger man, pale and fleshy, his dark eyes set close together.

"You're drunk," snapped the security guard. "Get out."

"Drunk?" Creedmore winced grotesquely, miming some crippling emo-
tional pain. "Says I'm drunk. - ." Creedmore turned  to  the  man
behind him. "Randy, this mo~herfucker says I'm drunk."

The  corners  of  the  large  man's  mouth,  which  was small and
strangely delicate in such a heavy stubbled face, turned instant-
ly  down,  as if he were genuinely and very, very deeply saddened
to learn that it was possible for one human being to treat anoth-
er in so unkind a way. "So whump his faggot ass, then," the large
man suggested softly, as if the prospect held at least some wist-
ful  possibility,  however  distant,  of cheer after great disap-
pointment.

"Drunk?" Creedmore was facing the security man again.  He  leaned
across  the counter, his chin level with the top of Rydell's bag.
"What kinda shit you tryin' to lay off on my buddy here?"

Creedmore was radiating an amphetamine-reptile  menace  now,  his
anger  gone  right  off  the mammalian scale. Rydell saw a little
muscle pulsing in Creedmore's cheek, steady  and  involuntary  as
some  tiny extra heart, Seeing that Creedmore had the guard's un-
divided attention, Rydell grabbed his bag with one hand, the pink
fanny pack with the other.

The  guard tried to snatch them back. Which was definitely a mis-
take, as the attempt occupied both his hands.

"Suck my dickl" Creedmore shrieked, striking with far more  speed
and  force  than  Rydell would've credited him with, and sank his
fist wrist-deep into the guard's stomach, just below the sternum.
Taken  by  surprise, the guard doubled forward. Rydell, as Creed-
more was winding back to slug the man in  the  face,  managed  to
tangle  Creedmore's wrist in the straps of the fanny pack, almost
dropping the bulky parcel in the process.

"Come on, Buell," Rydell said, spinning Creedmore  back  out  the
door.  Rydell knew someone would've hit a foot button by now.  92
"Motherfucker says I'm drunk," Creedmore protested.

"Well, you are, Buell," said the heavy man,  ponderously,  behind
them.

Creedmore giggled.

"Let's get out of here," Rydell said, starting for the bridge. As
he walked, he was trying to stuff the fanny pack  back  into  his
duffel and trying not to lose his precarious underarm grip on the
GlobEx package. A twisting gust of wind blew grit into his  eyes,
and,  blinking  down to clear them, he noticed for the first time
that the waybill was addressed

- - not to him but to "Cohn Laney."

Cohn space Laney. So why had they let Rydell pick it up?

Then they were in the thick of the crowd, headed up the  ramp  of
the lower level.

"What is this shit?" Creedmore asked, peering up.

"San Francisco-Oakland Bay," Rydell said.

"Shit,"  Creedmore  said,  squinting at the crowd, "smells like a
fuckin' baitbox. Bet you you could get you some weird-ass  pussy,
out here."

"I  need  a  drink,"  the  heavy man with the delicate mouth said
softly.

"I think I do too," said Rydell.        -
 93 22.     VEXED FONTAINE has two wives. I

Not, he will tell you, a condition to aspire to.

They live, these two wives, in uneasy truce, in a  single  estab-
lishment, nearer the Oakland side. Fontaine has for some time now
been opting to sleep here, in his shop.

The younger wife (at forty-eight, by some five years)  is  a  Ja-
maican  originally  from  Brixton,  tall  and light-skinned, whom
Fontaine has come to regard as  punishment  for  all  his  former
sins.

Her name is Clarisse. Incensed, she reverts to the dialect of her
childhood: "You tek de prize, Fonten."

Fontaine has been taking the prize for some years now, and he  is
taking it again today, Clansse standing angrily before him with a
shopping bag full of what appear to be catatonic Japanese babies.

These  are  in fact life-sized dolls, manufactured in the closing
years of the previous century for the solace of distant grandpar-
ents,  each one made to resemble photographs of an actual infant.
Produced by a firm in Meguro called Another  One,  they  are  in-
creasingly collectible, each example being to some degree unique.

"I don't want them," Fontaine allows.

"Listen up," Clarisse tells him,  folding  her  dialect  smoothly
away,  "there  is no way you are not taking these. You are taking
them, you are moving them, you are getting top  dollar,  and  you
are  giving  it to me. Because there is no way, otherwise, that I
am staying where you left me, cheek by jowl with that  mad  bitch
you married"

Who I was married to when you married me, thinks Fontaine, and no
secret about it. The reference being to Tourmaline Fontaine,  aka
Wife  One,  whom  Fontaine thinks of as being only adequately de-
scribed by the epithet "mad bitch."

Tourmaline is an utter terror; only her vast  girth  and  abiding
torpor prevent her coming here.

"Clarisse,"  he protests, "if they were 'mint in box'-" 94 "These
never mint in box, idiot! They always played with!"

"Then you know the market better than I do,  Clarisse.  You  sell
'em."

"You want to talk child support?"

Fontaine looks down at the Japanese dolls. "Man, those things ug-
ly. Look dead, you know?"

"Cause you gotta turn 'em on, fool." Clarisse sets the bag on the
floor and snatches up a naked baby boy. She stabs a long emerald-
green fingernail into the back of the doll's  neck.  She  is  at-
tempting  to  demonstrate  the thing's other, uniquely individual
feature, digitally recorded infant sounds, or possibly even first
words,  but  what  they hear instead is heavy, labored breathing,
followed by a childish giggle and  a  ragged  chorus  of  equally
childish fuck-you's. Clarisse frowns. "Somebody been messing with
it."

Fontaine sighs. "I'll do what I can. You heave 'em here. I'm  not
promising anything."

"You better believe I leave 'em here," Clarisse says, tossing the
baby headfirst into the bag.

Fontaine glances into the rear of the  shop,  where  the  boy  is
seated  cross-legged  on  the  floor,  barefoot,  his head close-
cropped, the notebook open on his lap, lost in concentration.

"Who the hell's that?" Clarisse inquires, noticing theboy for the
first time as she steps closer to the counter.

Which  somewhat stumps Fontaine. He tugs at one of his locks. "He
likes watches," he says.

"Huh," Clarisse says, "he hikes watches. How come you don't  have
your own kids over here?" Her eyes narrow, deepening the wrinkles
at their outer corners, which Fontaine desires suddenly to  kiss.
"How come you got some 'spanic fatboy likes watches instead?"

"Clarisse-"

"Clarisse  my  butt." Her green eyes widen in furious emphasis, a
green pale as drift glass,  DNA-echo  of  some  British  soldier,
Fontaine  has often surmised, on some chose Kingston night, these
several generations distant. "You move  these  dolls  or  you  be
vexed, understand?"

She  spins  smartly on her heel, not easily done in the black ga-
loshes she wears, and marches from his shop, proud and erect,  in
a man's long



tweed  overcoat Fontaine recalls purchasing fifteen years earlier
in Chicago.

Fontaine sighs. Something weighs heavy on him now, evening coming
on.  "Legal, here, be married to two women," Fontaine says to the
empty, coffee-scented air "Fucking crazy, but legal." He shuffles
over in his unlaced shoes and closes the front door, locks it be-
hind her. "You still think I'm a bigamist or something, baby, but
this is the State of Northern California."

He  goes  back and has another look at the boy, who seems to have
discovered the Christie's auction.

The boy looks up  at  him.  "Platinum  tonneau  minute  repeating
wristwatch," he says. "Patek Philippe, Geneve, number 187145."

"I  don't think so," Fontaine says. "Kind of out of our bracket."

"A gold hunter-cased quarter repeating watch-"

"Forget it."

"-with concealed erotic automaton."

"Can't afford that either," Fontaine says. "Look," he says, "tell
you  what:  that notebook's the slow way to look. I'll show you a
fast way."

"Fast. Way."

Fontaine goes rummaging through the drawers  of  a  paint-scabbed
steel  filing  cabinet,  until eventually he comes up with an old
pair of military eyephones. The rubbery lip around the  binocular
video  display  is cracked and peeling. It takes another few min-
utes to find the correct battery pack and to determine that it is
charged.  The  boy  ignores  him, lost in the Christie's catalog.
Fontaine plugs the battery pack into the eyephones  and  returns.
"Here. See? You put this on your head. .  96 23.     RUSSIAN HILL
THE apartment is large and has nothing in it that is not of prac-
tical  use.  Consequently,  the dark hardwood floors are bare and
quite meticulously swept.

Seated in  an  expensive,  semi-intelligent  Swedish  workstation
chair, he is sharpening the knife.

This  is  a task (he thinks of it as a function) requiring empti-
ness.

He sits facing a  nineteenth-century  reproduction  of  a  seven-
teenth-century  refectory  table.  Six inches in from its nearest
edge, two triangular sockets have been laser-cut into the  walnut
at  precise  angles.  Into these, he has inserted a pair of nine-
inch-long rods of graphite-gray ceramic, triangular in cross sec-
tion, forming an acute angle. These

hones fit the deep, laser-cut recesses perfectly, allowing for no
movement whatever.

The knife lies before him on the table, its blade between the ce-
ramic rods.

When it is time, he takes it in his left hand and places the base
of the blade against the left hone. He draws it down,  a  single,
'smooth, sure

stroke, pulling it toward him as he does. He is listening for any
indication of imperfection, although this would only be likely if
he  had  struck  bone, and it has been many years since the knife
struck bone.

Nothing.

He exhales, inhales, places the blade against the right hone.

The telephone rings.

He exhales. Places the knife on the table again,  its  blade  be-
tween the hones. "Yes?"

The  voice,  emerging from several concealed speakers, is a voice
he knows well, although it has been nearly a decade since he  has
shared  physical  space with the speaker. He knows that the words
he hears come in from a tiny, grotesquely expensive piece of ded-
icated real estate somewhere in the planet's swarm of satellites.
It is a direct transmis 97 sion, and nothing to do with the amor-
phous  cloud of ordinary human communication. "I saw what you did
on the bridge last night," the voice says.

The man says nothing. He is wearing a shirt cut  from  very  fine
gray  cotton  flannel,  its  collar  buttoned but tieless, French
cuffs secured with plain round links of sandblasted platinum.  He
places his hands on his thighs and waits.

"They think you're mad," says the voice.

"Who do you employ to tell you these things?"

"Children,"  the  voice  says.  "Hard  and bright. The best I can
find."

"Why do you bother?"

"I like to know."

"You like to know," the man says, adjusting the crease along  the
top of his left trouser leg, "but why?"

"Because you interest me."

"Do  you  fear  me?" the man asks. "No," the voice says, "I don't
believe I do." The man is silent.

"Why did you kill them?" the voice asks.

"They died," the man says. "But why were you there?"

"I wished to see the bridge."   -

"They think you went there knowing you'd attract someone, someone
who'd attack you. Someone to kill."

"No,"  says the man, a note of disappointment in his voice, "they
died."

"But you were the agent."

The man shrugs. His lips purse. Then: "Things happen."

"'Shit happens,' we used to say. Is that it?"

"I am unfamiliar with that expression," the man says.

"It's been a long time since I've asked for your help."

"That is the result of maturation, I would think," the man  says.
"You  are  less  inclined  now to move counter to the momentum of
things."  98 A Now the voice falls silent. The silence lengthens.
"You taught me that," it says finally.

When  he  is  positive  that  the conversation has ended, the man
picks up the knife and places the base of its blade  against  the
top of the right hone.

He  draws it, smoothly, down and back.          99 24, TWO LIGHTS
ON BEHIND


THEY found a dark place that felt as though it  hung  out  beyond
where  the  bridge's  handrails  would've  been.  Not a very deep
space, but long, the bar along the bridge side and  the  opposite
all  mismatched  windows, looking south, past the piers, to China
Basin. The panes were filthy, patched into  their  mulhions  with
yellowing translucent gobs of silicone.

Creedmore  in  the  meantime  had become startlingly lucid, reaiy
positively cordial, introducing his companion, the fleshy man, as
Randall  James Branch Cabell Shoats, from Mobile, Alabama. Shoats
was a session guitarist, Creedmore said, in Nashville  and  else-
where.

"Pleased  to meet you," said Rydell. Shoats'grip was cool and dry
arid very soft but studded with concise, rock-hard  calluses,  so
that his hand felt to Rydell like a kid glove set with rough gar-
nets.


Rydell looked at Creedmore and wondered what trough or plateau of
brain  chemistry the man was currently traversing and how long it
would be until he decided to alter it.

"I have to thank you for what you did back there, Buell,"  Rydell
said,  because  it  was true. It was also true that Rydell wasn't
sure you could say Creedmore had done it so much as been it,  but
the  way things had worked out, it looked as though Creedmore and
Shoats had happened along at exactly the right time, although Ry-
dell's  own  Lucky Dragon experience suggested to him that it was
far from over.

"Sons of bitches," Creedmore said, as if commenting generally  on
the texture of things.

Rydell  ordered  a  round  of beer. "Listen, Buell," Rydell said,
"it's possible they'll come looking for us, 'cause of  what  hap-
pened."

"Why the fuck? We're here, them sons of bitches back there."

"Well,  Buell,"  Rydell said, pretending to himself he was having
to explain this to a stubborn and willfully obtuse  six-year-old,
"I'd  just picked up this package here, before we had us our lit-
tle argument, and then you poked the security man in the gut.  He
won't be too happy about ~1~WILLIAMGI~O~

video  of  me,  voiceprint, whatever, and give it to the police."
The police? Sumbitch wants to make trouble we give it to im

~, right?"

"No," said Rydelh, "that won't help."

"Well, then," said Creedmore, resting his hand on RydeIl's shoul-
der, ~" "we'll come see you till you're out."

"Well,  no, Buell," Rydell said, shrugging off the hand. "I don't
think he'll bother much about the police. More he'll want to find
out who we work for and if he could sue us and win.

"Sue you?"

" Us. ~

"Huh," said Creedmore, absorbing this. "You in an ugly place."

"Maybe not," said Rydell. "Matter of witnesses."

"I  hear you," said Randy Shoats, "but I'd have to talk to my la-
bel, see what the lawyers say."

"Your label," said Rydell.

"That's right."

Their beer arrived, brown long necks. Rydell took a sip  of  his.
"Is Creedmore on your label?"

"No," said Randy Shoats.

Creedmore  looked  from  Shoats to Rydell, back to Shoats. "All I
did was poke him one, Randy. I didn't know it had anything to  do
with our

- - deal."

"It  doesn't,"  said  Shoats, "long as you're able to go into the
studio arid record."

"Goddamn, Rydehl," said Creedmore, "I don't need  you  comin'  in
here and fucking things up this way."

Rydelh, who was fumbling under the table with his duffel, getting
the fanny pack out and opening it, looked at Creedmore but didn't
say

anything.  He  felt  the Kraton grips of the ceramic switchblade.
"You boys excuse me," Rydell said, "I've gotta find the can."  He
stood  up, with the ClobEx box under his arm and the knife in his
pocket and went to ask

- -     the waitress where the Men's was.  ~A~ALL TOMORROW S PAR-
TIES       101  For  the  second  time that day, he found himself
seated in hut not using a toilet  stall,  this  one  considerably
more  odorous  than  the  last.  The  plumbing  out  here  was as
makeshift as any he'd seen, with bundles of scummy-looking trans-
parent  tubing snaking everywhere, and NoCal NOT POTABLE stickers
peeling off above the sink taps.

He took the knife out of  his  pocket  and  pressed  the  button,
watching  the  black blade swing out and lock. Then he pressed it
again, unlocking the blade, closed it, and opened it again.  What
was it about switchblades, he wondered, that made you do that? He
figured that that was a big part of what made people want them in
the  first  place,  something  psychological  but  dumb,  monkey-
brained.Actually they were kind of pointless, he thought,  except
in  terms  of  simple  convenience.  Kids liked them because they
looked dramatic, but if somebody saw you open one, then they knew
you  had a knife, and they'd either run or kick your ass or shoot
you, depending on how they felt about it and how they happened to
be  armed. He supposed there could be very specific situations in
which you could just click one open and stick somebody  with  it,
but he didn't think they'd be too frequent.

He  had  the GlobEx box across his lap. Gingerly, remembering how
he'd cut himself back in LA, he used the tip of the blade to slit
the gray tape. It went through the stuff like a wire through but-
ter. When he got it to the point where he thought he'd be able to
open  it, he cautiously folded the knife and put it away. Then he
lifted the lid.

At first he thought he was looking at a thermos  bottle,  one  of
those  expensive  brushed-stainless  numbers, but as he lifted it
out, the heft of it and the general fineness of manufacture  told
him it was something else.

He  turned  the  thing over, finding an inset rectangular section
with a cluster  of  micro-sockets,  but  nothing  else  except  a
slightly  scuffed  blue sticker that said FAMOUS ASPECT. He shook
it. it neither sloshed nor rattled. Felt solid, and there was  no
visible  lid or other way to open it. He wondered about something
like that going through customs, how the GlobEx brokers could ex-
plain  what  it was, whatever that was, and not something full of
some kind of contraband. He could think of a dozen 102  kinds  of
contraband  you  could stick in something this size and do pretty
well if you got it here from Tokyo.

Maybe it did contain drugs, he thought, or something else, and he
was  being set up. Maybe they'd kick the stall's door in any sec-
ond and handcuff him for trafficking in proscnbed fetal tissue or
something

He sat there. Nothing happened.

He  lay  the thing across his lap and searched through the fitted
foam packing for any message, any clue, something that might  ex-
plain  what  this was. But there was nothing, so he put the thing
back in its box, exited the  stall,  washed  his  hands  in  non-
potable bridge water, and left,

intending  to leave the bar, and Creedmore and Shoats in it, when
he'd picked up his bag, which he'd left them minding.

Now he saw that the woman, that Maryahice, the  one  from  break-
fast,  had  joined them, and that Shoats had found a guitar some-
where,

a scuffed old thing with what looked like masking tape patching a
long

-  -  crack down the front. Shoats had pushed his chair back from
the table

to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge  and
his  belly,  and  was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-har-
monies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.

Creedmore was hunched forward, watching, his  wet-look  streaked-
blonde  hair  gleaming  in  the  bar gloom, and Rydell saw a look
there, an

exposed hunger, that made him feel  funny,  like  he  was  seeing
Creedmore  want  something  through  the  wall of shit he kept up
around himself. It made Creedmore seem suddenly very  human,  and
that somehow made him even less attractive.

Now  Shoats,  absently,  produced  what looked like the top of an
old-fashioned tube of lipstick from his shirt pocket and began to
play,  using the gold metal tube as a slide. The sounds he coaxed
from the guitar caught Rydell in the pit of his stomach, as sure-
ly as Creedmore had sucker-punched that security man: they sound-
ed the way rosin feels on your fingers in a poolroom and made Ry-
dell think of tricks with glass rods and the skins of cats. Some-
where inside the fat looping slack of that sound, something  gor-
geously, nastily tight was being figured out.

The bar, not crowded at this time of day but far from empty, had



ALl.  TOMORROW'S  PARTIES gone absolutely silent under the scrap-
ing, looping expressions of Shoats' guitar,  and  then  Creedmore
began to sing, something high and quavering and dirge-like.

And  Creedmore sang about a train pulling out of a station, about
the two lights on the back of it: how the blue light was his  ba-
by.

How the red light was his mind.  104 25 SUIT


HAVING  abandoned  sleep,  Laney, neither a smoker nor a drinker,
has taken to tossing back the contents of very small brown  glass
bottles  of a patent specific for hangover, an archaic but still-
popular Japanese remedy that consists of alcohol caffeine  aspinn
and  liquid nicotine He knows somehow (somehow now he knows those
things he needs to know) that this, along with periodic belts  of
a  blue hypnotic cough syrup, is the combination he needs to con-
tinue.

Heart pounding, eyes wide to incoming data, hands cold  and  dis-
tant, he plunges resolutely on.

He  no  longer  leaves  the carton, relying both on Yamazaki (who
brings medicines he refuses) and on a neighbor in  the  cardboard
city, a

-  -     meticulously  groomed  madman whom he takes to be an ac-
quaintance of the old man, the builder of models, from whom Laney
has leased, or otherwise obtained, this space.

Laney doesn't remember the advent of this mad one, whom he thinks
of as the Suit, but that is not something he needs to know.

The Suit is, evidently, a former  salaryman.  The  Suit  wears  a
suit,  the one suit, always. It is black, this suit, and was once
a very good suit

indeed, and it is evident from its condition that  the  Suit,  in
whichever carton he dwells, has a steam iron, lint rollers, sure-
ly a needle and thread, and the skill to use them. It is unthink-
able,  for  instance,  that this suit's buttons would be anything
less than firmly and symmetrically

attached, or that the Suit's white shirt, luminous in the halogen
of the master model-builder's carton, would be anything less than
perfectly white.

But it is also obvious that the Suit has seen better days, as in-
deed must be true of any inhabitant of this place. It is obvious,
for instance,

that the Suit's shirt is white because he paints it daily,  Laney
surmises  (though  he  doesn't need to know) with a white product
intended for the renovation of athletic shoes.  The  heavy  black
frames  of  his glasses are held together with worryingly precise
ligatures of black electrical tape,                 105  upe  cut
to  narrow  custom widths with one of the old man's X-Acto knives
and a miniature steel T-square and  then  applied  with  lapidary
skill,

The  Suit is as tidy, as perfectly squared away, as a man can be.
But it has been a very long time, months or perhaps years,  since
the  Suit  has bathed. Every inch of visible flesh, of course, is
scrubbed and spotless, bat when the Suit moves, he exudes an odor
quite  indescribable,  a high thin reek, it seems, of madness and
despair. He carries,  always,  three  identical,  plastic-wrapped
copies  of a book about himself. Laney, who cannot read Japanese,
has seen that the three copies bear the same  smiling  photograph
of  the  Suit  himself, no doubt in better days, and holding, for
some reason, a hockey stick. Laney knows (without knowing how  he
knows)  that  this was one of those self-advertising, Sm ugly in-
spirational autobiographies that certain executives pay  to  have
ghostwritten.  But  the  rest of the Suit's story is occluded, to
Laney, and very probably to the Suit as well.

Laney has other things on his mind, but it does occur to him that
if  it is the Suit he sends out to the drugstore as his more pre-
sentable representative, then he, Laney, is in bad shape  indeed.

And  he  is, of course, but that seems, against the flood of data
flowing Nile-wide and constantly through him, from inner  horizon
to inner horizon, scarcely a concern.

Laney  is aware now of gifts without name. Of modes of perception
that may never have previously existed.  He has, for instance,  a
directly spatial sense of something very near the totality of the
infosphere.  He feels it as a single indescribable  shape,  some-
thing  brailled  out  for  him against a ground or backdrop of he
knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet's phrase, like  the
world  hurts  God.  Within  this, he palps nodes of potentiality,
strung along lines that are histories of  the  happened  becoming
the  not-yet.  He  is  very near, he thinks, to a vision in which
past and future are one and the same; his  present,  when  he  is
forced  to reinhabit it, seems increasingly arbitrary, its place-
ment upon the time line that is Cohn Laney more a matter of  con-
venience  than  of  any  absolute now.  1~ All his life Laney has
heard talk of the death of history, but confronted with the  lit-
eral shape of all human knowledge, all human memory, he begins to
see the way in which there never really has been any such  thing.

No history. Only the shape, and it comprised of lesser shapes, in
squirming fractal descent, on down into the infinitely finest  of
resolutions.

But there is will. "Future" is inherently plural.

And  thus he chooses not to sleep and sends the Suit for more Re-
gain, and he notices, as the Suit crawls out beneath  the  melon-
tinted  blanket,  that the man's ankles are painted, in imitation
of black socks, with something resembling asphalt.

107 26.     BAD SECTOR CHEVETTE bought two chicken sandwiches off
a  cart on the upper level and went back to find Tessa.  The wind
had shifted, then died down, and with it that pre-storm  tension,
that weird elation.

Storms  were serious business on the bridge, and even a gusty day
would up the probability of someone getting  hurt.  In  a  rising
wind  the  bridge  could feel like a ship, anchored rock solid to
the bottom of the bay, but straining. The bridge itself never re-
ally  moved,  no matter what (although she supposed it must have,
in the quake, which was why it was no longer used for what it had
been built for), but everything that had been added subsequently,
all of that, with the wrong kind of luck,  could  move,  and  did
sometimes  with  disastrous results. So that was what sent people
running, when a wind got up, to check tumbuckles, lengths of air-
craft cable, dubious webworks of two-by-four fir.

Skinner  had  taught her all that, more in passing than as formal
lessons, though he'd had his way of giving formal lessons. One of
those had been about how it had felt to be out here the night the
bridge was first occupied by the homeless. What it had felt  like
to  climb  and  topple  the chainlink barriers, erected after the
quake caused enough structural damage to suspend traffic.

Not that long ago, as years were measured, but some kind of life-
time  in  terms  of  concept of place. Skinner had shown her pic-
tures, what the bridge looked like before, but she  simply  can't
imagine that people wouldn't have lived here. He'd also shown her
drawings of older bridges too, bridges with shops and  houses  on
them,  and it just made sense to her. How could you have a bridge
and not live on it?

She loves it here, admits it now in her heart, but there is  also
something in her, watching, that feels not a part of. A self-con-
sciousness, as though she herself is making the sort of docu Tes-
sa  wanted  to make, some inner version of all the product Carson
coordinated for Real One.  108 Like she's back,  but  she  isn't.
Like  she's become something else in the meantime, without notic-
ing, and now she's watching herself being here.

She found Tessa squatting in front of  a  narrow  shopfront,  BAD
SECTOR  spray-bombed across a plywood facade that looks as though
it's been painted silver with a broom.

Tessa had God's Little Toy, semi-deflated, on her lap and is fid-
dling  with  something near the part that holds the camera. "Bal-
last," Tessa said, looking  up,  "always  goes  first."   "Here,"
Chevette  said,  holding out a sandwich, "while it's still warm."
Tessa tucked the Mylar balloon between her knees and accepts  the
greasy  paper  packet.   "Got  any  idea  where you want to sleep
tonight?" Chevette asked, unwrapping her own sandwich.   "In  the
van,"  Tessa  said,  around  a  mouthful. "Got bags, foam."  "Not
where it is," Chevette told her. "Kinda cannibal, around  there."
"Where then?"  "If it's still got wheels, there's a place over by
one of the piers, foot of Folsom, where people  park  and  sleep.
Cops  know  about it, but they go easy; easier for them if people
all park in one place, to camp. But it  can  be  hard  to  get  a
place."   "This  is  good,"  Tessa  said  to her sandwich, wiping
grease from her lips with the back of her hand.   "Bridge  chick-
ens.  Raise  'em over by Oakland, feed 'em scraps and stuff." She
bit into her sandwich. The bread was a square  bun  of  sourdough
white,  dusted with flour. She chewed, staring into the window of
this Bad Sector place.

Flat square tabs or sheets of plastic, different sizes  and  col-
ors, baffled her, but then she got it: these were data disks, old
magnetic media. And those big, round, flat black  plastic  things
were  analogue audio media, a mechanical system. You stuck a nee-
dle in a spiral scratch and spun the thing. Biting off more sand-
wich,  she stepped past Tessa for a better look. There were reels
of fine steel wire, ragged pinkcylinders of

109 wax with faded paper labe~s,  yellowing  transparent  plastic
reels of quarter-inch brown tape.

Looking past the disphy, she could see a lot of old hardware side
by side on shelves, most of ii in that grubby beige plastic.  Why
had people, for the first twenty years of computing, cased every-
thing in that? Anything digital, from that century it was  pretty
much  guaranteed  to  be that sad-ass institutional brige, unless
they'd wanted it to look more dramatic,  more  cutting  edge,  in
which  case they'd opted for black. But mostly this old stuff was
ifolded in nameless shades of next-to-nothing, nondescript  sort-
of-tan.   "This  is  buggered,"  sighed Tessa, who'd finished her
sandwich and gone back to poking at God's  Little  Toy  with  the
driver.  She  stuck  out  her hand, offering Chevette the driver.
"Give it back to him, okay?"

"Who?"  "The sumo guy inside"

Chevette took the little micro-torque tool and went into Bad Sec-
tor.

There  was  a  Chinese  kid behind the counter who looked like he
might weigh in somewhere over two hundred pounds. He had that big
pumpkin  head  the sumo guys had too, but his was recently shaven
and he had a soul patch. He had a short-sleeve  print  shirt  on,
big  tropical flowers, and a conical spike of blue Lucite through
the lobe of his left ear. He was standing, behind a  counter,  in
front  of  a  wall covered with dog-eared posters advertising ex-
tinct game platforms.

"This your driver, right?"

"She have any luck with it?" He made no move to take it.

"I don't think so," Chevette said, "but I  think  she  pinpointed
the  problem."  She heard a faint, rapid clicking. Looked down to
see a six-inch robot marching briskly across  the  countertop  on
big  cartoony  feet.  It  had  that  man-in-armor lDok, segmented
glossy white shells over shiny steel armatures. She'd seen  these
before: it was a fully remote peripheral, controlled by a program
that would take up most of a standard  notebook.  It  came  to  a
halt,  put  its hands together, executed a perfect miniature bow,
straightened, held up its little clip hands for the  driver.  She
let  it  take  the  driver,  the  pull of the little arms somehow
scary. It 110 straightened up, putting the driver over its shoul-
der like a miniature rifle, and gave her a military salute.

Sumo  boy  was waiting for a reaction, but Chevette wasn't having
any. She pointed at the beige hardware. "How come this  old  shit
is always that same color?"  His forehead creased. "There are two
theories. One is that it was to help people in the  workplace  be
more comfortable with radically new technologies that would even-
tually result in the mutation or  extinction  of  the  workplace.
Hence  the  almost  universal  choice, by the manufacturers, of a
shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms." He
smirked  at  Chevette.  "Yeah? What's two?"  "That the people who
were designing the stuff were unconsciously  terrified  of  their
own  product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it look-
ing as unexciting as possible.  Literally  'plain  vanilla,'  you
follow  me?"   Chevette brought her finger close to the microbot;
it did  a  funny  little  fall-back-and-shuffle  to  avoid  being
touched.  "So  who's  into  this  old stuff? Collectors?"  "You'd
think so, wouldn't you?"

"WJell?"

"Programmers."

"I don't get it," Chevette said.

"Consider," he said, holding out his hand to let the little  'bot
offer  him  the  driver, "that when this stuff was new, when they
were writing multi-million-line software, the unspoken assumption
was that in twenty years that software would have been completely
replaced by some better, more evolved version." He took the driv-
er  and gestured with it toward the hardware on the shelves. "But
the manufacturers were surprised to discover that there was  this
perverse  but powerful resistance to spending tens of millions of
dollars to replace existing software, let  alone  hardware,  plus
retraining possibly thousands of employees. Follow me?" He raised
the driver, sighting down its shaft at her.

"Okay," Chevette said.
 111 "So when you need the stuff to do new things, or to  do  old
things  better, do you write new stuff, from the ground up, or do
you patch the old stuff?"

"Patch the old?"

"You got it. Overlay new routines. As the machines got faster, it
didn't  matter if a routine went through three hundred steps when
it could actually be done in three steps. It  all  happens  in  a
fraction of a second anyway, so who cares?"

"Okay," Chevette said, "so who does care?"

"Smart  cookies,"  he  said and scratched his soul patch with the
tip of the driver. "Because they understand that all that  really
happens,  these days, is that ancient software is continually en-
crusted with overlays, to the point where it's literally impossi-
ble  for any one programmer to fully understand how any given so-
lution is arrived at."

"I still don't see why this stuff would be any help."

"Well, actually," he said, "you're right." He winked at her. "You
got it, girl. But the fact remains that there are some very smart
people who like to have this stuff around, maybe just  to  remind
themselves where it all comes from and how, really, all any of us
do, these days, is just fixes. Nothing new  under  the  sun,  you
know?"

"Thanks  for  the  screwdriver," Chevette said. "I gotta go see a
little black boy now."

"Really? What about?"

"A van," Chevette said.

"Girl,"  he  said,  raising  his  eyebrows,  "you   deep."    112
27.     BED-AND-BREAKFAST RYDELL sees it's dark, down here on the
lower level, the narrow thoroughfare crowded and  busy,  greenish
light  of scavenged fluorescents seen through swooping bundles of
that transparent plumbing, pushcarts rattling past to take up the
day's  positions.  He  took a flight of clanging steel stairs, up
through a hole cut unevenly in the roadbed above,  to  the  upper
level.

Where  more light fell, diffused through plastic, shadowed by the
jackstraw country suspended above, shacks that were no more  than
boxes,  catwalks  in  between, sails of wet laundry that had gone
back up with the dying of the earlier wind.

Young girl, brown eyes big as the eyes in those old Japanese ani-
mations, handing out slips of yellow paper, "BED & BREAKFAST." He
studied the map on the back.

He started walking, bag over his shoulder and the GlobEx box  un-
der  his arm, and in fifteen minutes he'd come upon something an-
nounced in pink neon as the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl.  He  knew  the
name  from the back of the yellow flyer, where the map gave it as
a landmark to find the bed-and-breakfast.

Line up outside Ghetto Chef, a  place  with  steamed-up  windows,
prices  painted  in  what  looked  like nail polish on a sheet of
cardboard.

He'd only ever been out here once before, and that  had  been  at
night  in  the  rain. Seeing it this way, it reminded him of some
gated attraction, Nissan County or Skywalker Park,  and  he  won-
dered  how you could have a place like this and not have security
or even a basic police presence.

He remembered how Chevette had told him that  the  bridge  people
and  the police had an understanding: the bridge people stayed on
the bridge, mostly, and the police stayed off it, mostly.

He spotted a sheaf of the yellow flyers, thumbtacked to a plywood
door,  in  a  wall  set  back a few feet from the front of Ghetto
Chef. It wasn't locked, and opened on a sort of hallway,  narrow,
walled with taut
 113  vhite  plastic stapled over a framework of lumber. Somebody
had drawn nurals on either wall, it looked  like,  with  a  heavy
black industrial narker, but the walls were too close together to
see what the overall ksign was about. Stars, fish,  circles  with
Xs  through  them.  .  . He had t hold his bag behind him and the
GlobEx box in front, to go down the bllway, and when  he  got  to
the  end  he turned a corner and found him-elf in somebody's win-
dowless kitchen, very small.

The walls, each covered in a different pattern of striped wallpa-
per,  eemed to vibrate. Woman there, stirring something on a lit-
tle propane cooker. Not that old, but her hair was gray and part-
ed in the middle. ame big eyes as the girl, but hers were gray.

"Bed-and-breakfast?" he asked her.

"Got  a reservation?" She wore a man's tweed sports coat, sleeves
vorn through at the elbows, over a denim jean jacket and  a  col-
larless  lannel baseball shirt. No makeup. Looked windburned. Big
hawk nose.

"I need a reservation?"

"We book through an agency in the city," the woman  said,  taking
the vooden spoon out of whatever was coming to boil there.

"I  got  this from a girl," Rydell said, showing her the flyer he
still held, ~lutched against his bag.

"You mean she's actually:handing them out?"

"Handed me this one," he said.

"You have money?"

"A credit chip," Rydell said. "Any contagious diseases?" "No."

"Are you a drug abuser?"

"No," Rydell said.

"A drug dealer?"

"No."

"Smoke anything? Cigarettes, a pipe?"

"No."

"Are you a violent person?"

Rydell hesitated. "No."  114 "More to the point, have you accept-
ed the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

"No," Rydell said, "I haven't."

"That's  good,"  she said, turning down the propane ring. "That's
one thing I can't tolerate. Raised by 'em."

"Well," Rydell said, "do I need a reservation  to  stay  here  or
not?"  He  was looking around the kitchen, wondering where "here"
might be; it was about seven feet on a side, and the  doorway  he
stood in was the only apparent entrance. The wallpaper, which had
buckled slightly from cooking steam, made the space look like  an
amateur  stage  set  or  something they'd build for children in a
makeshift day care.

"No," she said, "you don't. You've got a handbill."

"You have space?"

"Of course." She took the pot off the  cooker,  placed  it  on  a
round  metal  tray on the small, white-painted table, and covered
it with a clean-looking dish towel. "Go  back  out  the  way  you
came. Go on. I'll follow you."

He  did  as she said and waited in the open door for her to catch
up with him. He saw that the Ghetto Chef line had gotten  longer,
if anything.

"No,"  she  said,  behind  him,  "up here." He turned and saw her
hauling on a length of orange nylon rope, which  brought  down  a
counter-weighted  aluminum  ladder.  "Go  on up," she said. "I'll
send your bags."

Rydell put down his duffel and the GlobEx box and stepped up onto
the ladder.

"Go on," she said.

Rydell climbed the ladder to discover an incredibly tiny space he
was clearly expected to sleep in.  His  first  thought  was  that
someone  had decided to build one of those Japanese coffin hotels
out of offcuts from all the cheapest stuff at a discount building
supply.  The  walls  were  some  kind  of light-colored wood-look
sheathing that imitated bad imitations of some other product that
had  probably  imitated  some  now-forgotten  original.  The tiny
square of floor nearest him, the only part that wasn't  taken  up
by wall-to-wall bed, was carpeted with some kind of ultra-low-
 115  pile  itility stuff in a weird pale green with orange high-
lights. There was dayli1ht coming in from the far end, by what he
supposed was the head of tIe bed, but he'd have had to kneel down
to make out how that was possble.

Do you want to take it?" the woman called up.


Then pull up your bags."

lIe looked over and saw her loading his duffel and the GlobEx box
into rusty wire hamper she'd hung on the ladder.

Breakfast at nine, sharp," she said, without looking up, and then
she vas gone.

~ydell hauled the ladder, with his  luggage,  up  on  its  orange
rope.  When  he  got his stuff out, the ladder stayed up, held by
its hidden counterwright.  -le got down on his  hands  and  knees
and crawled into his bedroom, over the foam slab made up with one
of those micro-furry foam-core blanets, to  where  some  sort  of
multi-paned,  semi-hemispherical plastic bibble, probably part of
an airplane, had been epoxied into the outer wall, It  was  thick
with  salt,  outside, looked like; a crust of dried spray. It lel
light in, but just a featureless gray brightness.  It  looked  as
though you lept with your head right up in there. Okay by him. It
smelled funny but ~ot  bad.  He  should've  asked  her  what  she
charged, but he could do that later.

-le sat down on the foot of the bed and took off his shoes. There
were holes in the toes of both his black socks. Have to buy more.

lie pulled the glasses out of his jacket, put them on, and speed-
diakd Laney. He listened to a phone ringing  somewhere  in  Tokyo
and imaiined the room it was ringing in, some expensive hotel, or
maybe it was ringing on a desk the  size  of  Tong's,  but  real.
Laney answered, nine ring~ in.




116 Rydell was looking at the GlobEx box. "What projector?"

"The one you picked up from GlobEx today."

"Wait a minute," Rydell said, "how do you know about that?"

There was a pause. "It's what I do, Rydell."

"Listen,"  Rydell  said, "there was trouble, a fight. Not me, an-
other guy, but I was there, involved. They'll  check  the  GlobEx
security  recordings  and  they'll  know  I  signed  for you, and
they'll have footage of me."

"They don't," Laney said.

"Of course they do," protested Rydell, "I was there."

"No," Laney said, "they've got footage of me."

"What are you talking about, Laney?"

"The infinite plasticity of the digital."

"But I signed for it, My name, not yours."

"On a screen, right?"

"Oh." Rydell thought about it. "Who can get into GlobEx and alter
that stuff?"

"Not me," said Laney. "But I can see it's been altered."

"So who did it?"

"That's academic at this point."

"What's that mean?" Rydell asked.

"It means don't ask. Where are you?"

"In a bed-and-breakfast on the bridge. Your cough sounds better."

"This blue stuff," Laney said. Rydell had no idea what he  meant.
"Where's the projector?"

"Like a thermos? Right here."

"Don't  take it with you. Find a shop there called Bad Sector and
tell them you need the cable."

"What kind of cable?"

"They'll be expecting you," Laney said and hung up.

Rydell sat there on the end of the bed, with the  sunglasses  on,
thoroughly pissed off at Laney. Felt like bagging the whole deal.
Get a job back at that parking garage. Sit around and  watch  na-
ture in downtown Detroit.

Then  his work ethic caught up with him. He took off the glasses,
put them in his jacket, and started putting his shoes back on.

117 28.     FOLSOM STREET FOOT of Folsom in the rain,  all  these
soot-streaked  RVs,  spavined campers, gut-sprung vehicles of any
description, provided that description included old; things  that
ran, if they ran at all, on gasoline.

"Look at that," Tessa said, as she edged the van past an old Hum-
mer, ex-military, every square inch covered with  epoxied  micro-
junk, a million tiny fragments of the manufactured world glitter-
ing in Tessa's headlights and the rain.

"Think there's a spot there," Chevette said, peering through  the
bad  wiper  wash.  Tessa's van had Malibu-style wiper blades; old
and hadn't been wet for quite a while. They'd had to  creep  this
last block along the Embarcadero, when the rain had really start-
ed.

It was drumming steadily on the van's flat steel  roof  now,  but
Chevette's  sense  of  San Francisco weather told her it wouldn't
last all that long.

The black kid with the dreads had earned his fifty. They'd  found
him crouching there like a gargoyle on the curb, his face somehow
already as old as it would  ever  need  to  be,  smoking  Russian
cigarettes  from  a  red-and-white  pack  he kept tucked into the
rolled-up sleeve of an old army shirt, three sizes too  big.  The
van still had its wheels on and the tires were intact.

"What  do  you think he meant," Tessa said, maneuvering between a
moss-stained school bus of truly ancient vintage and a delaminat-
ing  catamaran  up  on  a trailer whose tires had almost entirely
rotted away, "when he said somebody was looking for you?"

"I don't know," Chevette said. She'd asked him who, but he'd just
shrugged and walked off. This after determinedly trying to hustle
Tessa for God's Little Toy. "Maybe if you'd given him the  camera
platform, he'd've told me."

"No  fear," Tessa said, killing the engine. 'That's half my share
of the Malibu house."

Chevette saw that there were lights on in the tiny cabin  of  the
cat-  118  boat,  through  little slit-like windows, and somebody
moving in there. She started cranking down the window beside her,
but it stuck after two turns, so she opened the door instead.

"That's  Buddy's space there," said a girl, straightening up from
the catamaran's hatch, her voice raised above  the  rain,  hoarse
and a little frightened. She hunched there, under some old poncho
or piece of tarp, and Chevette couldn't make out her face.

"S'cuse us," Chevette said, "but we need to stop for  the  night,
or anyway till this rain lets up."

"Buddy parks there."

"Do you know when he'll be back?"

"Why?"

"We'll  be out of here dawn tomorrow," Chevette said. "We're just
two women. You okay with that?"

The girl raised the  tarp  a  fraction,  and  Chevette  caught  a
glimpse of her eyes. "Just two of you?"

"Let  us  stay," Chevette said, "then you won't have to worry who
else might come along."

"Well," the girl said. And was gone, ducking back down.  Chevette
heard the hatch dragged shut.   -

"Bugger  leaks," Tessa said, examining the roof of the van with a
small black flashlight.

"I don't think it'll keep up long," Chevette said.

"But we can park here?"

"Unless Buddy comes back," Chevette said.

Tessa turned the light back into the rear of the van. Where  rain
was already pooling.

"I'll  get  the  foam and the bags up here," Chevette said. "Keep
'em dry till later, anyway."

She climbed back between the seats.
 119 29.     VICIOUS CYCLE RYDELL found a ma? of  the  bridge  in
his  sunglasses, a shopping and restaurant guide for tourists. It
was in Portuguese, but you could toggle to an English version.

It took him a while; a wrong move on the rocker-pad and he'd wind
up back in those Metro Rio maps, but finally he'd managed to pull
it up. Not a GPS map, just drawings of both levels, set  side  by
side, and he had no way of knowing how up-to-date it was.

His bed-and-breakfast wasn't on it, but Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl was
(three and a half stars) and Bad Sector was too.

The lozenge that popped up when he  clicked  on  Bad  Sector  de-
scribed it as a source for "retro hard and soft, with an idiosyn-
cratic twentieth-century bent." He wasn't sure  about  that  last
part, but he could at least see where the place was: lower level,
not far from that bar he'd gone in with Creedmore and the  guitar
player.

There  was a cabinet to put stuff in, behind the triple-faux pan-
eling, so he did: his duffel and the GlobEx box with the  thermos
thing. He put the switchblade, after some thought, under the foam
slab. He considered tossing it into the bay, but he  wasn't  sure
exactly where you could find a clear shot to do that out here. He
didn't want to carry it, and anyway he could always toss it  lat-
er.

It was raining when he came out beside Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, and
he'd seen it rain on the bridge  before,  when  he'd  first  been
here.  What  happened  was  that rain fell on the weird jumble of
shanty boxes people had built up there and shortly came  sluicing
down  through  all  of that in big random gouts, like someone was
emptying bathtubs. There was no real drainage here, things having
been  built  in  the  most random way possible, so that the upper
level, while sheltered, was no way dry.

This seemed to have thinned the line for the Ghetto Chef, so that
he  briefly  considered  eating, but then he thought of how Laney
had him on retainer and wanted him to get right over to this  Bad
Sector and get that cable. So instead he headed down to the lower
level.  120 The rain had concentrated the action down  here,  be-
cause it was relatively dry. It felt like easing your way through
a very long, very homemade rush-hour subway car, except over half
the  other  people  were doing that too, in either direction, and
the others were standing still, blocking the way and trying  hard
to sell you things. Rydell eased his wallet out of his right rear
pocket and into his right front.

Crowds made Rydell nervous. Well, not crowds so much as crowding.
Too close, people up against you. (Someone brushed his back pock-
et, feeling for the wallet that wasn't  there.)  Someone  shoving
those  long skinny Mexican fried-dough things at him, repeating a
price in Spanish. He felt his shoulders start to bunch.

The smell down here was starting to get to him:  sweat  and  per-
fume,  wet  clothing, fried food. He wished he was back in Ghetto
Chef Beef Bowl, finding out what those three  and  a  half  stars
were for.

He  couldn't  take much more of this, he decided, and looked over
the heads of the crowd for another stairway to the  upper  level.
He'd rather get soaked.

But  suddenly it opened out into a wider section, the crowd eddy-
ing away to either side, where there were food stalls, cafés, and
stores,  and  there  was Bad Sector, right there, done up in what
looked to him like old-fashioned aluminum furnace paint.

He tried to shrug the crowd-induced knots out of  his  shoulders.
He  was  sweating; his heart was pounding. He made himself take a
few deep breaths to calm down. Whatever it was he was supposed to
be  doing here, for Laney, he wanted to do it right. Get all jan-
gled, this way, you never knew what could happen. Calm down.  No-
body was losing it here.

He lost it almost immediately.

There was a very large Chinese kid behind the counter, shaved al-
most bald, with one of those little lip beards that always got on
Rydell's nerves. Very large kid, with that weirdly smooth-looking
mass that indicated a lot of muscle supporting the weight. Hawai-
ian  shirt with big mauvy-pink orchids on it. Antique gold-framed
Ray-Ban aviators and a shit-eating grin. Really it was that  grin
that did it.

"I  need a cable," Rydell said, and his voice sounded breathless,
and
 121 somehow it was not liking to hear  himself  sound  that  way
that took him the rest of the way over.

"I  know  what  you need," the kid said, making sure Rydell heard
the boredom in his voice.

"Then you know what kind of cable  I  need,  right?"  Rydell  was
closer  to  the  counter now. Ragged old posters tacked up behind
it, for things with names like Heavy Gear II and T'ai Fu.

"You need two." The grin was gone now, kid  trying  his  best  to
look hard. 'One's power: jack to any DC source or wall juice with
the inbuilt transformer. Think you can manage that?"

"Maybe," Rydell said, getting right up against the front  of  the
counter  and bracing his feet, "but tell me about this other one.
Like it cables what to what exactly?"


There was a skinny black tool lying on the counter. Some kind  of
specialist  driver.  "No," Rydell said, picking up the driver and
examining its tip, "but you're going to." He  grabbed  the  kid's
left ear with his other hand, pinched off an inch of the driver's
shaft between thumb and forefinger, and inserted  that  into  the
kid's  right  nostril. It was easy hanging on to the ear, because
the kid had some kind of fat plastic spike through it.

"Uh," the kid said.

"You got a sinus problem?"

"No."

"You could have." He let go of the ear. The kid stood very still.
"You aren't going to move, are you?"

"No..

Rydell  removed  the Ray-Bans, tossing them over his right shoul-
der. "I'm getting sick of people grinning at me because they know
shit I don't. Understand?"

"Okay."  "'Okay' what?"  "Just . . . okay?"

"Okay is: where are the cables?"

"Under the counter."  122

"Power's  standard  hut lab grade: transformer, current-scrubber.
The other, I can't tell you-"

Rydell moved the tool a fraction of an inch, and the  kid's  eyes
widened. "Not okay," Ryclell said.

"I don't know1 Know we had to have it assembled to spec, in Fres-
no. I just work here. Nobody tells me who pays for what." He took
a deep, shuddering breath. "If they did, somebody like you'd come
in and make me tell, right?"

"Yeah," Rydell said, "and that means people are liable to come in
and  torture  your  ass  into  telling them things you don't even
know..

"Look in my shirt pocket," the kid said  carefully.  "There's  an
address.  Get on there, talk to whoever, maybe they'll tell you."

Rydell gently patted the front of the pocket, making  sure  there
wouldn't  be any used needles or other surprises. The massive pad
of

muscle behind the pocket gave him pause. He slid two  fingers  in
and  came up with a slip of cardboard torn from something larger.
Rydell saw the address of a website. "The cable people?"

"Don't know. But I don't know why else I'd be supposed to give it
to you."

"And that's all you know?"

"Yes."

"Don't  move,"  said  Rydell.  He removed the tool from the kid's
nostril. "Cables under the counter?"

"Yes."

"I don't think I want you to reach under there."

"Wait," said the kid, raising  his  hands.  "I  gotta  tell  you:
there's  a  'bot under there. It's got your cables. It just wants
to give 'em to you, but I didn't want you to get the wrong idea."

"A 'bot?"

"It's okay!"

Rydell  watched  as a small, highly polished steel claw appeared,
looking a lot like a pair of articulated sugar tongs  his  mother
had  owned.  It  grasped  the edge of the counter. Then the thing
chinned itself, onehanded, and Rydell saw the head. It got a  leg
up and mounted the
 123  counter,  pulling a couple of heat-sealed plastic envelopes
behind it. Its head was disproportionately small, with a sort  of
wing-like  projection  or antenna sticking up on one side. It was
in that traditional Japanese style, the one that looked as though
a skinny little shiny robot was dressed in oversized white armor,
its forearms and ankles wider than its upper arms and thighs.  It
carried the transparent envelopes, each one containing a careful-
ly wound cable, across the counter, put them down, and backed up.
Rydell picked them up, shoved them into the pocket of his khakis,
and did a pretty good imitation of the robot, backing up.

As the kid's Ray-Bans came into his  peripheral  vision,  he  saw
that they hadn't broken,

When  he  was  in  the doorway, he tossed the black driver to the
kid, who missed catching it. It hit the Heavy Gear II poster  and
dropped out of sight behind the counter.


RYDELL found a laundromat-café combination, called Vicious Cycle,
that had one hotdesk at the back, behind a black plastic curtain.
The curtain suggested to him that people used this to access porn
sites, but why you'd want to do that in a laundromat  was  beyond
him.

He  was  glad of the curtain anyway, because he hated the idea of
people watching him talk to people who weren't there, so he  gen-
erally  avoided  accessing  websites  in public places. He didn't
know why using the phone, audio, wasn't embarrassing that way. It
just  wasn't.  When  you were using the phone you didn't actually
look like you were talking to  people  who  weren't  there,  even
though  you  were.  You  were talking to the phone. Although, now
that he thought about it, using the phone in the earpiece of  the
Brazilian glasses would look that way too.

So  he  pulled the curtain shut and stood there in the background
rumble of the dryers, a sound he'd always found sort of  comfort-
ing.  The glasses were already cabled to the hotdesk. He put them
on and worked the rocker-pad, inputting the address.

There was a brief and probably entirely symbolic passage  through
some  kind  of neon rain, heavy on the pinks and greens, and then
he was there.

Looking into that same empty space that he'd glimpsed  in  Tong's
124  corridor: some kind of dust-blown, sepulchral courtyard, lit
from above by a weird, attenuated light.

This time though, he could look up.  He  did.  He  seemed  to  be
standing  on  the  floor  of a vast empty air shaft that rose up,
canyon-like, between walls of peculiarly textured darkness.

High above, a skylight he guessed to be the size of a large swim-
ming  pool passed grimy sunlight through decades of soot and what
he took, at this distance, to be drifts of something more  solid.
Black  iron mu!lions divided long rectangles, some of them holed,
as by gunfire, through what he  guessed  was  archaic  wire-cored
safety glass.

When he lowered his head, they were there, the two of them, seat-
ed in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there  be-
fore.

One  of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particu-
lar era, his lips pursed primly.  He  wore  glasses  with  heavy,
rectangular frames of black plastic and a snap-brim hat of a kind
that RydelI knew only from old films. The hat was positioned dead
level  on  his  head, perhaps an inch above the black frames. His
legs were crossed, and Rydell saw that he wore black wingtip  ox-
fords. His hands were folded in his lap.

The  other  presented  in far more abstract form: an only vaguely
human figure, the space where its head should have been was coro-
naed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter, as
though a sniper's victim, in the  instant  of  impact,  had  been
recorded and looped. The halo of blood and brains flickered, nev-
er quite attaining a

steady state. Beneath it, an open mouth, white teeth exposed in a
permanent,  silent scream. The rest, except for the hands, clawed
as in agony around the gleaming arms of the  chair,  seemed  con-
stantly  to  be  dissolving  in  some terrible fiery wind. Rydell
thought of black-and-white footage,  ground  zero,  sb-mo  atomic
hurricane.

"Mr.  Rydell,"  said the one with the hat, "thank you for coming.
You may call me Klaus. This," and he gestured with  a  pale,  pa-
pery-looking hand, which immediately returned to his lap, "is the
Rooster."

The one called the Rooster didn't move at all when it spoke,  but
the  open  mouth flickered in and out of focus. Its voice was ei-
ther the soundcollage from Tong's or another like it. "Listen  to
me, Rydell. You are now
 125  responsible  for  something  of  the utmost importance, the
greatest possible value. Where is it?"

"I don't know who you are," Rydell said.  "I'm  not  telling  you
anything."

Neither responded, and then Klaus coughed dryly. "The only proper
answer. You would be wise to maintain that position. Indeed,  you
have  no  idea  who  we are, and if we were to reappear to you at
some later time, you would have no way of knowing that  we  were,
in fact, us."

"Then why should I listen to you?"

"In  your situation," said the Rooster, and its voice, just then,
seemed composed primarily of the sound of breaking  glass,  modu-
lated  into  the semblance of human speech, "you might be advised
to listen to anyone who cares to address you."

"But whether or not you choose to believe what you  are  told  is
another  matter,"  said  Klaus, fussily adjusting his shirt cuffs
and refolding his hands.

"You're hackers," Rydell said.

"Actually," said Klaus, "we might better be described as  envoys.
We represent," he paused, "another country."

"Though  not,  of  course,"  said  the perpetually disintegrating
Rooster, "in any obsolete sense of the merely geopolitical-"

"'Hacker,'" interrupted Klaus,  "has  certain  criminal  connota-
tions-"

"Which  we do not accept," the Rooster cut in, "having long since
established an autonomous reality in which-"

"Quiet," said Klaus, and Rydell had no doubt  where  the  greater
authority lay. "Mr. Rydell, your employer, Mr. Laney, has become,
for want of a better term, an ally of ours. He has brought a cer-
tain  situation to our attention, and it is clearly to our advan-
tage to come to his aid."

"That is difficult  to  explain,"  Klaus  said.  He  cleared  his
throat. "If indeed possible. Mr. Laney is possessed of a most pe-
culiar talent, one which he has very satisfactorily  demonstrated
to  us. We are here to assure you, Mr. Rydell, that the resources
of the Walled City will be at your disposal in  the  coming  cri-
sis."  126 "What city," Rydell asked, "what crisis?"

"The  nodal  point," the Rooster said, its voice like the trickle
of water far down in some unseen cistern.

"Mr. Rydel!," said Klaus, "you must keep the projector  with  you
at  all times. We advise you to use it at the earliest opportuni-
ty. Familiarize yourself with her."

"With who?"

"We are concerned," Klaus went on, "that Mr. Laney,  for  reasons
of  health,  will  be unable to continue. We number among us some
who are possessed of his talent, but none to such  an  extraordi-
nary extent. Should Laney be lost to us, Mr. Rydell, we fear that
little can be done."

"Jesus," said Rydell, "you  think  I  know  what  you're  talking
about?"

"I'm  not  being  deliberately  gnomic, Mr. Rydell, I assure you.
There is no time for explanations now, and for  some  things,  it
seems,  there  may  actually  be no explanations. Simply remember
what we have told you, and that we are here for you, at this  ad-
dress. And now you must return, immediately, to wherever you have
left the projector."

And they were gone, and the black courtyard with them,  compacted
into  a sphere of pink and green fractal neon that left residuals
on Rydell's retinas, as it shrank and vanished in the dark behind
the Brazilian sunglasses.
 127  30.     ANOTHER ONE FONTAINE had spent most of the late af-
ternoon on the phone, trying to lay  Clarisse's  creepy  Japanese
baby  dolls off on a decreasingly likely list of specialist deal-
ers.

He knew it wasn't the thing to do, in terms of realizing  optimum
cash,  but  dolls weren't one of his areas of expertise; besides,
they gave him the horrors, these Another One replicas.

Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could
whip  the  big  markup  to  collectors.  If you were a collector,
Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature's way of telling
you  you had too much money to begin with. But there was always a
chance he'd find one who knew somebody, one specific buyer, to go
to.  That was what Fontaine had been hoping for when he'd started
dialing.

But now it was eight calls later, and he was reduced  to  talking
to  this  Elliot,  in Biscayne Bay, Florida, who he knew had once
been put under electronic house arrest  for  something  involving
counterfeit  Barbies.  That was a federal rap, and Fontaine ordi-
narily avoided people like that, but Elliot did seem  to  have  a
line  on  a  buyer.  Although  he was, as you'd naturally expect,
cagey about it.

"Condition," Elliot said. "The three salient points here are con-
dition, condition, and condition."

"Elliot, they look great to me."

"Great' is not on the NAADC grading scale, Fontaine."

Fontaine  wasn't  sure, but he thought that might be the National
Association of Animatronic Doll Collectors. "Elliot, you  know  I
don't know how to rate condition on these things. They've got all
their fingers and toes, right? I mean, the  fucking  things  look
alive, okay?"

Fontaine  heard Elliot sigh. He'd never met the man. "My client,"
said Elliot, speaking slowly, for stress, "is a condition  queen.
He  wants  them minty. He wants them mintier than minty. He wants
them mint in box. He wants them new old stock."

"Hey, look," Fontaine said, remembering what Clarisse  had  said,
128  "you  don't get these things unused, right? The grandparents
bought them as, like, surrogate offspring, right? They were  big-
ticket items. They got used."

"Not  always,"  said  Elliot.  "The most desirable pieces, and my
client owns several, are replicas ordered just prior to the unex-
pected death of the grandchild."

Fontaine  took the phone from his ear, looking at it as though it
were something dirty. "Fucking hell," Fontaine  said,  under  his
breath.


"Sony, Elliot," Fontaine said, putting the phone back to his ear,
"gotta take one on  the  other  line.  I'll  get  back  to  you."
Fontaine broke the connection.

He  was  perched  on  a  tall stool behind the counter. He leaned
sideways to look at the Another One  dolls  in  their  bag.  They
looked   horrible.  They  were  horrible.  Elliot  was  horrible.
Clarisse was horrible too, but now Fontaine lapsed into  a  brief
but  intensely  erotic fantasy involving none other, with whom he
had not been conjugal in some while. That this fantasy  literally
involved Clarisse exclusively, he took to be significant. That it
produced an actual erectile response, he took  to  be  even  more
significant. He sighed. Adjusted his trousers.

Life, he reflected, was rough as a cob.

Through  the  sound  of  rain sluicing down around his shop (he'd
rigged gutters) he could hear a faint but rapid clicking from the
back  room  and  noted its peculiar regularity. Each one of those
clicks, he knew, represented another watch. He'd  shown  the  boy
how  to  call  up auctions on the notebook, not Christie's or An-
tiquorum, but the living messy scrum of the  net  auctions.  He'd
shown  him  how  to bookmark too, because he thought that picking
what he liked might be fun.

Fontaine sighed again, this time because he had no idea  what  he
would do about the boy. Having taken him in because he'd wanted a
closer look at-well, had wanted,  did  want-the  Jaeger-LeCoultre
militar~ç  Fontaine  would have found it impossible to explain to
anyone why he had subsequently  fed  him,  gotten  him  showered,
bought him fresh clothes, and shown him how to use the eyephones.
Actually he couldn't explain it to himself. He was  not  inclined
to charity, he didn't
 129  think, but sometimes he found himself moving as if to right
a particular wrong in the world. And this  never  made  sense  to
Fontaine,  really, because what he made right, he made right only
for a little while, and nothing ever really changed.

This boy now, he very likely had some sort of brain  damage,  and
most likely congenital, but Fontaine believed that trouble had no
first cause. There was sheer bad luck, he knew that, but often as
not  he'd  seen how cruelty or neglect or hard-luck genetics came
twining up through the generations like a vine.

Now he dug down deep, into the pocket of his tweed slacks,  where
he  was  keeping  the  Jaeger-LeCoultre. By itself, of course, so
that nothing else would scratch it. He pulled it out now and con-
sidered it, but the tenor of his thoughts prevented the momentary
distraction, the small pleasure, he'd hoped to take from it.

But how on earth, he wondered, had the boy gotten hold  of  some-
thing  like  this,  such  an elegant piece of serious collector's
ordnance?

And the workmanship of the strap worried  him.  He'd  never  seen
anything quite like it, for all that it was very simple. An arti-
san had sat down with the watch, whose lugs were  closed  not  by
spring bars but permanently soldered rods of stainless steel, in-
tegral parts of the case, and cut and  glued  and  hand  stitched
however many pieces of black calf leather. He examined the inside
of the strap, but there was nothing, no trademark  or  signature.
"If you could talk," Fontaine said, looking at the watch.

And what would it tell him? he wondered. The story of how the boy
had gotten it might turn out to be not the most  unlikely  adven-
ture  it  had had. Briefly he imagined it on some officer's wrist
out in the Burmese night, a star shell bursting  above  a  jungle
hillside, monkeys screaming...

Did  they  have  monkeys  in  Burma?  He did know the British had
fought there when this had been issued.

He looked down through the scratched, greenish glass that  topped
the counter. Watches there, each face to him a tiny and contained
poem, a pocket museum, subject over time to laws of  entropy  and
of  chance.  These tiny mechanisms, their jeweled hearts beating.
Wearing down, he 130 knew, through the friction of metal on  met-
al.  I-be  sold nothing unserviced, everything cleaned and lubri-
cated. He took fresh stock to a sullen but highly skilled Pole in
Oakland  to  be  cleaned,  oiled,  and timed. And he did this, he
knew, not to provide a better, more reliable product, but to  en-
sure that each one might better survive in an essentially hostile
universe. It would've been difficult to admit this to anyone, but
it was true and he knew it.

He  put the Jaeger-LeCoultre back in his pocket and slid from the
stool. Stood staring blankly into a  glass-fronted  cabinet,  the
shelf  at  eye level displaying military Dinky Toys and a Randall
Model 15 "Airman," a stocky-looking  combat  knife  with  a  saw-
toothed  spine  and  black Micarta grips. The Dinky Toys had been
played with; dull gray base metal showed  through  chipped  green
paint.  The  Randall was mint, unused, unsharpened, its stainless
steel blade exactly as it left the grinding belt.  Fontaine  won-
dered how many such had in fact never been used. Totemic objects,
they lost considerable resale value if sharpened, and it was  his
impression  that  they  circulated  almost as a species of ritual
currency, quite exclusively masculine. He had  two  currently  in
stock,  the  other a hiltless little leaf-point dirk said to have
been designed for the US Secret Service. Best dated by  the  name
of the maker on their saddle-sewn sheaths, he estimated them both
to be aboUt thirty years old. Such things were devoid of much po-
etry  for  Fontaine, although he understood the market and how to
value a piece. They spoke to him mainly, as did the window of any
army  surplus  store,  of  male fear and powerlessness. He turned
away now, seeing the dying eyes of a man he'd shot in  Cleveland,
possibly in the year one of those knives had been made.

He  locked  the  door,  put the CLOSED sign up, and went into the
back room where he found the boy still seated,  cross-legged,  as
he'd  left  him, his face hidden by the massive old eyephones ca-
bled to the open notebook in his lap.

"Hey," Fontaine said, "How's fishin'? You been  finding  anything
you think we should bid on?"

The boy continued to monotonously click a single key on the note-
book,  the  eyephones  bobbing  slightly   in   time.    ~   PAR-
TIES       131 "Hey," Fontaine said. "You gonna get netburn."

He squatted beside the boy, wincing at the pain it brought to his
knees. He rapped once on the gray cowl  of  the  eyephones,  then
gently  removed  them. The boy's eyes blinked furiously, swimming
in the vanished light of the miniature video  screens.  His  hand
clicked the notebook a few times, then stopped.

"Let's  see  what  you found," Fontaine said, taking the notebook
from him. He absently touched a few keys, curious to see what the
boy might have bookmarked.

He was expecting auction pages, each one with a scan and descrip-
tion of a given watch on offer, but what he  found  instead  were
numbered  lists of articles that came up in an archaic font meant
to recall typewriters.

He studied one list, then another. He felt  something  like  cold
air across the back of his neck and thought for a second that the
front door was open, but then he remembered locking it.

"Shit," Fontaine said, pulling up more  of  these  lists.  "Shit,
how'd you get this?"

These  were bank records, confidential tallies of the contents of
safety deposit boxes in banks of the brick-and-mortar  sort,  all
apparently  in  midwestern states. And each list he saw contained
at least one watch, very likely part  of  someone's  estate,  and
very likely forgotten.

A  Rolex  Explorer  in  Kansas City. Some sort of gold Patek in a
small town in Kansas.

He looked from the screen to the boy, aware  of  being  privy  to
something profoundly anomalous.

"How'd  you  get into these files?" he asked. "This stuff is pri-
vate. Should be impossible. Is impossible. How'd you do it?"

And only that absence behind the brown eyes, staring back at him,
either  infinitely  deep or of no depth at all, he couldn't tell.
132 31.     VIEW FROM A HELLWARD STANCHION HE dreams a vast  ele-
vator,  descending,  its  floor like the ballroom of some ancient
liner. Its sides are open, in part, and he finds her there at the
rail,  beside an ornate cast-iron stanchion worked in cherubs and
bunches of grapes, their outlines  softened  beneath  innumerable
coats of a black enamel glossy as wet ink.

Beyond  the  black  stanchion and the aching geometry of her pro-
file, a darkened world spreads to every  horizon,  island  conti-
nents blacker

than  the  seas in which they swim, the lights of great yet name-
less cities reduced to firefly glimmers at this height, this dis-
tance.

The  elevator,  this  ballroom, this waltzing host unseen now but
sensed as background, as necessary  gestalt,  descends  it  seems
down  all  his  days, in some coded iteration of the history that
brings him to this night.

If it is night.

The knife's plain haft, against  his  ribs,  through  a  starched
evening shirt.

The  handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplici-
ty, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibili-
ties for the user's hand.

That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates out-
come; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the
absence of grace.

And now she turns to him, and she is in that instant all she ever
was to him, and something more, for he is aware in that same  in-
stant that this is a dream, this mighty cage, descending, and she
is lost, as ever, and now he opens his eyes to the gray and  per-
fectly neutral ceiling of the bedroom on Russian Hill.

He  lies  dead straight, atop the blanket of gray lambs wool made
up in military fashion, in his gray flannel shirt with its  plat-
inum  links,  his black trousers, his black wool socks. His hands
are folded on his chest         ALL TOMORROW S PARTIES  133  like
the  hands  of a medieval effigy, a knight atop his own sarcopha-
gus, and the telephone is ringing.

He touches one of the platinum cuff links, to answer.

"It isn't too late, I hope," says the voice.


"I needed to talk." "Do you?"  "More  so,  lately"  "And  why  is
that?" "The time draws near."


"Can't  you feel it? You with your right place at the right time.
You with your letting things unfold. Can't you feel it?"

"I do not deal in outcomes."

"But you do," the voice says. "You've dealt a few for  me,  after
all. You become an outcome."

"No," the man says, "I simply discover that place where I am sup-
posed to be."

"You make it sound so simple. I wish that it were that simple for
me."

"It could be," the man says, "but you are addicted to complexity"

"More literally than you kno~" says the voice, and the man  imag-
ines  the  few square inches of satellite circuitry through which
it comes to him. That tiniest and mostly  costly  of  principali-
ties. "It's all about complexity now."

"It is about your will in the world," the man says and raises his
arms, cupping the back of his head in his hands.

There follows a silence.

"There was a time," the voice says at last, "when I believed that
you  were  playing a game with me. That all of that was something
you made up for me. To annoy me. Or amuse me. To hold  my  inter-
est. To ensure my patronage."

"I have never been in need of your patronage," the man says mild-
ly.

"No, I suppose not," the voice continues. "There will  always  be
134 those who need certain others not to be, and will pay to make
it so. But it's true: I took you to  be  another  mercenary,  one
with  an expressed philosophy perhaps, but I took that philosophy
to be nothing more than a way you had discovered of making  your-
self interesting, of setting yourself apart from the pack."

"Where I am," the man says to the gray neutral ceiling, "there is
no pack."

"Oh, there's a pack all right. Bright young  things  guaranteeing
executive  outcomes. Brochures. They have brochures. And lines to
read between. What were you doing when I called?"

"Dreaming," the man says.

"I wouldn't have imagined, somehow, that you dream. Was it a good
dream?"

The  man considers the perfect blankness of the gray ceiling. Re-
membered geometry of facial bone  threatens  to  form  there.  He
closes his eyes. "I was dreaming of hell," he says.

"How was it?"

"An elevator, descending."

"Christ,"  says  the  voice, "this poetry is unlike you." Another
silence follows.

The man sits up. Feels  the  smooth,  dark  polished  wood,  cool
through  his  black  socks. He begins to perform a series of very
specific

excercises that involve a minimum of visible movement.  There  is
stiff-ness  in  his shoulders. At some distance he hears a car go
past, tires on wet pavement.

"I'm not very far from you at the moment," the man says, breaking
the  silence.  "I'm in San Francisco."                     Now it
is the man's  turn  for  silence.  He  continues  his  exercises,
                remembering  the  Cuban  beach,  decades  ago, on
which he was first         - - -   taught this sequence  and  its
variations. His teacher that day the master

of  a school of Argentine knife-fighting most authoritatively de-
clared nonexistent by responsible scholars of the martial arts.

"How long has it been," the  voice  asks,  "since  we've  spoken,
faceto-face?"

"Some years," says the man.
 135  "I  think I need to see you now. Something extraordinary is
on the verge of happening."

"Really," says the man, and no one sees  his  brief  and  wolfish
smile, "are you about to become contented?"

A laugh, beamed down from the secret streets of that subminiature
cityscape in geosynchronous orbit. "Not that  extraordinary,  no.
But  some  very basic state is on the brink of change, and we are
near its locus."

"We? We have no current involvement."

"Physically Geographically. It's happening here."

The man moves into the final sequence of the exercise,  remember-
ing flies on the instructor's face during that initial demonstra-
tion.

"Why did you go to the bridge last night?"

"I needed to think," the man says and stands.

"Nothing drew you there?"

Memory.  Loss.  Flesh-ghost  in  Market  Street.  The  smell   of
cigarettes  in her hair. Her winter lips chill against his, open-
ing into warmth. "Nothing," he says, hands closing on nothing.

"It's time for us to meet," the voice says.

Hands opening. Releasing nothing.  136         - -     32.  LOWER
COMPANIONS


THE  back of the van collected a quarter-inch of water before the
rain quit. "Cardboard," Chevette told Tessa.

"Cardboard?"

"We'll find some, dry. Boxes. Open 'em out, put down a couple  of
layers. Be dry enough."

Tessa  clicked her flashlight on and had another look. "We're go-
ing to sleep in that puddle?"

"It's interstitial," Chevette told her.

Tessa turned the light  off,  swung  around.  "Look,"  she  said,
pointing  with  the  flashlight,  "at least it isn't pissing down
now. Let's go back to

the     bridge. Find a pub, something to eat, we'll  worry  about
this  later."  Chevette  said that would be fine, just as long as
Tessa didn't bring

God's Little Toy, or in any other way  record  the  rest  of  the
evening, and Tessa agreed to that.

They  left the van parked there, and walked back along the Embar-
cadero, past razor wire and barricades that sealed  (ineffectual-
ly,

Chevette  knew) the ruined piers. There were dealers in the shad-
ows there, and before they'd gotten to the bridge they  were  of-
fered  speed,  plug,  weed, opium, and dancer. Chevette explained
that these dealers weren't sufficiently competitive to  take  and
hold positions farther along,

nearer  the bridge. Those were the coveted spots, and the dealers
along the Embarcadero were either moving toward or away from that
particular arena.

"How do they compete?" Tessa asked. "Do they fight?"

"No,"  said Chevette, "it's the market, right? The ones with good
shit, good prices, and they turn up, well, the users want to  see
them.  Somebody  came  with bad shit, bad prices, the users drive
'em off. But you can see them change, when you live here; see 'em
every day, most of that stuff, if they're using themselves, it'll
take 'em down. Wind up back down here, then you  just  don't  see
'em."

"They  don't  sell  on  the bridge?"                  137 "Well,"
Chevette said, "yeah, they do, hut not so much. And when they do,
they're quieter about it. You don't get offered on the bridge, so
much, not if they don't know you."

"So how is it like that?" Tessa asked. "How do  people  know  not
to? Where does the rule come from?"

Chevette  thought  about  it.  "It isn't a rule," she said. "It's
just you aren't supposed to do it." Then she  laughed.  "I  don't
know: it's just like that. Like there aren't too many fights, but
the ones there are tend to be serious, and people get hurt."

"How many people actually live out here?"  Tessa  asked  as  they
walked up the ramp from Bryant.

"I don't know," Chevette said. "Not sure anyone does. Used to be,
everyone who did anything here, who had a  business  going,  they
lived here. 'Cause you have to. Have to be in possession. No rent
or anything. Now, though, you get businesses that  are  run  like
businesses,  you  know? That Bad Sector we were in. Somebody owns
all that stock, they built that storefront, and I  bet  they  pay
that sumo boy to sleep in the back, hold it down for them."

"But you didn't work here, when you lived here?"

"Nah," Chevette said, "I was messin', soon as I could. Got myself
a bike and I was all over town."

They made their way into the lower level, past boxes of  fish  on
ice,  until they came to a place Chevette remembered on the south
side. It had food sometimes, sometimes music, and it had no name.


"I'll  let  you  know  after  I've had a beer." Tessa was looking
around at the place, like she was trying to decide how  intersti-
tial it was.

It  turned  out  they  had an Australian beer Tessa really liked,
called a Redback, came in a brown bottle with a red spider on it,
and Tessa explained that these spiders were the Australian equiv-
alent of a black widow, maybe worse. It was a good  beer  though,
Chevette had to agree, and after they'd both had one, and ordered
another, Tessa ordered a cheeseburger,  and  Chevette  ordered  a
plate  of  hot  wings and a side of fries.  138 This place really
smelled like a bar: stale beer, smoke, fry grease, sweat. She re-
membered  the first bars she'd ever gone into, places along rural
highways back up in Oregon, and they'd  smelled  like  this.  The
bars  Carson  had taken her to in LA hadn't smelled like anything
much. Like aromatherapy candles, sort of.

There was a stage down at one end,  just  a  low  black  platform
raised  about  a  foot  above the floor, and there were musicians
there, setting up, plugging things in. There  was  some  kind  of
keyboard,  drums, a mike stand. Chevette had never been that much
into music, not any particular kind, although  in  her  messenger
days  she'd  gotten  to  like dancing in clubs, in San Francisco.
Carson, though, he'd been very particular  about  what  music  he
liked,  and  had tried to teach Chevette to appreciate it like he
did, but she just hadn't gotten with it at all. He was into  this
twentieth-century  stuff,  a  lot of it French, particularly this
Serge Something, really creepy-ass, sounded like the guy was  be-
ing  slowly  jerked  off while he sang, but like it really wasn't
even doing that much for him. She'd bought this new Chrome Koran,
"My  War  Is My War," sort of out of self-defense, but she hadn't
even liked it that much herself, and the one time  she'd  put  it
on,  when Carson was there, he'd looked at her like she'd shit on
his broadloom or something.

These guys, now, setting up on the  little  stage,  they  weren't
bridge  people,  but  she knew that there were musicians, some of
them famous, who'd come out and record on the bridge just so they
could say they had.

There  was  a  big man up there, with a white, stubbly face and a
sort of mashed-up cowboy hat on the back of his head. He was fid-
dling  with an unplugged guitar and listening to a smaller man in
jeans, wearing a belt buckle like an engraved silver dinner plat-
ter.

"Hey,"  Chevette  said, indicating the bottle-blonde man with the
belt buckle, "this girl gets molested in the dark, tells  'em  it
was  a  mesh-back did it. 'Well,' they say, 'how you know it was,
if it was dark?' ''Cause he had a tiny little dick  and  a  great
big belt buckle!'"

"What's a meshback?" Tessa tilted back the last of her beer.

"Redneck,  Skinner  called  'em," Chevette said. "It's from those
nylon baseball caps they used to wear, got black  nylon  mesh  on
the  back,  for ventilation? My mother used to call those 'gimme'
hats. .

139 "Why?" Tessa asked her.

"'Gimme one them hats.' Give 'em away free  with  advertising  on
them."

"Country music, that sort of thing?"

"Well,  more  like  Dukes  of  Nuke  'Em and stuff. I don't think
that's country music."

"It's the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white  proletariat,"
Tessa  said,  "barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America.
Or that's what they'd say on Real One.  But  we  have  that  joke
about  the big buckles in Australia, except it's about pilots and
wristwatches."

Chevette thought the man with the belt buckle was staring back at
her,  so  she  looked in the other direction, at the crowd around
the pool table, and here there actually  were  a  couple  of  the
meshbacked  hats, so she pointed these out to Tessa by way of il-
lustration.

"Excuse me, ladies," someone said, a woman, and  Chevette  turned
to  face  directly into the line of fire of some very serious bo-
som, laced up into a shiny black top. Huge cloud of blowsy blonde
hair  a  Ia  Ashleigh Modine Carter, who Chevette thought of as a
singer meshbacks would listen to,  if  they  listened  to  women,
which  she  wasn't  certain  they  did. The woman put two freshly
opened Redbacks down on their table. "With Mr.  Creedmore's  com-
pliments," she said, beaming at them.

"Mr. Creedmore?" Tessa asked.

"Buell  Creedmore, honey," the woman said. "That's him over there
getting ready to do the sound  check  with  the  legendary  Randy
Shoats."

"Is he a musician?"

"He's  a  singer,  honey," the woman said and seemed to look more
closely at Tessa. "You A&R?"

"No," Chevette said.

"Damn," the woman said, and Chevette thought  for  a  second  she
might take the beers back. "I thought you might be from an alter-
native label."

"Alternative to what?" Tessa asked.

The woman brightened. "Buell's singing, honey. It isn't like what
you  probably think of as country. Well, actually, it's a 'roots'
thing. Buell wants to take it back, back there  past  Waylon  and
Willie,  to  some kinda 140 dark 'primal kinda heartland.' Kinda.
Thing." The woman beamed, eyes slightly unfocused.  Chevette  got
the  feeling  that  all of that had been memorized, and maybe not
too well, but that it was her job to get it out.

"Randy, he was teaching Buell one earlier, called 'There Was

Whiskey and Blood on the Highway, but I Didn't Hear Nobody Pray'

That's a hymn, honey. Very traditional.  Give  me  goosebumps  to
hear it.

I  think  it's called that, anyway. But tonight's set is going to
be 'more

upbeat, electric.'"

"Cheers," Tessa said, "ta for the lager."

The woman looked puzzled. "Oh. You're welcome, honey.  Please  do
stick around for the set. It's Buell's Northern California debut,
and the first time he's actually sung with his Lower Companions."

"His what?" Chevette asked.

"'Buell  Creedmore and his Lower Companions.' I think it's a bib-
lical reference, though I can't quote you chapter and verse." The
woman

pointed  her straining bosom toward the stage and resolutely fol-
lowed it in that direction.

Chevette didn't really want another beer. "She  bought  us  these
because she thought we were A&R." She knew about that because of

Carson.  A&R  were the people in the music business who found and
        developed talent.      -         -          Tessa took  a
pull    on    her    beer    and   watched   the   woman,   who'd
                stopped to talk to one of the boys from the  pool
table, one of the ones

who  was  actually  wearing a meshbacked cap. "Do people like her
live here?"

"No," Chevette said, "there's clubs in the city for this kind  of
thing,  or sort of like it, but I've never seen a crowd like this
out here before."

The sound check consisted of the man with the squashed cowboy hat
playing guitar and the man with the belt buckle singing. They

stopped  and  started  a few times, on the one song they did, for
various twiddlings of knobs, but the guitarist could really  play
(Chevette  got  the  feeling he wasn't really letting it out yet,
what he could do) and the singer could sing. It was a song  about
being  sad  and being tired of being sad, The bar, meanwhile, was
starting to fill up, with what looked to be                 141 a
bunch of locals, regulars, and a hunch who weren't, who were here
to hear the hand. The locals tended to tattoos, facial piercings,
and  asymmetrical  haircuts,  while  the  visitors tended to hats
(meshback and cowboy, mostly), jeans, and (on  the  men,  anyway)
guts.  The  guts tended to be the kind that looked as though they
had moved in while their owners were unaware  and  had  taken  up
residence  on  otherwise  fat-free  frames.  The kind of gut that
hangs over the top of a pair of jeans  with  a  reasonably  small
waistband, swelling the front of a flannel shirt but cinched back
in, below, with one of those big buckles.

She'd started on Creedmore's Redback out  of  boredom,  when  she
spotted  the  singer  himself  headed  their way. He had borrowed
someone's meshbacked cap and pulled  it  on  backward,  over  his
weirdly  wet-looking  bleach-blonde hair. He was wearing an elec-
tric-blue cowboy shirt with the store creases still in it,  hori-
zontal  across  the  chest,  and  the  white pearlized snaps open
halfway down the front, revealing a pale, white,  decidedly  con-
cave  chest  that  wasn't at all the color of his face, which she
figured was painted on. He had what looked like tomato  juice  in
each hand, in a tall glass with ice. "How do," he said. "Saw that
Maryalice over here. Thought I'd bring the old girl a drink.  I'm
Buell Creedmore. You ladies enjoyin' your beer?"

"Yes,  thanks,"  said Tessa and looked in the opposite direction.
Creedmore did a quick, and to Chevette  very  obvious,  piece  of
mental  calculation, Chevette coming up as the one more likely to
be profitably hit on. "You hear about us in the city here or over
in Oakland?"

"We're  just  here  for the hot wings," Chevette said, indicating
the plate of chicken bones in front of her.

"They any good?"

"They're okay," Chevette said. "But we're just leaving."

"Leaving?" Creedmore took a big swig of his tomato juice.  "Hell,
we're  on  in  ten.  You  oughta stay 'n'hear us." There was some
weird-looking, greenish-sandy stuff,  Chevette  saw,  around  the
rims  of  the  glasses,  and now some of this was stuck on Creed-
more's upper lip.

"Vs/hat you doin' with those Caesar's, Buell?"  It  was  the  big
guitarist.  "Now  you  promised  me you wouldn't drink before the
set."

"For Maryalice," Creedmore said, gesturing  with  a  glass,  "and
this 142 here's for the pretty lady." He put the one he'd had the
swig from down in front of Chevette.

"So how come you got that garlic salt on your mouth?" the big man
asked.

Creedmore  grinned  and  wiped  the  back  of his hand across his
mouth. "Nerves, Randy. Big night. Gonna be okay..

"It better be, Buell. I don't see some evidence you can hold your
liquor,  be  the  last  gig you ever play with me." The guitarist
took the drink out of Creedmore's hand, took a sip, made a  face,
and  walked  off,  taking the drink with him.  "Sons of bitches,"
Creedmore said.  And it was at this point that Chevette saw  Car-
son  enter  the  bar. Recognition, on her part, was instantaneous
and one-hundred-percent positive. It was not  Carson  as  dressed
for  lounges  that  smelled like aromatherapy, but Carson dressed
for the knowing exploration of the lower reaches.   Chevette  had
actually  been  with him when he bought this outfit, so she'd had
to hear about how  the  jacket  was  Alaskan  steerhide  (Alaskan
steers  having thicker hides, due to the cold winters), and a mu-
seum-grade reproduction of a 1  940s  original.  The  jeans  were
nearly  as expensive, and more complicated in their sourcing, the
denim woven in Japan on  ancient,  lovingly  maintained  American
looms  and  then  finished  in Tunisia to the specifications of a
team of Dutch designers and garment historians. This was the kind
of  stuff that Carson cared deeply about, this absolutely authen-
tic fake stuff, and when Chevette saw him step through  that  en-
trance,  she  had absolutely no doubt that it was him.  And also,
though she couldn't have said exactly how, she knew that she  was
in  trouble.  Maybe,  she'd  think  later, it had been because he
hadn't known she was looking, so he hadn't really been  bothering
to be the guy he had always pretended to be when he was with her,
when he'd known she was looking.

It was like seeing a different guy, a very scary, very cold, very
angry  guy, and knowing it was Carson. Carson turning to scan the
bar- What she did next surpnsed her It must have surprised Creed-
more  even  more  The top of the huge silver buckle made a conve-
nient                 143 handle. She  grabbed  it,  pulled,  and
brought  him  down,  loose-kneed, to kiss his mouth, throwing her
arms around his neck and hoping the back  of  his  head,  in  the
backward meshback hat, was between her face and Carson's.  Creed-
more's ready enthusiasm was, unfortunately, about what she'd have
expected, had she had the time to think.  144 33.     DURIUS


RYDELL was midway back, through that lower-level crunch, when his
sunglasses rang. He got his back to the nearest wall,  took  them
out, opened them, put them on.  "Rydell?"  "Yeah?"  "Durius, man.
How are you?"  "Fine," Rydell said. The glasses were  acting  up;
weirdly elongated segments of Rio street maps were scrolling down
his field of vision.  "How are you?" He  heard  the  whine  of  a
drill  or  power  driver,  somewhere  in LA. "You at the Dragon?"
Durius said, "we got major construction  under  way  here."  What
for.   "Don't know," Durius said. "They're putting in a new node,
back by the ATM. Where they had the  baby  food  and  child  care
products before, you know? Park won't say what it is; don't think
he knows. All the branches gettin' 'em, whatever they are.  How's
your  ride  up? How's that ~i Creedmore?"  "I think he's an alco-
holic, Durius."  "No shit," Durius said. "How's the new job?"

"Well," Rydell said, "I don't think I've figured out  much  about
it yet, but it's getting interesting."

"That's  good," Durius said. "Well, just wanted to see how you're
doing. Praisegod, she says hi. Wants to  know  if  you  like  the
glasses."

The Rio street maps shuddered, contracted, stretched again. "Tell
her they're great," Rydell said. "Tell her  thanks."  "Will  do,"
said Durius. "You take care."

"You too," Rydell said, the maps vanishing as Durius hung up. Ry-
dell removed the glasses and put them away.

Beef bowl. Maybe he could grab some Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl on  the
way back.

Then  he thought about Klaus and the Rooster and decided bed bet-
ter check on the thermos first.                  145  WHATS  this
look  like  to  you, Martial?" Fontaine asked his lawyer, Martial
Matitse, of Matitse Rapelego Njembo, whose premises consisted  of
three notebooks and an antique Chinese bicycle.

Martial  made  tooth-sucking noises on the other end of the line,
and Fontaine knew he was looking at the lists the boy had  pulled
up. "They seem to be lists of the contents of safety deposit box-
es, as required under state law  in  various  jurisdictions.  An-
titerrorist  legislation. Keeps people from stashing drug precur-
sors, nuclear warheads, like that. Plus it was supposed  to  help
prevent  money laundering, but that was when money could still be
big stacks of green paper. But if I were you, Fontaine,  I  would
be asking my lawyer a different question. To wit: am I not break-
ing the law by being in possession of these documents?"

"Am I?" Fontaine asked.

Martial maintained telephone silence for a few seconds. "Yes," he
said,  "you  are.  But it depends on how you got them. And I have
just determined that the actual owners of the listed  properties,
in every case, are dead."

"Dead?"

"Entirely.  These  are probate documents. Still protected by law,
but I would say that some items on these lists are property to be
auctioned off as the various estates are executed."

Fontaine  looked  over his shoulder and saw the boy, still seated
on the floor, down his third iced-guava smoothie.

"How did you get these?" Martial asked.

"I'm not sure," Fontaine said.

"You aren't supposed to be able to decrypt files like this," Mar-
tial  said.  "Not unless you're the fed. If someone else does the
decryption, it's merely a privacy issue insofar  as  you're  con-
cerned. But if you're doing this yourself, or are knowingly party
to it, you are in possession of or are  party  to  possession  of
proscribed  technology which can earn you a stay 146 34.     MAR-
KET DISCONTINUITIES in one of those extremely  efficient  prisons
the private sector has done such a fine job of building and main-
taining."

"I'm not," said Fontaine.

"Be that as it may," said Martial, "if you  were,  you  might  be
able, through judicious application, and with all due secrecy, to
use said technology to reveal certain lucrative market  disconti-
nuities. Follow me, Fontaine?"

"No," said Fontaine.

"Put  it this way: if you have a way of getting hold of documents
nobody else can, you might want to talk  about  it  with  someone
who'd  have  an idea of exactly which documents might be most lu-
cratively obtained."

"Hey, Martial, I'm not into-"

"Fontaine, please. Anyone who sells secondhand  cutlery  and  old
rat-sucked  toys,  I understand it's an avocation. A calling. You
are not in it for the money, I know. However, if you have a  back
channel  into  something  else, I advise you to consult with your
lawyer, me, at your very earliest. Hear me?"

"Martial, I don't-"

"Clarisse has been making inquiries of  another  partner  in  our
firm, Fontaine. I tell you that in confidence."

Fontaine was not happy to hear it.

"She is talking divorce, my friend,"

"Gotta go, Martial. Customers."

Fontaine  hung up. Martial's news about Clarisse was not all that
new to Fontaine, but he had been so far  successful  in  avoiding
thinking about it.

He became aware of a soft, steady clicking and turned to see that
the boy had put the eyephones back on.

147 CHEVETTE hadn't closed her eyes when she'd  pulled  Creedmore
down and kissed him, but with her arms locked around his neck, to
hold him there and hide her from Carson, she  couldn't  see  past
the  sleeve of Skinner's jacket. What she could see, past an out-
of-focus view of Creedmore's  cheekbone  and  left  ear,  was  an
adrenaline-sharp  shot  of  Carson's  progress through the crowd.
This was sufficiently arresting that she had  managed  to  ignore
Creedmore's  response,  which had his tongue trying apparently to
subdue hers with a so-far unsuccessful combination of  speed  and
leverage, and his hands, up under Skinner's jacket, hunting fran-
tically for nipple.

The crystal-clear shot of Carson was eclipsed by  a  close-up  of
Tessa,  eyes wide with amazement and about to burst out laughing,
just as Creedmore found one of the  nipples  he  was  after,  and
Chevette,  in  pure  reflex, let go of his neck with her left arm
and punched him, as hard and as discreetly as  possible,  in  the
ribs, going in with all the knuckle she could leverage.

Creedmore's  eyes flew open, blue and bloodshot, and Chevette let
go of him, ducked off her chair, and rolled under the table,  all
on  automatic now. She thought she heard Creedmore's head hit the
table as he tried to follow her, but now that he didn't have  his
mouth  actually  on  hers,  she was aware of the taste of it, and
something naggingly familiar there, but that was  just  something
her  mind  was  doing  while  her  body took her out of there the
quickest way it saw. Which was a scramble  on  hands  and  knees,
still under the table; out on the floor, still crouching but get-
ting up speed; sprinting, still bent low, arms up to block anyone
who might try to stop her; out through the door.

Where instinct, something, some recollection, took her right, to-
ward Oakland.

And she didn't slow down until she felt it was safe  to,  but  by
then  she'd  realized  what  the  taste in Creedmore's mouth was:
dancer, and she wondered how much of that  she'd  taken  on.  Not
much, probably, 148 35.     ON AUTOMATIC but she could feel it in
the pounding of her heart, see it in a faint  aura  around  every
source  of  light  now, and know it in the fact that none of what
had just happened actually bothered her, very much.

Trouble could look abstract, on dancer.

Carson, she thought, was trouble, and seeing the look on his face
then,  a  look  she'd  suspected,  she now thought, but had never
quite managed to catch there, had made her scared of  him.  She'd
been  scared  of  him since the time he'd hit her, but she hadn't
understood it in quite the same way. He hadn't  really  hurt  her
much,  not  physically,  when he'd hit her. She was coming from a
place where she'd seen people maimed, hurt really bad,  and  this
cute  media boy, who didn't even know how to punch, how dangerous
was that?

But now she saw, the residual drug in Creedmore's  saliva  having
its  effect,  that what she'd been afraid of wasn't that he'd hit
her that time, or the possibility he'd do it again, but some  in-
stinctive, underlying recognition that there was something wrong,
something way worse. That he was bad news and covered it up.  Al-
ways, more carefully even than he chose his clothes.

And  Tessa,  when Chevette had had the conversation with her that
had resulted in her moving to Malibu, had said  that  she  envied
men  the  inability to get it up, when there was something wrong.
Even if they don't consciously know, Tessa said, it won't happen.
But  we don't have that, so something can be just as wrong as can
be, and we still stay. But you can't stay if he's  hit  you,  be-
cause he'll do it again.

Walking  on,  toward  Treasure  now,  the  bridge  gone spectral,
monochrome, and maybe that was the dancer too, she didn't know.

"Out of control," she said. That was how she felt  her  life  was
now.  She was just reacting to things. She stopped. Maybe she was
just reacting to Carson.

"Hey. Chevette."

Turning to see a face she knew, though she couldn't put a name to
it. Ragged pale hair above a thin hard face, bad scar snaking his
left cheek. A sometime messenger from her Allied days,  not  part
of  her  crew  but a face from parties. "Heron," the name came to
her.

"I thought you were gone," Heron said, displaying broken teeth.

149 Maybe something broken in his head too,  it  struck  her.  Or
maybe just some substance, tonight.

"1 was," Chevette said.

"Where?"

"SoCal."

"You ride down there? Messenger?"

"No," she said.

"I  can't  ride  now,"  Heron said and swung his left leg, rigid,
forward, catching his weight on it, something  wrong  there  with
his  knee.  "Tangled with a cage."A car, and she thought how long
it had been since she'd heard that.

"You get insurance?"

"Shit no, cage from DoJ City." The Department of Justice. "I  got
lawyers  on it, but    Crooked shrug. "One of my lawyers, Njembo,
you know those three  guys?  Refugees  from  the  African  Union,
right? Njembo, he knows that Fontaine. You know Fontaine, right?"

"Yeah," Chevette said, glancing back over her shoulder. "He still
out by Oakland, wives and kids?"

"No," Heron said, "no, he's got a shop, just up there." He point-
ed. "Sleeps there. Sells stuff to tourists. Njembo says his wives
are  after  his  ass."  He squinted at her, the scar on his cheek
catching the light. "You look good. Hair's different."

Something in that flash of scar catching in the  edge  of  Creed-
more's  spit-high;  she shivered, the dancer dealing her cards of
Carson walking this way, that same expression on his face,  hands
in the pockets of his leather jacket.

"Good to see you, Heron."

"Yeah,"  he said, something sullen and untrusting, maybe longing,
evident there, and again the crooked shrug, maybe just  to  shake
some pain from his shoulders. He looked down and set off back the
way she'd come, and she saw how twisted  the  accident  had  left
him, hobbling, swinging his stiff leg as he went.

She  zipped  up  Skinner's jacket and went looking for Fontaine's
shop,  wondering  if  she'd  know  it  if  she  found  it.    ISO
36.     FAMOUS  ASPECT  RYDELL  bought a white foam take-out beef
bowl from Ghetto Chef, then had to figure out how to get  up  the
ladder one-handed, without spilling it.

Climbing a ladder with something hot in one hand was one of those
things that you never ordinarily thought about, but  that  turned
out  to be difficult. You can't safely tuck a hot beef bowl under
your arm, and when you climb with only one hand,  you've  got  to
move that hand fast, keep catching those rungs.

But  he  got  up there, didn't spill any, and then he put it down
while he unlocked the two-by-four and chicken-wire security grid.
This  had  a  chrome-plated  Nepalese padlock on either side, and
he'd found the keys, earlier, hanging on a nail. It  was  one  of
those  deeply  pointless  arrangements, in terms of security, be-
cause anyone who wanted in could boltcut the padlocks, pry  their
hasps  out  of  the wood, or just yank the chicken wire until the
staples pulled out. On the other hand, if you went out,  left  it
unlocked,  and somebody took your stuff with no effort at all, he
guessed you'd feel even stupider.

When he got it open, he settled down on the foot of the bed  with
his beef bowl and the plastic spoon they'd given him. He was just
inhaling the steam when it came to him he  should  check  on  the
thermos-thing. The projector, Laney had called it. He sighed, put
his beef bowl down, and got up (well, he had to crouch).

The GlobEx box was in the cabinet there, beside his bag, and  the
spun-metal cylinder was in the GlobEx box.

He sat back down, with the GlobEx box next to him on the bed, and
got to work on his beef bowl, which was worth waiting for. It was
strange  how  this  kind  of shaved, basically overcooked mystery
meat, which he guessed  really  was,  probably,  beef,  could  be
tastier, under the right circumstances, than a really good steak.
He ate the whole thing, every last grain  of  rice  and  drop  of
broth  and figured the tourist-trap map had put their three stars
and a half in the right place.  ALL TOMORROW~S PARTIES  151  Then
he opened the GlobEx box and got the thermos-thing out. He looked
at the FAMOUS ASPECT sticker again, and it didn't  tell  him  any
more  than  it  had before. He stood the thing up on its base, on
the green-and-orange carpet, and crawled back up the bed  to  get
the switchblade. He used that to slice open the plastic envelopes
containing the two cables and sat there looking at them.

The one that was standard power just looked like what you used to
run  a  notebook  off the wall, he thought, although the end that
went into the thermos looked a little more complicated than  usu-
al. The other one though, the jacks on either end looked serious.
He found the socket that one end of this obviously went into, but
what  was  the  other  end  supposed  to fit? If the sumo kid was
telling the truth, this was a custom cable, required to jack this
thing  into  something  that  it might not usually be required to
jack to. This one was optical, it looked like.

The power cable, that was easy. What took a while was  finding  a
socket  up  here, but it turned out there was one (well, actually
the end of an industrial-grade  yellow  extension  cord)  in  the
storage cabinet.

No  control  on  the  thing,  that  he could see, no switches. He
plugged the power cable into the wall socket,  then  sat  on  the
bed,  the other end in his hand, looking at the silvery cylinder.

"Hell," he said and plugged the cable into the cylinder. Just  as
he  did,  he had the clearest possible vision of the thing being,
absolutely and no doubt, brimful of plastic explosive and a deto-
nator, just waiting for this juice- But, no, if it had been, he'd
be dead. He wasn't. But the cylinder wasn't  doing  anything  ei-
ther. He thought he could

hear    a  faint  hum from it, and that was it. "I don't get it,"
Rydell said.

Something flickered. Neon butterfly. Torn wings.

And then this girl was there, kneeling, right up  close,  and  he
felt his heart roll over, catch itself.

The  how of her not being there, then being there. Something hurt
in his chest, until he reminded himself to breathe.

If Rydell had had to describe her, he  would've  said  beautiful,
and  been  utterly  frustrated  in  the attempt to convey how. He
thought she 152 had to be one of Durius' examples of hybrid  vig-
or, but saying which races had been mixed was beyond him.

"Where are we?" she asked.

He blinked, uncertain as to whether she saw and addressed him, or
someone else, in  some  other  reality.  "Bed-and-breakfast,"  he
said, by way of experiment. "San Francisco-Oakland Bay."

"You are Laney's friend?"

"I-Well. Yeah."

She  was  looking  around  now, with evident interest, and Rydell
felt the hairs stand up along his arms, seeing that she  wore  an
outfit  that exactly mirrored his own, though everything she wore
fit her perfectly, and of course looked very  different  on  her.
Loose  khakis,  blue  workshirt, black nylon jacket with a Velcro
rectangle over the heart, where you stuck the logo of your compa-
ny.  Right  down  to  black  socks  (with holes? he wondered) and
miniature versions of the black Work-'N'-Walks  he'd  bought  for
Lucky Dragon. But the hair on his arms was up because he knew, he
had seen, he had, that in the first instant of her being there,

she'd crouched before him naked.

"I am Rei Toei," she said. Her hair was  coarse  and  glossy  and
roughly  but  perfectly  cut, her mouth wide and generous and not
quite smiling, and Rydell put out his hand and  watched  it  pass
right through her shoulder, through the pattern of coherent light
he knew she must be. "This

is a hologram," she said, "but I am real."

"Where are you?" Rydell asked, withdrawing his hand. "I'm  here,"
she said.  "But where are you really?"

"Here.  This  is not a broadcast hologram. It is generated by the
Famous Aspect unit. I am here, with you. Your room is very small.
Are  you poor?" She crawled past Rydell (he supposed she could've
crawled through him, if he hadn't moved aside) to the head of his
bed, examining the salt-caked hemisphere of plastic. Rydell could
see now that she literally was a source of  illumination,  though
somehow  it reminded him of moonlight.  "It's a rented room," Ry-
dell said. "And I'm not rich." She looked back at this. "I  meant
no offense."
 153  "That's okay," Rydell said, looking from her to the projec-
tor and back. "I mean, a lot of people, they'd think I'm poor."

"But more would think you rich."

"I don't know about that-"

"I do," she said. "There are, literally,  more  humans  alive  at
this  moment  who have measurably less than you do. You have this
sleeping place, you have clothing, I see you have eaten. What  is
your name?"

"Berry  Rydell,"  he  said,  feeling  a  strange  shyness. But he
thought he at least knew who she was,  or  was  supposed  to  be.
"Look,  I recognize you. You're that Japanese singer, the one who
isn't. . . I mean, the one who- "Doesn't exist?"

"I didn't say that. I mean, weren't you supposed to be married to
that Irish guy, Chinese, whatever? In that band?"

"Yes."  She'd  stretched  out  on  the bed, on her stomach, hands
propping her chin a few inches from the occluded plastic  bubble.
(Rydell  had  a flash of that seen from the water below, like the
glaucous eye of some behemoth.) "But we did not marry, Berry  Ry-
dell."

"How  do you know Laney?" he asked her, hoping to bring it around
to some footing that he could stand on  as  well,  whatever  that
might be.

"Laney and I are friends, Berry Rydell. Do you know where he is?"

"Not exactly," Rydell said, which was true.

She rolled over, gorgeous and quite literally glowing, in her in-
congruous  mirroring  of what he wore, which looked, on her, like
the first and purest expression of some irresistible new fashion,
and  fixed  him with a sorrowful stare. He would, in that moment,
have happily and willingly locked eyes with her for however  long
she wanted and have sat there, effectively, forever. "Laney and I
have been separated. I do not understand why, but  I  must  trust
that  it  is  for  our mutual and eventual good. Who gave you the
projector, Berry Rydell?"  "I don't know," Rydell said.  "It  was
shipped  here  GlobEx, but in Laney's name. Address in Melbourne,
company called Paragon-Asia."

She raised her eyebrows. "Do you know why we are together in  San
Francisco, Berry Rydell?"

"No," he said, "do you?"  154 "Laney believes that the world will
end soon," she said, and her smile was luminous.

He couldn't help but smile hack. "I think we  went  through  that
one when the century rolled over."  "Laney says that that was on-
ly a date. Laney says that this is the real thing. But I have not
spoken  with  him  in weeks, Berry Rydell. I do not know how much
closer we are now, to the nodal point."

155 BOOMZILLA, with a little shit money tonight,  debit  chip  he
got  off  those  truck bitches, goes down to Lucky Dragon. That's
where he goes when he gets money, because they got all the  shit.

Food  he  likes there, because it's not bridge food; food like on
TV, out of a package. And everything: shit to look at, the  games
they got in there. Best place.

Someday  he'll  have  his  shit  together  right. He'll live in a
house, and it will be clean as Lucky  Dragon.  All  lit  up  like
that, and he'll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches.
Watch everybody's ass and nobody fuck with him.

Gets the chip out, walking up to the front, because if he has  it
in  his  hand,  shows it to the security, security'!1 let him in.
Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise,  you'd  steal.
Boomzilla understands that.

Tonight is different. Tonight a big white truck in front of Lucky
Dragon. Biggest, cleanest truck he's ever seen. No writing on it,
SoCaI  plates, couple of securities standing out by it. Boomzilla
wonders if this what they bring the new games in? Never seen this
before.

So  in  the  doors,  holding up his chip, and heads over, like he
does, first to the candy.

Boomzilla likes this Jap candy that's like a little drug lab. You
mix  these  different  parts,  it fizzes, gets hot, cools. You do
this extrusion-molding thing and watch it harden.  When  you  eat
it, it's just candy, but Boomzilla likes making it.

Gets  six  of those, pissed there's no grape, and a couple or two
chocos. Spends a good long time by the machine that  makes  maga-
zines,  watching  screens, all the different shit you can get put
in your magazine. Then back to get his noodles, kind you add  wa-
ter and pull the string.

Back  there,  deciding  between beef and chicken, he sees they've
unfastened a whole piece of Lucky Dragon wall. Next to GlobEx and
the cash machine.  I 156 37.     A LITTLE SHIT MONEY So he thinks
this is what the white truck is about, some new thing to  put  in
there, and he wonders if it's maybe a game.

White  men  in  white paper suits working on the section of wall.
Watches them, then goes back to the front, shows his shit. Check-
er  runs  his shit over the window that counts, takes Boomzilla's
chip and debits it, There goes his shit money.

Takes his bag outside and finds a curb to  sit  on.  Pretty  soon
he'll  start  making the first candy. Red one.  He looks past the
white truck to the screens there, by the front,  and  he  notices
white  trucks  on  half  the  screens. So all over the world now,
these white trucks sitting outside Lucky Dragons, so it must mean
something new is being put in all of them tonight.  Boomzilla un-
seals the candy and studies the multistage but entirely nonverbal
instructions.  Gotta get it right.
 157 38.     VINCENT BLACK LIGHTNING FONTAINE'S shop must be this
narrow purple one with its high thin window caulked  with  enough
silicone  to  frost  a wedding cake. The whole front of the place
had been painted the same flat purple, blistered now by  sun  and
rain, and she had some faint memory of its earlier incarnation as
something else, used clothing maybe. They'd put that purple  over
everything:  over the droops and gobs of silicone, over the hard-
ware on the old wooden door with its upper panels  replaced  with
glass.

If  this  was Fontaine's place, he hadn't bothered naming it, but
that was like him. And the few things displayed  in  the  window,
under the beam of an antique Tensor, were like him as well: a few
old-fashioned watches with their dials going rusty,  a  bone-han-
dled  jackknife someone had polished till it shone, and some kind
of huge ugly telephone, sheathed in ridged black rubber. Fontaine
was  crazy  about  old  things, and sometimes, before, he'd bring
different pieces over, show them to Skinner.

Sometimes she'd thought he'd just done that to get  the  old  man
started, and then Skinner's own Stories would come out. He hadn't
been much for stories, Skinner, but turning some  battered  trea-
sure  of  Fontaine's  in his hands, he'd talk, and Fontaine would
sit and listen, and nod sometimes, as  though  Skinner's  stories
confirmed some long-held suspicion.

Made  privy to Skinner's past, Fontaine would then handle the ob-
jects himself with a new excitement, asking questions.

Fontaine lived in the world of things, it had seemed to her,  the
world  of  the things people made, and probably it was easier for
him to approach them, people, through these  things.  If  Skinner
couldn't  tell  Fontaine  a story about something, Fontaine would
make up his own story, read function in the shape  of  something,
read use in the way it was worn down. It seemed to comfort him.

Everything,  to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment
comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in
every-  158  thing,  that  sea  upon which the present tossed and
rode. When he'd built  Skinner's  funicular,  the  elevator  that
crawled  like  a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower,
when the old man's hip had gotten too bad to allow him to  easily
climb,  Fontaine  had  had  a  story about the derivation of each
piece. He wove their stories together, applied  electricity:  the
thing  rose,  clicking,  to  the  hatch in the floor of Skinner's
room.

Now she stands there, looking into the window, at  these  watches
with  their foxed faces, their hands unmoving, and she fears his-
tory.

Fontaine will fit her to  history  in  some  different  way,  she
knows, and it is a history she has avoided.

Through  the  thick pane of the door, thick enough to bend light,
the way water in a glass does, she sees that the lights are on in
a space behind the shop. Another door there, not quite closed.

CLOSED/CERRADO  says the dog-eared cardboard sign hung inside the
glass on a suction-cup shower hook.

She knocks.

Almost immediately the inner door is opened, a figure silhouetted
there against brightness.

"Hey, Fontaine. Chevette. It's me."     -

The figure shuffles forward, and she sees that it is in fact him,
this angular black man whose graying hair is twisted into irregu-
lar  branches  that  hang  like the arms of a dusty houseplant in
need of water. As he rounds the  flat  gleam  of  a  glass-topped
counter,  she  sees  that  he holds a gun, the old-fashioned kind
with the cylinder that turns as the bullets are  fired  manually,
one at a time. "Fontaine? It's me."

He stops there, looking. Takes a step forward. Lowers the pistol.
"Chevette?"

"Yeah?"

"Hold on." He comes forward and peers  at  her,  past  her.  "You
alone?"

"Yes," she says, glancing to either side.

"Hold  on-"  a  rattling  of locks, bolts undone, and at last the
door

v       Opens, and he blinks at her, mystified. "You back."  "How
are you, Fontaine?"

"Fine," he says, "fine," and steps back. "Come in."
 159  She  does.  The  place smells of machine oil, metal polish,
burnt  coffee.  A  thousand  things  gleam  from  the  depths  of
Fontaine's history reef.

"Thought you were in LA," he says.

"I was. I'm back.

He  closes  the  door and starts locking it, an elaborate process
but one he can do in the dark, in his sleep perhaps.  "Old  man's
gone. You know?"

"I know," she says. "How?"

"Just  old,"  he says, tucking his pistol away now. "Wouldn't get
out of bed, finally. Curled up there like a  baby.  Clarisse  she
came  to  nurse  him.  She been a nurse, Clarisse. Says when they
turn to face the wall, that means it's over soon."

Chevette wants so badly to say something, but it will not come.

"I like your hair, girl," Fontaine says, looking at her. "Not  so
fierce now."


"IT's  changing,"  Fontaine says, meaning the bridge and how they
live on it. He's told her  about  the  tendency  to  build  these
shops,  how  most  of  them are built with nonresident money, the
owners hiring people to live there and maintain possession. "That
Lucky  Dragon," he says, cupping a white china mug of his bitter,
silted coffee, "that's there because someone  decided  the  money
was  there for it to make. Tourists buying what they need to come
out here. That wouldn't have happened, before."

"Why do you think it is, that it's changing?"

"It just is," he says. "Things have a time, then they change."

"Skinner~" she says, "he lived out his life here,  didn't  he?  I
mean, when this was all what it was. He was here for all of that.
Here when they built it."

"Not his whole life. Just the end of it. That jacket you're wear-
ing,  he got that in England, when he was younger. He lived there
and rode motorcycles. Told me about it. Rode them up to Scotland,
rode them all over. Real old ones."

"He  told  me  a  little about it, once," she says. "Then he came
back here and the Little Big One came. Cracked the bridge. Pretty
soon he was out here."

"Here,"  he  says,  "I'll show you something." Opening a cabinet.
160 Brings out a sheath knife, greenish handles inlaid with  cop-
per  abstracts.  Draws  it  from  the waxed brown saddle leather.
Blade of Damascus steel, tracked with dark patterns.

The knife of Chevette's memories,  its  grip  scaled  with  belt-
ground segments of phenolic circuit board.

"I saw that made," she says, leaning forward.

"Forged from a motorcycle drive chain. Vincent 'Black Lightning,'
1952. Rode that in England. It was a good forty  years  old  too,
then.  Said  there wasn't ever a bike to match it. Kept the chain
till he found this maker." Passes the knife to her.  Five  inches
of blade, five inches of handle. "Like you to have it."

Chevette  runs  her  finger  along  the  flat  of  the blade, the
crocodile pattern of light and dark steel that had been formed as
the  links  were  beaten  out. "I was thinking about this before,
Fontaine. Today. How we went to where the  smith  worked.  Burned
coke in an old coffee can."

"Yes. I've seen it done." Hands her the sheath.

"But  you  need  to  sell this stuff." Tries to hand it back. "It
wasn't for sale," he says. "I was keeping it for you."


FONTAINE has a strange boy in the shop's back room.  Heavy,  His-
panic,  hair cut short. He sits the whole time, cross-legged, his
head in an old eyephone rig that looks like it came out  of  some
military robotics dump.

With  a  worn-out  old  notebook on his lap. Endlessly, steadily,
clicking from one screen to the next.

"Who's this?" she asks when they're back, Fontaine putting on a

- -     fresh pot of his terrible coffee. Thinking  the  boy  can
hear her.

"I  don't  know," Fontaine says, turning to regard the boy in the
eye-phones. "He was outside this morning, breathing  on  my  win-
dow."

Chevette looks at Fontaine, not getting it.

"He  likes watches," Fontaine says, lighting the butane ring with
a spark gun like a toy pistol. "Showed him how to hunt for watch-
es this

-  -     morning,  hasn't  done  much since." Fontaine crosses to
where the boy         sits, looks down at him.        -

"I'm not sure how much he understands English," Fontaine says.
 161 "Spanish maybe?"

"I had big Carlos by here," Fontaine says. "Didn't seem  to  make
much difference."

"You live here now, Fontaine?"

"Yeah," he says. "Not getting along with Clarisse."

"How's your kids?"

"They're  okay.  Hell,  Tourmaline's okay too, by anybody's stan-
dards but her own. I mean, not to live with, understand, but  her
health's pretty good."

Chevette  picks  up the sheathed Damascus boot knife and tries it
in the inner, zippered pocket of Skinner's jacket. It fit, if you
zipped  the pocket shut, as far as you could, to hold it upright.
"What's he doing with your notebook?"

"He's hunting watches. I started him looking on the net auctions,
but  now  he's looking everywhere. Gets places I don't understand
how he does."

"He gonna live here?"

Fontaine frowns. "I hadn't planned on it."

Chevette stands up, stretches, seeing the old  man,  Skinner,  in
memory,  sitting  up in his bed in the room atop the cable tower.
What dancer she'd gotten off Creedmore has long since  worn  off,
leaving  an  edge  of  tiredness. Long day. Very long day. "We're
sleeping in a van down the foot of Folsom," she says.

"You and who?"

"Tessa. Friend of mine."

"Know you're welcome here."

"No," she says,  "Tessa'll  be  worried.  I'm  glad  I  saw  you,
Fontaine."  She  zips  the  jacket.  "Thank  you  for keeping his
knife." Whatever history it was she'd felt herself  dodging,  she
hasn't found it. She just feels tired now; otherwise, she doesn't
seem to feel.

"Your knife. Made it for you. Wanted you to have  it.  Told  me."
Looking  up from beneath his sparse gray dreadlocks now. And gen-
tly says: "Asked us where you were, you know?"

Her fit with history, and how that hurts.  162 39.     PANOPTICON
LAN  EY'S progress through all the data in the world (or that da-
ta's progress through him) has long  since  become  what  he  is,
rather than something he merely does,

The  Hole,  that  blankness  at  the core of his being, ceases to
trouble him here. He is a man with a mission, though  he  readily
admits  to himself that he has no real idea what that mission may
finally be.

This all began, he reflects, knocking back his cough syrup in the
amniotic  darkness of his cardboard hutch, with his "interest" in
Cody Harwood. The first prickings of the so-called  stalker  syn-
drome thought to eventually afflict every test subject ever dosed
with 5-SB. His initial reaction, of course, had been denial: this
couldn't  be  happening to him, not after all these years. He was
interested in Harwood, and for good reason; his awareness of  the
nodal points, the points from which change

was emerging, would repeatedly bring Harwood to his attention. It
was

not so much that he was focusing on Harwood, as that things swung

toward Harwood, gently yet unavoidably, like the needle of a com-
jass. His life, at that point, had been in  stasis:  employed  by
the management of Lo/Rez, the pop group, to facilitate the singer
Rez's "mar-

riage" to the Japanese virtual star Rei Toei, Laney  had  settled
into  a  life  in Tokyo that centered around visits to a private,
artificially constructed island in Tokyo Bay, an expensive nub of
engineered landfill upon which

Rez  and Rei Toei intended to bring forth some sort of new reali-
ty. That Laney had never been able to quite grasp the  nature  of
this  reality  hadn't  surprised him. Rez was a law unto himself,
very possibly the last of the pre-posthuman  megastars,  and  Rei
Toei, the idoru, was an emergent system, a self continually being
iterated from experiential input. Rez was Rez, and thereby diffi-
cult,  and  Rei Toei was that river into which one can never step
twice. As she became more herself, through the inputting of expe-
rience,  through  human  interaction,  she~ grew and changed. Rez
hadn't, and a psychologist employed by the band's man
 163 agement had confided in Laney that Rez, whom  the  psycholo-
gist  characterized  as having narcissistic personality disorder,
wasn't likely to. "I've met a lot of people, particularly in this
industry,"  the  psychologist  had said, "who have that, but I've
never met one who had had it."

So Laney had climbed, each working day, from a Tokyo dock into an
inflatable  Zodiac.  To skim across the gray metallic skin of the
bay to that nameless and perfectly circular island, and there  to
interact  with ("teach" was not the word, somehow) the idoru. And
what he had done, although neither of them had planned it, was to
take  her  with  him,  into that flow of information where he was
most at home (or, really, farthest from his inner Hole).  He  had
shown  her,  as  it were, the ropes, although they were not ropes
that he or anyone else had names for.  He  had  shown  her  nodal
points  in that flow, and they had watched together as change had
emerged from these into the physical world.

And he had never asked her how it was, exactly, that she intended
to  "marry"  Rez, and he doubted that, in any ordinary sense, she
knew. She simply continued to emerge, to be,  to  be  more.  More
present.  And Laney fell in love with her, although he understood
that she had been designed for him (and for the world) to fall in
love  with. As the amplified reflection of desire, she was a team
effort; to the extent that her  designers  had  done  their  jobs
properly,  she  was  a waking dream, a love object sprung from an
approximation of the global mass unconscious. And this  was  not,
Laney  understood,  a matter of sexual desire exclusively (though
of course he felt that, to his great confusion) but of some actu-
al and initially painful opening of his heart.

He  loved  her,  and in loving her understood that his most basic
sense of what that word might mean had changed, supplanting every
previous  concept.  An  entirely  new feeling, and he had held it
close, sharing it with no one, least of all the idoru.

And it had been toward the end of this that Cody Harwood, shy and
smiling  and  gently  elusive,  someone  Laney had never felt the
least interest in, had begun to obsess him. Harwood,  most  often
depicted  as  a  twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and
Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney  than  a
vague  source  of irritation, one 164 of those familiar icons who
loom regularly on the horizons of media, only to drop away  until
they  next  appear.  Laney had had no opinion of 1-larwood, other
than that he felt he had been glimpsing him all his life,

and didn't quite know why, and was vaguely tired of it. But as he
spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were

concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Har-
wood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a  lo-
cus  of  nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way
he had been unable

to define, something very large was happening here.  His  compul-
sive  study  of  Harwood and things Harwoodian had led him to the
recognition that history too was subject to the nodal vision, and
the version of

history that Laney came to understand there bore little or no re-
lation to any accepted version.

He had been taught, of course, that history, along  with  geogra-
phy,  was dead. That history in the older sense was an historical
concept.

History in the older sense was narrative, stories  we  told  our-
selves  about where we'd come from and what it had been like, and
those narratives

were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had  been.
History  was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital
had not

so much changed that as made it too obvious  to  ignore.  History
was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation.

But  the "history" Laney discovered, through the quirk in his vi-
sion induced by having been repeatedly dosed with 5-SB, was some-
thing

very  different.  It was that shape comprised of every narrative,
every version; it was that shape that only he (as far as he knew)
could see.

At first, discovering this, he had attempted to share it with the
idoru. Perhaps, if shown, she, this  posthuman  emergent  entity,
would

simply start to see this way as well. And he had been disappoint-
ed when she had finally told him that what he saw was  not  there
for  her;  that  his ability to apprehend the nodal points, those
emergent systems of his

- -tory, was not there, nor  did  she  expect  to  find  it  with
growth. "This is human, I think," she'd said, when pressed. "This
is the result of what

you are, biochemically, being stressed in a particular way.  This
is wonderful. This is closed to me."
 165  H       And  shortly  after that, as her growing complexity
continued to widen the distance he already knew she  felt  toward
Rez,  she  had come to him and asked him to interpret the data as
it flowed around herself and Rez. And he had  done  this,  though
reluctantly,  out  of  love.  Knowing  somehow he would be saying
good-bye to her in the process.  The flow around Rez and Rei ~vas
ripe  with  nodal  points,  particularly at those junctures where
queerly occulted data poured steadily in from  the  Walled  City,
that  semi-mythical otherwhere of outlaw iconoH clasts. "Why have
you connected with these people?" he'd asked.

"Because I need them," she'd said, "I don't know why, but I  know
that  I  do.  The  situation does."  H       "Without them," he'd
said, "you might not have a situation."  "I know." Smiling.   But
as  his  obsession  with  Harwood had deepened, Laney had grown H
less comfortable with his trips to the island  and  their  forays
together into

the  fields of data. It had been as though he did not wish her to
see him this way, his concentration warped from within, bent  to-
ward  this  one object, this strangely banal object. The sense of
Harwood, of  the  information  cloud  he  generated,  swarmed  in
Laney's  dreams.  And  one  morning, waking in the Tokyo hotel in
which Lo/Rez kept him billeted, he had decided not to go to work.
And  sometime after that, he knew from Yamazaki, and from his own
observation of the flow, the idoru had departed Tokyo as well. He
had his own theories about that, about her conversations with the
denizens (they would have insisted on the term,  he  thought)  of
the  digitally  occluded Walled City, and now, evidently, she was
in San Francisco. Although he had known she would be, because  of
course she had


to  be.  Because  San  Francisco,  he  could  see in the shape of
things, was where the world ended. Was ending. And she was a part
of that, and so was he, and Harwood as well.  But something would
be decided (was being decided) there. And that was why  he  dared
not  sleep. Why he must send the Suit, immaculate and malodorous,
with his ankles tarred black, for Regain and  more  of  the  blue
syrup.


~160~LIAMGI~ON SOMETIMES, now, beyond the point of exhaustion, he
has started to enter, for what may be seconds but can  feel  like
hours or days, some new mode of being.

It  is  as  though he becomes a single retina, distributed evenly
across the inner surface of  a  sphere.  Unblinking,  he  stares,
globally,  into  that  eye, seeing that with which he sees, while
from a single invisible iris appear individual, card-like  images
of Harwood, one after another.

Yamazaki has brought him pillows and fresh sleeping bags, bottles
of water, an unused change of clothes. He  is  vaguely  aware  of
these  things, but when he becomes the eye that looks in upon it-
self, and upon the endless string of images, he has no  awareness
beyond that interiority, infinite and closed.

And  part  of him asks himself if this is an artifact of his ill-
ness, of the 5-SB, or if this vast and inward-looking eye is  not
in fact some inner aspect of that single shape comprised of every
bit of data in the world?

This last he feels is at least partly confirmed by  his  repeated
experience  of  the  eye  everting, turning itself inside out, in
Moebius spasm, at which point he finds himself, invariably, star-
ing at that indescribable shape.

But  now, when he is the eye, he is starting to be aware of some-
one eLse watching. Someone else is very interested in  those  im-
ages of Harwood. He feels them register each one.



THE  vintage plastic Gunsmith Cats alarm watch pulls him from the
flow. He finds it in the dark and turns off the alarm. He wonders
where it came from. The old man?

It is time to phone Rydell in San Francisco. He moves his fingers
delicately over the disposables on the cardboard  shelf,  feeling
for the used one with ten minutes left, How can that be?

167 40.     YELLOW RIBBON REI Toei could make herself very small.

Six inches tall, she sat on Rydell's pillow, in the  salt-frosted
plastic  dome  of  his room at the bed-and-breakfast, and he felt
like a child.

When she was small, the projection seemed more concentrated;  she
was  brighter,  and  it  made  him think of fairies in old anime,
those Disney things. She could  as  easily  have  had  wings,  he
thought, and fly around, trailing glowing dust if she wanted. But
she only sat there, even more perfect at  six  inches  tall,  and
talked with him.

And  when he'd close his eyes, not intending to sleep but only to
rest them, he could hear that her voice was actually coming  from
the  projector  at the foot of his bed. She was telling him about
Rez, the singer she'd  wanted  to  marry,  and  why  that  hadn't
worked,  but it was difficult to follow. Rez had been very inter-
ested in Rez, Rydell gathered, and not much else,  and  Rei  Toei
had  become  more  interested in other people (or, he guessed, if
you were her, in other things). But he kept slipping out  of  fo-
cus, falling asleep really, and her voice was so beautiful.

Before he'd stretched out here, and she'd shown him how she could
get small, he'd pulled  the  chicken-wire  gate  into  place  and
spread  the  curtains  that  were thumbtacked to it, some kind of
faded nubby fabric printed with a  pattern  of  ornate  keys  and
strange, long-necked cats (he thought they were).

He  didn't  know how long the sunglasses had been ringing, and it
took him several rings to locate his jacket in the dark.  He  was
fully  dressed,  shoes  and all, otherwise, and he knew he'd been
deep asleep.

"Hello?" He put the glasses on with his left hand. With his right
he  reached  up  and  touched  the  ceiling.  It's paneling gave,
slightly, when he did that, so he didn't do it again.

"Where are you?" It was Laney.

"Bed-and-breakfast," Rydell told him. With the sunglasses on,  it
was  totally  dark.  He  watched  the  low spark of his own optic
nerve, colors without names.  168 "Did you get the cables?"

"Yeah," Rydell said. He remembered being harsh with the sumo  kid
and  felt  stupid.  He'd  lost  it. That claustro thing he got in
crowds sometimes. Tara-MayAllenby had told him  that  was  called
agoraphobia, and it meant "fear of the mall," but it wasn't actu-
ally malls that did it to him. But he couldn't stand those little
under-lip beards either. "Two of them."

"Use them yet?"

"Just  the power," Rydell said. "The other one, I don't know what
it jacks with."

"Neither do I," said Laney. "Is she there?"

"She was," Rydell said, looking around in the dark for his  fairy
star, then remembering he was wearing sunglasses.

His  hand  found a switch that dangled from a wire near his head.
He clicked it. A bare fifty-watt bulb came on. He slid the glass-
es  down  his  nose  and  peered over them, finding the projector
still there and still  plugged  in.  "The  thermos-thing's  still
here."

"Don't let that out of your sight," Laney said. "Or the cables. I
don't know what we need her to do  there,  but  it's  all  around
her."

"What's  all around her?"  "The change."   - "Laney, she said you
told her the world was going to end."  "Is going to  end,"  Laney
corrected.  "Why'd you tell her that?"

Laney sighed, the deep end of his sigh becoming a cough, which he
seemed to choke off. "As we know it, okay?" he  managed.  "As  we
know it. And that's all I or anyone else can tell you about that.
It's not what I want you thinking about. You're working  for  me,
remember?"

And  you're  crazy, Rydell thought, but I've got your credit chip
in my pocket. "Okay," he said, "what's next?"

"You have to go to the site of a double homicide, one  that  took
place last night, on the bridge."

"What do you want me to try to find out?"

"Nothing,"  Laney  said.  "Just  look  like you're trying to find
something

Out. Pretend. Like you're  investigating.  Call  me  when  you're
ready to go, I'll give you the GPS fix for the spot."
 169 "Hey," Rydell said, "what if I do find something out?"

"Then call me."

"Don't hang up," Rydell said. "How come you haven't been in touch
with her, Laney? She said you two were separated."

"The people who, well, 'own' her, that's not quite the term,  re-
ally,  but  they'd like to talk to me, because she's missing. And
the Lo/Rez people too. So I need to be incommunicado at  the  mo-
ment,  as far as they're concerned. But she hasn't tried to reach
me, Rydel!. She'll be able to, when she needs to." He hung up.

Took the glasses off, left them folded on the pillow, and crawled
to  the end of the bed. "Hey," he said to the thermos-thing, "you
there?" Nothing.

He started getting himself together. He unpacked his duffel, used
the  switchblade to cut a couple of slits in it, took off his ny-
lon belt and threaded it through the slits, using it as a  strap,
so he could sling the bag over his shoulder.

"Hey,"  he said again to the thermos-thing, "you there? I'm gonna
unplug you now." He hesitated, did. He  put  it  in  the  duffel,
along with the power cable, the other cable, and his Lucky Dragon
fanny pack, this last because the thing had already saved his ass
once,  and it might be lucky. He put his nylon jacket on, put the
sunglasses in his pocket, and, as an afterthought,  gingerly  put
the  switchblade in his right front trouser pocket. Then he imag-
ined it opening there, thought about its lack of a safety  catch,
and,  even  more  gingerly,  fished it out and put it in the side
pocket of his jacket.


AND found the place without too much trouble, though Laney's mode
of  C  PS-by-phone  was pretty basic. Laney had a fix on the spot
(Rydell had no idea how) but no map of the bridge, so he triangu-
lated  Rydell's  sunglasses somehow and told him to walk back to-
ward San Francisco, lower level, keep walking, keep walking, get-
ting warmer. Okay, turn right.

Which  had left Rydell facing a blank plywood partition plastered
with rain-stained handbills, in a  European  language  he  didn't
recognize,  for  a  concert by someone named Ottoman Badchair. He
described this to Laney.  170 "That isn't it," Laney  said,  "hut
you're really close."

There  was  a  shop next door, closed, and he couldn't figure out
what it sold when it was open, and then a gap. Rolls  of  plastic
back  in  there.  Lumber.  Someone  was building another shop, he
thought. If this was it, the crime scene, there  ought  to  be  a
yellow  plastic  ribbon  with SFPD stapled up, but then he remem-
bered that the police didn't come out here all that much, and  he
wondered  what they did when they had a body to dispose of. Flip-
ping them over the side wouldn't make the  city  too  happy,  al-
though of course there was no way the city could prove a particu-
lar corpse had come off the bridge.  Still,  it  bothered  Rydell
that  there wasn't any yellow ribbon. He guessed he thought of it
as a mark of respect.

He moved in, edging past the rolls of plastic,  climbing  over  a
low  stack of plywood, and spotted, in the harsh light slung from
the scavenged fluorescents closer to the pedestrian  stroll,  two
frosty-looking  white  marks, something aerosoled over two darker
stains, and he knew what that was. Kil'Z, this stuff you  sprayed
where bodily fluids had gotten out, in case the person who'd lost
them was seropositive. He knew what Kil'Z looked like over blood,
and this was that.

Not  much of a crime scene. He stood there staring down at it and
wondering how Laney expected him to look like he  was  conducting
an  investigation.  He  put  the duffel with Rei Toei's projector
down on the rolls of plastic.

Kil'Z residue was fairly waterproof, so the rain hadn't washed it
away.  But  then he knew that the victims, whoever they had been,
had died the night before.

He felt like an idiot. He really had wanted to be a cop once, and
he'd  dreamed  of  crossing  the  yellow  line and looking at the
scene. And

being able to do something. And now here he was.

He took out the glasses and called Laney. But now Laney, in what-
ever fine hotel he might be in, in Tokyo, wouldn't answer.

"No shit, Sherlock," Rydell said to himself, listening to a phone
ring in Tokyo.




A
 171 1 "You do have a sense of humor," Harwood says, behind  him.
"I  know  it."  Leaning closer to the window, looking down. Fore-
shortened perspective up the side of this obelisk,  this  pyramid
so-called,  and  midway the dark bulge of that Japanese material,
placed to counter old quake damage. This is new, replacing earli-
er  splines  of  polycarbon, and the subject of architectural and
aesthetic scandal. Briefly fascinated, he watches as  reflections
of  the  lights  of  surrounding  buildings shudder slightly, the
thing's glossy surface tensing in response  to  winds  he  cannot
feel. The truss is alive.

Turning  to face Harwood, who is seated behind a broad dark plain
of nonreflective wood, across which an accumulation of  architec-
tural 172 41.     TRANSAM



"Associated  with  whom?" The knife, with its sheath and harness,
was secured in a twilit alcove off the  central  elevator  stack,
approximately eight hundred feet below.

"Cops  in Trouble," Harwood says. "A cultural treasure. Don't you
watch television?"

"No." He is looking east,  from  the  forty-eighth  and  ultimate
floor  of  the  city's tallest building, toward the shadow of the
ruined Embarcadero, the gypsy glow of the bridge, the feral dark-
ness of Treasure Island.

Stepping  closer to the window, he touches his belt. Stitched be-
tween two layers of black calf is concealed a ribbon  of  a  very
particular, very expensive material. Under certain circumstances,
it ceases to behave as though it were some loosely woven, tissue-
thin fabric, something a child might accidentally pull to pieces,
and becomes instead thirty inches of  something  limber,  double-
edged,  and  very  sharp.  Its  texture, in that state, its sleek
translucency, has reminded him of fresh cuttlebone.   models  and
hillocks  of documents suggest the courses of imaginary rivers: a
topography in which might be read change in the world beyond  the
window,  if  meanings  were known, and one were sufficiently con-
cerned with outcomes.

Harwood's eyes are the most present thing  about  him,  the  rest
giving an impression of existing at one remove, in some other and
unspecific dimension. A tall man, he seems to  occupy  relatively
little  space, communicating from elsewhere via deliberately con-
stricted channels. He is slender, with that  agelessness  of  the
aging  rich, his long face free of tension. His eyes, enlarged by
archaic lenses, are seldom still. "Why do you pretend to  not  be
interested in this former policeman visiting the site of your re-
cent activities?" On his wrist, gold  and  titanium  catches  the
light; some multitasking bauble with intricate displays.

"I  don't  pretend."  On  the large flatscreen that stands to the
left of the desk, four cameras present angles on a tall,  sturdy-
looking  man  who  stands, chin down, as if brooding. The cameras
would be no larger than roaches, but the four images, in spite of
inadequate  light,  offer excellent resolution. "Who placed these
cameras?"

"My bright young things."          "Why?"  -

"Against exactly this eventuality: that someone might  visit  the
site  of  these  two  utterly forgettable deaths and stand there,
thinking. Look at him. He's thinking."

"He looks unhappy."

"He's trying to imagine you."

"You imagine he is."

"The fact that he's found his way to that spot at all is  indica-
tive  of knowledge and motive. He knows that two men died there."

Amid the various models on Harwood's desk stands  one  in  glossy
red  and white, rendered with functioning miniature video screens
on the trademark pylon. Tiny images move  and  change  there,  in
liquid crystal.

"Do  you  own  the company that built this thing?" indicating the
model with his index finger.

The eyes behind Hardwood's glasses register surprise, from their

173 I peculiar distance. Then interest. "No. We advise  them.  We
are a public relations firm. We did, I believe, advise on impact.
We advised the city as well."

"It's horrible."

"Yes," says Harwood, "aesthetically, I agree. And that was an ex-
pressed concern of the municipal authorities. But our studies in-
dicated  that  positioning  it  there  would  encourage   walk-on
tourism, and that is a crucial aspect of normalization."

"Normalization?"

"There  is  an  ongoing  initiative to bring the bridge community
back into the fold, as it were. But the  issue  is  sensitive.  A
matter  of image really, and that of course is where we come in."
Harwood smiles. "A number of major cities have  these  autonomous
zones,  and  how  a given city chooses to deal with the situation
can impact drastically on that city's image. Copenhagen, for  in-
stance,  was one of the first, and has done very well. Atlanta, I
suppose, would be the classic example of what not to do." Harwood
blinks. "It's what we do now instead of bohemias," he says.

"Instead of what?"

"Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of
industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They  were
where  industrial  civilization  went  to dream. A sort of uncon-
scious R&D, exploring alternate  societal  strategies.  Each  one
would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expres-
sion, a substance or substances of choice, and a  set  of  sexual
values  at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did,
frequently, have locales with which they became  associated.  But
they became extinct."

"Extinct?"

"We  started picking them before they could ripen. A certain cru-
cial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mecha-
nisms  of  recommodification  became quicker, more rapacious. Au-
thentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there  are
no  more  backwaters.  They went the way of geography in general.
Autonomous zones do offer a certain insulation from the  monocul-
ture,  but they seem not to lend themselves to recommodification,
not in the same way. We don't know 174 why exactly."  The  little
images shift, flickering.

"They shouldn't have put it there."

Harwood's  eyes come in from their private distance. "I don't be-
lieve I've ever heard ~OU express so specific an opinion."

No reply.

"You'll have a second chance to see it. I want you  to  find  out
what our pensive friend here is thinking about."

"Is  this  concerned with what you implied when we spoke earlier,
that something is on the verge of happening?"

"Yes."

"And what would that be?"

Harwood considers him from the distance behind his  glasses.  "Do
you believe in forces of history?"

"I believe in what brings us to the moment."

"I  seem  to have come to believe in the moment myself. I believe
we are approaching one,  drawn  to  it  by  the  gravity  of  its
strangeness.  It is a moment in which everything and nothing will
change. I am seeking an outcome in which I will retain viability.
I am seeking an outcome in which Harwood Levine will not have be-
come four meaningless syllables. If the world is to be reborn,  I
wish to be reborn in it, as something akin to what I am today."

Thinking  of  the  possible number and variety of crosshairs that
must be trained on him now, hidden telepresent weapons platforms.
He is fairly certain, nonetheless, that he could kill Harwood, if
the moment required, though he also knows that  he  would  almost
certainly  predecease  him, if only by some fraction of a second.
"I think you have become more complicated, since we last met."

"Complex," Harwood says, and smiles.

175 I 176 42.     RED GHOSTS OF EUROPEAN TIME


FONTAINE makes himself a cup of instant  miso  on  the  hotplate.
This  is what he drinks before bed, a soothing saltiness and bits
of seaweed at the bottom. Thinking of Skinner's girl  and  seeing
her  again.  Usually when people leave the bridge they don't come
back. Weirdness around her departure but he forgets what exactly.
Not good for the old man but his time nearly done then anyway.

Tick tick of the silent boy under the eyephones, hunting watches.
Fontaine pours his miso into a cup missing its  handle,  savoring
the aromatic steam. Tired now, he wonders where the boy can sleep
here or if indeed he will. Maybe sit up all night hunting  watch-
es. Fontaine shakes his head. The ticking stops.

Carrying  his soup, he turns to see what's arrested the ceaseless
hunt.

There on the screen of the notebook, in the boy's lap, is a  scan
of  a  battered Rolex "Victory," an inexpensive wartime model for
the Canadian market, worth a fair bit now but not in this  condi-
tion. The steel case looks rough and the dial has faded unevenly.
Black Arabics from one to twelve are crisp, but the  inner  chap-
ter, red, European time, is almost gone.

Fontaine  sips  his miso, looking down, wondering what it is this
boy sees to hold him, in the red ghosts of European time.

Then the boy's head sags under the weight of the  eyephones,  and
Fontaine hears him start to snore.  LANEY finds himself on an is-
land in that mind-wide flow he ceaselessly cruises.

It is not a construct, this place, an environment proper, so much
as  a  knotting,  a  folding-in of information rooted in the sub-
strates of the oldest codes. It is  something  like  a  makeshift
raft,  random  pieces thrown together, but it is anchored, unmov-
ing. He knows that it is no accident, that it has been put in his
path for a reason.

The  reason,  he soon finds, is that Libia and Paco wish to speak
with him.

They are associates of the Rooster, junior denizens of the Walled
City, and present here as a sphere of mercury in zero gravity and
a black, three-legged cat, respectively. The  sphere  of  mercury
(Libia)  has  a lovely voice, a girl's, and the three-legged cat,
who is also missing one eye and one ear (Paco)  has  a  cunningly
modulated growl Laney thinks he remembers from a Mexican cartoon.
They are almost certainly from Mexico City, these two, if geogra-
phy  needs to be taken into consideration, and very likely belong
to that faction of flaming youth currently  opting  for  the  re-
flooding of the Federal District's drained lakes, a radical urban
reconfiguration that for some reason had obsessed Rei Toei in her
final  month in Tokyo. She had developed a fascination with large
human settlements in  general,  and  Laney  had  been  her  guide
through  certain of the stranger info-prospects presented by what
passes, this century, for town planning.

So he hangs here, at the juncture of these old code-roots,  in  a
place  devoid of very specific shape or texture, aside from Libia
and Paco, and hears them.

"The Rooster tells us you feel someone is watching you watch Cody
Harwood,"  says  the sphere of mercury, pulsing as it speaks, its
surface reflecting vehicles passing in some busy street.

"It might be an artifact," Laney counters,  not  sure  he  should
have

177  43.     LIBIA & PACO I brought it up with the Rooster, whose
paranoia is legendary. "Something the 5-SB generates."

"We think not," says the cat, its one-eyed  filthy  head  propped
atop an arrested drift of data. It yawns, revealing grayish-white
gums, the color of boiled pork, and a single orange  canine.  Its
one  eye  is  yellow and hate-filled, unblinking. "We have deter-
mined that you are, in fact, being observed in your observation."

"But not at the moment," says Libia.

"Because we have constructed this blind," says the cat.

"Do you know who it is?" Laney asks.

"It is Harwood," says Libia, the sphere quivering delicately.

"Harwood? Harwood is watching me watch him?"

"Harwood,"  says  the  cat, "dosed himself with 5-SB. Three years
after you were released from the orphanage in Gainesville."

Laney is suddenly and terribly aware of his physical  being,  the
condition of his body. His lungs failing in a cardboard carton in
the concrete bowels of Shinjuku Station.

Harwood. It is Harwood whom he  has  sometimes  imagined  as  the
presence of God.

Harwood, who is...

Like him.

Harwood  who sees, Laney now sees, the nodal points. Who sees the
shapes from which history emerges. And that is why he is  at  the
very  heart of the emergent cusp, this newness Laney cannot quite
glimpse. Of course Harwood is there.

Because Harwood, in a sense, is causing it.

"How do you know?" he hears himself ask, and wills himself beyond
the failing strictures of his body. "Can you be sure?"

"We've  found a way in," Libia chimes, the sphere distorting like
a topographic learning aid, turning reflections of moving traffic
into  animated  Escher-fragments that fly together, mirroring one
another. "The Rooster set us to it, and we did."

"And does he know?" Laney asks. "Does Harwood know?"

"We don't think he's noticed," growls the cat, purple-brown scabs
caked  on  the absence of its ear.  178 "Watch this," says Libia,
making no effort to conceal her pride. The intricately lobed sur-
face  of the mirrored shape flows and ripples, and Laney is look-
ing into the gray eyes of a young and very serious-looking man.

"You want us to kill him," the young man says. "Or do I misunder-
stand you?"

"You  understand me," says Harwood, his voice familiar, unmistak-
able, though he sounds tired.

"You know I think it's a very good idea,"  says  the  young  man,
"but it could be done with greater surety if you gave us time for
preparation. I

prefer to choose the time and the terrain, if possible."

"Not possible," Harwood says. "Do it when you can."

"You don't have to give me a reason, of course,"  the  young  man
says,  "hut you must realize I'm curious. We've suggested his re-
moval since you contracted with us."

"It's time," Harwood replies. "The moment."

Wind catches the young man's dark scarf.  It  flutters,  strobing
the image. "What about the other one, the rent-a-cop?"

"Kill  him if it seems he's likely to escape. Otherwise, it might
be

-       useful if he could be questioned. He's in this too, but I
don't cee exactly how"

Libia becomes a sphere again, rotating.

Laney  closes  his eyes and gropes in the close electric dark for
the blue cough syrup. He feels the hate-filled yellow eye  watch-
ing him, but he imagines it as Harwood's.

Harwood knows

Harwood took the 5-SB.

Harwood is like him.

But Harwood has an agenda of his own, and it is from this agenda,
in part, that the situation is emerging.

-       Laney cracks the seal. Drinks the  blue  syrup.  He  must
think now.  179

I 44. JUST WHEN YOU THINK.



THE  rain  wasn't  coming  back,  Chevette decided, shrugging her
shoulders against the weight of Skinner's jacket.

She was sitting on a bench,  behind  a  stack  of  empty  poultry
crates,  and  she knew she should be going somewhere but she just
couldn't. Thinking about Skinner dying here, about what  Fontaine
had said. The knife in the inside pocket, its handle digging into
her left collarbone, the way she was slouched.  She  straightened
her back against the plywood behind her and tried to pull herself
together.

She had to find Tessa and get back to the van, and she had to  do
that,  if  she could,- without running into Carson. It was possi-
ble, she figured, that he hadn't even  seen  her  run  out,  even
though  she  was sure somehow that when she'd seen him, he'd been
looking for nobody but her. But if he hadn't  seen  her,  and  he
wouldn't  have  found  her there, then probably that bar would be
the last place she should expect to find him now. And if  he  had
seen  her,  then  he  wouldn't  think she'd go back there either.
Which would also put him somewhere else. And it was possible that
Tessa,  who  liked  her  beers, would be there still, because she
sure hadn't been keen on bedding down in the van. Probably  Tessa
thought  that  the  bar was way interstitial, so it might just be
that Chevette, if she was careful about it, could slip  in  there
and get her, and get her back to the van. Carson wasn't too like-
ly to come sniffing around the foot of Folsom, and if he  did  he
was liable to run into the kind of people who'd take him for easy
meat.

But it was no good sitting here, this close  to  chicken  crates,
because  that  was a good way to catch lice, and just the thought
of it made her scalp itch. She stood up, stretched, smelling  the
faint ammonia tang of chicken shit, and set off through the upper
level toward the city, keeping an eye out for Carson.

Not many people out now, and none  of  them  tourists.  The  rain
could  do  that,  she remembered. Once again she got that feeling
that she loved this place but wasn't really a part of it anymore.
Kind  of twisted 180 in, like a hook, not a big feeling but sharp
and deep. She sighed, remembering foggy mornings when she'd  come
down  from  the  cable  tower with her bike over her shoulder and
pumped it over to Allied, wondering if Bunny'd have a scratch for
her right off, a good ticket to pull, or if he'd give her a dead-
head, what they called a pickup  outside  the  city  core.  She'd
liked  a deadhead sometimes, because she got to see parts of town
she might not have ridden before. And  sometimes  she'd  wind  up
clean,  what  they called it when you didn't have any deliveries,
and that could be great too, just go over to the Alcoholocaust or
one  of  the  other messenger bars and drink espresso until Bunny
paged her. It had been pretty good, riding for Allied. She'd nev-
er  even  eaten  it, wiped out bad, and the cops weren't as book-
happy if you were a girl; you could get away with doing sidewalks
and  stuff. Not that she could imagine going back to it now, rid-
ing, and that brought her mood back, because she didn't know what
else  she could do. Whatever, she wasn't going to star in any new
versions of Tessa's docu.

She remembered this skinny tech named Tara-May, somebody Cops  in
Trouble  had sent over to grab footage of poor Rydell, who'd only
ever wanted to feature in a segment of that thing. No,  she  cor-
rected  herself, that wasn't fair, because she knew that what Ry-
dell had really wanted was to be  a  cop,  which  was  what  he'd
started  out  to  be  in Tennessee. But it hadn't worked out, and
then his episode hadn't worked out,  let  alone  the  mini-series
they'd  talked  about spinning off. Mainly, she supposed, because
what Tara-May had shot had convinced the Cops in  Trouble  people
that  Rydell  looked  a  little on the heavy side on TV. Not that
there was any fat on him, he was all muscle and  long  legs,  but
when  they shot him he didn't look like that. And that had driven
him sort of crazy, that and Tara-May always going  on  about  how
Chevette  should  take speech and acting classes, learn all these
martial arts, and give up drugs. When Chevette had made it  clear
she  didn't do drugs, Tara-May had said that that would make net-
working a little harder, not having anything to  quit,  but  that
there  were  groups for everything and that was probably the best
way to meet people who could help you with your Career.

But Chevette hadn't wanted a career, or not the way Tara-May

181 I meant it, and Tara-May just hadn't been able to  get  that.
Actually  there  were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood,
maybe even most people were; everybody had something they  "real-
ly" did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she'd had massages from
a girl who was really a stunt double for  some  actress  Chevette
had  never  heard  of  yet,  except  she  hadn't really ever been
called, but they had her number. Somebody had everybody's number,
but  it  looked  to Chevette like the game had all their numbers,
every one, and nobody really was winning, but  nobody  wanted  to
hear  that,  or talk to you much if you didn't buy into what they
"really" did.

Now she thought about it, that was part of what  had  gotten  be-
tween her and Rydell, because he'd always buy into that, whatever
anybody told him they really were. And then he'd tell them how he
really  wanted  to  do  an episode of Cops in Trouble, and how it
looked like he actually would, because Cops in Trouble was paying
his  rent now. Which nobody wanted to hear really, because it was
a little too real, but Rydell never got that. And then they'd hit
on  him  for phone numbers, names, intros, and start slipping him
disks and lists of credits, hoping he was dumb enough to go  back
and  try to show them to producers. Which he was, or anyway good-
hearted enough, and that hadn't helped him any with the people at
Cops in Trouble either.

And  that,  somehow,  was  how she'd wound up with Carson. Rydell
sitting on the couch in  that  apartment  with  the  lights  off,
watching one old Cops in Trouble after another, looking lost, and
she just hadn't been able to handle it. It  had  been  fine  when
they'd  had things to do together, but when it came to just being
together, that hadn't seemed to work, and Rydell going into  that
sad  thing  when  it  had started to look like it wasn't going to
work out with the show...

But here was the bar, a small crowd around the door now  and  the
sound  of  music  she'd been hearing but not really listening to,
which died as she got up close to the crowd.

Place was packed. She slid in sideways between a couple of  Mexi-
cans looked like truck drivers, had those steel chisel-toe things
tacked to the front of their black cowboy boots. Inside, over the
heads  of the people packed on the floor, she could see Creedmore
with a 182 microphone in his hand, grinning out over  the  crowd.
It  was a dancer grin, ten thousand watts of bad electricity, and
she saw he had the start of that thing that dancer  did  to  your
gums.

People  were  clapping and whistling for more, and Creedmore, his
face running with sweat, looked like he was intending to give  it
to them.

"Thank  you,  thank  you kindly," she heard Creedmore's amplified
voice say. "Now this next number's one I wrote myself,  and  it's
going out soon as our first single, Buell Creedmore and his Lower
Companions, and it's called 'Just When You Think  You've  Got  It
Dicked..

Or  anyway  that was what she thought she heard him say, but then
the band kicked in, loud, with the guitarist choking steely  ser-
pentine  chords  out  of  a big, shiny, old red electric, and she
couldn't make out any of the words. Although she had to admit  it
sounded like Creedmore could sing.

They  were  jammed  in  here  so tight, it made it hard to keep a
lookout for Carson, but on the other hand it  wasn't  too  likely
he'd be able to see her either.

She kept moving, as best she could, trying to find Tessa.

183 I 45.     JACK MOVE


RYDELL  had taken a surveillance course, back at the academy, and
his favorite part had been going out  and  following  people.  It
wasn't  something  you  did alone, but with at least one partner,
and the more partners the better. You learned how to  trade  off,
somebody  taking your place, and how to deak up ahead of the sub-
ject so you'd be ready when the next guy  needed  to  trade  off.
That way the subject never had the same person behind him for too
long. There was a definite art to it, and when you got it down it
was sort of like a dance.

He  hadn't  really  gotten the chance to put it into practice, in
his very brief career as a police officer,  or  later  when  he'd
worked for IntenSecure, but he felt like he'd been pretty good at
it, and it had given him an idea of what it would  feel  like  if
you  were being followed, and particularly if you were being fol-
lowed by some people who knew how to do it right.

And that was what he found himself  thinking  about  now,  as  he
shouldered  the  duffel  with Rei Toei's projector in it and pre-
pared to depart this pathetic excuse for a crime scene. If  Laney
had  wanted  him to attract someone's attention by standing here,
well, he'd stood here. But maybe now, he thought, he was  getting
that  watched  feeling because Laney had told him he'd be sure to
be noticed if he came here.

Could be nerves. Maybe, but actually he didn't feel nervous, just
tired. He'd driven all night up the coast with Creedmore, and all
the downtime he'd had today had been when he'd fallen asleep lis-
tening  to  Rei Toei. What he felt like now was going back to his
room, checking out the projector to see if she'd come back,  then
hitting the bed.

But  there  it  was,  that  prickling at the back of his neck. He
turned and looked back, but there  was  nobody,  just  the  place
where the Kil'Z had been sprayed over dried blood.

Guy going by in the direction of Oakland and Rydell's room.

Young guy with dark military-buzzed hair, black coat, black scarf
up 184 around his face. Seemed not to see Rydell, just kept walk-
ing, hands in

his pockets. Rydell fell in behind him, about fifteen feet.

He  tried  to imagine this place the way it had been before, when
it was a regular bridge. Millions of cars had gone through  here,
this  same  space where he walked now. It had all been open then,
just girders and railing and deck; now it was this tunnel, every-
thing patched together out of junk, used lumber, plastic, whatev-
er people could find, all of it lashed up however  anybody  could
get  it  to  stay, it looked like, and some~- how it did stay, in
spite of the winds he knew must come through here.

He'd been back in a bayou once, in Louisiana, and something about
the  way  it looked in here reminded him of that: there was stuff
hanging

k       everywhere, tubing and cables and things  whose  function
he  couldn't identify, and it was like Spanish moss in a way, ev-
erything softened at

~       the outline. And the light now was dim and sort of under-
water-looking,

~       just  these  banks  of scavenged fluorescents slung every
twenty feet or so, some of them dead and others  flickering.   He
walked  around  a  puddle  where  a vendor had dumped about ten ~
pounds of dirty shaved ice.

Up ahead, he saw the guy with the black scarf turn into  a  café,
one  ~  ~of  these  tiny little places you got in here, maybe two
small tab1e~ and a counter that sat four or five Big  blonde  boy
looked  like a weight lifter was coming out as the scarf went in,
and the weight lifter made just that little bit  of  eye  contact
with Rydell that told him.

They  were  doing him: the trade-off. He was being tailed, and by
at ~Ieast three people.

~: Weight lifter started in the direction  of  Rydell's  bed-and-
breakfast,  ':~Treasure Island, Oakland. Back of his neck as wide
as Rydell's thigh. As ~Rydell passed the café, he looked  in  and
saw  the scarf ordering a cof~: fee. Just as normal as pie. So he
didn't look behind him, because he

knew that if he did that, they'd know. They would. Just like he'd
known,  when the weight lifter blew it by looking him in the eye.
The belt he'd slung the duffel from was cutting into  his  shoul-
der,  through  his  nylon  jacket, and he thought about Laney and
Klaus and

~       the Rooster, about how they  all  obviously  thought  the
projector was

185  I  really important, or valuable. Was that what he was being
followed for, or was it about this mystery man  of  Laney's,  his
man who wasn't there? Otherwise, he didn't think he had any seri-
ous long-term enemies up here, though it was hard to be sure, and
he  didn't  think  these  guys  were ordinary jackers, because it
looked to him like they really knew what  they  were  doing.   He
reached  into the jacket pocket and felt the knife. It was there,
and he was glad he had it, though the thought of actually cutting
somebody  with  it  bothered him. The thing about knives was that
the people who thought they wanted to use them  on  other  people
usually  had no idea how much mess it made. It wasn't like in the
movies; cut people bled like stuck pigs. He'd had to deal with  a
few  cut  people around the Sunset Lucky Dragon. And it could get
tricky because who knew who was seropositive? He and  Durius  had
these  goggles  they  were  supposed  to put on, to keep people's
blood from getting in their eyes, but usually  it  just  happened
all  at  once  and  they didn't remember the goggles until it was
likely too late anyway.

But the main thing about knives, even ones  that  cut  steel-belt
radials  like  ripe  banana, was that they weren't much good in a
gunfight.

Someone had slung up  an  old  anti-shoplifting  mirror  above  a
closed stall, and as he approached this he tried to see who might
be following him, but there was enough foot traffic in here  that
he only got a generalized sense of people moving.

But  what really bothered him now was that he was just doing what
they'd probably expect him to: heading back to  wherever  he  was
going to spend the night (assuming they didn't already know where
that was). And once he got there, what then? He'd be trapped,  up
in  his  room,  no  exit but that ladder, and they'd have him. He
guessed he could just keep walking, but he didn't see  what  that
would get him either.

What  he  needed, he thought, was something he could do that they
weren't expecting. Something that put the shoe on the other foot,
or  anyway  he should lose them, whoever they were. Then maybe he
could raise Laney and get Laney's take on who they might be.

He'd had an instructor in Knoxville who'd  liked  to  talk  about
lateral  thinking. Which in a way wasn't that far off what Durius
meant when 186 he talked about serious users getting lateral, out
on  the  sidewalk  outside  Lucky Dragon. Just losing it. What it
took, sometimes, was just your basic jack move, something nobody,
maybe even you, was expecting.

To  his  right  now, he saw he was passing a stretch of wall that
was actually canvas, like a sail or an old tent, stretched  tight
over  lumber and maybe half an inch thick with however many coats
of paint it had had since it was put up here. Some kind of mural,
but  he  wasn't  noticing that.  The switchblade sounded so loud,
opening it, that he was sure they'd have heard  it,  so  he  just
moved,  sweeping  the  ceramic  blade down, then sideways, to cut
himself a backward "L." Through which he ducked and  stepped,  as
if  in  a  dream, the paint on the canvas crackling as he did so.
Into warmth and a different light and these completely unexpected
people  seated  around  a table, cards in their hands, mother-of-
pearl chips piled on the table in front of them. And one of them,
a woman, the nipples of her bare breasts transfixed with surgical
steel, the stub of a small cigar wedged into the  corner  of  her
mouth, met Rydell's eye and said: "I'll see you one and raise you
one."  "Never mind me," Rydell heard himself say, as he saw a man
with a tattooed scalp, still holding his hand of cards, raise his
other hand, with a gun in it, from beneath the table. And  simul-
taneously he realjzed that he still had the black knife, open, in
his hand. He felt a weird wash of cold down his spine as his feet
just  kept  moving,  past  the table and the man and the deep and
somehow limitlessly large black  hole  in  the  winking  ring  of
stainless steel that was the pistol's muzzle.

Through  a  thick  brown  velour  curtain that smelled of ancient
movie houses and he was still moving, apparently intact.  Feeling
his  hand thumb the button, closing and cocking the blade against
his hip as he went, something he wouldn't have thought  of  doing
otherwise.  Pocketing  the knife. In front of him a ladder rough-
sawn from two-by-fours. Straight to it and just climbing, as fast
as  he  could.  Took him up through a square hole in a splintered
timber deck, narrow walkway between walls cut from peeling  bill-
boards,  a woman's huge stained paper eye faded there as if star-
ing into infinite distance.

Stop. Breathe. Heart pounding. Listen.

Laughter. The card players?

187 He started along the walkway, feeling a rising sense of  tri-
umph:  he'd  done it. Lost 'em. Wherever he was, up here, he'd be
able to find his way back out, and down, and then he'd see how it
went.  But  he had the projector and he'd lost them and he hadn't
gotten his ass shot for interrupting somebody's poker game. "Lat-
eral  thinking,"  he  said, congratulating himself, as he reached
the end of the walkway and rounded a corner.

He felt the rib crack as the weight lifter hit him and knew  that
the  black  glove,  like the ones he'd trained with in Nashville,
was weighted with lead.

It sent him back against the opposite  wall,  his  head  slamming
against  that,  and  his  whole left side refused to move when he
tried.

The weight lifter pulled the black glove back  for  a  roundhouse
into Rydell's face. And smiled.

Rydell tried to shake his head.

Faintest  look of surprise, maybe confusion, in the other's eyes,
his face. Then nothing. The smile gone slack.

The weight lifter went suddenly and very heavily  to  his  knees,
swayed,  and  crashed sideways to the gray timber deck. Revealing
behind him this slender, gray-haired man in a  long  smooth  coat
the  color  of  old  moss, who was replacing something there, the
lapel held open  with  his  other  hand.  Eyes  regarding  Rydell
through gold-rimmed glasses. A deep crease up each cheek, like he
smiled a lot. The man adjusted his beautiful coat and lowered his
hands.

"Are you injured?"

Rydell  drew a ragged breath, wincing as the rib seemed to grate.
"Rib," he managed.

"Are you armed?"

Rydell looked into the clear, bright, unmoving eyes. "Knife in my
right pocket," he said.

"Please keep it there," the man said. "Are you able to walk?"

"Sure,"  Rydell  said,  taking  a  step and almost falling on the
weight lifter.

"Come with me, please," the man said and turned, and Rydell  fol-
lowed.   188  CREEDMORE  was into the climax of his number before
Chevette spotted God's Little Toy  cruising  past  overhead.  The
bar,  like  a lot of the spaces here on the original deck, didn't
have a ceiling of its own, just the bottoms of whatever floor ar-
eas  had  been erected above it, with the result that what passed
for a ceiling was uneven and irregular.  The  management  had  at
some  point  sprayed  all that black, and Chevette might not have
noticed the floating camera platform if its Mylar balloon  hadn't
caught  and  reflected  the stage lights. It was definitely under
human control and looked like it might  be  jockeying  to  get  a
close-up of Creedmore. Then Chevette spotted two more of the sil-
ver balloons, these parked up in a sort of hollow  created  by  a
discontinuity in the floors above.

That  meant,  she thought, that Tessa had gotten someone to drive
her back to the foot of Folsom. Then either she'd driven back  or
gotten  a  lift.  (She was pretty sure Tessa wouldn't have walked
it, not with the balloons anyway.) Chevette hoped the latter, be-
cause she didn't .want to have to try to find a space to park the
van a second time. Whatever Tessa was up to here, they were going
to need a place to sleep later.

Creedmore's  song  ended with a sort of yodeling cry of brainless
defiance, which was echoed  back,  amplified  into  a  terrifying
roar,  by the meshback crowd. Chevette was amazed by the enthusi-
asm, not so much that it was for Creedmore as  it  was  for  this
kind of music. Music was strange that way though; there were peo-
ple into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got  enough
of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty
good time.

She was still working her way through the crowd, warding off  the
odd  grope, looking for Tessa, and keeping an eye out for Carson,
when Creedmore's friend Maryahce found her. Maryalice had  undone
a  couple of extra increments of bustier, it looked like, and was
presenting as very ample indeed. She looked really happy, or any-
way as happy as you

189 46.     PINE BOX can look when you're really drunk, which she
definitely and obviously was.

"Honey!" she cried, grabbing Chevette by  the  shoulders.  "Where
have  you  been? We got all kinds of free drinks for our industry
guests!"

Maiyalice clearly didn't remember Chevette having told  her  that
she and Tessa weren't A&R people, but Chevette guessed that there
was quite a lot, usually, that Maryalice didn't remember.

"That's great," Chevette said. "Have you seen Tessa? My friend  I
was here with? She's Australian-"

"Up  in  the  light  booth with Saint Vitus, honey. She's getting
Buell's  whole  performance  on  those  little  balloon  things!"
Maryalice  beamed.  Gave  Chevette a big, lipstick-greasy kiss on
the cheek and instantly forgot  her,  face  going  blank  as  she
turned  in  what  Chevette supposed would be the direction of the
bar.

But the light booth, now, she could see that: a sort of oversized
matte-black  crate tacked up against the angle of the wall, oppo-
site the stage, with a warped plastic window running its  length,
through  which  she  could see, quite plainly, the faces of Tessa
and some bald-headed boy with mean-looking slitty black  glasses.
Just  their  two  heads in there, like puppet heads. Reached, she
saw, by an aluminum stepladder fastened to the wall with  lengths
of rusting pipe strap.

Tessa  had her own special glasses on, and Chevette knew she'd be
seeing the output from God's Little Toy, adjusting angle and  fo-
cus  with  her  black  glove. Creedmore had launched into another
song, its tempo faster, and people were tapping  their  feet  and
bobbing up and down in time.

Couple  of men in those meshback caps, drinking beer out of cans,
by that ladder, but she ducked under their arms and  climbed  up,
ignoring  the  one who laughed and swatted her butt with the flat
of his hand.

Up through the square hole, her  nose  level  with  dusty,  beer-
soaked brown carpet. "Tessa. Hey."

"Chevette?"  Tessa  didn't turn, lost in the view in her glasses.
"Where'd you go?"

"I saw Carson," Chevette said, climbing up through the  hole.  "I
took off."  190 "This is amazing footage," Tessa said. "The faces
on these people.

Like Robert Frank. I'm going to treat it as  mono  and  grain  it
down-"

"Tessa," Chevette said, "I think we should get out of here."

"Who  the fuck are you?" said the baldie, turning. He was wearing
a sleeveless tube shirt and his upper arms were no  thicker  than
Chevette's  wrists,  his  bare  shoulders  looking fragile as the
bones of a bird.

"This is Saint Vitus," Tessa said,  as  if  absently  bidding  to
forestall  hostilities,  attention elsewhere. "He does the lights
in here, but he's the sound man at two other clubs on the bridge,
Cognitive  Dissidents  and something else    Tessa's hand dancing
with itself in the black control glove.

Chevette knew Cog Diss from before. "That's a dancer bar, Tessa,"
she said.

"We're  going  over there after this," Tessa said. "He says it'll
just be getting going, and it'll be a lot more  interesting  than
this."

"Anything would," Saint Vitus said with infinite weariness.

"Blue  Ahmed  cut a single there," Tessa said, "called 'My War Is
My

- War.'"

"It sucked," Chevette said.

"You're thinking of the Chrome Koran cover,"  said  Saint  Vitus,
his  voice  dripping  with  contempt. "You've never heard Ahmed's
version."

"How the fuck would you know?" Chevette demanded.

"Because it was never released," Saint Vitus declared smugly.

"Well, maybe it fucking escaped," Chevette said, feeling like she
wanted to deck this diz-monkey, and thinking it might not be that
hard to do, although you never knew what would happen if somebody
tightened  on  dancer  got  really upset. All those stories about
twelve-year-olds getting so dizzed they'd grab the  bumper  of  a
cop car and flip the whole

-  thing, though these usually involved the kids' muscles popping
out through their skins, which she sincerely hoped  was  impossi-
ble. Had to be: what Carson called urban legends.

Creedmore's  song  ended  with a steely clash of guitar that drew
Chevette's attention to the stage.  Creedmore  looked  completely
tightened now, staring triumphantly out as though across a sea of
faces in some vast stadium.

191 The big guitarist unslung his red guitar and handed it  to  a
boy  with  sideburns  and  a black leather vest, who passed him a
black guitar with a skinnier body.

"This here's called 'Pine Box,' " Creedmore said, as the big gui-
tarist began to play. Chevette couldn't catch the words as Creed-
more began to sing, except that it sounded old  and  doleful  and
was about winding up in a pine box, by which she took him to mean
a coffin, like what they used to bury people in, but she  guessed
it  could  just as easily apply to this sound booth she was stuck
in here, with Tessa and this asshole. She looked around  and  saw
an  old  chrome  stool with its pad of upholstery split and taped
over, so she planted herself on that and decided she was just go-
ing  to keep quiet until Tessa had taped as much as she wanted of
Creedmore's act. Then she'd see about getting them out  of  here.
192  47.     SAl  SHING ROAD LIBIA and Paco have shown Laney to a
barbershop in Sai Shing Road. He has  arrived  here,  of  course,
with  no  knowledge  of  the  route involved; Sai Shing is in the
Walled City, and he is a visitor,  not  a  resident.  The  Walled
City's  whereabouts, the conceptual mechanisms by which its citi-
zens have opted to secede from the human datascape at  large  are
the place's central and most closely held secret. The Walled City
is a universe unto itself, a subversive rumor, the stuff of  leg-
end.

Laney  has  been  here before, although not to this specific con-
struct, this barbershop, and he dislikes the place. Something  in
the underlying code of the Walled City's creation induces a meta-
physical vertigo, and the visual representation is tediously  ag-
gressive, as though one were caught in some art school video pro-
duction with infinitely high production values. Nothing  is  ever
straightforward, in the Walled City; nothing is ever presented as
written, but filtered instead through half a

-       dozen species of carefully cultivated bit rot, as  though
the inhabitants were determined to express their massive attitude
right down into the least fractal texture of the place.  Where  a
clever website might hint at

-       dirt,  at  wear,  the  Walled City luxuriates in apparent
frank decay, in tex

- -     Lure maps that constantly  unravel,  revealing  of  other
textures, equally moth-eaten.

This barbershop, for instance, is shingled from overlapping tiles
of texture, so that they don't quite match up at their edges, de-
liberately  spoiling any illusion of surface or place. And every-
thing here is done in a palette of rain-wet Chinatown neon: pink,
blue, yellow, pale green, and the authoritatively faded red.

Libia  and  Paco  depart immediately, leaving Laney to wonder how
he, were he to bother, might choose to present  himself  in  this
environment: perhaps as a large cardboard carton?

Klaus  and  the  Rooster  put  an  end  to this surmise, however,
abruptly appearing in two of the shop's four barber chairs.  They
look  as  he  remembers them, except that Klaus now wears a black
leather version

193 of his snap-brim fedora, its brim turned up all  around,  and
the  Rooster  somehow looks even more like one of Francis Bacon's
screaming popes.

"Whole new game here," Laney opens.

"How so?" Klaus appears to suck his teeth.

"Harwood's had 5-SB. And you know it too, because those  chilango
kids of yours just told me. How long have you known?"

"We operate on a need-to-know basis," the Rooster begins, in full
geek-pontificator mode, but Klaus cuts him off: "About  ten  min-
utes longer than you have. We're anxious to know what you make of
it."

"It changes everything," Laney says. "The way he's been  success-
ful  all  these  years: the public relations empire, advertising,
the rumors that he was  pivotal  in  getting  President  Millbank
elected, that he was behind the partition of Italy. .

"I  thought  that was his girlfriend," the Rooster says sullenly,
"that Padanian princess-"

"You mean he's only picking winners?" Klaus demands. "You're sug-
gesting  that  he's in nodal mode and simply gets behind emerging
change? If that's all it is, my friend, why aren't you one of the
richest men in the world?"

"It  doesn't work that way," Laney protests. "5-SB allows the ap-
prehension of nodal points, discontinuities in the texture of in-
formation.  They  indicate  emerging  change,  but  not what that
change will be."

"True," agrees Klaus and purses his lips.

"What I want to know," Laney says, "what  I  need  to  know,  and
right  now, is what Harwood is up to. He's sitting at the cusp of
some unprecedented potential for change. He appears to be instru-
mental  in  it. Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-
eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work  rent-a-cop.  .  .  These
people  are  about  to  change human history in some entirely new
way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911-"

"What happened in 1911?" the Rooster demands.

Laney sighs. "I'm still not sure. It's complicated and I  haven't
had the time to really look at it. Madame Curie's husband was run
over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start
there.  But if Harwood is the strange attractor here, the crucial
piece of weirdness 194 I things need to accrete around, and  he's
self-aware  in  that  role, what is it he's trying to do that has
the potential to literally change everything?"  "We aren't  posi-
tive," the Rooster begins, "but-"

"Nanotechnology," Klaus says. "Harwood was a major player in Sun-
flower Corporation. A scheme to rebuild San Francisco. Very radi-
cal  restructuring, employing nanotechnology along much the lines
it was employed, post-quake, in Tokyo. That didn't fly, and, very
oddly  indeed, it looks to us as though your man Rydell was some-
how instrumental in helping it not to fly, but that can wait.  My
point  is  that  Harwood  has demonstrated an ongoing interest in
nanotechnology, and this has manifested most recently in  a  col-
laboration between Nanofax AG of Geneva-"

"Harwood  front," the Rooster says, "run through a shell corpora-
tion in Antigua-"

"Shut up," and the Rooster does. "Between Nanofax  AG  of  Geneva
and  the Lucky Dragon Corporation of Singapore. Lucky Dragon is a
Harwood Levine client of course.

"Nanofax?"

"Everything the name  implies,"  says  Klaus,  "and  considerably
less."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nanofax  AG  offers  a  technology that digitally reproduces ob-
jects, physically, at a distance.  Within  certain  rather  large
limitations,  of course. A child's doll, placed in a Lucky Dragon
Nanofax unit in London, will be reproduced in  the  Lucky  Dragon
Nanofax unit in New York-"

"How?"


"I  thought  that  they'd  proven that didn't work anyway," Laney
says.

"Oh no," says the Rooster, "they just don't want it to."

"They who?"

"Nation-states,"   says    the    Rooster.    "Remember    them?"
                196  RYDELL watched this man move ahead, in front
of him, and felt something complicated, something he couldn't get
a  handle on, but something that came through anyway, through the
ache in his side, the pain that grated there if he stepped wrong.
He'd  always  dreamed of a special kind of grace, Rydell: of just
moving, moving right, without thinking  of  it.  Alert,  relaxed,
there.  And somehow he knew that that was what he was seeing now,
what he was following: this guy who  was  maybe  fifty,  and  who
moved,  though  without  seeming to think about it, in a way that
kept him in every bit of available shadow. Upright  in  his  long
wool  coat, hands in pockets, he just moved, and Rydell followed,
in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain
somehow of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all
these years to be something like this man, whoever  and  whatever
he was.

A  killer, Rydell reminded himself, thinking of the weight lifter
they'd left behind; Rydell knew that killing was not  the  explo-
sive  handshake  exchange of movies, but a terrible dark marriage
unto and perhaps (though he hoped not) even beyond the grave,  as
still  his own dreams were sometimes visited by the shade of Ken-
neth Turvey, the only man he'd ever had to kill. Though he'd nev-
er  doubted  the  need of killing Turvey, because Turvey had been
demonstrating his seriousness with random shots through the  door
of  a  closet  in  which  he'd  locked his girlfriend's children.
Killing anyone was a terrible and permanent thing to enter  into,
Rydell believed, and he also knew that violent criminals, in real
life, were about as romantic as a lapful of  guts.  Yet  here  he
was,  doing  the  best  he could to keep up with this gray-haired
man, who'd just killed someone in a manner Rydell  would've  been
unable  to  specify,  but  silently  and without raising a sweat;
who'd just killed someone the way another man  might  change  his
shirt  or  open a bottle of beer. And something in Rydell yearned
so to be that, that, feeling it now, he blushed.

The man stopped, in shadow, looking back.  "How  are  you?"   196
48.     IN  THE  MOMENT "Fine," Rydell said, which was almost al-
ways what he said if any- one asked him that.

"You are not 'fine.'You are injured. You may be  bleeding  inter-
nally."

Rydell  halted in front of him, hand pressed to his burning side.
"What did you do to that guy?"

You couldn't have said that the man smiled, but  the  creases  in
his  cheeks  seemed to deepen slightly. "I completed the movement
he began when he struck you."

"You stabbed him with something," Rydell said.

"Yes. That was the most elegant  conclusion,  under  the  circum-
stances.  His unusual center of gravity made it possible to sever
the spinal cord without  contacting  the  vertebrae  themselves."
This  in  a tone that someone might use to describe the discovery
of a new but convenient bus route.

"Show me."

The man's head moved, just  a  fraction.  Some  birdlike  acuity.
Light  winked,  reflected,  in the round, gold-framed glasses. He
reached into the open front of his long coat and produced, with a
very peculiar and offhand grace, a blade curved, upswept, chisel-
tipped. What they called a tanto, Rydell knew: the short  version
of  one  of those Japanese swords. The same light that had caught
in the round lenses now snagged for an  instant  in  a  hair-fine
line  of  rainbow  along  the curved edge and the angled tip, and
then the man reversed the movement that had produced  the  knife.
It  vanished within the coat as though a segment of tape had been
run backward.

Rydell remembered being taught how you had to use something  any-
thing  if  someone was coming after you with a knife and you were
unarmed. If nothing else you were supposed to take off your jack-
et and

roll it around your hands and wrists to protect them Now he imag-
ined using the projector, in its bag, as a  sort  of  shield,  to
ward  off  the  knife he'd just seen, and the hopelessness of the
idea actually struck him as funny.

"Why did you smile?" the man asked.

Rydell stopped smiling I don t think I could explain he said 'Who
are  you~          ALL  TOMORROW S PARTIES  197 "I can't tell you
that," the man said.

"I'm Berry Rydell," Rydell said. "You saved my ass back there."

"But not your torso, I think."

"He might've killed me."

"No," the man said, "he wouldn't have killed you. He  would  have
rendered  you helpless, taken you to a private location, and tor-
tured you to extract information. Then he would have killed you."

"Well,"  Rydell  said,  uneasy  with the matter-of-factness here,
"thanks."

"You are welcome," said the man, with great gravity and  not  the
least hint of irony.

"Well," Rydell said, "why did you do that, take him out?"

"Because it was necessary, to complete the movement."

"I don't get it," said Rydell.

"It  was  necessary,"  the man said. "There are a number of these
men seeking you tonight. I'm uncertain of how many. They are mer-
cenaries."

"Did  you  kill someone else, back there, last night? Where those
patches of dried blood and Kil'Z are?"

"Yes," the man said.

"And I'm safer with you than I am with these  guys  you  say  are
mercs?"

"I  think so, yes," the man said, frowning, as though he took the
question very seriously.

"You kill anybody else in the past forty-eight hours?"

"No," said the man, "I did not."

"Well," Rydell said, "I guess I'm with you. I'm sure not going to
try to fight you."

"That is wise," the man said.

"And  I  don't  think  I could run fast enough, or very far, with
this rib."

"That is true."

"So what do we do?" Rydell shrugged, instantly regretting it, his
face contorting in a grimace of pain.

"We  will  leave the bridge," the man said, "and seek medical aid
for your injury. I myself have a thorough  working  knowledge  of
anatomy,  should  it prove necessary."  198 "Unh, thanks," Rydell
managed. "If [could just buy some four-inch tape and  some  anal-
gesic  plasters  at that Lucky Dragon, I could probably make do."
He looked around, wondering when he'd next see or be seen by  the
one  with  the scarf. He had a feeling the scarf was the one he'd
really have to watch out for; he couldn't say why. "What if those
mercs scope us leaving?"

"Don't anticipate outcome," the man said. "Await the unfolding of
events. Remain in the moment."

In the moment, Rydell decided he knew for  a  fact  his  ass  was
lost. Just plain lost.

199 I G6B1346

RA *AF 1fl153 The 6B denoting a particular grade of movement, de-
gree of accuracy, he knows, though the  346  is  a  mystery.  The
broad arrow, central, the Queen's mark, her property. 53 the year
of issue, but 172? Could the boy somehow pry knowledge from these
numbers,  if  the  question  could  be  put to him? Somewhere out
there, Fontaine knows, every last 49.     RADON SHADOW


FONTAINE finds the boy an old camping pad, left here by his chil-
dren  perhaps, and lays him back on this, still snoring. Removing
the heavy eyephones he sees how the  boy  sleeps  with  his  eyes
half-open,  showing  the  white;  imagines  watches ticking past,
there, one after another. He covers him with an old sleeping  bag
whose faded flannel liner depicts mountains and bears, then takes
his miso back to the counter to think.

There is a faint vibration now,  though  whether  of  the  shop's
flimsy  fabric, the bones of the bridge, or the underlying plates
of the earth he cannot tell:  but  small  sounds  come  from  the
shelves  and cabinets as tiny survivors of the past register this
new motion. A lead soldier, on one shelf, topples forward with  a
definitive  clack,  and  Fontaine makes a mental note to buy more
museum wax, a sticky substance meant to prevent this.

Fontaine, seated on his high stool, behind the  counter,  sipping
gingerly at his hot miso, wonders what exactly he would see, were
he to follow the boy's course today  via  the  notebook's  recall
function.  That  business with the Iockboxes, and Martial getting
all worked up. Where else might the boy have  been?  But  nowhere
really dangerous, Fontaine decides, if he's only chasing watches.
But how was it he did that, got  those  lockbox  lists?  Fontaine
puts  the miso down and fishes the JaegerLeCoultre from his pock-
et. He reads the ordnance marks on its back: 200 bit of  informa-
tion makes its way into the stream. He puts the watch down on his
Rolex pad and takes up the salty miso again. Looking down through
the  scratch-frosted  glass  countertop, he notices a recent pur-
chase, not yet examined. A Helbros from the 1940s,  styled  after
military  watches  but  not an "issue" watch. Something he bought
from a scavenger, down from the Oakland hills.  He  reaches  into
the counter and brings it out, a shabby thing after the G6B.

Its  bezel  is  badly  dinged, probably too badly to benefit from
buffing, and the luminous on the dull black dial has gone a shade
of  silvery  ash.  He  takes  his loupe from his other pocket and
screws it into his eye, turning the Helbros under  his  ten-power
Cyclops gaze. The caseback has been removed, screwed back in, but
left untightened. He turns it out with his fingers, to check  in-
side for minute graven records of its repair history.

He  squints  through  the loupe: the last repair date etched into
the inside back is August 1945.

He turns it over again and studies it. The crystal is  synthetic,
some sort of plastic, definitely vintage and very probably origi-
nal. Because, he sees, holding it at just this certain  angle  to
the  light, radiation from the original radium numerals has dark-
ened the crystal focally, each number  having  in  effect  radio-
graphed itself in the accidental plate of the crystal.

And somehow this, combined with the hidden date, gives Fontaine a
shiver, so that he puts the caseback back  into  place,  replaces
the Helbros in the counter, checks the locks on the door, finish-
es his miso, and starts to ready himself for bed.

The boy, on his back, is no longer snoring, and that  is  a  good
thing.

When  Fontaine  lies  down  on his own narrow bunk, to sleep, the
Smith & Wesson Kit Gun, as it is every night, is at the ready.

201 50.     "MORE TROUBLE" RYDELL'S father, dying of cancer,  had
told  Rydell a story. He claimed to have gotten it from a book of
famous last words, or if not famous then at least memorable.

This man was being executed in England, back  in  the  old  days,
when execution was made as deliberately hard a thing as possible,
and after being burned with hot irons, broken on the  wheel,  and
various  other horrific punishments, the man was shown the block,
the heads-man's ax. And having  been  closed-mouthed  and  stolid
throughout  his various tortures, he had looked at the ax and the
block and the burly headsman and made no reply at all.

But then another torturer arrived, carrying an assortment of ter-
rible-looking  tools,  and the man was informed that he was to be
disemboweled prior to his beheading.

The man sighed. "More trouble," he said.


1F they want me," RydelI said, wincing along beside the man  with
the tanto in his coat, "why don't they just grab me?"

"Because you are with me."

"Why don't they just shoot you?"

"Because  we  have,  these  men  and  I,  the same employer. In a
sense."

"He wouldn't let them shoot you?"

"That would depend," the man said.

Rydell could see that they were coming up  on  the  nameless  bar
where  he'd  heard  Buell Creedmore sing that old song. There was
noise there: loud music,  laughter,  a  crowd  around  the  door,
drinking beer and openly smoking cigarettes.

His  side hurt with each step he took, and he thought of Rei Toei
perched on his pillow, glowing. What, he wondered, did  the  pro-
jector slung over his shoulder mean to her? Was it her only means
of manifesting here, of interacting  with  people?  Did  being  a
hologram feel like anything? (He doubted it.) Or did the programs
that generated her 202 somehow provide some greater  illusion  of
being there? But if you weren't real in the first place, what did
you have to compare not being there to?

But what really bothered him, now, was that Laney, and Klaus  and
the  Rooster  too,  had thought that the projector was important,
really important, and now here he went, Rydell, limping willingly
along  beside this killer, this man who evidently worked for who-
ever it was was after Rydell's ass, and probably after  the  pro-
jector as well, and he was just going along with it. Sheep to the
slaughter.

"I want to go in here a minute," Rydell said.

"Why?"  "See a friend," Rydell said.

"Is this a bid for escape?"

"1 don't want to go with you."

The man regarded him from behind the thin crystal rounds  of  his
glasses. "You are complicating things," he said.

"So  kill  me,"  Rydell  said, gritting his teeth as he slung his
weight around and staggered past the smokers by  the  door,  into
the warm loud

beer  smell  and  crowd  energy  Creedmore was onstage with Randy
Shoats and a bass player with sideburns, and whatever  they  were
playing reached its natural conclusion at just that point, Creed-
more jumping into the air as he let out a final whoop and the mu-
sic  crashed  down around him, the crowd roaring and stomping and
clapping. Rydell had seen Creedmore's eyes flash flat and  bright
as  a  doll's  in  the stage light. "Hey, Buell!" Rydell shouted.
"Creedmore!" He shouldered someone out of his way and kept going.
He was a few feet from the stage now. "Buell!" It was just a lit-
tle thing, the stage, maybe a foot high, and the crowd

- wasn't that thick.  Creedmore saw him. He stepped down from the
stage.  The  singer's  pearl-button  cowboy shirt was open to the
waist, his hollow white chest gleaming with sweat. Someone handed
him a towel and he wiped his face with it, grinning, showing long
yellow teeth and no gum. "Rydell,"

he said. "Son of a bitch. Where you  been?"   "Looking  for  you,
Buell."

203  The  man  with  the knife put his hand on Rydell's shoulder.
"This is unwise," he said.

"Hey, Buell," Rydell said, "get me a beer, okay?"

"You see me, Rydell? I was fuckin' Jesus' son, man. Fuckin'  Hank
Williams,  motherfucker."  Creedmore  beamed,  yet Rydell saw the
thing that was waiting there to toggle into rage. Someone  handed
Creedmore two tall cans, already opened. He passed one to Rydell.
Creedmore splashed cold malt liquor down his chest,  rubbed  him-
self with it. "Damn, I'm good."

"We can be too easily contained here," the man said.

"Leggo  my buddy there," said Creedmore, noticing the man for the
first time. "Faggot," he added, as if further taking in the man's
appearance  and seeming to have difficulty placing it in any more
convenient category of abuse."Buell," Rydell  said,  reaching  up
and grabbing the man's wrist,

"want you to meet a friend of mine."

"Looks  like some faggot oughta be kilt with a shovel," Creedmore
observed, slit-eyed and  furious  now,  the  toggle  having  been
thrown.

"Let  go  of  my  shoulder," Rydell said to the man, quietly. "It
doesn't look good."

The man let go of Rydell's shoulder.

"Sorry," Rydell said, "but I'm staying here with Buell and a hun-
dred  or  so of his close personal friends." He looked at the can
in his hand. Something called King Cobra. He  took  a  sip.  "You
want to go, go. Otherwise, just kill me."

"Goddamn  you,  Creedmore,"  Randy  Shoats said, stepping heavily
down from the stage, "you  fucking  drug  addict.  You're  drunk.
Drunk and ripped to the tits on dancer."

Creedmore  goggled  up  at  the  big  guitar player, his eyes all
pupil. "Jesus, Randy," he began, "you know I just needed to get a
little loose-"

"Loose? Loose? Jesus. You forgot the words to 'Drop That Jerk and
Come with Me'!  How  fucked  do  you  have  to  be  to  do  that?
Fuckin'audience knew the words, man; they were singing along with
you. Trying to, anyway." Shoats rammed his  callused  thumb  into
Creedmore's chest for 204 emphasis. "I told you I don't work with
diz-monkeys. You're toast, understand? Outta here. History."

Creedmore seemed to reach far down into the depths of his  being,
as if to summon some new degree of honesty, in order to face this
moment of crisis. He seemed to find it.  Drew  himself  more  up-
right.  "Fuck you," he said. "Motherfucker," he added, as Shoats,
disgusted, turned and walked away.

"Buell," Rydell said, "they got a table or something reserved for
you here? Someplace I could sit down?"

"Maryalice,"  Creedmore  said,  thoughts elsewhere, waving in the
general direction of the back of the bar. He set off,  apparently
after  Shoats.   Rydell ignored the man with the tanto and headed
for the back of the bar, where he found Maryalice seated alone at
a  table.  There  was  a  hand-lettered sign, on brown corrugated
cardboard, done in different colored felt pens, that said '~BUELL
CREEDMORE*~ & HIS LOWER COMPANIONS, each of the Os done in red as
a little happy face. The table was solid, side to side, with emp-
ties,  and Maryalice looked like somebody had just whacked her in
the head with something th~it didn't leave a mark. "You A&R?" she
asked Rydell, as if startled from a dream.

"I'm  Berry  Rydell," he said, pulling out a chair and unslinging
the bag with the projector. "Met earlier. You're Maryalice."

"Yes," she smiled, as if pleased with the convenience of being so
reminded, "I am. Wasn't Buell wonderful?"

Rydell  sat,  trying to find a way to manage it that kept the rib
from killing him. "They got an outlet around here, Maryalice?" He
was  opening  the duffel, pushing it down around the sides of the
projector, pulling out the power cable.  "You're A&R,"  Maryalice
said,  delighted,  seeing  the projector, "I knew you were. Which
label?"

"Plug this in there, please?" Rydell pointed to  an  outlet  just
beside  her, on the scabrous wall, and passed her the plug end of
the cable. She held it close to her face, blinked at  it,  looked
around,  saw the socket. Plugged it in. Turned back to Rydell, as
if puzzled by what she'd just done.
 20S The man with the tanto brought over a chair,  placed  it  at
the  table,  and took a seat opposite Maryalice. He did it, some-
how, in a way that occuppied as  little  of  anyone  else's  con-
sciousness  as possible. "Now you," Maryalice said to him, with a
quick glance down to check the state  of  her  bodice,  "you  are
pretty clearly a label head, am I correct?"

"Lapel?"

"I knew you were," Maryalice said.

Rydell heard the projector humming.  And then Rei Toei was there,
standing beside their table, and Rydell knew that once again he'd
seen  her naked for a second, glowing, white, but now she wore an
outfit identical, it seemed, to Maryalice's.  "Hello,  Berry  Ry-
dell,"  she  said,  then looked down and tightened the strings at
the top of the black thing she wore.

"Hey," Rydell said.

"Well, suck me raw with a breast  pump,"  Maryalice  said,  voice
soft with amazement, as she stared at Rei Toei. "I swear to God I
didn't see you standing there..

The man with the tanto was looking at Rei Toei too, the light  of
her projection reflected in the round lenses.

"We are in a nightclub, Berry Rydell?"

"A bar," Rydell said. -

"Rez  liked bars," she said, looking around at the crowd. "I have
the impression that people in bars, though they seem to be  talk-
ing  to  one another, are actually talking to themselves. Is this
because higher brain function has been suppressed for recreation-
al purposes?"

"I  just  love  your  top,"  Maryalice  said.   "I  am Rei Toei."
"Maryalice," Maryalice said, extending her hand.  The  idoru  did
likewise, her hand passing through Maryalice's.

Maryalice  shivered.  "Had about enough, this evening," she said,
as if to herself.

"I am Rei Toei." To the man with the tanto.

"Good evening."  "I know your name," she gently said to the  man.
"I  know  a  great deal about you. You are a fascinating person."
206 He looked at her, expression unchanged. "Thank you," he said.
"Mr.  Rydell,  is  it  your  intention  to remain here, with your
friends?"

"Time being," Rydell said. "I have to phone somebody."

"As you will," the man said. He turned to  survey  the  entrance,
and just then the scarf came strolling in and saw them all, imme-
diately.

More trouble, thought Rydell.
 207 51.     THE REASON OF LIFE LANEYS two favorite  Tokyo  bars,
during  the  happier  phase  of  his  employment  at Paragon-Asia
Dataflow, had been Trouble Peach,  a  quiet  sit-and-drink  place
near  Shimo-kitazawa  Station, and The Reason of Life, an art bar
in the basement of an office building in Aoyama.  The  Reason  of
Life  was  an  art bar, in Laney's estimation, by virtue of being
decorated with huge black-and-white prints of  young  women  pho-
tographing  their own crotches with old-fashioned reflex cameras.
These were such modest pictures that it took  you,  initially,  a
while  to  figure  out what they were doing. Standing, mostly, in
crowded streetscapes, with the camera on  the  pavement,  between
their  feet,  smiling into the photographer's lens and thumbing a
manual release. They wore sweaters and plaid skirts, usually, and
smiled  out at you with a particularly innocent eagerness. Nobody
had ever explained to Laney what this  was  all  supposed  to  be
about,  and  it wouldn't have occurred to him to ask, but he knew
art when he saw it, and he was seeing it again now,  courtesy  of
the Rooster, who somehow knew Laney liked the place in Aoyama and
had decided to reproduce it, off the cuff,  here  in  the  Walled
City.

In  any  case,  Laney  prefers  it to the barbershop made of mis-
aligned graphics tiles. You can just look at these girls, in cool
monochrome  renditions  of  wooi  and flesh and other textures of
cities, and he finds that restful. It was strange though, to  sit
in a bar when you didn't have a body present.

"They're  coy about it," the Rooster is saying, of Libia and Paco
and how it may be that they've succeeded  in  hacking  Cody  Har-
wood's  most  intensely private means of communication. "They may
have physically introduced an agent into Harwood Levine's  commu-
nications  satellite.  Something small. Very small. But how could
they have controlled it? And how long would it have taken,  unde-
tected,  to  effect  a  physical  alteration  in  the hardware up
there?"

"I'm sure they found a more elegant solution," Klaus  says,  "but
the  208  bottom line is that I don't care. Access is access. The
means to access are academic. We've hacked Harwood's hotline. His
red telephone."

"And  you  have  a tendency to pat yourselves on the back," Laney
says. "We know that Harwood's had 5-SB, but we don't know why, or
what he's doing with nodal apprehension. You seem to be convinced
it's something to  do  with  Lucky  Dragon  and  this  half-baked
Nanofax launch."

"Aren't  you?"  asks  Klaus.  "Nanofax units are going into every
Lucky Dragon in the world. Right now. Literally. Most of them are
fully installed, ready to go operational."

"With  the  faxing  of  the  first  Taiwanese teddy bear from Des
Moines to Seattle? What's he hope to gain?" Laney concentrates on
his  favorite girl, imagining her thumb on the plunger of a hypo-
dermic-style manual release.  "Think network," the  Rooster  puts
in.  "Function,  even ostensible function, is not the way to look
at this. All function, in these terms, is ostensible.  Temporary.
What  he wants is a network in place. Then he can figure out what
to do with it."  "But why does he need to have  something  to  do
with  it  in  the first place?" Laney demands.  "Because he's be-
tween a rock and a hard place," responds Klaus. "He's the richest
man  in the world, possibly, and he's ahead of the curve. He's an
agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He em-
bodies  paradoxical  propositions.  Too  hip to live, too rich to
die. Get it?"

"No," Laney says.  "We think  he's  like  us,  basically,"  Klaus
says.  "He's  trying  to hack reality but he's going strictly big
casino, and he'll take the rest of the species with him,  however
and  whatever."   "You  have to admire that, don't you?" says the
Rooster, out of the  depths  of  his  silent  faux-Bacon  scream.
Laney isn't sure that you do.

He wonders if the Rooster's reiteration of The Reason of Life in-
corporates the tiny, six-seater bar downstairs,  the  darker  one
where
 209  you  can  sit beneath very large prints of the pictures the
girls themselves were taking: huge abstract triangles of luminous
gelatin-printed white panty.

"Can you get me that kind of look-in on Harwood's stuff anytime?"

"Until he notices you, we can."  210 52.     MY BOYFRIEND'S  BACK
CHEVETTE had had a boyfriend named Lowell, when she'd first lived
on the bridge, who did dancer.

Lowell had had a friend called Codes, called that because he tum-
bled  the codes on hot phones and notebooks, and this Saint Vitus
reminded her of Codes. Codes hadn't liked her either.

Chevette hated dancer. She hated being around  people  when  they
were  on it, because it made them selfish, too pleased with them-
selves, and nervous; suspicious, too prone to make things  up  in
their  heads, imagining everyone out to get them, everyone lying,
everyone talking behind their back. And  she  particularly  hated
watching anyone actually do the stuff, rub it into their gums the
way they did, all horrible, because it was just  so  gross.  Made
their lips numb, at first, so they'd drool a little, and how they
always thought that was funny. But what she hated about  it  most
was  that  she'd  ever done it herself, and that, even though she
had all these reasons to hate it, she still found herself, watch-
ing  Saint  Vitus  vigorously massaging a good solid hit into his
gumsT feeling the urge to ask him for some.  She guessed that was
what  they  meant  by  it being addictive. That she'd gotten just
that little edge of it off the country singer sticking his tongue
in  her  mouth  (and  if  that  was  the  only way to get it, she
thought, she'd pass) and now the actual  molecules  of  diz  were
twanging at receptor sites in her brain, saying gimme, gimme. And
she'd never even been properly strung out on the stuff,  not  how
they meant it when they said that on the street.

Carson  had  coordinated on a Real One sequence about the history
of stimulants, so Chevette knew that  dancer  was  somewhere  out
there  past crack cocaine in terms of sheer gotcha. The addiction
schedule was a little less merciless, in terms of frequency,  but
she figured she'd still just barely missed it, chipping with Low-
ell. Lowell who'd explain in detail and at great length  how  the
schedule  he'd  worked out for using it was going to optimize his
functionality in the world, but never result in
 211 one of those ugly habit deals. You just had to know  how  to
do  it,  and  when to do it, and most important of all, why to do
it. Powerful substance like this, Lowell would explain, it wasn't
there  just  for  any  casual  jack-off recreational urge. It was
there to allow you to do things. To empower you, he said, so that
you could do things and, best of all, finish them.

Except that what Lowell had mainly wanted to do, dizzed, was have
sex, and the diz made it impossible for him to finish. Which  had
been  okay  by  Chevette, because otherwise he tended to finish a
little on the quick side. The Real One  sequence  had  said  that
dancer made it possible for men to experience something much more
like the female orgasm, a sort of ongoing climax, less  localized
and, well, messy.

Dancer  was  pretty deadly stuff, in terms of getting people into
bed in the first place. Strangers doing dancer together, if there
was any basis for attraction at all, were inclined to decide that
that was basically a fine idea, and one  to  be  acted  on  right
away, but only provided the other party seemed agreeable to doing
it until both were pretty well dead.

And people did wind up dead around  the  stuff;  hearts  stopped,
lungs  forgot  to breathe, crucial tiny territories of brain blew
out. People murdered one another when  they  were  crazy  on  the
stuff,  and then in cold blood just to get some more.  It was one
ugly substance and no doubt about it.

"You got any more of that?" she asked Saint Vitus, who  was  dab-
bing at the spit-slick corners of his mouth with a wadded-up tis-
sue, dots of blood dried brown on it.

Saint Vitus fixed her with his slitty glasses. "You've got to  be
kidding," he said.

"Yeah,"  said  Chevette,  pushing  off the stool, "I am." Must've
been the time of night. How could she even have thought that? She
could smell his metallic breath in the sound box.

"Got it," said Tessa, pulling off the glasses. "Crowd's thinning.
Chevette, I'll need you to help me get the camera  platforms  to-
gether."

Saint  Vitus  smirked. At the thought, Chevette guessed, of some-
body else having to do something like  work.   212  "You  haven't
seen  Carson,  have you?" Chevette asked, stepping to the window.
The dwindling crowd, seen from above, was moving in one of  those
ways  that  there  was probably a logarithm for: milling and dis-
persing.

"Carson?"

She spotted Buell Creedmore, just in front of the stage,  talking
with  a  big  guy in a black jacket, his back to the sound booth.
Then the big guitar player, the one with the squashed cowboy hat,
jumped  down  from  the stage and seemed to be giving Creedmore a
hard time. Creedmore tried to say something, got  shut  up,  then
managed  to say something short, and by the look on his face, not
too sweet, and the guitar player turned and walked away. Chevette
saw  Creedmore  say something to the other guy, gesturing back in
her direction, and this one turned and headed that way, his  face
concealed, from just this angle, by a dusty swoop of black-paint-
ed cable.

"He was here before," Chevette said. "That's why I  Frenched  the
meshback and ran out the door. Didn't you wonder?"

Tessa  looked at her. "I did, actually. But I thought maybe I was
just getting to know you better." She laughed. "Are you  sure  it
was him?"

"It was him, Tessa."

"How would he know we're up here?"

"Somebody told him at the house? You talked enough, before, about
your docu."

"Maybe," Tessa said, interest waning. "Help me get the  platforms
tethered,  okay?"  She  handed Chevette four black nylon tethers,
each one tipped with a mini-bungee and a metal clip.

"Listen," Chevette said, "I'm not up for  a  night  at  Cognitive
Dissidents,  okay?  I  don't think you are either. I just watched
your friend here gum enough dancer to wire a mule."

"Chevette," Tessa said, "we're up  here  to  document,  remember?
We're going interstitial."

Saint Vitus sniggered.

"I  think  where  we're  going  is  to  sleep, Tessa. Where's the
truck?"

"Where we parked it."

213 "How'd you get the balloons back here?"

"Elmore," Tessa said. "Has one of those caps, and an  ATV  to  go
with it."

"See if you can find him again," Chevette said, starting down the
ladder. "We could use a lift back."

Chevette wasn't sure what it would actually take to get Tessa  to
give  up  on Cognitive Dissidents. Worst case, she might actually
have to go there, if only to make sure Tessa was okay.  Cog  Diss
was a rough enough place even if you didn't have your head buried
in a pair of video glasses.

She went down the ladder and headed out  onto  the  floor,  where
God's  Little  Toy was already descending, under Tessa's control.
She reached up, got it tethered, and turned to signal  Tessa,  in
the sound booth, to start bringing the others down.

And  found  hei-self looking, for however many dreamlike seconds,
before he hit her, into Carson's eyes.

Hard and in the face, just like he'd done  before,  and  she  saw
those  same  colors,  like a flashback; saw herself falling back,
across the big beige couch in  his  loft-space,  blood  splashing
from her nose, and still not believing it, that he'd done that.

Except  that  here she went over into a couple of Creedmore's re-
maining audience, who caught her, laughing, saying  "Hey.  Whoa,"
and then Carson was on her again, grabbing a handful of Skinner's
jacket- "Hey, buddy," said one of the men who'd caught her, hold-
ing up his

spread hand as if to block the second punch that Carson, his face
as calm and serious as she'd seen it in the editing booth at Real
One,  was  aiming  at her. And looking into Carson's eyes she saw
nothing there like hatred or anger, only some abstract and  some-
how almost technical need.

Carson tried for her, past that stranger's upraised hand, and her
protector yelped as one of his fingers got bent back. It deflect-
ed  the blow, though, and gave Chevette time to twist out of that
grip.

She backed off two steps and shook her head, trying to clear  it.
Something was wrong with her eyes.

Carson  came  after  her, that same look on his face, and in that
214 instant she knew that she knew neither who he was nor what it
was that was wrong with him.

"You  just didn't get it, did you?" he said, or that was what she
thought she heard him say, feeling  a  tear  run  down  from  her
swelling eye, her head still ringing.

She took a step back. He came on.

"You just didn't get it."

And then a hand came down on his shoulder and he spun around. And
went down, the man behind him having done something that Chevette
hadn't seen.

And she saw that it was Rydell.

It wasn't.

It was.

Rydell  in a rent-a-cop's black nylon jacket, looking at her with
an expression of utter and baffled amazement.

And Chevette got it, right then  and  absolutely,  that  she  was
dreaming, and felt the most enormous sense of relief, because now
she would wake up, surely, into a world that would make sense.

On the floor, Carson, rolling over, got to his knees,  stood  up,
shook  himself,  brushed  a  squashed  cigarette-filter  from the
sleeve of his jacket, and suckerpunched Rydell, who saw it coming
and  tried  to move aside, so that Carson's fist slammed into his
ribs, rather than his stomach, as intended.

And Rydell screamed, in shrill animal  pain,  doubled  over-  And
that was when the guy with the black leather car-coat, the

fresh-looking  black  buzzcut, black scarf knotted up high around
his neck, this guy Chevette had never seen before, stepped up  to
Carson.  "Mistake,"  she thought she heard him say. He took some-
thing from the pocket of his black coat. Then: "You're not on the
menu."

And  he  shot Carson, right up close, without looking down at the
gun in his hand.

And it was not a loud sound, not loud at all, more like the sound
of  a  large  pneumatic nail-gun, but it was final and definitive
and accompanied by a yellow-blue flash, and Chevette could  never
remember,

215  exactly,  seeing this, though she knew she had: Carson blown
back by however many thousand foot-pounds  of  energy  trying  to
find  their  way  to kinetic rest at just that one instant in his
body.

But it didn't take, in memory; it did not stick, and she would be
grateful.

And  grateful  too,  though for other reasons, that this was when
Tessa, in the sound  booth  overhead,  killed  the  lights.   216
53.     (YOU KNOW I CAN'T LET YOU) SLIDE THROUGH MY HANDS


RYDELL  knew that sound: a subsonic projectile through a silencer
that slowed it even more, draining off the expanding gases of the
ignited  charge,  and still the muzzle velocity would be right up
there, and the impact, where it was localized.

He knew this through the pain in his  side,  which  felt  like  a
white-hot ax blade between his ribs; he knew it through his shock
(he was literally in shock in a number of  ways)  at  discovering
Chevette  (this  version of Chevette, with really different hair,
more the way he'd always wished she'd wear it). He knew it in the
dark  that  followed the report, the dark that followed the death
(he was pretty sure) of whoever the  man  was  who'd  gone  after
Chevette,  the  man  he'd decked, the man who'd gotten up and, it
felt like, driven Rydell's broken rib  halfway  through  his  di-
aphragm.  He knew it, and he held on to it, for the very specific
reason that it meant the scarf was a  trained  professional,  and
not just some espontaneo in a bar.

Rydell  knew,  in those first instants of darkness, that he had a
chance: as long as the scarf was a pro, he had a chance. A drunk,
a crazy, any ordinary perp, in a pitch-dark bar, that was a crap-
shoot. A pro would move to minimize the random factor.

Which was considerable, by the sound of it, the remaining  crowd,
and  maybe Chevette as well, screaming and heaving and struggling
to get out the door. That was bad, Rydell knew, and easily fatal;
he'd  been  a squarebadge at concerts, and had seen bodies peeled
off crowd barriers.

He stood his ground, nursing the pain in  his  side  as  best  he
could, and waited for the scarf to make a move.

Where  was  Rei  Toei?  She should've shown up in the dark like a
movie marquee, but no.

And zooming past Rydell's shoulder, toward where he'd  last  seen
the  scarf, there she was, more comet than pixie, and casting se-
rious light.
 217 She circled the scarf's head twice, fast, and Rydell saw him
hat at her with the gun. Just a ball of silver light, moving fast
enough to leave trails on Rydell's retina. The scarf  ducked,  as
she  shot  straight  in at his eyes; he spun and ran to the left.
Rydell watched as the light expanded slightly, to whiz like cold,
pale  ball lightning around the perimeter of the dark bar, people
moaning and gasping, screaming as she shot past. Past the  strug-
gling  knot  at  the  door,  where several lay unconscious on the
floor, and still no sign of Chevette.

But then the Rei-sphere swung in and  down,  and  Rydell  spotted
Chevette on her hands and knees, crawling in the direction of the
door. He ran over to her as best he could, his side feeling  like
it  was  about  to  split;  bent, grabbed her, pulled her up. She
started to struggle.

"It's me," he said, feeling the complete unreality of seeing  her
again, here, this way, "Rydell."

"What the fuck are you doing here, Rydell?"

"Getting out."

The  blue  flash and the nail-gun f-wut were simultaneous, but it
seemed to Rydell that the flick of the slug, past his head,  pre-
ceded it. In immediate reply, one tight white ball of light after
another was hurled past him from behind. From the  projector,  he
realized, and likely straight into the scarf's eyes.

He  grabbed  Chevette  under  the  arm and hustled her across the
floor, adrenaline flooding the pain in his side.  The  stream  of
projected light, behind him, was just enough to show him the wall
to the right of the door. He hoped it was plywood, and  none  too
thick,  as  he pulled the switchblade from his pocket, popped it,
and drove the blade in overhand, just at eye  level.  It  punched
through,  up  to  the handle, and he yanked it sideways and down,
hearing an odd little sizzle of parting wood fiber.  He  made  it
down  to  waist  height, twisted it, back to the left, and three-
quarters of the way  up  the  other  side  before  he  heard  the
glasslike tink of the ceramic snapping.

"Kick. Here," he said, striking the center of his cutout with the
stub of the blade. "Brace up against me. Kick!"

And she did. She could kick like a mule,  Chevette.  The  section
gave  way  with  her  second  try, and he was boosting her up and
through, try- 218 ing not to scream at the  pain.  He  was  never
sure  how  he  made it through himself, hut he did, expecting any
second one of those subsonics would find him.

There were people unconscious, outside the door, and other people
kneeling, trying to help them.

"This  way,"  he  said,  starting to limp in the direction of the
ramp and the Lucky Dragon. But she  wasn't  with  him.  He  swung
around, saw her headed in the opposite direction. "Chevette!"

He went after her but she didn't slow down. "Chevette!"

She turned. Her right eye swelling, bruised, swimming with tears;
the left wide and gray and crazy now.  As  if  she  saw  him  but
didn't register who it was she saw. "Rydell?"

And  all this time he'd thought about her, remembered her, having
her there in front of him was something completely different: her
long straight nose, the line of her jaw, the way he knew her lips
looked in profile.

"It's okay," he said, which was absolutely all he could think  of
to say.

"It's not a dream?"

"No," he said.

"They  shot Carson. Somebody shot him. I saw somebody shoot him."

"Who was he? Why'd he hit you?"

"He was-" She broke off, her front teeth pressing into her  lower
lip. "Somebody I lived with. In LA."

"Huh,"  Rydell said, all he could manage around the idea that the
scarf had just shot Chevette's new boyfriend.

"I mean I wasn't with him. Not now. He was following me, but, Je-
sus, Rydell, why'd that guy. . . Just walked up and shot him!"

Because  he was going after me, Rydell thought. Because he wanted
to wail on me and I'm supposed to be theirs.  But  Rydell  didn't
say  that.  "The  guy  with the gun," he said, instead, "he'll be
looking for me. He's not alone. That means you don't want  to  be
with me when he finds me."

"Why's he looking for you?"

"Because  I've  got something-" But he didn't; he'd left the pro-
jector in the bar.
 219 "You were looking for me, back there?"   I've  been  looking
for  you  since you walked out. I've been working up and down the
face of the waking world, every last  day,  with  a  tiny  little
comb,  looking for you. And each day shook out empty, never never
you. And he heard in memory the sound those rocks made,  punching
into  the  polymer  behind the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. Pointless,
pointless. "No. I'm working.  Private  investigation  for  a  man
named Laney."

She  didn't  believe  him.  "Carson followed me up here. I didn't
want to be with him. Now you. What is this?"

Laney says it's the end of the world. "I'm just  here,  Chevette.
You're just here. I gotta go now-"

"Where?"

"Back in the bar. I left something. It's important."

"Don't go back there!"

"I have to."

"Rydell,"  she began, starting to shake, "you're ... you're-" And
looked down at her open hands, the palms dark with something. And
he  saw  that  it  was  blood,  and  knew  that  it  would be the
boyfriend's, that she'd crawled through that. She started to sob,
and wiped her palms down her black jeans, trying to get it off.

"Mr. Rydell?"

The  man with the tanto, carrying Rydell's duffel in the crook of
his arm as though it were a baby.

"Mr. Rydell, I don't think it would be advisable for you  to  at-
tempt  to  leave  the  bridge.  A watch has almost certainly been
posted, and they will shoot you rather than permit the possibili-
ty  of your escape." The pallid glare of the fluorescents chained
overhead winked in the round lenses; this lean  and  concise  man
with  perfectly  blank,  perfectly  circular  absences where eyes
should be. "Are you with this young woman?"

"Yes," Rydell said.

"We must start toward Oakland," the man said, handing Rydell  the
duffel, the solid weight of the projector. Rydell hoped he'd got-
ten the power cable as well. "Otherwise, they will slip past  and
cut us off."

Rydell  turned  to  Chevette. "Maybe they didn't see us together.
You should just go."  220 "I wouldn't advise that," the man said.
"I saw you together. They likely did as well."

Chevette  looked up at Rydell. "Every time you come into my life,
Rydell, I wind up in    She made a face.

"Shit," Rydell finished for her.  A         221 THE Gunsmith Cats
alarm watch taped to the wall of Laney's box brings him home from
the Walled City. It buzzes to announce the Suit's  impending  ar-
rival. The Suit has no watch of his own but is relentlessly punc-
tual, his rounds timed to the clocks of the subway, which are set
in turn by radio, from an atomic clock in Nagoya.

Laney  tastes  blood.  It is a long time since he has brushed his
teeth, and they feel artificial and ill-fitting, as though in his
absence  they have been replaced with a stranger's. He spits into
a bottle kept for this purpose and considers attempting the jour-
ney to the restroom. Importance of grooming. He feels the stubble
on his cheeks, calculating the effort required to remove  it.  He
could  request  that  the Suit obtain an electric disposable, but
really he prefers a blade. He is one of those men who  has  never
grown  a beard, not even briefly. (And now, some small voice, one
always best ignored, suggests: he never will.)

He hears the old man, in the next box, say something in Japanese,
and  knows  that  the Suit has arrived. He wonders what model the
old man is building now, and sees, in his mind's eye, with hallu-
cinatory  clarity,  the finishing touches being put on a model of
Cohn Laney.

It is a "garage" kit, this Laney kit, a limited run produced  for
only  the most serious of enthusiasts, the otaku of plastic model
kits, and as such it is molded from styrene of a  quite  nauseous
mauve. The plastic used in garage kits tends to uniformly ghastly
shades, as the enthusiast-manufacturers know that no kit,  assem-
bled, will ever remain unpainted.

The Laney the old man is detailing is an earlier Laney, the Laney
of his days in LA, when he worked as a quantitative  analyst  for
Slitscan,  a tabloid television show of quite monumental vicious-
ness: this Laney wears Padanian designer clothing  and  sports  a
very  expensive  pair of sunglasses, the frames of which are even
now being picked out in silver by the old man's narrowest  sable,
scarcely more than a single hair.

But  this  waking dream is broken now by the advent of the Suit's
222 54.     SOME THINGS NEVER HAPPEN  head,  his  hair  like  the
molded  pompadour  of some archaic mannequin. Laney feels, rather
than sees, the precision with which  the  Suit's  black  eyeglass
frames have been most recently mended, and as the Suit crawls in,
beneath the flap of melon blanket, Laney smells the rancid stale-
ness the Suit's clothing exudes. It is strange that any odor pro-
duced by a warm body should suggest intense cold, but the  Suit's
somehow does.

The  Suit  is bringing Laney more of the blue syrup, more Regain,
several large chocolate bars laden with sucrose and caffeine, and
two  liters  of generic cola. The Suit's painted shirtfront seems
faintly self-luminous, like  the  numerals  of  a  diver's  watch
glimpsed far down in the depth of a lightless well, a sacrificial
cenote perhaps, and Laney finds himself adrift for  just  an  in-
stant in fragments of some half-remembered Yucatan vacation.

Something  is  wrong,  Laney  thinks; something is wrong with his
eyes, because now the Suit's luminous shirt glows with the  light
of  a  thousand suns, and all the rest is black, the black of old
negatives. And still somehow he manages to give the Suit two more
of  the  untraceable  debit  chips, and even to nod at the Suit's
tense little salaryman bow, executed kneeling, amid sleeping bags
and  candy  wrappers, and then the Suit is gone, and the glare of
his shirt, surely that was just some artifact of whatever process
this is that Laney is here to pursue.


LANEY drinks half of one of the bottles of cough syrup, chews and
swallows a third of one of the candy bars, and washes  this  down
with a swallow of the lukewarm cola.

When he closes his eyes, even before he puts the eyephones on, he
seems to plunge into the flow of data.

Immediately he is aware of Libia and Paco, directing him. They do
not  bother  to  speak  or to present, but he knows them now by a
certain signature, a style of navigation. He lets them  take  him
where they will, and of course he is not disappointed.

A lozenge opens before him.

He  is looking down into what he takes to be Harwood's office, in
San Francisco, at Harwood seated behind a vast dark desk littered
with

223  architectural models and stacks of printout. Harwood holding
a telephone handset.

"It's an absurd launch," Hardwood says, "but then it's an  insane
service.  It  works  because it's redundant, understand? It's too
dumb not to work."

Laney does not hear the reply, and takes this to mean that  Libia
and  Paco  have  hacked  a security camera in the ceiling of Har-
wood's office. The audio is ambient sound, not a phone tap.

Now Harwood rolls his eyes.

"People are fascinated by the pointlessness of  it.  That's  what
they  like  about  it. Yes, it's crazy, but it's fun. You want to
send your nephew in Houston a toy, and you're in Paris,  you  buy
it,  take  it to a Lucky Dragon, and have it re-created, from the
molecules up, in a Lucky Dragon in Houston. . . What?  What  hap-
pens  to  the toy you bought in Paris? You keep it. Give it away.
Eviscerate it with your teeth, you tedious, literal-minded bitch.
What?  No,  I didn't. No, I'm sorry Noriko, that must be an arti-
fact of your translation program. How could you imagine  I'd  say
that?"  Harwood  stares straight ahead, stunned with boredom. "Of
course I want to give the interview. This is an exclusive,  after
all.  And  you  were my first choice." Harwood smiles as he calms
the journalist, but the smile vanishes the instant she begins  to
ask her next question.

"People  are  frightened of nanotechnology, Noriko. We know that.
Even in  Tokyo,  seventeen-point-eight  of  your  markedly  tech-
nofetishistic  populace refuses to this day to set foot in a nan-
otech structure. Here on the coast, I'd point to the  example  of
Malibu,  where  there's been a very serious biotech accident, but
one which is entirely unrelated to nanotech. It's actually  being
cleaned  up  with  a combination of three smart algae, but every-
one's  convinced  that  the  beaches  are  alive  with  invisible
nanobots  waiting to crawl up your disagreeable pussy. What? 'Un-
friendly cat'? No. There's something wrong  with  your  software,
Noriko.  And  I do hope you're only writing this down, because we
negotiated the interview on a nonrecorded basis. If any  of  this
ever  turns up in any recorded form at all, you'll not be getting
another. What?  224 Good.  I'm  glad  you  do."  Harwood  yawned,
silently. "One last question, then."

Harwood listens, pursing his lips.

"Because Lucky Dragon is about convenience. Lucky Dragon is about
being able to purchase those things you need, really  need,  when
you  need them, twenty-four seven. But Lucky Dragon is also about
fun. And people are going to have fun  with  these  units.  We've
done enough research that we know that we don't really know what,
exactly, Lucky Dragon customers will find to do with  this  tech-
nology, but that's all part of the fun." Harwood explored the re-
cesses of his left nostril with the nail of his little finger but
seemed  to  find  nothing  of interest. "Blow me," he said. "'In-
flate'? I don't think so, Noriko,  but  I'd  have  that  software
checked,  if  I  were  you.  'Bye."  Harwood puts the phone down,
stares straight ahead. It rings. He picks it up, listens. Frowns.

"Why  doesn't  that  surprise me? Why doesn't that surprise me in
the least?" He looks, to Laney, as if he's on the verge of laugh-
ing. "Well. You can try. You can certainly try. Please do. But if
you can't, then he'll kill you. All of you. Every last one. But I
shouldn't  worry  about  that,  should  I?  Because I've got your
brochure here, and it's really a wonderful brochure,  printed  in
Geneva,  spare  no  expense  in  presentation;  full-color, heavy
stock, and it assures me that I've hired the best, the very best.
And  I  really do believe that you are the best. We did shop com-
paratively. But I also know that he is what he is. And  God  help
you."

Harwood hangs up.

Laney  feels Libia and Paco tugging at him, urging him elsewhere.

He wishes that he could stay here, with Harwood. He  wishes  that
he  and  Harwood could sit opposite one another across that desk,
and share their experience of the nodal  apprehension.  He  would
love,  for instance, to hear Harwood's interpretation of the node
of 1911. He would like to be able to  discuss  the  Lucky  Dragon
nanofacsimile  launch with Harwood. He imagines himself sending a
replica of the garage kit Laney-though "sending" isn't the  word,
here-but where, and to whom?

Libia and Paco tug him to the place where that thing is growing,
 225  and  he sees that it has changed. He wonders if Harwood has
looked at it recently: the shape of a new world, if any world can
be said to be new. And he wonders if he will ever have the chance
to speak with Harwood.

He doubts it.  Some things never happen, he reminds himself.

But this one always does, says the still small voice of  mortali-
ty.

Blow  me,  Laney tells it.  226 55.     BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS LATER
Fontaine would remember that when he woke, hearing the  sound  at
his door, he thought not of his Smith & Wesson but of the Russian
chain gun, plastered away beneath gypsum filler  and  gauze  some
four months earlier, out of sight and out of mind.

And he would wonder about why that was, that he'd thought of that
particular ugly thing as he became conscious of something  click-
ing urgently against the glass of the shop door.

"Fontaine!" A sort of stage whisper.

"Spare  me,"  Fontaine  said,  sitting up. He rubbed his eyes and
squinted at the luminous  hands  of  a  soulless  black  Japanese
quartz  alarm,  a gift of sorts from Clarisse, who liked to point
out that Fontaine was  frequently  late,  particularly  with  the
child  support, in spite of owning such a great many old watches.

He'd gotten about an hour's sleep.

"Fontaine!" Female, yes, but not Clarisse.

Fontaine put his trousers on, slid his feet into his cold  clammy
shoes, and picked up the Kit Gun. "I'll say it was self-defense,"
he said, glancing back to see his mystery boy sprawled whale-like
on the camping pad, snoring again but softly.

And out through the shop, where he made out the face of Skinner's
girl, though somewhat the worse for wear,  really  major  serious
shiner going there, and looking anxious indeed.

"It's me! Chevette!" Rapping on his glass with something metal.

"Don't  break  my damn window, girl." Fontaine had the gun out of
sight, by his side, as was his habit when answering the door, and
he  saw now that she was not alone; two white men behind her, the
one a big, brown-haired, cop-looking person, and  the  other  re-
minding  him  of  a  professor  of music known decades before, in
Cleveland. This latter causing Fontaine a prickling of neck hair,
though  he couldn't have said exactly why. A very still man, this
one.

"Chevette," he said, "I'm sleeping."
 227 "We need help."  "We' who, exactly?"

"It's Rydell," she said. "You remember?"

And Fontaine did, though vaguely: the man she'd gone down to  Los
Angeles with. "And?"

She  started  to speak, looked lost, glanced back over her shoul-
der.

"A friend," the one called Rydell said, none too convincingly. He
was  hugging a cheap-looking drawstring bag, which seemed to con-
tain a large thermos, or perhaps one of those portable rice cook-
ers.  (Fontaine  hoped  that this wasn't going to be one of those
pathetic episodes in which he was mistaken for a pawnbroker.)

"Let us in, Fontaine. We're in trouble."

You probably are trouble, by now, Fontaine decided, after whatev-
er  it  was got you the black eye. He started unlocking the door,
noticing how she kept glancing either way, as  if  expecting  un-
wanted  company.  The cop-looking one, this Rydell, was doing the
same. But the professor, Fontaine noted, was watching him, watch-
ing  Fontaine,  and  it made him glad to have the Kit Gun down by
his leg.

"Lock it," Chevette said, as she entered, followed by Rydell  and
the professor.

"I'm not sure I want to," Fontaine said. "I might want to show it
to you."

"Show it to me?"

"You in the plural. Show you the door. Follow me?  I  was  sleep-
ing."

"Fontaine, there are men on the bridge with guns."

"There  are  indeed,"  said Fontaine, as he rubbed his thumb over
the knurls atop the little double-action's hammer.

The professor closed the door.

"Hey," Fontaine said, in protest.

"Is there another exit?" the professor asked, studying the locks.

"No," Fontaine said.

The  man  glanced back through the shop, to the rear wall, beyond
the upturned toes of Fontaine's guest. "And on the other side  of
this  wall,  there  is  only  a sheer drop?"  228 "That's right,"
Fontaine said, somehow resenting the ease with which the man  had
extracted this information.

"And  above? There are people living above?" The man looked up at
the shop's painted plywood ceiling.

"I don't know," Fontaine admitted. "If there are, they're  quiet.
Never heard 'em."

This  Rydell  he  seemed  to be having trouble walking He made it
over to the glass-topped counter and put his duffel down on it.

"You don't want to break my display there, hear?"

Rydell turned, hand pressed into  his  side.  "Got  any  adhesive
tape? The wide kind?"

Fontaine did have a first-aid kit, but it never had anything any-
one ever needed. He had a couple of  crumbling  wound  compresses
circa  about 1978 in there and an elaborate industnal eye bandage
with

instructions in what looked like Finnish. "I  got  gaffer  tape,"
Fontaine said.

"What's that?"

"Duct tape. You know: silver? Stick to skin okay. You want that?"
Rydell shrugged painfully out  of  his  black  nylon  jacket  and
started

fumbling  one-handed with the buttons of his wrinkled blue ~hirt.
The girl started helping him, and when she'd gotten the shirt off
Fontaine  saw  the  yellow gray mottling of a fresh bruise up his
side A bad one

"You in an accident?" He'd tucked the Smith  &  Wesson  into  the
side  pocket  of  his trousers, not a safe carry ordinarily but a
convenient one under the circumstances. The worn checkered walnut
of the butt stuck out just enough to get a handy purchase, should
he need it. He got a roll of tape out of the top drawer of an old
steel  filing  cabinet.  It  made that sound when he pulled out a
foot or so of it. "You want me to put this on you? I taped fight-
ers in Chicago. In the ring, you know?"

"Please,"  said  Rydell,  wincing  as  he  raised  the arm on the
bruised side.

Fontaine tore the length of tape off  and  studied  Rydell's  rib
cage.  "Tape's mystical, you know that?" He snapped the tape taut
between his two hands, the darker,  adhesive-coated  side  toward
Rydell.




229 I "How's that?" Rydell asked.

"Cause  it's  got  a dark side," Fontaine said, demonstrating, "a
light side," showing the dull silver backing, "and it  holds  the
universe together." Rydell started to yell when the strip was ap-
plied, but caught it. "Breathe," Fontaine said. "You ever deliver
a baby?"

"No," Rydell managed.

"Well,"  said Fontaine, readying the next strip, this one longer,
"you want to breathe the way they tell women to breathe when  the
contractions come. Here: now breathe out. .

It went pretty fast then, and when Fontaine was done, he saw that
Rydell was able to use both hands to button his shirt.

"Good evening," he heard the professor say and, turning with  the
roll  of tape in his hand, saw that the boy was awake and sitting
up, brown eyes wide and empty, staring at the man  in  the  gray-
green overcoat. "You look well. Is this your home?"

Something moved, behind the boy's eyes; saw, retreated again.

"You two know each other?" Fontaine asked.

"We met last night," the man said, "here, on the bridge."

"Wait a minute," Fontaine said. "He get a watch off you?"

The man turned and regarded Fontaine evenly, saying nothing.

Fontaine  felt a wave of guilt. "It's okay," he said. "Just keep-
ing it for him."

~'I see."

"That's quite a watch," Fontaine said. "Where'd you get it?"

"Singapore."

Fontaine looked from the smooth gaunt wolfish face of the man who
very  probably  wasn't a music professor to the blank and unlined
face of the boy, beneath its new haircut.

"I see that you have a pistol in your pocket," the man said.

"I'm just glad to see you," Fontaine said, but nobody got it.

"What is its caliber?" "Twenty-two long rifle." "Barrel  length?"
"Four  inches."  "Accurate?"   230  "It's  not  a target pistol,"
Fontaine said, "but for four inches of barrel, it's not too bad."
This  was  making  him very nervous, and he very badly wanted the
gun in his hand, but he thought that if he touched it now,  some-
thing would happen. Something would.

"Give it to me," the man said.

"Forget it," Fontaine said.

"An undetermined number of armed men are searching for Mr. Rydell
tonight. They would like to capture him alive, in order to  ques-
tion  him,  but  they would certainly kill him to prevent his es-
cape. They will kill anyone they find with him. That would simply
be a matter of housekeeping for them. Do you understand?"

"Who are they?"

"'Bright young things,'" the man said.

"What?"

"They  are mercenaries, in the pay of someone who regards Mr. Ry-
dell as being in the employ of a competitor, an enemy."

Fontaine looked at him. "Why you want my gun?"

"In order to kill as many of them as I can."

"I don't know you from Adam," Fontaine said.

"No," said the man, "you don't."

"This is crazy   Fontaine looked  at  Chevette.  "You  know  this
guy?"

"No," Chevette said.

"You. Rydell. You know this guy?"

Rydell  looked  from Fontaine to the man, back to Fontaine. "No,"
Rydell said, "I don't. But you know what?"

"What?"

"I'd give him the gun."

"Why?"  "I don't know," Rydell  said,  and  something  seemed  to
catch in his voice. "I just know I would."

"This  is  crazy"  Fontaine  said, repeating himself, hearing the
pitch of his own voice rising. "Come on, Chevette! Why'd you come
in here? You bring these people-"

"Cause  Rydell  couldn't  walk fast enough," she said. "I'm sony,
Fontaine. We just needed help."
 231 I "Fuck," said Fontaine, pulling the Smith & Wesson from his
pocket,  its  blue  steel  warm with his body heat. He opened the
cylinder and ejected the five cartridges into his  palm.  Fragile
bits of brass less than

the  thickness of a pencil, each one tipped with its copper-coat-
ed, precisely swaged and hollowed segment of lead alloy. "This is
it,  right?  All  the ammunition I've got." He passed the man the
revolver, barrel pointed at the ceiling and cylinder  open,  then
the cartridges.

"Thank you," the man said. "May I load it now?"

"Gentlemen,"  said Fontaine, feeling a frustration that he didn't
understand, "you may start your fucking engines."

"I suggest," the man said, inserting the five cartridges, one af-
ter  another,  "that you lock the door after me and conceal your-
selves, out of the sight lines for the door and window.  If  they
determine you are here, they will try to kill you." He closed the
cylinder, sighted down the barrel at a blank patch of wall.

"Pulls a little to the left," Fontaine said, "single-action.  You
want to compensate in the sight picture."

"Thank  you," the man said and was gone, out the door, closing it
behind him.

Fontaine looked at Rydell,  whose  eyes  were  bright  with  what
Fontaine  suddenly saw were brimming tears.  232 56.     KOMBINAT
PIECE MR. Fontaine," Rydell said, "you wouldn't have another  gun
around here, would you?"

The  three  of  them  were  sitting on the floor, in a row, their
backs to the wall nearest Oakland, in the back room of Fontaine's
little  shop.  Between  Rydell  and Fontaine, the duffel with the
projector. The kid who'd been sleeping on  the  floor  there  was
sitting  up  in Fontaine's narrow bunk, back against the opposite
wall, clicking through something on a notebook; had one of  those
big-ass  old  military displays on, made him look like a robot or
something, except you could see the bottom half of his face,  see
he kept his mouth open while he was doing it. The lights were all
off, so you could see the steady pulse of pixel-glow leaking from
the helmet, from whatever it was he kept pulling up.

"I don't deal in firearms," the black man said. "Vintage watches,
knives by name makers, die-cast military..

Rydell thought he'd had enough to do with knives already. "I just
don't like sitting here, waiting."

"Nobody  does,"  Chevette said beside him. She was pressing a wet
cloth against her eye.

Actually what bothered Rydell most  about  sitting  was  that  he
wasn't  sure  how easy it would be to get back up. His side, with
the duct tape on it now, didn't hurt too badly, but he knew  he'd
stiffen  up.  He  was about to ask Fontaine about the knives when
Fontaine said: "Well.  "Well what?" Rydell asked.

"Well," Fontaine said, "it isn't actually part of my  stock,  you
know?"  "What isn't?"  "I've got this lawyer, he's African Union,
you know? Forced out by politics."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Fontaine said, "but you know how it is, people  come  out
of  a  situation like that, all that ethnic cleansing and shit. .
"Yeah?"
 233 "Well, they like to feel they got protection, something hap-
pens."

Rydell was definitely interested.

"Trouble  is,"  Fontaine said, "they got this overkill mentality,
over there. And my lawyer, Martial, he's like that. Actually he's
trying not to be, understand? Got him a therapist and everything,
trying to learn to walk around without a gun and  not  feel  he's
liable  to  get his ass blown away by tribal enemies, right? Like
this is America, here, you know?"

"I think you're still liable to get your ass blown away by tribal
enemies, in America, Mr. Fontaine."

"That's  true,"  Fontaine  said, shifting his buttocks, "but Mar-
tial's got that post-traumatic thing, right?"

"You help him with these problems? You  help  him  by  holding  a
weapon  for him, Mr. Fontaine? Something he wouldn't want to keep
on his own premises?"

Fontaine looked at Rydell. Pursed his lips. Nodded.

"Where is it?"

"It's in the wall, behind us."

Rydell looked at the wall between them. "This is plywood?"

"Most of it," Fontaine said, swinging  around,  "See  here?  This
part's  a  patch, gypsum wall filler. We built a box in here, put
it in, plastered it over, painted."

"Guess someone could find it with a metal detector," Rydell said,
remembering being trained how to search for stashes like this.

"I don't think it has a lot of metal in it," Fontaine said, "any-
way not in the delivery system."

"Can we .see it?"

"Well," said Fontaine, "once we get it out, I'm stuck with it."

"No," Rydell said, "I am."

Fontaine produced a little bone-handled pocketknife.  Opened  it,
started digging gingerly at the wall.

"We could get a bigger knife," Rydell suggested.

"Hush,"  Fontaine said. As Rydell watched, the point of the knife
exposed a dark ring, the size you'd wear on your finger. Fontaine
pried  it up and out of the hardened plaster, but it seemed to be
fastened to something. "You pull this, okay?"   234  Rydell  slid
his middle finger through the ring, tugged it a little. Felt sol-
id.

"Go on," Fontaine said. "Hard."

Plaster cracked, tore loose, as the fine steel wire  attached  to
the ring pulled out around the patch, cutting through it like dry
cheese. A rough, inch-thick rectangle  coming  away  in  Rydell's
hand.  Fontaine  was pulling something out of the rectangular re-
cess that had been exposed. Something wrapped in what looked like
an old green shirt.

Rydell  watched  as  Fontaine gingerly unwrapped the green cloth,
exposing a squat heavy object that looked like  a  cross  between
the  square waxed-paper milk cartons of Rydell's childhood and an
industrial power drill. It was a uniform,  dusty  olive-green  in
color,  and  if  it  was in fact a firearm, it was the clumsiest-
looking firearm Rydell had yet seen. Fontaine held it  with  what
would've  been the top of the milk carton pointed up at an angle,
toward the ceiling. There was an awkward-looking pistol  grip  at
the  opposite  end,  and  a  sort of grooved, broom-handle affair
about six inches in front of that.

"What is it?" Rydell asked.

"Chain gun," Fontaine said. "Disposable. Can't reload  it.  Case-
less:

this  long  square  thing's the cartridges and the barrel in one.
No-moving parts to it: ignition's electrical. Two  buttons  here,
where the trigger would be, you just point it, press 'em both the
same time. It'll do that four times. Four charges."

"Why do they call it a chain gun?"

"What this  is,  Martial  says,  it's  more  like  a  directional
grenade, you understand? Or sort of like a portable fragmentation
mine. Main thing he told me is you don't use it in  any  kind  of
confined  space, and you only use it when there's nobody in front
of you you don't mind seeing get really fucked up."

"So what's the chain part?"

Fontaine reached over and tapped the fat square  barrel  lightly,
once,  with  his  forefinger.  "In here. Thing's packed with four
hundred two-foot lengths of super-fine steel chain, sharp as  ra-
zor wire."

Rydell  hefted  the  thing  by its two grips, keeping his fingers
away from those buttons. "And that-"
 235 "Makes hamburger," Fontaine said.

"I heard a shot," Chevette said, lowering her wet cloth.

"I didn't hear anything," Rydell said.

"I did," Chevette said. "Just one."

"You wouldn't hear much, that little .22," Fontaine said.

"I don't think I can stand this," Chevette said.

Now Rydell thought he heard something. Just a pop. Short,  sharp.
But just the one. "You know," he said, "I think I'm going to take
a look."

Chevette leaned in close, her one eye  purple-black  and  swollen
almost completely shut, the other gray and fierce, scared and an-
gry all at once. "It's not a television show,  Rydell.  You  know
that?  You  know the difference? It's not an episode of anything.
It's your life. And mine. And his," pointing  to  Fontaine,  "and
his," pointing at the kid across the room. "So why don't you just
sit there?"

Rydell felt his ears start to burn, and knew that he  was  blush-
ing. "I can't just sit here and wait-"

"I know," she said. "I could've told you that."

Rydell handed the chain gun back to Fontaine and got to his feet,
stiff but not as bad as he'd expected. Fontaine passed him up the
gun. "I need keys to unlock the front?"

"No," Fontaine said. "I didn't do the dead bolts."

Rydell  stepped  around  the  shallow  section  of partition that
screened them from the window in the door and the display window.

Someone in the shadows opposite cut loose with something automat-
ic, something silenced so efficiently that there was only the ma-
chine-like  burr  of a slide working, and the stitching sounds of
bullets. Both Fontaine's  windows  vanished  instantly,  and  the
glass front of the counter as well.

Rydell  found  himself  on  the  floor,  unable to recall getting
there. The gun across the street stopped abruptly, having  chewed
its way through a full clip.

He  saw  himself  down  in  the  basement range at the academy in
Knoxville, ejecting a half-moon clip from the stock of a bull-pup
assault  rifle,  pulling out another, and slapping it into place.
How long it took. The number of movements, exactly, that it took.
236  There  was a high, thin, very regular sound in his ears, and
he realized that it was Chevette, crying.

And then he was up, shoving the milk-carton  nose  of  Fontaine's
lawyer's  Kombinat  gun over the bottom of the square hole in the
door where the glass had been.

One of the two buttons, he thought, must be a safety.

And the other filled the air outside with flame, recoil close  to
breaking  his  wrist,  but nobody, really nobody, was going to be
reloading anything.

Not over there.

237 57.     EYE AND when they are  cleaning  up,  the  next  day,
Fontaine  will  find a cardboard canister of coarse Mexican salt,
holed, on the floor, in the back room.

And he will pick it up, the weight wrong somehow,  and  pour  the
salt  out into the palm of his hand, through the entrance hole in
the side, until out falls the fully blossomed exotic hollow-point
slug that had penetrated the plywood partition, then straight in-
to this round box of salt, upon its shelf,  spending  its  energy
there  as  heat.  But  it will be cold then, like a fanged bronze
kernel of popcorn, evidence of the ways in which its  makers  in-
tended it to rend flesh.

And  he  will  place it on a shelf beside a lead soldier, another
survivor of the war.

But now he can only move as in a dream, and  what  comes  to  him
most  strongly  in  this  silence,  this tangible silence through
which he feels he moves as if through glycerine, is the memory of
his  father, against his mother's ardent fear, taking him briefly
out, into the yard behind a house in tidewater Virginia, to expe-
rience the eye of a hurricane.

And  in  that eye, after the storm's initial rage, nothing moves.
No bird sings. Each twig of each leafless tree defined  in  utter
stillness,  yet  perhaps on the very edge of perception there can
be some awareness of the encircling system.  Something  subsonic;
felt, not heard. Which will return. That is certain.

And  it  is like that now as he rises and moves, seeing the boy's
hands frozen, trembling, above the notebook's  keys,  head  still
helmed  with  that  old military set. And thinks for a moment the
boy is injured, but he sees no blood. Frightened only.

All guns exist to be fired, he knows, and Rydell has proven  this
by  firing Martial's, that ugly thing, Russian, vicious booty out
of the Kombinat states by way of Africa, out of wars of an  abid-
ing stupidity, ethnic struggles smoldering on for centuries, like
airless fires down in the heart of a dry bog. A gun for those un-
able  to  be trained to shoot.  238 Reek of its propellant charge
in the hack of his throat, harsh  and  chemical.  A  frosting  of
shattered glass beneath his shoes.

Rydell  stands  at the door, the ungainly chain gun dangling from
his hand like a duelist's pistol, and now Fontaine stands  beside
him, looking out into the bridge's narrow covered thoroughfare as
into a tableau or diorama, and opposite, there, all glitters with
red. Though surely in the shadows one would find more solid, sub-
stantial evidence, bone and gristle perhaps, and  that  automatic
gun.

"Chevette,"  Rydell  says, not to her but as if reminding himself
of her, and turns, crunching back through the glass, to find her.

Fontaine  blinks  at  the queer red glitter over there, the smear
that someone has so instantly become, and catches something  mov-
ing, high up in the periphery of vision. Silver.

Flinches,  but  it's a balloon, a cushiony oblate of inflated My-
lar, with, it looks like, little caged articulated  props  and  a
camera.  This draws even with the front of his shop, halts itself
with reversing props, then neatly rotates, so that the lens looks
down at him.

Fontaine  looks  up  at the thing, wondering if it has the where-
withal to hurt him, but it simply hangs  there,  staring,  so  he
turns  and  surveys the damage to his shop. All this glass is the
most evident breakage, bullet holes themselves being not so visi-
ble.  Two  of  them,  though, have punched through a round enamel
Coke sign that previously would've rated an eighty  percent,  but
now is scarcely "very good."

It  is  the counter that draws him, though he dreads what he will
find:

his watches there beneath shards of glass, like fish in  a  shat-
tered  aquarium. Plucking up a Gruen "Curvex" by its faux-alliga-
tor band, he finds it not to be ticking. He sighs.  Clarisse  has
been  after him for some time now, to buy a fire safe in which to
place his more valuable stock at  night.  Had  he  done  so,  the
watches  would still be ticking. But this one is, the Doxa chrono
with the gently corroded dial, a favorite of his which  customers
pass  over  repeatedly. He holds it to his ear, hearing the sound
of a mechanism assembled years before his own birth.

But here he sees something which will make Clarisse more  unhappy
still:  her  Another  One babies lie tumbled in a heap, like some
tabloid photo from a nameless atrocity, their ruptured heads  and
torsos

239 oozing silicone (which is either a liquid that behaves like a
solid or vice versa, Fontaine can never remember which). Not  one
of them has survived intact, and as he bends for a closer look he
hears one repeating,  endlessly,  an  apparent  single  syllable,
though  whether  in  Japanese  or  English  he  cannot tell. This
briefly and deeply fascinates him, and  he  remembers  a  similar
feeling,  as  a  child,  when he viewed through a police line the
rubble of a movie theater in Harlem; the fire that had gutted the
place  had  stopped short of the candy counter, but everything in
that counter had melted, had poured out  and  solidified  into  a
frozen  stream  of refined sugar, smelling much better, even over
the sourness of damp ashes, than this silicone does.

And hears Chevette and Rydell talking, arguing it seems,  and  he
wishes they would stop.

He  is  in  the  eye,  and  he wishes simply to know it.  240 THE
close-up, hand-held, shows Laney this small blue absence just  in
from  the corner of the dead man's eye, like some radical experi-
ment with mascara. A bullet hole, entry wound, of the most modest
circumference.

"You'll  note the lack of powder burns," says the one holding the
camera. "Done from a distance."

"Why are you showing me this?" Harwood asks, once more the disem-
bodied voice.

The  frame  pulls back, revealing the dead man, blonde in a black
leather jacket, reclining against some  vertical  surface  fogged
with  whorls  of  aerosol enamel. He looks surprised and slightly
cross-eyed. Pulls back farther, revealing a second body, this one
in a black armored vest, facedown on worn pavement.

"One shot each. We weren't expecting him to have a gun."

"The  bridge  isn't  noted for adherence to firearms regulations,
you know."

The man with the camera reverses it, his face appearing  from  an
odd  angle,  shot  from the level of his waist. "I just wanted to
tell you 'I told you so.'"

"If he leaves the vicinity alive, your firm will find  itself  in
more than contractual difficulties. You signed on to take care of
anything, remember?"

"And you agreed to listen to our suggestions."

"I listened."

"I came out here with a five-man team. Now two of them are  dead,
I've lost radio contact with the other three, and I've just heard
what sounded like an explosion. This  environment  is  inherently
unstable:  an armed anthill. These people have short fuses and no
coordinating authority. We could have a riot on  our  hands,  and
once  that  happens, we'll have no hope at all of taking out your
man, or of capturing Rydell."

"Recapturing Rydell, you should say."

"I have one last suggestion." The man raises the camera slightly,
so

241  58.     SMALL  BLUE  ABSENCE that his face fills the screen,
his black scarf blanking the bottom third of the image.

"Yes?"

"Burn it."

"Burn what?"

"The bridge. It's a tinderbox."

"But wouldn't that take time to arrange?"

"It's already arranged." The man shows the camera a small rectan-
gle,  a  remote,  that  he  holds  in his other hand. "We've been
planting radio-activated incendiaries. We like to cover  the  op-
tions."

"But  aren't  our  two men likely to escape in the ensuing confu-
sion? You tell me you're afraid of a riot, after all. .

"Nobody's getting off this thing. It'll burn from both ends, from
Bryant Street to Treasure Island."

"And how are you getting off yourself?"

"That's been taken care of."

Harwood  falls  silent.  "Well," he says, at last, "I suppose you
should."

The man thumbs a button on the remote.

Laney flicks away from the lozenge, panicking, looking for  Libia
and Paco.

The  projector  is  still  here,  still  on  the bridge. He still
doesn't know what part it plays, but Rei Toei must have  a  pres-
ence in the impending cusp.

And  he sees that Harwood knows that, or feels it, and is moving,
has moved, to prevent it.

He pulls the eyephones from his head and gropes through the  col-
ors  of  darkness,  searching for a phone.  242 59.     THE BIRDS
ARE ON FIRE CHEVETTE kept looking at the  holes  in  the  plywood
partition  between  the  front  and  the back of Fontaine's shop,
noticing how the bullets had taken out long splinters of  plywood
on  each  side of the actual holes; extending lines, in her mind,
through those holes and on back through the room.

She couldn't figure how she'd missed catching one.  What  it  had
done, though, was give her the shakes; she kept shivering, and if
she didn't keep her teeth together they'd actually  chatter,  and
she  had  hiccups as well, and both these things embarrassed her,
so she was taking it out on Rydell and feeling sorry for  him  at
the  same  time, because he looked like he was in his own kind of
shock.

She was vaguely aware of people coming up to the door of the shop
and looking in, but then they'd see Rydell with the chain gun and
go away, fast. These were bridge people, and this  was  how  they
reacted  to something like this. If they hadn't seen an armed man
there, they'd have asked if everyone  was  okay  and  could  they
help,  but  otherwise  it  was  about taking care, as Skinner had
liked to put it, of your own side of the street.

She felt like she'd split in half, the part of her that was  rag-
ging  Rydell  for getting her into this kind of crazy shit again,
and the part of her that just kept looking around and wanting  to
say: look at this, and how come I'm alive?

But  something  started  beeping, in Rydell's pocket, and he took
out a pair of sunglasses, black frames with  cheap  chrome  trim,
and put them on. "Hello?" he said. "Laney?"

She  looked  over as the one who'd talked Fontaine out of his gun
opened the door, glass grating beneath it, and stepped in,  look-
ing  exactly  the  same  as  when he'd left, except he had a long
fresh scratch down the side of his face, where blood was beading.
He  took  the skinny little revolver out of his pocket and handed
it to Fontaine, holding it sideways

243 with his hand around the thing you put the bullets in. "Thank
you," he said.

Fontaine  brought the gun up beneath his nose, sniffed at it, and
raised his eyebrows questioningly.

"I've adjusted the windage," the man said, whatever  that  meant.
"No need now to compensate for the pull."

Fontaine  clicked  the  bullet-thing  out  and ejected five empty
brass cartridges into his palm. He looked at these, looked up  at
the man. "How'd you do?"

"Three," the man said.

"I  think  they've got one," Rydell was saying. "There's this kid
here on it. You want me to try the cable? You talk to her, Laney?
She  told  me you used to talk with her a lot. . ." Rydell looked
idiotic, standing there talking to the ~ir in front of  him,  one
hand up to hold the ear bead in, the other letting that crazy-ass
gun hang down. She wished he'd put  it  somewhere,  back  in  the
wall, anywhere.

"Come  on,  Rydell," she said, but then she saw that God's Little
Toy was up against the ceiling in the front of the shop, watching
her. "Tessa? Tessa, you hear me?"

There  was  a  burst  of  squawky static, like a parrot trying to
talk.

"Tessa?"

"I'm sorry," the man in the long coat said. "The men who attacked
you  communicate on a number of specific channels. I am employing
a jammer at those frequencies." He looked at  God's  Little  Toy.
"This device's control frequencies are unaffected, but voice com-
munication is currently impossible."

"Tessa!" Chevette waved frantically at the balloon, but  it  only
continued to stare at her with its primary lens.

"What  do  you  mean, burn it?" she heard Rydell say. "Now? Right
now?" Rydell pulled the sunglasses off. "They're setting fire  to
the bridge."

"Fire?" She remembered Skinner's caution around that, how careful
people were with cooking gas, matches; how a lit butt thrown down
could earn you a broken nose.

But  Rydell  had  the sunglasses on again. "I thought you said to
get 244 out? What do you mean, leave her? Damn, Laney, why  don't
you  make  some sense for once? Why-Laney? Hey?" She saw Rydell's
tension as he took off the glasses. "Listen up. Everybody.  We're
leaving  now. Laney says they're setting fire to the bridge." Ry-
dell bent, wincing, and opened his bag, hauling this silver thing
out. She saw it glint in the light from outside. Like a big steel
thermos. He pulled out  some  coiled  cables  and  tossed  her  a
length. "Find a socket." He had another cable in his hand now and
was standing over the boy with the old  military  eye-phone  rig.
"Hey.  Kid?  We have to borrow the notebook. Hear me?" The helmet
came up and seemed to regard him blindly but sentiently, like the
head  of  a giant termite. Rydell reached down and took the note-
book, unhooking the lead to the helmet. Chevette  saw  the  boy's
mouth  close.  The  notebook's  screen showed the black dial of a
clock. No, Chevette saw, it was an old-fashioned watch,  enlarged
to the size of a baby's face.

Rydell  studied  the  two ends of the cable he held, then tried a
socket on the back of the notebook. Another. It fit. Chevette had
found  an outlet, set crookedly into one of Fontaine's walls. She
plugged the cable in and passed Rydell  the  other  end.  He  was
plugging the cable from the notebook into the silver canister. He
plugged the power cable in beside it. She thought  she  heard  it
start to hum.

And  a girl was there, pale and slim, glowing with her own light,
naked for an instant between them. And then  she  wore  Skinner's
jacket,  faded  horsehide.  Black jeans, a black sweatshirt, lug-
soled runners. Everything cleaner and somehow sharper  than  what
Chevette wore, but otherwise identical.

"I am Rei Toei," the girl said. "Berry Rydell, you must leave the
bridge now. It is burning."

"You said that you knew my name," the man in the  overcoat  said,
the  long  thin  scratch  on his face black in the light she gave
off. "In the tavern."

"Konrad," the glowing girl said, "with a 'K.'"

The man's eyebrows rose, above his round gold glasses.  "And  how
do you know that?"

"I know many things, Konrad," the girl said, and as she said it,

245  became,  for a few seconds, another girl, blonde, the irises
of her blue eyes ringed with black.

The man seemed carved from some incredibly dense wood, heavy  and
inert,  and Chevette thought for some reason of dust motes float-
ing in sunlight in an old museum, something she'd seen  once  but
could  not  remember where or when. "Lise," he said, a name as if
dredged from some deep place of pain. "Yesterday. I dreamed I saw
her, in Market Street."

"Many things are possible, Konrad."

Rydell had taken a pink fanny pack from his duffel and was strap-
ping it around his  waist.  It  had  a  grinning  cartoon  dragon
screened on the front. As Chevette watched, he zipped it open and
unfolded a pink bib, which he fastened around his neck.  The  bib
said  LUCKY  DRAGON  SECURITY  in  square  black letters. "What's
that?" Chevette asked him.

"Bulletproof," Rydell said. He turned to the glowing girl. "Laney
says  I  should leave the projector here. But that means we leave
you-"

"That is what I want," she said. "We are about to find our way to
the  heart  of  Harwood's  plan. And change it. And change every-
thing." She smiled at Rydell then, and Chevette felt a  twist  of
jealousy.

Chevette became aware of noise approaching, the revving and whin-
ing of overtaxed electric engines. There was a crashing of  metal
on  wood, and Fontaine sprang away from the door. A three-wheeled
ATV slammed to a halt outside, Tessa straddling its seat behind a
moon-faced  boy  who wore a black meshbacked cap, backward, and a
black T-shirt. Tessa was wearing her input glasses and had a con-
trol  glove on either hand. She pulled off the glasses and pushed
hair back from her eyes. "Come on, Chevette."

"Get off the damn trike, honey," the round-faced boy said. "Don't
have a lot of turning radius in here."

Tessa  hopped  off the bike and stepped into the shop, looking up
at God's Little Toy. "I'm not getting any audio," she said.

The boy punched the engines mounted in the ATV's rear  hubs,  re-
versing  one.  The  trike  lurched around and back, then forward,
turning so that he faced back toward  San  Francisco.  "Come  on,
honey,"  he  said.   248  "I'm picking up flames on two cameras,"
Tessa said. "This sucker's on fire."

"Time to go," Rydell said, putting his hand on Chevette's  shoul-
der. "Mr. Fontaine, you get you a ride here with Chevette."

"I'm not going anywhere, son," Fontaine said.

"It's on fire, Mr. Fontaine."

"It's where I live."

"Come  on, Rydell," Chevette said, grabbing him by his waistband.

Tessa had climbed back on, behind her meshbacked driver, and  was
putting  her  input glasses on. "Jesus," Tessa said, "I don't be-
lieve the angles I'm getting. .

Chevette tugged Rydell through the door and climbed on  the  back
of  the ATV~ sort of sidesaddle, leaving room for Rydell. "Wait,"
Rydell said, "we can't just leave them here.

"We'? Hey, boy, I'm not carrying you-" But the moon-faced boy saw
the chain gun then and stopped.

"Go  on,"  said  Fontaine,  who stood now with his arm around the
shoulder of the boy who'd worn the helmet,  whose  eyes  regarded
Rydell with a sort of animal calm. "Go on. We'll be okay here."

"I'm sorry," Rydell said. "I'm sorry about your shop

"Your ass be sorry, you don't get out of here."

Chevette heard a woman start screaming, toward San Francisco. She
yanked his waistband, hard. The fly button popped off his khakis.
He  climbed  on the back of the ATV opposite her, hanging on with
one hand, the chain gun in the other.

The last she saw of the glowing girl, she was saying something to
the  man she'd called Konrad. Then Tessa's meshback popped it and
they took off toward the  city.  "Good-bye,  Fontaine,"  Chevette
shouted, but she doubted he ever heard her.

Remembering  the  night  of a hill fire above the sharehouse, the
birds in the brush all around the house waking in the dark, sens-
ing it. All their voices.

And now through the plywood patchwork overhead she hears it too:

the drumming of conflagration.
 247  60.     RATS KNOW FONTAINE knows the bridge is burning when
he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then an-
other, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be
most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly  by
the  bridge's host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral
children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and
surgical  tubing.  These bridge slingshots are lethal not only to
rats, their users favoring balls of dense damp clay, a trick held
over from the Middle Ages and not to be underestimated.

Fontaine  watches the rats flash past and sighs. He has a fire ax
here, somewhere, salvage from a tug sank in China Basin in  2003,
and  an  extinguisher  too, but he can't imagine these will be of
much use, although chopping a hole in the back wall  and  falling
into  the  bay is a possibility. He wonders if there actually are
sharks there, as the bridge children like to  believe.  He  knows
for  a  fact there are mutant fish, warped, it is said, by oxides
leaching off the piers of the cable towers.

But Fontaine has survived many disasters, both municipal and mar-
ital,  and  there is in him that which believes, against all odds
or hope, that all will simply, somehow, be well. Or that  in  any
case  there  is usually not much to be done about certain things,
or in any case not by him.

So, now, rather than digging through the closet, where he  remem-
bers,  possibly, putting that fire ax, he picks up his push broom
and begins tidying the front of the shop, sweeping as much of the
glass  as possible into a single drift beside the door. Glass, he
reflects, sweeping, is one of those substances that takes up rel-
atively  little  space until you break it. But it is also, he re-
calls being told, if considered over truly  cosmic  stretches  of
time,  a liquid. All the glass in every pane in every window, ev-
erywhere, is in the infinitely slow process of melting,  sagging,
sliding  down, except it would be unlikely that any one pane sur-
vive the millennia required to be reduced to a solid puddle.

While outside the rats are being joined by fleeing humans, as di-
verse  a  company  of them as only the bridge can offer. He hopes
that 24.8 Clarisse and the  children  are  safe;  he's  tried  to
phone,  but no answer, and there seemed little point in leaving a
message, under the circumstances.

He looks back and sees Rydell's hologram girlfriend kneeling  be-
side  the  bunk, talking to the boy. Beside the boy sits the pro-
fessor who had borrowed the Kit Gun,  and  they  strike  Fontaine
just  then  as  a  family group, unlikely perhaps but not without
warmth. Fontaine has lived long enough with technological  change
that  he really doesn't question the why or what of the girl: she
is like a game program that comes out and sits in your  room,  he
thinks, and some people would like that just fine.

Now he comes to an obstacle in his sweeping: the butchered Anoth-
er One dolls in their puddle of  consensual  silicone.  At  least
none  of  them are talking now. It looks terrible, cruel, when he
pushes the broom up against them, amid shards  of  glass,  so  he
leans the broom against the counter, fishes one from the glass by
its limp arms. He carries the  faux  Japanese  baby  outside  and
stretches it on its back in front of the shop. The others follow,
and he is laying out the last when a fat woman,  fleeing  heavily
toward  Treasure Island, clutching what appears to be a bedsheet-
load of wet laundry, notices what  he  is  doing  and  starts  to
scream.  And  screams  all the way out of sight, and can still be
heard as he turns back into the shop, thinking of Tourmaline, his
first wife.

There  is smoke in the air now, and maybe it is time to find that
ax.

249 THAT shape that Laney sees when he looks at Harwood,  at  the
idoru, at Rydell, and these others, has never before been a place
for him, an inhabitable space. Now, driven by a new urgency  (and
augmented  by virtually the entire population of the Walled City,
working in a mode of simultaneity that very  nearly  approximates
unison)  he  succeeds in actually being there, within a space de-
fined by the emerging factors of the nodal point. It is  a  place
where metaphor collapses, a descriptive black hole. He is no more
able to describe it to himself, experiencing it, than he would be
able to describe it to another.

Yet  what  it  most  nearly  resembles,  that place where history
turns, is the Hole he has posited at the core of  his  being:  an
emptiness, as devoid of darkness as it is of light.

And  Harwood, he knows immediately, though without knowing how he
knows, is there.

-Harwood?

-Cohn Laney. An evening for miracles. The unexpected.

-You told them to burn the bridge.

-Is there no privacy?

-You're trying to stop her, aren't you?

-I suppose I am, yes, although without knowing exactly what it is
I'm  attempting to stop her from doing. She's an emergent system.
She doesn't know herself.

-Do you? Do you know what you want?

-I want the advent of a degree of functional nanotechnology in  a
world that will remain recognizably descended from the one I woke
in this morning. I want my world  transfigured,  yet  I  want  my
place  in  that world to be equivalent to the one I now occupy. I
want to have my cake and eat it too. I want  a  free  lunch.  And
I've found the way to have it, it seems. Though you have too. And
what,  we  have  to  ask  ourselves,  went  wrong   there?    250
61.     FUTUREMATIC -You chose it. You chose to take 5-SB. In the
orphanage, we volunteered to be test subjects, but we had no idea
what we were taking.

-And  I  chose  to take 5-SB based on results collected from you,
Laney. You and a girl named Jennifer Mo, who subsequently  became
the homicidally obsessed stalker of an astonishingly boring actor
named Kevin  Burke.  She  committed  suicide  while  holding  him
hostage at a meditation retreat in Idaho.

Laney knows the story of Jennifer Mo; it has haunted him since he
first read it, several years ago, as a classified government doc-
ument.

-Why hasn't it gotten you, Harwood? Why hasn't it kicked in?

-Perhaps because I'm too perfectly self-obsessed to become inter-
ested in anyone else. It's been all gravy for me. The  next  best
thing  to  knowing the future. Better, actually: just that little
degree of free will and we're so much more happy, aren't we?  And
looking  backward  is very nearly as much fun as looking forward,
though our digital soup does thin out rather  rapidly,  that  way
down the time-line. Amazing, though: that business around Curie's
husband... Changed everything, and who knows? I ask  you,  Laney,
who knows?

-We do.

-Yes, we do.

-It's changing again. Tonight.

-This morning, rather. Pacific Standard. Very early. But, yes, it
is. And I'm here to see that it changes in the directions I  pre-
fer it to, and not in others.

-We're going to try to stop you.

-Of  course.  That's  the  shape  of  things tonight, isn't it? I
couldn't expect otherwise.

Now Laney feels two things simultaneously: a  coldness,  physical
and inescapable, rising beneath his heart, and the secret, ranked
presence of the individual inhabitants of the  Walled  City,  ar-
rayed  behind  him like clay soldiers set to march forever across
the floor of an emperor's tomb. Yet these will move, should Laney
require them, and he senses as well the presence of Rei Toei, and
he knows that the configuration is not yet complete.
 251 -She's here, Laney. She's in the flow. You've done that, you
and  your friends. But it won't help now, because I'm going where
you won't find me. For the duration. Till the deal is done.  Your
friends aren't the only ones who learned how to secede.

And  with the cold rising around his heart, Laney knows that this
is true, that Harwood is going now, inverting himself into an in-
formational  wormhole  of the sort the Walled City exists within-
And reaches down (it seems like down, though in this place there

is neither direction nor ordination), a legion reaching with him,
to  find-  252  62.     LOS PROJECTOS SILENCIO is remembering the
rusting cans of fire, in the yards of los projectos, how the  men
stand and spit and warm their hands. Playboy and Raton he had met
around such a fire, and now there is the smell  of  the  cans  in
this  room,  and  he  is  frightened, and even this kind one, who
makes her own light and speaks to him  in  the  language  of  his
mother (but kind) will not keep the fear away, and he wishes only
to return to the watches, to their faces and conditions and  val-
ues,  this  universe that has discovered him, this mode of being,
without which there is only the fear.

Crouching here on the black man's bed, the kind one  glowing  be-
side  him,  he feels the fear come very big, and the black man in
the closet, throwing things out,  and  Silencio  wants  only  the
watches.

At  the  edge  of  his  mind wait men with dog's teeth and wings,
their faces blacker than the face  of  the  black  man  with  the
watches. Their faces are the black of the drug men rub into their
gums.

"Bring the projector closer," she tells the  man,  this  one  who
stilled  Playboy  and  Raton, and Silencio sees that for the time
she speaks she is another, her hair smooth gold, the bones of her
face another's bones. "Bring the notebook. Be very careful of the
cable." And the man shifts the silver thing Silencio  fears  (now
Silencio fears everything) closer, and brings the watch finder to
the bed, still on its wire.

"Connect the eyephones. Quickly!" The man puts the wire from  the
hat into the watch finder and hands Silencio the hat. Inside, Si-
lencio sees, are the pictures that fit against the eyes, and they
are pictures of the watch on the screen of the finder, and Silen-
cio feels relief, the fear moving  away,  back  to  the  edge  of
things  where  the  dog-toothed men are. He puts the hat over his
eyes.

And is in another  place,  nothing  up  or  down,  but  something
spreading  forever,  wider than the yards of los projectos or any
other. space he has ever seen.

But the one who shines is there, and  beside  her  another,  less
clear.
 253  "This is Mister Laney," she says, in the language of Silen-
cio's mother. "You must help him. He needs to find a watch.  This
watch."  And she holds in her palm the watch Silencio had seen on
the screen. It is a LeCoultre "Futurematic," a back-winder, black
dial,  with  wind  reserve. Silencio knows its serial number, its
bid history, its number in today's auction. "Someone is taking it
away, and you must follow it."

Silencio  looks from the beautiful face of the Futurematic to the
face of the woman.

"You must find it for him-"

And the watch is gone, and she is gone, and the other  with  her,
leaving  Silencio  in  that  place that is only wide, and without
color or shape, and Silencio thinks he might cry now.

But very far away, he feels it, the watch. He knows it, and it is
there  still, but only this distance, these gray fields of light.
Gone again.

No. There is the system: the system of all the watches. Similari-
ties.  Differences.  The  words. A coding. Nothing is lost within
the system, and the Futurematic rises inside as  though  it  were
lifting through clear water. It is within his grasp.

And gone again. Blankness.

No. He wants it. He enters the system again.

He crosses the gray fields, seeing only the Futurematic. Where it
has gone...  254 RYDELL had had a certain amount of  riot-control
training in Knoxville and knew something, in theory anyway, about
fires and natural disasters, but nothing had prepared him for the
weirdness of clinging one-handed to the back of an ATV, while El-
more, the meshback Chevette's  friend  had  somehow  talked  into
driving, gunned it back toward Bryant Street through the bridge's
upper level. Rydell had never seen a vehicle here  before,  aside
from  bicycles,  and he suspected that under normal circumstances
they wouldn't have been allowed to get very far.

But these were not normal circumstances, nor was this in any  way
a normal place. People were boiling out of the upper parts of the
squatter's community like ants out of a  broken  nest,  and  what
struck Rydell about it now was the quiet with which they were do-
ing it. These were not, in some sense,  civilians,  but  hardened
survivors  used  to living on their own in a community of similar
people. There were a few people screaming, and  probably  running
the  wrong  way, or in circles, but from the moving vantage point
of the bucking, pitchingATV~ it was hard to  tell.  Rydell's  im-
pression  was  mainly  of  determination; they'd decided that the
place was burning, and they'd decided they were getting out. Most
people seemed to be carrying something. A few were carrying small
children, more carried household goods, and Rydell  had  seen  at
least three carrying guns.

Elmore's  style of getting through the crowd was straightforward;
he'd gun it toward whoever was in his way, sounding an irritating
little  horn that Rydell suspected nobody was hearing anyway, and
trust that people would get out of his way. Which they managed to
do,  some just barely, until the ATV's right back wheel clipped a
stack of yellow plastic vegetable crates and brought that down on
top  of a couple of heavily tattooed characters in lederhosen and
paint-splattered construction boots. Elmore had to hit the brakes
then, and Rydell saw Chevette flip off; he couldn't grab her, be-
cause he had the chain gun in the hand nearest her and no way  to
put it down.

Blocked by the pile of empty yellow crates, Elmore whipped it in-
to
 255 63.     FUNICULAR reverse, pulled back about four feet,  and
popped it, plowing into the crates and the men in lederhosen, who
promptly went lateral, swarming over the pile of crates and grab-
bing  Elmore,  who  didn't look to Rydell like fighting material.
"Get off him," Chevette's girlfriend shouted, trying to keep from
being  pulled  from  the saddle with the driver. Rydell slung the
chain gun up and put it in the face of one of the  tattooed  men.
The  guy  blinked at it, looked Rydell in the eye, and started to
go after him, but some cop reflex caused Rydell to bellow  "LAPD!
Get on the ground!"-which made absolutely no sense under the cir-
cumstances, but seemed to work. "This is a gun,"  he  added,  and
remembered  Fontaine's advice that the chain gun was anything but
directional.

"You people are crazy," snapped one of the tattooed men,  barech-
ested  and  elaborately inked, scrambling over the yellow crates,
the light catching on a round steel stud in his  lower  lip.  His
partner was right behind him.

Rydell  jumped  down  and  found Chevette struggling to extricate
herself from what seemed to be a pile of squashed eggplant. As he
was  turning  back to the ATV, he saw a woman with a crew cut and
serious biceps tackle Elmore, who went over into the crates.

"Where's Tessa?"

"I don't know," said Rydell, taking Chevette's hand.  "Come  on."
As  soon as they were away from the ATV, which in any case wasn't
going anywhere, Rydell began to get the idea that  something  was
seriously wrong here. While most of the way from Fontaine's, peo-
ple had been running toward Bryant, now he saw they were  running
back,  and  now  you  could  see  the fear. "I think it's burning
there, by the ramp," Rydell said. You could see  the  smoke  now,
and Rydell noticed how quickly it was thickening.

"Where's Tessa?"

"Lost her."

A  young  girl  came  running, screaming, with her shirt on fire,
from the direction  of  the  city.  Rydell  tripped  her,  handed
Chevette  the chain gun, and bent to roll the girl over, smother-
ing the flames. The girl just kept screaming, and then she was up
and  running,  though  Rydell  saw that her shirt had been extin-
guished. He took the chain gun back from 256 Chevette. "We  don't
want  to  try  that  way," he said. He didn't want to think about
what might be happening there, if the crowd was trying  to  force
its  way  through flame. "Come on, let's try this." He tugged her
through the doorway of a café, deserted, cups of  coffee  on  the
tables,  music playing calmly, steam rising from a pot of soup on
a hotplate behind the counter. He pulled her behind the  counter,
and  into  the  tight  little kitchen, but found that while there
were windows, they'd been barred against thieves with elaborately
welded  grids  of rebar. "Shit," he said, leaning to peer through
the salt-crusted pane, trying to estimate the drop here, in  case
they could find a way.

Now it was her turn to grab him, pull him out, but she pulled him
out into the path of a fresh batch  of  panicked  bridge  people,
fleeing  whatever  was  happening  toward  Bryant. They both went
down, and Rydell saw the chain gun drop through a  hole  sawn  in
the deck to admit a bundle of sewage-tubing. He braced for an ex-
plosion when the thing hit bottom, but none came.

"Look," Chevette said, getting to her feet, pointing,  "we're  at
the foot of Skinner's tower. Let's try to get up there."

"There's no way off that," Rydell protested, his side killing him
as he got up.

"There's nothing to burn, either," she said,  "once  you're  past
the 'ponics operation."

"Smoke'll get us."

"You  don't know that," she said, "but down here it'll get us for
sure." She looked at him. "I'm sorry, Rydell."

"Why?"

"Because I was trying to make all this your fault."

"I sure hope it's not," he said.

"How've you been?"

Rydell grinned, in spite of everything, that she'd ask  him  this
now.

"I missed you," he said.

She hesitated. "Me too." Then she grabbed his hand again, heading
for the plastic around the foot of the cable tower. It looked  as
though  people  had cut their way out. Chevette stepped through a
five-foot slit. Rydell ducked to follow her. Into warm jungle air
and the smell of
 257  chemical fertilizer. But there was smoke here too, swirling
under the glare of the grow lights.  Chevette  started  coughing.
Shadows  of  people fleeing raced across the translucent plastic.
Chevette went to a ladder and started climbing. Rydell groaned.

"What?" She stopped and looked down.

"Nothing," he said, starting up after her, biting  his  lip  each
time he had to raise his arms.

In  the  distance he could hear sirens, a weird, rising cacophony
that blended together, wove in and out, like a concert  performed
by  robot  wolves. He wondered if it had sounded like that in the
minutes after the Little Big One.

He really didn't know how much of this ladder he could manage. It
was metal, stuck to the wall with that super-goop they used here,
and he looked up and saw Chevette's plastic-cleated  feet  vanish
through a triangular opening.

And  he  realized he was smiling, because that really was her and
those really were her feet, and she'd said she'd missed him.  The
rest  of  the  way  didn't  seem  so hard, but when he got up and
through, sitting on the edge for a breather, he  saw  that  she'd
started climbing up the slanted girder, hanging on to either side
of the blunt-toothed track that the little car,  which  he  could
make out up at the top, ran on.

"Jesus," Rydell said, imagining himself having to follow her.

"Stay  there," she said, over her shoulder, "I'll try to bring it
down for you." Rydell watched her climb,  worried  about  grease,
but  she  just  kept going, and soon she was there, climbing into
the car, which from here looked like one of the  waste  bins  out
behind Lucky Dragon, but smaller.

Rydell  heard  an electric engine whine. With a creak, the little
car, Chevette in it, started down.

He got to his feet and the smoke caught in his  lungs,  his  side
stabbing him each time he coughed.

"Somebody's been up here," she said, when she reached the bottom.
"The grease shows it. I was up here earlier, looking around,  and
there was dust on it."

"Somebody  probably  lives  here," Rydell said, looking around at
the dark flimsy walls that sheathed the tower twelve feet up from
the  plat  258 form he stood on. He climbed into the car, and she
pushed a button. The car groaned, creaked,  and  started  up  the
girder.

The  first  thing Rydell wasn't prepared for, as they cleared the
screening wall, was the extent of the fire. It looked  as  though
the  end  by  Bryant  was completely aflame, huge clouds of black
smoke billowing up into the night sky. Through that he could  see
the lights of emergency vehicles, dozens of them, it looked like,
and above the creaking of the cog wheel he could still  hear  the
concert  of  wailing  sirens.  "Jesus," he said. He looked in the
other direction, toward  Treasure,  and  that  was  burning  too,
though  it  didn't  seem as intense, but maybe that was just dis-
tance.

"You got a flashlight?" Chevette asked.

He unzipped his Lucky Dragon fanny pack and fished out  a  little
Lucky  Dragon  disposable  he'd  helped  himself  to  back in LA.
Chevette twisted it on and started up the ladder that led to  the
hole  in  the  floor  of the little tower-top cube she'd lived in
when Rydell had met her. Just a square opening there, and he  saw
her shine the light into it. "It's open," she said, not too loud,
and that made Rydell start up after her.

When he climbed through, into the single room,  she  was  shining
the  light  around.  There  was  nothing here, just some garbage.
There was a round hole in one wall, where Rydell remembered there
had been an old stained-glass window before.

He  saw  the  expression  on her face in the glow from the flash-
light. "It's really not here anymore," she said, as if she didn't
quite  believe  herself.  "I  guess  I  thought it would still be
here."

"Nobody lives here now" Rydell said, not sure why he had.

"Roof hatch is open too," Chevette said, shining the light up.

Rydell went to the old ladder bolted to the wall and started  up,
feeling damp splintery wood against his palms. He was starting to
get the idea this might have been a very bad  idea,  climbing  up
here, because if the whole bridge were going to burn, they proba-
bly weren't going to make it. He knew the smoke was as  dangerous
as the fire, and he wasn't sure she understood that.

And the second thing he wasn't prepared for, as he stuck his head
up through the hatch, was the barrel of a  gun  thrust  into  his
ear.

His buddy with the scarf.

259  64.     TAG  AND  as  Harwood recedes, and the rest of it as
well, amid this spreading cold, and Laney feels,  as  at  a  very
great  distance,  his legs spasming within their tangle of sleep-
ing-bags and candy wrappers, Rci Toci is there,  and  passes  him
this  sigil,  clockface,  round  seal,  the  twelve hours of day,
twelve of night, black lacquer and golden numerals, and he places
it on the space that Harwood occupied.

And  sees  it  drawn  in,  drawn infinitely away, into that place
where Harwood is going; drawn by the mechanism of  inversion  it-
self, and then it is gone.

And Laney is. going too, though not with Harwood.

"Gotcha," Laney says, to the dark in his fetid box, down amid the
subsonic sighing of commuter trains and the constant  clatter  of
passing feet.

And  finds  himself  in Florida sunlight, upon the broad concrete
steps leading up to the bland entrance to a federal orphanage.

A girl named Jennifer is there, his age exactly, in a blue  denim
skirt  and  a white T-shirt, her black bangs straight and glossy,
and she is walking, heel to toe, heel to toe,  arms  outstretched
for  balance,  as if along a tightrope, down the very edge of the
topmost step.

Balancing so seriously.

As if, were she to fall, she might fall forever.

And Laney smiles, to see her, remembering the orphanage's smells:

jelly sandwiches, disinfectant, modeling clay, clean sheets...

And  the  cold  is  everywhere, now, somewhere, but he is home at
last.  260 65.     OPEN AIR FONTAINE, wielding the  ax  now,  re-
flects  that  he has lived quite a long time and yet this experi-
ence is new: to lift the heavy head above his own  and  bring  it
down  against  the  shop's rear wall, the plywood booming. He's a
little surprised at how it simply bounces off, but with his  next
swing he's reversed the head, so that the sharp, four-inch spike,
rather than the blade, contacts the wall, and this digs most sat-
isfyingly  in,  and  on a third blow penetrates, and he redoubles
his efforts.

"Need us some air," he says, as much to himself  as  to  the  two
seated on his bunk, the gray-haired man and the boy with his head
down, lost in the helmet again. To look at these two, you'd think
there was no problem, that the bridge wasn't burning.

Where'd that hologram girl go?

Still,  this  chopping  is getting somewhere, though his arms are
already aching. Hole there the size of a saucer, and getting big-
ger.

No  idea  what he'll do when he's got it big enough, but he likes
to keep busy.

And this is the way it always is, for  Fontaine,  when  he  knows
that  things  are  bad, very bad indeed, and very likely over. He
likes to keep busy.
 261 66.     BULKL]FT CHEVETTE climbs through the  hatch  in  the
roof of Skinner's room to find Rydell kneeling there in his Lucky
Dragon security bib, but the critical factor here is the man from
the  bar,  the  one who shot Carson, who's got a gun pressed into
Rydell's ear and is watching her, and smiling.

He's not much older than she is, she thinks, with his black  buzz
cut and his black leather coat, his scarf wrapped just so, casual
but you know he takes time with it, and she  wonders  how  it  is
people  get  this  way, that they'll stick a gun in someone's ear
and you know they'll use it. And why does  it  seem  that  Rydell
finds people like that, or do they find him?

And  behind  him  she can see a plume of water arcing higher than
the bridge, and knows that that must be from a fireboat,  because
she's seen one used when a pier on the Embarcadero burned.

God, it's strange up here, now, with the night sky all smoke, the
flames, lights of the city  swimming  and  dimmed  as  the  smoke
rolls.  Little  glowing  red  worms are falling, winking out, all
around her, and the smell of burning. She knows she doesn't  want
Rydell hurt but she isn't afraid. She just isn't now, she doesn't
know why.

Something on the roof beside her and she sees that it's a  glider
up  on  its own little frame, staked to the asphalt-coated wooden
roof with bright sharp spikes.

And other things piled beside it:  black  nylon  bags,  what  she
takes  to  be bedding. Like someone's ready to camp here, if they
need to, and she understands the buzz-cut boy wanted to  be  cov-
ered, if he had to stay, to hide. And it comes to her that proba-
bly he's responsible for the burning of the bridge, and how  many
dead  already, and he's just smiling there, like he's glad to see
her, his gun in Rydell's ear.

Rydell looks sad. So sad now.

"You killed Carson," she heard herself say.

"Who?"  262 "Carson. In the bar."

"He was doing a pretty good job putting your lights out."

"He was an asshole," she said, "but you didn't have to kill him."

"Fortunately,"  he  said, "it isn't about who's an asshole. If it
were, our work would never be done."

"Can you fly this?" Pointing at the glider.

"Absolutely. I'm going to take this gun out of your ear now,"  he
said  to Rydell. He did. She saw Rydell's eyes move; he was look-
ing at her. The boy with the buzz cut hit him in  the  head  with
the  gun.  Rydell toppled over. Lay there like a big broken doll.
One of the glowing red worms fell on his stupid pink bib,  burned
a  black mark. "I'm going to leave you here," he said. He pointed
the gun at one of Rydell's legs. "Kneecap," he said.

"Don't," she said.

He smiled. "Lay down over there. By the edge. On  your  stomach."
The gun never moved.

She did as she was told.

"Put your hands behind your head."

She did.

"Stay that way.

She  could  watch him out of the corner of her eye, moving toward
the glider. The black fabric of its simple  triangular  wing  was
catching a breeze now, thrumming with it.

She  saw him duck under the kite-like wing and come up within the
carbon-fiber framework extending beneath it. There was a control-
bar there; she'd seen people fly these on Real One.

He still had the gun in his hand but it wasn't pointed at Rydell.

She could smell the asphalt caked on  the  roof.  She  remembered
spreading  it with Skinner on a hot windless day, how they heated
the hard bucket of tar with a propane-ring.

The world Skinner had helped build was burning now, and  she  and
Rydell  might burn now with it, but the boy with the buzz cut was
ready to fly.

"Can you make it to the Embarcadero with that?"

263 "Easily," he said. She saw him shove the gun into the  pocket
of  his  black coat and grip the bar with both hands, lifting the
glider. The breeze caught at it. He walked into the wind, remind-
ing  her somehow of a crow walking, one of those big ravens she'd
grown up seeing, in Oregon. He was within a few feet of the  edge
now,  the side of Skinner's room that faced China Creek. "You and
your friend here caused me a great deal  of  trouble,"  he  said,
"but you're either going to burn to death or asphyxiate now, so I
suppose we're even." He looked out, stepped forward.

And Chevette, without having made any conscious decision at  all,
found  herself on her feet, moving, drawing the knife Skinner had
left for her. And ripping it down, as he stepped from  the  edge,
through  the black fabric, a three-foor slash, from near the cen-
ter and straight out through the trailing edge.

He never made a sound, then, as he went fluttering down,  faster,
spinning like a leaf, until he struck something and was gone.

She realized that she was standing at the very edge, her toes out
over empty air, and she took a step back. She looked at the knife
in  her  hand, at the pattern locked there by the beaten links of
motorcycle chain. Then she tossed it over,  turned  and  went  to
kneel  beside Rydell. His head was bleeding, from somewhere above
the hairline. His eyes were open, but  he  seemed  to  be  having
trouble focusing.

"Where is he?" Rydell asked.

"Don't move your head," she said. "He's gone."

The  breeze  shifted,  bringing them smoke so thick the city van-
ished. They both started to cough.

"What's that sound?" Rydell managed, trying  to  crane  his  neck
around.

She thought it must be the sound of the fire, but it resolved in-
to a steady drumming, and she looked out to see, just level  with
her,  it  seemed, the block-wide impossible brow of a greasy-gray
bulklifter, OMAHA TRANSFER painted across it  in  letters  thirty
feet  high. "Jesus Christ," she said, as the thing was upon them,
its smooth, impossibly vast girth so close she  might  touch  it.
264 r And then it jettisoned its cargo, close to two million gal-
lons of pure glacial water destined for the towns  south  of  Los
Angeles,  and  she  could only cling to Rydell and keep her mouth
shut against the weight and the surge of it,  and  then  she  was
somewhere  else,  and  drifting,  and  it seemed so long, so long
since she'd slept.
 265 67.     SILVER CASTLE IN the gray fields  Silencio  finds  a
silver  castle, an empty place and somehow new. There are no peo-
ple here, only empty hallways, and he wonders why  someone  would
build such a thing.

The  system  of  the  watches leads him deeper, deep within, each
hallway like the last, and he is tired of this, but  the  Future-
matic is there still, and he will find it.

And  when  he  does, at last, in a very small room at the root of
the silver world, he discovers that he is not alone.

There is a man, and the man looks at Silencio and  does  not  be-
lieve Silencio is there, and the man's eyes fill with a fear that
Silencio feels must mirror his own fear, and Silencio  wishes  to
tell  the man he has only come here to find the watch, because it
is part of the system of hands and faces  and  applied  numerals,
and  Silencio means no harm, but the man's eyes are like the eyes
of those to whom Raton shows the knife, and someone coughs behind
Silencio.  And  turning, Silencio sees a terrible man, whose head
is a cloud of blood, and whose mouth is  open  in  a  red-toothed
scream,  and  the mouth does not move when this man says, "Hello,
Harwood."

But now somehow he is with the bright one again.

She tells Silencio to remove the hat, and he does, inside it  the
pictures  of  the  castle,  fading,  and  the room is filled with
smoke, and out through the broken door is  more  smoke,  and  the
black  man,  the  gray branches of his hair hanging limp now, has
cut a hole in the wall with his ax. Not a big hole  but  he  puts
his  head and shoulders out through it now, and Silencio sees him
jerk as if something strikes him. And he draws back inside,  eyes
wide, and wet, wet, running with water, and water is falling past
the hole and the gray hair sticks in its  tangles  to  the  man's
face,  and  now  more  water  comes  down, into the tunnel like a
street, beyond the door, so much water.  266 And the man  in  the
long coat is standing there, hands in his pockets, and he watches
the water come down, and Silencio sees the lines  in  this  man's
cheeks  deepen.  Then this man nods to Silencio, and to the black
man, and goes out through the broken door.

Silencio wonders if it is wet in the silver castle too.

267 68.     THE ABSOLUTE AT LARGE BOOMZILLA in the Lucky  Dragon,
back  in there for what he knows is the first time they work this
Lucky Dragon Nanofax, not a game but how you copy solid shit from
one store to another. Not sure he gets that but there's free can-
dy and big drinks for the kids, of which he is opting to be  very
definitely one, right now, but it's gone sideways with the bridge
burning, and those motherfucker bulklifters come drop a  fuckload
of  water  on  it, got about a hundred fire trucks and everything
here, police, tactical squads, helicopters  up  in  the  air,  so
Lucky  Dragon  can't do the special thing for the first time they
use the Lucky Dragon Nanofax, manager's going lateral, walks  the
aisle  talking  to  himself.  But the store's doing business big-
time, home office won't let him close,  and  Boomzilla's  started
eating  candy  bars  free because the securities are watching the
smoke still rise off the wet black garbage, all that's left  this
end,  so  you  can see the real bridge there, the old part, black
too, hanging out in the air like something's bones.

And finally the manager comes and reads from a  notebook,  ladies
and gentlemen, this momentous occasion, jaw jaw, and now they are
placing the first object in the  unit  in  our  Singapore  branch
(Boomzilla  sees  on  TV, out on the pylon, it's a gold statue of
the Lucky Dragon himself, smiling) and it will now be reproduced,
at a molecular level, in every branch of our chain throughout the
world.

Checker and two securities, they clap. Boomzilla sucks on the ice
in the bottom of his big drink. Waits.

Lucky Dragon Nanofax has a hatch on the front Boomzilla could fit
through, he wanted to,  and  he  wonders  would  that  make  more
Boomzillas  other  places and could he trust those motherfuckers?
If he could, he'd have a tight posse but he  doesn't  trust  any-
body, why should they?

Light over the hatch turns green, and the hatch slides up and out
crawls, unfolds sort of, this butt-naked girl, black hair,  maybe
Chinese,  Japanese, something, she's long and thin, not much tit-
ties on her the 268 way Boomzilla likes but  she's  smiling,  and
everybody,  the manager, checker, securities, they jaw-hang, eyes
popped: girl straightening up, still smiling, and walks  fast  to
the  front of the store, past the security counter, and Boomzilla
sees her reach up and open the door, just right on out, and it'll
take  more than a naked Japanese girl get anybody's attention out
there, in the middle of this disaster shit.

But the crazy thing is, and he really doesn't get this,  standing
looking  out through the doors at the video pylon, so that he has
to go outside and fire up his  last  Russian  Marlboro  to  think
about  it,  after, is that when he sees her walk past the screens
there, he sees her on every last screen,  walking  out  of  every
Lucky Dragon in the world, wearing that same smile.

Boomzilla still thinking about this when his Marlboro's done, but
thinks it's time for a  Lucky  Dragon  Muff-Lette  microwave,  he
thinks  of  that as his businessman's breakfast, and he's got the
money but when he gets back in they got  no  Muff-Lette,  fucking
firemen ate them all.

"Fuck  that," he tells them. 'Why don't you fax me one from fuck-
ing Paris?"

So security throws his ass out.

269 69.     EVERYTHING TAKES FOREVER RYDELL  wakes  to  pain,  in
what  has  been  the  nearest approximation of heaven he's known,
this miraculously dry, brand-new,  extremely  high-tech  sleeping
bag,  curled  beside  Chevette,  his ribs on fire, and lies there
listening to the helicopters swarming like dragonflies, wondering
if  there's  maybe  something bad for you in the stuff that holds
duct tape on.

They'd found this bag, hermetically sealed in its stuff sack,  in
the wake of the flood, snagged on one of the spikes that held the
scarf's hang-glider rack to the roof. And no  more  welcome  find
there  ever  was,  to get out of wet clothes and into dry warmth,
the bag's bottom water-and probably bullet-proof as well, a  very
expensive  piece  of  ordnance.  And  lie there watching two more
bulklifters come, huge, slow-moving cargo  drones  diverted  from
their  courses,  it will turn out, according to a plan arrived at
several years before by a team of NoCal contingency planners,  to
dump still more water, extinguishing the fire at the Treasure end
and damping down the central span as well. And each one, depleted
and  limp,  starting  to  rise immediately, free of ballast, in a
sort of awkward elephantine ballet.

And held each other, up there, into the dawn, sea breeze carrying
away the smell of burning.

Now  Rydell  lies awake, looking at Chevette's bare shoulder, and
thinking nothing much at all although  breakfast  does  begin  to
come to mind after a while, though he can wait.

"Chevette?"  Voice from some tinny little speaker. He looks up to
see a silver Mylar balloon straining  on  a  tether,  camera  eye
peering at them.

Chevette stirs. "Tessa?"

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," she says, voice sleepy. "What about you?"

"It's  a  feature," the voice from the balloon says. "Action. Big
budget. I've got footage you won't believe."

"What do you mean it's a feature?"  270 "I'm signed. They flew up
this morning. What are you doing up there?"

"Trying  to sleep," Chevette says and rolls over, pulling the bag
over her head.

Rydell lies watching the balloon bob on its tether, until finally
he sees it withdrawn.

He  sits  up and rubs his face. Rolls out of the bag, and stands,
stiffly, a naked man with a big patch of silver duct tape  across
his  ribs,  wondering how many TV screens he's making, right now.
He hobbles over to the hatch and climbs down into darkness, where
he relieves himself against a wall.

"Rydell?"

Rydell starts, getting his ankle wet.

It's Creedmore, sitting on the floor, knees up, wet-look head be-
tween his hands. "Rydell," Creedmore says, "you got  anything  to
drink?"

"What are you doing up here, Buell?"

"Got  in that greenhouse thing down there. Thought there'd be wa-
ter there. Then I figured my ass would boil like a  fucking  cat-
fish, so I climbed up here. Sons of bitches."

"Who?"

"I'm  fucked,"  Creedmore  says,  ignoring the question. "Randy's
canceled my contract and the goddamn bridge has burned down. Some
debut, huh? Jesus."

"You could write a song about it, I guess."

Creedmore  looks  up at him with utter despair. He swallows. When
he speaks, there is no trace of accent: "Are you really from Ten-
nessee?"

"Sure," Rydell says.

"I wish to fuck I was," Creedmore says, his voice small, but loud
in the hollow of this empty wooden box, sunlight falling  through
the  square  hole  above, lighting a section of two-by-fours laid
long way up to make a solid floor.

"Where you from, Buell?" Rydell asks.

"Son of a bitch," Creedmore says, the accent returning, "New Jer-
sey."

271 And then he starts to cry.

Rydell climbs back up and stands on the ladder with just his head
out, looking toward San Francisco. Whatever Laney was  on  about,
that  end of the world thing, everything changing, it looked like
it hadn't happened.

Rydell looks over at the black mound of sleeping bag and reads it
as containing that which he most desires, desires to cherish, and
the wind shifts, catching his hair, and when he climbs  the  rest
of the way, back up into sunlight, he still hears Creedmore weep-
ing in the room below.  272 70.     COURTESY CALL IN the  cab  to
Transamerica  he  closes  his  eyes, seeing the watch he gave the
boy, where time arcs in one direction only across a  black  face,
interior  time  gone rudderless now, unmoored by a stranger's re-
construction of Lise's face. The hands of the watch trace a radi-
um  orbit,  moments  back-to-back.  He  senses some spiral of un-
leashed possibility in the morning, though not for him.

The bridge, behind him now,  perhaps  forever,  is  a  medium  of
transport  become  a  destination:  salt air, scavenged neon, the
sliding cries of gulls. He has glimpsed the edges of a life there
that  he  feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder
arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion.

Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of  those
who  order  the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly
fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of  pure  information,
some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses
somehow will never now arrive, or not in the  form  his  career's
employers have imagined.

In the atrium he describes the purpose of his visit as a courtesy
call. He is disarmed, searched, cuffed, and taken, per  Harwood's
orders, by his seven captors, into an elevator.

And  as  its doors close he feels grateful that they are excited,
and inexperienced, and have cuffed his  hands  in  front,  rather
than behind his back.

By  the time the express elevator reaches Harwood's office floor,
he will be alone.

He touches the buckle of his belt, and thinks of the  simple  yet
perfectly  efficient  tool  concealed  between the layers of fine
Italian calf.

And exists in the moment.
 273 71.     YAMAZAKI YAMAZAKI. grim and nervous,  descends  into
the  early  morning  rush  hour  accompanied by a very large Aus-
tralian, shaven-headed, with one mutilated ear.

"You knew he was here?" the large man asks.

"He desired secrecy," Yamazaki says. "I am sorry."

Yamazaki leads the Australian to the cardboard  city  and  points
out Laney's carton and its entrance.

"This one?"

Yamazaki nods.

The  Australian  produces a knife that telescopes silently at the
touch of a button, both its edges serrated. He slits the top from
Laney's  carton,  lifting it like the lid of a box of cereal, and
Yamazaki sees the stickers of Cody Harwood that he glimpsed  once
before.

The  Australian,  much  taller than Yamazaki, stands staring down
into the carton. Yamazaki himself is not yet ready to look.

"What was he running from?" the Australian asks.

Yamazaki looks up at the man's small, fiercely intelligent  eyes,
set  in  a  face of the most abiding brutality. "Toward,"Yamazaki
says. "He ran toward something."

A train arrives in the depths of the system, shunting a  wall  of
stale  warm  air  toward  the surface streets and a new day.  274
FONTAINE comes back from the blackened ribs  toward  Bryant  with
ajug  of  water  and  two  Red Cross sandwiches. It's strange out
there, very much the post-disaster scenario and not to  his  lik-
ing.  Media vehicles outnumber emergency, though there are plenty
of those. The body count is remarkably low, he gathers, and  puts
this down to the nature of bridge folk, their seriousness in sur-
vival and a certain belief in unorganized cooperation.  Probably,
he  thinks, he'll never know what any of this was about, in terms
of causality, though he's sure he's been witness to something.

He hopes Chevette and her boyfriend have  made  it  through,  but
somehow  he  assumes  they  have, and the professor has gone, off
about whatever business a man of his sort pursues,  and  that  is
business  best not known about. Martial will have to be told that
his chain gun is gone, but that's just  as  well.  (Opposite  his
shop,  someone  has  sprayed  a  great  deal of that stuff called
KiI'Z, lest the  smear  that  the  chain  gun  left  there  prove
seropositive in any troublesome way.)

As he comes up to the shop he hears the sound of someone sweeping
broken glass, and sees that it is the boy, flatfooted in his  big
white shoes, and sees that the kid's done quite a good job of it,
really, down to rearranging things on the surviving shelves. That
silver  piece of hardware, like an oversized cocktail shaker, en-
joys pride of place, up behind the glassless frame of  Fontaine's
counter,  between  lead  soldiers  and a pair of trench-art vases
beaten from the Kaiser's cannon casings.

"Where'd she go?" Fontaine asks, looking up at this.

The boy stops sweeping, sighs, leans on his broom, says  nothing.

"Gone, huh?"

The boy nods.

"Sandwiches," Fontaine says, handing one to the boy. "We're going
to be roughing it out here, for a while." He looks up at the sil-
ver  cannister again. Somehow he knows it no longer contains her,
whoever, whatever she was. It has  become  as  much  history,  no
more, no less than

275 72.     FONTAINE the crude yet wistfully dainty vases pounded
out of shell casings in some French trench. That is  the  mystery
of things.

"Fonten."

He  turns,  sees  Clarisse there with a shopping bag in her arms.
"Clarisse."

Something troubled there, in her sea-green eyes,  some  worry  or
concern. "You okay, then?"

"Yes," he says.

"I thought you dead, Fonten."

"No."

"I brought you food."

"The kids okay?"  "Scared," she says. "They with Tourmaline."

"I'd be scared too, then."

A  smile  twitches  the  corner  of her mouth. She comes forward,
shifting the bag aside. Her lips brush his.

"Thank you," he says, taking  the  heavy  bag,  from  which  fine
smells arise. "Thank you, Clarisse."

He  sees  tears  in the corners of her eyes. "Bastard," she says,
"where's my dolls?"

"I'm sony," he says, as gravely as he can manage, "but they  were
victims of the terrible fire."

And  then  they  both start to laugh.  276 73.     SILENCIO WHERE
did you find it?"

"Treasure Island," the boy lies, passing the watch, a solid brown
wafer of corrosion, across the glass countertop.

Silencio peers through his loupe at the damp biscuit of metal. He
scores the rust with a diamond scribe.  "Stainless,"  he  admits,
knowing  the  boy will know that that is good, though not good as
gold. Worth the price of a meal.

"I want to see you fix it," the boy says.

Silencio twists the loupe from his eye and looks at the  boy,  as
if noticing him for the first time.

"I  want  to see you fix it." The boy points down, indicating the
watches arrayed beneath the glass.

"The bed," Silencio says. "You were here with Sandro, when we re-
stored that Vacheron."

Silencio  brings the restoration bed from the rear of the shop, a
square cushion, ten inches on a side. He places it on the counter
and the boy bends close, to see the velvety green surface made up
of millions of manipulators.

Silencio places the watch on the bed.  They  watch  as  it  rises
smoothly  on  edge,  as  if  of its own accord, and then seems to
sink, impossibly, as if through the shallow bed and the glass be-
neath. Vanishing like a coin set into soft mud...

Silencio  looks  at  the  watch  on his wrist, a military Jaeger-
LeCoultre, RAAF. "Nine minutes," he said. "There's coffee."

"I want to watch," the boy says.

"Nothing to see."

Within the bed, the rusted disk of the watch is  being  read  and
disassembled.  Molecules are moving. In nine minutes it will rise
again, bright and perfect as the day it first left its factory in
Switzerland.

"I want to watch," the boy says.

Silencio understands. He goes to get the coffee.

277



Thanks  TO even one who waited for this one with even greater pa-
tience than usual, particularly my publishers, as personally  and
wonderfully represented by Susan Allison and Tony Lacey.

To Deb and Graeme and Claire, with love, for putting up with far

more than the ordinary basement-dwelling.

To Julia Witwer. for being this text's first reader and more.

The  following are special friends of this book: Gordon Begg, Ju-
dith

Beale, Jessica Eastman, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Mark Halyk, Richard

Kadrev, Kevin Kelly, Lueza Jean Lamb, Roger Trilling,  Jack  Wom-
ack.

Thank you all.

And  to the post-cyberpunk contingent in Mexico City, who, though
I declined their thoughtful offer of the  definitive  alternative
tour,  encouraged  me,  with  their  warm enthusiasm, through the
writing of a crucial chapter in the Hotel Camino Real.

William Gibson

MAY 10. 1999

VANCOUVER, B.C.