41. Candlelight 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 apprehend any suggestion of Rez’s death or other misfortune?”
   “No, but I wouldn’t, not unless there was a degree of intentionality that would emerge from the data. Accidents, actions by anyone 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 aroundseemed 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.” 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 constant 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, luminous 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 one of confusion, almost of terror, but when he saw Laney at the window of the green van, he grimaced and changed course, heading straight for them.

42. Checking Out

   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 proscribed, 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 toward him again and Chia saw Maryalice cringe, where she sat beside Eddie on the carpet.
   “You are lucky man,” the Russian said to Eddie. “We are honoring our agreement. Isotope to be delivered. 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 itself without looking at it. ‘That thing you’re holding is a heavy crime, Rozzer. Your fan-club turnout’s bringing the police. Better 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.
   “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 Masahiko followed. The elevator door closed. “Looking for vehicle,” the Russian said. “Come.” They followed him through the sliding glass door, into the parking 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 plastic 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 football. 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.”

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.”
   “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 formulated, and 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 something of a done deal now, isn’t it? De facto relationship, really. 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 going 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 become. 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 otherness, who no doubt will voice an opinion in that regard. I’d say you were set to become the court prognosticator, 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 explosives 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 myselfaround. 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 Blackwell, “when you find that fair land, I will go there with you myself. We’ll live on fruit and nuts, commune with all that’s left of bloody nature. But ’til then, Laney, I’m going to have a conversation with your Kathy Torrance. I will explain certain things to her. Nothing complicated. Simple, simpleprotocols of cause and effect. And she will neverallow Slitscan to run that footage of your doppelgänger.”
   “Blackwell,” Laney said, “she dislikesme, 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 violenceon your part isn’t going to stop her. It’ll only up the ante; she’ll go to hersecurity people—”
   “No,” said Blackwell, “she won’t, because that would be a violation of the very personalterms 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 allneed certainties. They help build character. And I will leave your Kathy with the deepest possible conviction that if she crosses me, she willdie—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 pencilled 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.

   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 suggesting 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 suggest a drink. Nine in the evening, by the blue clock in the corner 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 seenKathy?”
   “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 toofucking weird, but I swear– I think she’s been abducted.”
   “Have you called the police?”
   “We did, we did, but it’s all fucking Martian, all these forms they tick through on their notebooks, and what blood typewas she… You don’t knowwhat 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 friendship. “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.

44. La Puirissima

   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 Zona.)
   And she’d seen the helicopter shots of the vigil, a field of the baffled tactical squads facing an estimated twenty-five hundred teary-eyed 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 hurry 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 monocle-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 irresponsible 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, expressing 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 interest 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 famous, now.
   All in all, the coverage seemed to treat the whole thing as some kind of silly-season item that might have had serious repercussions 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 Francisco and she worked for Lo/Rez and knew Rez personally, and she was the one who’d driven the van out through the crowd. And then she’d lost a police helicopter by doing something completely crazy on that expressway, 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, except 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. Arleigh 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 Rez hunched down in there, under a jacket, but maybe sensing it somehow. And something in Chia letting her know she’d never quite be like that again. Never as comfortably 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 boringthings, 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?”
   “For 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?
   “My father has arranged her release. 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 everywhere, and at least three room-service trays with half-empty ceramic 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 rectangular 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.”
   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, distant 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 embroidered robes, the tiny bright patterns lit from within, moving. “Hollow 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 myself. 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 activated the video units in your goggles. What she saw there indicated to her that you were in grave danger. As I believe you were. She must then have decided on a plan. Returning to her secret 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,” Chia said. “It was real?”
   “And extremelyillegal,” the Etruscan said.
   “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 effect of quickly surrounding Hotel Di with a sea of potential witnesses.”
   “Whatever the next stage of her plan,” the Etruscan said, “she had exposed her presence in her website. The original owners became 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 criminal lawyer.”
   “Then I can find her,” Chia said.
   “But she would not wish this,” the idoru said. “Mercedes Purissima 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.

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 serried cliffs of the new buildings, reflecting the lights of the city.

46. Fables of the Reconstruction

   Chia dreamed of a beach pebbled with crushed fragments of consumer 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. Unthinkable 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 accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated 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 emptiness, an address unknown: the killfile 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 mornings, now, she checks into the City, hears the gossip in a favorite barbershop in Sai Shing Road. The Etruscan is there, sometimes, with Klaus and the Rooster and the other ghosts he hangs with, and they tolerate her.
   She’s proud of that, because they’ll clam up around Masahiko. Are they old, incredibly ancient, or do they just act that way? Whatever, 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 stable; something they have to do to 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 questions, but they’d send her first class on Japan Air Lines. So Arleigh 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 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 crying.
   And Arleigh said she should just wait. Because that girl in Mexico City, more than anything else, needed to be somebody else. And it didn’t matter that she hadn’t beenZona, 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 her fast little car.
   –But I couldn’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 embroidered on the back in three different languages.
   She hadn’t ever worn it, and she’d never really shown it to anybody 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 really 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 Etruscan did. He said it was the craziest thing since they’d turned that first killfile inside out.
   Sometimes Chia wondered if they all weren’t just joking, because 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 Espressomatic, I’ll go there.

COUNT ZERO

William Gibson


The Sprawl

COUNT ZERO
1 Smooth-Running Gun
2 MARLY
3 BOBBY PULLS A WILSON
4 CLOCKING IN
5 THE JOB
6 BARRYTOWN
7 THE MALL
8 PARIS
9 THE PROJECTS
10 ALAIN
11 ON SITE
12 CAFÉ BLANC
13 WITH BOTH HANDS
14 NIGHT FLIGHT
15 BOX
16 LEGBA
17 THE SQUIRREL WOOD
18 NAMES OF THE DEAD
19 HYPERMART
20 ORLY FLIGHT
21 HIGHWAY TIME
22 JAMMER’S
23 CLOSER
24 RUN STRAIGHT DOWN
25 GOTHIK/KASUAL
26 THE WIG
27 STATIONS OF THE BREATH
28 JAYLENE SLIDE
29 BOXMAKER
30 HIRED MAN
31 VOICES
32 COUNT ZERO
33 WRACK AND WHIRL
34 A CHAIN ‘BOUT NINE MILES LONG
35 TALLEY ISHAM
36 THE SQUIRREL WOOD

COUNT ZERO

   FOR MY D



   Quiero hacer contigo
   lo que la primavera
   hace con los cervezos
   –Neruda


   COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT – On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.

1 Smooth-Running Gun

   THEY SENT A SLAMHOUND on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.
   He didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
   Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn’t made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat
   It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market The eyes were green.
   He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of the previous century. The Dutchman’s visits were gray dawn dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his second floor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs, late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
   And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-light that hurt his eyes. “You can go home now, Turner We’re done with you You’re good as new.
   He was good as new. How good was that? He didn’t know. He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.
   And the next. And ever was.
   He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels left ferroconcrete, drinks arrived, dinner was served.
   In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of the corridor, he changed his ticket.

   He flew to Mexico. And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of brooms, a woman’s body warm against his own.
   The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf. The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse chambray, softened by countless washings.
   He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. He’d had to walk twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on runway concrete.
   He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plastered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. He’d ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink Lucite and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver. Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was there to welcome him back to Mexico.
   Among the dozen-odd Microsofts the Dutchman had given him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish, but in Vallarta he’d fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures, the day’s winning numbers in the national lottery.
   The woman beside him stirred in her sleep.
   He raised himself on one elbow to look at her A stranger’s face, but not the one his life in hotels had taught him to expect. He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fashion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of the previous five years.
   Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and American. The blue sheets were nicked across her hips, the sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her long thighs with diagonals of gold. The faces he woke with in the world’s hotels were like God’s own hood ornaments. Women’s sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void. But this one was different. Already, somehow, there was meaning attached to it. Meaning and a name.
   He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His soles registered the grit of beach-sand on cool tile. There was a faint, pervasive smell of insecticide. Naked, head throbbing, he stood. He made his legs move. Walked, tried the first of two doors, finding white tile, more white plaster, a bulbous chrome shower head hung from rust-spotted iron pipe The sink’s taps offered identical trickles of blood-warm water. An antique wristwatch lay beside a plastic tumbler, a mechanical Rolex on a pale leather strap.
   The bathroom’s shuttered windows were unglazed, strung with a fine green mesh of plastic. He peered out between hardwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and saw a dry fountain of flower-painted tiles and the rusted carcass of a VW Rabbit
   Allison. That was her name.

   She wore frayed khaki shorts and one of his white T-shirts. Her legs were very brown. The clockwork Rolex, with its dull stainless case, went around her left wrist on its pigskin strap. They went walking, down the curve of beach, toward Barre de Navidad. They kept to the narrow strip of firm wet sand above the line of surf.
   Already they had a history together; he remembered her at a stall that morning in the little town’s iron-roofed mercado, how she’d held the huge clay mug of boiled coffee in both hands. Mopping eggs and salsa from the cracked white plate with a tortilla, he’d watched flies circling fingers of sunlight that found their way through a patchwork of palm frond and corrugated siding. Some talk about her job with some legal firm in L.A., how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle pontoon towns tethered off Redondo. He’d told her he was in personnel. Or had been, anyway. “Maybe I’m looking for a new line of work
   But talk seemed secondary to what there was between them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the thing. She squeezed his hand.
   A blue figure came marching up the beach toward them, a military policeman headed for town, spitshined black boots unreal against the soft bright beach. As the man passed, his face dark and immobile beneath mirrored glasses, Turner noted the carbine-format Steiner-Optic laser with Fabrique Nationale sights. The blue fatigues were spotless, creased like knives.
   Turner had been a soldier in his own right for most of his adult life, although he’d never worn a uniform. A mercenary, his employers vast corporations warring covertly for the control of entire economies. He was a specialist in the extraction of top executives and research people. The multinationals he worked for would never admit that men like Turner existed...
   “You worked your way through most of a bottle of Herradura last night,” she said.
   He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails painted with chipped pink gloss.
   The breakers rolled in, their edges transparent as green glass.
   The spray beaded on her tan.

   After their first day together, life fell into a simple pattern. They had breakfast in the mercado at a stall with a concrete counter worn smooth as polished marble. They spent the morning swimming, until the sun drove them back into the shuttered coolness of the hotel, where they made love under the slow wooden blades of the ceiling fan, then slept. In the afternoons they explored the maze of narrow streets behind the Avenida, or went hiking in the hills. They dined in beachfront restaurants and drank on the patios of the white hotels. Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf.
   And gradually, without words, she taught him a new style of passion. He was accustomed to being served, serviced anonymously by skilled professionals. Now, in the white cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt Pacific mixed with her own wet, her inner thighs cool against his cheeks. Palms cradling her hips, he held her, raised her like a chalice, lips pressing tight, while his tongue sought the locus, the point, the frequency that would bring her home Then, grinning, he’d mount, enter, and find his own way there.
   Sometimes, then, he’d talk, long spirals of unfocused narrative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very little, but he’d learned to value what little she did say, and, always, she held him. And listened.

   A week passed, then another. He woke to their final day together in that same cool room, finding her beside him. Over breakfast he imagined he felt a change in her, a tension.
   They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot the faint edge of anxiety.
   In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach, toward Barre, the way they’d gone that first morning.
   Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Spanish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect. Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer, sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida.
   His tan was dark and even. The angular patchwork left by the Dutchman’s grafts was gone, and she had taught him the unity of his body. Mornings, when he met the green eyes in the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the smell of dust and fried breads
   The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way down the bay’s arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a detonation.
   Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure’s facade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and pattern of tile.
   HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capitals above one concrete arch. “Mar,” he said, completing it, though he’d removed the microsoft.
   “It’s over,” she said, stepping beneath the arch, into shadow.
   “What’s over?” He followed, the straw basket rubbing against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between his toes.
   “Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future.”
   He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed-springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls.
   “It smells like piss,” he said. “Let’s swim.

   The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner’s room and ate, silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved her sun-streaked hair.
   “You make me think about horses,” he said finally.
   “Well,” she said, as though she spoke from the depths of exhaustion, “they’ve only been extinct for thirty years.”
   “No,” he said, “their hair. The hair on their necks, when they ran.”
   “Manes,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “Fuck it.” Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the beach.
   “It, me, what’s it matter?” Her arms around him again. “Oh, come on, Turner Come on”
   And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen, where the water met the sky.

   When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did, back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn’t survived. The waves had licked away its foundation.
   “Give me the basket
   She was buttoning her blouse. He’d bought it for her in one of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. “I said give me the basket.”
   She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon, finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad-ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung toward the beach.
   “Turner, I -”
   “Get up.” Bundling the blanket and her towel into the basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands.
   “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “If I am, get out of here. Cut for that second stand of palms.” He pointed. “Don’t go back to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home -”
   He could hear the purr of the outboard now.
   He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stumbling in a drift of sand. She didn’t look back.
   He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflatable was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named Tsushima, and he’d last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He’d seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck.
   He didn’t need the glasses to know that the inflatable’s passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka’s ninjas. He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his last can of Mexican beer.

   He looked back at the line of white hotels, his hands inert on one of Tsushima’s teak railings Behind the hotels, the little town’s three holograms glowed: Banamex, Aeronaves, and the cathedral’s six-meter Virgin.
   Conroy stood beside him. “Crash job,” Conroy said. “You know how it is.” Conroy’s voice was flat and uninflected, as though he’d modeled it after a cheap voice chip. His face was broad and white, dead white. His eyes were dark-ringed and hooded, beneath a peroxide thatch combed back from a wide forehead. He wore a black polo shirt and black slacks. “In-side,” he said, turning. Turner followed, ducking to enter the cabin door. White screens, pale flawless pine; Tokyo’s austere corporate chic.
   Conroy settled himself on a low, rectangular cushion of slate-gray ultrasuede. Turner stood, his hands slack at his sides. Conroy took a knurled silver inhaler from the low enamel table between them. “Choline enhancer?”
   “No.”
   Conroy jammed the inhaler into one nostril and snorted.
   “You want some sushi?” He put the inhaler back on the table. “We caught a couple of red snapper about an hour ago”
   Turner stood where he was, staring at Conroy.
   “Christopher Mitchell,” Conroy said. “Maas Biolabs. Their head hybridoma man. He’s coming over to Hosaka.”
   “Never heard of him.”
   “Bullshit. How about a drink?”
   Turner shook his head. Silicon’s on the way out, Turner. Mitchell’s the man who made biochips work, and Maas is sitting on the major patents. You know that. He’s the man for monoclonals. He wants out YOU and me, Turner, we’re going to shift him.”
   “I think I’m retired, Conroy. I was having a good time, back there.”
   “That’s what the psych team in Tokyo say. I mean, it’s not exactly your first time out of the box, is it? She’s a field psychologist, on retainer to Hosaka.”
   A muscle in Turner’s thigh began to jump.
   “They say you’re ready, Turner. They were a little worried, after New Delhi, so they wanted to check it out. Little therapy on the side. Never hurts, does it?”

2 MARLY

   SHE’D WORN HER BEST for the interview, but it was raining in Brussels and she had no money for a cab. She walked from the Eurotrans station.
   Her hand, in the pocket of her good jacket, a Sally Stanley but almost a year old, was a white knot around the crumpled telefax. She no longer needed it, having memorized the address, but it seemed she could no more release it than break the trance that held her here now, staring into the window of an expensive shop that sold menswear, her focus phasing between sedate flannel dress shirts and the reflection of her own dark eyes.
   Surely the eyes alone would be enough to cost her the job. No need for the wet hair she now wished she’d let Andrea cut. The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone could read, and most certainly these things would soon be revealed to Herr Josef Virek, least likely of potential employers.
   When the telefax had been delivered, she’d insisted on regarding it as some cruel prank, another nuisance call. She’d had enough of those, thanks to the media, so many that Andrea had ordered a special program for the apartment’s phone, one that filtered out incoming calls from any number that wasn’t listed in her permanent directory. But that, Andrea had insisted, must have been the reason for the telefax. How else could anyone reach her?
   But Marly had shaken her head and huddled deeper into Andrea’s old terry robe. Why would Virek, enormously weal-thy, collector and patron, wish to hire the disgraced former operator of a tiny Paris gallery?
   Then it had been Andrea’s time for head-shaking, in her impatience with the new, the disgraced Marly Krushkhova, who spent entire days in the apartment now, who sometimes didn’t bother to dress. The attempted sale, in Paris, of a single forgery, was hardly the novelty Marly imagined it to have been, she said. If the press hadn’t been quite so anxious to show up the disgusting Gnass for the fool he most assuredly was, she continued, the business would hardly have been news. Gnass was wealthy enough, gross enough, to make for a weekend’s scandal. Andrea smiled. “If you had been less attractive, you would have gotten far less attention.”
   Marly shook her head. “And the forgery was Alain’s. You were innocent. Have you forgotten that?”
   Marly went into the bathroom, still huddled in the thread-bare robe, without answering.
   Beneath her friend’s wish to comfort, to help, Marly could already sense the impatience of someone forced to share a very small space with an unhappy, nonpaying guest.
   And Andrea had had to loan her the fare for the Eurotrans.
   With a conscious, painful effort of will, she broke from the circle of her thoughts and merged with the dense but sedate flow of serious Belgian shoppers.
   A girl in bright tights and a boyfriend’s oversized loden jacket brushed past, scrubbed and smiling. At the next inter-section, Marly noticed an outlet for a fashion line she’d favored in her own student days. The clothes looked impossibly young.
   In her white and secret fist, the telefax.
   Galerie Duperey, 14 Rue au Beurre, Bruxelles.
   Josef Virek.

   The receptionist in the cool gray anteroom of the Galerie Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble inlaid with an enameled keyboard. She raised lustrous eyes as Marly approached. Marly imagined the click and whirr of shutters, her bedraggled image whisked away to some far corner of Josef Virek’s empire.
   ‘Marly Krushkhova,” she said, fighting the urge to pro-duce the compacted wad of telefax, smooth it pathetically on the cool and flawless marble. “For Herr Virek.”
   “Fraulein Krushkhova,” the receptionist said, “Herr Virek is unable to be in Brussels today.”
   Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was learning to take in disappointment. “I see.”
   “However, he has chosen to conduct the interview via a sensory link. If you will please enter the third door on your left.

   The room was bare and white. On two walls hung un-framed sheets of what looked like rain-stained cardboard, stabbed through repeatedly with a variety of instruments. Katatonenkunst. Conservative. The sort of work one sold to committees sent round by the boards of Dutch commercial banks.
   She sat down on a low bench covered in leather and finally allowed herself to release the telefax. She was alone, but assumed that she was being observed somehow.
   “Fraulein Krushkhova.” A young man in a technician’s dark green smock stood in the doorway opposite the one through which she’d entered. “In a moment, please, you will cross the room and step through this door. Please grasp the knob slowly, firmly, and in a manner that affords maximum contact with the flesh of your palm. Step through carefully. There should be a minimum of spatial disorientation.”
   She blinked at him “I beg-”
   “The sensory link,” he said, and withdrew, the door closing behind him.
   She rose, tried to tug some shape into the damp lapels of her jacket, touched her hair, thought better of it, took a deep breath, and crossed to the door. The receptionist’s phrase had prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim signal routed via Bell Europa. She’d assumed she’d wear a helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a passive viewer as a human camera.
   But Virek’s wealth was on another scale of magnitude entirely.
   As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact.
   Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder.
   A few drops of rain blew into her face.
   Smell of rain and wet earth.
   A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek’s illusion.
   Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well, fighting vertigo. She knew this place. She was in the Guell Park, Antonio Gaudi’s tatty fairyland, on its barren rise behind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.
   “You are disoriented. Please forgive me.”
   Josef Virek was perched below her on one of the park’s serpentine benches, his wide shoulders hunched in a soft topcoat. His features had been vaguely familiar to her all her she remembered, for some reason, a photograph of life. Now Virek and the king of England. He smiled at her. His head was large and beautifully shaped beneath a brush of stiff dark gray hair. His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce. His eyes, very large behind the round, rimless glasses that were a trademark, were pale blue and strangely soft.
   “Please.” He patted the bench’s random mosaic of shattered pottery with a narrow hand. “You must forgive my reliance on technology. I have been confined for over a decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stockholm. Or perhaps of hell. I am not a well man, Marly. Sit beside me.”
   Taking a deep breath, she descended the stone steps and crossed the cobbles “Herr Virek,” she said, “I saw you lecture in Munich, two years ago. A critique of Faessler and his Autisuches Theater. You seemed well then...”
   “Faessler?” Virek’s tanned forehead wrinkled. “You saw a double. A hologram perhaps. Many things, Marly, are perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one I another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities. However, for reasons so complex as to be entirely occult, the fact of my illness has never been made public.”
   She took her place beside him and peered down at the dirty pavement between the scuffed toes of her black Paris boots. She saw a chip of pale gravel, a rusted paper clip, the small dusty corpse of a bee or hornet. “It’s amazingly detailed...”
   “Yes,” he said, “the new Maas biochips. You should know,” he continued, “that what I know of your private life is very nearly as detailed. More than you yourself do, in some instances.”
   “You do?” It was easiest, she found, to focus on the city, picking out landmarks remembered from a half-dozen student holidays. There, just there, would be the Ramblas, parrots and flowers, the taverns serving dark beer and squid.
   “Yes I know that it was your lover who convinced you that you had found a lost Cornell original...”
   Many shut her eyes.
   “He commissioned the forgery, hiring two talented student-artisans and an established historian who found himself in certain personal difficulties... He paid them with money he’d already extracted from your gallery, as you have no doubt guessed. You are crying...”
   Marly nodded. A cool forefinger tapped her wrist.
   “I bought Gnass. I bought the police off the case. The press weren’t worth buying; they rarely are And now, perhaps, your slight notoriety may work to your advantage.”
   “Herr Virek, I – “
   “A moment, please. Paco! Come here, child.”
   Marly opened her eyes and saw a child of perhaps six years, tightly gotten up in dark suit coat and knickers, pale stockings, high-buttoned black patent boots. Brown hair fell across his forehead in a smooth wing. He held something in his hands, a box of some kind.
   “Gaudi began the park in 1900,” Virek said “Paco wears the period costume. Come here, child. Show us your marvel.”
   “Señor,” Paco lisped, bowing, and stepped forward to exhibit the thing he held.
   Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects.
   “Cornell,” she said, her tears forgotten. “Cornell?” She turned to Virek.
   “Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist.”
   “There are more? More boxes?”
   “I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I ordinarily take little interest in...”
   But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
   The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skinbut the thing’s face was seared and blackened.
   The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
   “Gracias, Paco.”
   Box and boy were gone.
   She gaped.
   “Ah. Forgive me, I have forgotten that these transitions are too abrupt for you. Now, however, we must discuss your assignment .
   “Herr Virek,” she said, “what is ‘Paco’?”
   “A subprogram.”
   “I see.”
   “I have hired you to find the maker of the box.”
   “But, Herr Virek, with your resources -”
   “Of which you are now one, child. Do you not wish to be employed? When the business of Gnass having been stung with a forged Cornell came to my attention, I saw that you might be of use in this matter.” He shrugged. “Credit me with a certain talent for obtaining desired results.”
   “Certainly, Herr Virek! And, yes, I do wish to work!”
   “Very well You will be paid a salary. You will be given access to certain lines of credit, although, should you need to purchase, let us say. substantial amounts of real estate”
   “Real estate?”
   “Or a corporation, or spacecraft. In that event, you will require my indirect authorization. Which you will almost certainly be given Otherwise, you will have a free hand I suggest, however, that you work on a scale with which you yourself are comfortable. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing touch with your intuition, and intuition, in a case such as this, is of crucial importance.” The famous smile glittered for her once more.
   She took a deep breath. “Herr Virek, what if I fail? How long do I have to locate this artist?”
   “The rest of your life,” he said.
   Forgive me,” she found herself saying, to her horror, “but I understood you to say that you live in a – a vat?”
   “Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh. Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something like a tenth of my annual income. Making me, I suppose, the world’s most expensive invalid. I was touched, Marly, at your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold.”
   And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
   A wing of night swept Barcelona’s sky. like the twitch of a vast slow shutter, and Virek and Gdell were gone, and she found herself seated again on the low leather bench, staring at torn sheets of stained cardboard.