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 testimony to the skill of its engineers; that it had survived the subsequent 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 constructs, 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 reference 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 mother-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. “I 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 sensing 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 history.”
   “Kathy Torrance? From Slitscan?”
   “Not like they said they were, but they’ve got all these techs, and techs always talk too much, and Ghengis down in the garage saw the decals on some of the cases, when they were unloading. There’s about 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 upto anything.”
   “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 contraction 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

   Chia used a public dataport in the deepest level of the station. The Sandbenders sent the number they’d given her for Mitsuko Mimura, the Tokyo chapter’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 address.”
   “Japanese addresses are difficult.”
   “It’s okay,” Chia said, “I’ve got global positioning.” The Sandbenders, working the Tokyo telco, was already showing her Mitsuko Mimura’s latitude and longitude. In Seattle, that only worked for business numbers.
   “No,” Mitsuko said, “I must greet you. I am 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 station. Gray buildings, pastel neon, a streetscape dotted with vaguely unfamiliar shapes. Dozens of bicycles were parked everywhere, 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 visible on the high wheel. As it cleared her field of vision, she saw a Japanese girl wearing a short plaid skirt and black biker jacket. 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 neat and organized. So was Mitsuko, who had a razor-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 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 covered, segmented box that contained a California roll and an assortment 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. Mitsuko 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 translation was generally glitch-free, except when Mitsuko used Japanese slang that was too new, or when she inserted English words that she knew but couldn’t 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 somewhere, 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, Masahiko. Her mother was away, visiting a 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.”
   “I understand,” Mitsuko said.
   “So is it true? Does Rez really want to marry a software agent?”
   Mitsuko 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-deficit,’ ” this last all strung together like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth running it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions updated 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 not the same,” Mitsuko said.
   “Well,” Chia said, “it’s a boything, right? The otaku guys at my last school were into, like, plastic anime babes, military simulations, and trivia. Bigtime into trivia.” She watched Mitsuko listen to the translation.
   “Yes,” Mitsuko said, “but you say they go to school. Ours do not go to school. They complete their studies on-line, and that is bad, because they cheat easily. Then they are tested, later, and are caught, and fail, but they do not care, It is a social problem.”
   “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 Mitsuko’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.
   “What is that?” Mitsuko asked.
   “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.
   Mitsuko giggled nervously.

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.
   “Hello, Mr. Laney,” Yamazaki said. “You are feeling better now?”
   Laney watched a purple-and-yellow top blur into action as the girl gave the carefully wound cord an expert pull. The commentator held a hand mike near the top to pick up the hum it was producing, then said something in Japanese.
   “Better than last night,” Laney said.
   “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?”
   “Your employer is Paragon-Asia Dataflow, Melbourne. They are employing me as well.”
   “What about 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 corporate 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-designers. 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 declared this to be his intention.”
   “Can you tell me what it is they’ve hired youto do?”
   “Initially, I think, they hoped I would be able to explain the idoru 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 background of the situation.”
   “Who are they?”
   “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 meantime, 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 collar, 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. Lo/Rez later purchased Dog Soup and used it to release less commercial material 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. Reflected clouds whipped past in time-lapse on the towering triangular face as the Universal Copyright Agreement warning scrolled into view.
   Laney watched long enough to see that the video was spliced together 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. Yamazaki seemed capable of quizzing him on it later.
   Why did people 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, saying 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 successful 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 left 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 fast-forward, No. Mute? No. Yamazaki was having this stuff piped in for his benefit. 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 unchanged 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 smallest 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 gestured toward the camera with a glass of red wine.
   “If we could ever once stop talking about the music, and the industry, 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.
   “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.”

14. Tokyo Chapter

   The site Mitsuko’s chapter had erected for the meeting reminded Chia of Japanese prints she’d seen on a school trip to the museum in Seattle; there was a brownish light that seemed to arrive 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, Lo’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 special computer. Her Sandbenders managed a few effects like that, but mainly in its presentation of Sandbenders software.
   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 distracting). 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 Kolb blouson-and-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 floating 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 constrained within the form of a girl. The face 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 introduction, 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. 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 thanks 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 accurate 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 recite 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 brings us to the present, and the historic visit of Chia McKenzie, the representative of our sister chapter in Seattle, in the State of Washington. And now I hope that she will honor us by recounting 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, uncertain 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 unfortunate.”
   “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 officialchapter,” Hiromi said. “We have the honor of working closely with actual employees of the band. Their publicists 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 Rei Toei, that he was going to marry her. There was a long quote.” Chia was definitely starting to get the feeling that something was wrong here. This was not what she’d come all this physical distance for; she might as well have been sitting 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 face. Stonewalling bitch. What to do? What would Zona Rosa do if she were in Chia’s place? Something 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 you say it’s not happening, we’ll accept that. We all care about Rez 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 organization 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 forebears. 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 Hiromi. “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 Kyoto.”
   “Kyoto is very beautiful.”
   “I’m on my way,” Chia said. “Thanks for putting this site together 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 of Chia’s attitude.
   So worry about it, Chia thought.

   “You knew,” Chia said. “You knew she’d do that.”
   Mitsuko was blushing, bright red. Looking at the floor, her jelly-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 passage, 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. He wore a soft, smocklike garment sewn from very black denim, multiple 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 influences, touring. Combination of stress and boredom. Cities start to look the same. One hotel room after another. It’s a syndrome, is what it is.”
   “Where are we going?”
   “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 bastards had been feeding him had made a pig’s breakfast of his endocrine 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 conversation.
   “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 brownish, 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 unlikely grace Laney had noted before, the car bucking noticeably with the departure of his weight. Laney, sliding across the gray velour seat, felt tired and wooden.
   “Somehow I was expecting a more upscale destination,” he said to Blackwell. It was true.
   “Stop expecting,” Blackwell said.
   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 consistent range of goods: wallscreens, immersion consoles, automated recliners 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. Blackwell holding a final tarp aside. Laney ducked, entering.
   “We’ve been holding it open for the past hour, Blackwell,” someone said. “Not an easy thing.”
   Blackwell let the tarp fall into place behind him. “Had to collect him from the hotel.”
   The space, walled off with the blue tarps on three sides, was twice the size of Laney’s hotel room but considerably more crowded.
   A lot of hardware was assembled there: a collection of black consoles were cabled together in a white swamp of Styrofoam packing-forms, torn corrugated plastic, and crumpled sheets of bubble-pack. Two men and a woman, waiting. It was the woman who had spoken. As Laney shuffled forward, 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.
   “Nonotice,” the other corrected, and he was definitely from California. 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 Laney’s 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.”

16. Zona

   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 aslant 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 jacket over a white t-shirt. In that place she presented as a quick collage, fragments torn from films, magazines, Mexican newspapers: 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 KoIb outfit. “There was a meeting. Very formal. Majorbutt-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 coloration 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 myKelsey, 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 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 woman?”
   “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 idiom. 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 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 suddenly 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?”
   “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.

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 of degrees of magnitude.”
   “What can’t 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 private as possible.”
   “Then why not bring themin?” 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 personal 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 generating 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 execution of her estate.

   A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of a guesthouse 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. Someone 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 function had been used exactly once, on the day the manufacturer’s warranty had been activated. The warranty was now two months void, 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-brown beach, and then the gray and silver sea. Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the image’s border, there appeared 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 himself surrounded by archaeologically precise records of the restoration of five vast ceramic stoves in an apartment in Stockholm. 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, disassembly, 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 her 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 knitted into new configurations of concern. The three technicians looked carefully blank, hands in the pockets of their matching jackets.
   “How’s that, then?” Blackwell asked.
   “I’m not sure,” Laney said. “He doesn’t seem to doanything.”
   “He doesn’t bloody do anything butdo things,” Blackwell declared, “as you’d know if you were orchestrating his bloody security!”
   “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 empire, 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 inthere.”
   “That’s his bloody life.”
   “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 buysit 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.”
   “But what about all the rest of it?”
   Laney put the eyephones down on the keyboard. “That isn’t a person. That’s a corporation.”
   “But you’ve got it all! His bloody houses! His flats! 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’sa 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 gotvideo, 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 technicians, 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 staythat 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 rectangular, yielding to the first 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. Grubby-looking white paper slippers.
   “Mitsuko made tea,” indicating the tray, the stoneware pot, two cups. “But you were ported.”
   “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.
   “You’re her brother?”
   “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 badly chewed.
   “Where’s that?”
   “Netside,” he said, flipping the weight of his hair back, over one shoulder.
   “What do they say about her?”
   “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 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 material 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.
   “I 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.
   “How 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 successive 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. Hundreds of irregular blocks or rooms, units of some kind, pressing in around a central vacancy, an uneven vertical rectangle, black.
   “Walled City,” he said, following her eye. He leaned forward, 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?”
   “No,” she said.
   “The Palace. No lights. From a tall building, at night, the Imperial 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, upstairs 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 Sandbenders.
   “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 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 decided she didn’t want to go alone. Better to go with a boy than Mitsuko, 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,” he said.
   “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 uncomfortable. Maybe just being outside. He’d traded his gray sweats for equally baggy black cotton pants, cinched at the ankle with elastic-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. Everything 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.

19. Arleigh

   There was a fax from Rydell waiting for Laney when Blackwell 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 twenty-four-hour convenience store on Sunset. The smiling Lucky Dragon, 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
   “Okay,” Laney said, and remembered how he’d walked to the Lucky Dragon one night, against Rydell’s advice, 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 to J.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 faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn’t even imagine wanting.
   He re-read the fax, walking down the corridor, and used the cardkey 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 imagined 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 something she’d willingly do. In the weird vibrationless quiet of supersonic flight, she’d be staring at the gray blank of the window, 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. Yamazaki’s second video.

   He was a third of the way through it when the door chimed. Rez was strolling along a narrow trail in the jungle somewhere, wearing sun-bleached khakis and rope-soled sandals. 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 subsequently 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 skirt, 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. Usually 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?”
   “Yamazaki.”
   “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?”
   “Colin. No. I don’t.”
   “They can make them up for you at the desk. Everyone has a card here.”
   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. “I 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 talking about in that interview?”
   “You haven’t met him yet, have you?”
   “No.”
   “Its not the easiest thing, deciding what Rez 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 actually been expecting the first one, had they?
   “Yamazaki told me the story. What happened to you,” Arleigh McCrae 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 breakfast 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 terra 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 evidence whatever, and indeed Daniels’s most potent public indulgence 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, and Laney had detected a lack of temper in the accustomed spring; a 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 carried 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.”
   “Don’t get up, son,” Pursley said, though Laney hadn’t thought to. “Fella’s just bringing you your breakfast.” One of the Mongolian waiters was crossing with a tray, from the direction of the bungalows. Pursley put his battle-scarred briefcase down and took one of the white-painted metal chairs. The waiter served Laney’s eggs. Laney signed for them, adding a 15-percent tip. Pursley was flipping through the contents of his case. He wore half a dozen heavy silver rings on the fingers of either hand, some of them studded with turquoise. Laney couldn’t remember when he’d last seen anyone carry around that much paper.
   “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?”
   “Yes,” Laney said, his eggs looking somehow 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 substance 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 themost illegal substances, any damn country you care to look. Drug that makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians, well, boy, it’ll getto 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 matters 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 you were good at it, but you just got too damn goodat it.”
   “But she wasn’t famous,” Laney said.
   “But heis,” 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 allwill 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 todo. 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?”
   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 probably 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 particulate 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 protruding like the popping eyes of a cartoon victim. Chia noticed that the artist had devoted much more time to drawing the twine, exactly how it was wrapped and knotted, than to drawing the breasts themselves. The woman had sweat running down 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 directionless 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 result. “Someone pays attention to my address,” he said, “and to Mitsukos.”
   “The restaurant?”
   “Our user addresses.”
   “What kind of attention?”
   “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 manufacturer 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 motion 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 for more.
   “So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking 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, heading 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 ever 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 patterns. Escalators, stairways, and looping slides twisted through the hollow limbs, and puffs of white smoke emerged at regular intervals 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 California 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 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 differences: 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 Seattle, 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 chocolate-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 looked in and saw that 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 Eddie’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 plastic 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 paper 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?”
   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 fun: 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 arein the water trade, after all, and one tries to be philosophical. But who is your friend here? I like his hair…”
   “Masahiko Mimura,” Chia said.
   “I likethat 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 agreements,” he said, “You aren’tfrom the magazine?”
   “No.”
   “If he hadn’t come in that night, I suppose we might still be up and running. And really he wasn’t the sort of thing we’d tried 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 nota 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 together 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 burning 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 follow 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’regoing with him; he’ll have none of it, waves ’em back, morelaughter. Not that anyone else was paying him that much attention, I was going into the booth in five minutes, with a set of extremelyraw North African; had to judge the crowd, get on it with them, know just when to drop it in. But there he went, 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 didhe 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 materializedthere, 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 Rez’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 becausehe did that, opened his mouth up in my club, Lo slash bloody Rez boughtmy club. Bought me as well, and I’ve signed agreementsthat I won’t talk to anyof you about anyof that. And now if you and your charming friend will excuse me, darling, I have work to do.”