21. Standover Man

   There was a man on stilts at the intersection nearest the hotel. He wore a hooded white paper suit, a gas mask, and a pair of rectangular sign-boards. Messages scrolled down the boards in Japanese as he shifted his weight to maintain balance. Streams of pedestrian traffic flowed around and past him.
   “What’s that?” Laney asked, indicating the man on stilts.
   “A sect,” Arleigh McCrae said. “ ‘New Logic.’ They say the world will end when the combined weight of all the human nervous tissue on the planet reaches a specific figure.”
   A very long multi-digit number went scrolling down.
   “Is that it?” Laney asked.
   “No,” she said, “that’s their latest estimate of the current total weight.” She’d gone back to her room for the black coat she now wore, leaving Laney to change into clean socks, underwear, a blue shirt. He didn’t have a tie, so he’d buttoned the shirt at the collar and put his jacket back on. He’d wondered if everyone who worked for Lo/Rez stayed in that same hotel.
   Laney saw the man’s eyes through the transparent visor as they passed. A look of grim patience. The stilts were the kind workers wore to put up ceilings, articulated alloy sprung with steel. “What’s supposed to happen when there’s enough nervous tissue?”
   “A new order of being. They don’t talk about it. Rez was interested in them, apparently. He tried to arrange an audience with the founder.”
   “And?”
   “The founder declined. He said that he made his living through the manipulation of human nervous tissue, and that that made him untouchable.”
   “Rez was unhappy?”
   “Not according to Blackwell. Blackwell said it seemed to cheer him up a little.”
   “He’s not cheerful, ordinarily?” Laney sidestepped to avoid a bicycle someone was wheeling in the opposite direction.
   “Let’s say that the things that bother Rez aren’t the things that bother most people.”
   Laney noticed a dark green van edging along beside them. Its wraparound windows were mirrored, its neon license plates framed with animated tubes of mini-Vegas twinklers. “I think we’re being followed,” he said.
   “We’d better be. I wanted the kind with the weird chrome curb-feelers that make them look like silverfish, but I had to settle for custom license-plate trim. Where you go, it goes. And parking, around here, is probably more of a challenge than anything you’ll be expected to do tonight. Now,” she said, “down here.”
   Steep, narrow stairs, walled with an alarming pink mosaic of glistening tonsil-like nodules. Laney hesitated, then saw a sign, the letters made up of hundreds of tiny pastel oblongs: LE CHICLE. Stepping down, he lost sight of the van.
   A chewing-gum theme-bar, he thought, and then: I’m getting too used to this. But he still avoided touching the wall of chewed gum as he followed her down.
   Into powdery pinks and grays, but these impersonating the unchewed product, wall-wide slabs of it, hung with archaic signage from the nation of his birth. Screen-printed steel. Framed and ancient cardboard, cunningly lit. Icons of gum. Bazooka Joe featured centrally, a figure unknown to Laney but surely no more displaced.
   “Come here often?” Laney asked, as they took stools with bulbous cushions in a particularly lurid bubble-gum pink. The bar was laminated with thousands of rectangular chewing-gum wrappers.
   “Yes,” she said, “but mainly because it’s unpopular. And it’s nonsmoking, which is still kind of special here.”
   “What’s ‘Black Black’?” Laney asked, looking at a framed poster depicting a stylized l940s automobile hurtling through the faint suggestion of city streets. Aside from “Black Black,” it was lettered in a sort of Art Deco Japanese.
   “Gum. You can still buy it,” she said. “The cab drivers all chew it. Lots of caffeine.”
   “In gum?”
   “They sell pick-me-ups here full of liquid nicotine.”
   “I think I’ll have a beer instead.”
   When the waitress, in tiny silver shorts and a prehensile pink angora top, had taken their orders, Arleigh opened her purse and removed a notebook. “These are linear topographies of some of the structures you accessed earlier today.” She passed Laney the notebook. “They’re in a format called Realtree 7.2.”
   Laney clicked through a series of images: abstract geometrics arranged in vanishing linear perspective. “I don’t know how to read them,” he said.
   She poured her sake. “You really were trained by DatAmerica?”
   “I was trained by a bunch of Frenchmen who liked to play tennis.”
   “Realtree’s from DatAmerica. The best quantitative analysis software they’ve got.” She closed the notebook, put it back in her purse.
   Laney poured his beer. “Ever hear of something called TIDAL?”
   “ ‘Tidal’?”
   “Acronym. Maybe.”
   “No.” She lifted the china cup and blew, like a child cooling tea.
   “It was another DatAmerica tool, or the start of one. I don’t think it reached the market. But that was how I learned to find the nodal points.”
   “Okay,” she said.“What arethe nodal points?”
   Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds,” Laney said. “Except the things you see are really there.”
   She put her sake down. “Yamazaki promised me you weren’t crazy.”
   “It’s not crazy. It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”
   “And Slitscan hired you on the basis of that?”
   “They hired me when I demonstrated that it works. But I can’t do that with the kind of data you showed me today.”
   “Why not?”
   Laney raised his beer. “Because it’s like trying to have a drink with a bank. It’s not a person. It doesn’t drink. There’s no place for it to sit.” He drank. “Rez doesn’t generate patterns I can read, because everything he does is at one remove. It’s like looking in an annual report for the personal habits of the chairman of the board. It’s not going to be there. From the outside, it just looks like that Realtree stuff. If I enter a specific area, I don’t get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It’s got to be relational.” He drummed his fingers on the laminated gum wrappers. “Somewhere in Ireland. Guesthouse with a beach view. Nobody there. Records of how it was kept stocked: stuff for the bathroom, toothpaste, shaving foam.
   “I’ve been there,” she said. “That’s on an estate he bought from an older musician, an Irishman. It’s beautiful. Like Italy, in a way.”
   “You think he’ll take this idoru back there, when they get hitched?”
   “Nobody has any idea what he’s talking about when he says he wants to ‘marry’ her.”
   “Then an apartment in Stockholm. Huge. Great big stoves in each room, made of glazed ceramic bricks.”
   “I don’t know that one. He has places all over, and some of them are kept very quiet. There’s another country place in the south of France, a house in London, apartments in New York, Paris, Barcelona… I was working out of the Catalan office, reformatting all their stuff and Spain’s as well, when this idoru thing hit. I’ve been here ever since.”
   “But you know him? You knew him before?”
   “He’s the navel of the world I work in, Laney. That has a way of making people unknowable.”
   “What about Lo?”
   “Quiet. Very. Bright. Very.” She frowned at her sake. “I don’t think any of it’s ever really gotten to Lo. He seems to regard their entire career as some freak event unrelated to anything else.”
   “Including his partner deciding to marry a software agent?”
   “Lo told me a story once, about a job he’d had. He worked for a soup vendor in Hong Kong, a wagon on the sidewalk. He said the wagon had been in business for over fifty years, and their secret was that they’d never cleaned the kettle. In fact, they’d never stopped cooking the soup. It was the same seafood soup they’d been selling for fifty years, but it was never the same, because they added fresh ingredients every day, depending on what was available. He said that was what his career as musician felt like, and he liked that about it. Blackwell says if Rez were more like Lo, he’d still be in prison.”
   “Why?”
   “Blackwell was serving a nine-year sentence, in an Australian maximum-security prison, when Rez talked his way in. To give a concert. Just Rez. Lo and the others thought it was too dangerous. They’d been warned that it could turn into a hostage-taking situation. The prison authorities refused to take any responsibility, and they wanted it in writing. Rez signed anything they put in front of him. His security people resigned on the spot. He went in with two guitars, a wireless mike, and a very basic amplification system. During the concert, a riot broke out. Apparently it was orchestrated by a group of Italian prisoners from Melbourne. Five of them took Rez into the prison laundry, which they’d chosen because it was windowless and easily defended. They informed Rez they were going to kill him if they couldn’t negotiate their release in exchange for his. They discussed cutting off at least one of his fingers to demonstrate that they meant business. Or possibly some more intimate part, though that may simply have been to make him more anxious. Which it did.” She signaled the pink angora waitress for more sake. “Blackwell, who’d evidently been extremely irritated at the interruption of the concert, which he’d been enjoying enormously, appeared in the laundry approximately forty minutes after Rez was taken prisoner. Neither Rez nor the Italians saw him arrive, and the Italians definitely hadn’t been expecting him.” She paused. “He killed three of them, with a tomahawk. Put the end of it into their heads: one, two, three, Rez says, like that. No fuss whatever.”
   “A tomahawk?”
   “Sort of narrow-bladed hatchet, with a spike opposite the blade. Extends the reach, imparts terrific force, and with practice can be thrown with considerable accuracy. Blackwell swears by it. The other two fled, although they both seem to have died in the aftermath of the riot. Personally, I’m sure Blackwell or his ‘mates’ killed them, because he was never charged with the murder of the other three. The sole surviving witness was Rez, whom Blackwell escorted to the barricade the guards had erected in the exercise yard.” Her sake arrived. “It took Rez’s lawyers three months to get Blackwell’s sentence reversed on a technicality. They’ve been together ever since.”
   “What was Blackwell in for?”
   “Murder,” she said. “Do you know what a standover man is?”
   “No.”
   “It’s a peculiarly Australian concept. I’m tempted to think it could only have grown out of a culture comprised initially of convicts, but my Australian friends don’t buy that. The standover man is a loner, a predator who preys on other, more prosperous criminals, often extremely dangerous ones. He captures them and ‘stands over’ them. To extort money.”
   “What’s that mean?”
   “He tortures them until they tell him where their money is. And these are often fairly serious operators, with people paid to take care of them, specifically to prevent this sort of thing…”
   “Tortures them?”
   “ ‘Toe-cutter’ is a related term. When they tell him what he needs to know, he kills them.”
   And Blackwell was suddenly and noiselessly and simply there, very black, and matte, in an enormous waxed-cotton drover’s coat. Behind him the faded American advertising and the grays and pinks of gum. His fretted scalp concealed by the waxed-cotton crown of a broad black hat.
   “Arleigh, dear, you wouldn’t take the name in vain, would you?”
   But he smiled at her.
   “I’m explaining your earlier career to Mr. Laney, Blackwell. I’d only just gotten up to the massage parlor, and now you’ve ruined it.”
   “Never mind. Dinner’s been moved up, at the request of his Rozzer. I’m here to take you. Change of venue as well. Hope you don’t mind.”
   “Where?” Arleigh asked, as if not yet prepared to move.
   “The Western World,” said Blackwell.
   “And me in my good shoes,” she said.

22. Gomi Boy

   The trains more crowded now, standing room only, everyone pressed in tight, and somehow the eye-contact rules were different here, but she wasn’t sure how. Her bag with the Sandbenders was jammed up against Masahiko’s back. He was looking at the control-face again, holding it up the way a commuter would hold a strategically folded newspaper.
   On their way back to Mitsuko’s father’s restaurant, and then she didn’t know what. She’d done the thing that Hiromi hadn’t wanted her to do. And gotten nothing for it but a vaguely unpleasant idea of Rez as someone capable of being boring. And where did it leave her? She’d gone ahead and used Kelsey’s cashcard, to pay for the train, and for another train back. And Zona had said somebody was looking for her; they could track her when she used the cashcard. Maybe there was a way to cash it in, but she doubted it.
   None of this had gone the way she’d tried to imagine it, back in Seattle, but then you couldn’t be expected to imagine anyone like Maryalice, could you? Or Eddie, or even Hiromi.
   Masahiko frowned at the control-face. Chia saw the dots and squiggles changing.
   That thing Maryalice had stuck in her bag. Right here under her arm. She should’ve left it at Mitsuko’s. Or thrown it away, but then what would she say if Eddie or Maryalice showed up? What if it was full of drugs?
   In Singapore they hung people, right in the mall, for that. Her father didn’t like it and he said that was one of the reasons he never invited her there. They put it on television, too, so that it was really hard to avoid seeing it, and he didn’t want her to see it. Now she wondered how far Singapore was from Tokyo? She wished she could go there and keep her eyes closed until she was in her father’s apartment, and never turn the tv on, just be there with him and smell his shaving smell and put her face against his scratchy wool shirt, except she guessed you didn’t wear those in Singapore because it was hot there. She’d keep her eyes closed anyway, and listen to him talk about his work, about the arbitrage engines shuttling back and forth through the world’s markets like invisible dragons, fast as light, shaving fragments of advantage for traders like her father…
   Masahiko turned, accidentally knocking her bag aside, as the train stopped at a station—not theirs. A woman with a yellow shopping bag said something in Japanese. Masahiko took Chia’s wrist and pulled her toward the open door.
   “This isn’t where we get off—”
   “Come! Come!” Out onto the platform. A different smell here; something chemical and sharp. The walls not so clean, somehow. A broken tile in the ceramic ceiling.
   “What’s the matter? Why are we getting off?”
   He pulled her into the corner formed by the tiled wall and a huge vending machine. “Someone is at the restaurant, waiting for you.” He looked down at her wrist, as if amazed to find that he was holding it, and instantly released her.
   “How do you know?”
   “Walled City. There have been inquiries, in the last hour.”
   “Who?”
   “Russians.”
   “Russians?”
   “There are many from the Kombinat here, since the earthquake. They forge relationships with the gumi.”
   “What’s gumi?”
   “Mafia, you call it Yakuza. My father has arrangement with local gumi. Necessary, in order to operate restaurant. Gumi representatives spoke about you to my father.”
   “Your neighborhood mafia is Russian?” Behind his head, on the side of the machine, the animated logo of something called Apple Shires.
   “No. Yamaguchi-gumi franchise. My father knows these men. They tell my father Russians ask about you, and this is not good. They cannot guarantee usual safety. Russians not reliable.”
   “I don’t know any Russians,” Chia said.
   “We go now.”
   “Where?”
   He led her along the crowded platform, its pavement wet from hundreds of furled umbrellas. It must be raining now, she thought. Toward an escalator.
   “When Walled City saw attention was being paid to our addresses, my sister’s and mine, a friend was sent to remove my computer…”
   “Why?”
   “Because I have responsibility. For Walled City. Distributed processing.”
   “You’ve got a MUD in your computer?”
   “Walled City is not anywhere,” he said, as they stepped onto the escalator. “My friend has my computer. And he knows about men who are waiting for you.”

   Masahiko said his friend was called Gomi Boy.
   He was very small, and wore an enormous, balloon-bottomed pair of padded fatigue pants covered with at least a dozen pockets. These were held up with three-inch-wide Day-Glo orange suspenders, over a ratty cotton sweater with the cuffs rolled back. His shoes were pink, and looked like the shoes babies wore, but bigger. He was perched on an angular aluminum chair now and the baby shoes didn’t quite touch the floor. His hair looked as though it had been sculpted with a spatula, gleaming swirls and dips, like your hand might stick there if you touched it. It was the way they painted J.D. Shapely’s hair on those murals in Pioneer Square, and Chia knew from school that that had something to do with that whole Elvis thing, though she couldn’t remember exactly what.
   He was talking with Masahiko in Japanese, over the crashing sound-surf of this gaming arcade. Chia wished she was wearing a translator, but she’d have to open her bag, find one, turn the Sandbenders on. And Gomi Boy looked like he’d be just as happy knowing she couldn’t understand him.
   He was drinking a can of something called Pocari Sweat, and smoking a cigarette. Chia watched the blue smoke settling out in layers in the air, lit by the glare of the games. There was cancer in that, and they’d arrest you in Seattle if you did it. Gomi Boy’s cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a perfect white tube with a brown tip he put to his lips. Chia had seen those in old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn’t gone through yet to digitally erase them, but the only other cigarettes she’d seen were the twisted-up paper ones they sold on the street in Seattle, or you could buy a little baggie of the tobacco stuff and the white squares of paper to roll it up in. Meshbacks in school did it.
   The rain was still coming down. Through the arcade’s streaming window she could make out another arcade, across the street, one of the ones with the machines the silver balls poured through. The neon and the rain and the silver balls ran all together, and she wondered what Masahiko and Gomi Boy were talking about.
   Gomi Boy had Masahiko’s computer in a plaid plastic carry-bag with quilted pink International Biohazard symbols on the sides. It was sitting on the little table beside the can of Pocari Sweat. What was a Pocari? She imagined a kind of wild pig, with bristles, turned-up tusks, like she’d seen on the Nature Channel.
   Gomi Boy sucked on his cigarette, making the end glow. He squinted through the smoke at Masahiko and said something. Masahiko shrugged. There was a fresh mini-can of microwaved espresso in front of him, and Chia had another Coke Lite. In Tokyo there was nowhere to sit down unless you bought something, and it was quicker to buy a drink than something to eat. And it cost less. Except she wasn’t paying for these. Gomi Boy was, because he and Masahiko didn’t want her to use Kelsey’s cashcard.
   Gomi Boy spoke again. “He wishes to talk with you,” Masahiko said.
   Chia bent over, unzipped her bag, found the ear-clips. She only had the two, so she handed one to Gomi Boy, put the other on herself, and hit power. He put his on. “I am from Walled City,” he said. “You understand?”
   “A MUD, right? Multi user domain.”
   “Not in the sense you mean, but approximately, yes. Why are you in Tokyo?”
   “To gather information about Rez’s plan to marry the idoru, Rei Toei.”
   Gomi Boy nodded. Being an otaku was about caring a lot about information; he understood being a fan. “Do you have dealings with the Combine?” Chia knew he had said Kombinat, and the translator had covered it. He meant that mafia government in Russia.
   “No,” Chia said.
   “And you came to be at Masahiko’s because…”
   “Mitsuko’s the social secretary of the Tokyo chapter of the Lo/Rez group I belong to in Seattle.”
   “How many times did you port, from the restaurant?”
   “Three times.” The Silke-Marie Kolb outfit. The meeting. Zona Rosa. “I paid for presentation software, Mitsuko and I did the meeting, I linked home.”
   “You paid for the software with your cashcard?”
   “Yes.” She looked from Gomi Boy to Masahiko. Between and behind them, the rain. The endless racketing cascade of the little silver balls, through the glass across the street. Players hunched there on integral stools, manipulating the flood of metal. Masahiko’s expression told her nothing at all.
   “Masahiko’s computer maintains certain aspects of Walled City,” Gomi Boy said. “Contingency plans were in place for its removal to safety. When it became obvious that both Masahiko’s and his sister’s user addresses were attracting unusual attention, I was sent to secure his machine. We frequently exchange hardware. I am a dealer in second-hand equipment. That is why I am called Gomi Boy. I have my own keys to Masahiko’s room. His father knows I am allowed to enter. His father does not care. I came and took the computer. Nearby is a small civic recreation area. The restaurant is visible from it. Seeing Oakland Overbombers, I crossed the street and spoke with them.”
   “Seeing what?”
   “A skateboard group. They are named for the California soccer club. I asked them if there had been unusual activity. They told me they had seen a very large vehicle, an hour before.”
   –A Graceland.
   “A Daihatsu Graceland. There are fewer here than in America, I think.”
   Chia nodded. Her stomach did that cold flip-thing again. She thought she might throw up.
   Gomi Boy leaned sideways with his cigarette, which was short now, and mashed the lit end into a little chrome bowl that was fastened to the side of a game console. Chia wondered what this was actually used for, and why he did that, but she supposed he had to put it somewhere or it would burn his fingers. “The Graceland parked near the restaurant. Two men got out…”
   “What did they look like?”
   “Gumi representatives.”
   “Japanese?”
   “Yes. They went into the restaurant. The Graceland waited. After fifteen minutes, they returned, got into the Graceland, and left. Masahiko’s father appeared. He looked in all directions, studying the street. He took his phone from his pocket and spoke with someone. He went back into the restaurant.” Gomi Boy looked at the carry-bag. “I did not want to remain in the recreation area with Masahiko’s computer. I told the leader of the Overbombers I would give him a better telephone, later, if he would remain there and phone me if more activity occurred. The Overbombers do nothing anyway, so he agreed. I left. He phoned twenty minutes later to report a gray Honda van. The driver is Japanese, but the other three are foreigners. He thinks they are Russian.”
   “Why?”
   “Because they are very large, and dress in a style he associates with the Combine. They are still there.”
   “How do you know?”
   “If they leave, he must call me. He wants his new phone.”
   “Can I port from here? I have to talk to Air Magellan right away about changing my reservations. I want to go home.” And leave Maryalice’s package in that trash cannister she could see behind Gomi Boy.
   “You must not port,” Masahiko said. “You must not use the cash-card. If you do, they will find you.”
   “But what else am I supposed to do?” she said, startled by her own voice, which sounded like someone else’s. “I just want to go home!”
   “Let me see the card,” Gomi Boy said. It was in her parka, with her passport and her ticket home. She took it out and handed it to him. He opened a pocket on his fatigue pants and took out a small rectangular device that seemed to be held together with multiple layers of fraying silver tape. He swiped Chia’s card along a slot and peered into a peephole reader like the one on a fax-beeper. “This is nontransferable and cannot be used to obtain cash. It is also very easy to trace.”
   “My friend’s pretty sure they’ve got the number anyway,” Chia said, thinking of Zona.
   Gomi Boy began to tap the edge of the cashcard on the rim of his can of Pocari Sweat. “There is a place where you can use this and not be traced,” he said, Tap tap. “Where Masahiko could access Walled City.” Tap tap. “Where you could phone home.”
   “Where’s that?”
   “A love hotel.” Tap. “Do you know what that is?”
   “No,” Chia said. Tap.

23. Here at the Western World

   Emerging from Le Chicle’s pink mosaic gullet into the start of rain, Laney saw that the stilt-walking New Logic disciple was still at his post, his animated sandwich-board illuminated against the evening. As Blackwell held the door of a mini-limo for Arleigh, Laney looked back at the scrolling numerals and wondered how much the planet’s combined weight of human nervous tissue had increased while they’d been in the bar.
   Laney got in after her, noticing those Catalan suns again, the three of them, decreasing in size down her inner calf. Blackwell thunked the door behind him, then opened the front, should’ve-been driver’s side door and seemed to pour himself into the car, a movement that simultaneously suggested the sliding of a ball of mercury and the settling of hundreds of pounds of liquid concrete. The car waddled and swayed as its shocks adjusted to accommodate his weight.
   Laney saw how the brim of Blackwell’s black-waxed hat drooped low in back, but not far enough to conceal a crisscrossing of fine red welts decorating the back of his neck,
   Their driver, to judge by the back of his head, might have been the same one who’d driven them to Akihabara. He pulled out into the mirror-image traffic. The rain was running and pooling, tugging reflected neon out of the perpendicular and spreading it in wriggly lines across sidewalk and pavement.
   Arleigh McCrae was wearing perfume, and it made Laney wish that Blackwell wasn’t there, and that they were on their way somewhere other than wherever it was they were going now, and in another city, and that quite a lot of the last seven months of Laney’s life hadn’t happened at all, or had happened differently, or maybe even as far back as DatAmerica and the Frenchmen, but as it became more complicated, it became depressing.
   “I’m not sure you’re going to enjoy this place,” she said.
   “How’s that?”
   “You don’t seem like the type.”
   “Why not?”
   “I could be wrong. Lots of people do enjoy it. I suppose if you take it as a very elaborate joke…”
   “What is it?”
   “A club. Restaurant. An environment. If we turned up there without Blackwell, I doubt they’d let us in. Or even admit it’s there.”
   Laney was remembering the Japanese restaurant in Brentwood, the one Kathy Torrance had taken him to. Not Japanese Japanese. Owned and operated. Its theme an imaginary Eastern European country. Decorated with folk art from that country, and everyone who worked there wore native garb from that country, or else a sort of metallic-gray prison outfit and these big black shoes. The men who worked there all had these haircuts, shaved high on the sides, and the women had big double braids, rolled up like wheels of cheese. Laney’s entrée had had all kinds of different little sausages in it, the smallest he’d ever seen, and some kind of pickled cabbage on the side, and it hadn’t tasted like it had come from anywhere in particular, but maybe that was the point. And then they’d gone back to her apartment, decorated like a sort of deluxe version of the Cage at Slitscan. And that hadn’t worked out either, and sometimes he wondered whether that had made her even angrier, when he’d gone over to Out of Control.
   “Laney?”
   “Sorry… This place—Rez likes it?”
   Past ambient forests of black umbrellas, waiting to cross at an intersection.
   “I think he just likes to brood there,” she said.

   The Western World occupied the top two floors of an office building that hadn’t quite survived the quake. Yamazaki might have said that it represented a response to trauma and subsequent reconstruction. In the days (some said hours) immediately following the disaster, an impromptu bar and disco had come into being in the former offices of a firm that had brokered shares in golf-club memberships. The building, declared structurally unsound, had been sealed by emergency workers at the ground floor, but it was still possible to enter through the ruined sublevels. Anyone willing to climb eleven flights of mildly fissured concrete stairs found the Western World, a bizarrely atypical (but some said mysteriously crucial) response to the upheaval that had, then, so recently killed eighty-six thousand of the region’s thirty-six million inhabitants. A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya’s idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was the early Western World’s substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convulsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo’s psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.
   But now, Arleigh was explaining, as they climbed the first of those eleven flights of stairs, it was very definitely a commercial operation, the damaged building owing its continued survival to the unlicensed penthouse club that was its sole occupant. If in fact it continued to be unlicensed, and she had her doubts about that. “There isn’t a lot of slack here,” she said, climbing, “not for things like that. Everybody knows the Western World’s here. I think there’s a very quiet agreement, somewhere, to allow them to operate the place as though it were still unlicensed. Because that’s what people want to pay for.”
   “Who owns the building?” Laney asked, watching Blackwell float up the stairs in front of them, his arms, in the matte black sleeves of the drover’s coat, like sides of beef dressed for a funeral. The stairwell was lit with irregular loops of faintly bioluminescent cable.
   “Rumor has it, one of the two groups who can’t quite agree on who owns our hotel.”
   “Mafia?”
   “Local equivalent, but only very approximately equivalent. Real estate was baroque, here, before the quake; now it’s more like occult.”
   Laney, glancing down as they passed one of the glowing loops, noticed, on the treads of the stairs, hardened trickles of something that resembled greenish amber. “There’s stuff on the stairs,” he said.
   “Urine,” Arleigh said.
   “Urine?”
   “Solidified, biologically neutral urine.”
   Laney took the next few steps in silence. His calves were starting to ache. Urine?
   “The plumbing didn’t work, after the quake,” she said. “They couldn’t use the toilets. People just started going, down the stairs. Pretty horrible, by all accounts, although some people actually get nostalgic about it.”
   “It’s solid?”
   “There’s a product here, a powder, looks like instant soup. Some kind of enzyme. They sell it mainly to mothers with young kids. The kid has to pee, you can’t get them to a toilet in time, they pee in a paper cup, an empty juice box. You drop in the contents of a handy, purse-sized sachet of this stuff, zap, it’s a solid. Neutral, odorless, completely hygienic. Pop it in the trash, it’s landfill.”
   They passed another loop of light and Laney saw miniature stalactites suspended from the edges of a step. “They used that stuff…”
   “Lots of it. Constantly. Eventually they had to start sawing off the build-up…”
   “They still… ?”
   “Of course not. But they kept the Grotto.” Another flight. Another loop of ghostly undersea light. “What did they do about the solids?” he asked.
   “I’d rather not know.”

   Winded, his ankles sore, Laney emerged from the Grotto. Into a black-walled and indeterminate space defined by blue light and the uprights of gilded girders. After chemically frozen frescoes of piss, the Western World disappointed. A gutted office block dressed with mismatched couches and nondescript bars. Something looming in the middle foreground. He blinked. A tank. American, he thought, and old.
   “How did they get that up here?” he asked Arleigh, who was passing her black coat to someone. And why hadn’t the floor collapsed?
   “It’s resin,” she said. “Membrane sculpture. Stereo lithography. Otaku thing: they bring them in in sections and glue them together.”
   Blackwell had given up his drover’s coat, exposing a garment that resembled a suit jacket but seemed to have been woven from slightly tarnished aluminum. Whatever this fabric was, there was enough of it there for a double bedspread. He moved forward, through the maze of couches and low tables, with that same effortless determination, Laney and Arleigh drawn along in his wake.
   “That’s a Sherman tank,” Laney said, remembering a CD-ROM from Gainesville, one about the history of armored vehicles. Arleigh didn’t seem to have heard him. But then she’d probably never played with CD-ROMs, either. Time in a Federal Orphanage had a way of acquainting you with dead media platforms.
   If Arleigh were right, and the Western World were being kept on as a kind of tourist attraction, Laney wondered what the crowd would have been like in the early days, when the sidewalks below were buried in six feet of broken glass.
   These people on the couches, now, hunched over the low tables that supported their drinks, seemed unlike any crowd he’d seen so far in Tokyo. There was a definite edged-out quality there, and prolonged eye-contact might have been interesting in some cases, dangerous in others. Distinct impression that the room’s combined mass of human nervous tissue would have been found to be freighted with the odd few colorants. Or else these people were somehow preselected for a certain combination of facial immobility and intensity of glance?
   “Laney,” Blackwell said, dropping a hand on Laney’s shoulder and twirling him into the gaze of a pair of long green eyes, “this is Rez. Rez, Colin Laney. He’s working with Arleigh.”
   “Welcome to the Western World,” smiling, and then the eyes slid past him to Arleigh. “Evenin’, Miz MacCrae.”
   Laney noticed something then that he knew from his encounters with celebs at Slitscan: that binary flicker in his mind between image and reality, between the mediated face and the face there in front of you. He’d noticed how it always seemed to speed up, that alternation, until the two somehow merged, the resulting composite becoming your new idea of the person. (Someone at Slitscan had told him that it had been clinically proven that celebrity-recognition was handled by one particular area in the brain, but he’d never been sure whether or not they were joking.)
   Those had been tame celebrities, the ones Kathy had already had her way with. In the building (but never the Cage) to have various aspects of their public lives scripted, per whatever agreements were already in place. But Rez wasn’t tame, and was a much bigger deal in his own way, although Laney had only been aware of his later career because Kathy had hated him so.
   Rez had his arm around Arleigh now, gesturing with the other into the relative darkness beyond the Sherman tank, saying something Laney couldn’t hear.
   “Mr. Laney, good evening.” It was Yamazaki, in a green plaid sportscoat that sat oddly on his narrow shoulders. He blinked rapidly,
   “Yamazaki.”
   “You have met Rez, yes? Good, very good. A table is prepared, to dine.” Yamazaki put two fingers inside the oversized, buttoned collar of his cheap-looking white dress shirt and tugged, as though it were far too tight. “I understand initial attempts to identify nodal points did not meet with success.” He swallowed.
   “I can’t pull a personal fix out of something textured like corporate data. He’s just not there.”
   Rez was moving in the direction of whatever lay beyond the tank.
   “Come,” Yamazaki said, then lowered his voice. “Something extraordinary. She is here. She dines with Rez. Rei Toei.”
   The idoru.

24. Hotel Di

   In this tiny cab now with Masahiko and Gomi Boy, Masahiko up front, on what should’ve been the driver’s side, Gomi Boy beside her in the back. Gomi Boy had so many pockets in his fatigue pants, and so many things in them, that he had trouble getting comfortable. Chia had never been in a car this small, let alone a cab. Masahiko’s knees were folded up, almost against his chest. The driver had white cotton gloves and a hat like the hats cab drivers wore in 1940s movies. There were little covers made of starched white lace fixed to all the headrests with special clips.
   She guessed it was such a small cab because Gomi Boy was going to be paying, cash money, and he made it clear he didn’t have a lot of that.
   Somehow they had ascended out of the rain into this crazy, impressive, but old-fashioned-looking multilevel expressway, its steel bones ragged with bandages of Kevlar, and were whipping past the middle floors of tall buildings—maybe that Shinjuku again, because there went that Tin Toy Building, she thought, glimpsed through a gap, but far away and from another direction—and here, gone so fast she was never sure she’d seen him, through one window like all the rest, was a naked man, crosslegged on an office desk, his mouth open as wide as possible, as if in a silent scream.
   Then she began to notice other buildings, through sheets of rain, and these were illuminated to a degree excessive even by local standards, like Nissan County attractions in a television ad, isolated theme-park elements thrusting up out of a strata of more featureless structures, unmarked and unlit. Each bright building with its towering sign: HOTEL KING MIDAS with its twinkling crown and scepter, FREEDOM SHOWER BANFF with blue-green mountains flanking a waterfall of golden light. At least six more in rapid succession, then Gomi Boy said something in Japanese. The driver’s shiny black bill dipped in response.
   They swung onto an off-ramp, slowing. From the ramp’s curve, in the flat, ugly flare of sodium floods, she saw a rainy, nowhere intersection, no cars in sight, where pale coarse grass lay wet and dishevelled up a short steep slope. No place at all, like it could as easily have been on the outskirts of Seattle, the outskirts of anywhere, and the homesickness made her gasp.
   Gomi Boy shot her a sidewise glance, engaged in the excavation of something from another of his pockets, this one apparently insidehis pants. From somewhere well below the level of his crotch he fished up a wallet-sized fold of paper money, secured with a wide black elastic band. In the passing glare of another road light Chia saw him snap the elastic back and peel off three bills. Bigger than American money, and on one she made out the comfortingly familiar logo of a company whose name she’d known all her life. He tucked the three bills into the sleeve of his sweater and set about replacing the rest wherever it was he kept it.
   “There soon,” he said, withdrawing his hand and refastening his suspenders.
   “Where soon?”
   They took a right and stopped, all around them a strange white fairy glow, falling with the rain to oil-stained concrete neatly painted with two big white arrows, side by side, pointing in opposite directions. The one pointing in the direction they were headed indicated a square opening in a featureless, white-painted concrete wall. Five-inch-wide ribbons of shiny pink plastic hung from its upper edge to the concrete below, concealing whatever was behind and reminding Chia of streamers at a school dance. Gomi Boy gave the driver the three bills. He sat patiently, waiting for change.
   Her legs cramping, Chia reached for the door handle, but Masahiko quickly reached across from the front, stopping her. “Driver must open,” he said. “If you open, mechanism breaks, very expensive.” The driver gave Gomi Boy change. Chia thought Gomi Boy would tip him, but he didn’t. The driver reached down and did something, out of sight, that made the door beside Chia open.
   She climbed out into the rain, dragging her bag after her, and looked up at the source of the white glow: a building like a wedding cake, HOTEL DI spelled out in white neon script edged with clear twinkling bulbs. Masahiko beside her now, urging her toward the pink ribbons. She heard the cab pull away behind her. “Come.” Gomi Boy with the plaid bag, ducking through the wet ribbons.
   Into an almost empty parking area, two small cars, one gray, one dark green, their license plates concealed by rectangles of smooth black plastic. A glass door sliding aside as Gomi Boy approached.
   A disembodied voice said something in Japanese. Gomi Boy answered. “Give him your card,” Masahiko said. Chia took out the card and handed it to Gomi Boy, who seemed to be asking the voice a series of questions. Chia looked around. Pale blues, pink, light gray. A very small space that managed to suggest a hotel lobby without actually offering a place to sit down. Pictures cycling past on wallscreens: interiors of very strange-looking rooms. The voice answering Gomi Boy’s questions.
   “He asks for a room with optimal porting capacity,” Masahiko said quietly.
   Gomi Boy and the voice seemed to reach agreement. He slotted Chia’s card above something that looked like a small pink water fountain. The voice thanked him. A narrow hatch opened and a key slid down into the pink bowl. Gorni Boy picked it up and handed it to Masahiko. Chia’s card emerged from the slot; Gomi Boy pulled it out and passed it to Chia. He handed Masahiko the plaid bag, turned, and walked out, the glass door hissing open for him.
   “He isn’t coming with us?”
   “Only two people allowed in room. He is busy elsewhere. Come.” Masahiko pointed toward an elevator that opened as they approached.
   “What kind of hotel did you say this is?” Chia got into the elevator. He stepped in behind her and the door closed.
   He cleared his throat. “Love hotel,” he said.
   “What’s that?” Going up.
   “Private rooms. For sex. Pay by the hour.”
   “Oh,” Chia said, as though that explained everything. The elevator stopped and the door opened. He got out and she followed him along a narrow corridor lit with ankle-high light-strips. He stopped in front of a door and inserted the key they’d been given. As he opened the door, lights came on inside.
   “Have you been to one of these before?” she asked, and felt herself blush. She hadn’t meant it that way.
   “No,” he said. He closed the door behind her and examined the locks. He pushed two buttons. “But people who come here sometimes wish to port. There is a reposting service that makes it very hard to trace. Also for phoning, very secure.”
   Chia was looking at the round pink furry bed. It seemed to be upholstered in what they made stuffed animals out of. The wall-to-wall was shaggy and white as snow, the combination reminding her of a particularly nasty-looking sugar snack called a Ring-Ding.
   Velcro made that ripping sound. She turned to see Masahiko removing his nylon gaiters. He took off his black workshoes (the toe was out, in one of his thin gray socks) and slid his feet into white paper sandals. Chia looked down at her own wet shoes on the white shag and decided she’d better do the same. “Why does this place lookthe way it does?” she asked, kneeling to undo her laces.
   Masahiko shrugged. Chia noticed that the quilted International Biohazard symbol on the plaid bag was almost exactly the color of the fur on the bed.
   Spotting what was obviously the bathroom through an open door, she carried her own bag in there and closed the door behind her. The walls were upholstered with something black and shiny, and the floor was checkered with black and white tiles. Complicated mood-lighting came on and she was surrounded by ambient birdsong. This bathroom was nearly as big as the bedroom, with a bath like a miniature black swimming pool and something else that Chia only gradually recognized as a toilet. Remembering the one back in Eddie’s office, she put her bag down and approached the thing with extreme caution. It was black, and chrome, and had arms and a back, sort of like a chair at the stylist’s. There was a display cycling, on a little screen beside it, with fragments of English embedded in the Japanese. Chia watched as “(A) Pleasure” and “(B) Super Pleasure” slid past. “Uh-uh,” she said.
   After studying the seat and the ominous black bowl, she lowered her pants, positioned herself strategically over the toilet, squatted carefully, and urinated without sitting down. She’d let someone else flush that one, she decided, while she washed her hands at the basin, but then she heard it flush itself.
   There was a glossy pink paper bag beside the basin with the words “Teen Teen Toiletry Bag” printed on it in swirly white script. It was sealed at the top with a silver stick-on bow. She removed the bow and looked inside. Lots of different little give-away cosmetics and at least a dozen different kinds of condoms, everything packaged to look more or less like candy.
   There was a shiny black cabinet to the left of the mirror above the basin, the only thing in the room that looked Japanese in that old-fashioned way. She opened it; a light came on inside, revealing three glass shelves arranged with shrink-wrapped plastic models of guy’s dicks, all different sizes of them, molded in weird colors. Other objects she didn’t recognize at all: knobby balls, something that looked like a baby’s pacifier, miniature inner-tubes with long rubbery whiskers. In the middle of it all stood a little black-haired doll in a pretty kimono made of bright paper and gold cloth. But when she tried to pick it up, the wig and the kimono came off in one piece, revealing yet another shrink-wrapped replica, this one with delicately painted eyes and a Cupid’s-bow mouth. When she tried to put the wig and kimono back on, it fell over, knocking over everything on its shelf, so she closed the cabinet. Then she washed her hands again.
   Back in the Ring-Ding room, Masahiko was cabling his computer to a black console on a shelf full of entertainment gear. Chia put her bag on the bed. Something chimed softly, twice, and then the surface of the bed began to ripple, slow osmotic waves centering in on the bag, which began to rise slightly, and fall…
   “Ick,” she said, and pulled the bag off the bed, which chimed again and began to subside.
   Masahiko glanced in her direction, but went back to whatever he was doing with the equipment on the shelf.
   Chia found that the room had a window, but it was hidden behind some kind of softscreen. She tried the clips that held the screen in place until she got the one that let her slide the screen aside on hidden tracks. The window looked out on a chainlinked parking lot beside a low, beige building sided with corrugated plastic. There were three trucks parked there, the first vehicles she’d seen in Japan that weren’t new or particularly clean. A wet-looking gray cat emerged from beneath one of the trucks and sprang into the shadow beneath another. It was still raining.
   “Good,” she heard Masahiko say, evidently satisfied. “We go to Walled City.”

25. The Idoru

   How do you mean, she’s ‘here’?” Laney asked Yamazaki, as they rounded the rear of the Sherman tank. Clots of dry clay clung to the segments of its massive steel treads.
   “Mr. Kuwayama is here,” Yamazaki whispered. “He represents her—”
   Laney saw that several people were already seated at a low table.
   Two men. A woman. The woman must be Rei Toei.
   If he’d anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. That was usually the way in Hollywood, and the formula tended to be even more rigid, in the case of software agents—eigenheads, their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity.
   She was nothing like that.
   Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.
   And now her eyes met his.
   He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon. The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.
   Laney shivered. In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.
   The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met his.
   “We’re here.” Arleigh beside him, hand at his elbow. She was indicating two places at the table. “Are you all right?” she asked, under her breath. “Take your shoes off.”
   Laney looked at Blackwell, who was staring at the idoru, something like pain in his face, but the expression vanished, sucked away behind the mask of his scars.
   Laney did as he was told, kneeling and removing his shoes, moving as if he were drunk, or dreaming, though he knew he was neither, and the idoru smiled, lit from within.
   “Laney?”
   The table was set above a depression in the floor. Laney seated himself, arranging his feet beneath the table and gripping his cushion with both hands. “What?”
   “Are you okay?”
   “Okay?”
   “You looked… blind.”
   Rez was taking his place now at the head of the table, the idoru to his right, someone else—Laney saw that it was Lo, the guitarist—to his left. Next to the idoru sat a dignified older man with rimless glasses, gray hair brushed back from his smooth forehead. He wore a very simple, very expensive-looking suit of some lusterless black material, and a high-collared white shirt that buttoned in a complicated way. When this man turned to address Rei Toei, Laney quite clearly saw the light of her face reflect for an instant in the almost circular lenses.
   Arleigh’s sharp intake of breath. She’d seen it too.
   A hologram. Something generated, animated, projected. He felt his grip relax slightly, on the edges of the cushion,
   But then he remembered the stone tombs, the river, the ponies with their iron bells.
   Nodal.

   Laney had once asked Gerrard Delouvrier, the most patient of the tennis-playing Frenchmen of TIDAL, why it was that he, Laney, had been chosen as the first (and, as it would happen, the only) recipient of the peculiar ability they sought to impart to him. He hadn’t applied for the job, he said, and had no reason to believe the position had even been advertised. He had applied, he told Delouvrier, to be a trainee service rep.
   Delouvrier, with short, prematurely gray hair and a suntable tan, leaned back in his articulated workstation chair and stretched his legs. He seemed to be studying his crepe-soled suede shoes. Then he looked out the window, to rectangular beige buildings, anonymous landscaping, February snow. “Do you not see? How we do not teach you? We watch. We wish to learn from you.”
   They were in a DatAmerica research park in Iowa. There was an indoor court for Delouvrier and his colleagues, but they complained constantly about its surface.
   “But why me?”
   Delouvrier’s eyes looked tired. “We wish to be kind to the orphans? We are an unexpected warmth at the heart of DatAmerica?” He rubbed his eyes. “No. Something was done to you, Laney. In our way, perhaps, we seek to redress that. Is that a word, ‘redress’?”
   “No,” Laney said.
   “Do not question good fortune. You are here with us, doing work that matters. It is winter in this Iowa, true, but the work goes on.” He was looking at Laney now. “You are our only proof,” he said.
   “Of what?”
   Delouvrier closed his eyes. “There was a man, a blind man, who mastered echo-location. Clicks with the tongue, you understand?” Eyes closed, he demonstrated. “Like a bat. Fantastic,” He opened his eyes. “He could perceive his immediate environment in great detail, Ride a bicycle in traffic. Always making the tik, tik. The ability was his, was absolutely real. And he could never explain it, never teach it to another…” He wove his long fingers together and cracked his knuckles. “We must hope that this is not the case with you.”

   Don’t think of a purple cow. Or was it a brown one? Laney couldn’t remember. Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.
   He could watch her hands. Watch the way she ate.
   The meal was elaborate, many small courses served on individual rectangular plates. Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei, and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was simultaneously veiled with a flawless copy, holo food on a holo plate.
   Even the movement of her chopsticks brought on peripheral flickers of nodal vision. Because the chopsticks were information too, but nothing as dense as her features, her gaze. As each “empty” plate was removed, the untouched serving would reappear.
   But when the flickering began, Laney would concentrate on his own meal, his clumsiness with his own chopsticks, conversation around the table. Kuwayama, the man with the rimless glasses, was answering something Rez had asked, though Laney hadn’t been able to catch the question itself. “—the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as ‘desiring machines’.” Rez’s green eyes, bright and attentive. “Not in any literal sense,” Kuwayama continued, “but please envision aggregates of subjective desire. It was decided that the modular array would ideally constitute an architecture of articulated longing…” The man’s voice was beautifully modulated, his English accented in a way that Laney found impossible to place.
   Rez smiled then, his eyes going to the face of the idoru. As did Laney’s as well, automatically.
   He fell through her eyes. He was staring up at a looming cliff face that seemed to consist entirely of small rectangular balconies, none set at quite the same level or depth. Orange sunset off a tilted, steel-framed window. Oilslick colors crawling in the sky.
   He closed his eyes, looked down, opened them. A fresh plate there, more food.
   “You’re really into your meal,” Arleigh said.
   A concentrated effort with the chopsticks and he managed to capture and swallow something that was like a one-inch cube of cold chutney omelet. “Wonderful. Don’t want any of that fugu though. Blowfish with the neurotoxins? Heard about that?”
   “You’ve already had seconds,” she said. “Remember the big plate of raw fish arranged like the petals of a chrysanthemum?”
   “You’re kidding,” Laney said.
   “Lips and tongue feel faintly numb? That’s it.”
   Laney ran his tongue across his lips. Was she kidding? Yamazaki, seated to his left, leaned close. “There may be a way around the problem you face with Rez’s data. You are aware of Lo/Rez global fan activity?”
   “Of what?”
   “Many fans. They report each sighting of Rez, Lo, other musicians involved. There is much incidental detail.”
   Laney knew from his day’s video education that Lo/Rez were theoretically a duo, but that there were always at least two other “members,” usually more. And Rez had been adamant from the start about his dislike of drum machines; the current drummer, “Blind” Willy Jude, seated opposite Yamazaki, had been with them for years. He’d been turning his enormous black glasses in the idoru’s direction throughout the meal; now he seemed to sense Laney’s glance. The black glasses, video units, swung around. “Man,” Jude said, “Rozzer’s sittin’ down there makin’ eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle.”
   “You can’t see her?”
   “Holos are hard, man,” the drummer said, touching his glasses with a fingertip “Take my kids to Nissan County, I’ll call ahead, get ’em tweaked around a little. Then I can see ’em. But this lady’s on funny frequency or something. All I can see’s the projector and this kinda, kinda ectoplastic, right? Glow, like.”
   The man seated between Jude and Mr. Kuwayama, whose name was Ozaki, bobbed apologetically in Jude’s direction. “We regret this very much. We regret deeply. A slight adjustment is required, but it cannot be done at this time,”
   “Hey,” Jude said, “no big problem. I seen her already. I get all the music channels with these. That one where she’s a Mongol princess or something, up in the mountains.
   Laney lost a chopstick.
   “The most recent single,” Ozaki said.
   “Yeah,” Jude said, “that’s pretty good. She wears that gold mask? Okay shit.” He popped a section of maki into his mouth and chewed.

26. HakNani

   Chia and Masahiko sat facing one another on the white carpet. The room’s only chair was a fragile-looking thing with twisted wire legs and a heart-shaped seat upholstered in pink metal-flake plastic. Neither of them wanted to sit on the bed. Chia had her Sandbenders across her knees and was working her fingers into her tip-sets. Masahiko’s computer was on the carpet in front of him; he’d put its control-face back on and peeled a very compact pair of tip-sets out of the back of the cube, along with two small black oval cups on fine lengths of optical cable. Another length of the cable ran from his computer to a small open hatch at the back of the Sandbenders.
   “Okay,” Chia said, settling the last of her tips, “let’s go. I’ve got to get hold of somebody…”
   “Yes,” he said. He picked up the black cups, one in either hand, and placed them over his eyes. When he let go, they stayed there. It looked uncomfortable.
   Chia reached up and pulled her own glasses down, over her eyes “What do I—”
   Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. It wasn’t even like porting. Software conflict? Faint impression of light through a fluttering of rags.
   And then the thing before her: building or biomass or cliff face looming there, in countless unplanned strata, nothing about it even or regular. Accreted patchwork of shallow random balconies, thousands of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles of fog. Stretching either way to the periphery of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a black fur of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth of cable. And past this scribbled border a sky where colors crawled like gasoline on water.
   “Hak Nam,” he said, beside her.
   “What is it?”
   “ ‘City of darkness.’ Between the walls of the world.”
   She remembered the scarf she’d seen, in his room behind the kitchen, its intricate map of something chaotic and compacted, tiny irregular segments of red and black and yellow. And then they were moving forward, toward a narrow opening. “It’s a MUD, right?” Something like a larger, permanent version of the site the Tokyo chapter had erected for the meeting, or the tropical forest Kelsey and Zona had put up. But people played games in MUDs; they made up characters for themselves and pretended. Little kids did it, and lonely people.
   “No,” he said, “not a game.” They were inside now, smoothly accelerating, and the squirming density of the thing was continual visual impact, an optical drumming. “Tai Chang Street.” Walls scrawled and crawling with scrolling messages, spectral doorways passing like cards in a shuffled deck.
   And they were not alone: others there, ghost-figures whipping past, and everywhere the sense of eyes .
   Fractal filth, bit-rot, the corridor of their passage tented with crazy swoops of faintly flickering lines of some kind. “Alms House Backstreet.” A sharp turn. Another. Then they were ascending a maze of twisting stairwells, still accelerating, and Chia took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Retinal fireworks bursting there, but the pressure was gone.
   When she opened her eyes, they were in a much cleaner but no larger version of his room behind the kitchen in the restaurant. No empty ramen bowls, no piles of clothing. He was beside her on the sleeping ledge, staring at the shifting patterns on his computer’s control-face. Beside it on the work-surface, her Sandbenders. The texture-mapping was rudimentary, everything a little too smooth and glossy. She looked at him, curious to see how he’d present. A basic scan job, maybe a year out of date: his hair was shorter. He wore the same black tunic.
   On the wall behind the computers was an animated version of the printed scarf, its red, black, and yellow bits pulsing slightly. A bright green line traced a route in from the perimeter; where it ended, bright green, concentric rings radiated from one particular yellow square.
   She looked back at him, but he was still staring at the control-face.
   Something chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and saw a small white rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge. She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate, up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming to a halt when it was in optimum position to be read. It was in that same font they’d used at Whiskey Clone, or one just like it. It said “Ku Klux Klan Kollectibles,” and then some letters and numbers that didn’t look like any kind of address she knew.
   Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray blur scoot from under it. Flat, whirling, fast. It was on the white rectangle now, something like the shadow of a crab or spider, two-dimensional and multi-legged. It swallowed it, shot for the door.
   “I have completed responsibility to Walled City,” Masahiko said, turning from the control-face.
   “What were those things?” Chia asked him.
   “What things?”
   “Like a business card, Crawled under the door. Then another thing, like a gray cut-out crab, that ate it.”
   “An advertisement,” he decided, “and a sub-program that offered criticism.”
   “It didn’t offer criticism; it ate it.”
   “Perhaps the person who wrote the sub-program dislikes advertising. Many do. Or dislikes the advertiser. Political, aesthetic, personal reasons, all are possible.”
   Chia looked around at the reproduction of his tiny room. “Why don’t you have a bigger site?” Instantly worried that it was because he was Japanese, and maybe they were just used to that. But still it was about the smallest virtual space she could remember having been in, and it wasn’t like a bigger one cost more, not unless you were like Zona and wanted yourself a whole country.
   “The Walled City is a concept of scale. Very important. Scale isplace, yes? Thirty-three thousand people inhabited original. Two-point-seven hectares. As many as fourteen stories,”
   None of which made any sense to Chia. “I have to port, okay?”
   “Of course,” he said, and gestured toward her Sandbenders.
   She was braced for that two-directions-at-once thing, but it didn’t happen. The bit-mapped fish were swimming around in the glass coffee table. She looked out the window at the crayon trees and wondered where the Mumphalumpagus was. She hadn’t seen it for a while. It was something her father had made for her when she was a baby, a big pink dinosaur with goofy eyelashes.
   She checked the table for mail, but there was nothing new.
   She could phone from here. Call her mother. Sure.
   –Hi, I’m in Tokyo. In a “love hotel.” People are after me because somebody put something in my bag. So, uh, what do you think I should I do?
   She tried porting to Kelsey’s address instead, but all she got was that annoying marble anteroom and the voice, not Kelsey’s, that said that Kelsey Van Troyer wasn’t in at the moment. Chia exited without leaving a message. The next address she tried was Zona’s, but Zona’s provider was down. That happened a lot, in Mexico, and particularly in Mexico City, where Zona lived. She decided to try Zona’s secret place, because it was on a mainframe in Arizona and it was never down. She knew Zona didn’t like people just showing up there, because Zona didn’t want the company that had built the original website, and then forgotten about it, to discover that Zona had gotten in and set up her own country.
   She asked the Sandbenders where she was porting from now and it said Helsinki, Finland. So that reporting capability at the hotel was working, at least.
   Just before twilight at Zona’s, like always. Chia scanned the floor of a dry swimming pool, looking for Zona’s lizards, but she didn’t see them. Usually they were right there, waiting for you, bur not this time. “Zona?”
   Chia looked up, wondering if she’d see those spooky condor-things that Zona kept. The sky was beautiful but empty. Originally that sky had been the most important part of this place, and no expense had been spared. Serious sky: deep and clean and a crazy Mexican shade like pale turquoise. They’d brought people here to sell them airplanes, corporate jets, when the jets were still in the design phase. There’d been a white concrete landing strip, but Zona had folded it up into a canyon and mapped over it. All the local color was Zona’s stuff: the cooking fires and the dead pools and the broken walls. She’d imported landscape files, maybe even real stuff she knew from somewhere in Mexico. “Zona?”
   Something rattled, up the nearest ridge, like pebbles on a sheet of metal.
   –It’s okay. One of the lizards. She’s just not here now.
   A twig snapped. Closer.
   –Don’t fuck around, Zona.
   But she exited.
   The bit-mapped fish swam back and forth.
   That had been very creepy. She wasn’t sure why, exactly, but it had been. Still was, kind of. She looked at the door to her bedroom and found herself wondering what she’d find there if she gestured for it. The bed, her Lo Rez Skyline poster, the agent of Lo greeting her in his mindless friendly way. But what if she found something else?
   Something waiting. Like she could still hear that rattle, up the slope. Or what if she went to the wire-framed door where her mother’s room would have been? What if she opened it and her mother’s room was there after all, and not her mother, waiting, but something else?
   She was creeping herself out, that was all. She looked at her stack of Lo/Rez albums beside the lithographed lunch box, her virtual Venice beside that. Even her Music Master would seem like company now. She opened it, watching the Piazza decompress like some incredibly intricate paper pop-up book on fast-forward, facades and colonnades springing up around her, with the hour before a winter’s dawn for backlight.
   Turning from the water, where the prows of black gondolas bobbed like marks in some lost system of musical notation, she lifted her finger and shot forward into the maze, thinking as she did that this place had been as strange, in its way, as Masahiko’s Walled City, and what was that all supposed to be about anyway?
   And it was only as she crossed her third bridge that she noticed that he wasn’t there.
   –Hey.
   She stopped. A shop window displayed the masks of Carnival, the really ancient ones. Black, penis-nosed leather, empty eye-holes. A mirror draped with yellowed crepe.
   Checking the Sandbenders to make sure she hadn’t turned him off. She hadn’t.
   Chia closed her eyes and counted to three. Made herself feel the carpeted floor she sat on in the Hotel Di. She opened her eyes.
   At the end of the narrow Venetian street, down the tilted, stepped cobbles, where it opened out into a small square or plaza, an unfamiliar figure stood beside the central fountain.
   She pulled the goggles off without bothering to close Venice.
   Masahiko sat opposite her, his legs crossed, the black cups sucked up against his eyes. His lips were moving, silently, and his hands, on his knees, in their black tip-sets, traced tiny fingerpatterns in the air.
   Maryalice was sitting on the furry pink bed with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She had a little square gray gun in her hand, and Chia saw how the freshly glossed red of her nails contrasted with the pearly plastic of the handle.
   “Started again,” Maryalice said, around the cigarette. She pulled the trigger, causing a small golden flame to spring up from the muzzle, and used it to light her cigarette. “Tokyo. I’ll tell you. Does it every time.”

27. That Physical Thing

   Laney was at a black rubber urinal in the Men’s when he noticed the Russian combing his hair in the mirror.
   Or least it looked like black rubber, with sort of floppy edges. They obviously had the plumbing working, but he wondered what they’d say if you asked to make your own contribution to the Grotto? On his way here he’d noticed that one of the bars was topped with a slab of something murky green and translucent, lit from below, and he’d hoped they hadn’t made that from what they’d sawn out of the stairwell.
   Dinner was over and he’d probably had too much sake with it. He and Arleigh and Yamazaki had watched Rez meeting this new version of the idoru, the one Willy Jude saw as a big silver thermos. And Blackwell was having to get used to that, because Laney guessed that the bodyguard hadn’t had any idea she’d be here, not until he’d walked in and Rez had told him.
   Arleigh had talked with Lo through most of it, mainly about real estate. Different properties he owned around the world. Laney had listened to more of Yamazaki’s ideas about accessing this teenage fan-club stuff and there might actually be something to that, but they’d have to try it to find it. Blackwell hadn’t said two words to anybody, drinking lager instead of sake and packing his food away as though he were trying to plug something, some gap in security that could be taken care of if you stuffed it methodically with enough sashimi. The Australian was an ace with chopsticks; he could probably stick one in your eye at fifty paces. But the main show had been Rez and the idoru, and to a lesser extent Kuwayama, who’d carried on long conversations with them both. The other one, Ozaki, seemed to be the guy they brought along in case someone had to change the batteries in the silver thermos. And Willy Jude was amiable enough, but in about as content-free a way as possible.
   Techs were supposed to be an easy source of whatever passed for gossip in a given company, so Laney had tried a few openings in that direction, but Ozaki hadn’t said any more than he’d had to. And since Laney couldn’t get Rei Toei within his field of vision without starting to slide over into nodal mode, he’d had to conduct his evening’s eavesdropping with whatever pick-up visuals were available. Arleigh wasn’t too bad for that. There was something about the line of her jaw that he particularly liked, and kept coming back to.
   Laney zipped up and went to wash his hands, the basin made of that same floppy-looking black stuff, and noticed that the Russian was still combing his hair. Laney had no way of knowing if the man was literally Russian or not, but he thought of him that way because of the black patent paratrooper boots with contrasting white stitching, the pants with the black silk ribbon down the side, and the white leather evening jacket. Either Russian or one of those related jobs, but very definitely Kombinat-inflected, that mutant commie-mafioso thing.
   The Russian was combing his hair with a total concentration that made Laney think of a fly grooming itself with its front feet, He was very large, and had a large head, though it was mainly in the vertical, quite tall from the eyebrows up, seeming to taper very slightly toward the crown. For all the attention being given to the combing, the man didn’t actually have much hair, not on top anyway, and Laney had thought these guys all went in for implants. Rydell had told him Kombinat types were all over Tokyo. Rydell had seen a documentary about it, how they were so singularly and surrealistically brutal that nobody wanted to mess with them. Then Rydell had started to tell him about two Russians, San Francisco cops of some kind, who he’d had some sort of run-in with, but Laney had to take a meeting with Rice Daniels and a make-up artist, and never heard the end of it.
   Laney checked to see that he didn’t have anything stuck in his teeth from dinner.
   As he went out, the Russian was still combing.
   He saw Yamazaki, blinking and looking lost. “It’s back there,” he said.
   “What is?”
   “The can.”
   “Can?”
   “Men’s. The toilet.”
   “But I was looking for you.”
   “You found me.”
   “I observed, as we ate, that you avoided looking directly at the idoru.”
   “Right.”
   “I surmise that density of information is sufficient to allow nodal apprehension…”
   “You got it.”
   Yamazaki nodded. “Ah. But this would not be the case with one of her videos, or even with a ‘live’ performance.”
   “Why not?” Laney had started back in the direction of their table.
   “Bandwidth,” Yamazaki said, “The version here tonight is high-bandwidth prototype.”
   “Are we compensated for beta-testing?”
   “Can you describe the nature of nodal apprehension, please?”
   “Like memories,” Laney said, “or clips from a movie. But something the drummer said made me think I was just seeing her latest video.”
   Someone shoved Laney out of the way, from behind, and he fell across the nearest table, breaking a glass. He felt the glass shatter under him and found himself staring straight down, for a second, into the taut gray latex lap of a woman who screamed explosively just before the table gave way. Something, probably her knee, clipped him hard in the side of the head.
   He managed to get to his knees, holding his head, and found himself recalling an experiment they’d done in Science, back in Gainesville. Surface tension. You sprinkled pepper over the water in a glass. Brought the tip of a needle close to the film of pepper. Watched it spring back from the needle like a live thing. And he saw that happening here, his head ringing, but instead of pepper it was the crowd in the Western World, and he knew that the needle must be pointed at Rez’s table.
   The back of a white leather evening jacket… But then he saw the Sherman tank come unmoored on the shoulders of the recoiling crowd, spinning toward him, huge and weightless, and the lights went out.
   The crowd had been screaming anyway, but the dark twisted the communal pitch up into something that had Laney covering his ears. Or trying to, because someone stumbled into him and he went over, backward, instinctively curling into a tight fetal knot and clamping his hands across the back of his neck.
   “Hey,” said a voice, very close to his ear, “get on up. You gonna get stepped on.” It was Willy Jude, “I can see.” A hand around his wrist. “Got infrared.”
   Laney let the drummer pull him to his feet. “What is it? What’s happening?”
   “Dunno, but come on. Gonna get worse—” As if on cue, a terrible squeal of raw animal pain cut through the frenzied crowd-noise. “Blackwell got one,” Willy Jude said, and Laney felt the drummer’s hand grip his belt. He stumbled as he was pulled along. Someone ran into him, shouted in Japanese. After that he kept his hands up, trying to protect his face, and went where the drummer pulled him,
   Suddenly they were in a cove or pocket of relative quiet. “Where are we?” Laney asked.
   “This way…” Something clipped Laney across the shins. “Stool,” Willy Jude said. “Sorry.” Glass snapped beneath Laney’s shoes.
   A curve of greenish light, broken cursive hanging in the dark. Another few steps and he saw the Grotto. Willy Jude let go of his belt. “You can see here, right? That bioluminescent stuff?”
   “Yeah,” Laney said. “Thanks,”
   “It doesn’t register on my glasses. I get infrared off warm bodies, but I can’t make out the steps. Walk me down.” He took Laney’s hand. They started down the stairs together. A black-clad trio of Japanese shot past them, leaving a high-heeled pump on the encrusted stairs, and vanished around the landing. Laney kicked the shoe out of Willy Jude’s way and kept going.
   When they rounded the corner at the landing, Arleigh was there, a green champagne bottle cocked over her shoulder. There was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth, darker than her lipstick. When she saw Laney, she lowered the bottle. “Where were you?” she said.
   “The Men’s,” Laney said.
   “You missed the show.”
   “What happened?”
   “Damn it,” she said, “my coat’s up there.”
   “Keep moving, keep moving,” Willy Jude said, More stairs, more landings, the rippling walls of the Grotto giving way to concrete. People kept rushing down, past them, knots and singles, taking the stairs too fast. Laney rubbed his ribs where he’d come down on the glass. It hurt, but somehow he hadn’t been cut.
   “They looked like Kombinat,” Arleigh said. “Big ugly guys, bad outfits. I couldn’t tell if they were after Rez or the idoru. Like they just thought they could walk in and do it.”
   “Do what?”
   “Don’t know,” she said. “Kuwayama had at least a dozen of his own security people at the two closest tables. And Blackwell probably prays for a scene like that every night before he goes to bed. He reached into his jacket, then the lights went out.”
   “He put ’em out,” Willy Jude said. “Some kinda remote. He can see better in the dark than I can with these infrareds. Dunno how that is, but he can.”
   “How’d you get out?” Laney asked Arleigh.
   “Flashlight. In my purse.”
   “Laney-san…”
   Looking back to see Yamazaki, one sleeve of his green plaid coat pulled free at the shoulder, his glasses missing a lens. Arleigh had taken a phone from her purse and was cursing softly as she tried to get it to work.
   Yamazaki caught up with them at the next landing. The four of them continued down together, Laney still holding the blind drummer’s hand.
   When they reached the street, the Western World’s sullen crew of doorpeople were nowhere in sight. A single policeman with a plastic rain-cover on his cap was muttering frantically into a microphone clipped to the front of his rain-cape. He was walking in tight circles as he did this, gesturing dramatically with a white baton at nothing in particular. Several kinds of alien siren were converging on the Western World, and Laney thought he could hear a helicopter.
   Willy Jude dropped Laney’s hand and adjusted his video-goggles to the street’s light-level. “Where’s my car?”
   Arleigh lowered her phone, which apparently was working now. “You’d better come with us, Willy. Some kind of tactical unit is on the way…
   “Nothing like it,” Rez said, and Laney turned, to see the singer emerging from the Western World, brushing something white from his dark jacket. “That physical thing. Too much time in the virtual, we forget that, don’t we? You’re Leyner?” Extending his hand.
   “Laney,” Laney said, as Arleigh’s dark green van pulled up beside them.

28. A Matter of Credit

   Maryalice opened a curved drawer that was built into the pink bed’s headboard. She was wearing a black skin-suit with big red Ashleigh Modine Carter-style sequin roses on the lapels. She took out a little blue glass dish and balanced it on her knee. “I hate these places,” she said. “There’s lots of ways to make sex ugly, but it’s kind of hard to make it look this ridiculous.” She knocked the gray end off her cigarette, into the blue saucer. “How old are you, anyway?”
   “Fourteen,” Chia said.
   “About what I told ’em. You’re fourteen, fifteen, for real, and no way you were on to me. I was on to you, right? It was my move. I planted on you. But they don’t believe me. Say you’re some kind of operator, say I’m just stupid, say that Rez guy sent you to SeaTac to get the stuff. Say you’re a set-up and I’m crazy to believe a kid couldn’t do that.” She sucked on the cigarette, squinting. “Where is it?” She looked down at Chia’s bag, open on the white carpet. “There?”
   “I didn’t mean to take it. I didn’t know it was there.”
   “I know that,” Maryalice said. “What I told ’em. I meant to get it back off you at the club.”
   “I don’t understand any of this,” Chia said. “It just scares me.”
   “Sometimes I bring stuff back for Eddie. Party favors for the club. It’s illegal, but it’s not all thatillegal, you know? Not hard stuff, really. But this time he was doing something else on the side, something with the Russians, and I didn’t like it. That’s what scares me, that stuff. Like its alive.”
   “What stuff?”
   “That. Assemblers, they’re called.”
   Chia looked at her bag. “That thing in my bag is a nanotech assembler?”
   “More like what you start with. Kind of an egg, or a little factory. You plug that thing into another machine that programs ’em, and they start building themselves out of whatever’s handy. And when there’s enough of ’em, they start building whatever it was you wanted them to. There’s some kind of law against selling that stuff to the Kombinat, so they want it bad. But Eddie worked out a way to do it. I met these two creepy German guys in the SeaTac Hyatt. They’d flown in there from wherever, I figured maybe Africa.” She mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the little blue dish, making it smell even worse. “They didn’t want to give it to me, because they were expecting Eddie. Lot of back and forth on the phone. Finally they did. I was supposed to put it in the suitcase with the other stuff, but it made me nervous. Made me wanna self-medicate.” She looked around the room. She put the blue dish with the crushed cigarette on a square black side table and did something that made the front of it open. It was a refrigerator, filled with little bottles. Maryalice bent over, peering in there. The pistol-shaped lighter slid off the pink bed. “No tequila,” Maryalice said. “You tell me why anybody’d name a vodka ‘Come Back Salmon’… ” Removing a little square bottle with a fish on its side. “Japanese would, though.” She looked down at the lighter. “Like a Russian would make a cigarette lighter that looks like a pistol.”
   Chia saw that Maryalice didn’t have her hair-extensions in anymore. “When they were taking DNA samples, in SeaTac,” Chia said, “you stuck the end of your extension in there.
   Maryalice cracked the seal on the little bottle, opened it, drained it in a single gulp, and shivered. “Those extensions are all my own hair,” she said. “Grew ’em out when I was on sort of a health diet, understand? They catch people doing recreationals, when they take those hair samples. Some recreationals, they stay in your hair a long time.” Maryalice put the empty bottle down beside the blue dish. “What’s he doing?” Pointing at Masahiko.
   “Porting,” Chia said, unable to think of a quick way to explain the Walled City.
   “I can see that. You came here ’cause these places’ll re-post, right?”
   “But you found us anyway.”
   “I got connections with a cab company. I figured it was worth a try. But the Russians’ll think of it, too, if they haven’t already.”
   “But how’d you get in? It was all locked.”
   “I know my way around these places, honey. I know my way entirely too well.”
   Masahiko removed the black cups that covered his eyes, saw Maryalice, looked down at the cups, then back up at Chia.
   “Maryalice,” Chia said.

   Gomi Boy presented like a life-size anime of himself, huge eyes and even taller hair. “Who drank the vodka?” he asked.
   “Maryalice,” Chia said.
   “Who’s Maryalice?”
   “She’s in the room at the hotel,” Chia said.
   “That was the equivalent of twenty minutes porting,” Gomi Boy said. “How can there be someone in your room at the Hotel Di?”
   “It’s complicated,” Chia said. They were back in Masahiko’s room in the Walled City. They’d just clicked back, none of that maze-running like the first time. Past an icon reminding her she’d left her Venice open, but too late for that. Maybe once you were in here, you got back fast. But Masahiko’d said they had to, quick, there was trouble. Maryalice had said she didn’t mind, but Chia didn’t like it at all that Maryalice was in the room with them while they were porting.
   “Your cash card is good for twenty-six more minutes of room-time,” Gomi Boy said. “Unless your friend hits the mini-bar again. Do you have an account in Seattle?”
   “No,” Chia said, “just my mother…”
   “We’ve already looked at that,” Masahiko said. “Your mother’s credit would not sustain rental of the room plus porting charges. Your father—”
   “My father?”
   “Has an expense account with his employer in Singapore, a merchant bank—”
   “How do you know that?”
   Gomi Boy shrugged. “Walled City. We find things out. There are people here who know things.”
   “You can’t tap into my father’s account,” Chia said. “It’s for his job.”
   “Twenty-five minutes remaining,” Masahiko said.
   Chia pulled her goggles off. Maryalice was taking another miniature bottle from the little fridge. “Don’t open that!”
   Maryalice gave a guilty little shriek and dropped the bottle. “Just maybe some rice crackers,” she said.
   “Nothing,” Chia said. “It’s too expensive! We’re running out of money!”
   “Oh,” Maryalice said, blinking. “Right. I don’t have any, though. Eddie’s cut my cards off, for sure, and the first time I plug one, he’ll know exactly where I am.”
   Masahiko spoke to Chia without removing the eyecups. “We have your father’s expense account on line…”
   Maryalice smiled. “What we like to hear, right?”
   Chia was pulling off her tip-sets. “You’ll have to take it to them,” she said to Maryalice, “the nano-thing. I’ll give it to you now, you take it to them, give it to them, tell them it was all a mistake.” She scooted on her hands and knees over to where her bag sat open on the floor. She dug for the thing, found it, held it out to Maryalice in what was left of the blue and yellow bag from the SeaTac duty-free. The dark gray plastic and the rows of little holes made it look like some kind of deformed designer pepper grinder. “Take it. Explain to them. Tell them it was just a mistake.”
   Maryalice cringed. “Put it back, okay?” She swallowed. “See, the problem isn’t whether or not there’s been a mistake. The problem’s they’ll kill us now anyway, because we know about it. And Eddie, he’ll let ’em. ’Cause he has to. And ’cause he’s just sort of generally fed up with me, the ungrateful little greasy shithead motherfucker…” Maryalice shook her head sadly. “It’s about the end of our relationship, you ask me.”
   “Account accessed,” Masahiko said. “Join us here now, please. You have another visitor.”

29. Her Bad Side

   Arleigh’s van smelled of long-chain monomers and warm electronics. The rear seats had been removed to make room for the collection of black consoles, cabled together and wedged into place with creaking wads of bubble-pack.
   Rez rode up front, beside the driver, the ponytailed Japanese Californian from Akihabara. Laney squatted on a console, between Arleigh and Yamazaki, with Willy Jude and the red-haired tech behind them. Laney’s ribs hurt, where he’d come down on the table, and that seemed to be getting worse. He’d discovered that the top of his left sock was sticky with blood, but he wasn’t sure where it had come from or even if it was his own.
   Arleigh had her phone pressed to her ear. “Option eight,” she said, evidently to the driver, who touched the pad beside the dashboard map. Laney glimpsed Tokyo grid-segments whipping past on the screen. “We’re taking Rez back with us.”
   “Take me to the Imperial,” Rez said.
   “Blackwell’s orders,” Arleigh said.
   “Let me talk to him.” Reaching back for the phone.
   They swung left, into a wider street, their lights picking out a small crowd speedwalking away from the Western World, all of them trying to look as though they just happened to be there, out for a brisk stroll. The neighborhood was nondescript and generically urban and, aside from the guilty-looking speedwalkers, quite deserted.
   “Keithy,” Rez said, “I want to go back to the hotel.” The terrible white daystar of a police helicopter swept over them, carbon-black shadows speeding away across concrete. Rez was listening to the phone. They passed an all-night noodle wagon, its interior ghostly behind curtains of yellowed plastic. Images flicking past on a small screen behind the counter. Arleigh nudged Laney’s knee, pointed past Rez’s shoulder. A trio of white armored cars shot through the approaching intersection, blue lights flashing on their rectangular turrets, and vanished without a sound. Rez turned, handing the phone back to her. “Keithy’s being his para self. He wants me to go to your hotel and wait for him.”
   Arleigh took the phone. “Does he know what it was about?
   “Autograph-hunters?” Rez started to turn back around in his seat.
   “What happened to the idoru?” Laney asked.
   Rez peered at him. “If you kidnapped that new platform—and I thought it was wonderful—what exactly would you have?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “Rei’s only reality is the realm of ongoing serial creation,” Rez said. “Entirely process; infinitely more than the combined sum of her various selves. The platforms sink beneath her, one after another, as she grows denser and more complex…” The long green eyes seemed to grow dreamy, in the light of passing storefronts, and then the singer turned away.
   Laney watched Arleigh dab at the cut corner of her mouth with a tissue.
   “Laney-san…” Yamazaki, a whisper. Putting something into his hand. A cabled set of eyephones. “We have global fan-activity database…”
   His ribs hurt. Was his leg bleeding? “Later, okay?”

   Arleigh’s suite was at least twice as large as Laney’s room. It had its own miniature sitting room, separated from the bedroom and bath with gilded French doors. The four chairs in the sitting room had very tall, very narrow backs, each one tapering to a rendition of the elf hat, done in sandblasted steel. These chairs were quite amazingly uncomfortable, and Laney was hunched forward on one now, in considerable pain, hugging his bruised ribs. The blood in his sock had turned out to be his own, from a skinned patch on his left shin. He’d plastered it over with micropore from the professional-looking first-aid kit in Arleigh’s bathroom. He doubted there was anything there for his ribs, but he was wondering if some kind of elastic bandage might help.
   Yamazaki was on the chair to his right, reattaching the sleeve of his plaid jacket with bright gold safety pins from an Evil Elf Hat emergency sewing kit. Laney had never actually seen anyone use a hotel room’s emergency sewing kit for anything. Yamazaki had removed his damaged glasses and was working with the jacket held close to his face. This made him look older, and somehow calmer. To Yamazaki’s right, the red-haired technician, who was called Shannon, was sitting up very straight and reading a complimentary style magazine.
   Rez was sprawled on the bed, propped up on the maximum available number of pillows, and Willy Jude sat at its foot, channel-surfing with his video units. The panic at the Western World apparently hadn’t made the news yet, although the drummer said he’d caught an oblique reference on one of the clubbing channels.
   Arleigh was standing by the window, pressing an ice cube in a white washcloth against her swollen lip.
   “Did he give you any idea of when he might turn up?” Rez, from the bed.
   “No,” Arleigh said, “but he made it clear he wanted you to wait.”
   Rez sighed.
   “Let the people take care of you, Rez,” Willy Jude said. “It’s what they’re paid for.”
   Laney had taken it for granted that all of them were expected to wait, along with Rez, for Blackwell. Now he decided to try to return to his room. All they could do was stop him.
   Blackwell opened the door from the corridor, pocketing something black, something that definitely wasn’t your standard-issue hotel key. There was a pale X of micropore across his right cheek, the longest arm reaching the tip of his chin.
   “Evening, Keithy,” Rez said.
   “You really mustn’t piss off like that,” the bodyguard said. “Those Russians are a serious crew. Massive triers, those boys. Wouldn’t do if they got hold of you, Rozzer. Not at an. You wouldn’t like it.”
   “Kuwayama and the platform?”
   “Have to tell you, Rez.” Blackwell stood at the foot of the bed. “I’ve seen you go with women I wouldn’t take to a shit-fight on a dark night, but at least they were human. Hear what I’m saying?”
   “I do, Keithy,” the singer said. “I know how you feel about her. But you’ll come around. It’s the way of things, Keithy. The new way. New world.”
   “I don’t know anything about that. My old dad was a Painter and Docker; had a docky’s brief. Broke his heart I turned out the sort of crim I did. Died before you’d got me out of B Division. Would’ve liked him to see me assume responsibility, Rez. For you. For your safety. But now I don’t know. Might not impress him so. Might tell me I’m just minding a fool with a bloated sense of himself.”
   Rez came up off the bed, surprising Laney with his speed, a performer’s grace, and then he was in front of Blackwell, his hands on the huge shoulders. “But you don’t think that, do you, Keithy? You didn’t in Pentridge. Not when you came for me. And not when I came back for you.”
   Blackwell’s eyes glistened. He was about to say something, but Yamazaki suddenly stood up, blinking, and put his green plaid sportscoat on. He craned his neck, peering nearsightedly at the pins he’d used to mend it, then seemed to realize that everyone in the suite was looking at him. He coughed nervously and sat back down.
   A silence followed. “Out of line, I was, Rozzer,” Blackwell said, breaking it.
   Rez clapped the bodyguard’s shoulder, releasing him. “Stressed. I know.” Rez smiled. “Kuwayama? The platform?”
   “Had his own team there,”
   “And our crashers?”
   “That’s a bit odd,” Blackwell said, “Kombinat, Rez. Say we’ve stolen something of theirs. Or at least that’s all the one I questioned knew.”
   Rez looked puzzled, but seemed to put whatever it was out of his mind. “Take me back to the hotel,” he said.
   Blackwell checked his huge steel watch. “We’re still sweeping, there. Another twenty minutes and I’ll check with them.”
   Laney took this as his opportunity, standing up and stepping past Blackwell to the door. “I’m going to take a hot shower,” he said. “Cracked my ribs up there.” No one said anything. “Call if you need me.” Then he opened the door, stepped out, closed it behind him, and limped in what he hoped was the direction of the elevator.
   It was. In it, he leaned against the mirrored wall and touched the button for his floor.
   It said something in a soothing tone, Japanese.
   The door closed. He shut his eyes.
   He opened his eyes as the door opened. Stepped out, turned the wrong way, then the right way. Fishing for his wallet, where he’d put his key. Still there. Bath, hot shower, these concepts more theoretical as he approached his room. Sleep. That was it. Undress and lie down and not be conscious.
   He swiped the key down the slot. Nothing. Again. Click.
   Kathy Torrance, sitting on the edge of his bed. She smiled at him. Pointed at the moving figures on the screen. One of whom was Laney, naked, with a larger erection than he recalled ever having had.
   The girl vaguely familiar, but whoever she was, he didn’t remember doing that with her.
   “Don’t just stand there,” Kathy said. “You have to see this.”
   “That’s not me,” Laney said.
   “I know,” she said, delighted. “He’s waytoo big. And I’d loveto see you try to prove it.”

30. The Etruscan

   Chia worked the tips back on, regoggled, let Masahiko take her to his room. That same instant transition, the virtual Venice icon strobing… Gomi Boy was there, and someone else, though at first she couldn’t see him. Just this glass tumbler on the work-surface that hadn’t been there before, mapped to a higher resolution than the rest of the room: filthy, chipped at the rim, something crusted at the bottom.
   “That woman,” Gomi Boy began, but someone coughed. A strange dry rattle.
   “You arean interesting young woman,” said a voice unlike any Chia had heard, a weird, attenuated rasp that might have been compiled from a library of faint, dry, random sounds. So that a word’s long vowel might be wires in the wind, or the click of a consonant the rattle of a dead leaf against a window. “Youngwoman,” it said again, and then there was something indescribable, which she guessed was meant as laughter.
   “This is the Etruscan,” Masahiko said. “The Etruscan accessed your father’s expense account for us. He is most skilled.”
   Something there for a second. Skull-like. Above the dirty glass. The mouth drawn and petulant. “It was nothing, really…”
   She told herself it was all presentation. Like when Zona presented, you could never quite focus on her. This was like that, but more extreme. And a lot of work put into the audio. But she didn’t like it.
   “You brought me here to meet him?” she asked Masahiko.
   “Oh, no,” said the Etruscan, the Oha polyphonic chorale, “I just wanted a look, dear.” The thing like laughter.
   “The woman,” Gomi Boy said. “Did you arrange for her to meet you, at Hotel Di?”
   “No,” Chia said. “She checked the taxi cabs, so you aren’t as smart as you think.”
   “Well put.” The putthe sound of a single pebble falling into a dry marble fountain. Chia focused on the glass. A huge centipede lay curled at its bottom, a thing the color of dead cuticle. She saw that it had tiny, pink hands—
   The glass was gone.
   “Sorry,” Masahiko said. “He wished only to meet you.”
   “Who is the woman in Hotel Di?” Gomi Boy’s anime eyes were bright and eager, but his tone was hard.
   “Maryalice,” Chia said. “Her boyfriend’s with those Russians. The thing they’re after’s in my bag there.”
   “What thing?”
   “Maryalice says it’s a nano-assembler.”
   “Unlikely,” Gomi Boy said,
   “Tell it to the Russians.”
   “But you have contraband? In the room?”
   “I’ve got something they want.”
   Gomi Boy grimaced, vanished.
   “Where’d he go?”
   “This changes the situation,” Masahiko said. “You did not tell us you have contraband.”
   “You didn’t ask! You didn’t ask why they were looking for me…”
   Masahiko shrugged, calm as ever. “We were not certain that it was you they were interested in. The Kombinat would be very eager for the skills of someone like the Etruscan, for instance. Many people know of Hak Nam, but few know how to enter. We reacted to protect the integrity of the city.”
   “But your computer’s in the hotel room. They can just come there and get it.”
   “It no longer matters,” he said. “I am no longer engaged in processing. My duties are assumed by others. Gomi Boy is concerned now for his safety outside, you understand? Penalties for possession of contraband are harsh. He is particularly vulnerable, because he deals in second-hand equipment.”
   “I don’t think it’s the police you want to worry about, right now. I think we want to callthe police. Maryalice says those Russians’ll kill us, if they find us.”
   “The police would not be a good idea. The Etruscan has accessed your father’s account in Singapore. That is a crime.”
   “I think I’d rather get arrested than killed.”
   Masahiko considered that. “Come with me,” he said. “Your visitor is waiting.”
   “Not the centipede,” Chia said. “Forget it.”
   “No,” he said, “not the Etruscan. Come.”
   And they were out of his room, fast-forward through the maze of Hak Nam, up twisted stairwells and through corridors, the strange, compacted world flickering past… “What isthis place? A communal site, right? But what are you so worried about? Why’s it all a secret?”
   “Walled City is of the net, but not on it. There are no laws here, only agreements.”
   “You can’t be on the net and notbe on the net,” Chia said, as they shot up a final flight of stairs.
   “Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile—”
   “Zona!” There across this uneven roofscape, overgrown with strangeness.
   “Touch nothing. Some are traps. I come to you.” Zona, presenting in that quick, fragmentary way, moved forward.
   To Chia’s right, a kind of ancient car lay tilted in a drift of random textures, something like a Christmas tree growing from its unbroken windshield. Beyond that…
   She guessed that the rooftops of the Walled City were its dumping ground, but the things abandoned there were like objects out of a dream, bit-mapped fantasies discarded by their creators, their jumbled shapes and textures baffling the eye, the attempt to sort and decipher them inducing a kind of vertigo. Some were moving.
   Then a movement high in the gasoline sky caught her eye. Zona’s bird-things?
   “I went to your site,” Chia said. “You weren’t there, something—”
   “I know. Did you see it?” As Zona passed the Christmas tree, its round, silver ornaments displayed black eye-holes, each pair turning to follow her.
   “No. I thought I heard it.”
   “I do not know what it is.” Zona’s presentation was even quicker and more jumpy than usual. “I came here for advice. They told me that you had been to my site, and that now you were here .
   “You know this place?”
   “Someone here helped me establish my site. It is impossible to come here without an invitation, you understand? My name is on a list. Although I cannot go below, into the city itself, unaccompanied.”
   “Zona, I’m in so much trouble now! We’re hiding in this horrible hotel, and Maryalice is there—”
   “This bitch who made you her mule, yes? She is where?”
   “In the room at this hotel. She said she broke up with her boyfriend, and it’s his, the nano-thing—”
   “The what?”
   “She says it’s some kind of nano-assembler thing.”
   Zona Rosa’s features snapped into focus as her heavy eyebrows shot up. “Nanotechnology?”
   “This is in your bag?” Masahiko asked.
   “Wrapped in plastic.”
   “One moment.” He vanished.
   “Who is that?” Zona asked.
   “Masahiko. Mitsuko’s brother. He lives here.”
   “Where did he go?”
   “Back to the hotel we’re porting from,”
   “This shit you are in, it is crazy,” Zona said.
   “Please, Zona, help me! I don’t think I’ll ever get home!”
   Masahiko reappeared, the thing in his hand minus the duty-free bag. “I scanned it,” he said. “Immediate identification as Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C-slash-7A. This is a lab prototype. We are unable to determine its exact legal status, but the production model, C-slash-9E, is Class 1 nanotechnology, proscribed under international law. Japanese law, conviction of illegal possession of Class 1 device carries automatic life sentence.”
   “Life?” Chia said.
   “Same for thermonuclear device,” he said, apologetically, “poison gas, biological weapon” He held up the scanned object for Zona’s inspection.
   Zona looked at it. “Fuck your mother,” she said, her tone one of somber respect.