William Gibson - Mona Lisa Overdrive


The Smoke

The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in
a departure lounge at Narita.

For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her
purse, a smooth dark oblong, one side impressed with the ubiquitous Maas-Neotek
logo, the other gently curved to fit the user's palm.

She sat up very straight in her seat in the first-class cabin, her
features composed in a small cold mask modeled after her dead mother's most
characteristic expression. The surrounding seats were empty; her father had
purchased the space. She refused the meal the nervous steward offered. The
vacant seats frightened him, evidence of her father's wealth and power. The man
hesitated, then bowed and withdrew. Very briefly, she allowed the mask her
mother's smile.

Ghosts, she thought later, somewhere over Germany, staring at the
upholstery of the seat beside her. How well her father treated his ghosts.

There were ghosts beyond the window, too, ghosts in the stratosphere of
Europe's winter, partial images that began to form if she let her eyes drift out
of focus. Her mother in Ueno Park, face fragile in September sunlight. »The
cranes, Kumi! Look at the cranes!" And Kumiko looked across Shinobazu Pond and
saw nothing, no cranes at all, only a few hopping black dots that surely were
crows. The water was smooth as silk, the color of lead, and pale holograms
flickered indistinctly above a distant line of archery stalls. But Kumiko would
see the cranes later, many times, in dreams; they were origami, angular things
folded from sheets of neon, bright stiff birds sailing the moonscape of her
mother's madness. . . .

Remembering her father, the black robe open across a tattooed storm of
dragons, slumped behind the vast ebony field of his desk, his eyes flat and
bright, like the eyes of a painted doll. »Your mother is dead. Do you
understand?" And all around her the planes of shadow in his study, the angular
darkness. His hand coming forward, into the lamp's circle of light, unsteadily,
to point at her, the robe's cuff sliding back to reveal a golden Rolex and more
dragons, their manes swirling into waves, pricked out strong and dark around his
wrist, pointing. Pointing at her. »Do you understand?" She hadn't answered, but
had run instead, down to a secret place she knew, the warren of the smallest of
the cleaning machines. They ticked around her all night, scanning her every few
minutes with pink bursts of laser light, until her father came to find her, and,
smelling of whiskey and Dunhill cigarettes, carried her to her room on the
apartment's third floor.

Remembering the weeks that followed, numb days spent most often in the
black-suited company of one secretary or another, cautious men with automatic
smiles and tightly furled umbrellas. One of these, the youngest and least
cautious, had treated her, on a crowded Ginza sidewalk, in the shadow of the
Hattori clock, to an impromptu kendo demonstration, weaving expertly between
startled shop girls and wide-eyed tourists, the black umbrella blurring
harmlessly through the art's formal, ancient arcs. And Kumiko had smiled then,
her own smile, breaking the funeral mask, and for this her guilt was driven
instantly, more deeply and still more sharply, into that place in her heart
where she knew her shame and her unworthiness. But most often the secretaries
took her shopping, through one vast Ginza department store after another, and in
and out of dozens of Shinjuku boutiques recommended by a blue plastic Michelin
guide that spoke a stuffy tourist's Japanese. She purchased only very ugly
things, ugly and very expensive things, and the secretaries marched stolidly
beside her, the glossy bags in their hard hands. Each afternoon, returning to
her father's apartment, the bags were deposited neatly in her bedroom, where
they remained, unopened and untouched, until the maids removed them.

And in the seventh week, on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, it was
arranged that Kumiko would go to London.

"You will be a guest in the house of my kobun ," her father said.

"But I do not wish to go," she said, and showed him her mother's smile.

"You must," he said, and turned away. "There are difficulties," he said to
the shadowed study. "You will be in no danger, in London."

"And when shall I return?"

But her father didn't answer. She bowed and left his study, still wearing
her mother's smile.

The ghost woke to Kumiko's touch as they began their descent into Heathrow. The
fifty-first generation of Maas-Neotek biochips conjured up an indistinct figure
on the seat beside her, a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed
casually in tan breeches and riding boots. "Hullo," the ghost said.

Kumiko blinked, opened her hand. The boy flickered and was gone. She
looked down at the smooth little unit in her palm and slowly closed her fingers.

" 'Lo again," he said. "Name's Colin. Yours?"

She stared. His eyes were bright green smoke, his high forehead pale and
smooth under an unruly dark forelock. She could see the seats across the aisle
through the glint of his teeth. "If it's a bit too spectral for you," he said,
with a grin, "we can up the rez. . . ." And he was there for an instant,
uncomfortably sharp and real, the nap on the lapels of his dark coat vibrating
with hallucinatory clarity. "Runs the battery down, though," he said, and faded
to his prior state. "Didn't get your name." The grin again.

"You aren't real," she said sternly.

He shrugged. "Needn't speak out loud, miss. Fellow passengers might think
you a bit odd, if you take my meaning. Subvocal's the way. I pick it all up
through the skin. . . ." He uncrossed his legs and stretched, hands clasped
behind his head. "Seatbelt, miss. I needn't buckle up myself, of course, being,
as you've pointed out, unreal."

Kumiko frowned and tossed the unit into the ghost's lap. He vanished. She
fastened her seatbelt, glanced at the thing, hesitated, then picked it up again.

"First time in London, then?" he asked, swirling in from the periphery of
her vision. She nodded in spite of herself. "You don't mind flying? Doesn't
frighten you?"

She shook her head, feeling ridiculous.

"Never mind," the ghost said. "I'll look out for you. Heathrow in three
minutes. Someone meeting you off the plane?"

"My father's business associate," she said in Japanese.

The ghost grinned. "Then you'll be in good hands, I'm sure." He winked.
"Wouldn't think I'm a linguist to look at me, would you?"

Kumiko closed her eyes and the ghost began to whisper to her, something
about the archaeology of Heathrow, about the Neolithic and the Iron ages,
pottery and tools. . . .

"Miss Yanaka? Kumiko Yanaka?" The Englishman towered above her, his gaijin bulk
draped in elephantine folds of dark wool. Small dark eyes regarded her blandly
through steel-rimmed glasses. His nose seemed to have been crushed nearly flat
and never reset. His hair, what there was of it, had been shaved back to a gray
stubble, and his black knit gloves were frayed and fingerless. "My name, you
see," he said, as though this would immediately reassure her, "is Petal."

Petal called the city Smoke.

Kumiko shivered on chill red leather; through the ancient Jaguar's window
she watched the snow spinning down to melt on the road Petal called M4. The late
afternoon sky was colorless. He drove silently, efficiently, his lips pursed as
though he were about to whistle. The traffic, to Tokyo eyes, was absurdly light.
They accelerated past an unmanned Eurotrans freight vehicle, its blunt prow
studded with sensors and banks of headlights. In spite of the Jaguar's speed,
Kumiko felt as if somehow she were standing still; London's particles began to
accrete around her. Walls of wet brick, arches of concrete, black-painted
ironwork standing up in spears.

As she watched, the city began to define itself. Off the M4, while the
Jaguar waited at intersections, she could glimpse faces through the snow,
flushed gaijin faces above dark clothing, chins tucked down into scarves,
women's bootheels ticking through silver puddles. The rows of shops and houses
reminded her of the gorgeously detailed accessories she'd seen displayed around
a toy locomotive in the Osaka gallery of a dealer in European antiques.

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was
nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing,
parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it
seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone
and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over
the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and
empire.

"Regret Swain couldn't come out to meet you himself," the man called Petal
said. Kumiko had less trouble with his accent than with his manner of
structuring sentences; she initially mistook the apology for a command. She
considered accessing the ghost, then rejected the idea.

"Swain," she ventured. "Mr. Swain is my host?"

Petal's eyes found her in the mirror. "Roger Swain. Your father didn't
tell you?"

"No."

"Ah." He nodded. "Mr. Kanaka's conscious of security in these matters, it
stands to reason. . . . Man of his stature, et cetera . . ." He sighed loudly.
"Sorry about the heater. Garage was supposed to have that taken care of. . . ."

"Are you one of Mr. Swain's secretaries?" Addressing the stubbled rolls of
flesh above the collar of the thick dark coat.

"His secretary?" He seemed to consider the matter. "No," he ventured
finally, "I'm not that." He swung them through a roundabout, past gleaming
metallic awnings and the evening surge of pedestrians. "Have you eaten, then?
Did they feed you on the flight?"

"I wasn't hungry." Conscious of her mother's mask.

"Well, Swain'll have something for you. Eats a lot of Jap food, Swain." He
made a strange little ticking sound with his tongue. He glanced back at her.

She looked past him, seeing the kiss of snowflakes, the obliterating sweep
of the wipers.

Swain's Notting Hill residence consisted of three interconnected Victorian
townhouses situated somewhere in a snowy profusion of squares, crescents, and
mews. Petal, with two of Kumiko's suitcases in either hand, explained to her
that number 17 was the front entrance for numbers 16 and 18 as well. "No use
knocking there," he said, gesturing clumsily with the heavy cases in his hand,
indicating the glossy red paint and polished brass fittings of 16's door.
"Nothing behind it but twenty inches of ferroconcrete."

She looked down the crescent, nearly identical facades receding along its
shallow curve. The snow fell more thickly now, and the featureless sky was lit
with a salmon glow of sodium lamps. The street was deserted, the snow fresh and
unmarked. There was an alien edge to the cold air, a faint, pervasive hint of
burning, of archaic fuels. Petal's shoes left large, neatly defined prints. They
were black suede oxfords with narrow toes and extremely thick corrugated soles
of scarlet plastic. She followed in his tracks, beginning to shiver, up the gray
steps to number 17.

"It's me then," he said to the black-painted door, "innit." Then he
sighed, set all four suitcases down in the snow, removed the fingerless glove
from his right hand, and pressed his palm against a circle of bright steel set
flush with one of the door panels. Kumiko thought she heard a faint whine, a
gnat sound that rose in pitch until it vanished, and then the door vibrated with
the muffled impact of magnetic bolts as they withdrew.

"You called it Smoke," she said, as he reached for the brass knob, "the
city. . . ."

He paused. "The Smoke," he said, "yes," and opened the door into warmth
and light, "that's an old expression, sort of nickname." He picked up her bags
and padded into a blue-carpeted foyer paneled in white-painted wood. She
followed him, the door closing itself behind her, its bolts thumping back into
place. A mahogany-framed print hung above the white wainscoting, horses in a
field, crisp little figures in red coats. Colin the chip-ghost should live there
, she thought. Petal had put her bags down again. Flakes of compacted snow lay
on the blue carpet. Now he opened another door, exposing a gilt steel cage. He
drew the bars aside with a clank. She stared into the cage, baffled. "The lift,"
he said. "No space for your things. I'll make a second trip."

For all its apparent age, it rose smoothly enough when Petal touched a
white porcelain button with a blunt forefinger. Kumiko was forced to stand very
close to him then; he smelled of damp wool and some floral shaving
preparation.

"We've put you up top," he said, leading her along a narrow corridor,
"because we thought you might appreciate the quiet." He opened a door and
gestured her in. "Hope it'll do. . . ." He removed his glasses and polished them
energetically with a crumpled tissue. "I'll get your bags."

When he had gone, Kumiko walked slowly around the massive black marble tub
that dominated the center of the low, crowded room. The walls, angled sharply
toward the ceiling, were faced with mottled gold mirror. A pair of small dormer
windows flanked the largest bed she'd ever seen. Above the bed, the mirror was
inset with small adjustable lights, like the reading lamps in an airliner. She
stood beside the tub to touch the arched neck of a gold-plated swan that served
as a spout. Its spread wings were tap handles. The air in the room was warm and
still, and for an instant the presence of her mother seemed to fill it, an
aching fog.

Petal cleared his throat in the doorway. "Well then," he said, bustling in
with her luggage, "everything in order? Feeling hungry yet? No? Leave you to
settle in . . ." He arranged her bags beside the bed. "If you should feel like
eating, just ring." He indicated an ornate antique telephone with scrolled brass
mouth and earpieces and a turned ivory handle. "Just pick it up, you needn't
dial. Breakfast's when you want it. Ask someone, they'll show you where. You can
meet Swain then. . . ."

The sense of her mother had vanished with his return. She tried to feel it
again, when he said goodnight and closed the door, but it was gone.

She remained a long time beside the tub, stroking the smooth metal of the
swan's cool neck.



Kid Afrika

Kid Afrika came cruising into Dog Solitude on the last day in November, his
vintage Dodge chauffeured by a white girl named Cherry Chesterfield.

Slick Henry and Little Bird were breaking down the buzzsaw that formed the
Judge's left hand when Kid's Dodge came into view, its patched apron bag
throwing up brown fantails of the rusty water that pooled on the Solitude's
uneven plain of compacted steel.

Little Bird saw it first. He had sharp eyes, Little Bird, and a 10X
monocular that dangled on his chest amid the bones of assorted animals and
antique bottleneck cartridge brass. Slick looked up from the hydraulic wrist to
see Little Bird straighten up to his full two meters and aim the monocular out
through the grid of unglazed steel that formed most of Factory's south wall.
Little Bird was very thin, almost skeletal, and the lacquered wings of brown
hair that had earned him the name stood out sharp against the pale sky. He kept
the back and sides shaved high, well above his ears; with the wings and the
aerodynamic ducktail, he looked as though he were wearing a headless brown gull.

"Whoa," said Little Bird, "motherfuck."

"What?" It was hard to get Little Bird to concentrate, and the job needed
a second set of hands.

"It's that nigger."

Slick stood up and wiped his hands down the thighs of his jeans while
Little Bird fumbled the green Mech-5 microsoft from the socket behind his ear --
instantly forgetting the eight-point servo-calibration procedure needed to
unfuck the Judge's buzzsaw. "Who's driving?" Afrika never drove himself if he
could help it.

"Can't make out." Little Bird let the monocular clatter back into the
curtain of bones and brass.

Slick joined him at the window to watch the Dodge's progress. Kid Afrika
periodically touched up the hover's matte-black paint-job with judicious
applications from an aerosol can, the somber effect offset by the row of chrome-
plated skulls welded to the massive front bumper. At one time the hollow steel
skulls had boasted red Christmas bulbs for eyes; maybe the Kid was losing his
concern with image.

As the hover slewed up to Factory, Slick heard Little Bird shuffle back
into the shadows, his heavy boots scraping through dust and fine bright spirals
of metal shavings.

Slick watched past a last dusty dagger of window glass as the hover
settled into its apron bags in front of Factory, groaning and venting steam.

Something rattled in the dark behind him and he knew that Little Bird was
behind the old parts rack, fiddling the homemade silencer onto the Chinese
rimfire they used for rabbits.

"Bird," Slick said, tossing his wrench down on the tarp, "I know you're an
ignorant little redneck Jersey asshole, but do you have to keep goddamn
reminding me of it?"

"Don't like that nigger," Little Bird said, from behind the rack.

"Yeah, and if that nigger'd bother noticing, he wouldn't like you either.
Knew you were back here with that gun, he'd shove it down your throat sideways."

No response from Little Bird. He'd grown up in white Jersey stringtowns
where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.

"And I'd help him, too." Slick yanked up the zip on his old brown jacket
and went out to Kid Afrika's hover.

The dusty window on the driver's side hissed down, revealing a pale face
dominated by an enormous pair of amber-tinted goggles. Slick's boots crunched on
ancient cans rusted thin as old leaves. The driver tugged the goggles down and
squinted at him; female, but now the amber goggles hung around her neck,
concealing her mouth and chin. The Kid would be on the far side, a good thing in
the unlikely event Little Bird started shooting.

"Go on around," the girl said.

Slick walked around the hover, past the chrome skulls, hearing Kid
Afrika's window come down with that same demonstrative little sound.

"Slick Henry," the Kid said, his breath puffing white as it hit the air of
the Solitude, "hello."

Slick looked down at the long brown face. Kid Afrika had big hazel eyes,
slitted like a cat's, a pencil-thin mustache, and skin with the sheen of buffed
leather.

"Hey, Kid." Slick smelled some kind of incense from inside the hover. "How
y ' doin'?"

"Well," the Kid said, narrowing his eyes, "recall you sayin' once, if I
ever needed a favor . . ."

"Right," Slick said, feeling a first twinge of apprehension. Kid Afrika
had saved his ass once, in Atlantic City; talked some irate brothers out of
dropping him off this balcony on the forty-third floor of a burned- out
highstack. "Somebody wanna throw you off a tall building?"

"Slick," the Kid said, "I wanna introduce you to somebody."

"Then we'll be even?"

"Slick Henry, this fine-looking girl here, this is Miss Cherry
Chesterfield of Cleveland, Ohio." Slick bent down and looked at the driver.
Blond shockhead, paintstick around her eyes. "Cherry, this is my close personal
friend Mr. Slick Henry. When he was young and bad he rode with the Deacon Blues.
Now he's old and bad, he holes up out here and pursues his art , understand. A
talented man, understand."

"He's the one builds the robots," the girl said, around a wad of gum, "you
said."

"The very one," the Kid said, opening his door. "You wait for us here,
Cherry honey." The Kid, draped in a mink coat that brushed the immaculate tips
of his yellow ostrich boots, stepped out onto the Solitude, and Slick caught a
glimpse of something in the back of the hover, eyeblink ambulance flash of
bandages and surgical tubing. . . .

"Hey, Kid," he said, "what you got back there?" The Kid's jeweled hand
came up, gesturing Slick back as the hover's door clanked shut and Cherry
Chesterfield hit the window buttons.

"We have to talk about that, Slick."

"I don't think it's much to ask," Kid Afrika said, leaning back against a bare
metal workbench, wrapped in his mink. "Cherry has a med-tech's ticket and she
knows she'll get paid. Nice girl, Slick." He winked.

"Kid . . ."

Kid Afrika had this guy in the back of the hover who was like dead, coma
or something, had him hooked up to pumps and bags and tubes and some kind of
simstim rig, all of it bolted to an old alloy ambulance stretcher, batteries and
everything.

"What's this?" Cherry, who'd followed them in after the Kid had taken
Slick back out to show him the guy in the back of the hover, was peering
dubiously up at the towering Judge, most of him anyway; the arm with the buzzsaw
was where they'd left it, on the floor on the greasy tarp. If she has a med tech
's ticket , Slick thought, the med-tech probably hasn 't noticed it 's
missing yet . She was wearing at least four leather jackets, all of them several
sizes too big.

"Slick's art, like I told you."

"That guy's dying. He smells like piss."

"Catheter came loose," Cherry said. "What's this thing supposed to do ,
anyway?"

"We can't keep him here, Kid, he'll stiff. You wanna kill him, go stuff
him down a hole on the Solitude."

"The man's not dying," Kid Afrika said. "He's not hurt, he's not sick. . .
."

"Then what the fuck's wrong with him?"

"He's under , baby. He's on a long trip . He needs peace and quiet ."

Slick looked from the Kid to the Judge, then back to the Kid. He wanted to
be working on that arm. Kid said he wanted Slick to keep the guy for two weeks,
maybe three; he'd leave Cherry there to take care of him.

"I can't figure it. This guy, he's a friend of yours?"

Kid Afrika shrugged inside his mink.

"So why don't you keep him at your place?"

"Not so quiet. Not peaceful enough."

"Kid," Slick said, "I owe you one, but nothing this weird. Anyway, I gotta
work, and anyway, it's too weird. And there's Gentry, too. He's gone to Boston
now; be back tomorrow night and he wouldn't like it. You know how he's funny
about people. . . . It's mostly his place , too, how it is. . . ."

"They had you over the railing, man," Kid Afrika said sadly. "You
remember?"

"Hey, I remember, I . . ."

"You don't remember too good," the Kid said. "Okay, Cherry. Let's go.
Don't wanna cross Dog Solitude at night." He pushed off from the steel bench.

"Kid, look . . ."

"Forget it. I didn't know your fucking name, that time in Atlantic City,
just figured I didn't wanna see the white boy all over the street, y'know? So I
didn't know your name then, I guess I don't know it now."

"Kid . . ."

"Yeah?"

"Okay. He stays. Two weeks max. You gimme your word, you'll come back and
get him? And you gotta help me square it with Gentry."

"What's he need?"

"Drugs."



Little Bird reappeared as the Kid's Dodge wallowed away across the
Solitude. He came edging out from behind an outcropping of compacted cars, rusty
pallets of crumpled steel that still showed patches of bright enamel.

Slick watched him from a window high up in Factory. The squares of the
steel frame had been fitted with sections of scavenged plastic, each one a
different shade and thickness, so that when Slick tilted his head to one side,
he saw Little Bird through a pane of hot-pink Lucite.

"Who lives here?" Cherry asked, from the room behind him.

"Me," Slick said, "Little Bird, Gentry . . ."

"In this room, I mean."

He turned and saw her there beside the stretcher and its attendant
machines. "You do," he said.

"It's your place?" She was staring at the drawings taped to the walls, his
original conceptions of the Judge and his Investigators, the Corpsegrinder and
the Witch.

"Don't worry about it."

"Better you don't get any ideas," she said.

He looked at her. She had a large red sore at the corner of her mouth. Her
bleached hair stood out like a static display. "Like I said, don't worry about
it."

"Kid said you got electricity."

"Yeah."

"Better get him hooked up," she said, turning to the stretcher. "He
doesn't draw much, but the batteries'll be getting low."

He crossed the room to look down at the wasted face. "You better tell me
something," he said. He didn't like the tubes. One of them went into a nostril
and the idea made him want to gag. "Who is this guy and what exactly the fuck is
Kid Afrika doing to him?"

"He's not," she said, tapping a readout into view on a biomonitor panel
lashed to the foot of the stretcher with silver tape. "REM's still up, like he
dreams all the time . . ." The man on the stretcher was strapped down in a
brand-new blue sleeping bag. "What it is, he -- whoever -- he's paying Kid for
this."

There was a trode-net plastered across the guy's forehead; a single black
cable was lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the
fat gray package that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure.
Simstim? Didn't look like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot
about cyberspace, or anyway he talked about it, but Slick couldn't remember
anything about getting unconscious and just staying jacked in. . . . People
jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all
the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise
around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it
was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you
needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.

"He paying the Kid?"

"Yeah," she said.

"What for?"

"Keep him that way. Hide him out, too."

"Who from?"

"Don't know. Didn't say."

In the silence that followed, he could hear the steady rasp of the man's
breath.



Malibu

There was a smell in the house; it had always been there.

It belonged to time and the salt air and the entropic nature of expensive
houses built too close to the sea. Perhaps it was also peculiar to places
briefly but frequently uninhabited, houses opened and closed as their restless
residents arrived and departed. She imagined the rooms empty, flecks of
corrosion blossoming silently on chrome, pale molds taking hold in obscure
corners. The architects, as if in recognition of eternal processes, had
encouraged a degree of rust; massive steel railings along the deck had been
eaten wrist-thin by years of spray.

The house crouched, like its neighbors, on fragments of ruined
foundations, and her walks along the beach sometimes involved attempts at
archaeological fantasy. She tried to imagine a past for the place, other houses,
other voices. She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny
Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop nest when she stepped down
from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her
line of sight. There was something wistful about the way it followed her, as
though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.

She knew that Hilton Swift was watching through the Dornier's cameras.
Little that occurred in the beach house escaped Sense/Net; her solitude, the
week alone she'd demanded, was under constant surveillance.

Her years in the profession had conveyed a singular immunity to
observation.



At night she sometimes lit the floods mounted beneath the deck, illuminating the
hieroglyphic antics of huge gray sandfleas. The deck itself she left in
darkness, and the sunken living room behind her. She sat on a chair of plain
white plastic, watching the Brownian dance of the fleas. In the glare of the
floods, they cast minute, barely visible shadows, fleeting cusps against the
sand.

The sound of the sea wrapped her in its movement. Late at night, as she
slept in the smaller of the two guest bedrooms, it worked its way into her
dreams. But never into the stranger 's invading memories.

The choice of bedrooms was instinctive. The master bedroom was mined with
the triggers of old pain.

The doctors at the clinic had used chemical pliers to pry the addiction
away from receptor sites in her brain.

She cooked for herself in the white kitchen, thawing bread in the microwave,
dumping packets of dehydrated Swiss soup into spotless steel pans, edging dully
into the nameless but increasingly familiar space from which she'd been so
subtly insulated by the designer 's dust.

"It's called life," she said to the white counter. And what would
Sense/Net's in-house psychs make of that, she wondered, if some hidden
microphone caught it and carried it to them? She stirred the soup with a slender
stainless whisk, watching steam rise. It helped to do things, she thought, just
to do things yourself; at the clinic, they'd insisted she make her own bed. Now
she spooned out her own bowl of soup, frowning, remembering the clinic.

She'd checked herself out a week into the treatment. The medics protested. The
detoxification had gone beautifully, they said, but the therapy hadn't begun.
They pointed out the rate of relapse among clients who failed to complete the
program. They explained that her insurance was invalid if she terminated her
treatment. Sense/Net would pay, she told them, unless they preferred she pay
them herself. She produced her platinum MitsuBank chip.

Her Lear arrived an hour later; she told it to take her to LAX, ordered a
car to meet her there, and canceled all incoming calls.

"I'm sorry, Angela," the jet said, banking over Montego Bay seconds after
they'd taken off, "but I have Hilton Swift on executive override."

"Angie," Swift said, "you know I'm behind you all the way. You know that,
Angie."

She turned to stare at the black oval of the speaker. It was centered in
smooth gray plastic, and she imagined him crouching back there, his long
runner's legs folded painfully, grotesquely, behind the Lear's bulkhead.

"I know that, Hilton," she said. "It's nice of you to phone."

"You're going to L.A., Angie."

"Yes. That's what I told the plane."

"To Malibu."

"That's right."

"Piper Hill is on her way to the airport."

"Thank you, Hilton, but I don't want Piper there. I don't want anybody. I
want a car."

"There's no one at the house, Angie."

"Good. That's what I want, Hilton. No one at the house. The house, empty."

"Are you certain that's a good idea?"

"It's the best idea I've had in a long time, Hilton."

There was a pause. "They said it went really well, Angie, the treatment.
But they wanted you to stay."

"I need a week," she said. "One week. Seven days. Alone."

After her third night in the house, she woke at dawn, made coffee, dressed.
Condensation stippled the broad window facing the deck. Sleep had been simply
that; if dreams had come, she couldn't recall them. But there was something -- a
quickening, almost a giddiness. She stood in the kitchen, feeling the cold of
the ceramic floor through thick white sweatsocks, both hands around the warm
cup.

Something there. She extended her arms, raising the coffee like a chalice,
the gesture at once instinctive and ironic.

It had been three years since the loa had ridden her, three years since
they had touched her at all. But now?

Legba? One of the others?

The sense of a presence receded abruptly. She put the cup down on the
counter too quickly, coffee slopping over her hand, and ran to find shoes and a
coat. Green rubber boots from the beach closet, and a heavy blue mountain jacket
she didn't remember, too large to have been Bobby's. She hurried out of the
house, down the stairs, ignoring the hum of the toy Dornier's prop as it lifted
off behind her like a patient dragonfly. She glanced north, along the jumble of
beach houses, the confusion of rooflines reminding her of a Rio barrio, then
turned south, toward the Colony.

The one who came was named Mamman Brigitte, or Grande Brigitte, and while some
think her the wife of Baron Samedi, others name her "most ancient of the dead."

The dream architecture of the Colony rose to Angie's left, a riot of form
and ego. Frail-looking neon-embedded replicas of the Watts Towers lifted beside
neo-Brutalist bunkers faced with bronze bas-reliefs.

Walls of mirror, as she passed, reflected morning banks of Pacific cloud.

There had been times, during the past three years, when she had felt as
though she were about to cross, or recross, a line, a subtle border of faith, to
find that her time with the loa had been a dream, or, at most, that they were
contagious knots of cultural resonance remaining from the weeks she'd spent in
Beauvoir 's New Jersey oumphor. To see with other eyes: no gods, no Horsemen.

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of
beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

Her father was dead, seven years dead, and the record he'd kept of his
life had told her little enough. That he'd served someone or something, that his
reward had been knowledge, and that she had been his sacrifice.

Sometimes she felt as though she'd had three lives, each walled away from
the others by something she couldn't name, and no hope of wholeness, ever.

There were the child's memories of the Maas arcology, carved into the
summit of an Arizona mesa, where she'd hugged a sandstone balustrade, face into
the wind, and felt as though the whole hollowed tableland was her ship, that she
could steer out into those sunset colors beyond the mountains. Later, she'd
flown away from there, her fear a hard thing in her throat. She could no longer
recall her last glimpse of her father's face. Though it must have been on the
microlight deck, the other planes tethered against the wind, a row of rainbow
moths. The first life ended, that night; her father's life had ended too.

Her second life had been a short one, fast and very strange. A man called
Turner had taken her away, out of Arizona, and had left her with Bobby and
Beauvoir and the others. She remembered little about Turner, only that he was
tall, with hard muscles and a hunted look. He'd taken her to New York. Then
Beauvoir had taken her, along with Bobby, to New Jersey. There, on the fifty-
third level of a mincome structure, Beauvoir had taught her about her dreams.
The dreams are real, he'd said, his brown face shining with sweat. He taught her
the names of the ones she'd seen in dreams. He taught her that all dreams reach
down to a common sea, and he showed her the way in which hers were different and
the same. You alone sail the old sea and the new , he said.

She was ridden by gods, in New Jersey.

She learned to abandon herself to the Horsemen. She saw the loa Linglessou
enter Beauvoir in the oumphor, saw his feet scatter the diagrams outlined in
white flour. She knew the gods, in New Jersey, and love.

The loa had guided her, when she'd set out with Bobby to build her third,
her current life. They were well matched, Angie and Bobby, born out of vacuums,
Angie from the clean blank kingdom of Maas Biolabs and Bobby from the boredom of
Barrytown. . . .

Grande Brigitte touched her, without warning; she stumbled, almost fell to her
knees in the surf, as the sound of the sea was sucked away into the twilit
landscape that opened in front of her. The whitewashed cemetery walls, the
gravestones, the willows. The candles.

Beneath the oldest willow, a multitude of candles, the twisted roots pale
with wax.

Child , know me .

And Angie felt her there, all at once, and knew her for what she was,
Mamman Brigitte, Mademoiselle Brigitte, eldest of the dead.

I have no cult , child , no special altar .

She found herself walking forward, into candleglow, a buzzing in her ears,
as though the willow hid a vast hive of bees.

My blood is vengeance .

Angie remembered Bermuda, night, a hurricane; she and Bobby had ventured
out into the eye. Grande Brigitte was like that. The silence, the sense of
pressure, of unthinkable forces held momentarily in check. There was nothing to
be seen, beneath the willow. Only the candles.

"The loa . . . I can't call them. I felt something . . . I came looking. .
. ."

You are summoned to my reposoir. Hear me . Your father drew vˇvˇs in
your head: he drew them in a flesh that was not flesh . You were consecrated to
Ezili Freda. Legba led you into the world to serve his own ends. But you were
sent poison , child , a coup-poudre . . .

Her nose began to bleed. "Poison?"

Your father 's vˇvˇs are altered , partially erased , redrawn. Though
you have ceased to poison yourself , still the Horsemen cannot reach you . I
am of a different order.

There was a terrible pain in her head, blood pounding in her temples. . .
. "Please . . ."

Hear me . You have enemies . They plot against you . Much is at stake ,
in this. Fear poison , child!

She looked down at her hands. The blood was bright and real. The buzzing
sound grew louder. Perhaps it was in her head. "Please! Help me! Explain . . ."

You cannot remain here . It is death .

And Angie fell to her knees in the sand, the sound of the surf crashing
around her, dazzled by the sun. The Dornier was hovering nervously in front of
her, two meters away. The pain receded instantly. She wiped her bloodied hands
on the sleeves of the blue jacket. The remote's cluster of cameras whirred and
rotated.

"It's all right," she managed. "A nosebleed. It's only a nosebleed. . . ."
The Dornier darted forward, then back. "I'm going back to the house now. I'm
fine." It rose smoothly out of sight.

Angie hugged herself, shaking. No , don 't let them see . They 'll know
something happened , but not what . She forced herself to her feet, turned,
began to trudge back up the beach, the way she'd come. As she walked, she
searched the mountain jacket's pockets for a tissue, anything, something to wipe
the blood from her face.

When her fingers found the corners of the flat little packet, she knew
instantly what it was. She halted, shivering. The drug. It wasn't possible. Yes,
it was. But who? She turned and stared at the Dornier until it slid away.

The packet. Enough for a month.

Coup-poudre .

Fear poison, child.



Squat

Mona dreamed she was dancing the cage back in some Cleveland juke, naked in a
column of hot blue light, where the faces thrusting up for her through the veil
of smoke had blue light snagged in the whites of their eyes. They wore the
expression men always wore when they watched you dance, staring real hard but
locked up inside themselves at the same time, so their eyes told you nothing at
all and their faces, in spite of the sweat, might have been carved from
something that only looked like flesh.

Not that she cared how they looked, when she was in the cage, high and hot
and on the beat, three songs into the set and the wiz just starting to peak, new
strength in her legs sending her up on the balls of her feet . . .

One of them grabbed her ankle.

She tried to scream, only it wouldn't come, not at first, and when it did
it was like something ripped down inside her, hurt her, and the blue light
shredded, but the hand, the hand was still there, around her ankle. She came up
off the bed like a pop-up toy, fighting the dark, clawing hair away from her
eyes.

"Whatsa matter, babe?"

He put his other hand against her forehead and shoved her back, down into
the pillow's hot depression.

"Dream . . ." The hand was still there and it made her want to scream.
"You got a cigarette, Eddy?" The hand went away, click and flare of the lighter,
the planes of his face jumping out at her as he lit one, handed it to her. She
sat up quickly, drew her knees up under her chin with the army blanket over them
like a tent, because she didn't feel like anybody touching her then at all.

The scavenged plastic chair's broken leg made a warning sound as he leaned
back and lit his own cigarette. Break , she thought, pitch him on his ass so he
gets to hit me a few times . At least it was dark, so she didn't have to look at
the squat. Worst thing was waking up with a bad head, too sick to move, when
she'd come in crashing and forgotten to retape the black plastic, hard sun to
show her all the little details and heat the air so the flies could get going.

Nobody ever grabbed her, back in Cleveland; anybody numb enough to reach
through that field was already too drunk to move, maybe to breathe. The tricks
never grabbed her either, not unless they'd squared it with Eddy, paid extra,
and that was just pretend.

Whichever way they wanted it, it got to be a kind of ritual, so it seemed
to happen in a place outside your life. And she'd gotten into watching them,
when they lost it. That was the interesting part, because they really did lose
it, they were totally helpless, maybe just for a split second, but it was like
they weren't even there.

"Eddy, I'm gonna go crazy, I gotta sleep here anymore."

He'd hit her before, for less, so she put her face down, against her knees
and the blanket, and waited.

"Sure," he said, "you wanna go back to the catfish farm? Wanna go back to
Cleveland?"

"I just can't make this anymore. . . ."

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow what?"

"That soon enough for you? Tomorrow night, private fucking jet? Straight
up to New York? Then you gonna quit giving me this shit?"

"Please, baby," and she reached out for him, "we can take the train. . .
."

He slapped her hand away. "You got shit for brains."

If she complained any more, anything about the squat, anything that
implied he wasn't making it, that all his big deals added up to nothing, he'd
start, she knew he'd start. Like the time she'd screamed about the bugs, the
roaches they called palmetto bugs, but it was because the goddamn things were
mutants, half of them; someone had tried to wipe them out with something that
fucked with their DNA, so you'd see these screwed-up roaches dying with too many
legs or heads, or not enough, and once she'd seen one that looked like it had
swallowed a crucifix or something, its back or shell or whatever it was
distorted in a way that made her want to puke.

"Baby," she said, trying to soften her voice, "I can't help it, this place
is just getting to me. . . ."

"Hooky Green's," he said, like he hadn't heard her, "I was up in Hooky
Green's and I met a mover . He picked me out , you know? Man's got an eye for
talent." She could almost feel his grin through the dark. "Outa London, England.
Talent scout. Come into Hooky's and it was just 'You, my man!' "

"A trick?" Hooky Green's was where Eddy had most recently decided the
action was, thirty-third floor of a glass highstack with most of the inside
walls knocked down, had about a block of dancefloor, but he'd gone off the place
when nobody there was willing to pay him much attention. Mona hadn't ever seen
Hooky himself, "lean mean Hooky Green," the retired ballplayer who owned the
place, but it was great for dancing.

"Will you fucking listen? Trick? Shit . He's the man , he's a
connection, he's on the ladder and he's gonna pull me up. And you know what? I'm
gonna take you with me."

"But what's he want?"

"An actress. Sort of an actress. And a smart boy to get her in place and
keep her there."

"Actress? Place? What place?"

She heard him unzip his jacket. Something landed on the bed, near her
feet. "Two thou."

Jesus. Maybe it wasn't a joke. But if it wasn't, what the hell was it?

"How much you pull tonight, Mona?"

"Ninety." It had really been one-twenty, but she'd figured the last one
for overtime. She was too scared to hold out on him, usually, but she'd needed
wiz money.

"Keep it. Get some clothes. Not like work stuff. Nobody wants your little
ass hanging out, not this trip."

"When?"

"Tomorrow, I said. You can kiss this place goodbye."

When he said that, it made her want to hold her breath.

The chair creaked again. "Ninety, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me."

"Eddy, I'm so tired. . . ."

"No," he said.

But what he wanted wasn't the truth or anything like it. He wanted a
story, the story that he'd taught her to tell him. He didn't want to hear what
they talked about (and most of them had some one thing they wanted real bad to
tell you, and usually they did), or how they got around to asking to see your
bloodwork tickets, or how every other one made that same joke about how what
they couldn't cure they could put in remission, or even what they wanted in bed.

Eddy wanted to hear about this big guy who treated her like she didn't
matter. Except she had to be careful, when she told it, not to make the trick
too rough, because that was supposed to cost more than she'd actually been paid.
The main thing was that this imaginary trick had treated her like she was a
piece of equipment he'd rented for half an hour. Not that there weren't plenty
like that, but they mostly spent their money at puppet parlors or got it on
stim. Mona tended to get the ones who wanted to talk, who tried to buy you a
sandwich after, which could be bad in its own way but not the kind of bad Eddy
needed. And the other thing Eddy needed was for her to tell him how that wasn't
what she liked but she'd found herself wanting it anyway, wanting it bad.

She reached down in the dark and touched the envelope full of money.

The chair creaked again.

So she told him how she was coming out of a BuyLow and he'd hit on her,
this big guy, just asked how much, which had embarrassed her but she told him
anyway and she'd said okay. So they went in his car, which was old and big and
kind of damp-smelling (cribbing detail from her Cleveland days), and he'd sort
of flipped her over the seat --

"In front of the BuyLow?"

"In back."

Eddy never accused her of making any of it up, even though she knew he
must have taught her the general outline somehow and it was always basically the
same story. By the time the big guy had her skirt up (the black one, she said,
and I had on my white boots) and his pants down, she could hear Eddy's
beltbuckle jingling as he peeled off his jeans. Part of her was wondering, when
he slid into bed beside her, whether the position she was describing was
physically possible, but she kept on going, and anyway it was working on Eddy.
She remembered to put in how it hurt, when the guy was getting it in, even
though she'd been really wet. She put in how he held her wrists, though by now
she was pretty confused about what was where, except that her ass was supposed
to be up in the air. Eddy had started to touch her, stroking her breasts and
stomach, so she switched from the offhand brutality of the trick's moves to how
it was supposed to have made her feel.

How it was supposed to have made her feel was a way she hadn't ever felt.
She knew you could get to a place where doing it hurt a little but still felt
good, but she knew that wasn't it. What Eddy wanted to hear was that it hurt a
lot and made her feel bad, but she liked it anyway. Which made no sense at all
to Mona, but she'd learned to tell it the way he wanted her to.

Because anyway it worked, and now Eddy rolled over with the blanket
bunched up across his back and got in between her legs. She figured he must be
seeing it in his head, like a cartoon, what she was telling him, and at the same
time he got to be that faceless pumping big guy. He had her wrists now, pinned
above her head, the way he liked.

And when he was done, curled on his side asleep, Mona lay awake in the
stale dark, turning the dream of leaving around and around, bright and
wonderful.

And please let it be true.



Portobello

Kumiko woke in the enormous bed and lay very still, listening. There was a faint
continuous murmur of distant traffic.

The air in the room was cold; she drew the rose duvet around her like a
tent and climbed out. The small windows were patterned with bright frost. She
went to the tub and nudged one of the swan's gilded wings. The bird coughed,
gargled, began to fill the tub. Still huddled in the quilt, she opened her cases
and began to select the day's garments, laying the chosen articles out on the
bed.

When her bath was ready, she let the quilt slide to the floor and climbed
over the marble parapet, stoically lowering herself into the painfully hot
water. Steam from the tub had melted the frost; now the windows ran with
condensation. Did all British bedrooms contain tubs like this? she wondered. She
rubbed herself methodically with an oval bar of French soap, stood up, sluiced
the suds off as best she could, wrapped herself in a large black towel, and,
after some initial fumbling, discovered a sink, toilet, and bidet. These were
hidden in a very small room that might once have been a closet, its walls fitted
with dark veneer.

The theatrical-looking telephone chimed twice.

"Yes?"

"Petal here. Care for breakfast? Roger's here. Eager to meet you."

"Thank you," she said. "I'm dressing now."

She pulled on her best and baggiest pair of leather slacks, then burrowed
into a hairy blue sweater so large that it would easily have fit Petal. When she
opened her purse for her makeup, she saw the Maas-Neotek unit. Her hand closed
on it automatically. She hadn't intended to summon him, but touch was enough; he
was there, craning his neck comically and gaping at the low, mirrored ceiling.

"I take it we aren't in the Dorchester?"

"I'll ask the questions," she said. "What is this place?"

"A bedroom," he said. "In rather dubious taste."

"Answer my question, please."

"Well," he said, surveying the bed and tub, "by the decor, it could be a
brothel. I can access historical data on most buildings in London, but there's
nothing notable about this one. Built in 1848. Solid example of the prevalent
classical Victorian style. The neighborhood's expensive without being
fashionable, popular with lawyers of a certain sort." He shrugged; she could see
the edge of the bed through the burnished gleam of his riding boots.

She dropped the unit into her purse and he was gone.

She managed the lift easily enough; once in the white-painted foyer, she
followed the sound of voices. Along a sort of hallway. Around a corner.

"Good morning," said Petal, lifting the silver cover from a platter. Steam
rose. "Here's the elusive Mr. Swain, Roger to you, and here's your breakfast."

"Hello," the man said, stepping forward, his hand extended. Pale eyes in a
long, strong-boned face. Lank mouse-colored hair was brushed diagonally across
his forehead. Kumiko found it impossible to guess his age; it was a young man's
face, but there were deep wrinkles under the grayish eyes. He was tall, with the
look of an athlete about his arms and shoulders. "Welcome to London." He took
her hand, squeezed and released it.

"Thank you."

He wore a collarless shirt, very fine red stripes against a pale blue
ground, the cuffs fastened with plain ovals of dull gold; open at the neck, it
displayed a dark triangle of tattooed flesh. "I spoke with your father this
morning, told him you'd arrived safely."

"You are a man of rank."

The pale eyes narrowed. "Pardon?"

"The dragons."

Petal laughed.

"Let her eat," someone said, a woman's voice.

Kumiko turned, discovering the slim dark figure against tall, mullioned
windows; beyond the windows, a walled garden sheathed in snow. The woman's eyes
were concealed by silver glasses that reflected the room and its occupants.

"Another of our guests," said Petal.

"Sally," the woman said, "Sally Shears. Eat up, honey. If you're as bored
as I am, you feel like a walk." As Kumiko stared, her hand came up to touch the
glasses, as though she were about to remove them. "Portobello Road's a couple
blocks. I need some air." The mirrored lenses seemed to have no frames, no
earpieces.

"Roger," Petal said, forking pink slices of bacon from a silver platter,
"do you suppose Kumiko will be safe with our Sally?"

"Safer than I'd be, given the mood she's in," Swain said. "I'm afraid
there isn't much here to amuse you," he said to Kumiko, leading her to the
table, "but we'll try to make you as comfortable as possible and arrange for you
to see a bit of the city. It isn't Tokyo, though."

"Not yet, anyway," said Petal, but Swain seemed not to hear.

"Thank you," Kumiko said, as Swain held her chair.

"An honor," Swain said. "Our respect for your father --"

"Hey," the woman said, "she's too young to need that bullshit. Spare us."

"Sally's in something of a mood, you see," Petal said, as he put a poached
egg on Kumiko's plate.

Sally Shears's mood, it developed, was one of barely suppressed rage, a fury
that made itself known in her stride, in the angry gunshot crack of her black
bootheels on icy pavement.

Kumiko had to scramble to keep up, as the woman stalked away from Swain's
house in the crescent, her glasses flashing coldly in directionless winter
sunlight. She wore narrow trousers of dark brown suede and a bulky black jacket,
its collar turned up high; expensive clothing. With her short black hair, she
might have been taken for a boy.

For the first time since leaving Tokyo, Kumiko felt fear.

The energy pent in the woman was almost tangible, a knot of anger that
might slip at any moment.

Kumiko slid her hand into her purse and squeezed the Maas-Neotek unit;
Colin was instantly beside her, strolling briskly along, his hands tucked in the
pockets of his jacket, his boots leaving no imprint in the dirty snow. She
released the unit then, and he was gone, but she felt reassured. She needn't
fear losing Sally Shears, whose pace she found difficult; the ghost could
certainly guide her back to Swain's. And if I run from her , she thought, he
will help me . The woman dodged through moving traffic at an intersection,
absently tugging Kumiko out of the path of a fat black Honda taxi and somehow
managing to kick the fender as it slid past.

"You drink?" she asked, her hand around Kumiko's forearm.

Kumiko shook her head. "Please, you're hurting my arm."

Sally's grip loosened, but Kumiko was steered through doors of ornate
frosted glass, into noise and warmth, a sort of crowded burrow lined in dark
wood and worn fawn velour.

Soon they faced each other across a small marble table that supported a
Bass ashtray, a mug of dark ale, the whiskey glass Sally had emptied on her way
from the bar, and a glass of orange squash.

Kumiko saw that the silver lenses met the pale skin with no sign of a
seam.

Sally reached for the empty whiskey glass, tilted it without lifting it
from the table, and regarded it critically. "I met your father once," she said.
"He wasn't as far up the ladder, back then." She abandoned the glass for her mug
of ale. "Swain says you're half gaijin. Says your mother was Danish." She
swallowed some of the ale. "You don't look it."

"She had them change my eyes."

"Suits you."

"Thank you. And your glasses," she said, automatically, "they are very
handsome."

Sally shrugged. "Your old man let you see Chiba yet?"

Kumiko shook her head.

"Smart. I was him, I wouldn't either." She drank more ale. Her nails,
evidently acrylic, were the shade and sheen of mother-of-pearl. "They told me
about your mother." Her face burning, Kumiko lowered her eyes.

"That's not why you're here. You know that? He didn't pack you off to
Swain because of her. There's a war on. There hasn't been high-level infighting
in the Yakuza since before I was born, but there is now." The empty pint clinked
as Sally set it down. "He can't have you around, is all. You'd be too easy to
get to. A guy like Swain's pretty far off the map, far as Kanaka's rivals are
concerned. Why you got a passport with a different name, right? Swain owes
Kanaka. So you're okay, right?"

Kumiko felt the hot tears come.

"Okay, so you're not okay." The pearl nails drummed on marble. "So she did
herself and you're not okay. Feel guilty, right?"

Kumiko looked up, into twin mirrors.

Portobello was choked Shinjuku-tight with tourists. Sally Shears, after
insisting Kumiko drink the orange squash, which had grown warm and flat, led her
out into the packed street. With Kumiko firmly in tow, Sally began to work her
way along the pavement, past folding steel tables spread with torn velvet
curtains and thousands of objects made of silver and crystal, brass and china.
Kumiko stared as Sally drew her past arrays of Coronation plate and jowled
Churchill teapots. "This is gomi ," Kumiko ventured, when they paused at an
intersection. Rubbish. In Tokyo, worn and useless things were landfill. Sally
grinned wolfishly. "This is England. Gomi 's a major natural resource. Gomi
and talent. What I'm looking for now. Talent."

The talent wore a bottle-green velvet suit and immaculate suede wingtips, and
Sally found him in another pub, this one called the Rose and Crown. She
introduced him as Tick. He was scarcely taller than Kumiko, and something was
skewed in his back or hip, so that he walked with a pronounced limp that
heightened an overall impression of asymmetry. His black hair was shaved close
at the back and sides, but piled into an oily loaf of curls above his forehead.

Sally introduced Kumiko: "My friend from Japan and keep your hands to
yourself." Tick smiled wanly and led them to a table.

"How's business, Tick?"

"Fine," he said glumly. "How's retirement?"

Sally seated herself on a padded bench, her back to the wall. "Well," she
said, "it's sort of on again, off again."

Kumiko looked at her. The rage had evaporated, or else been expertly
concealed. As Kumiko sat down, she slid her hand into her purse and found the
unit. Colin popped into focus on the bench beside Sally.

"Nice of you to think of me," Tick said, taking a chair. "Been two years,
I'd say." He cocked an eyebrow in Kumiko's direction.

"She's okay. You know Swain, Tick?"

"Strictly by reputation, thank you."

Colin was studying their exchange with amused fascination, moving his head
from side to side as though he were watching a tennis match. Kumiko had to
remind herself that only she could see him.

"I want you to turn him over for me. I don't want him to know."

He stared at her. The entire left half of his face contorted in a huge
slow wink. "Well then," he said, "you don't half want much, do you?"

"Good money, Tick. The best."

"Looking for something in particular, or is it a laundry run? Isn't as
though people don't know he's a top nob in the rackets. Can't say I'd want him
to find me on his manor. . . ."

"But then there's the money, Tick."

Two very rapid winks.

"Roger's twisting me, Tick. Somebody's twisting him. I don't know what
they've got on him, don't much care. What he's got on me is enough. What I want
to know is who, where, when. Tap in to incoming and outgoing traffic. He's in
touch with somebody, because the deal keeps changing."

"Would I know it if I saw it?"

"Just have a look, Tick. Do that for me."

The convulsive wink again. "Right, then. We'll have a go." He drummed his
fingers nervously on the edge of the table. "Buy us a round?"

Colin looked across the table at Kumiko and rolled his eyes.

"I don't understand," Kumiko said, as she followed Sally back along Portobello
Road. "You have involved me in an intrigue. . . ."

Sally turned up her collar against the wind.

"But I might betray you. You plot against my father's associate. You have
no reason to trust me."

"Or you me, honey. Maybe I'm one of those bad people your daddy's worried
about."

Kumiko considered this. "Are you?"

"No. And if you're Swain's spy, he's gotten a lot more baroque recently.
If you're your old man's spy, maybe I don't need Tick. But if the Yakuza's
running this, what's the point of using Roger for a blind?"

"I am no spy."

"Then start being your own. If Tokyo's the frying pan, you may just have
landed in the fire."

"But why involve me?"

"You're already involved. You're here. You scared?"

"No," Kumiko said, and fell silent, wondering why this should be true.

Late that afternoon, alone in the mirrored garret, Kumiko sat on the edge of the
huge bed and peeled off her wet boots. She took the Maas-Neotek unit from her
purse.

"What are they?" she asked the ghost, who perched on the parapet of the
black marble tub.

"Your pub friends?"

"Yes."

"Criminals. I'd advise you to associate with a better class, myself. The
woman's foreign. North American. The man's a Londoner. East End. He's a data
thief, evidently. I can't access police records, except with regard to crimes of
historical interest."

"I don't know what to do. . . ."

"Turn the unit over."

"What?"

"On the back. You'll see a sort of half-moon groove there. Put your
thumbnail in and twist. . . ."

A tiny hatch opened. Microswitches.

"Reset the A/B throw to B. Use something narrow, pointed, but not a biro."

"A what?"

"A pen. Ink and dust. Gum up the works. A toothpick's ideal. That'll set
it for voice-activated recording."

"And then?"

"Hide it downstairs. We'll play it back tomorrow. . . ."



Morning Light

Slick spent the night on a piece of gnawed gray foam under a workbench on
Factory's ground floor, wrapped in a noisy sheet of bubble packing that stank of
free monomers. He dreamed about Kid Afrika, about the Kid's car, and in his
dreams the two blurred together and Kid's teeth were little chrome skulls.

He woke to a stiff wind spitting the winter's first snow through Factory's
empty windows.

He lay there and thought about the problem of the Judge's buzzsaw, how the
wrist tended to cripple up whenever he went to slash through something heavier
than a sheet of chipboard. His original plan for the hand had called for
articulated fingers, each one tipped with a miniature electric chainsaw, but the
concept had lost favor for a number of reasons. Electricity, somehow, just
wasn't satisfying; it wasn't physical enough. Air was the way to go, big tanks
of compressed air, or internal combustion if you could find the parts. And you
could find the parts to almost anything, on Dog Solitude, if you dug long
enough; failing that, there were half-a-dozen towns in rustbelt Jersey with
acres of dead machines to pick over.

He crawled out from under the bench, trailing the transparent blanket of
miniature plastic pillows like a cape. He thought about the man on the
stretcher, up in his room, and about Cherry, who'd slept in his bed. No stiff
neck for her. He stretched and winced.

Gentry was due back. He'd have to explain it to Gentry, who didn't like
having people around at all.


Little Bird had made coffee in the room that served as Factory's kitchen. The
floor was made of curling plastic tiles and there were dull steel sinks along
one wall. The windows were covered with translucent tarps that sucked in and out
with the wind and admitted a milky glow that made the room seem even colder than
it was.

"How we doing for water?" Slick asked as he entered the room. One of
Little Bird's jobs was checking the tanks on the roof every morning, fishing out
windblown leaves or the odd dead crow. Then he'd check the seals on the filters,
maybe let ten fresh gallons in if it looked like they were running low. It took
the better part of a day for ten gallons to filter down through the system to
the collection tank. The fact that Little Bird dutifully took care of this was
the main reason Gentry would tolerate him, but the boy's shyness probably helped
as well. Little Bird managed to be pretty well invisible, as far as Gentry was
concerned.

"Got lots," Little Bird said.

"Is there any way to take a shower?" Cherry asked, from her seat on an old
plastic crate. She had shadows under her eyes, like she hadn't slept, but she'd
covered the sore with makeup.

"No," Slick said, "there isn't, not this time of year."

"I didn't think so," Cherry said glumly, hunched in her collection of
leather jackets.

Slick helped himself to the last of the coffee and stood in front of her
while he drank it.

"You gotta problem?" she asked.

"Yeah. You and the guy upstairs. How come you're down here? You off duty
or something?"

She produced a black beeper from the pocket of her outermost jacket. "Any
change, this'll go off."

"Sleep okay?"

"Sure. Well enough."

"I didn't. How long you work for Kid Afrika, Cherry?"

" 'Bout a week."

"You really a med-tech?"

She shrugged inside her jackets. "Close enough to take care of the Count."

"The Count?"

"Count, yeah. Kid called him that, once."

Little Bird shivered. He hadn't gotten to work with his styling tools yet,
so his hair stuck out in all directions. "What if," Little Bird ventured, "he's
a vampire?"

Cherry stared at him. "You kidding?"

Eyes wide, Little Bird solemnly shook his head.

Cherry looked at Slick. "Your friend playing with a full deck?"

"No vampires," Slick said to Little Bird, "that's not a real thing,
understand? That's just in stims. Guy's no vampire, okay?"

Little Bird nodded slowly, looking not at all reassured, while the wind
popped the plastic taut against the milky light.

He tried to get a morning's work in on the Judge, but Little Bird had vanished
again and the image of the figure on the stretcher kept getting in the way. It
was too cold; he'd have to run a line down from Gentry's territory at the top of
Factory, get some space heaters. But that meant haggling with Gentry over the
current. The juice was Gentry's because Gentry knew how to fiddle it out of the
Fission Authority.

It was heading into Slick's third winter in Factory, but Gentry had been
there four years when Slick found the place. When they'd gotten Gentry's loft
together, Slick had inherited the room where he'd put Cherry and the man she
said Kid Afrika called the Count. Gentry took the position that Factory was his,
that he'd been there first, got the power in so the Authority didn't know. But
Slick did a lot of things around Factory that Gentry wouldn't have wanted to do
himself, like making sure there was food, and if something major broke down, if
the wiring shorted or the water filter packed it in, it was Slick who had the
tools and did the fixing.

Gentry didn't like people. He spent days on end with his decks and FX-
organs and holo projectors and came out only when he got hungry. Slick didn't
understand what it was that Gentry was trying to do, but he envied Gentry the
narrowness of his obsession. Nothing got to Gentry. Kid Afrika couldn't have
gotten to Gentry, because Gentry wouldn't have gone over to Atlantic City and
gotten into deep shit and Kid Afrika's debt.

He went into his room without knocking and Cherry was washing the guy's chest
with a sponge, wearing white throwaway gloves. She'd carried the butane stove up
from the room where they did the cooking and heated water in a steel mixing
bowl.

He made himself look at the pinched face, the slack lips parted just
enough to reveal yellow smoker's teeth. It was a street face, a crowd face, face
you'd see in any bar.

She looked up at Slick.

He sat on the edge of the bed, where she'd unzipped his sleeping bag and
spread it out flat like a blanket, with the torn end tucked in under the foam.

"We gotta talk, Cherry. Figure this, you know?"

She squeezed the sponge out over the bowl.

"How'd you get mixed up with Kid Afrika?"

She put the sponge in a Ziploc and put that away in the black nylon bag
from the Kid's hover. As he watched her, he saw there was no wasted motion, and
she didn't seem to have to think about what she was doing. "You know a place
called Moby Jane's?"

"No."

"Roadhouse, off the interstate. So I had this friend was manager there,
doing it for about a month when I move in with him. Moby Jane, she's just huge;
she just sits out back the club in a float tank with this freebase IV drip in
her arm and it's totally disgusting. So like I said, I move in there with my
friend Spencer, he's the new manager, because I had this trouble over my ticket
in Cleveland and I couldn't work right then."

"What kind of trouble?"

"The usual kind, okay? You wanna hear this or not? So Spencer's let me in
on the owner's horrible condition, right? So the last thing I want anybody to
know is that I'm a med-tech, otherwise they'll have me out there changing
filters on her tank and pumping freebase into two hundred kilos of hallucinating
psychotic. So they put me waiting tables, slinging beer. It's okay. Get some
good music in there. Kind of a rough place but it's okay because people know I'm
with Spencer. 'Cept I wake up one day and Spencer's gone. Then it comes out he's
gone with a bunch of their money." She was drying the sleeper's chest as she
spoke, using a thick wad of white absorbent fiber. "So they knock me around a
little." She looked up at him and shrugged. "But then they tell me what they're
gonna do. They're gonna cuff my hands behind my back and put me in the tank with
Moby Jane and turn her drip up real high and tell her my boyfriend ripped her
off. . . ." She tossed the damp wad into the bowl. "So they locked me up in this
closet to let me think about it before they did it. When the door opens, though,
it's Kid Afrika. I never saw him before. 'Miss Chesterfield,' he said, 'I have
reason to believe you were until recently a certified medical technician.' "

"So he made you an offer."

"Offer, my ass. He just checked my papers and took me straight on out of
there. Not a soul around, either, and it was Saturday afternoon. Took me out in
the parking lot, there's this hover sittin' in the lot, skulls on the front, two
big black guys waiting for us, and any way away from that float tank, that's
just fine by me."

"Had our friend in the back?"

"No." Peeling off the gloves. "Had me drive him back to Cleveland, to this
burb. Big old houses but the lawns all long and scraggy. Went to one with a lot
of security, guess it was his. This one," and she tucked the blue sleeping bag
up around the man's chin, "he was in a bedroom. I had to start right in. Kid
told me he'd pay me good."

"And you knew he'd bring you out here, to the Solitude?"

"No. Don't think he did, either. Something happened. He came in next day
and said we were leaving. I think something scared him. That's when he called
him that, the Count. 'Cause he was angry and I think maybe scared. 'The Count
and his fucking LF,' he said."

"His what?"

" 'LF.' "

"What's that?"

"I think this," she said, pointing up at the featureless gray package
mounted above the man's head.



No There, There


She imagined Swift waiting for her on the deck, wearing the tweeds he favored in
an L. A. winter, the vest and jacket mismatched, herringbone and houndstooth,
but everything woven from the same wool, and that, probably, from the same sheep
on the same hillside, the whole look orchestrated in London, by committee, in a
room above a Floral Street shop he'd never seen. They did striped shirts for
him, brought the cotton from Charvet in Paris; they made his ties, had the silk
woven in Osaka, the Sense/Net logo embroidered tight and small. And still,
somehow, he looked as though his mother had dressed him.

The deck was empty. The Dornier hovered, then darted away to its nest.
Mamman Brigitte's presence still clung to her.

She went into the white kitchen and scrubbed drying blood from her face
and hands. When she stepped into the living room, she felt as though she were
seeing it for the first time. The bleached floor, the gilt frames and cut-velvet
upholstery of the Louis XVI chairs, the Cubist backdrop of a Valmier. Like
Hilton's wardrobe, she thought, contrived by talented strangers. Her boots
tracked damp sand across the pale floor as she went to the stairwell.

Kelly Hickman, her wardrobe man, had been to the house while she'd been in
the clinic; he'd arranged her working luggage in the master bedroom. Nine Herm¸s
rifle cases, plain and rectangular, like coffins of burnished saddle hide. Her
clothes were never folded; they lay each garment flat, between sheets of silk
tissue.

She stood in the doorway, staring at the empty bed, the nine leather
coffins.

She went into the bathroom, glass block and white mosaic tile, locking the
door behind her. She opened one cabinet, then another, ignoring neat rows of
unopened toiletries, patent medicines, cosmetics. She found the charger in the
third cabinet, beside a bubble card of derms. She bent close, peering at the
gray plastic, the Japanese logo, afraid to touch it. The charger looked new,
unused. She was almost certain that she hadn't bought it, hadn't left it here.
She took the drug from her jacket pocket and examined it, turning it over and
over, watching the measured doses of violet dust tumble in their sealed
compartments.

She saw herself place the packet on the white marble ledge, position the
charger above it, remove a derm from its bubble and insert it. She saw the red
flash of a diode when the charger had drawn off a dose; she saw herself remove
the derm, balancing it like a white plastic leech on the tip of her index
finger, its moist inner surface glittering with minute beads of DMSO --

She turned, took three steps to the toilet, and dropped the unopened
packet into the bowl. It floated there like a toy raft, the drug still perfectly
dry. Perfectly. Her hand shaking, she found a stainless nailfile and knelt on
the white tile. She had to close her eyes when she held the packet and drove the
tip of the file against the seam, twisting. The file clattered on tile as she
touched the flush button and the two halves of the empty packet vanished. She
rested her forehead against cool enamel, then forced herself to get up, go to
the sink, and carefully wash her hands.

Because she wanted, now she really knew she wanted, to lick her fingers.

Later that day, in a gray afternoon, she found a corrugated plastic shipping
cannister in the garage, carried it up to the bedroom, and began to pack Bobby's
remaining things. There wasn't much: a pair of leather jeans he hadn't liked,
some shirts he'd either discarded or forgotten, and, in the teak bureau's bottom
drawer, a cyberspace deck. It was an Ono-Sendai, hardly more than a toy. It lay
amid a tangle of black leads, a cheap set of stim-trodes, a greasy-looking
plastic tube of saline paste.

She remembered the deck he'd used, the one he'd taken with him, a gray
factory-custom Hosaka with unmarked keys. It was a cowboy's deck; he'd insisted
on traveling with it, even though it caused problems during customs checks. Why,
she wondered, had he bought the Ono-Sendai? And why had he abandoned it? She was
seated on the edge of the bed; she lifted the deck from the drawer and put it on
her lap.

Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in.
You don't need it, he'd said. And she hadn't, because she'd dreamed cyberspace,
as though the neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.

There 's no there ,there. They taught that to children, explaining
cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor's lecture in the arcology's executive
cr¸che, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-
looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology
linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video
terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the
vibrotactile feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers. . .
. As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied.
. . .

She leaned forward and picked up the trode-set, shook it to free its leads
from the tangle.

No there, there.

She spread the elastic headband and settled the trodes across her temples
-- one of the world's characteristic human gestures, but one she seldom
performed. She tapped the Ono-Sendai's battery-test stud. Green for go. She
touched the power stud and the bedroom vanished behind a colorless wall of
sensory static. Her head filled with a torrent of white sound.

Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the
static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the
bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

"Angela," the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, "I have a call from
Hilton Swift. . . ."

"Executive override?" She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen
counter.

"No," it said, confidingly.

"Change your tone," she said, around a mouthful of beans. "Something with
an edge of anxiety."

"Mr. Swift is waiting ," the house said nervously.

"Better," she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, "but I want
something closer to genuine hysteria. . . ."

"Will you take the call?" The voice was choked with tension.

"No," she said, "but keep your voice that way, I like it."

She walked into the living room, counting under her breath. Twelve,
thirteen . . .

"Angela," the house said gently, "I have a call from Hilton Swift --"

"On executive override," Swift said.

She made a farting sound with her lips.

"You know I respect your need to be alone, but I worry about you."

"I'm fine, Hilton. You needn't worry. Bye-bye."

"You stumbled this morning, on the beach. You seemed disoriented. Your
nose began to bleed."

"I had a nosebleed."

"We want you to have another physical. . . ."

"Great."

"You accessed the matrix today, Angie. We logged you in the BAMA
industrial sector."

"Is that what it was?"

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"There isn't anything to talk about. I was just screwing around. You want
to know , though? I was packing some crap Bobby left here. You'd have approved ,
Hilton! I found a deck of his and I tried it. I punched a key, sat there looking
around, jacked out."

"I'm sorry, Angie."

"For what?"

"For disturbing you. I'll go now."

"Hilton, do you know where Bobby is?"

"No."

"You telling me Net security hasn't kept tabs on him?"

"I'm telling you I don't know, Angie. That's the truth."

"Could you find out, if you wanted to?"

Another pause. "I don't know. If I could, I'm not sure that I would."

"Thanks. Goodbye, Hilton."

"Goodbye, Angie."

She sat on the deck that night, in the dark, watching the fleas dance against
floodlit sand. Thinking of Brigitte and her warning, of the drug in the jacket
and the derm charger in the medicine cabinet. Thinking of cyberspace and the sad
confinement she'd felt with the Ono-Sendai, so far from the freedom of the loa.

Thinking of the other's dreams, of corridors winding in upon themselves,
muted tints of ancient carpet . . . An old man, a head made of jewels, a taut
pale face with eyes that were mirrors . . . And a beach in the wind and dark.

Not this beach, not Malibu.

And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the
corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she
half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she
prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep.

Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a
present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of
an Italian fashion magazine:

T-A


"Call Continuity," she told the house, over a third cup of coffee.

"Hello, Angie," said Continuity.

"That orbital sequence we did, two years ago. The Belgian's yacht . . ."
She sipped her cooling coffee. "What was the name of the place he wanted to take
me? The one Robin decided was too tacky."

"Freeside," the expert system said.

"Who's taped there?"

"Tally Isham recorded nine sequences in Freeside."

"It wasn't too tacky for her?"

"That was fifteen years ago. It was fashionable."

"Get me those sequences."

"Done."

"Bye."

"Goodbye, Angie."

Continuity was writing a book. Robin Lanier had told her about it. She'd
asked what it was about. It wasn't like that, he'd said. It looped back into
itself and constantly mutated; Continuity was always writing it. She asked why.
But Robin had already lost interest: because Continuity was an AI, and AIs did
things like that.

Her call to Continuity cost her a call from Swift.

"Angie, about that physical . . ."

"Haven't you scheduled it yet? I want to get back to work. I called
Continuity this morning. I'm thinking about an orbital sequence. I'm going over
some things Tally did; I may get some ideas."

There was a silence. She wanted to laugh. It was difficult to get a
silence out of Swift. "You're sure, Angie? That's wonderful, but is it really
what you want to do?"

"I'm all better, Hilton. I'm just fine. I want to work. Vacation's over.
Have Porphyre come out here and do my hair before I have to see anyone."

"You know, Angie," he said, "this makes all of us very happy."

"Call Porphyre. Set up the physical." Coup-poudre . Who , Hilton? Maybe
you?

He had the resources, she thought, half an hour later, as she paced the
fogbound deck. Her addiction hadn't threatened the Net, hadn't affected her
output. There were no physical side effects. If there had been, Sense/ Net would
never have allowed her to begin. The drug's designer, she thought. The designer
would know. And never tell her, even if she could reach him, which she doubted
she could. Suppose, she thought, her hands on the rust of the railing, that he
hadn't been the designer? That the molecule had been designed by someone else,
to his own ends?

"Your hairdresser," the house said.

She went inside.

Porphyre was waiting, swathed in muted jersey, something from the Paris
season. His face, as smooth in repose as polished ebony, split into a delighted
smirk when he saw her. "Missy," he scolded, "you look like homemade shit."

She laughed. Porphyre clucked and tutted, came forward to flick his long
fingers at Angie's bangs with mock revulsion. "Missy was a bad girl. Porphyre
told you those drugs were nasty!"

She looked up at him. He was very tall, and, she knew, enormously strong.
Like a greyhound on steroids, someone had once said. His depilated skull
displayed a symmetry unknown to nature.

"You okay?" he asked, in his other voice, the manic brio shut off as if
someone had thrown a switch.

"I'm fine."

"Did it hurt?"

"Yeah. It hurt."

"You know," he said, touching her chin lightly with a fingertip, "nobody
could ever see what you got out of that shit. It didn't seem to get you high. .
. ."

"It wasn't supposed to. It was just like being here, being there, only you
didn't have to --"

"Feel it as much?"

"Yes."

He nodded, slowly. "Then that was some bad shit."

"Fuck it," she said. "I'm back."

His smirk returned. "Let's wash your hair."

"I washed it yesterday!"

"What in? No! Don't tell me!" He shooed her toward the stairwell.

In the white-tiled bathroom, he massaged something into her scalp.

"Have you seen Robin lately?"

He sluiced cool water through her hair. "Mistah Lanier is in London,
missy. Mistah Lanier and I aren't currently on speaking terms. Sit up now." He
raised the back of the chair and draped a towel around her neck.

"Why not?" She felt herself warming to the Net gossip that was Porphyre's
other specialty.

"Because," the hairdresser said, his tone carefully even as he ran a comb
back through her hair, "he had some bad things to say about Angela Mitchell
while she was off in Jamaica getting her little head straight."

It wasn't what she'd expected. "He did?"

"Didn't he just, missy." He began to cut her hair, using the scissors that
were one of his professional trademarks; he refused to use a laser pencil,
claimed never to have touched one.

"Are you joking, Porphyre?"

"No. He wouldn't say those things to me , but Porphyre hears , Porphyre
always hears. He left for London the morning after you got here."

"And what was it you heard he'd said?"

"That you're crazy. On shit or off. That you hear voices. That the Net
psychs know."

Voices . . . "Who told you that?" She tried to turn in the chair.

"Don't move your head. There." He went back to his work. "I can't say.
Trust me."

There were a number of calls, after Porphyre left. Her production crew, eager to
say hello.

"No more calls this afternoon," she told the house. "I'll run the Tally
sequences upstairs."

She found a bottle of Corona at the rear of the fridge and took it to the
master bedroom. The stim unit in the teak headboard was equipped with studio-
grade trodes that hadn't been there when she'd left for Jamaica. Net technicians
periodically upgraded equipment in the house. She had a swig of beer, put the
bottle on the bedside table, and lay down with the trodes across her forehead.
"Okay," she said, "hit me."

Into Tally-flesh, Tally-breath.

How did I ever replace you? she wondered, overcome by the former star's
physical being. Do I give people this same pleasure?

Tally-Angie looking out across a vine-hung chasm that was also a
boulevard, glancing up to the inverse horizon, squares of distant tennis courts,
Freeside's "sun" an axial thread of brilliance overhead . . .

"Fast forward," she told the house.

Into smooth-pumping muscle and a blur of concrete, Tally hurling her cycle
around a low-grav velodrome . . .

"Fast forward."

A dining scene, tension of velvet straps across her shoulders, the young
man across the table leaning forward to pour more wine . . .

"Fast forward."

Linen sheets, a hand between her legs, purple twilight through plate
glass, sound of running water . . .

"Reverse. The restaurant."

The red wine gurgling into her glass . . .

"Little more. Hold it. There."

Tally's eyes had been focused on the boy's tanned wrist, not on the
bottle.

"I want a graphic of the visual," she said, pulling off the trodes. She
sat up and took a swallow of beer, which mingled weirdly with the ghost-flavor
of Tally's recorded wine.

The printer downstairs chimed softly as it completed its task. She forced
herself to take the stairs slowly, but when she reached the printer, in the
kitchen, the image disappointed her.

"Can you clear this up?" she asked the house. "I want to be able to read
the label on the bottle."

"Justifying image," the house said, "and rotating target object eight
degrees."

The printer hummed softly as the new graphic was extruded. Angie found her
treasure before the machine could chime, her dream-sigil in brown ink: T-A.

They'd had their own vineyards, she thought.

Tessier-Ashpool S.A. , the typeface regal and spidery.

"Gotcha," she whispered.



Texas Radio

Mona could see the sun through a couple of rips in the black plastic they kept
taped over the window. She hated the squat too much to stay there when she was
awake or straight, and now she was both.

She got quietly out of bed, wincing when her bare heel brushed the floor,
and fumbled for her plastic thongs. The place was dirty; you could probably get
tetanus from leaning up against the wall. Made her skin crawl to think about it.
Stuff like that didn't seem to bother Eddy; he was too far gone in his schemes
to notice his surroundings much. And he always managed to keep clean, somehow,
like a cat. He was cat-clean, never a fleck of dirt under his polished nails.
She figured he probably spent most of what she earned on his wardrobe, although
it wouldn't have occurred to her to question the fact. She was sixteen and
SINless, Mona, and this older trick had told her once that that was a song,
"Sixteen and SINless." Meant she hadn't been assigned a SIN when she was born, a
Single Identification Number, so she'd grown up on the outside of most official
systems. She knew that it was supposed to be possible to get a SIN, if you
didn't have one, but it stood to reason you'd have to go into a building
somewhere and talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona's idea of a good
time or even normal behavior.

She had a drill for getting dressed in the squat, and she could do it in
the dark. You got your thongs on, after giving them a quick knock together to
dislodge possible crawlies, and then you walked over to where you knew there was
a roll of old fax on a Styrofoam crate beside the window. You peeled off about a
meter of fax, maybe a day and a half of Asahi Shimbun , folded and creased it,
put it down on the floor. Then you could stand on it, get the plastic bag from
beside the crate, undo the twist of wire that held it shut, and find the clothes
you wanted. When you stepped out of the thongs to put your pants on, you knew
you'd be stepping on fresh fax. It was an article of faith with Mona that
nothing was going to wander across the fax in the time it took her to step into
a pair of jeans and get the thongs back on.

You could put on a shirt or whatever, carefully reseal the bag, and get
out of there. Makeup, when required, went on in the corridor outside; there was
some mirror left, beside the derelict elevator, a Fuji biofluorescent strip
glued above it.

There was a strong piss smell beside the elevator this morning, so she
decided to skip the makeup.

You never saw anybody in the building, but you heard them sometimes; music
through a closed door, or footsteps just gone around a corner at the far end of
a corridor. Well, that made sense; Mona had no desire to meet her neighbors
either.

She took the stairs down three flights and into the gaping dark of the
underground garage. She had her flashlight in her hand, found her way with six
quick little blinks that steered her around stagnant puddles and dangling
strands of dead optic cable, up the concrete steps and out into the alley. You
could smell the beach, sometimes, in the alley, if the wind was right, but today
it just smelled of garbage. The side of the squat towered away above her, so she
moved fast, before some asshole decided to drop a bottle or worse. Once she was
out on the Avenue, she slowed, but not too much; she was conscious of the cash
in her pocket, and full of plans for spending it. Wouldn't do to get taken off,
not when it looked like Eddy had wrangled them some kind of ticket out. She
alternated between telling herself it was a sure thing, that they were
practically gone, and warning herself not to get her hopes up. She knew Eddy's
sure things: hadn't Florida been one of them? How it was warm in Florida and the
beaches were beautiful and it was full of cute guys with money, just the spot
for a little working vacation that had already stretched into the longest month
Mona could remember. Well, it was fucking hot in Florida, like a sauna. The only
beaches that weren't private were polluted, dead fish rolling belly-up in the
shallows. Maybe the private stretches were the same, but you couldn't see them,
just the chainlink and the guards in shorts and cop shirts standing around.
Eddy'd get excited by the weapons the guards carried and describe each one to
her in numbing detail. He didn't have a gun himself, though, not as far as she
knew, and Mona figured that was a good thing. Sometimes you couldn't even smell
the dead fish, because there was another smell, a chlorine smell that burned the
roof of your mouth, something from the factories up the coast. If there were
cute guys, they were still tricks, and the ones down here weren't exactly
offering to pay double.

About the only thing to like about Florida was drugs, which were easy to
come by and cheap and mostly industrial strength. Sometimes she imagined the
bleach smell was the smell of a million dope labs cooking some unthinkable
cocktail, all those molecules thrashing their kinky little tails, hot for
destiny and the street.

She turned off the Avenue and walked down a line of unlicensed food
stalls. Her stomach started growling at the smell, but she didn't trust street
food, not if she didn't have to, and there were licensed places in the mall that
would take cash. Somebody was playing a trumpet in the asphalt square that had
been the parking lot, a rambling Cuban solo that bounced and distorted off the
concrete walls, dying notes lost in the morning clatter of the market. A soapbox
evangelist spread his arms high, a pale fuzzy Jesus copying the gesture in the
air above him. The projection rig was in the box he stood on, but he wore a
battered nylon pack with two speakers sticking over each shoulder like blank
chrome heads. The evangelist frowned up at Jesus and adjusted something on the
belt at his waist. Jesus strobed, turned green, and vanished. Mona laughed. The
man's eyes flashed God's wrath, a muscle working in his seamed cheek. Mona
turned left, between rows of fruit vendors stacking oranges and grapefruit in
pyramids on their battered metal carts.

She entered a low, cavernous building that housed aisles of more permanent
businesses: sellers of fish and packaged foods, cheap household goods, counters
serving a dozen kinds of hot food. It was cooler here in the shade, and a little
quieter. She found a wonton place with six empty stools and took one. The
Chinese cook spoke to her in Spanish; she ordered by pointing. He brought her
soup in a plastic bowl; she paid him with the smallest of her bills, and he made
change with eight greasy cardboard tokens. If Eddy meant it, about leaving, she
wouldn't be able to use them; if they stayed in Florida, she could always get
some wonton. She shook her head. Gotta go, gotta. She shoved the worn yellow
disks back across the painted plyboard counter. "You keep 'em." The cook swept
them out of sight, bland and expressionless, a blue plastic toothpick fixed at
the corner of his mouth.

She took chopsticks from the glass on the counter and fished a folded
noodle from the bowl. There was a suit watching her from the aisle behind the
cook's pots and burners. A suit who was trying to look like something else,
white sportshirt and sunglasses. More the way they stand than anything, she
thought. But he had the teeth, too, and the haircut, except he had a beard. He
was pretending to look around, like he was shopping, hands in his pockets, his
mouth set in what he might have thought was an absent smile. He was pretty, the
suit, what you could see of him behind the beard and the glasses. The smile
wasn't pretty, though; it was kind of rectangular, so you could see most of his
teeth. She shifted a little on the stool, uneasy. Hooking was legal, but only if
you did it right, got the tax chip and everything. She was suddenly aware of the
cash in her pocket. She pretended to study the laminated foodhandling license
taped to the counter; when she looked up again, he was gone.

She spent fifty on the clothes. She worked her way through eighteen racks in
four shops, everything the mall had, before she made up her mind. The vendors
didn't like her trying on so many things, but it was the most she'd ever had to
spend. It was noon before she'd finished, and the Florida sun was cooking the
pavement as she crossed the parking lot with her two plastic bags. The bags,
like the clothes, were secondhand: one was printed with the logo of a Ginza shoe
store, the other advertised Argentinian seafood briquettes molded from
reconstituted krill. She was mentally mixing and matching the things she'd
bought, figuring out different outfits.

From the other side of the square, the evangelist opened up at full
volume, in mid-rant, like he'd warmed up to a spit-spraying fury before he'd cut
the amp in, the hologram Jesus shaking its white-robed arms and gesturing
angrily to the sky, the mall, the sky again. Rapture, he said. Rapture's coming.

Mona turned a corner at random, automatic reflex avoiding a crazy, and
found herself walking past sunfaded card tables spread with cheap Indo simstim
sets, used cassettes, colored spikes of microsoft stuck in blocks of pale blue
Styrofoam. There was a picture of Angie Mitchell taped up behind one of the
tables, a poster Mona hadn't seen before. She stopped and studied it hungrily,
taking in the star's clothes and makeup first, then trying to figure out the
background, where it had been shot. Unconsciously, she adjusted her expression
to approximate Angie's in the poster. Not a grin, exactly.A sort of half-grin,
maybe a little sad. Mona felt a special way about Angie. Because -- and tricks
said it, sometimes -- she looked like her. Like she was Angie's sister. Except
her nose, Mona's, had more of a tilt, and she, Angie, didn't have that smear of
freckles out to her cheekbones. Mona's Angie half-grin widened as she stared,
washed in the beauty of the poster, the luxury of the pictured room. She guessed
it was a kind of castle, probably it was where Angie lived, sure, with lots of
people to take care of her, do her hair and hang up her clothes, because you
could see the walls were made of big rocks, and those mirrors had frames on them
that were solid gold, carved with leaves and angels. The writing across the
bottom would say where it was, maybe, but Mona couldn't read. Anyway, there
weren't any fucking roaches there, she was sure of that, and no Eddy either. She
looked down at the stim sets and briefly considered using the rest of her money.
But then she wouldn't have enough for a stim, and anyway these were old, some of
them older than she was. There was whatsit, that Tally, she'd been big when Mona
was maybe nine. . . .

When she got back, Eddy was waiting for her, with the tape off the window and
the flies buzzing. Eddy was sprawled out on the bed, smoking a cigarette, and
the suit with the beard, who'd been watching her, was sitting in the broken
chair, still wearing his sunglasses.

Prior , he said that was his name, like he didn't have a first one. Or like Eddy
didn't have a last one. Well, she didn't have a last name herself, unless you
counted Lisa, and that was more like having two first ones.

She couldn't get much sense of him, in the squat. She thought maybe that
was because he was English. He wasn't really a suit, though, not like she'd
thought when she'd seen him in the mall; he was onto some game, it just wasn't
clear which one. He kept his eyes on her a lot, watched her pack her things in
the blue Lufthansa bag he'd brought, but she couldn't feel any heat there, not
like he wanted her. He just watched her, watched Eddy smoke, tapped his
sunglasses on his knee, listened to Eddy's line of bullshit, and said as little
as he needed to. When he did say something, it was usually funny, but the way he
talked made it hard to tell when he was joking.

Packing, she felt light-headed, like she'd done a jumper but it hadn't
quite come on. The flies were fucking against the window, bumping on the dust-
streaked glass, but she didn't care. Gone, she was already gone.

Zipping up the bag.

It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out
of a nowhere sky. She'd never been to an airport before, but she knew them from
the stims.

Prior's car was a white Datsun rental that drove itself and played
elevator music through quad speakers. It left them beside their luggage in a
bare concrete bay and drove away in the rain. If Prior had a bag, it wasn't with
him; Mona had her Lufthansa bag and Eddy had two black gator-clone suitcases.

She tugged her new skirt down over her hips and wondered if she'd bought
the right shoes. Eddy was enjoying himself, had his hands in his pockets and his
shoulders tilted to show he was doing something important.

She remembered him in Cleveland, the first time, how he'd come out to the
place to look at a scoot the old man had for sale, a three-wheel Skoda that was
mostly rust. The old man grew catfish in concrete tanks that fenced the dirt
yard. She was in the house when Eddy came, long high-walled space of a truck
trailer up on blocks. There were windows cut down one side, square holes sealed
over with scratched plastic. She was standing by the stove, smell of onions in
sacks and tomatoes hung up to dry, when she felt him there, down the length of
the room, sensed the muscle and shoulder of him, his white teeth, the black
nylon cap held shyly in his hand. Sun was coming in the windows, the place lit
up bare and plain, the floor swept the way the old man had her keep it, but it
was like a shadow came, blood-shadow where she heard the pumping of her heart,
and him coming closer, tossing the cap on the bare chipboard table as he passed
it, not shy now but like he lived there, right up to her, running a hand with a
bright ring back through the oiled weight of his hair. The old man came in then
and Mona turned away, pretended to do something with the stove. Coffee, the old
man said, and Mona went to get some water, filling the enamel pot from the roof-
tank line, the water gurgling down through the charcoal filter. Eddy and the old
man sitting at the table, drinking black coffee, Eddy's legs spread straight out
under the table, thighs hard through threadbare denim. Smiling, jiving the old
man, dealing for the Skoda. How it seemed to run okay, how he'd buy it if the
old man had the title. Old man getting up to dig in a drawer. Eddy's eyes on her
again. She followed them out into the yard and watched him straddle the cracked
vinyl saddle. Backfire set the old man's black dogs yelping, high sweet smell of
cheap alcohol exhaust and the frame trembling between his legs.

Now she watched him pose beside his suitcases, and it was hard to connect
that up, why she'd left with him next day on the Skoda, headed into Cleveland.
The Skoda'd had a busted little radio you couldn't hear over the engine, just
play it soft at night in a field by the road. Tuner part was cracked so it only
picked up one station, ghost music up from some lonesome tower in Texas, steel
guitar fading in and out all night, feeling how she was wet against his leg and
the stiff dry grass prickling the back of her neck.

Prior put her blue bag into a white cart with a striped top and she
climbed in after it, hearing tiny Spanish voices from the Cuban driver's
headset. Then Eddy stowed the gator cases and he and Prior got in. Rolling out
to the runway through walls of rain.

The plane wasn't what she knew from the stims, not like a long rich bus inside,
with lots of seats. It was a little black thing with sharp, skinny wings and
windows that made it look like it was squinting.

She went up some metal stairs and there was a space with four seats and
the same gray carpet all over, on the walls and ceiling too, everything clean
and cool and gray. Eddy came in after her and took a seat like it was something
he did every day, loosening his tie and stretching his legs. Prior was pushing
buttons beside the door. It made a sighing sound when it closed.

She looked out the narrow, streaming windows at runway lights reflected on
wet concrete.

Came down here on the train , she thought, New York to Atlanta and then
you change .

The plane shivered. She heard the airframe creak as it came to life.

She woke briefly, two hours later, in the darkened cabin, cradled by the long
hum of the jet. Eddy was asleep, his mouth half-open. Maybe Prior was sleeping
too, or maybe he just had his eyes closed, she couldn't tell.

Halfway back into a dream she wouldn't remember in the morning, she heard
the sound of that Texas radio, fading steel chords drawn out like an ache.



Underground

Jubilee and Bakerloo, Circle and District. Kumiko peered at the little laminated
map Petal had given her and shivered. The concrete platform seemed to radiate
cold through the soles of her boots.

"It's so fucking old," Sally Shears said absently, her glasses reflecting
a convex wall sheathed in white ceramic tile.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The tube." A new tartan scarf was knotted under Sally's chin, and her
breath was white when she spoke. "You know what bothers me? It's how sometimes
you'll see 'em sticking new tile up in these stations, but they don't take down
the old tile first. Or they'll punch a hole in the wall to get to some wiring
and you can see all these different layers of tile. . . ."

"Yes?"

"Because it's getting narrower , right? It's like arterial plaque. . . ."

"Yes," Kumiko said dubiously, "I see. . . . Those boys, Sally, what is the
meaning of their costume, please?"

"Jacks. What they call Jack Draculas."

The four Jack Draculas huddled like ravens on the opposite platform. They
wore nondescript black raincoats and polished black combat boots laced to the
knee. One turned to address another and Kumiko saw that his hair was drawn back
into a plaited queue and bound with a small black bow.

"Hung him," Sally said, "after the war."

"Who?"

"Jack Dracula. They had public hangings for a while, after the war. Jacks,
you wanna stay away from 'em. Hate anybody foreign . . ."

Kumiko would have liked to access Colin, but the Maas-Neotek unit was
tucked behind a marble bust in the room where Petal served their meals, and then
the train arrived, amazing her with the archaic thunder of wheels on steel rail.

Sally Shears against the patchwork backdrop of the city's architecture, her
glasses reflecting the London jumble, each period culled by economics, by fire,
by war.

Kumiko, already confused by three rapid and apparently random train
changes, let herself be hauled through a sequence of taxi rides. They'd jump out
of one cab, march into the nearest large store, then take the first available
exit to another street and another cab. "Harrods," Sally said at one point, as
they cut briskly through an ornate, tile-walled hall pillared in marble. Kumiko
blinked at thick red roasts and shanks displayed on tiered marble counters,
assuming they were made of plastic. And then out again, Sally hailing the next
cab. "Covent Garden," she said to the driver.

"Excuse me, Sally. What are we doing?"

"Getting lost."

Sally drank hot brandy in a tiny cafˇ beneath the snow-streaked glass roof of
the piazza. Kumiko drank chocolate.

"Are we lost, Sally?"

"Yeah. Hope so, anyway." She looked older today, Kumiko thought; lines of
tension or fatigue around her mouth.

"Sally, what is it that you do? Your friend asked if you were still
retired. . . ."

"I'm a businesswoman."

"And my father is a businessman?"

"Your father is a businessman, honey. No, not like that. I'm an indie. I
make investments, mostly."

"In what do you invest?"

"In other indies." She shrugged. "Feeling curious today?" She sipped her
brandy.

"You advised me to be my own spy."

"Good advice. Takes a light touch, though."

"Do you live here, Sally, in London?"

"I travel."

"Is Swain another 'indie'?"

"He thinks so. He's into influence, nods in the right direction; you need
that here, to do business, but it gets on my nerves." She tossed back the rest
of the brandy and licked her lips.

Kumiko shivered.

"You don't have to be scared of Swain. Yanaka could have him for
breakfast. . . ."

"No. I thought of those boys in the subway. So thin . . ."

"The Draculas."

"A gang?"

"Bosozoku ," Sally said, with fair pronunciation. " 'Running tribes'?
Anyway, like a tribe." It wasn't the right word, but Kumiko thought she saw the
distinction. "They're thin because they're poor." She gestured to the waiter for
a second brandy.

"Sally," Kumiko said, "when we came here, the route we took, the trains
and cabs, that was in order to make certain we were not followed?"

"Nothing's ever certain."

"But when we went to meet Tick, you took no precautions. We could easily
have been followed. You enlist Tick to spy on Swain, yet you take no
precautions. You bring me here, you take many precautions. Why?"

The waiter put a steaming glass down in front of her. "You're a sharp
little honey, aren't you?" She leaned forward and inhaled the fumes of brandy.
"It's like this, okay? With Tick, maybe I'm just trying to shake some action."

"But Tick is concerned that Swain not discover him."

"Swain won't touch him, not if he knows he's working for me."

"Why?"

"Because he knows I might kill him." She raised the glass, looking
suddenly happier.

"Kill Swain?"

"That's right." She drank.

"Then why were you so cautious today?"

"Because sometimes it feels good to shake it all off, get out from under.
Chances are, we haven't. But maybe we have. Maybe nobody, nobody at all, knows
where we are. Nice feeling, huh? You could be kinked, you ever think of that?
Maybe your dad, the Yak warlord, he's got a little bug planted in you so he can
keep track of his daughter. You got those pretty little teeth, maybe Daddy's
dentist tucked a little hardware in there one time when you were into a stim.
You go to the dentist?"

"Yes."

"You stim while he works?"

"Yes . . ."

"There you go. Maybe he's listening to us right now. . . ."

Kumiko nearly overturned what was left of her chocolate.

"Hey." The polished nails tapped Kumiko's wrist. "Don't worry about it. He
wouldn't've sent you here like that, with a bug. Make you too easy for his
enemies to track. But you see what I mean? It's good to get out from under, or
anyway try. On our own, right?"

"Yes," Kumiko said, her heart still pounding, the panic continuing to
rise. "He killed my mother," she blurted, then vomited chocolate on the cafˇ's
gray marble floor.

Sally leading her past the columns of Saint Paul's, walking, not talking.
Kumiko, in a disjointed trance of shame, registering random information: the
white shearling that lined Sally's leather coat, the oily rainbow sheen of a
pigeon's feathers as it waddled out of their way, red buses like a giant's toys
in the Transport Museum, Sally warming her hands around a foam cup of steaming
tea.

Cold, it would always be cold now. The freezing damp in the city's ancient
bones, the cold waters of Sumida that had filled her mother's lungs, the chill
flight of the neon cranes.

Her mother was fine-boned and dark, the thick spill of her hair grained
with gold highlights, like some rare tropical hardwood. Her mother smelled of
perfume and warm skin. Her mother told her stories, about elves and fairies and
Copenhagen, which was a city far away. When Kumiko dreamed of the elves, they
were like her father's secretaries, lithe and staid, with black suits and furled
umbrellas. The elves did many curious things, in her mother's stories, and the
stories were magic, because they changed with the telling, and you could never
be certain how a tale might end on a given night. There were princesses in the
stories as well, and ballerinas, and each of them, Kumiko had known, was in some
way her mother.

The princess-ballerinas were beautiful but poor, dancing for love in the
far city's heart, where they were courted by artists and student poets, handsome
and penniless. In order to support an aged parent, or purchase an organ for an
ailing brother, a princess- ballerina was sometimes obliged to voyage very far
indeed, perhaps as far as Tokyo, to dance for money. Dancing for money, the
tales implied, was not a happy thing.

Sally took her to a robata bar in Earls Court and forced her to drink a glass of
sake. A smoked fugu fin floated in the hot wine, turning it the color of
whiskey. They ate robata from the smoky grill, and Kumiko felt the cold recede,
but not the numbness. The decor of the bar induced a profound sense of cultural
dislocation: it managed to simultaneously reflect traditional Japanese design
and look as though it had been drawn up by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

She was very strange, Sally Shears, stranger than all of gaijin London.
Now she told Kumiko stories, stories about people who lived in a Japan Kumiko
had never known, stories that defined her father's role in the world. The oyabun
, she called Kumiko's father. The world Sally's stories described seemed no more
real than the world of her mother's fairy tales, but Kumiko began to understand
the basis and extent of her father's power. "Kuromaku ," Sally said. The word
meant black curtain. "It's from Kabuki, but it means a fixer, someone who sells
favors. Means behind-the-scenes, right? That's your father. That's Swain, too.
But Swain's your old man's kobun , or anyway one of them. Oyabun-kobun , parent-
child. That's partly where Roger gets his juice. That's why you're here now,
because Roger owes it to the oyabun . Giri , understand?"

"He is a man of rank."

Sally shook her head. "Your old man, Kumi, he's it . If he's had to ship
you out of town to keep you safe, means there's some serious changes on the
way."

"Been down the drinker?" Petal asked, as they entered the room, his eyeglass
edges winking Tiffany light from a bronze and stained-glass tree that grew on
the sideboard. Kumiko wanted to look at the marble head that hid the Maas-Neotek
unit, but forced herself to look out into the garden. The snow there had become
the color of London sky.

"Where's Swain?" Sally asked.

"Guvnor's out," Petal told her.

Sally went to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of scotch from a
heavy decanter. Kumiko saw Petal wince as the decanter came down hard on the
polished wood. "Any messages?"

"No."

"Expect him back tonight?"

"Can't say, really. Do you want dinner?"

"No."

"I'd like a sandwich," Kumiko said.

Fifteen minutes later, with the untouched sandwich on the black marble bedside
table, she sat in the middle of the huge bed, the Maas-Neotek unit between her
bare feet. She'd left Sally drinking Swain's whiskey and staring out into the
gray garden.

Now she took up the unit and Colin shuddered into focus at the foot of the
bed.

"Nobody can hear my half of this," he said quickly, putting a finger to
his lips, "and a good thing, too. Room's bugged."

Kumiko started to reply, then nodded.

"Good," he said. "Smart girl. Got two conversations for you. One's your
host and his minder, other's your host and Sally. Got the former about fifteen
minutes after you stashed me downstairs. Listen . . ." Kumiko closed her eyes
and heard the tinkle of ice in a whiskey glass.

"Where's our little Jap, then?" Swain asked.

"Tucked up for the night," Petal said. "Talks to herself, that one. One-
sided conversation. Queer."

"What about?"

"Bloody little, actually. Some people do, y 'know. . . ."

"What?"

"Talk to themselves. Like to hear her?"

"Christ, no. Where's the delightful Miss Shears?"

"Out for her constitutional."

"Call Bernie 'round, next time, see what she's about on these little walks
. . ."

"Bernie," and Petal laughed, "he'd come back in a fucking box!"

Now Swain laughed. "Mightn't be a bad thing either way, Bernard off our
hands and the famous razorgirl's thirst slaked . . . Here, pour us another."

"None for me. Off to bed, unless you need me . . ."

"No," Swain said.

"So," said Colin, as Kumiko opened her eyes to find him still seated on
the bed, "there's a voice-activated bug here in your room; the minder reviewed
the recording and heard you address me. Our second segment, now, is more
interesting. Your host sits there with his second whiskey, in comes our Sally. .
. ."

"Hullo," she heard Swain say, "been out taking the air?"

"Fuck off."

"You know," Swain said, "none of this was my idea. You might try keeping
that in mind. You know they've got me by the balls as well."

"You know, Roger, sometimes I'm tempted to believe you."

"Try it. It would make things easier."

"Other times, I'm tempted to slit your fucking throat."

"Your problem, dear, is that you never learned to delegate; you still want
to do everything personally."

"Listen, asshole, I know where you're from, and I know how you got here,
and I don't care how far you've got your tongue up Kanaka's crack or anybody
else's. Sarakin! " Kumiko had never heard the word before.

"I heard from them again," Swain said, his tone even, conversational.
"She's still on the coast, but it looks as though she'll make a move soon. East,
most likely. Back on your old manor. I think that's our best bet, really. The
house is impossible. Enough private security along that stretch to stop a fair-
sized army . . ."

"You still trying to tell me this is just a snatch, Roger? Trying to tell
me they're gonna hold her for ransom?"

"No. Nothing's been said about selling her back."

"So why don't they just hire that army? No reason they'd have to stop at
fair-sized, is there? Get the mercs, right? The corporate-extraction boys. She's
not that hard a target, no more than some hotshit research man. Get the fucking
pros in . . ."

"For perhaps the hundredth time, that isn't what they want. They want
you."

"Roger, what do they have on you, huh? I mean, do you really not know
what it is they got on me?"

"No, I don't. But