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

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

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

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

  “The rest is silver?”

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

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

  “I drank too much. And with tequila in them, too. ‘Vitamin T,’ Eddie calls it. I wasn't bad, was I?”

  Chia shook her head.

  “I can't always remember, if I'm bad.”

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

  “Nine hours easy,” the blond said, and sighed. “Subsonics just suck, don't they? Eddie had me booked on a super, in full business, but then he said something went wrong with the ticket. Eddie gets all the tickets from this place in Osaka. We went on Air France once, first class, and your seat turns into a bed and they tuck you in with a little quilt. And they have an open bar right there and they just leave the bottles out, and champagne and just the best food.” The memory didn't seem to cheer her up. “And they give you perfume and makeup in its own case, from Hermès. Real leather, too. Why are you going to Tokyo?”

  “Oh,” Chia said. “Oh. Well. My friend. To see my friend.”

  “It's so strange. You know? Since the quake.”

  “But they've built it all back now. Haven't they?”

  “Sure, but they did it all so fast, mostly with that nanotech, that just grows? Eddie got in there before the dust had settled. Told me you could see those towers growing, at night. Rooms up top like a honeycomb, and walls just sealing themselves over, one after another. Said it was like watching a candle melt, but in reverse. That's too scary. Doesn't make a sound. Machines too small to see. They can get into your body, you know?”

  Chia sensed an underlying edge of panic there. “Eddie?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “Eddie's like a businessman. He went to Japan to make money after the earthquake. He says the infa, infa, the structure was wide open, then. He says it took the spine out of it, sort of, so you could come in and root around, quick, before it healed over and hardened up again. And it healed over around Eddie, like he's an implant or something, so now he's part of the infa, the infa—”

  “Infrastructure.”

  “The structure. Yeah. So now he's plugged in, to all that juice. He's a landlord, and he owns these clubs, and has deals in music and vids and things.”

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

  “Part of the time.”

  “Do you like it?”

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

  “What?”

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

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

  “My name's Maryalice. Like it's one word.”

  “Mine's Chia.”

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

  “Pretty name,” Maryalice said.

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

  7. The Wet, Warm Life in Alison Shires

  “She'll try to kill herself,” Laney said.

  “Why?” Kathy Torrance sipped espresso. A Monday afternoon in the Cage.

  “Because she knows. She can feel me watching.”

  “That's impossible, Laney.”

  “She knows.”

  “You aren't ‘watching’ her. You're examining the data she generates, like the data all our lives generate. She can't know that.”

  “She does.”

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

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

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

  “No, I'd rather—”

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

  She added a travel bonus. Laney was sent to Slitscan' s in-house agency and booked into a hollowed-out hilltop above Ixtapa, a hotel with vast stone spheres ranged across the polished concrete of its glass-walled lobby. Beyond the glass, iguanas regarded the registration staff with an ancient calm, green scales bright against dusty brown branches.

  Laney met a woman who said she edited lamps for a design house in San Francisco. Tuesday evening. He'd been in Mexico three hours. Drinks in the lobby bar.

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

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

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

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

  It's there, one day, she said, and you can look at it, and touch it, and know whether or not it's good.

  Laney considered this. She seemed very calm. Shadows lengthened with almost visible speed across the floor of glossy concrete.

 
He put his hand over hers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Cross-indexing her charges against the records of her credit-provider and its client retailers, he produced a list of everything she'd purchased in the past week. Six-pack, blades, Tokkai carton opener. Did she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he remembered Kathy's advice, that this was the part of research most prone to produce serious transference, the point at which the researcher's intimacy with the subject could lead to loss of perspective. “It's often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney. We're a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different brand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out.”

  The floor of Laney's apartment was terraced against the original slope of the parking garage. He slept at the deep end, on an inflatable guest bed he'd ordered from the Shopping Channel. There were no windows. Regulations required a light-pump, and reconstituted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel in the ceiling, but he was seldom there during daylight hours.

  He sat on the slippery edge of the inflatable, picturing Alison Shires in her Fountain Avenue apartment. Larger than this, he knew, but not by much. Windows. Her rent was paid, Slitscan had finally determined, by her married actor. Via a fairly intricate series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. “His reptile fund,” Kathy called it.

  He could hold Alison Shires' history in his mind like a single object, like the perfectly detailed scale model of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus. He'd never met her, or spoken to her, but he'd come to know her, he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever had or would. Husbands didn't know their wives this way, or wives their husbands. Stalkers might aspire to know the objects of their obsession this way, but never could.

  Until the night he woke after midnight, head throbbing. Too hot, something wrong with the conditioning again. Florida. The blue shirt he slept in clinging to his back and shoulders. What would she be doing now?

  Was she staring up, awake, at faint bars of reflected light on the ceiling, listening to Upful Groupvine?

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

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

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

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

  “Hey there,” the fridge said. “You've left me open.”

  Laney said nothing.

  “Well, do you want the door open, partner? You know it interferes with the automatic de-frost…”

  “Be quiet.” His hands felt better. Cooler.

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

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

  “We're not talking conscious decision, here?” Blackwell kneaded what was left of his right ear.

  “No,” Laney said, “I don't know what I thought I was doing.”

  “You were trying to save her. The girl.”

  “It felt like something snapped. A rubber band. It felt like gravity.”

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

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

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

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

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

  The nodal point.

  “You don't want to talk about it?”

  Laney looked up from his empty cup, meeting Blackwell's eyes across the table.

  “I've never really told this to anyone,” he said, and it was true.

  “Let's walk,” Blackwell said, and stood, his bulk seeming to lift effortlessly, as though he were a helium parade float. Laney wondered what time it might be, here or in L.A. Yamazaki was taking care of the bill.

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

  “How do you fold it?”

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

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

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

  Laney's protracted survey of Alison Shires had already involved any number of criminal violations, one of which had provided him with the codes required to open the door into her building's foyer, activate the elevator, unlock the door of her fifth-floor apartment, and cancel the private security alarm that would automatically warrant an armed response if she did these things without keying in two extra digits. This last was intended as insurance against endemic home invasion, a crime in which residents were accosted in parking garages and induced to surrender their codes. Alison Shires' code consisted of her month, date, and year of birth, something any security service strongly advised against. Her back-up code was 23, her age the year before, when she'd moved in and become a subscriber.

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

  23.

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

  —Bang.

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

  502.

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

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