All Tomorrow's Parties

By William Gibson

1. CARDBOARD CITY
THROUGH this evenings tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the stations airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.

Evolved to cope with jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shopping bags, ruthless briefcases, Yamazaki and his small burden of information go down into the neon depths. Toward this tributary of relative quiet, a tiled corridor connecting parallel escalators.

Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked with dust-furred ventilators, smoke detectors, speakers. Behind the columns, against the far wall, derelict shipping cartons huddle in a ragged train, improvised shelters constructed by the city's homeless. Yamazaki halts, and in that moment all the oceanic clatter of commuting feet washes in, no longer held back by his sense of mission, and he deeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere.
He winces, violently, as a fashionable young matron, features swathed in Chanel micropore, rolls over his toes with an expensive three-wheeled stroller. Blurting a convulsive apology, Yamazaki glimpses the infant passenger through flexible curtains of some pink-tinted plastic, the glow of a video display winking as its mother trundles determinedly away.
Yamazaki sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters. He wonders briefly what the passing commuters will think, to see him enter the carton fifth from the left. It is scarcely the height of his chest, longer than the others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap of thumb-smudged white corrugate serving as its door.
Perhaps the~~ will not see him, he thinks. Just as he himself has never seen anyone enter or exit one of these tidy hovels. It is as though their inhabitants are rendered invisible in the transaction that allows such structures to exist in the context of the station. lie is a student of

existential sociology, and such transactions have been his particular con-
cern.
And now he hesitates, fighting the urge to remove his shoes and place them beside the rather greasy-looking pair of yellow plastic sandals arranged beside the entrance flap on a carefully folded sheet of Parco gift wrap. No, he thinks, imagining himself waylaid within, struggling with faceless enemies in a labyrinth of cardboard. Best he not be shoeless.
Sighing again, he drops to his knees, the notebook clutched in both hands. He kneels for an instant, hearing the hurrying feet of those who pass behind him. Then he places the notebook on the ceramic tile of the station's floor and shoves it forward, beneath the corrugate flap, and follows it on his hands and knees.
He desperately hopes that he has found the right carton.
He freezes there in unexpected light and heat. A single halogen fixture floods the tiny room with the frequency of desert sunlight. Unventilated, it heats the space like a reptile's cage.
"Come in," says the old man, in Japanese. "Don't leave your ass hanging out that way." He is naked except for a sort of breechclout twisted from what may once have been a red T-shirt. He is seated, cross-legged, on a ragged, paint-flecked tatami mat. He holds a brightly colored toy figure in one hand, a slender brush in the other. Yamazaki sees that the thing is a model of some kind, a robot or military exoskeleton. It glitters in the sun-bright light, blue and red and silver. Small tools are spread on the tatami: a razor knife, a sprue cutter, curls of emery paper.
The old man is very thin, clean-shaven but in need of a haircut. Wisps of gray hair hang on either side of his face, and his mouth is set in what looks to be a permanent scowl of disapproval. He wears glasses with heavy black plastic frames and archaically thick lenses. The lenses catch the light.
Yamazaki creeps obediently into the carton, feeling the door flap drop shut behind him. On hands and knees, he resists the urge to try to bow.
"He's waiting," the old man says, his brush tip poised above the figure in his hand. "In there." Moving only his head.
Yamazaki sees that the carton has been reinforced with mailing tubes, a system that echoes the traditional post-and-beam architecture of Japan, the tubes lashed together with lengths of salvaged poly-ribbon. There are too many objects here, in this tiny space. Towels and blankets and cooking pots on cardboard shelves. Books. A small television.
"In there?" Yamazaki indicates what he takes to be another door, like the entrance to a hutch, curtained with a soiled square of melon-yellow, foam-cored blanket, the sort of blanket one finds in a capsule hotel. But the brush tip dips to touch the model, and the old man is lost in the concentration this requires, soYamazaki shuffles on hands and knees across the absurdly tiny space and draws the section of blanket aside. Darkness.
"Laney-San?"
What seems to be a crumpled sleeping bag. He smells sickness- "Yeah?" A croak. "In here."
Drawing a deep breath, Yamazaki crawls in, pushing his notebook before him. When the melon-yellow blanket falls across the entrance, brightness glows through the synthetic fabric and the thin foam core, like tropical sunlight seen from deep within some coral grotto.
"Laney?"
The American groans. Seems to turn, or sit up. Yamazaki can't see. Something covers Laney's eyes. Red wink of a diode. Cables. Faint gleam of the interface, reflected in a thin line against Laney's sweat-slick cheekbone.
"I'm deep in, now," Laney says, and coughs.
"Deep in what?"
"They didn't follow you, did they?"
"I don't think so."
"I could tell if they had."
Yamazaki feels sweat run suddenly from both his armpits, coursing down across his ribs. He forces himself to breathe. The air here is foul, thick. He thinks of the seventeen known strains of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis

Laney draws a ragged breath. "But they aren't looking for me, are they?"

3
I
"No," Yamazaki says, "they are looking for her."

"They won't find her," Laney says. "Not here. Not anywhere. Not now.',

"Why did you run away, Laney?"

"The syndrome," Laney says and coughs again, and Yamazaki feels the smooth, deep shudder of an incoming maglev, somewhere deeper in the station, not mechanical vibration but a vast pistoning of displaced air. "It finally kicked in. The 5-SB. The stalker effect." Yamazaki hears feet hurrying by, perhaps an arm's length away, behind the cardboard wall.

"It makes you cough?" Yamazaki blinks, making his new contact lenses swim uncomfortably.

"No," Laney says and coughs into his pale and upraised hand. "Some bug. They all have it, down here."

"I was worried when you vanished. They began to look for you, but when she was gone-"

"The shit really hit the fan."

"Shit?"

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney's hollowed eyes. "It's all going to change, Yamazaki. We're coming up on the mother of all nodal points. I can see it, now. It's all going to change."

"I don't understand."

"Know what the joke is? It didn't change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I've been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history. Last time we had one like this was 1911."

"What happened in 1911?"

"Everything changed."

"How?"

"It just did. That's how it works. I can see it now"

"Laney," Yamazaki says, "when you told me about the stalker effect, you said that the victims, the test subjects, became obsessed with one particular media figure."
"Yes."

"And you are obsessed with her?"

Laney stares at him, eyes lit by a backwash of data. "No. Not with her. Guy named Harwood. Cody Harwood. They're coming together, though. In San Francisco. And someone else. Leaves a sort of negative trace; you have to infer everything from the way he's not there.

"Why did you ask me here, Laney? This is a terrible place. Do you wish me to help you to escape?" Yamazaki is thinking of the blades of the Swiss Army knife in his pocket. One of them is serrated; he could easily cut his way out through the wall. Yet the psychological space is powerful, very powerful, and overwhelms him. He feels very far from Shinjuku, from Tokyo, from anything. He smells Laney's sweat. "You are not well."

"Rydell," Laney says, replacing the eyephones. "That rent-a-cop from the Chateau. The one you knew. The one who told me about you, back in LA."

"Yes?"

"I need a man on the ground, in San Francisco. I've managed to move some money. I don't think they can trace it. I dcked with DatArnerica's banking sector. Find Rydell and tell him he can have it as a retainer."

"To do what?"

Laney shakes his head. The cables on the eyephones move in the dark like snakes. "He has to be there, is all. Something's coming down. Everything's changing."

"Laney, you are sick, Let me take you-"

"Back to the island? There's nothing there. Never will be, now she's gone."

And Yamazaki knows this is true.

"Where's Rez?" Laney asks.

"He mounted a tour of the Kombinat states, when he decided she was gone."

Laney nods thoughtfully, the eyephones bobbing mantis-like in the dark. "Get Rydell, Yamazaki. I'll tell you how he can get the money"

5
"But why?"

"Because he's part of it. Part of the node."

LATER Yamazaki stands, staring up at the towers of Shinjuku, the walls of animated light, sign and signifier twisting toward the sky in the unending ritual of commerce, of desire. Vast faces fill the screens, icons of a beauty at once terrible and banal.

Somewhere below his feet, Laney huddles and coughs in his cardboard shelter, all of DatAmerica pressing steadily into his eyes. Laney is his friend, and his friend is unwell. The American's peculiar talents with data are the result of experimental trials, in a federal orphanage in Florida, of a substance known as 5-SB. Yamazaki has seen what Laney can do with data, and what data can do to Laney.

He has no wish to see it again.

As he lowers his eyes from the walls of light, the mediated faces, he feels his contacts move, changing as they monitor his depth of focus. This still unnerves him.

Not far from the station, down a side street bright as day, he finds the sort of kiosk that sells anonymous debit cards. He purchases one. At another kiosk, he uses it to buy a disposable phone good for a total of thirty minutes, Tokyo-LA.

He asks his notebook for Rydell's number.
0
2. Lucky Dragon
'HEROIN." declared Durius Walker, Rydell's colleague in security at the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. "It's the opiate of the masses."

Durius had finished sweeping up. He held the big industrial dustpan carefully, headed for the inbuilt hospital-style sharps container, the one with the barbed biohazard symbol. That was where they put the needles, when they found them.

They averaged five or six a week. Rydell had never actually caught anyone shooting anything up, in the store, although he wouldn't have put it past them. It just seemed like people dropped used needles on the floor, usually back by the cat food. You could find other things, sweeping up in the Lucky Dragon: pills, foreign coins, hospital identification bracelets, crumpled paper money from countries that still used it. Not that you wanted to go poking around in that dustpan. When Rydell swept up, he wore the same Kevlar gloves that Durius was wearing now, and latex underneath that.

He supposed Durius was right though, and it made you wonder: all the new substances around to abuse, but people didn't forget the ones that had been around forever. Make cigarettes illegal, say, and people found a way to keep smoking. The Lucky Dragon wasn't allowed to sell rolling papers, but they did a brisk trade in Mexican hair-curler papers that worked just as well. The most popular brand was called Biggerhair, and Rydell wondered if anyone had ever actually used any to curl their hair. And how did you curl your hair with little rectangles of tissue paper anyway?

"Ten minutes to," Durius said over his shoulder. "You wanna do the curb check?"

At four o'clock, one of them got to take a ten-minute break, out back. If Rydell did the curb check, it meant he got to take his break first, then let Durius take one. The curb check was something that Lucky Dragon's parent corporation, back in Singapore, had instituted on the advice of an in-house team of American cultural anthropologists. Mr.

7
I
Park, the night manager, had explained this to Rydell, ticking off points on his notebook. He'd tapped each paragraph on the screen for emphasis, sounding thoroughly bored with the whole thing, hut Rydell had supposed it was part of the job, and Mr. Park was a definite stickler. "'In order to demonstrate Lucky Dragon's concern with neighborhood safety, security personnel will patrol curb in front of location on a nightly basis.'" Rydell had nodded. "You not out of store too long," Mr. Park added, by way of clarification. "Five minute. Just before you take break." Pause. Tap. "Lucky Dragon security presence will be high-profile, friendly, sensitive to local culture.'"

"What's that mean?"

"Anybody sleeping, you make them move. Friendly way. Hooker working there, you say hello, tell joke, make her move."

"I'm scared of those old girls," Rydell said, deadpan. "Christmastime, they dress up like Santa's elves."

"No hooker in front of Lucky Dragon."

"'Sensitive to local culture'?"

"Tell joke. Hooker like joke."

"Maybe in Singapore," Durius had said, when Rydell had recounted Park's instructions.

"He's not from Singapore," Rydell had said. "He's from Korea."

"So basically they want us to show ourselves, clear the sidewalk back a few yards, be friendly and sensitive?"

"And tell joke."

Durius squinted. "You know what kinda people hang in front of a convenience store on Sunset, four in the morning? Kids on dancer, tweaked off their dimes, hallucinating monster movies. Guess who gets to be the monster? Plus there's your more mature sociopaths; older, more complicated, polypharmic .

"Say what?"

"Mix their shit," Durius said. "Get lateral."

"Gotta be done. Man says."

Durius looked at Rydell. "You first." He was from Compton, and the only person Rydell knew who had actually been born in Los Angeles.

"You're bigger."
8
"Size ain't everything."

"Sure," Rydell had said.

ALL that summer Rydell and Durius had been night security at the Lucky Dragon, a purpose-built module that had been coptered into this former car-rental lot on the Strip. Before that, Rydell had been night security at the Chateau, just up the Street, and before that he'd driven a wagon for IntenSecure. Still farther back, briefly and he tried not to think about it too often, he'd been a police officer in Knoxville, Tennessee. Somewhere in there, twice, he'd almost made the cut for Coiis in Trouble, a show he'd grown up on but now managed never to watch.

Working nights at the Lucky Dragon was more interesting than Rydell would have imagined. Durius said that was because it was the only place around, for a mile or so, that sold anything that anyone actually needed, on a regular basis or otherwise. Microwave noodles, diagnostic kits for most STDs, toothpaste, disposable anything, Net access, gum, bottled water. . . There were Lucky Dragons all over America, all over the world for that matter, and to prove it you had your trademark Lucky Dragon Global Interactive Video Column outside. You had to pass it entering and leaving the store, so you'd see whichever dozen Lucky Dragons the Sunset franchise happened to be linked with at that particular moment: Paris or Houston or Brazzaville, wherever. These were shuffled, every three minutes, for the practical reason that it had been determined that if the maximum viewing time was any more, kids in the world's duller suburbs would try to win bets by having sex on camera. As it was, you got a certain amount of mooning and flashing. Or, still more common, like this shit-faced guy in downtown Prague, as Rydell made his exit to do the curb check, displaying the universal finger.

"Same here," Rydell said to this unknown Czech, hitching up the neon-pink Lucky Dragon fanny pack he was contractually obligated to wear on duty. He didn't mind that though, even if it did look like shit: it was bulletproof, with a pull-up Kevlar baby bib to fasten around your neck if the going got rough. A severely lateral customer with a ceramic

9
switchblade had tried to stab Rydell through the Lucky Dragon logo his second week on the job, and Rydell had sort of bonded with the thing after that.

He had that switchblade up in his room over Mrs. Siekevitz's garage. They'd found it below the peanut butter, after the LAPD had taken the lateral one away. It had a black blade that looked like sandblasted glass. Rydell didn't like it; the ceramic blade gave it a weird balance, and it was so sharp that he'd already cut himself with it twice. He wasn't sure what he should do with it.

Tonight's curb check looked dead simple. There was a Japanese girl standing out there with a seriously amazing amount of legs running down from an even more amazingly small amount of shorts. Well, sort of Japanese. Rydell found it hard to make distinctions like that in LA. Durius said hybrid vigor was the order of the day, and Rydell guessed he was right. This girl with all the legs, she was nearly as tall as Rydell, and he didn't think Japanese people usually were. But then maybe she'd grown up here, and her family before her, and the local food had made them taller. He'd heard about that happening. But, no, he decided, getting closer, the thing was, she wasn't actually a girl. Funny how you got that. Usually it wasn't anything too obvious. It was like he really wanted to buy into everything she was doing to be a girl, but some subliminal message he got from her bone structure just wouldn't let him.

"Hey," he said.

"You want me to move?"

"Well," Rydell said, "I'm supposed to."

"I'm supposed to stand out here convincing a jaded clientele to buy blow jobs. What's the difference?"

Rydell thought about it. "You're freelance," he decided, "I'm on salary. You go on down the street for twenty minutes, nobody's going to fire you." He could smell her perfume through the complicated pollution and that ghostly hint of oranges you got out here sometimes. There were orange trees around, had to be, but he'd never found one.

She was frowning at him. "Freelance."

"That's right."

She swayed expertly on her stacked heels, fishing a box of Russian
10
Marlboros from her pink patent purse. Passing cars were already honking at the sight of the Lucky Dragon security man talking to this six-foot-plus boygirl, and now she was deliberately doing something illegal. She opened the red-and-white box and pointedly offered Rydell a cigarette. There were two in there, factory-made filter tips, but one was shorter than the other and had blue metallic lipstick on it.

"No thanks."

She took out the shorter one, partially smoked, and put it between her lips. "Know what I'd do if I were you?" Her lips, around the tan filter tip, looked like a pair of miniature water beds plastered with glittery blue candy coat.

"What?"

She took a lighter from her purse. Like the ones they sold in those tobacciana shops. They were going to make that illegal too, he'd heard. She snapped it and lit her cigarette. Drew in the smoke, held it, blew it out, away from Rydell. "I'd fuck off into the air."

He looked into the Lucky Dragon and saw Durius say something to Miss Praisegod Satansbane, the checker on this shift. She had a fine sense of humor, Praisegod, and he guessed you had to, with a name like that. Her parents were some particularly virulent stripe of SoCal NeoPuritan, and had taken the name Satansbane before Praisegod had been born. The thing was, she'd explained to Rydell, nobody much knew what "bane" meant, so if she told people her last name, they mostly figured she was a Satanist anyway. So she often went by the surname Proby, which had been her father's before he'd gotten religion.

Now Durius said something else, and Praisegod threw back her shoulders and laughed. Rydell sighed. He wished it had been Durius' turn to do curb check.

"Look," Rydell said, "I'm not telling you you can't stand out here. The sidewalk's public property. It's just that there's this company policy."

"I'm going to finish this cigarette," she said, "and then I'm calling my lawyer."

"Can't we just keep it simple?"

"Uh-uh." Big metallic-blue, collagen-swollen smile.

Rydell glanced over and saw Durius making hand signals at him.

11
Pointing to Praisegod, who held a phone. He hoped they hadn't called

LAPD. He had a feeling this girl really did have herself a lawyer, and

Mr. Park wouldn't like that.

Now Durius came out. "For you," he called. "Say it's Tokyo."

"Excuse me," Rydell said, and turned away. "Hey," she said.

"Hey what?" He looked back. "You're cute."
12
3. DEEP IN
LANEY hears his piss gurgle into the screw-top plastic liter bottle. It's awkward kneeling here, in the dark, and he doesn't like the way the bottle warms in his hand, filling. He caps it by feel and stands it upright in the corner that's farthest from his head when he sleeps. In the morning, he'll carry it under his coat to the Men's and empty it. The old man knows he's too sick now to crawl out, to walk the corridor every time, but they have this agreement. Laney pisses in the bottle and takes it out when he can.

He doesn't know why the old man lets him stay here. He's offered to pay, but the old man just keeps building his models. It takes him a day to complete one, and they're always perfect. And where do they go when he finishes them? And where do the unbuilt kits come from?

Laney has a theory that the old man is a sensei of kit-building, a national treasure, with connoisseurs shipping in kits from around the world, waiting anxiously for the master to complete their vintage Gundams with his unequaled yet weirdly casual precision, his Zen moves, perhaps leaving each one with a single minute and somehow perfect flaw, at once his signature and a recognition of the nature of the universe. How nothing is perfect, really. Nothing ever finished. Everything is process, Laney assures himself, zipping up, settling back into his squalid nest of sleeping bags.

But the process is all a lot stranger than he ever bargained for, he reflects, bunching a fold of sleeping bag to pillow his head against the cardboard, through which he can feel the hard tile wall of the corridor.

Still, he thinks, he ,weds to be here. If there's any place in Tokyo Rez's people won't find him, this is it. He's not quite sure how he got here; things got a little fuzzy around the time the syndrome kicked in. Some kind of state change, some global shift in the nature of his perception. Insufficient memory. Things hadn't stuck.

Now he wonders if in fact he did make some deal with the old man. Maybe he's already covered this, the rent, whatever. Maybe that's why

13
I
the old man gives him food and bottles of flat mineral water and tolerates the smell of piss. He thinks that might be it, but he isn't sure.

It's dark in here, but he sees colors, faint flares and swathes and stipplings, moving. Like the afterimages of the DatAmerica flows are permanent now, retinally ingrained. No light penetrates from the corridor outside-he's blocked every pinhole with black tape-and the old man's halogen is off. He assumes the old man sleeps there, but he's never seen him do it, never heard any sounds that might indicate a transition from model-building to sleep. Maybe the old man sleeps upright on his mat, Gundam in one hand, brush in the other.

Sometimes he can hear music from the adjacent cartons, but it's faint, as though the neighbors use earphones.

He has no idea how many people live here in this corridor. It looks as though there might be room for six, but he's seen more, and it may be that they shelter here in shifts. He's never learned much Japanese, not after eight months, and even if he could understand, he guesses, these people are all crazy, and they'd only talk about the things crazy people talk about.

And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too.

But he isn't. He knows he isn't, in spite of everything. He has the syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that Gainesville orphanage, but he isn't crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn't him. It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love and didn't want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth, or how he'd always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved.

But the syndrome wasn't like that. It was separate from him and had nothing to do with anyone or anything he, Laney, was even interested in. When he'd felt it starting, he'd taken it for granted that it would be about her, about Rei Toei, because there he was, close to her, or as close
14
as you could get to anyone who didn't physically exist. 'I~hey'd tasked almost every day, Laney and the idoru.

And at first, he considered now, maybe it had been about her, hut then it was as though he'd been following something hack through the data flows, doing it without really thinking about it, the way your hand will find a thread on a garment and start pulling at it, unraveling it.

And what had unraveled was the way he'd thought the world worked. And behind that he'd found Harwood, who was famous, but famous in that way of being famous for being famous. Harwood who they said had elected the president. Harwood the PR genius, who'd inherited Harwood Levine, the most powerful PR firm in the world, and had taken it somewhere seriously else, into a whole other realm of influence, But who'd managed somehow never to become prey to the mechanism of celebrity itself. Which grinds, Laney so well knew, exceedingly fine, Harwood who, maybe, just maybe, ran it all, but somehow managed never to get his toe caught in it. Who managed, somehow, to be famous without seeming to be important, famous without being central to anything. Really, he'd never even gotten much attention, except when he'd split with Maria Paz, and even then it had been the Padanian star who'd made the top of every sequence, with Cody Harwood smiling from a series of sidebars, embedded hypertext lozenges: the beauty and this gentle-looking, secretive, pointedly uncharismatic billionaire.

"Hello," Laney says, his fingers finding the handle of a mechanical flashlight from Nepal, a crude thing, its tiny generator driven by a mechanism like a pair of spring-loaded pliers. Pumping it to life, he raises it, the faintly fluctuating beam finding the cardboard ceiling. Which is plastered, inch by inch, with dozens of stickers, small and rectangular, produced to order by a vending machine inside the station's west entrance: each one a different shot of the reclusive Harwood.

He can't remember going to the machine, executing a simple image search for Harwood, and paying to have these printed out, but he supposes he must have. Because he knows that that is where they are from. But neither can he remember peeling the adhesive backing from each One and sticking them up on the ceiling. But someone did. "I see you," Laney says and relaxes his hand, letting the dim beam brown and vanish.

15
4. FORMAL ABSENCES OF PRECIOUS THINGS

IN Market Street, the nameless man who haunts Laney's nodal configuration has just seen a girl.

Drowned down three decades, she steps fresh as creation from the bronze doors of some brokerage. And he remembers, in that instant, that she is dead, and he is not, and that this is another century, and this quite clearly another girl, some newly minted stranger, one with whom he will never speak.

And passing this one now, through a faint chromatic mist of incoming night, he bows his head some subtle increment in honor of that other, that earlier passing.

And sighs within his long coat, and the harness he wears beneath that: a taking in and giving up of one resigned breath, thronged around by the traders descending from their various places of employment. Who continue to emerge into the October street, toward drink or dinner or whatever home, whatever sleep, awaits them.

But now the one with whom he will not speak is gone as well, and he awash in some emotion, not loss exactly but a very particular awareness of his own duration in the world and in its cities, and this one most of all.

Beneath his right arm, reliably concealed, depends a knife that sleeps head down, like a vampire bat, honed to that edge required by surgeons, when surgeons cut with steel.

It is secured there with magnets set within a simple hilt of nickel silver. The blade's angled tip, recalling a wood carver's chisel, inclines toward the dark arterial pulse in the pit of his arm, as if reminding him that he too is only ever inches from that place the drowned girl went, so long ago, that timelessness. That other country, waiting.

He is by trade a keeper of the door to that country.

Drawn, the black blade becomes a key. When he holds it, he holds the wind in his hand.
16
The door swings gently open.

But he does not draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial, in a coat of grayish green, the color of certain lichens, who blinks behind the fine gold rims of his small round glasses and raises his hand to halt a passing cab. Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own, and the man steps past them, his cheeks seamed vertically in deep parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile. They do not see him smile.

THE Tao, he reminds himself, mired in traffic on Post Street, is older than God.

He sees a beggar seated beneath a jeweler's windows. In those windows are small empty pedestals, formal absences of precious things, locked away now for the night. The beggar has wrapped his legs and feet in brown paper tape, and the effect is startlingly medieval, as though someone has partially sculpted a knight from office materials. The trim calves, the tapered toes, an elegance calling out for ribbons. Above the tape, the man is a blur, a spastic scribble, his being abraded by concrete and misfortune. He has become the color of pavement, his very race in
question. -

The cab lurches forward. The man in the loden coat reaches within it to adjust the knife against his ribs. He is left-handed, and he has thought often about such subtle polarities.

The girl who drowned so long ago has settled now, swept down in a swirl of toffee hair and less hurtful memories, to where his youth turns gently, in its accustomed tides, and he is more comfortable that way.

The past is past, the future unformed.

There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

And now he leans forward, to rap, once, upon the driver's tinted safety shield.

He asks to be taken to the bridge.

THE cab draws up before a rain-stained tumble of concrete tank traps, huge rhomboids streaked with rust, covered with the stylized initials of forgotten lovers.

This spot has a certain place in the local mythology of romance and
has been the subject of any number of popular ballads.

"Pardon me, sir," says the cab driver, through several layers of protective plastic and digital translation, "but do you wish me to leave you here? This neighborhood is dangerous. I will be unable to wait for you." The question is rote, required by law against the possibility of litigation.

"Thank you. I will be in no danger." His English as formal as that of the translation program. He hears a musical rattle, his words rendered in some Asian language he doesn't recognize. The driver's brown eyes look back at him, mild and dispassionate, through goggles, shield; multiple layers of reflection.

The driver releases a magnetic lock.

The man opens the door and steps from the cab, straightening his coat. Above him, beyond the tank traps, lift the ragged, swooping terraces, the patchwork superstructure in which the bridge is wrapped. Some aspect of his mood lifts: it is a famous sight, a tourist's postcard, the very image of this city.

He closes the door, and the cab pulls away, leaving behind it the baking-sugar sweetness of exhausted gasohol.

He stands looking up at the bridge, at the silvered plywood of uncounted tiny dwellings, it reminds him of the favelas of Rio, though the scale of the parts is different, somehow. There is a fairy quality to the secondary construction, in contrast to the alternating swoop and verticality of the core structure's poetry of suspension. The individual shelters-if in fact they are shelters-are very small, space being at an absolute premium. He remembers seeing the entrance to the lower roadway flanked with guttering torches, though now, he knows, the residents largely cooperate with the city's air-pollution measures.

"Dancer?"

In concrete shadow she palms the tiny vial. Feral grimace intended to facilitate commerce. This drug causes the user's gums steadily to recede, producing in those few who survive its other rigors a characteristic and terrible smile.

He replies with his eyes, the force of his gaze punching through her
intent as if through paper. Briefly in her eyes the light of panic, then she is gone.

Toffee hair swirls in the depths.

He looks down at the toes of his shoes. They are black and very precise, against the random mosaic of impacted litter.

He steps over an empty can of King Cobra and walks between the nearest rhomboids, toward the bridge.

These are not kindly shadows through which he moves, the legs of his narrow trousers like the blades of a deeper darkness. This is a lurking place, where wolves come down to wait for the weaker sheep. He has no fear of wolves, nor of any other predator the city might field, tonight or any other night. He simply observes these things, in the moment.

But now he allows himself to anticipate the sight that awaits him, past the last rhomboid: the bridge's mad maw, the gateway to dream and memory, where sellers of fish spread their wares on beds of dirty ice. A perpetual bustle, a coming and going, that he honors as the city's very pulse.

And steps out, into unexpected light, faux-neon redline glare above a smooth sweep of Singaporean plastic. -

Memory is violated.

Someone brushes past him, too close, unseeing, and very nearly dies, the magnets letting go with that faint click that he feels more than hears. But he does not draw the blade fully, and the drunk staggers on, oblivious.

He reseats the hilt and stares bleakly at this latest imposition:

LUCKY DRAGON swirling in bland script up a sort of fin or pylon whose base seems comprised of dozens of crawling video screens.

19
5. MARIACHI STATIC
'so she left you for this TV producer," the country singer said, slipping what was left of thirteen ounces of vodka back into the waistband of his indigo jeans, so new and taut that they creaked when he walked. The flat bottle's concavity rode there behind an antique buckle that resembled an engraved commemorative plaque, something someone had once won, Rydell supposed, for calf-roping or some similar competitive activity. Rydell powered the side window down, a crack, to let the fumes out.

"Production coordinator," Rydell said, wishing the vodka would put his passenger, whose name was Buell Creedmore, to sleep again. The man had spent the better part of their drive up the coast asleep, snoring lightly, and Rydell hadn't minded that. Creedmore was a friend, or maybe more of an acquaintance, of Durius Walker's. Durius had been a drug dealer before, in South Central, and had gotten addicted to the stuff. Now that he'd gotten his recovery, he spent a lot of time with other people who had drug problems, trying to help them. Rydell assumed Buell Creedmore was one of those, though as far he could see the man was just basically a drunk.

"Bet that one burned your ass," Creedmore said, his eyes slit with spirits. He was a small man, lightly built, but roped with the sort of whipcord muscle that had never seen the inside of a gym. Ditchdigger muscle. What Rydell took to be several layers of artificial tan were wearing off over an inherent pallor. Bleached hair with dark roots was slicked straight back with some product that kept it looking like he'd just stepped out of a shower. He hadn't, though, and he was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning.

"Well," Rydell said, "I figured it's her call."

"What kind of bleeding-ass liberal bullshit is that?" Creedmore asked. He pulled the bottle from his waistband and eyed the remaining liquor narrowly, as though he were a carpenter checking a level. It seemed to fail to meet his standards just then, so he returned it to its
20
place behind the commemorative plaque. "What kind of man are you, anyway?"

Rydell briefly entertained the idea of pulling over on the margin,

beating Creedmore senseless, then leaving him there at the side of the five, to get up to San Francisco as best he could. But he didn't and, in fact, said nothing.

"Pussy-assed attitude like that, that's what's wrong with America today."

Rydell thought about illegal choke holds, brief judicious constriction of the carotid artery. Maybe Creedmore wouldn't even remember if Rydell put one on him. But it wouldn't keep him under, not that long anyway, and they'd taught Rydell in Knoxville that you couldn't count on how a drunk would react to anything.

"Hey, Buell," Rydell asked, "whose car is this anyway?"

Creedmore fell silent. Grew, Rydell felt, restive.

Rydell had wondered from the start if the car might not be stolen. He hadn't wanted to think about it really, because he needed the ride up to NoCal. A plane ticket would've had to come out of his severance from the Lucky Dragon store, and he had to be extra careful with that until he determined whether or not there was anything to this story of '~mazaki's, that there was money for him to earn, up in San Francisco.

Yamazaki was deep, Rydell told himself. He'd never actually figured out what it was that Yamazaki did. Sort of a freelance Japanese anthropologist who studied Americans, as near as Rydell could tell. Maybe the Japanese equivalent of the Americans Lucky Dragon hired to tell them they needed a curb check. Good man, Yamazaki, but not easy to say where he was coming from. The last time he'd heard from Yamazaki, he'd wanted Rydell to find him a netrunner, and Rydell had sent him this guy named Laney, a quantitative researcher who'd just quit Slitscan, and had been moping around the Chateau, running up a big bill. Laney had taken the job, had gone over to Tokyo, and Rydell had subsequently gotten fired for, they called it, fraternizing with the guests. That was basically how Rydell had wound up working night security in a
nience store, because he'd tried to help Yamazaki.
21
Now he was driving this Hawker-Aichi roadster up the Five, very definitely the designated driver, no idea what was waiting for him up there, and halfway wondering if he weren't about to transport a stolen vehicle across a state line. And all because Yamazaki said that that same Laney, over in Tokyo, wanted to hire him to do some fieldwork. That was what Yamazaki called it, "fieldwork."

And that, after he'd talked with Durius, had been enough for Rydell.

The Lucky Dragon had been starting to get old for Rydell. He hadn't ever gotten along with Mr. Park too well, and when he'd take his break, out back, after the curb check every morning, he'd started to feel really down. The patch of ground the Lucky Dragon had been set down on was sort of scooped out of the foot of the hillside there, and at some point the exposed, nearly vertical cut had been quake-proofed with some kind of weird, gray, rubbery polymer, a perpetual semi-liquid that knit the soil behind it together and trapped whatever was thrown or pressed against it in a grip like summer tar. The polymer was studded with hubcaps, because the place had been a car lot once. Hubcaps and bottles and more nameless junk. In the funk that had started to come over him, out back there on his breaks, he'd collect a handful of rocks and stand there, throwing them, as hard as he could, into the polymer. They didn't make much of a noise when they hit, and in fact they vanished entirely. Just ripped straight into it and then it sealed over behind them, like nothing had happened. And Rydell had started to see that as emblematic of broader things, how he was like those rocks, in his passage through the world, and how the polymer was like life, sealing over behind him, never leaving any trace at all that he'd been there.

And when Durius would come back to take his own break and tell Rydell it was time to get back out front, sometimes he'd find Rydell that way, throwing those rocks.

"Hit you a hubcap, man," Durius would advise, "break you a bottle."

But Rydell hadn't wanted to.

And when Rydel! had told Durius about Yamazaki and Laney and some money, maybe, to be made up in San Francisco, Durius had listened carefully, asking a few questions, then advised Rydell to go for it.
22
"What about job security?" Rydell had asked. "Job security? Doing this shit? Are you crazy?" "Benefits," Rydell countered.

"You tried to actually use the medical coverage they give you here?

Gotta go to Tiajuana to get it."
"\Vell," Rydell had said, "I don't like to just quit."

"That's 'cause you got fired from every last job you ever had," Durius had explained. "I seen your résumé."

So Rydell had given Mr. Park written notice, and Mr. Park had promptly fired him, citing numerous violations of Lucky Dragon policy on Rydell's part, up to and including offering medical aid to the victim of a one-car collision on Sunset, an act which Mr. Park insisted could have involved Lucky Dragon's parent corporation in costly insurance litigation.

"But she walked in here under her own power," Rydell had protested. "All I did was offer her a bottle of iced tea and call the traffic cops."

"Smart lawyer claim ice tea put her in systemic shock."

"Shock my butt."

But Mr. Park had known that if he fired Rydell, the last. paycheck would be smaller than if Rydell quit.

Praisegod, who could get all emotional if someone was leaving, had cried and given him a big hug, and then, as he'd left the store, she'd slipped him a pair of Brazilian GPS sunglasses, with inbuilt phone and AM-FM radio, about the most expensive item Lucky Dragon carried. Rydell hadn't wanted to take them, because he knew they'd turn up missing on the next inventory.

"Fuck the inventory," Praisegod had said.

Back in his room over Mrs. Siekevitz's garage, six blocks away and just below Sunset, Rydell had stretched out on his narrow bed and tried to get the radio in the glasses to work. All he'd been able to get, though, was static, faintly inflected with what might have been mariachi music.

He'd done a little better with the GPS, which had a rocker keypad built into the right temple. The fifteen-channel receiver seemed to have really good lock-on, but the tutorial seemed to have been translated
23
badly, and all Rydell could do was zoom in and out of what he quickly realized was a street map of Rio, not LA. Still, he'd thought, taking the glasses off, he'd get the hang of it. Then the phone in the left temple had beeped, so he'd put the glasses back on.

"Yeah?"

"Rydell, hey."

"Hey, Durius."

"You want a ride up to NoCal tomorrow in a nice new car?"

"W/ho's going?"

"Name of Creedmore. Knows a guy I know in the program."

Rydell had had an uncle who was a Mason, and this program Durius belonged to reminded him of that. "Yeah? Well, I mean, is he okay?"

"Prob'ly not," Durius had said, cheerfully, "so he needs a driver. This three-week-old 'lectric needs to get ferried up there though, and he says it's fine to drive. You used to be a driver, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it's free. This Creedmore, he'll pay for the charge."

Which was how Rydell came to find himself, now, driving a Hawker-Aichi two-seater, one of those low-slung wedges of performance materials that probably weighed, minus its human cargo, about as much as a pair of small motorcycles. There didn't seem to be any metal involved at all, just streamlined foam-core sandwiches reinforced with carbon fiber. The motor was in the back, and the fuel cells were distributed through the foam sandwiches that simultaneously passed for chassis and bodywork. Rydell didn't want to know what happened if you hit something, driving a rig like this.

It was damn near silent though, handled beautifully, and went like a bat once you got it up to speed. Something about it reminded Rydell of a recumbent bicycle he'd once ridden, except you didn't have to pedal.

"You never did tell me whose car this is," Rydell reminded Creedmore, who'd just downed the last two fingers of his vodka.

"This friend of mine," Creedmore said, powering down the window on his side and tossing out the empty bottle.
24
"Hey," Rydell said, "that's a ten-thousand-dollar fine, they catch
you:
"They can kiss our asses good-bye, is what they can do," Creedmore said. "Sons of bitches," he added, then closed his eyes and slept.

Rydell found himself starting to think about Chevette again. Regretting he'd ever let the singer get him on the topic. He knew he didn't want to think about that.

Just drive, he told himself,

On a brown hillside, off to his right, a wind farm's white masts. Late afternoon sunlight.

Just drive.

25
6. SJLENC)O
SILENCIO gets to carry. lie's the smallest, looks almost like a kid. He doesn't use, and if the cops grab him, he can't talk. Or anyway about the stuff.

Silencio has been following Raton and Playboy around for a while now, watching them use, watching them get the money they need in order to keep using. Raton gets mean when he's needing to use, and Silencio's learned to keep back from him then, out of range of feet and fists.

Raton has a long, narrow skull and wears contacts with vertical irises, like a snake. Silencio wonders if Raton is supposed to look like a rat who's eaten a snake, and now maybe the snake is looking out through its eyes. Playboy says Raton is a pinche Chupacabra from Watsonville and they all look this way.

Playboy is the biggest, his bulk wrapped in a long, formal topcoat worn over jeans and old work boots. He has a Pancho Villa mustache, yellow aviator glasses, a black fedora. He is kinder to Silencio, buys him burritos from the stalls, water, cans of pop, one time a big smooth drink made from fruit.

Silencio wonders if maybe Playboy is his father. He doesn't know who his father might be. His mother is crazy, back in los projectos. He doesn't think Playboy is his father really, because he remembers how he met Playboy in the market on Bryant Street, and that was just an accident, but sometimes he wonders anyway, when Playboy buys him food.

Silencio sits watching Raton and Playboy use, here behind this empty stall with its smell of apples. Raton has a little flashlight in his mouth so he can see what he is doing. It is the black tonight, and Raton is cutting the little plastic tube with the special knife, its handle longer than its short curved blade. The three of them are sitting on plastic crates.

Raton and Playboy use the black two, maybe three times in a day and a night. Three times with the black, then they must use the white
26
as well. The white is more expensive, hut too much black and they start to talk fast and maybe see people who are not there. "Speaking with Jesus," Playboy calls that, hut the white he calls "walking with the king." But it is not walking: white brings stillness, silence, sleep. Silencio prefers the white nights.

Silencio knows that they buy the white from a black man, but the black from a white man, and he assumes this is the mystery depicted in the picture Raton wears on the chain around his neck: the black and the white teardrops swirling together to make roundness; in the white teardrop a small round of black, in the black a small round of white.

To get the money they talk to people, usually in dark places, so the people are frightened. Sometimes Raton shows them a different knife, while Playboy holds their arms so they cannot move. The money is in little tabs of plastic printed with pictures that move. Silencio would like to keep these when the money is gone out of them, but this is not allowed. Playboy throws them away, after wiping them carefully. He drops them down the slots beside the street. He does not want his fingers to leave marks on them. Sometimes Raton hurts the people, so that they will tell the charms that make money come from the moving pictures. The charms are names, letters, numbers. Silencio knows every charm that Raton and Playboy have learned, but they do not know this; if he told them, they might be angry.

The three of them sleep in a room in the Mission. Playboy pulls the mattress from the bed and puts it on the floor. Playboy sleeps there, Raton on the other part of the bed. Silencio sleeps on the floor.

Now Raton has cut the tube and puts half of the black on Playboy's finger. Playboy has licked his finger so the black will stick. Playboy puts the finger in his mouth and rubs the black against his gums. Silencio wonders what it tastes like, but he does not ever wish to speak with Jesus. Now Raton is rubbing his own gums with black, the flashlight forgotten in his other hand. Raton and Playboy look foolish doing this, but it does not make Silencio laugh. Soon they will want to use again, and the black gives them energy to get the money they will need. Silencio knows there is now no money, because they have not eaten Since yesterday.

27
Usually they find people in the dark places between the big shapes at the foot of Bryant Street, but now Raton thinks the police are watching those places. Raton has told Silencio that the police can see in the dark. Silencio has looked at the eyes of the police, passing in their cars, and wondered how they can see in the dark.

But tonight Raton has led them out, onto the bridge where people live, and he says they will find money here. Playboy has said he does not like the bridge, because the bridge people are pinche; they do not like outsiders working here. Raton says he feels lucky.

Raton tosses the empty vial into the darkness, and Silencio hears it hit something, a single small click.

Raton's snake-eyes are wide with the black. He runs his hand back through his hair and gestures. Playboy and Silencio follow him.

SILENCID passes the bodega for the second time, watching the man in his long coat, where he sits at his small white table, drinking coffee.

Raton says it is a fine coat. See the old man's glasses, says Raton:

they are made of gold. Silencio supposes Playboy's are made of gold too, but Playboy's have yellow glass. The man's are plain. He has gray hair cut very short and deep lines in his cheeks. He sits alone, looking at the smallest cup of coffee Silencio has ever seen. A doll's cup.

They have followed the old man here. He has walked in the direction of Treasure Island. This part of the bridge is for the tourists, Playboy says. There are bodegas, shops with glass windows, many people walking.

Now they are waiting to see which way the old man goes when he finishes his little coffee. If he walks back, toward Bryant, it will be difficult. If he goes on, toward Treasure, Baton and Playboy will be happy.

It is Silencio's job to tell them when the man leaves.

Silencio feels the man's eyes on him as he passes, but the man is only watching the crowd.

SILENCIO watches Raton and Playboy follow the man toward Treasure Island.

They are in the bridge's lower level now, and Silencio keeps looking
28
'~!!1
up to see the bottom of the upper deck, its paint peeling. It reminds him of a wall in los projectos. There are only a few bridge people here. Only a few lights. The man walks easily. He does not hurry. Silencio feels the man is only walking; he has nowhere to go. Silencio feels the man needs nothing: he is not looking for money, to eat or to use. This must be because he already has the money he needs to eat or to use, and this is why Raton and Playboy have chosen him, because they see he has the money they need.

Raton and Playboy keep pace with the man, but they hang back. They do not walk together. Playboy has his hands in the pockets of his big coat. He has taken off his yellow glasses and his eyes are dark-circled with the look of those who have used the black. He looks sad when he is going to get the money to use. He looks like he is paying very close attention.

Silencio follows them, looking back sometimes. Now it is his job to tell them if someone comes.

The man stops, looking into the window of a shop. Silencio steps behind a cart piled with rolls of plastic, as he sees Raton and Playboy

step behind other things, in case the man looks back. The man doesn't, but Silencio wonders if the man is watching the street in the glass. Silencio has done this himself.

The man does not look back. He stands with his hands in the pockets of his long coat, looking into the glass.

Silencio unbuttons his jeans and quietly waters the rolls of plastic, careful that it makes no sound. As he buttons his jeans, he sees the man step away from the window, still moving toward Treasure, where Playboy says there are people who live like animals. Silencio, who knows only dogs and pigeons and gulls, has a picture in his head of dog-toothed men with wings. When Silencio has a picture in his head, the picture doesn't go away.

Stepping from behind the cart, as Raton and Playboy step out to follow the man, Sjlencio sees the man turn right. Gone. The man is gone. Silencio blinks, rubs his knuckles against his eyes, looks again. Raton and Playboy are walking faster now. They are not trying to hide. Silencio walks faster too not to be lost and amves at the place where the man

29

turned. Baton's narrow back goes around that corner, after Playboy, and is gone.

Silencio stops. Feels his heart beating. Steps forward and looks around the corner.

It is a space where a shop is meant to be, but there is no shop. Sheets of plastic hang down from above. Pieces of wood, more rolls of plastic. He sees the man.

The man stands at the back of the space and looks from Playboy to Raton to Silencio. Looks through the round pieces of glass. Silencio feels how still the man is.

Playboy is walking toward the man, his boots stepping over the wood, the plastic. Playboy says nothing. His hands are still in the pockets of his coat. Raton is not moving but is ready to, and then he takes the knife from where he keeps it and opens it, flicking his wrist that way he practices, letting the man see it.

The man's face does not change when he sees it, and Silencio remembers other faces, how they changed when they saw Raton's knife.

Now Playboy steps down from the last of the wood, his hands coming out to take the man by the arms and spin him. That is how it is done.

Silencio sees the man move but only, it seems, a little.

Everything stops.

Silencio knows that he has seen the man's left hand reach into the long coat, which was buttoned before but now is not. But somehow he has not seen that hand return, and still it has. The man stands with his fist against Playboy's chest, just at the center. Pressing the thumb of his closed fist against Playboy's coat. And Playboy is not moving. His hands have stopped, almost touching the man, fingers spread, but he is not moving.

And then Silencio sees Playboy's fingers close, on nothing, and open. And the man's right hand comes up to push Playboy back, and the thin black thing is pulled out of Playboy's chest, and Silencio wonders how long it could have been hidden there, and Playboy falls back over the wood and the rolls of plastic.

Silencio hears someone say pinche madre and this is Raton. When Raton uses the black and fights, he is very fast and you do not know
30
what he will do; he hurts people and then shakes, laughing, sucking air through his mouth. Now he comes over the rolls of plastic like he is flying, with his knife shining in his hand, and Silencio sees the picture of a man with dog teeth and wings, and Raton's teeth are like that, his snake eyes wide.
And the black thing, like a long wet thumb, goes through Raton's neck. And everything stops again.

Then Raton tries to speak, and blood comes on his lips. He swings his knife at the man, but the knife cuts only air, and Raton's fingers can no longer hold it.

The man pulls the black thing from Raton's throat. Raton sways on loose knees, and Silencio thinks of how it is when Raton uses too much white, then tries to walk. Raton puts his hands up to cover his throat on both sides. His mouth moves, but no words come out. One of Raton's snake eyes falls out. The eye behind it is round and brown.

Raton falls down on his knees, with his hands still on his throat. His snake eye and his brown eye look up at the man, and Silencio feels they look from different distances, seeing different things.

Then Raton makes a small, soft sound in his throat and falls over backward, still on his knees, so that he lies on his back with his knees spread wide and his legs twisted back, and Silencio watches Raton's gray pants go dark between his legs.

Silencio looks at the man. Who is looking at him.

Silencio looks at the black knife, how it rests in the man's hand. He feels that the knife holds the man. That the knife may decide to move.

Then the man moves the knife. Its point is almost square, like the real point has been snapped off. It only moves a little. Silencio understands this means he must move.

He steps sideways, so the man can see him.

The point moves again. Silencio understands.

Closer.
ALL TOMORROW S PARTIES 31
I
7. SHAREHOUSE

LEAVE a house empty in Malibu, Tessa told Chevette, and you get the kind of people come down from the hills and barbecue dogs in your fireplace.

Hard to get rid of, those kind of people, and locks wouldn't keep them out. That was why the people who used to live here, before the Spill, were willing to rent them out to students.

Tessa was Australian, a media sciences student at USC and the reason Chevette was out here now, couching it.

Well, that and the fact that she, Chevette, didn't have a job or any money, now she'd split with Carson.

Tessa said Carson was a piece of work.

And look where it had all gotten her, Chevette thought, pumping her way up the trainer's illusion of a Swiss mountain road and trying to ignore the reek of moldy laundry from the other side of the drywall partition. Someone had left a wet load in the machine, probably last Tuesday, before the fire, and now it was rotting in there.

Which was too bad, because that made it hard to get into riding the trainer. You could configure it for a dozen different bikes, and as many terrains, and Chevette liked this one, an old-fashioned steel-frame ten-speed you could take up this mountain road, wildflowers blurring in your peripheral vision. Her other favorite was a balloon-tired cruiser you rode along a beach, which was good for Malibu because you couldn't ride along the beach, not unless you wanted to climb over rusty razor wire and ignore the biohazard warnings every hundred feet.

But that gym-sock mildew reek kept catching in the back of her sinuses, nothing alpine meadow about it at all, telling her she was broke and out of work and staying in a sharehouse in Malibu.

The house was right on the beach, with the wire about thirty feet out from the deck. Nobody knew exactly what it was that had spilled, because the government wasn't telling. Something off a freighter, some people said, and some said it was a bulklifter that had come down in a
32
storm. The government was using nanobots to clean it up though; everybody agreed on that, and that was why they said you shouldn't walk out there.

Chevette had found the trainer her second day here, and she'd ride two or three times a day or, like now, late at night. Nobody else seemed to be interested in it or ever to come into this little room off the garage, next to the laundry room, and that was fine with her. Living on the bridge, she'd been used to people being around, but everybody had always had something to do up there. The sharehouse was full of USC media sciences students, and they got on her nerves. They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.

She felt sweat run between the headband of the interface visor and her forehead, then down the side of her nose. She was getting a good bum on now; she could feel groups of muscles working in her back, ones that didn't usually get it.

The trainer did a better job on the bike's chartreuse lacquer than on the shift levers, she noticed. They were sort of cartoony, with road surface blurring past beneath them in generic texture map. The clouds would be generic too, if she looked up; just basic fractal stuff.

She was definitely not too happy with being here, or with her life in general at this point. She'd been talking with Tessa about that after dinner. Well, arguing about it.

Tessa wanted to make this documentary. Chevette knew what a documentary was because Carson had worked for a channel, Real One, that only just ran those, and Chevette had had to watch about a thousand of them. As a result, she thought, she now knew a whole lot about nothing in particular, and nothing in particular about whatever it was she was actually supposed to know. Like what to do now that her life had gotten her to this place.

Tessa wanted to take her back up to San Francisco, but Chevette had mixed feelings. The documentary Tessa wanted to make was about interstitial communities, and Tessa said Chevette had lived in one, because Chevette had lived on the bridge. Interstitial meant in between things, and Chevette figured that that made a kind of sense, anyway.
33
And she did miss it up there, miss the people, but she didn't like thinking about it. Because of how things had gone since she'd come down here, and because she hadn't kept in touch.

Just pump, she told herself, cresting the illusion of a rise. Shift again. Pump harder. The road surface started to look glassy in places, because she was overtaking the simulator's refresh rate.

"Zoom in." Tessa's voice, in miniature.

"Shit," Chevette said. Flipping up the visor.

The camera platform, like a helium-filled cushion of silver Mylar, at eye level in the open doorway. Kid's toy with little caged propellers, controlled from Tessa's bedroom. Ring of light reflected in the lens housing as it extruded, zooming.

The propellers blurred to gray, brought it forward through the door, stopped; blurred to gray again, reversing. Rocked there, till it steadied on the ballast of the underslung camera. God's Little Toy, Tessa called her silver balloon. Disembodied eye. She sent it on slow cruises through the house, mining for image fragments. Everyone who lived here was constantly taping everyone else, except lain, and lain wore a motion-capture suit, even slept in it, and was recording every move he ever made.

The trainer, performance machine that it was, sensed Chevette's loss of focus and sighed, slowing, complex hydraulics beginning to deconfigure. The narrow wedge of seat between her thighs widened, spreading to support her butt in beach-bike mode. The handlebars unfolded, upward, raising her hands. She kept on pedaling, but the trainer was winding her down now.

"Sorry." Tessa's voice from the tiny speaker. But Chevette knew she wasn't.

"Me too," Chevette said, as the pedals made a final arc, locking for dismount. She swung the bars up and stepped down, batting at the platform, spoiling Tessa's shot.

"Une petite problemette. Concerns you, I think."

"What?"

"Come into the kitchen and I'll show you." Tessa reversed one set of props, turning the platform on its axis. Then two forward and it sailed
back through the doorway, into the garage. Chevette followed it, pulling a towel from a nail driven into the doorjamb. Closing the door behind her. Should've had it closed when she was riding, but she'd forgotten. God's Little Toy couldn't open doors.
The towel needed washing. A little stiff but it didn't smell bad. She used it to wipe sweat from her pits and chest. She overtook the balloon, ducked under it, entered the kitchen.

Sensed roaches scurrying for cover. Every flat surface, except the floor, was solid with unwashed dishes, empties, pieces of recording equipment. They'd had a party, the day before the fire, and nobody had cleaned up yet.

No light here now but a couple of telltales and the methodical flicker as the security system flipped from one external night-vision camera to the next. 4:32 A.M. showing in the corner of the screen. They kept maybe half the security shut down because people were in and out all day, and there was always someone there.

Whir of the platform as Tessa brought it up behind her.

"What is it?" Chevette asked.

'Watch the driveway."

Chevette moved closer to the screen The deck, slung out over the sand...

The space between the house and the next one. The driveway. With Carson's car sitting there.

"Shit," Chevette said, as the Lexus was replaced with the between-houses view on the other side, then a view from a camera under the deck.

"Been there since 3:24."

Thedeck,..

"How'd he find me?"

Between houses...

"Web search, probably. Image matching. Someone was uploading Pictures from the party. You were in some of them."
The Lexus in the driveway. Nobody in it.

"Where is he)

Between the houses...
35
Under the deck...

"No idea," Tessa said.

"Where are you?"

Deck again. Watch this and you start to see things that aren't there. She looked down at the mess on the counter and saw a foot-long butcher knife lying in what was left of a chocolate cake, the blade clotted with darkness.

"Upstairs," Tessa said. "Best you come up."

Chevette felt suddenly cold in her bike shorts and T-shirt. Shivered. Left the kitchen for the living room. Pre-dawn gray through walls of glass. English lain stretched, snoring lightly, on a long leather couch, a red LED on his motion-capture suit winking over his sternum. The lower half of Lain's face never seemed to be in focus to Chevette; teeth uneven, different colors, like he was lightly pixilated. Mad, Tessa said. And never changed the suit he slept in now; kept it laced corset-tight.

Muttered in his sleep, turning his back to her as she passed.

She stood with her face a few inches from the glass, feeling the chill that radiated from it. Nothing on the deck but a ghostly white chair, empty beer cans. Where was he?

The stair to the second floor was a spiral, wedge-shaped sections of very thick wood spun out from an iron shaft. She took that now, the carbon-fiber pedal clips set into the soles of her shoes clicking with each step.

Tessa waited at the top, slim blonde shadow bulked in a puffy coat Chevette knew was burnt-orange in daylight. "The van's parked next door," she said. "Let's go."

"Where?"

"Up the coast. My grant came through. I was up talking to Mum, telling her that, when the boyfriend arrived."

"Maybe he just wants to talk," Chevette said. She'd told Tessa about him hitting her that time. Now she half regretted it.

"I don't think that's a chance you want to take. We're away, right? See? I'm packed." Bumping her hip against the bulging rectangle of a gear bag slung from her shoulder.

"I'm not," Chevette said.
36
"You never unpacked, remember?" Which was true. "We'll go out over the deck, go 'round past Barbara's, get in the van: we're gone."

"No," Chevette said, "let's wake everybody up, turn on the outside lights. What can he do?"
"I don't know what he can do. But he can always come back. He knows you're here now. You can't stay."
"I don't know for sure he'd try to hurt me, Tessa."

"Want to be with him?"

"Did you invite him here?"

"No."

'Want to see him?" Hesitation. "No."

"Then get your bag." Tessa pushed past, leading with the gear bag. "Now," she said, over her shoulder, descending.

Chevette opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. Turned, felt her way along the corridor, to the door to her room. A closet, this had been, though bigger inside than some houses on the bridge. A frosted dome came on in the ceiling when you opened the door. Someone had cut a thick slab of foam so that it fit the floor, down half the length of the narrow, windowless space, between an elaborate shoe rack of some pale tropical hardwood and a baseboard of the same stuff. Chevette had never seen anything made of wood that was put together that well, The whole house was like that, under the sharehouse dirt, and she'd wondered who'd lived in it before, and how they'd felt about having to leave. Whoever it was, to judge by the rack, had had more shoes than Chevette had owned in her life.

Her knapsack sat at the end of the narrow foam bed. Like Tessa had said, still packed. Open, though. The mesh bag with her toilet stuff and makeup beside it. Skinner's old biker jacket hung above it, shoulders set broad and confident on a fancy wooden hanger. Black once, its horsehide had gone mostly gray with wear and time. Older than she was, he'd said. A pair of new black jeans were draped over the rod beside it. She pulled these down and worked her feet out of the riding shoes. Got the Jeans on over her shorts. A black sweatshirt from the open mouth of the

37
knapsack. Smell of clean cotton as she pulled it over her head; she'd washed everything, at Carson's, when she'd decided she was leaving. She crouched at the foot of the foam, lacing up lug-soled high-tops, no socks. Stood and took Skinner's jacket from the hanger. It was heavy, as if it retained the weight of horses. She felt safer in it. Remembering how she'd always ridden with it in San Francisco, in spite of the weight. Like armor.

"Come on." Tessa, calling softly from the living room.

Tessa had come over to Carson's with another girl, South African, the day they'd first met, to interview him about his work at Real One. Something had clicked; Chevette smiling back at the skinny blonde whose features were all a little too big for her face; who looked great anyway and laughed and was so smart.

Too smart, Chevette thought, stuffing the mesh bag into the knapsack, because now she was on her way to San Francisco with her, and she wasn't sure that was such a good idea.

"Come on."

Bent to stuff the mesh bag into the knapsack, buckle it. Put that over her shoulder. Saw the riding shoes. No time now. Stepped out and closed the closet door.

Found Tessa in the living room, making sure the alarms on the sliding glass doors were deactivated.

lain grunted, thrashing out at something in a dream.

Tessa tugged one of the doors open, just wide enough to get out, its frame scraping in the corroded track. Chevette felt cold sea air. Tessa stepped out, reached back through to pull her gear bag out.

Chevette stepped through, knapsack rattling against the frame. Something brushed her hair, Tessa reaching out to capture God's Little Toy there. She handed the inflated platform to Chevette, who took it by one of the propeller cages; it felt weightless and awkward and too easy to break. Then she and Tessa both grabbed the door handle one-handed, and together they pulled it shut against the friction of the track.

She straightened, turned, looked out at the lightening gray that was all she could see of the ocean now, past the black coils of razor wire, and felt a kind of vertigo, as though for just a second she stood at the very
38
edge of the turning world. She'd felt that before, on the bridge, up on the roof of Skinner's place, high up over everything; just standing there in a fog that socketed the bay, throwing every sound back at you from a new and different distance.

Tessa took the four steps down to the beach, and Chevette heard the sand squeak under her shoes. It was that quiet. She shivered. Tessa crouched, checking under the deck. Where was he?

And they never saw him, not there and not then, as they trudged through the sand, past old Barbara's deck, where the wide windows were all blanked with quilted foil and sun-faded cardboard. Barbara was an owner from before the Spill, and not often seen. Tessa had tried to cultivate her, wanted her in her documentary, an interstitial community of one, become a hermit in her house, holed up amid sharehouses. Chevette wondered if Barbara was watching them go, past her house and around between it and the next, back to where Tessa's van waited, almost cubical, its paintwork scoured with windblown sand.

All this more dreamlike somehow with each step she took, and now Tessa was unlocking the van, after checking through the window with a flashlight to see he wasn't waiting there, and when Chevette climbed

up the passenger side and settled in the creaking seat, blanket laced over ripped plastic with bungee cord, she knew that she 'was going.

Somewhere.

And that was okay with her.
39
8. THE HOLE
DRIFT.

Laney is in drift.
That is how he does it. It is a matter, he knows, of letting go. He admits the random.
The danger of admitting the random is that the random may admit the Hole.
The Hole is that which Laney's being is constructed around. The Hole is absence at the fundamental core. The Hole is that into which he has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information.

Mainly.-lately-information.

Information. This flow. This. . . corrosion.

Drift.

ONCE, before he'd come to Tokyo, Laney woke in the bedroom of his suite in the Chateau.

It was dark, only a shush of tires up from Sunset; muffled drumming of a helicopter, hunting the hills behind.

And the Hole right there, beside him in the lonely queen-size expanse of his bed.

The Hole, up close and personal.
40
9. SWEEP SECOND
pRIGHT pyramids of fruit, beneath buzzing neon.
• He watches as the boy drains a second liter of the pulped drink. swallowing the entire contents of the tall plastic cup in an unbroken stream, with no apparent effort.

"You should not drink cold things so quickly."
The boy looks at him. There is nothing between the boy's gaze and his being: no mask. No personality. He is not, apparently, deaf, because
he has understood the suggestion of the cold drink. But there is no evi= dence, as yet, that he is capable of speech.
"Do you speak Spanish?" This in the language of Madrid, unspoken for many years.
The boy places the empty cup beside the first one and looks at the man There is no fear in him
'The men who attacked me they were your friends~ Raising an eyebrow
Nothing at all
'How old are yo&
Older, the man guesses, than his emotional age. Touches of razored stubble at the corners of his upper lip Brown eyes clear and placid
The boy looks at the two empty plastic cups on the worn steel Counter. He looks up at the man.
'Anoth& You wish to drink another~ The boy nods.
The man signals to the Italian behind the counter He turns back ~: to the boy.

Do you have a name?"
Nothing Nothing moves in the brown eyes The boy regards him as calmly as might some placid dog.
The silver pulping machine chugs briefly amid the stacked fruit Shaved ice whirs into the pulp. The Italian transfers the drink to a plastiC cup and places it before the boy The boy looks at it
41
The man shifts on the creaking metal stool, his long coat draped like resting wings. Beneath his arm, carefully cleaned now, the knife in its magnetic sheath swings free, sleeping.
The boy raises the cup, opens his mouth, and pours the thick sludge of ice and fruit pulp down his throat.
Defective, the man thinks. Syndromes of the city's tragic womb. The signal of life distorted by chemicals, by starvation, by blows of fortune. Yet he, like everyone else, like the man himself, is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao: darkness within darkness.
The boy places the empty cup beside the other two.
The man straightens his legs, stands, buttoning his coat.
The boy reaches out. Two fingers touch the watch the man wears on his left wrist. He opens his mouth as if to speak.

"The time?"
Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy's eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely.
The enlightened warrior rides into battle as if to a loved one's funeral, and how could it be otherwise?
The boy leans forward now, the thing behind his eyes seeing only the watch.

The man thinks of the two he leaves tonight on the bridge. Hunters of sorts, now they will hunt no more. And this one, following them. To pick up scraps.

"You like this?"

Nothing registers. Nothing breaks the concentration, the link between that which has surfaced behind the boy's eyes and the austere black face of the watch.

The Tao moves.

The man unfastens the steel buckle that secures the strap. He hands the watch to the boy. He does this without thought. He does this
42
with the same unthinking certainty with which, earlier, he killed. He does this because it fits, is fitting; because his life is alignment with the Tao.
There is no need to say good-bye.

He leaves the boy lost in contemplation of the black face, the hands.
He leaves now. The moment in balance.

43
I
10. AMERICAN ACROPOLIS

RYD ELI managed to get part of the San Francisco grid on the Brazilian glasses coming in, but he still needed Creedmore to tell him how to get to the garage where they were leaving the Hawker-Aichi. Creedmore, when Rydell woke him for that, seemed uncertain as to who Rydell was, but did a fairly good job of covering it up. He did know, after consulting a folded business card he took from the watch pocket of his jeans, exactly where they should go.

It was an old building, in the kind of area where buildings like that were usually converted to residential, but the frequency of razor wire suggested that this was not yet gentrified territory. There were a couple of Universal square badges controlling entry, a firm that mostly did low-level industrial security. They were set up in an office by the gate, watching Real One on a flatscreen propped up on a big steel desk that looked like someone had gone over every square inch of it with a ball peen hammer. Cups of take-out coffee and white foam food containers. It all felt kind of homey to Rydell, who figured they'd be going off shift soon, seven in the morning. Wouldn't be a bad job, as bad jobs went.

"Delivering a drive-away," Rydell told them.

There was a deer on the flatscreen. Behind it the familiar shapes of the derelict skyscrapers of downtown Detroit. The Real One logo in the lower right corner gave him the context: one of those nature shows.

They gave him a pad to punch in the reservation number on Creedmore's paper, and it came up paid. Had him sign on the pad, there. Told him to put it in slot twenty-three, level six. He left the office, got back into the Hawker, swung up the ramp, wet tires squealing on concrete.

Creedmore was conducting a grooming operation in the illuminated mirror behind the passenger-side sun visor. This consisted of running his fingers repeatedly back through his hair, wiping them on his jeans, then rubbing his eyes. He considered the results. "Time for a drink," he said to the reflection of his bloodshot eyes.
~&
"Seven in the morning," Rydell said.

"What I said," Creedmore said, flipping the visor back up. Rydell found the number twenty-three painted on the concrete,

between two vehicles shrouded in white dustcovers. He edged the Hawker carefully in and started shutting it down. He was able to do this without having to go to the help menu.
Creedmore got out and went over to urinate on somebody's tire.

Rydell checked the interior to see they hadn't left anything, undid

~- the harness, leaned over to pull the passenger-side door shut, popped the trunk, opened the driver-side door, checked that he had the keys,

~ got out, closed the door.

"Hey, Buell. Your friend's gonna pick this up, right?" Rydell was pulling his duffel out of the Hawker-Aichi's weirdly narrow trunk, a space suggestive of the interior of a child's coffin. There was nothing else in there, so he assumed Creedmore was traveling without luggage.

"No," Creedmore said, "they gonna leave it up here get all dusty."

He was buttoning his fly.

"So I give the keys to those Universal boys dowstairs?"

"No," Creedmore said, "you give 'em to me."

"I signed," Rydell said.

"Give 'em to me."

"Buell, this vehicle is my responsibility now. I've signed it in here."

He closed the trunk, activated the security systems.

"Please step back," said the I-Iawker-Aichi. "Respect my boundaries as I respect yours." It had a beautiful, strangely genderless voice, gentle but firm.

Rydell took a step back, another.

'°]That's my friend's car and my friend's keys, and I'm supposed to

- Øve 'em to him." Creedmore rested his hand on the big roper's buckle like it was the wheel of his personal ship of state, but he looked uncertam, as though his hangover were leaning on him.

"Just tell him the keys'll be here. That's how you do it. Safer all
'round, that way." Rydell shouldered his bag and started down the ramp,

~ glad to be stretching his legs. He looked back at Creedmore. "See you
~ 'round, Buell."

45
"Son of a bitch," Creedmore said, though Rydell took it to be more a reference to the universe that had created Rydell than to Rydell himself. Creedmore looked lost and disconnected, squinting under the greenish-white strip lighting.
Rydell kept walking, down the battered concrete spiral of the parking garage, five more levels, till he came abreast of the office at the entrance. The Universal guards were drinking coffee, watching the end of their nature show. Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky.
They made a lot of nature shows there.
He went out into the street, looking for a cab or a place that made breakfast. Smelling how San Francisco was a different place than Los Angeles, and feeling that was fine by him. He'd get something to eat, use the Brazilian glasses to phone Tokyo.
Find out about that money.
48 WILLtAM GIBSON
11. OTHER GUY

CHEVETTE had never driven a standard, so it fell to Tessa to drive them up to San Francisco. Tessa didn't seem to mind. She had her head full of the docu they were going to make, and she could work it out as she drove, telling Chevette about the different communities she wanted to cover and how she was going to cut it all together. All Chevette had to do was listen, or look like she was listening, and finally just fall asleep. She fell asleep as Tessa was telling her about a place called the Walled City, how there'd actually been this place, by Hong Kong, but it had been torn down before Hong Kong went back to being part of China. And then these crazy net people had built their own version of it, like a big communal website, and they'd turned it inside out, vanished in there. It wasn't making much sense when Chevette nodded out, but it left pictures in her head. Dreams.
• "What about the other guy?" Tessa was asking, when Chevette woke from those dreams.
Chevette blinked out at the Five, the white line that seemed to reel up beneath the van. "What other guy?"
'The cop. The one you went to Los Angeles with."
"Rydell," Chevette said.
"So why didn't that work?" Tessa asked.
Chevette didn't really have an answer. "It just didn't."
"So you had to hook up with Carson?"
"No," Chevette said, "I didn't have to." What were those white things, so many of them, off in a field there? Wind things: they made electricity. "It just seemed like the thing to do."

"I've done a few of those myself," Tessa said.
ALL TOMORROW~S PARTIES 47
12. EL PRIMERO
FONTAINE'S first glimpse of the boy comes as he starts to lay out the morning's stock in his narrow display window: rough dark hair above a forehead pressed against the armored glass.

Fontaine leaves nothing of value in the window at night, but he dislikes the idea of an entirely empty display.

He doesn't like to think of someone passing and glimpsing that vacancy. It makes him think of death. So each night he leaves out a few items of relatively little value, ostensibly to indicate the nature of the shop's stock, but really as a private act of propitiatory magic.

This morning the window contains three inferior Swiss mechanicals, their dials flecked with age, an IXL double penknife with jigged bone handles and shield, fair condition, and an East German military field telephone that looks as though it has been designed not only to survive a nuclear explosion but to function during one.

Fontaine, still on the morning's first coffee, stares down, through the glass, at the matted, spiky hair. Thinking this at first a corpse, and not the first he's discovered this way, but never propped thus, kneeling, as in attitude of prayer. But no, this one lives: breath fogs Fontaine's window.

In Fontaine's left hand: a 1947 Cortebert triple-date moon phase, manual wind, gold-filled case, in very nearly the condition in which it left the factory. In his right, a warped red plastic cup of black Cuban coffee. The shop is filled with the smell of Fontaine's coffee, as burnt and acrid as he likes it.

Condensation slowly pulses on the cold glass: gray aureoles outline the kneeler's nostrils.

Fontaine puts the Cortebert back in the tray with the rest of his better stock, narrow divisions of faded green velour holding a dozen watches. He sets the tray aside, on the counter behind which he stands when he does business, transfers the red plastic cup to his left hand, and with his right reassures himself of the Smith & Wesson .32-.22 Kit
Gun in the right side pocket of the threadbare trench coat that serves him as a dressing gown.

The little gun is there, older than some of his better watches, its worn walnut grip comforting and familiar. Probably intended to be kept in a freshwater fisherman's tackle box, against the dispatching of water snakes or the decapitation of empty beer bottles, the Kit Gun is Fontaine's considered choice: a six-shot rimfire revolver with a four-inch barrel. He doesn't want to kill anyone, Fontaine, though if truth be known, he has, and very probably could again. He dislikes recoil, in a handgun, and excessive report, and distrusts semi-automatic weapons. He is an anachronist, a historian: he knows that the Smith & Wesson's frame evolved for a .32-caliber center-fire round, long extinct, that was once the standard for American pocket pistols. Rechambered for the homely .22, it survived, in this model, well into the middle of the twentieth century. A handy thing and, like most of his stock, a rarity.

He finishes the coffee, places the empty cup on the counter beside the tray of watches.

He is a good shot, Fontaine. At twelve paces, employing an archaic one-handed duelist's stance, he has been known to pick the pips from
a playing card. -

He hesitates before unlocking the shop's front door, a complicated process. Perhaps the kneeler is not alone. Fontaine has few enemies on the bridge proper, but who is to say what might have drifted in from either end, San Franciso or Oakland? And the wilds of Treasure Island traditionally offer a more feral sort of crazy.

But still.

He throws the last hasp and draws the pistol.

Sunlight falls through the bridge's wrapping of scrap wood and plastic like some strange benison. Fontaine scents the salt air, a source of Corrosion.

"You," he says, "mister." The gun in his hand, hidden by the folds of the trench coat.

Under the trench coat, which is beltless, open, Fontaine wears faded plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved white thermal undershirt rendered ecru by the vagaries of the laundry process Black
49
shoes, sockless and unlaced, their gloss gone matte in the deeper
creases.
Dark eyes look up at him, from a face that somehow refuses to come into focus.

"What you doing there?"

The boy cocks his head, as if listening to something Fontaine cannot hear.

"Get away from my window."

With a weird and utter lack of grace that strikes Fontaine as amounting to a species of grace in itself, this person gets to his feet. The brown eyes stare at Fontaine but somehow do not see him, or do not recognize him, perhaps, as another being.

Fontaine displays the Smith & Wesson, his finger on the trigger, but he does not quite point it at the boy. He never points a gun at anyone he is not yet entirely willing to shoot, a lesson learned long ago from his father.

This kneeler, this breather on his glass, is not of the bridge. It would be difficult for Fontaine to explain how he knows this, but he does. It is a function of having lived here a long time. He doesn't know everyone on the bridge, nor would he want to, but he nonetheless distinguishes bridge dwellers from others, and with absolute certainty.

This one, now, has something missing. Something wrong; not a state bespeaking drugs, but some more permanent mode of not-being-there. And while the population of the bridge possesses its share of these, they are somehow worked into the fabric of the place and not inclined to appear thus, so randomly, as to disturb mercantile ritual.

Somewhere high above, the bay wind whips a loose flap of plastic, a frenzied beating, like the idiot wing of some vast wounded bird.

Fontaine, looking into brown eyes in the face that still refuses to come into focus (because, he thinks now, it is incapable), regrets having unlocked his door. Salt air even now gnaws at the bright metal vitals of his stock. He gestures with the barrel of his pistol: go.

The boy extends his hand. A watch.

"What? You want to sell that?"
50
T
The brown eyes register no language.

Fontaine, motivated by something he recognizes as compulsion, takes a step forward, his finger tightening on the pistol's double-action trigger. The chamber beneath the firing pin is empty, for safety's sake, but a quick, long pull will do the trick.

Looks like stainless. Black dial.

Fontaine takes in the filthy black jeans, the frayed running shoes, the faded red T-shirt hiked above a paunch that betrays the characteristic bloat of malnutrition.

"You want to show that to me?"

The boy looks down at the watch in his hand, then points to the three in the window.

"Sure," Fontaine says, "we got watches. All kinds. You want to see?"
Still pointing, the boy looks at him.

"Come on," Fontaine says, "come on in. Cold out here." Still holding the gun, though his finger has relaxed, he steps back into the shop. "You coming?"
After a pause, the boy follows, holding the watch with the black dial as though it were a small animal.
Be nothing, Fontaine thinks. Army Waltham with the guts rusted out. Bullshit. Bullshit he's let this freak in here.
The boy stands, staring, in the center of the shop's tiny floor space. Fontaine closes the door, locks it once only, and retreats behind his

counter. All this done without lowering the gun, getting within grabbing distance, or taking his eyes off his visitor.

The boy's eyes widen as he sees the tray of watches. "First things first," Fontaine says, whisking the tray out of sight with his free hand.

'~ "Let's see." Pointing at the watch in the boy's hand. "Here," Fontaine commands, tapping the faded gilt Rolex logo on a padded round of dark green leatherette.

The boy seems to understand. He places the watch on the pad.
~ Fontaine sees the black beneath the ragged nails as the hand withdraws.

"Shit," Fontaine says. Eyes acting up. "Back up, there, a minute," ~r' he says, gently indicating direction with the barrel of the Smith & '~ Wesson. The boy takes a step back.
51
I
Still watching the boy, he digs in the left side pocket of the trench coat and comes up with a black loupe, which he screws into his left eye. "Don't you move now, okay? Don't want this gun to go off..

Fontaine picks up the watch, affords himself a quick squint through the loupe. 'Whistles in spite of himself. "Jaeger LeCoultre." He unsquints, checking; the boy hasn't moved. Squints again, this time at the ordnance markings on the caseback. "Royal Australian Air Force, 1953," he translates. "Where'd you steal this?"

Nothing.

"This is near mint." Fontaine feels, all at once, profoundly and unexpectedly lost. "This a redial?"

Nothing.

Fontaine squints through the loupe. "All original?"

Fontaine wants this watch.

He puts it down on the green pad, atop the worn symbol of a golden crown, noting that the black calf band is custom-made, handsewn around bars permanently fixed between the lugs. This work itself, which he takes to be either Italian or Austrian, may have cost more than some of the watches in his tray. The boy immediately picks it up.

Fontaine produces the tray. "Look here. You want to trade? Gruen Curvex here. Tudor 'London,' 1948; nice original dial. Vulcain Cricket here, gold head, very clean."

But already he knows that his conscience will never allow him to divest this lost soul of this watch, and the knowledge hurts him. Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what his father called "sharp practices," and he invariably fails.

The boy is leaning forward over the tray, Fontaine forgotten.

"Here," Fontaine says, sliding the tray aside and replacing it with his battered notebook. He opens it to the pages where he shops for watches. "Just push this, then push this, it'll tell you what you're looking at." He demonstrates. A Jaeger with a silver face.

Fontaine presses the second key. "1945 Jaeger chronometer, stainless steel, original dial, engraving on case back," says the notebook.

"Case," the boys says. "Back."

"This," Fontaine shows the boy the stainless back of a gold-filled
52
Tissot tank. "But with writing on, like 'Joe Blow, twenty-five years with Blowcorp, congratulations."

The boy looks blank. Presses a key. Another watch appears on the screen. He presses the second key. "A 1960 Vulcain jump-hour, chrome, brassing at lugs, dial very good."

"'Very good,' "Fontaine advises. "Not good enough. See these spots here?" Indicating certain darker flecks scattered across the scan. "If it were 'very fine,' sure."

"Fine," says the boy, looking up at Fontaine. He presses the key that produces the image of another watch.

"Let me see that watch, okay?" Fontaine points at the watch in the boy's hand. "It's okay. I'll give it back."
The boy looks from the watch to Fontaine. Fontaine puts the Smith & Wesson away in its pocket. Shows the boy his empty hands.
"I'll give it back."

The boy extends his hand. Fontaine takes the watch.

"You gonna tell me where you got this?"

Blank.

"You want a cup of coffee?"

Fontaine gestures back, toward the simmering pot on the hotplate. Smells its bitter brew, thickening.

The boy understands.

He shakes his head.

Fontaine screws the loupe into his eye and settles into contemplation.

Damn. He wants this watch.

LATER in the day, when the bento boy brings Fontaine his lunch, the Jaeger LeCoultre military is in the pocket of Fontaine's gray tweed SlaCks, high-waisted and extravagantly pleated, but Fontaine knows that the watch is not his. The boy has been put in the back of the shop, in that cluttered little zone that divides Fontaine's business from his private life, and Fontaine has become aware of the fact that he can, yes, smell his visitor; under the morning's coffee smell a definite and insistent reek of old sweat and unwashed clothes.

53
As the bento boy exits to his box-stacked bicycle, Fontaine undoes the clips on his own box. Tempura today, not his favorite for bento, because it cools, but still he's hungry. Steam wafts from the bowl of miso as he un5naps its plastic lid. He pauses.

"Hey" he says, back into the space behind the shop, "you want some miso?" No reply. "Soup, you hear me?"

Fontaine sighs, climbs off his wooden stool, and carries the steaming soup into the back of the shop.

The boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, the notebook open on his lap. Fontaine sees the image of a large, very complicated chronometer floating there on the screen. Something from the eighties, by the look of it.

"You want some miso?"

"Zenith," says the boy. "El Primero. Stainless case. Thirty-one jewels, 3O19PHC movement. Heavy stainless bracelet with flip lock. Original ;crewdown crown. Crown dial and movement signed."

Fontaine stares at him.
13. SECONDHAND DAYLIGHT

YAMAZAKI returns with antibiotics, packaged foods, coffee in self-heating tins. He wears a black nylon flight jacket and carries these things, along with his notebook, in a blue mesh bag.

He descends into the station through a crowd of only ordinary density well before the evening rush hour. He has found it difficult to sleep, his dreams haunted by the perfect face of Rei Toei, who is in a sense his employer, and who in another sense does not exist.

She is a voice, a face, familiar to millions. She is a sea of code, the ultimate expression of entertainment software. Her audience knows that she does not walk among them; that she is media, purely. And that is a large part of her appeal.

If not for Rei Toei, Yamazaki considers, Laney would not be here now. It was the attempt to understand her, to second-guess her motivation, that had originally brought Laney to Tokyo. In the employ of Rez's management team, the singer Rez having declared his intention to many her. And how, they asked, was that to be? How could any human, even one so thoroughly mediated, marry a construct, a congeries of software, a dream?
And Rez, the Chinese-Irish singer, the pop star, had tried. Yamazaki knows this. He knows as much about this as any living human, includ
ing Rez, because Rei Toei has discussed it with him. He understands
that Rez exists as thoroughly, in the realm of the digital, as it is possible
~ for a living human to exist. If Rez-the-man were to die, today, Rez-the
icon would certainly live on. But Rez's yearning was to go there, literally
to go where Rei Toei is. Or was, she having now effectively vanished.

The singer had sought to join her in some realm of the digital or in some not-yet-imagined borderland, some intermediate state. And had

failed.
But has she gone there now? And why had Laney fled as well?

Rez tours the Kombinat states now. Insists on traveling by rail.
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Station to station, Moscow hts goal, rumors of madness flickering in the band's wake.
It is a dark business, Yaivazaki thinks and wonders, taking the stairs to the cardboard city, what exactly Laney is about here. Speaking of nodal points in history, of son-te emerging pattern in the texture of things. Of everything changing.
Laney is a sport, a mutant, the accidental product of covert clinical trials of a drug that induced something oddly akin to psychic abilities in a small percentage of test subjects. But Laney isn't psychic in any non-rational sense; rather he is able, through the organic changes wrought long ago by 5-SB, this drug, tj somehow perceive change emerging from vast flows of data.
And now Rei Toei is gone, her management claims, and how can that be? Yamazaki suspects that Laney may know why, or where, and that is a factor in Yamazaki's having decided to return here and find him. He has been extremely careful to avoid being followed, but he also knows that that can mean next to nothing.
The smell of the Tokyo 5ubway, familiar as the smell of his mother's apartment, comforts him now. It is a smell at once utterly distinctive and impossible to describe It is the smell of Japanese humanity, of which he very much feels himself a part, as manifested in this singular environment, this world of tubes, of white corridors, of whispering silver trains.
He finds the passageway between the two escalators, the tiled columns. He half suspects that the shelters will be gone.
But they are here, and when he dons a white micropore mask and enters the model-builder's brightly lit hutch, nothing has changed except the kit the old man concentrates on now: a multi-headed dinosaur with robotic hind lmbs in navy and silver. The brush tip works in the eye of one reptilian head. The old man does not look up.
"Laney?"
Nothing from behind the square of melon-yellow blanket.
Yamazaki nods to the old man and crawls past on hands and knees, pushing his mesh bag of supplies before him.
"Laney?"
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"Hush," Laney says, from the narrow fetid dark. "He's talking."
"Who is talking?" Pushing the bag past the limp, foam-filled fabric, its touch on his face reminding him of nursery school.
As Yamazaki enters, Laney activates a projector in the clumsy eye-phones: the images he sees splay across Yamazaki, blinding him. Yamazaki twists to avoid the beam. Sees figures framed in secondhand daylight. "-magine he does this on a regular basis?" Hand-held but digitally stabilized. "Something to do with phases of the moon?"
Zooms in on one of the figures, lean and male, as all are. Mouth obscured by a dark scarf. Stiff black hair above a high white forehead. "No evidence of that. Opportunistic. He waits for them to come to him. Then he takes them. These," and the camera swings smoothly to frame the face and bare chest of a dead man, eyes staring, "are jackers. This one had dancer in his pocket." There is a dark comma on the dead man's pale chest, just below the sternum. "The other one was stabbed through the throat, but somehow he managed to miss the arteries."
"He would," says the unseen man.
'We have profiles," the man with the scarf says, off-camera, the face of the corpse thrown across Laney's cardboard wall, the melon blanket. 'We have a full forensic psych run-up. But you ignore them!~
"Of course I do."
'You re in denial Two pairs of hands in latex gloves grasp the dead man flip him over There is a second smaller wound visible beneath one shoulder blade blood has pooled within the body darkened He poses as real a danger to you as to anyone else."

But hes interesting isn t he~
The wound in close up is a small unsmiling mouth The blood reads black. "Not to me."
But you aren t interesting are you~

No and the camera pans up light catching a sharp cheekbone above the black scarf, "and you don't want me to be, do you?"

There is a faint chime as the transmission is terminated. Laney throws back his head the image of the man with the scarf in freeze frame across the ceiling of the carton too bnght distorted and Yamazaki sees that the cardboard there is shingled with tiny self
57
adhesive printouts, dozens of different images of a bland-looking man, oddly familiar. Yamazaki blinks, his contacts shifting, and misses his glasses. He feels incomplete without them. "Who was that man, Laney?"

"The help," Laney says.

"'Help'?"

"Hard to get good help these days." Laney kills the projector and removes the massive eyephones. In the sudden gloom, his face is reduced to a child's drawing, smudged black eyeholes against a pallid smear. "The man who was taking that call-"
"The one who spoke?"

"He owns the world. Near as anyone does."

Yamazaki frowns. "I have brought medicine-"

"That was from the bridge, Yamazaki."

"San Francisco?"

"They followed my other man there. They followed him, last night, but they lost him. They always do. This morning they found those bodies.

"Followed who?"

"The man who isn't there. The one I'm having to infer."

"These are pictures of Harwood? Of Harwood Levine?" Yamazaki has recognized the face replicated on the stickers.

"Spooks are his. Best money can buy, probably, but they can't get close to the man who isn't there."

"What man?"

"I think he's someone Harwood ... collected. Collects people. Interesting people. I think he might've worked for Harwood, taken commissions. He doesn't leave a trace, none at all. When he crosses someone's path, they're just gone. Then he erases himself."

Yamazaki fumbles the antibiotics from his bag. "Will you take these, Laney? Your cough-"

"Where's Rydell, Yamazaki? He's supposed to be up there now. It's all coming together."

"What is?"

"I don't know," Laney says, leaning forward to dig through the con-
58
tents of the bag. He finds a coffee and activates it, tossing it from hand to hand as it heats. Yamazaki hears the pop, the vacuum hiss, as Laney opens it. Smell of coffee. Laney sips from the steaming can.

"Something's happening," Laney says and coughs into his hand, slopping hot creamed coffee on Yamazaki's wrist. Yamazaki flinches.

"Everything's changing. Or it's not, really. How I see it is changing. But since I've been able to see it the new way, something else has started. There's something building up. Big. Bigger than big. It'll happen soon, then there'll be a cascade effect.

"What will happen?"

"I don't know." Another fit of coughing requires that he set aside the coffee. Yamazaki has opened the antibiotics and tries to offer them. Laney waves them aside. "Have you been back to the island? Do they have any idea where she is?"

Yamazaki blinks. "No. She is simply not present."

Laney smiles, faint gleam of teeth against the darkness of his mouth. "That's good. She's in it too, Yamazaki." He reaches for the coffee. "She's in it too."

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14. BREAKFAST, COOKING
RYDELL found a place in one of those buildings that had clearly been a bank, when banks had needed to have buildings. Thick walls. Someone had turned it into an all-day breakfast-special place, and that was what Rydell was after. Actually it looked like it had been some kind of discount store before that, and who knew what else before, but it had that eggs.and-gre