Blackwell regarded him dourly, settled on an injection-molded crate like a black-draped Buddha, the scars in his eyebrows knitted into new configurations of concern. The three technicians looked carefully blank, hands in the pockets of their matching jackets.
“How's that, then?” Blackwell asked.
“I'm not sure,” Laney said. “He doesn't seem to do anything.”
“He doesn't bloody do anything but do things,” Blackwell declared, “as you'd know if you were orchestrating his bloody security!”
“Okay,” Laney said, “then where'd he have breakfast?”
Blackwell looked uncomfortable. “In his suite.”
“His suite where?”
“Imperial Hotel.” Blackwell glared at the technicians.
“Which empire, exactly?”
“Here. Bloody Tokyo.”
“Here? He's in Tokyo?”
“You lot,” Blackwell said, “outside.” The brown-haired woman shrugged, inside her nylon jacket, and went kicking through the Styrofoam, head down, the other two following in her wake. When the tarp dropped behind them, Blackwell rose from his crate. “Don't think you can try me on for size…”
“I'm telling you that I don't think this is going to work. Your man isn't in there.”
“That's his bloody life.”
“How did he pay for his breakfast?”
“Signed to the suite.”
“Is the suite in his name?”
“Of course not.”
“Say he needs to buy something, during the course of the day?”
“Someone buys it for him, don't they?”
“And pays with?”
“A card.”
“But not in his name.”
“Right.”
“So if anyone were looking at the transaction data, there'd be no way to connect it directly to him, would there?”
“No.”
“Because you're doing your job, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then he's invisible. To me. I can't see him. He isn't there. I can't do what you want to pay me to do. It's impossible.”
“But what about all the rest of it?”
Laney put the eyephones down on the keyboard. “That isn't a person. That's a corporation.”
“But you've got it all! His bloody houses! His flats! Where the gardeners put the bloody flowers in the rock wall! All of it!”
“But I don't know who he is. I can't make him out against the rest of it. He's not leaving the traces that make the patterns I need.”
Blackwell sucked in his upper lip and kept it there. Laney heard the dislodged prosthesis click against his teeth.
“I have to get some idea of who he really is,” Laney said.
The lip re-emerged, damp and gleaming. “Christ,” Blackwell said, “that's a poser.”
“I have to meet him.”
Blackwell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “His music, then?” He raised his eyebrows hopefully. “Or there's video—”
“I've got video, thanks. It really might help if I could meet him.”
Blackwell touched his ear-stump. “You meet him, you think you'll be able to get his nodes, nodal, do that thing Yama's on about?”
“I don't know,” Laney said. “I can try.”
“Bloody hell,” Blackwell said. He plowed through the Styrofoam, swept the tarp aside with his arm, barked for the waiting technicians, then turned back to Laney. “Sometimes I'd as soon be back with my mates in Jika Jika. Get things sorted, in there, they'd bloody stay that way.” The woman with the brown bangs thrust her head in, past the edge of the tarp. “Collect this business in the van,” Blackwell told her. “Have it ready to use when we need it.”
“We don't have a van, Keithy,” the woman said.
“Buy one,” Blackwell said.
18. The Otaku
Something rectangular, yielding to the first touch but hard inside, as she tugged it free. Wrapped in a blue and yellow plastic bag from the SeaTac duty-free, crookedly sealed with wrinkled lengths of slick brown tape. Heavy. Compact.
“Hello.”
Chia very nearly falling backward, where she crouched above her open bag, at the voice and the sight of this boy, who in that first instant she takes to be an older girl, side-parted hair falling past her shoulders.
“I am Masahiko.” No translator. He wore a dark, oversized tunic, vaguely military, buttoned to its high, banded collar, loose around his neck. Old gray sweatpants bagging at the knees. Grubby-looking white paper slippers.
“Mitsuko made tea,” indicating the tray, the stoneware pot, two cups. “But you were ported.”
“Is she here?” Chia pushed the thing back down into her bag.
“She went out,” Masahiko said. “May I look at your computer?”
“Computer?” Chia stood, confused.
“It is Sandbenders, yes?”
She poured some of the tea, which was still steaming. “Sure. You want tea?”
“No,” Masahiko said. “I drink coffee only.” He squatted on the tatami, beside the low table, and ran an admiring fingertip along the edge of the Sandbenders' cast aluminum. “Beautiful. I have seen a small disk player by the same maker. It is a cult, yes?”
“A commune. Tribal people. In Oregon.”
The boy's black hair was long and glossy and smoothly brushed, but Chia saw there was a bit of noodle caught in it, the thin, kinky kind that came in instant ramen bowls.
“I'm sorry I was ported when Mitsuko came back. She'll think I was rude.”
“You are from Seattle.” Not a question.
“You're her brother?”
“Yes. Why are you here?” His eyes large and dark, his face long and pale.
“Your sister and I are both into Lo/Rez.”
“You have come because he wants to marry Rei Toei?”
Hot tea dribbled down Chia's chin. “She told you that?”
“Yes,” Masahiko said. “In Walled City, some people worked on her design.” He was lost in his study of her Sandbenders, turning it over in his hands. His fingers were long and pale, the nails badly chewed.
“Where's that?”
“Netside,” he said, flipping the weight of his hair back, over one shoulder.
“What do they say about her?”
“Original concept. Almost radical.” He stroked the keys. “This is very beautiful…”
“You learned English here?”
“In Walled City.”
Chia tried another sip of tea, then put the cup down. “You have any coffee?”
“In my room,” he said.
Masahiko's room, at the bottom of a short flight of concrete stairs, to the rear of the restaurant's kitchen, had probably been a storage closet. It was a boy-nightmare, the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers of friends, its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers. A tower of empty foam ramen bowls in one corner, their hologram labels winking from beyond a single cone of halogen. A desk or table forming a second, higher ledge, cut from some recycled material that looked as though it had been laminated from shredded juice cartons. His computer there, a featureless black cube. A shallower shelf of the juice-carton board supported a pale blue microwave, unopened ramen bowls, and half a dozen tiny steel cans of coffee.
One of these, freshly microwaved, was hot in Chia's hand. The coffee was strong, sugary, thickly creamed. She sat beside him on the lumpy bed ledge, a padded jacket wadded up behind her for a cushion.
It smelled faintly of boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he seemed very clean, now that she was this close, and she had a vague idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn't they love to bathe? The thought made her want a shower.
“I like this very much.” Reaching to touch the Sandbenders again which he'd brought from upstairs and placed on the work surface, in front of his black cube, sweeping aside a litter of plastic spoons, pens, nameless bits of meta
l and plastic.
“How do you see to work yours?” Gesturing toward his computer with the miniature can of coffee.
He said something in Japanese. Worms and dots of pastel neon lit the faces of the cube, crawling and pulsing, then died.
The walls, from floor to ceiling, were thickly covered with successive layers of posters, handbills, graphics files. The wall directly in front of her, above and behind the black computer, was hung with a large scarf, a square of some silky material screened with a map or diagram in red and black and yellow. Hundreds of irregular blocks or rooms, units of some kind, pressing in around a central vacancy, an uneven vertical rectangle, black.
“Walled City,” he said, following her eye. He leaned forward, fingertip finding a particular spot. “This is mine. Eighth level.”
Chia pointed to the center of the diagram. “What's this?”
“Black hole. In the original, something like an airshaft.” He looked at her. “Tokyo has a black hole, too. You have seen this?”
“No,” she said.
“The Palace. No lights. From a tall building, at night, the Imperial Palace is a black hole. Watching, once, I saw a torch flare.”
“What happened to it in the earthquake?”
He raised his eyebrows. “This of course would not be shown. All now is as before. We are assured of this.” He smiled, but only with the corners of his mouth.
“Where did Mitsuko go?”
He shrugged.
“Did she say when she'd be back?”
“No.”
Chia thought of Hiromi Ogawa, and then of someone phoning for Kelsey's father. Hiromi? But then there was whatever it was, upstairs in her bag in Mitsuko's room. She remembered Maryalice yelling from behind the door to Eddie's office. Zona had to be right. “You know a club called Whiskey Clone?”
“No.” He stroked the buffed aluminum edges of her Sand-benders.
“How about Monkey Boxing?”
He looked at her, shook his head.
“You probably don't get out much, do you?”
He held her gaze. “In Walled City.”
“I want to go to this club, Monkey Boxing. Except maybe it isn't called that anymore. It's in a place called Shinjuku. I was in the station there, before.”
“Clubs are not open, now.”
“That's okay. I just want you to show me where it is. Then I'll be able to find my own way back.”
“No. I must return to Walled City. I have responsibilities. Find the address of this place and I will explain to your computer where to go.”
The Sandbenders could find its own way there, but Chia had decided she didn't want to go alone. Better to go with a boy than Mitsuko, and Mitsuko's allegiance to her chapter could be a problem anyway. Mainly, though, she just wanted to get out of here. Zona's news had spooked her. Somebody knew she was here. And what to do about the thing in her bag?
“You like this, right?” Pointing at her Sandbenders.
“Yes,” he said.
“The software's even better. I've got an emulator in there that'll install a virtual Sandbenders in your computer. Take me to Monkey Boxing and it's yours.”
“Have you always lived here?” Chia asked, as they walked to the station. “In this neighborhood, I mean?”
Masahiko shrugged. Chia thought the street made him uncomfortable. Maybe just being outside. He'd traded his gray sweats for equally baggy black cotton pants, cinched at the ankle with elastic-sided black nylon gaiters above black leather workshoes. He still wore his black tunic, but with the addition of a short-billed black leather cap that she thought might have once been part of a school uniform. If the tunic was too big for him, the cap was too small. He wore it perched forward at an angle, the bill riding low. “I live in Walled City,” he said.
“Mitsuko told me. That's like a multi-user domain.”
“Walled City is unlike anything.”
“Give me the address when I give you the emulator. I'll check it out.” The sidewalk arched over a concrete channel running with grayish water. It reminded her of her Venice. She wondered if there had been a stream there once.
“It has no address,” he said.
“That's impossible,” Chia said.
He said nothing.
She thought about what she'd found when she'd opened the SeaTac duty-free bag. Something flat and rectangular, dark gray. Maybe made from one of those weird plastics that had metal in them. One end had rows of little holes, the other had complicated shapes, metal, and a different kind of plastic. There didn't seem to be any way to open it, no visible seams. No markings. Didn't rattle when she shook it. Maybe What Things Are, the icon dictionary, would recognize it, but she hadn't had time. Masahiko had been downstairs changing when she'd slit the blue and yellow plastic with Mitsuko's serially numbered, commemorative Lo/Rez Swiss Army knife. She'd glanced around the room for a hiding place. Everything too neat and tidy.
Finally she'd put it back in her bag, hearing him coming up the stairs from the kitchen. Which was where it was now, along with her Sandbenders, under her arm, as they entered the station. Which was probably not smart but she just didn't know.
She used Kelsey's cashcard to buy them both tickets.
19. Arleigh
There was a fax from Rydell waiting for Laney when Blackwell dropped him at the hotel. It had been printed on expensive-looking gray letterhead that contrasted drastically with the body of the fax itself, which had been sent from a Lucky Dragon twenty-four-hour convenience store on Sunset. The smiling Lucky Dragon, blowing smoke from its nostrils, was centered just below the hotel's silver-embossed logo, something Laney thought of as the Droopy Evil Elf Hat. Whatever it was supposed to be, the hotel's decorators were very fond of it. It formed a repeating motif in the lobby, and Laney was glad that it didn't seem to have reached the guest rooms yet.
Rydell had hand-printed his fax with a medium-width fiber-pen in scrupulously neat block capitals. Laney read it in the elevator.
It was addressed to C. LANEY, GUEST:
I THINK THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. SHE AND THE DAY MANAGER HAD COFFEE IN THE LOBBY AND HE KEPT LOOKING AT ME. HE COULD'VE CHECKED THE PHONE LOG EASY. WISH I HADN'T CALLED YOU THERE. SORRY. ANYWAY, THEN SHE AND THE OTHERS CHECKED OUT FAST, LEFT THE TECHS TO PACK UP. A TECH TOLD GHENGIS IN THE GARAGE THAT SOME OF THEM WERE ON THEIR WAY TO JAPAN AND HE WAS GLAD HE WASN'T. WATCH OUT, OKAY? RYDELL
“Okay,” Laney said, and remembered how he'd walked to the Lucky Dragon one night, against Rydell's advice, because he couldn't sleep. There were scary-looking bionic hookers posted every block or so, but otherwise it hadn't felt too dangerous. Someone had painted a memorial mural to J. D. Shapely on one side of the Lucky Dragon, and the management had had the good sense to leave it there, culturally integrating their store into the actual twenty-four-hour life of the Strip. You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn't even imagine wanting.
He re-read the fax, walking down the corridor, and used the cardkey to open his door.
There was a shallow wicker basket on the bed, spread with white tissue and unfamiliar objects. On closer inspection, these proved to be his socks and underwear, freshly laundered and arranged in little paper holders embossed with the Elf Hat. He opened the narrow, mirrored closet door, activating a built-in light, and discovered his shirts arranged on hangers, including the blue button-downs Kathy Torrance had made fun of. They looked brand new. He touched one of the lightly starched cuffs. “Stitch count,” he said. He looked down at Rydell's folded fax. He imagined Kathy Torrance headed straight for him, on an SST from Los Angeles. He discovered that he couldn't imagine her sleeping. He'd never seen her asleep and somehow it didn't seem like something she'd willingly do. In the weird vibrationless quiet of supersonic flight, she'd be staring
at the gray blank of the window, or at the screen of her computer.
Thinking of him.
The screen behind him came on with a soft chime and he jumped, four inches, straight up. He turned and saw the BBC logo. Yamazaki's second video.
He was a third of the way through it when the door chimed. Rez was strolling along a narrow trail in the jungle somewhere, wearing sun-bleached khakis and rope-soled sandals. He was singing something as he went, a wordless little melody, over and over, trying different tones and stresses. His bare chest shone with sweat, and when the open shirt swung aside you'd catch a corner of his I Ching tattoo. He had a length of bamboo, and swung it as he walked, swatting at dangling vines. Laney had a sneaking suspicion that the wordless melody had subsequently turned into some global billion-seller, but he couldn't place it yet. The door chimed again.
He got up, crossed to the door, thumbed the speaker button. “Yes?”
“Hello?” A woman's voice.
He touched the card-sized screen set into the doorframe and saw a dark-haired woman. Bangs. The tech from the appliance warehouse. He unlocked the door and opened it.
“Yamazaki thinks we should talk,” she said.
Laney saw that she was wearing a black suit with a narrow skirt, dark stockings.
“Aren't you supposed to be shopping for a van?” He stepped back to let her in.
“Got one,” closing the door behind her. “When the Lo/Rez machine decides to throw money at a problem, money will be thrown. Usually in the wrong direction.” She looked at the screen, where Rez was still swinging along, swatting flies from his neck and chest, lost in composition. “Homework?”
“Yamazaki.”
“Arleigh McCrae,” she said, taking a card from a small black purse and handing it to him. Her name there, then four telephone numbers and two addresses, neither of them physical. “Do you have a card, Mr. Laney?”
“Colin. No. I don't.”
“They can make them up for you at the desk. Everyone has a card here.”
He put the card in his shirt pocket. “Blackwell didn't give me one. Neither did Yamazaki.”
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