The Bridge Trilogy Part 56

102 William Gibson . U *.

"You knew," Chia said. "You knew she'd do that."

Mitsuko was blus.h.i.+ng, bright red. Looking at the floor, her jelly-bag computer on her lap. "I am sorry. It was her decision."

"They got to her, right? They told her to get rid of me, hush it up.

"She communicates with the Lo/Rez people privately. It is one of the privileges of her position."

Chia still had her tip-sets on. "I have to talk with my chapter now. Can you give me a few minutes alone?" She felt sorry for Mitsuko, but she was still angry. "I'm not angry with you, okay?"

"I will make tea," Mitsuko said.

When Mitsuko had closed the door behind her, Chia checked that the Sandbenders was still ported, put the goggles back on, and selected the Seattle chapter's main site.

She never got there. Zona Rosa was waiting to cut her out.

15. Akihabara Low gray cloud pressing down on the sheer gray city. A glimpse of new buildings, through the scaled-down limo's tinted, lace-curtained windows.

They pa.s.sed an Apple s.h.i.+res ad, a cobbled lane leading away into some hologram nursery land, where smiling juice bottles danced and sang. Laney's jet lag was back, in some milder but more baroque format. Something compounded of a pervasive sense of guilt and a feeling of physical distance from

his own body, as though the sensory signals arrived stale, after too long a pa.s.sage, through some other country that he himself was never privy to.

"I thought we'd done with all of that when we got rid of those Siberian neuropaths," Blackwell said. He was dressed entirely in black, which had the effect of somewhat reducing his bulk. I-Ic wore a soft, smocklike garment sewn from very black denim, multiple pockets around its wide hem.

Laney thought it looked vaguely j.a.panese, in some medieval way. Something a carpenter might wear.

"Bent as a dog's hind legs. Picked them up touring the Kombinat states."

"Neuropaths?"

"Filling Rez's head with their garbage. He's vulnerable to influences, touring. Combination of stress and boredom. Cities start to look the same. One hotel room after another. It's a syndrome, is what itis."

"Where are we going?"

105.

P.

"Akihbara"

Where?'

Where we're going." Blackwell consulted an enormous, elaborately dialed, steel-braceleted chronometer that looked as though it had been designed to do double duty as bra.s.s knuckles. "Took a month before they'd let me have a go, do what was needed. Then we got him over to a clinic in Paris and they told us what those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had been feeding him had made a pig's breakf~st of his endocrine system. Put him right, in the end, but it needn't have happened, none of it."

But you got rid of them?" Laney had no idea what Blackwell was talking about, but it seemed best to keep up the illusion of conversation.

"Told them I was thinking about putting them face-first through a little Honda tree-shredder I'd purchased, just on the off chance," Blackwell said. "Not necessary. Showed them it, though. In the end, they were sent along with no more than a moderate touch-up.'

Laney looked at the back of the driver's head. The right-hand drive worried him. He felt like there was n.o.body in the driver's seat. "How long did you say you'd worked for the band?'

"Five years."

Laney thought of the video, Blackwell's voice in the darkened club. Two years ago. "Where are we going?"

"Be there, soon enough."

They entered an area of narrower streets, of featureless, vaguely shabby buildings covered with unlit, inactivated advertising. Huge representations of media platforms Laney didn't recognize.

Some of the buildings revealed what he a.s.sumed was quake damage. Head-sized gobs of a btownish, gla.s.slike substance protruded from cracks that ran diagonally across one facade, like a cheap toy repaired badly by a clumsy giant. The limo pulled to the curb.

"'Electric Town,'" Blackwell said. "I'll page you," he said to the driver, who nodded in a way that struck Laney as being not particularly j.a.panese. Blackwell opened the door and got out with that same 106 William Gibson unlikely grace Laney had noted before, the car bucking noticeably with the departure of his weight. Laney, sliding across the gray velour seat, felt tired and wooden.

'Somehow I was expecting a more upscale destination," he said to Blackwell. It was true.

'Stop expecting," Blackwell said.

The building with the cracks and the brown, saplike k.n.o.bs opened into a white-and-pastel sea of kitchen appliances. The ceiling was low, laced with temporary-looking pipes and conduits. Laney

followed Blackwell down a central aisle. A few figures stood along other aisles to either side, but he had no way of knowing whether these were salespeople or potential customers.

An old-fas.h.i.+oned escalator was grinding away, at the end of the central aisle, the rectilinear steel teeth at the edges of each ascending step worn sharp and bright. Blackwell kept walking.

Levitated ahead of Laney, climbing, his feet barely seeming to move. Laney mounted hard behind him.

They rose up to a second level, this one displaying a less consistent range of goods: wallscreens, immersion consoles, automated rediners with ma.s.sage-modules bulging from their cus.h.i.+ons like the heads of giant mechanical grubs.

Along an aisle walled with corrugated plastic cartons, Blackwell with his scarred hands tucked deep in the pockets of his ninja smock. Into a maze of bright blue plastic tarps, slung from pipes overhead. Unfamiliar tools. A worker's dented thermos standing on a red toolkit that spanned a pair of aluminum sawhorses. Blackwell holding a final tarp aside. Laney ducked, entering.

"We've been holding it open for the past hour, Blackwell," someone said. "Not an easy thing."

Blackwell let the tarp fall into place behind him. "Had to collect him from the hotel."

The s.p.a.ce, walled off with the blue rarps on three sides, was twice the size of Laney's hotel room but considerably more crowded.

A lot of hardware was a.s.sembled there: a collection of black consoles o

2.

107.

were cabled together in a white swamp of Styrofoam packing-forms, 1 torn corrugated plastic, and crumpled sheets of bubble-pack. Two men and a woman, waiting. It was the woman who had spoken. As Laney shuffled forward, ankle-deep through the packing materials, the stuff creaked and popped, slippery under the soles of his shoes.

Blackwell kicked at it. "You might have tidied up.'

"We aren't set-dressers," the woman said. She sounded to Laney as though she was from Northern California. She had short brown hair cut in bangs, and something about her reminded him of the quants who worked at Slitscan. Like the other two, men, one j.a.panese and one red-haired, she wore jeans and a generic nylon bomber jacket.

"h.e.l.l of a job on short notice," the redhead said.

"No notice," the other corrected, and he was definitely from California. His hair was pulled straight back, fastened high in a little samurai ponytail.

"What you're paid for," Blackwell said.

"We're paid to tour," the redhead said.

"If you want to tour again, you'd better hope that these work.' Blackwell looked at the cabled consoles.