The Bridge Trilogy Part 64

"No."

"If he hadn't come in that night, I suppose we might still be up

142 William Gibson and running. And really he wasn't the sort of thing we'd cried to be about. We'd had Maria Paz, just after she'd split up with her boyfriend, the public relations monster, and the press were thick as flies. She's huge here, did you know that? And we'd had Blue Ahmed from Chrome Koran and the press scarcely noticed. Rez and his friends, though, press was not a problem. Sent in this big minder who looked as though he'd been using his face as a chopping block. Came up to me and said Rez had heard about the place and was about to drop in with a few friends, and could we arrange a table with a bit of privacy. . . . Well, really, I had to think: Rez who? Then it clicked, of course, and I said fine, absolutely, and we put three tables together in the back, and even borrowed a purple cordon from the gumi boys in the hostess place upstairs."

"And he came? Rez?"

"Absolutely. An hour later, there he is. Smiling, shaking hands, signing things if you asked him to, though there wasn't too burning a demand, actually. Four women with him, two other men if you didn't count the minder. Very nice black suit. Yohji. Bit the worse for wear. Rez, I mean. Been out to dinner, it looked like. Had a few drinks with it. Certain amount of laughter, if you follow me.' He turned and said something to one of the workmen, who wore shoes like two-toed black leather socks.

Chia, who had no idea what Monkey Boxing had actually been about, imagined Rez at a table with some other people, behind a purple rope, and in the foreground a crowd of j.a.panese people doing whatever j.a.panese people did at a club like that. Dancing?

"Then our boy gets up, he's going to the toilet. The big minder makes as if he's getting up to go too, but our boy waves him back. Big laugh from the table, big minder not too happy. Two of the women start to get up, like they're going with him; he'll have none of it, waves 'em back, more laughter. Not that anyone else was paying him that much attention, I was going into the booth in five minutes, with a set of extremely raw North African; had to judge the crowd, get

on it with them, know just when to drop it in. But there he went, 0

2.

143.

-right through them, and only one or two even noticed, and they

didn't stop dancing.'

What kind of club was it, where n.o.body would stop dancing for Rez?

"So I was thinking about my set, the order of it, and suddenly he's right in front of me. Big grin. Eyes funny, though I wouldn't swear it was anything he'd done in the toilet-if you know what I mean."

Chia nodded her head. What did he mean?

"And would I mind, he said, hand on my shoulder, if he just spoke briefly to the crowd? Said he'd been thinking about something for a long time, and now he'd made up his mind and he wanted to tell people. And the big minder just materialized there, wanting to know was there any problem? None at all, Rez says, giving my shoulder a squeeze, but he was just going to have a word with the crowd."

Chia looked at Jun's shoulders, wondering which one had been squeezed by Rca's actual hand. "So he did," Jun said.

"But what did he say?" Chia asked.

"A load of b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, dear. Evolution and technology and pa.s.sion; man's need to find beauty in the emerging order; his own burning need to get his end in with some software dolly w.a.n.k toy. b.a.l.l.s, Utter." He pushed his headband up with his thumb, but it fell back. "And because he did that, opened his mouth up himy club, Lo slash b.l.o.o.d.y Rez bought my club. Bought me as well, and I've signed agreements that I won't talk to any of you about any of that. And now if you and your charming friend will excuse me, darling, I have work to do."

144 William Gibson There was a man on stilts at the intersection nearest the hotel. He wore a hooded white paper suit, agas mask, and a pair of rectangular sign-boards. Messages scrolled down the boards in j.a.panese as he s.h.i.+fted his weight to maintain balance. Streams of pedestrian traffic flowed around and past him.

"What's that?" Laney asked, indicating the man on stilts.

"A sect," Arleigh McCrae said. "New Logic.' They say the world will end when the combined weight of all the human nervous tissue on the planet reaches a specific figure."

A very long multi-digit number went scrolling down.

"Is that it?" Laney asked.

"No," she said, "that's their latest estimate of the current total weight." She'd gone back to her room for the black coat she now wore, leaving Laney to change into clean socks, underwear, a blue s.h.i.+rt. He didn't have a tie, so he'd b.u.t.toned the s.h.i.+rt at the collar and put his jacket back on.

He'd wondered if everyone who worked for Lo/Rez stayed in that same hotel.

Laney saw the man's eyes through the transparent visor as they pa.s.sed. A look of grim patience.

The stilts were the kind workers wore to put up ceilings, articulated alloy sprung with steel.

"What's supposed to happen when there's enough nervous tissue?"

"A new order of being. They don't talk about it. Rez was inter ested in them, apparently. He tried to arrange an audience with the 3 hunder." 0

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145.

21. Standower Man "And?"

'the founder declined. He said that Rn made his living through the manipulation of human nervous tissue, and that that made him untouchable."

"Rez was unhappy?"

"Not according to Blackwell. Blackwell said it seemed to cheer him up a little."

"He's not cheerful, ordinarily?" Laney sidestepped to avoid a bicycle someone was wheeling in the opposite direction.

"Let's say that the things that bother Rez aren't the things that bother most people."

Laney noticed a dark green van edging along beside them. Its wraparound windows were mirrored, its neon license plates framed with animated tubes of mini-Vegas twinklers. "I think we're being followed," he said.

"We'd better be. I wanted the kind with the weird chrome curb-feelers that make them look like silverfish, but I had to settle for custom license-plate trim. Where you go, it goes. And parking, around here, is probably more of a challenge than anything you'll be expected to do tonight. Now,"

she said, "down here."

Steep, narrow stairs, walled with an alarming pink mosaic of glistening tonsil-like nodules. Laney hesitated, then saw a sign, the letters made up of hundreds of tiny pastel oblongs: LE CHICLE.

Stepping down, he lost sight of the van.

A chewing-gum theme-bar, he thought, and then: I'm getting too used to this. But he still avoided touching the wall of chewed gum as he followed her down.

Into powdery pinks and grays, but these impersonating the unchewed product, wall-wide slabs of it, hung with archaic signage from the nation of his birth. Screen-printed steel, Framed and ancient cardboard, cunningly lit. Icons of gum. Bazooka Joe featured centrally, a figure unknown to Laney but surely no more displaced.

"Come here often?" Laney asked, as they took stools with bul 146 William Gibson I bous cus.h.i.+ons in a particularly lurid bubble-gum pink. The bar was laminated with thousands of rectangular chewing-gum wrappers.

"Yes," she said, "but mainly because it's unpopular. And it's nonsmoking, which is still kind of special here."

"What's 'Black Black'?" Laney asked, looking at a framed poster depicting a stylized l940s automobile hurtling through the faint suggestion of city streets. Aside from "Black Black," it was lettered in a sort of Art Deco j.a.panese.

"Gum. You can still buy it," she said. "The cab drivers all chew it. Lots of caffeine."

"In gum?"

"They sell pick-me-ups here full of liquid nicotine."

"I think I'll have a beer instead."