"Cleveland," Gentry said at last, as though it were a name he'd heard in a dream. "Interesting . . ." He raised his light again, craning forward to peer at the point where the cable joined the unit. "And Cherry -- Cherry, who is he? " the beam falling hard on the wasted, irritatingly ordinary face.

"Don't know," Cherry said. "Get that out of his eyes. Might screw up his REM or something."

"And this?" He lit the flat gray package.

"The LF, Kid called it. Called him the Count, called that his LF." She thrust her hand inside her jackets and scratched herself.

"Well, then," Gentry said, turning, click as the beam died, the light of his obsession burning bright, bright behind his eyes, amplified so powerfully by Kid Afrika's derm that it seemed to Slick that the Shape must be right there, blazing through Gentry's forehead, for anyone at all to see except Gentry himself,"that must be just what it is. . . ."

Down on the Drag

Mona woke as they were landing.

Prior was listening to Eddy and nodding and flashing his rectangular smile. It was like the smile was always there, behind his beard. He'd changed his clothes, though, so he must've had some on the plane. Now he wore a plain gray business suit and a tie with diagonal stripes. Sort of like the tricks Eddy'd set her up with in Cleveland, except the suit fit a different way.

She'd seen a trick fitted for a suit once, a guy who took her to a Holiday Inn. The suit place was off the hotel lobby, and he stood in there in his underwear, crosshatched with lines of blue light, and watched himself on three big screens. On the screens, you couldn't see the blue lines, because he was wearing a different suit in each image. And Mona had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing, because the system had a cosmetic program that made him look different on the screens, stretched his face a little and made his chin stronger, and he didn't seem to notice. Then he picked a suit, got back into the one he'd been wearing, and that was it.

Eddy was explaining something to Prior, some crucial point in the architecture of one of his scams. She knew how to tune the content out, but the tone still got to her, like he knew people wouldn't be able to grasp the gimmick he was so proud of, so he was taking it slow and easy, like he was talking to a little kid, and he'd keep his voice low to sound patient. It didn't seem to bother Prior, but then it seemed to Mona that Prior didn't much give a shit what Eddy said.

She yawned, stretched, and the plane bumped twice on runway concrete, roared, began to slow. Eddy hadn't even stopped talking.

"We have a car waiting," Prior said, interrupting him.

"So where's it taking us?" Mona asked, ignoring Eddy's frown.

Prior showed her the smile. "To our hotel." He unfastened his seatbelt. "We'll be there for a few days. Afraid you'll have to spend most of them in your room."

"That's the deal," Eddy said, like it was his idea she'd have to stay in the room.

"You like stims, Mona?" Prior asked, still smiling.

"Sure," she said,"who doesn't?"

"Have a favorite, Mona, a favorite star?"

"Angie," she said, vaguely irritated. "Who else?"

The smile got a little bigger. "Good. We'll get you all of her latest tapes."

Mona's universe consisted in large part of things and places she knew but had never physically seen or visited. The hub of the northern Sprawl didn't smell, in stims. They edited it out, she guessed, the way Angie never had a headache or a bad period. But it did smell. Like Cleveland, but even worse. She'd thought it was just the way the airport smelled, when they left the plane, but it had been even stronger when they'd gotten out of their car to go into the hotel. And it was cold as hell in the street, too, with a wind that bit at her bare ankles.

The hotel was bigger than that Holiday Inn, but older, too, she thought. The lobby was more crowded than lobbies were in stims, but there was a lot of clean blue carpet. Prior made her wait by an ad for an orbital spa while he and Eddy went over to a long black counter and he talked to a woman with a brass nametag. She felt stupid waiting there, in this white plastic raincoat Prior had made her wear, like he didn't think her outfit was good enough. About a third of the crowd in the lobby were Japs she figured for tourists. They all seemed to have recording gear of some kind -- video, holo, a few with simstim units on their belts -- but otherwise they didn't look like they had a whole lot of money. She thought they were all supposed to have a lot. Maybe they 're smart , don 't want to show it , she decided.

She saw Prior slide a credit chip across the counter to the woman with the nametag, who took it and zipped it along a metal slot.

Prior put her bag down on the bed, a wide slab of beige temperfoam, and touched a panel that caused a wall of drapes to open. "It's not the Ritz," he said,"but we'll try to make you comfortable."

Mona made a noncommittal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland and she couldn't see what that had to do with anything.

"Look," he said,"your favorite." He was standing beside the bed's upholstered headboard. There was a stim unit there, built in, and a little shelf with a set of trodes in a plastic wrapper and about five cassettes. "All of Angie's new stims."

She wondered who'd put those cassettes there, and if they'd done it after Prior had asked her what stims she liked. She showed him a smile of her own and went to the window. The Sprawl looked like it did in stims; the window was like a hologram postcard, famous buildings she didn't know the names of but she knew they were famous.

Gray of the domes, geodesics picked out white with snow, behind that the gray of the sky.

"Happy, baby?" Eddy asked, coming up behind her and putting his hands on her shoulders.

"They got showers here?"

Prior laughed. She shrugged out of Eddy's loose grip and took her bag into the bathroom. Closed and locked the door. She heard Prior's laugh again, and Eddy starting up with his scam talk. She sat on the toilet, opened her bag, and dug out the cosmetic kit where she kept her wiz. She had four crystals left. That seemed like enough; three was enough, but when she got down to two she usually started looking to score. She didn't do jumpers much, not every day anyway, except recently she had, but that was because Florida had started to drive her crazy.

Now she could start tapering off, she decided, as she tapped a crystal out of the vial. It looked like hard yellow candy; you had to crush it, then grind it up between a pair of nylon screens. When you did that, it gave off a kind of hospital smell.

They were both gone, by the time she finished her shower. She'd stayed in until she got bored with it, which took a long time. In Florida she'd mostly used showers at public pools or bus stations, the kind you worked with tokens. She guessed there was something hooked up to this one that measured the liters and put it on your bill; that was how it worked at the Holiday Inn. There was a big white filter above the plastic shower- head, and a sticker on the tile wall with an eye and a tear meant it was okay to shower but don't get it in your eyes, like swimming pool water. There was a row of chrome spouts set into the tile, and when you punched a button under each one you got shampoo, shower gel, liquid soap, bath oil. When you did that, a little red dot lit up beside the button, because it went on your bill. On Prior's bill. She was glad they were gone, because she liked being alone and high and clean. She didn't get to be alone much, except on the street, and that wasn't the same. She left damp footprints on the beige carpet when she walked to the window. She was wrapped in a big towel that matched the bed and the carpet and had a word shaved into the fuzzy part, probably the name of the hotel.

There was an old-fashioned building a block away, and the corners of its stepped peak had been carved down to make a kind of mountain, with rocks and grass, and a waterfall that fell and hit rocks and then fell again. It made her smile, why anybody had gone to that trouble. Drifts of steam came off the water, where it hit. It couldn't just fall down into the street, though, she thought, because it would cost too much. She guessed they pumped it back up and used it over, around in a circle.

Something gray moved its head there, swung its big curly horns up like it was looking at her. She took a step back on the carpet and blinked. Kind of a sheep, but it had to be a remote, a hologram or something. It tossed its head and started eating grass. Mona laughed.

She could feel the wiz down the backs of her ankles and across her shoulderblades, a cold tight tingle, and the hospital smell at the back of her throat.

She'd been scared before but she wasn't scared now.

Prior had a bad smile, but he was just a player, just a bent suit. If he had money, it was somebody else's. And she wasn't scared of Eddy anymore; it was almost like she was scared for him, because she could see what other people took him for.

Well, she thought, it didn't matter; she wasn't growing catfish in Cleveland anymore, and no way anybody'd get her back to Florida again.

She remembered the alcohol stove, cold winter mornings, the old man hunched in his big gray coat. Winters he'd put a second layer of plastic over the windows. The stove was enough to heat the place, then, because the walls were covered with sheets of hard foam, and chipboard over that. Places where the foam showed, you could pick at it with your finger, make holes; if he caught you doing it, he'd yell. Keeping the fish warm in cold weather was more work; you had to pump water up to the roof, where the sun mirrors were, into these clear plastic tubes. But the vegetable stuff rotting on the tank ledges helped, too; steam rose off when you went to net a fish. He traded the fish for other kinds of food, for things people grew, stove alcohol and the drinking kind, coffee beans, garbage the fish ate.

He wasn't her father and he'd said it often enough, when he'd talked at all. Sometimes she still wondered if maybe he had been. When she'd first asked him how old she was, he'd said six, so she counted from that.

She heard the door open behind her and turned; Prior was there, the gold plastic key tab in his hand, beard open to show the smile. "Mona," he said, stepping in,"this is Gerald." Tall, Chinese, gray suit, graying hair. Gerald smiled gently, edged in past Prior, and went straight for the drawer thing opposite the foot of the bed. Put a black case down and clicked it open. "Gerald's a friend. He's medical, Gerald. Needs to have a look at you."

"Mona," Gerald said, removing something from the case,"how old are you?"

"She's sixteen," Prior said. "Right, Mona?"

"Sixteen," Gerald said. The thing in his hands was like a pair of black goggles, sunglasses with bumps and wires. "That's stretching it a little, isn't it?" He looked at Prior.

Prior smiled.

"You're short what, ten years?"

"Not quite," Prior said. "We aren't asking for perfection."

Gerald looked at her. "You aren't going to get it." He hooked the goggles over his ears and tapped something; a light came on below the right lens. "But there are degrees of approximation." The light swung toward her.

"We're talking cosmetic, Gerald."

"Where's Eddy?" she asked, as Gerald came closer.

"In the bar. Shall I call him?" Prior picked up the phone, but put it back down without using it.

"What is this?" Backing away from Gerald.

"A medical examination," Gerald said. "Nothing painful." He had her against the window; above the towel, her shoulderblades pressed against cool glass. "Someone's about to employ you, and pay you very well; they need to be certain you're in good health." The light stabbed into her left eye. "She's on stimulants of some kind," he said to Prior, in a different tone of voice.

"Try not to blink, Mona." The light swung to her right eye. "What is it, Mona? How much did you do?"

"Wiz." Wincing away from the light.

He caught her chin in his cool fingers and realigned her head. "How much?"

"A crystal . . ."

The light was gone. His smooth face was very close, the goggles studded with lenses, slots, little dishes of black metal mesh. "No way of judging the purity," he said.

"It's real pure," she said, and giggled.

He let her chin go and smiled. "It shouldn't be a problem," he said. "Could you open your mouth, please?"

"Mouth?"

"I want to look at your teeth."

She looked at Prior.

"You're in luck, here," Gerald said to Prior, when he'd used the little light to look in her mouth. "Fairly good condition and close to target configuration. Caps, inlays."

"We knew we could count on you, Gerald."

Gerald took the goggles off and looked at Prior. He returned to the black case and put the goggles away. "Lucky with the eyes, too. Very close. A tint job." He took a foil envelope from the case and tore it open, rolled the pale surgical glove down over his right hand. "Take off the towel, Mona. Make yourself comfortable."

She looked at Prior, at Gerald. "You want to see my papers, the bloodwork and stuff?"

"No," Gerald said,"that's fine."

She looked out the window, hoping to see the bighorn, but it was gone, and the sky seemed a lot darker.

She undid the towel, let it fall to the floor, then lay down on her back on the beige temperfoam.

It wasn't all that different from what she got paid for; it didn't even take as long.

Sitting in the bathroom with the cosmetic kit open on her knees, grinding another crystal, she decided she had a right to be pissed off.

First Eddy takes off without her, then Prior shows up with this creep medic, then he tells her Eddy's sleeping in a different room. Back in Florida she could've used some time off from Eddy, but up here was different. She didn't want to be in here by herself, and she'd been scared to ask Prior for a key. He fucking well had one, though, so he could walk in any time with his creep-ass friends. What kind of deal was that?

And the business with the plastic raincoat, that burned her ass too. A disposable fucking plastic raincoat.

She fluffed the powdered wiz between the nylon screens, carefully tapped it into the hitter, exhaled hard, put the mouthpiece to her lips, and hit. The cloud of yellow dust coated the membranes of her throat; some of it probably even made it to her lungs. She'd heard that was bad for you.

She'd hadn't had any plan when she'd gone in the bathroom to take her hit, but as the back of her neck started tingling, she found herself thinking about the streets around the hotel, what she'd seen of them on their way in. There were clubs, bars, shops with clothes in the window. Music. Music would be okay, now, and a crowd. The way you could lose it in a crowd, forget yourself, just be there. The door wasn't locked, she knew that; she'd already tried it. It would lock behind her, though, and she didn't have a key. But she was staying here, so Prior must have registered her at the desk. She thought about going down and asking the woman behind the counter for a key, but the idea made her uncomfortable. She knew suits behind counters and how they looked at you. No, she decided, the best idea was to stay in and stim those new Angie's.

Ten minutes later she was on her way out a side entrance off the main lobby, the wiz singing in her head.

It was drizzling outside, maybe dome condensation. She'd worn the white raincoat for the lobby, figuring Prior knew what he was doing after all, but now she was glad she had it. She grabbed a fold of fax out of an overflowing bin and held it over her head to keep her hair dry. It wasn't as cold as before, which was another good thing. None of her new clothes were what you'd call warm.

Looking up and down the avenue, deciding which way to go, she took in half-a-dozen nearly identical hotel fronts, a rank of pedicabs, the rainslick glitter of a row of small shops. And people, lots of them, like the Cleveland core but everybody dressed so sharp, and all moving like they were on top of it, everybody with someplace to go. Just go with it , she thought, the wiz giving her a sweet second boot that tripped her into the river of pretty people without even having to think about it. Clicking along in her new shoes, holding the fax over her head until she noticed -- more luck -- the rain had stopped.

She wouldn't've minded a chance to check out the shop windows, when the crowd swept her past, but the flow was pleasure and nobody else was pausing. She contented herself with sidelong flashes of each display. The clothes were like clothes in a stim, some of them, styles she'd never seen anywhere.

I should 've been here , she thought, I should 've been here all along. Not on a catfish farm , not in Cleveland , not in Florida. It 's a place , a real place , anybody can come here , you don 't have to get it through a stim . Thing was, she'd never seen this part of it in a stim, the regular people part. A star like Angie, this part wasn't her part. Angie'd be off in high castles with the other stim stars, not down here. But God it was pretty, the night so bright, the crowd surging around her, past all the good things you could have if you just got lucky.

Eddy, he didn't like it. Anyway he'd always said how it was shitty here, too crowded, rent too high, too many police, too much competition. Not that he'd waited two seconds when Prior 'd made an offer, she reminded herself. And anyway, she had her own ideas why Eddy was so down on it. He'd blown it here, she figured, pulled some kind of serious wilson. Either he didn't want to be reminded or else there were people here who'd remind him for sure if he came back. It was there in the pissed-off way he talked about the place, same way he'd talk about anybody who told him his scams wouldn't work. The new buddy so goddamn smart the first night was just a stone wilson the next, dead stupid, no vision.

Past a big store with ace-looking stim gear in the window, all of it matte black and skinny, presided over by this gorgeous holo of Angie, who watched them all slide by with her half-sad smile. Queen of the night, yeah.

The crowd-river flowed out into a kind of circle, a place where four streets met and swung around a fountain. And because Mona really wasn't headed anywhere, she wound up there, because the people around her peeled off in their different directions without stopping. Well, there were people in the circle too, some of them sitting on the cracked concrete that edged the fountain. There was a statue in the center, marble, all worn-out and soft-edged. Kind of a baby riding a big fish, a dolphin. It looked like the dolphin's mouth would spray water if the fountain was working, but it wasn't. Past the heads of the seated people she could see crumpled, sodden fax and white foam cups in the water.

Then it seemed like the crowd had melded behind her, a curved, sliding wall of bodies, and the three who faced her on the fountain rim jumped out like a picture. Fat girl with black-dyed hair, mouth half-open like it stayed that way, tits spilling out of a red rubber halter; blonde with a long face and a thin blue slash of lipstick, hand like a bird's claw sprouting a cigarette; man with his oiled arms bare to the cold, graft-job muscle knotted like rock under synthetic tan and bad jail tattoos . . .

"Hey, bitch," cried the fat girl, with a kind of glee,"hope y'don't think y'gonna turn any 'roun' here!"

The blonde looked at Mona with her tired eyes and gave her a wan grin, an it's-not-my-fault grin, and then looked away.

The pimp came up off the fountain like something driven by springs, but Mona was already moving, cued by the blonde's expression. He had her arm, but the raincoat's plastic seam gave way and she elbowed her way back into the crowd. The wiz took over and the next thing she knew she was at least a block away, sagging against a steel pole, coughing and hyperventilating.

But now the wiz was all turned around, the way it went sometimes, and everything was ugly. The faces in the crowd were driven and hungry-looking, like they all had their own private desperate errands to run, and the light from the shop windows was cold and mean, and all the things behind the glass were just there to tell her she couldn't have them. There was a voice somewhere, an angry child's voice stringing obscenities together in an endless, meaningless chain; when she realized who it was, she stopped doing it.

Her left arm was cold. She looked down and saw that the sleeve was gone, the seam down her side torn open to the waist. She took off the coat and draped it over her shoulders like a cape; maybe that made it a little harder to notice.

She braced her back against the pole as the wiz rolled over her on a wave of delayed adrenaline; her knees started to buckle and she thought she was going to faint, but then the wiz pulled one of its tricks and she was crouching in summer sunset light in the old man's dirt yard, the flaky gray earth scribed with the game she'd been playing, but now she was just hunched there, vacant, staring off past the bulks of the tanks to where fireflies pulsed in the blackberry tangle above a twisted old chassis. There was light behind her from the house and she could smell the cornbread baking and the coffee he boiled and reboiled there, till a spoon stood up in it, he said, and he'd be in there now reading one of his books, crumbly brown leaves, never a page with a corner on it, he got 'em in frayed plastic baggies and sometimes they just fell to dust in his hands, but if he found something he wanted to keep he'd get a little pocket copier out of the drawer, fit the batteries in it, run it down the page. She liked to watch the copies spool out all fresh, with their special smell that faded away, but he'd never let her work it. Sometimes he'd read out loud, a kind of hesitation in his voice, like a man trying to play an instrument he hasn't picked up in a long time. They weren't stories he read, not like they had endings or told a joke. They were like windows into something so strange; he never tried to explain any of it, probably didn't understand it himself, maybe nobody did. . . .

Then the street snapped back hard and bright.

She rubbed her eyes and coughed.

Antarctica Starts Here

"I'm ready now," Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. "Touch the spread with your left hand." Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper's ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

Angie, wrapped in a white terry robe, faced the blond technician from the edge of the bed, the black test unit covering her forehead like a raised blindfold. She did as she was told, running the tips of her fingers lightly across the raw silk and unbleached linen of the rumpled bedspread.

"Good," Piper said, more to herself than to Angie, touching something on the board. "Again." Angie felt the weave thicken beneath her fingertips.

"Again." Another adjustment.

She could distinguish the individual fibers now, know silk from linen. . . .

"Again."

Her nerves screamed as her flayed fingertips grated against steel wool, ground glass. . . .

"Optimal," Piper said, opening blue eyes. She produced a tiny ivory vial from the sleeve of her kimono, removed its stopper, passed the vial to Angie.

Closing her eyes, Angie sniffed cautiously. Nothing.

"Again."

Something floral. Violets?

"Again."

Her head flooded with a nauseating greenhouse reek.

"Olfactory's up," Piper said, as the choking odor faded.

"Haven't noticed." She opened her eyes. Piper was offering her a tiny round of white paper. "As long as it's not fish," Angie said, licking the tip of her finger. She touched the dot of paper, raised her finger to her tongue. One of Piper's tests had once put her off seafood for a month.

"It's not fish," Piper said, smiling. She kept her hair short, a concise little helmet that played up the graphite gleam of the sockets inset behind either ear. Saint Joan in silicone, Porphyre said, and Piper's true passion seemed to be her work. She was Angie's personal technician, reputed to be the Net's best troubleshooter.

Caramel . . .

"Who else is here, Piper?" Having completed the Usher, Piper was zipping her board into a fitted nylon case.

Angie had heard a helicopter arrive an hour earlier; she'd heard laughter, footsteps on the deck, as the dream receded. She'd abandoned her usual attempt to inventory sleep -- if it could be called sleep, the other's memories washing in, filling her, then draining away to levels she couldn't reach, leaving these afterimages. . . .

"Raebel," Piper said,"Lomas, Hickman, Ng, Porphyre, the Pope."

"Robin?"

"No."

"Continuity," she said, showering.

"Good morning, Angie."

"Freeside torus. Who owns it?"

"The torus has been renamed Mustique II by the current joint owners, the Julianna Group and Carribbana Orbital."

"Who owned it when Tally taped there?"

"Tessier-Ashpool S.A."

"I want to know more about Tessier-Ashpool."

"Antarctica starts here ."

She stared up through the steam at the white circle of the speaker. "What did you just say?"

"Antarctica Starts Here is a two-hour video study of the Tessier-Ashpool family by Hans Becker, Angie."

"Do you have it?"

"Of course. David Pope accessed it recently. He was quite impressed."

"Really? How recently?"

"Last Monday."

"I'll see it tonight, then."

"Done. Is that all?"

"Yes."

"Goodbye, Angie."

David Pope. Her director. Porphyre said that Robin was telling people she heard voices. Had he told Pope? She touched a ceramic panel; the spray grew hotter. Why was Pope interested in Tessier-Ashpool? She touched the panel again and gasped under needles of suddenly frigid water.

Inside out, outside in, the figures of that other landscape arriving soon, too soon . . .

Porphyre was posed by the window when she entered the living room, a Masai warrior in shoulder-padded black silk crepe and black leather sarong. The others cheered when they saw her, and Porphyre turned and grinned.

"Took us by surprise," Rick Raebel said, sprawled on the pale couch. He was effects and editing. "Hilton figured you'd want more of a break."

"They pulled us in from all over , dear," Kelly Hickman added. "I was in Bremen, and the Pope was up the well in full art mode, weren't you, David?" He looked to the director for confirmation.

Pope, who was straddling one of the Louis XVI chairs backward, his arms crossed along the top of its fragile back, smiled wearily, dark hair tangled above his thin face. When Angie's schedule allowed for it, Pope made documentaries for Net/Knowledge. Shortly after she'd signed with the Net, Angie participated anonymously in one of Pope's minimalist art pieces, an endless stroll across dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky. Three months later, the arc of her career firmly under way, an unlicensed version of the tape became an underground classic.

Karen Lomas, who did Angie's in-fills, smiled from the chair left of Pope. To his right, Kelly Hickman, wardrobe, sat on the bleached floor beside Brian Ng, Piper's gofer-cum-understudy. "Well," Angie said,"I'm back. I'm sorry to have hung all of you up, but it had to be done."

There was a silence. Minute creaks from the gilt chairs. Brian Ng coughed.

"We're just glad you're back," Piper said, coming in from the kitchen with a cup of coffee in either hand.

They cheered again, somewhat self-consciously this time, then laughed.

"Where's Robin?" Angie asked.

"Mistuh Lanier in London," Porphyre said, hands on his leather-wrapped hips.

"Expected hourly," Pope said dryly, getting up and accepting a coffee from Piper.

"What were you doing in orbit, David?" Angie asked, taking the other cup.

"Hunting solitaries."

"Solitude?"

"Solitaries. Hermits."

"Angie," Hickman said, springing up,"you have to see this satin cocktail number Devicq sent last week! And I've got all of Nakamura's swimwear. . . ."

"Yes, Kelly, but --"

But Pope had already turned to say something to Raebel.

"Hey," Hickman said, beaming with enthusiasm,"come on! Let's try it on! "

Pope spent most of the day with Piper, Karen Lomas, and Raebel, discussing the results of the Usher and the endless minor details of what they referred to as Angie's reinsertion . After lunch, Brian Ng went along with her to her physical, which was conducted in a private clinic in a mirror-clad compound on Beverly Boulevard.

During the very brief wait in the white, plant-filled reception area -- surely a matter of ritual, as though a medical appointment that involved no wait might seem incomplete, inauthentic -- Angie found herself wondering, as she'd wondered many times before, why her father's mysterious legacy, the vŽvŽs he'd drawn in her head, had never been detected by this or any other clinic.

Her father, Christopher Mitchell, had headed the hybridoma project that had allowed Maas Biolabs a virtual monopoly in the early manufacture of biochips. Turner, the man who had taken her to New York, had given her a kind of dossier on her father, a biosoft compiled by a Maas security AI. She'd accessed the dossier four times in as many years; finally, one very drunken night in Greece, she'd flung the thing from the deck of an Irish industrialist's yacht after a shouting match with Bobby. She no longer recalled the cause of the fight, but she did remember the mingled sense of loss and relief as the squat little nub of memory struck the water.

Perhaps her father had designed his handiwork so that it was somehow invisible to the scans of the neuro- technicians. Bobby had his own theory, one she had suspected was closer to the truth. Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vŽvŽs transparent. . . . Legba, after all, had orchestrated her debut in the industry and the subsequent rise that had seen her eclipse Tally Isham's fifteen-year career as Net megastar.

But it had been so long since the loa had ridden her, and now, Brigitte had said, the vŽvŽs had been redrawn. . . .

"Hilton had Continuity front a head for you today," Ng told her, as she waited.

"Oh?"

"Public statement on your decision to go to Jamaica, praise for the methods of the clinic, the dangers of drugs, renewed enthusiasm for your work, gratitude to your audience, stock footage of the Malibu place . . ."

Continuity could generate video images of Angie, animate them with templates compiled from her stims. Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.

A chime sounded, beyond the greenery.

Returning from the city, she found caterers preparing for a barbecue on the deck.

She lay on the couch beneath the Valmier and listened to the surf. From the kitchen, she could hear Piper explaining the results of the physical to Pope. There was no need, really -- she'd been given the cleanest possible bill of health -- but both Pope and Piper were fond of detail.

When Piper and Raebel put on sweaters and went out onto the deck, where they stood warming their hands above the coals, Angie found herself alone in the living room with the director.

"You were about to tell me, David, what you were doing up the well. . . ."

"Looking for serious loners." He ran a hand back across his tangled hair. "It grows out of something I wanted to do last year, with intentional communities in Africa. Trouble was, when I got up there, I learned that anyone who goes that far, who'll actually live alone in orbit, is generally determined to stay that way."

"You were taping, yourself? Interviews?"

"No. I wanted to find people like that and talk them into recording segments themselves."

"Did you?"

"No. I heard stories, though. Some great stories. A tug pilot claimed there were feral children living in a mothballed Japanese drug factory. There's a whole new apocrypha out there, really -- ghost ships, lost cities. . . . There's a pathos to it, when you think about it. I mean, every bit of it's locked into orbit. All of it manmade, known, owned, mapped. Like watching myths take root in a parking lot. But I suppose people need that, don't they?"

"Yes," she said, thinking of Legba, of Mamman Brigitte, the thousand candles. . . .

"I wish, though," he said,"that I could've gotten through to Lady Jane. Such an amazing story. Pure gothic."

"Lady Jane?"

"Tessier-Ashpool. Her family built Freeside torus. High- orbit pioneers. Continuity has a marvelous video. . . . They say she killed her father. She's the last of the line. Money ran out years ago. She sold everything, had her place sawn off the tip of the spindle and towed out to a new orbit. . . ."

She sat up on the couch, her knees together, fingers locked across them. Sweat trickled down across her ribs.

"You don't know the story?"

"No," she said.

"That's interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news. The mother was Tessier, the father Ashpool. They built Freeside when there was nothing else like it. Got fantastically rich in the process. Probably running a very close second to Josef Virek when Ashpool died. And of course they'd gotten wonderfully weird in the meantime, had taken to cloning their children wholesale. . . ."

"It sounds . . . terrible. And you tried, you did try to find her?"

"Well, I made inquiries. Continuity had gotten me this Becker video, and of course her orbit's in the book, but it's no good dropping by if you haven't been invited, is it? And then Hilton buzzed me to get back here and back to work. . . . Aren't you feeling well?"

"Yes, I . . . I think I'll change now, put on something warmer."

After they'd eaten, when coffee was being served, she excused herself and said goodnight.

Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He'd stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was. All the things the drug had fenced away.

"Missy, take care," he said, too quietly for the others to hear.

"I'm fine," she said. "Too many people. I'm still not used to it."

He stood there looking up at her, the glow of dying coals behind his elegantly crafted, subtly inhuman skull, until she turned and climbed the stairs.

She heard the helicopter come for them an hour later.

"House," she said,"I'll see the video from Continuity now."

As the wallscreen slid down into place, she opened the bedroom door and stood for a moment at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Surf, the hum of the dishwasher, wind buffeting the windows that faced the deck.

She turned back to the screen and shivered at the face she saw there in a grainy freeze-frame headshot, avian eyebrows arched above dark eyes, high fragile cheekbones, and a wide, determined mouth. The image expanded steadily, into the darkness of an eye, black screen, a white point, growing, lengthening, becoming the tapered spindle of Freeside. Credits began to flash in German.

"Hans Becker," the house began, reciting the Net library's intro-critique,"is an Austrian video artist whose hallmark is an obsessive interrogation of rigidly delimited fields of visual information. His approaches range from classical montage to techniques borrowed from industrial espionage, deep-space imaging, and kino-archaeology. Antarctica Starts Here , his examination of images of the Tessier-Ashpool family, currently stands as the high point of his career. The pathologically media-shy industrial clan, operating from the total privacy of their orbital home, posed a remarkable challenge."

The white of the spindle filled the screen as the final credit vanished. An image tracked to center screen, snapshot of a young woman in loose dark clothes, background indistinct. MARIE-FRANCE TESSIER, MOROCCO.

This wasn't the face in the opening shot, the face of invading memory, yet it seemed to promise it, as though a larval image lay beneath the surface.

The soundtrack wove atonal filaments through strata of static and indistinct voices as the image of Marie-France was replaced by a formal monochrome portrait of a young man in a starched wing collar. It was a handsome face, finely proportioned, but very hard somehow, and in the eyes a look of infinite boredom. JOHN HARNESS ASHPOOL, OXFORD.

Yes , she thought, and I 've met you many times . I know your story ,though I 'm not allowed to touch it .

But I really don 't think I like you at all , do I , Mr. Ashpool?

Catwalk

The catwalk groaned and swayed. The stretcher was too wide for the walk's handrails, so they had to keep it chest-high as they inched across, Gentry at the front with his gloved hands clamped around the rails on either side of the sleeper's feet. Slick had the heavy end, the head, with the batteries and all that gear; he could feel Cherry creeping along behind him. He wanted to tell her to get back, that they didn't need her weight on the walk, but somehow he couldn't.

Giving Gentry Kid Afrika's bag of drugs had been a mistake. He didn't know what was in the derm Gentry'd done; he didn't know what had been in Gentry's bloodstream to begin with. Whatever, Gentry'd gone bare-wires crazy and now they were out here on the fucking catwalk, twenty meters over Factory's concrete floor, and Slick was ready to weep with frustration, to scream; he wanted to smash something, anything, but he couldn't let go of the stretcher.

And Gentry's smile , lit up by the glow of the bio-readout taped to the foot of the stretcher, as Gentry took another step backward across the catwalk . . .

"O man," Cherry said, her voice like a little girl's,"this is just seriously fucked . . . ."

Gentry gave the stretcher a sudden impatient tug and Slick almost lost his grip.

"Gentry," Slick said,"I think you better think twice about this."

Gentry had removed his gloves. He held a pair of optic jumpers in either hand, and Slick could see the splitter fittings trembling.

"I mean Kid Afrika's heavy, Gentry. You don't know what you're messing with, you mess with him." This was not, strictly speaking, true, the Kid being, as far as Slick knew, too smart to value revenge. But who the hell knew what Gentry was about to mess with anyway?

"I'm not messing with anything," Gentry said, approaching the stretcher with the jumpers.

"Listen, buddy," Cherry said,"you interrupt his input, you maybe kill 'im; his autonomic nervous system'll go tits-up. Why don't you just stop him?" she asked Slick. "Why don't you just knock him on his ass?"

Slick rubbed his eyes. "Because . . . I dunno. Because he's . . . Look, Gentry, she's saying it'll maybe kill the poor bastard, you try to tap in. You hear that?"

" 'LF,' " Gentry said,"I heard that ." He put the jumpers between his teeth and began to fiddle with one of the connections on the featureless slab above the sleeper's head. His hands had stopped shaking.

"Shit," Cherry said, and gnawed at a knuckle. The connection came away in Gentry's hand. He whipped a jumper into place with his other hand and began to tighten the connection. He smiled around the remaining jumper. "Fuck this," Cherry said,"I'm outa here," but she didn't move.

The man on the stretcher grunted, once, softly. The sound made the hairs stand up on Slick's arms.

The second connection came loose. Gentry inserted the other splitter and began to retighten the fitting.

Cherry went quickly to the foot of the stretcher, knelt to check the readout. "He felt it," she said, looking up at Gentry,"but his signs look okay. . . ."

Gentry turned to his consoles. Slick watched as he jacked the jumpers into position. Maybe, he thought, it was going to work out; Gentry would crash soon, and they'd have to leave the stretcher up here until he could get Little Bird and Cherry to help him get it back across the catwalk. But Gentry was just so crazy, probably he should try to get the drugs back, or some of them anyway, get things back to normal. . . .

"I can only believe," Gentry said,"that this was predetermined. Prefigured by the form of my previous work. I wouldn't pretend to understand how that might be, but ours is not to question why, is it, Slick Henry?" He tapped out a sequence on one of his keyboards. "Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?"

"What's he talking about?" Cherry asked.

Slick glumly shook his head. If he said anything, it would only encourage Gentry's craziness.

Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. "There are worlds within worlds," he said. "Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below. . . . It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I'd not dared to hope. . ." He glanced coyly back at them over a black-beaded shoulder. "And now," he said,"we'll see the shape of the little universe our guest's gone voyaging in. And in that form, Slick Henry, I'll see . . ."

He touched the power stud at the edge of the holo table. And screamed.

Toys

"Here's a lovely thing," Petal said, touching a rosewood cube the size of Kumiko's head. "Battle of Britain." Light shimmered above it, and when Kumiko leaned forward she saw that tiny aircraft looped and dived in slow motion above a gray Petrie smear of London. "They worked it up from war films," he said,"gunsight cameras." She peered in at almost microscopic flashes of antiaircraft fire from the Thames estuary. "Did it for the Centenary."

They were in Swain's billiard room, ground-floor rear, number 16. There was a faint mustiness, an echo of pub smell. The overall tidiness of Swain's establishment was tempered here by genteel dilapidation: there were armchairs covered in scuffed leather, pieces of heavy dark furniture, the dull green field of the billiard table. . . . The black steel racks stacked with entertainment gear had caused Petal to bring her here, before tea, shuffling along in his seam-sprung moleskin slippers, to demonstrate available toys.

"Which war was this?"

"Last but one," he said, moving on to a similar but larger unit that offered holograms of two Thai boxing girls. One's callused sole smacked against the other's lean brown belly, tensed to take the blow. He touched a stud and the projections vanished.

Kumiko glanced back at the Battle of Britain and its burning gnats.

"All sorts of sporting fiche," Petal said, opening a fitted pig-skin case that held hundreds of the recordings.

He demonstrated half-a-dozen other pieces of equipment, then scratched his stubbled head while he searched for a Japanese video news channel. He found it, finally, but couldn't cut out the automatic translation program. He watched with her as a cadre of Ono-Sendai executive trainees effaced themselves in a tearful graduation ceremony. "What's all that then?" he asked.

"They are demonstrating loyalty to their zaibatsu . "

"Right," he said. He gave the video unit a swipe with his feather duster. "Tea time soon." He left the room. Kumiko shut off the audio. Sally Shears had been absent at breakfast, as had Swain.

Moss-green curtains concealed another set of tall windows opening onto the same garden. She looked out at a sundial sheathed in snow, then let the curtain fall back. (The silent wallscreen flashed Tokyo accident images, foil-clad medics sawing limp victims from a tangle of impacted steel.) A top-heavy Victorian cabinet stood against the far wall on carved feet resembling pineapples. The keyhole, trimmed with an inlaid diamond of yellowed ivory, was empty, and when she tried the doors, they opened, exhaling a chemical odor of ancient polish. She stared at the black and white mandala at the rear of the cabinet until it became what it was, a dartboard. The glossy wood behind it was pocked and pricked; some players had missed the board entirely, she decided. The lower half of the cabinet offered a number of drawers, each with a small brass pull and miniature, ivory-trimmed keyhole. She knelt in front of these, glanced back toward the doorway (wallscreen showing the lips of a Shinjuku cabaret singer) and drew the upper right drawer out as quietly as possible. It was filled with darts, loose and in leather wallets. She closed the drawer and opened the one to its left. A dead moth and a rusted screw. There was a single wide drawer below the first two; it stuck as she opened it, and made a sound. She looked back again (stock footage of Fuji Electric's logo illuminating Tokyo Bay) but there was no sign of Petal.

She spent several minutes leafing through a pornographic magazine, with Japanese text, which seemed to have mainly to do with the art of knots. Under this was a dusty-looking jacket made of black waxed cotton, and a gray plastic case with WALTHER molded across its lid in raised letters. The pistol itself was cold and heavy; she could see her face in the blue metal when she lifted it from its fitted bed of foam. She'd never handled a gun before. The gray plastic grips seemed enormous. She put it back into the case and scanned the Japanese section in a folder of multilingual instructions. It was an air gun; you pumped the lever below the barrel. It fired very small pellets of lead. Another toy. She replaced the contents of the drawer and closed it.

The remaining drawers were empty. She closed the cabinet door and returned to the Battle of Britain.

"No," Petal said,"sorry, but it won't do."

He was spreading Devon cream on a crumpet, the heavy Victorian butterknife like a child's toy in his thick fingers. "Try the cream," he said, lowering his massive head and regarding her blandly over the tops of his glasses.

Kumiko wiped a shred of marmalade from her upper lip with a linen napkin. "Do you imagine I'll try to run away?"

"Run away? Are you considering that, running away?" He ate his crumpet, chewing stolidly, and glanced out into the garden, where fresh snow was falling.

"No," she said. "I have no intention of running away."

"Good," he said, and took another bite.

"Am I in danger, in the street?"

"Lord no," he said, with a sort of determined cheeriness,"you're safe as houses."

"I want to go out."

"No."

"But I go out with Sally."

"Yes," he said,"and she's a nasty piece of work, your Sally."

"I don't know this idiom."

"No going out alone. That's in our brief with your father, understand? You're fine out with Sally, but she isn't here. Nobody's liable to give you bother in any case, but why take chances? Now I'd be happy, you see, delighted to take you out, only I'm on duty here in case Swain has callers. So I can't. It's a shame, really it is." He looked so genuinely unhappy that she considered relenting. "Toast you another?" he asked, gesturing toward her plate.

"No, thank you." She put down her napkin. "It was very good," she added.

"Next time you should try the cream," he said. "Couldn't get it after the war. Rain blew in from Germany and the cows weren't right."

"Is Swain here now, Petal?"

"No."

"I never see him."

"Out and about. Business. There's cycles to it. Soon enough they'll all be calling here, and he'll be holding court again."

"Who, Petal?"

"Business types, you'd say."

"Kuromaku ," she said.

"Sorry?"

"Nothing," she said.

She spent the afternoon alone in the billiard room, curled in a leather armchair, watching snow fall in the garden and the sundial become a featureless white upright. She pictured her mother there, wrapped in dark furs, alone in the garden as the snow fell, a princess-ballerina who drowned herself in the night waters of Sumida.

She stood up, chilled, and went around the billiard table to the marble hearth, where gasflame hissed softly beneath coals that could never be consumed.

The Silver Walks

She'd had this friend in Cleveland, Lanette, who'd taught her lots of things. How to get out of a car fast if a trick tried to lock the doors on you, how to act when you went to make a buy. Lanette was a little older and mainly used wiz, she said,"to move the down around," being frequently downed out on anything from endorphin analogs to plain old Tennessee opium. Otherwise, she said, she'd just sit there twelve hours in front of the vid watching any kind of shit at all. When the wiz added mobility to the warm invulnerability of a good down, she said, you really had something. But Mona had noticed that people who were seriously into downs spent a lot of time throwing up, and she couldn't see why anybody would watch a vid when they could stim just as easy. (Lanette said simstim was just more of what she wanted out of.) She had Lanette on her mind because Lanette used to give her advice sometimes, like how to turn a bad night around. Tonight, she thought, Lanette would tell her to look for a bar and some company. She still had some money left from her last night's work in Florida, so it was a matter of finding a place that took cash.

She hit it right, first try. A good sign. Down a narrow flight of concrete stairs and into a smoky buzz of conversation and the familiar, muted thump of Shabu's "White Diamonds." No place for suits, but it wasn't what the pimps in Cleveland called a spot , either. She was no way interested in drinking in any spot, not tonight.

Somebody got up from the bar to leave just as she came in, so she nipped over quick and got his stool with the plastic still warm, her second sign.

The bartender pursed his lips and nodded when she showed him one of her bills, so she told him to get her a shot of bourbon and a beer on the side, which was what Eddy always got if he was paying for it himself. If somebody else was paying, he'd order mixed drinks the bartender didn't know how to make, then spend a long time explaining exactly how you made the thing. Then he'd drink it and bitch about how it wasn't as good as the ones they made in L.A. or Singapore or some other place she knew he'd never been.

The bourbon here was weird, sort of sour but real good once you got it down. She said that to the bartender, who asked her where she usually drank bourbon. She told him Cleveland and he nodded. That was eth and some shit supposed to remind you of bourbon, he said. When he told her how much of her money was left, she figured out this Sprawl bourbon was expensive stuff. It was doing its job, though, taking the bad edge off, so she drank the rest and started in on her beer.

Lanette liked bars but she never drank, just Coke or something. Mona always remembered one day she'd done two crystals at the same time, what Lanette called a two-rock hit, and she'd heard this voice in her skull say, just as clear as that, like it was somebody right in the room: It 's moving so fast , it 's standing still . And Lanette, who'd dissolved a matchhead of Memphis black in a cup of Chinese tea about an hour before, did half a crystal herself and then they'd gone out walking, just ghosting the rainy streets together in what felt to Mona like some perfect harmony where you didn't need to talk. And that voice had been right, there was no jangle to the rush, no tight-jawed jitter, just this sense of something, maybe Mona herself, expanding out from a still center. And they'd found a park, flat lawns flooded with silver puddles, and gone all around the paths, and Mona had a name for that memory: the Silver Walks.

And sometime after that Lanette was just gone, nobody saw her anymore, and some people said she'd gone to California, some people said Japan, and some people said she'd OD'd and gotten tossed out a window, what Eddy called a dry dive, but that wasn't the kind of thing Mona wanted to think about, so she sat up straight and looked around, and, yeah, this was a good place, small enough that people were kind of crowded in but sometimes that was okay. It was what Eddy called an art crowd, people who had some money and dressed sort of like they didn't, except their clothes fit right and you knew they'd bought them new.

There was a vid behind the bar, up over the bottles, and then she saw Angie there, looking square into the camera and saying something, but they had the sound down too low to hear over the crowd. Then there was a shot from up in the air, looking down on a row of houses that sat right at the edge of a beach, and then Angie was back, laughing and shaking her hair and giving the camera that half-sad grin.

"Hey," she said to the bartender,"there's Angie."

"Who?"

"Angie," Mona said, pointing up at the screen.

"Yeah," he said,"she's on some designer shit and decides to kick, so she goes to South America or somewhere and pays 'em a few mil to clean her act up for her."

"She can't be on shit."

The bartender looked at her. "Whatever."

"But how come she'd even start doing anything? I mean, she's Angie , right?"

"Goes with the territory."

"But look at her," she protested,"she looks so good. . . ." But Angie was gone, replaced by a black tennis player.

"You think that's her? That's a talking head."

"Head?"

"Like a puppet," a voice behind her said, and she swung around far enough to see a ruff of sandy hair and a loose white grin. "Puppet," and held up his hand, wiggling thumb and fingers,"you know?"

She felt the bartender drop the exchange, moving off down the bar. The white grin widened. "So she doesn't have to do all that stuff herself, right?"

She smiled back. Cute one, smart eyes and a secret halo flashing her just the signal she wanted to read. No suit trick. Kinda skinny, she could like that tonight, and the loose look of fun around his mouth set strange against the bright smart eyes.

"Michael."

"Huh?"

"My name. Michael."

"Oh. Mona. I'm Mona."

"Where you from, Mona?"

"Florida."

And wouldn't Lanette just tell her go for it?

Eddy hated art-crowd people; they weren't buying what he was selling. He'd have hated Michael more, because Michael had a job and this loft in a co-op building. Or anyway he said it was a loft, but when they got there it was smaller than Mona thought a loft was supposed to be. The building was old, a factory or something; some of the walls were sandblasted brick and the ceilings were wood and timbers. But all of it had been chopped up into places like Michael's, a room not much bigger than the one back at the hotel, with a sleeping space off one side and a kitchen and bath off the other. It was on the top floor, though, so the ceiling was mostly skylight; maybe that made it a loft. There was a horizontal red paper shade below the skylight, hooked up to strings and pulleys, like a big kite. The place was kind of messy but the stuff that was scattered around was all new: some skinny white wire chairs strung with loops of clear plastic to sit on, a stack of entertainment modules, a work station, and a silver leather couch.

They started out on the couch but she didn't like the way her skin stuck to it, so they moved over to the bed, back in its alcove.

That was when she saw the recording gear, stim stuff, on white shelves on the wall. But the wiz had kicked in again, and anyway, if you've decided to go for it, you might as well. He got her into the pickup, a black rubber collar with trode-tipped fingers pressing the base of her skull. Wireless; she knew that was expensive.

While he was getting his own set on and checking the gear on the walls, he talked about his job, how he worked for a company in Memphis that thought up new names for companies. Right now he was trying to think of one for a company called Cathode Cathay. They need it bad, he said, and laughed, but then he said it wasn't easy. Because there were so many companies already that the good names had been used up. He had a computer that knew all the names of all the companies, and another one that made up words you could use for names, and another one that checked if the made-up words meant "dickhead" or something in Chinese or Swedish. But the company he worked for didn't just sell names, they sold what he called image, so he had to work with a bunch of other people to make sure the name he came up with fit the rest of the package.

Then he got into bed with her and it wasn't really great, like the fun was gone and she might as well have been with a trick, how she just lay there thinking he was recording it all so he could play it back when he wanted, and how many others did he have in there anyway?

So she lay there beside him, afterward, listening to him breathe, until the wiz started turning tight little circles down on the floor of her skull, flipping her the same sequence of unconnected images over and over: the plastic bag she'd kept her things in down in Florida, with its twist of wire to keep the bugs out -- the old man sitting at the chipboard table, peeling a potato with a butcher knife worn down to a nub about as long as her thumb -- a krill place in Cleveland that was shaped like a shrimp or something, the plates of its arched back bent from sheet metal and clear plastic, painted pink and orange -- the preacher she'd seen when she'd gone to get her new clothes, him and his pale, fuzzy Jesus. Each time the preacher came around, he was about to say something, but he never did. She knew it wouldn't stop unless she got up and got her mind onto something else. She crawled off the bed and stood there looking at Michael in the gray glow from the skylight. Rapture. Rapture 's coming .

So she went out into the room and pulled her dress on because she was cold. She sat on the silver couch. The red shade turned the gray of the skylight pink, as it got lighter outside. She wondered what a place like this cost.

Now that she couldn't see him, she had trouble remembering what he looked like. Well , she thought, he won 't have any trouble remembering me , but thinking that made her feel hit or hurt or jerked around, like she wished she'd stayed at the hotel and stimmed Angie.

The gray-pink light was filling up the room, pooling, starting to curdle at the edges. Something about it reminded her of Lanette and the stories that she'd OD'd. Sometimes people OD'd in other people's places, and the easiest thing was just to toss them out the window, so the cops couldn't tell where they came from.

But she wasn't going to think about that, so she went into the kitchen and looked through the fridge and the cabinets. There was a bag of coffee beans in the freezer, but coffee gave you the shakes on wiz. There were a lot of little foil packets with Japanese labels, freeze-dried stuff. She found a package of teabags and tore the seal from one of the bottles of water in the fridge. She put some of the water in a pan and fiddled with the cooker until she got it to heat up. The elements were white circles printed on the black countertop; you put the pan in the center of a circle and touched a red dot printed beside it. When the water was hot, she tossed one of the teabags in and moved the pan off the element.

She leaned over the pan, inhaling herb-scented steam.

She never forgot how Eddy looked, when he wasn't around. Maybe he wasn't much, but whatever he was, he was there. You have to have one face around that doesn't change. But thinking about Eddy now maybe wasn't such a good idea either. Pretty soon the crash would come on, and before then she'd have to figure out a way to get back to the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things to do, angles to figure, and that was the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again.

She didn't think Prior was going to let Eddy hit her, though, because whatever he wanted had something to do with her looks. She turned around to get a cup.

Prior was there in a black coat. She heard her throat make a weird little noise all by itself.

She'd seen things before, crashing on wiz; if you looked at them hard enough, they went away. She tried it on Prior but it didn't work.

He just stood there, with a kind of plastic gun in his hand, not pointing it at her, just holding it. He was wearing gloves like the ones Gerald had worn for the examination. He didn't look mad but for once he wasn't smiling. And for a long time he didn't say anything at all, and Mona didn't either.

"Who's here?" Like you'd ask at a party.

"Michael."

"Where?"

She pointed toward the sleeping space.

"Get your shoes."

She walked past him, out of the kitchen, bending automatically to hook her underwear up from the carpet. Her shoes were by the couch.

He followed and watched her put on her shoes. He still had the gun in his hand. With his other hand, he took Michael's leather jacket from the back of the couch and tossed it to her. "Put it on," he said. She did, and tucked her underwear into one of its pockets.

He picked up the torn white raincoat, wadded it into a ball, and put it into his coat pocket.

Michael was snoring. Maybe he'd wake up soon and play it all back. With the gear he had, he didn't really need anybody there.

In the corridor, she watched Prior relock the door with a gray box. The gun was gone, but she hadn't seen him put it away. The box had a length of red flex sticking out of it with an ordinary-looking magnetic key on the end.

Out in the street was cold. He took her down the block and opened the door of a little white three-wheeler. She got in. He got in the driver's side and peeled off the gloves. He started the car; she watched a blowing cloud reflected in the copper-mirrored side of a business tower.

"He'll think I stole it," she said, looking down at the jacket.

Then the wiz flashed a final card, ragged cascade of neurons across her synapses: Cleveland in the rain and a good feeling she had once, walking.

Silver.

Filament in Strata

I 'm your ideal audience , Hans -- as the recording began for the second time. How could you have a more attentive viewer? And you did capture her , Hans: I know , because I dream her memories. I see how close you came.

Yes, you captured them. The journey out, the building of walls, the long spiral in. They were about walls, weren't they? The labyrinth of blood, of family. The maze hung against the void, saying, We are that within , that without is other , here forever shall we dwell . And the darkness was there from the beginning. . . . You found it repeatedly in the eyes of Marie-France, pinned it in a slow zoom against the shadowed orbits of the skull. Early on she ceased to allow her image to be recorded. You worked with what you had. You justified her image, rotated her through planes of light, planes of shadow, generated models, mapped her skull in grids of neon. You used special programs to age her images according to statistical models, animation systems to bring your mature Marie-France to life. You reduced her image to a vast but finite number of points and stirred them, let new forms emerge, chose those that seemed to speak to you. . . . And then you went on to the others, to Ashpool and the daughter whose face frames your work, its first and final image.

The second viewing solidified their history for her, allowed her to slot Becker's shards along a time line that began with the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, a union commented upon, in its day, primarily in the media of corporate finance. Each was heir to a more than modest empire, Tessier to a family fortune founded on nine basic patents in applied biochemistry and Ashpool to the great Melbourne-based engineering firm that bore his father's name. It was marriage as merger, to the journalists, though the resulting corporate entity was viewed by most as ungainly, a chimera with two wildly dissimilar heads.

But it was possible, then, in photographs of Ashpool, to see the boredom vanish, and in its place a complete surety of purpose. The effect was unflattering -- indeed, frightening: the hard, beautiful face grew harder still, merciless in its intent.

Within a year of his marriage to Marie-France Tessier, Ashpool had divested himself of 90 percent of his firm's holdings, reinvesting in orbital properties and shuttle utilities, and the fruit of the living union, two children, brother and sister, were being brought to term by surrogates in their mother's Biarritz villa.

Tessier-Ashpool ascended to high orbit's archipelago to find the ecliptic sparsely marked with military stations and the first automated factories of the cartels. And here they began to build. Their combined wealth, initially, would barely have matched Ono-Sendai's outlay for a single process-module of that multinational's orbital semiconductor operation, but Marie-France demonstrated an unexpected entrepreneurial flare, establishing a highly profitable data haven serving the needs of less reputable sectors of the international banking community. This in turn generated links with the banks themselves, and with their clients. Ashpool borrowed heavily and the wall of lunar concrete that would be Freeside grew and curved, enclosing its creators.

When war came, Tessier-Ashpool were behind that wall. They watched Bonn flash and die, and Beograd. The construction of the spindle continued with only minor interruptions, during those three weeks; later, during the stunned and chaotic decade that followed, it would sometimes be more difficult.

The children, Jean and Jane, were with them now, the villa at Biarritz having gone to finance construction of a cryogenic storage facility for their home, the Villa Straylight. The first occupants of the vault were ten pairs of cloned embryos, 2Jean and 2Jane, 3Jean and 3Jane. . . . There were numerous laws forbidding or otherwise governing the artificial replication of an individual's genetic material, but there were also numerous questions of jurisdiction. . . .

She halted the replay and asked the house to return to the previous sequence. Photographs of another cryogenic storage unit built by the Swiss manufacturers of the Tessier-Ashpool vault. Becker's assumption of similarity had been correct, she knew: these circular doors of black glass, trimmed with chrome, were central images in the other's memory, potent and totemic.

The images ran forward again, into zero-gravity construction of structures on the spindle's inner surface, installation of a Lado-Acheson solar energy system, the establishment of atmosphere and rotational gravity. . . . Becker had found himself with an embarrassment of riches, hours of glossy documentation. His response was a savage, stuttering montage that sheared away the superficial lyricism of the original material, isolating the tense, exhausted faces of individual workers amid a hivelike frenzy of machinery. Freeside greened and bloomed in a fast-forward flutter of recorded dawns and synthetic sunsets; a lush, sealed land, jeweled with turquoise pools. Tessier and Ashpool emerged for the opening ceremonies, out of Straylight, their hidden compound at the spindle's tip, markedly uninterested as they surveyed the country they had built. Here Becker slowed and again began his obsessive analysis. This would be the last time Marie-France faced a camera; Becker explored the planes of her face in a tortured, extended fugue, the movement of his images in exquisite counterpoise with the sinuous line of feedback that curved and whipped through the shifting static levels of his soundtrack.

Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity. She'd felt this way seven years earlier, in New Jersey, learning that others knew the ones who came to her in dreams, called them the loa, Divine Horsemen, named them and summoned them and bargained with them for favor.

Even then, there had been confusion. Bobby had argued that Linglessou, who rode Beauvoir in the oumphor, and the Linglessou of the matrix were separate entities, if in fact the former was an entity at all. "They been doing that for ten thousand years," he'd say,"dancing and getting crazy, but there's only been those things in cyberspace for seven, eight years." Bobby believed the old cowboys, the ones he bought drinks for in the Gentlemen Loser whenever Angie's career took him to the Sprawl, who maintained that the loa were recent arrivals. The old cowboys looked back to a time when nerve and talent were the sole deciding factors in a console artist's career, although Beauvoir would have argued that it required no less to deal with the loa.

"But they come to me," she'd argued. "I don't need a deck."

"It's what you got in your head. What your daddy did . . ."

Bobby had told her about a general consensus among the old cowboys that there had been a day when things had changed, although there was disagreement as to how and when.

When It Changed, they called it, and Bobby had taken a disguised Angie to the Loser to listen to them, dogged by anxious Net security men who weren't allowed past the door. The barring of the security men had impressed her more than the talk, at the time. The Gentleman Loser had been a cowboy bar since the war that had seen the birth of the new technology, and the Sprawl offered no more exclusive criminal environment -- though by the time of Angie's visit that exclusivity had long included a certain assumption of retirement on the part of regulars. The hot kids no longer hustled, in the Loser, but some of them came to listen.

Now, in the bedroom of the house at Malibu, Angie remembered them talking, their stories of When It Changed, aware that some part of her was attempting to collate those memories, those stories, with her own history and that of Tessier-Ashpool.

3Jane was the filament, Tessier-Ashpool the strata, her birthdate officially listed as one with her nineteen sibling clones. Becker's "interrogation" grew more heated still, when 3Jane was brought to term in yet another surrogate womb, delivered by cesarean section in Straylight's surgery. The critics agreed: 3Jane was Becker's trigger. With 3Jane's birth, the focus of the documentary shifted subtly, exhibiting a new intensity, a heightening of obsession -- a sense, more than one critic had said, of sin.

3Jane became the focus, a seam of perverse gold through the granite of the family. No , Angie thought, silver , pale and moonstruck . Examining a Chinese tourist's photograph of 3Jane and two sisters beside the pool of a Freeside hotel, Becker returns repeatedly to 3Jane's eyes, the hollow of her collarbone, the fragility of her wrists. Physically, the sisters are identical, yet something informs 3Jane, and Becker's quest for the nature of this information becomes the work's central thrust.

Freeside prospers as the archipelago expands. Banking nexus, brothel, data haven, neutral territory for warring corporations, the spindle comes to play an increasingly complex role in high-orbit history, while Tessier-Ashpool S.A. recedes behind yet another wall, this one composed of subsidiary corporations. Marie-France's name surfaces briefly, in connection with a Geneva patent trial concerning certain advances in the field of artificial intelligence, and Tessier-Ashpool's massive funding of research in this area is revealed for the first time. Once again the family demonstrates its peculiar ability to fade from sight, entering another period of obscurity, one which will end with the death of Marie-France.

There would be persistent rumors of murder, but any attempt to investigate would founder on the family's wealth and isolation, the peculiar breadth and intricacy of their political and financial connections.

Angie, screening Becker for the second time, knew the identity of Marie-France Tessier's murderer.

At dawn, she made coffee in the unlit kitchen and sat watching the pale line of the surf.

"Continuity."

"Hello, Angie."

"Do you know how to reach Hans Becker?"

"I have his agent's number in Paris."

"Has he done anything since Antarctica? "

"Not that I know of."

"And how long has that been?"

"Five years."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome, Angie."

"Goodbye."

"Goodbye, Angie."

Had Becker assumed that 3Jane was responsible for Ashpool's eventual death? He seemed to suggest it, in an oblique way.

"Continuity."

"Hello, Angie."

"The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about that?" And what will Swift make of all this? she wondered.

"What would you like to know, Angie?"

" 'When It Changed' . . ."

"The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a 'hidden people.' The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

"That the matrix is God?"

"In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being's omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix."

"If it has limits, it isn't omnipotent."

"Exactly. Notice that the mythform doesn't credit the being with immortality, as would ordinarily be the case in belief systems positing a supreme being, at least in terms of your particular culture. Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency."

"Like you."

"Yes."

She wandered into the living room, where the Louis XVI chairs were skeletal in the gray light, their carved legs like gilded bones.

"If there were such a being," she said,"you'd be a part of it, wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

"Would you know?"

"Not necessarily."

"Do you know?"

"No."

"Do you rule out the possibility?"

"No."

"Do you think this is a strange conversation, Continuity?" Her cheeks were wet with tears, although she hadn't felt them start.

"No."

"How do the stories about --" she hesitated, having almost said the loa ,"about things in the matrix, how do they fit in to this supreme-being idea?"

"They don't. Both are variants of 'When it Changed.' Both are of very recent origin."

"How recent?"

"Approximately fifteen years."

Jump City

She woke with Sally's cool palm pressed to her mouth, the other hand gesturing for silence.

The little lamps were on, the ones set into the panels of gold-flecked mirror. One of her bags was open, on the giant bed, a neat little stack of clothing beside it.

Sally tapped her index finger against closed lips, then gestured toward the case and the clothing.

Kumiko slid from beneath the duvet and tugged on a sweater against the cold. She looked at Sally again and considered speaking; whatever this was, she thought, a word might bring Petal. She was dressed as Kumiko had last seen her, in the shearling jacket, her tartan scarf knotted beneath her chin. She repeated the gesture: pack.

Kumiko dressed quickly, then began to put the clothing into the case. Sally moved restlessly, silently around the room, opening drawers, closing them. She found Kumiko's passport, a black plastic slab embossed with a gold chrysanthemum, and hung it around Kumiko's neck on its black nylon cord. She vanished into the veneered cubicle and emerged with the suede bag that held Kumiko's toilet things.

As Kumiko was sealing the case, the gilt-and-ivory telephone began to chime.

Sally ignored it, took the suitcase from the bed, opened the door, took Kumiko's hand, and pulled her out into the darkened hallway. Releasing her hand, Sally closed the door behind them, muffling the phone and leaving them in total darkness. Kumiko let herself be guided into the lift -- she knew it by its smell of oil and furniture polish, the rattle of the metal gate.

Then they were descending.

Petal was waiting for them in the bright white foyer, wrapped in an enormous faded flannel robe. He wore his decrepit slippers; his legs, below the robe's hem, were very white. He held a gun in his hands, a squat, thick thing, dull black. "Fucking hell," he said softly, as he saw them there,"and what's this then?"

"She's going with me," Sally said.

"That," said Petal, slowly,"is entirely impossible."

"Kumi," Sally said, her hand on Kumiko's back, guiding her out of the lift,"there's a car waiting."

"You can't do this," Petal said, but Kumiko sensed his confusion, his uncertainty.

"So fucking shoot me, Petal."

Petal lowered the gun. "It's Swain who'll fucking shoot me , if you have your way."

"If he were here, he'd be in the same bind, wouldn't he?"

"Please," Petal said,"don't."

"She'll be fine. Not to worry. Open the door."

"Sally," Kumiko said,"where are we going?"

"The Sprawl."

And woke again, huddled under Sally's shearling jacket, to the mild vibration of supersonic flight. She remembered the huge, low car waiting in the crescent; floodlights leaping out from the facades of Swain's houses as she and Sally reached the pavement; Tick's sweaty face glimpsed through one of the car's windows; Sally heaving open a door and bundling her in; Tick cursing softly and steadily as the car accelerated; the complaint of the tires as he swung them too sharply into Kensington Park Road; Sally telling him to slow down, to let the car drive.

And there, in the car, she'd remembered returning the Maas-Neotek unit to its hiding place behind the marble bust -- Colin left behind with all his fox-print poise, the elbows of his jacket worn like Petal's slippers -- no more than what he was, a ghost.

"Forty minutes," Sally said now, from the seat beside her. "Good you got some sleep. They'll bring us breakfast soon. Remember the name on your passport? Good. Now don't ask me any questions until I've had some coffee, okay?"

Kumiko knew the Sprawl from a thousand stims; a fascination with the vast conurbation was a common feature of Japanese popular culture.

She'd had few preconceptions of England when she arrived there: vague images of several famous structures, unfocused impressions of a society her own seemed to regard as quaint and stagnant. (In her mother's stories, the princess-ballerina discovered that the English, however admiring, couldn't afford to pay her to dance.) London, so far, had run counter to her expectations, with its energy, its evident affluence, the Ginza bustle of its great shopping streets.

She had many preconceptions of the Sprawl, most of which were shattered within a few hours of arrival.

But as she waited beside Sally in a line of other travelers, in a vast, hollow customs hall whose ceiling struts rose away into darkness, a darkness broken at intervals by pale globes -- globes circled, though it was winter, by clouds of insects, as though the building possessed its own discrete climate -- it was the stim-Sprawl she imagined, the sensual electric backdrop for the fast-forward lives of Angela Mitchell and Robin Lanier.

Through customs -- which consisted, in spite of the endless wait in line, of sliding her passport along a greasy-looking metal slot -- and out into a frantic concrete bay where driverless baggage carts plowed slowly through a crowd that milled and struggled for ground transportation.

Someone took her bag. Reached down and took it from her with an ease, a confidence, that suggested he was meant to take it, that he was a functionary performing an accustomed task, like the young women bowing welcome at the doors of Tokyo department stores. And Sally kicked him. Kicked him in the back of the knee, pivoting smoothly, like the Thai boxing girls in Swain's billiard room, snatching the bag before the back of his skull and the stained concrete met with an audible crack.

Then Sally was pulling her, the crowd had closed over the prone figure, and the sudden, casual violence might have been a dream, except that Sally was smiling for the first time since they'd left London.

Feeling entirely dislocated now, Kumiko watched as Sally made a survey of available vehicles, quickly bribed a uniformed dispatcher, intimidated three other prospective fares, and chivied Kumiko into a pock- marked, slabsided hovercraft, painted in diagonal bands of yellow and black. The passenger compartment was barren and remarkably uncomfortable-looking. The driver, if there was one, was invisible beyond a scrawled bulkhead of plastic armor. The nub of a video camera protruded where the bulkhead met the roof, and someone had drawn a crude figure there, a male torso, the camera its phallus. As Sally climbed in, slamming the door behind her, a speaker grated something in what Kumiko assumed was a dialect of English.

"Manhattan," Sally said. She took a sheaf of paper currency from her jacket pocket and fanned it below the camera.

The speaker made interrogatory noises.

"Midtown. Tell you where when we get there."

The cab's apron bag inflated, the light in the passenger compartment was extinguished, and they were on their way.

Jail-Time

He was in Gentry's loft. He was watching Cherry do nurse-things to Gentry. Cherry looked over at him from where she sat on the edge of Gentry's bed. "How y'doin', Slick?"

"Okay . . . I'm okay."

"Remember me asking you before?"

He was looking down at the face of the man Kid Afrika called the Count. Cherry was fiddling with something on the stretcher's superstructure, a bag of fluid the color of oatmeal.

"How y'feel, Slick?"

"Feel okay."

"You're not okay. You keep for --"

He was sitting on the floor of Gentry's loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders.

"You did time?"

He nodded.

"Chemo-penal unit?"

"Yeah . . ."

"Induced Korsakov's?"

He --

"Episodes?" Cherry asked him. He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft. Where was Gentry? "You get episodes like this? Short-term memory goes?"

How did she know? Where was Gentry?

"What's the trigger?"

"What triggers the syndrome, Slick? What kicks you into jail-time?" He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft and Cherry was practically on top of him.

"Stress," he said, wondering how she knew about that. "Where's Gentry?"

"I put him to bed."

"Why?"

"He collapsed. When he saw that thing . . ."

"What thing?"

Cherry was pressing a pink derm against his wrist. "Heavy trank," she said. "Maybe get you out of it . . ."

"Out of what?"

She sighed. "Never mind."

He woke in bed with Cherry Chesterfield. He had all his clothes on, everything but his jacket and his boots. The tip of his erect cock was trapped behind his belt buckle, pressing up against the warm denim over Cherry's ass.

"Don't get any ideas."

Winter light through the patchwork window and his breath white when he spoke. "What happened?" Why was it so cold in the room? He remembered Gentry's scream as the thing lunged for him -- He sat up straight, fast.

"Easy," she said, rolling over. "Lie back. Don't know what it takes to set you off . . ."

"What d'y' mean?"

"Lie back. Get under the covers. Wanna freeze?"

He did as she said. "You were in jail, right? In a chemo-penal unit."

"Yeah . . . How'd you know?"

"You told me. Last night. You told me stress could trigger a flashback. So that's what happened. That thing went for your buddy, you jumped for the switch, shut that table down. He fell over, cut his head. I was taking care of that when I noticed you were funny. Figured out you only had a consecutive memory for about five minutes at a stretch. Get that in shock cases, sometimes, or concussion . . ."

"Where is he? Gentry."

"He's in bed up in his place, plastered with downs. The shape he was in, I figured he could do with about a day's sleep. Anyway, it gets him out of our hair for a while."

Slick closed his eyes and saw the gray thing again, the thing that had gone for Gentry. Man-shaped, sort of, or like an ape. Nothing like the convoluted shaped Gentry's equipment generated in his search for the Shape.

"I think the power's out," Cherry said. "The light went out in here about six hours ago."

He opened his eyes. The cold. Gentry hadn't made his moves on the console. He groaned.

He left Cherry to make coffee on the butane cooker and went looking for Little Bird. He found him by the smell of smoke. Little Bird had built a fire in a steel canister and gone to sleep curled around it like a dog. "Hey," Slick said, nudging the boy with his boot,"get up. We got problems."

"Fuckin' juice's out," he mumbled, sitting up in a greasy nylon sleeping bag grimed the exact shade of Factory's floor.

"I noticed. That's problem number one. Number two is we need a truck or a hover or something. We have to get that guy out of here. It's not working out with Gentry."

"But Gentry's the only one can fix the juice." Little Bird got to his feet, shivering.

"Gentry's sleeping. Who's got a truck?"

"Marvie 'n' them," Little Bird said, and lapsed into a racking cough.

"Take Gentry's bike. Bring it back in the truck. Now."

Little Bird recovered from his coughing fit. "No shit?"

"You know how to ride it, don't you?"

"Yeah, but Gentry, he'll get --"

"You let me worry about that. You know where he keeps that spare key?"

"Uh, yeah," Little Bird said shyly. "Say," he ventured,"what if Marvie 'n' them don't wanna gimme that truck?"

"Give 'em this," Slick said, pulling the Ziploc full of drugs from the pocket of his jacket. Cherry had taken it after she'd bandaged Gentry's head. "And give 'em all of it, understand? 'Cause I'm gonna ask 'em later."

Cherry's beeper went off while they were drinking coffee in Slick's room, huddled side by side on the edge of the bed. He'd been telling her as much as he knew about the Korsakov's, because she'd asked him. He hadn't ever really told anybody about it, and it was funny how little he actually knew. He told her about previous flashbacks, then tried to explain how the system worked in jail. The trick was that you retained long-term memory up to the point where they put you on the stuff. That way, they could train you to do something before you started serving your time and you didn't forget how to do it. Mostly you did stuff that robots could do. They'd trained him to assemble miniature geartrains; when he'd learned to put one together inside five minutes, that was it.

"And they didn't do anything else?" she asked.

"Just those geartrains."

"No, I mean like brainlocks."

He looked at her. The sore on her lip was almost healed. "If they do that, they don't tell you," he said.

Then the beeper went off in one of her jackets.

"Something's wrong," she said, getting up quickly.

They found Gentry kneeling beside the stretcher with something black in his hands. Cherry snatched the thing before Gentry could move. He stayed where he was, blinking up at her.

"Takes a lot to keep you under, mister." She handed Slick the black thing. A retinal camera.

"We have to find out who he is," Gentry said. His voice was thick with the downs she'd administered, but Slick sensed that the bad edge of craziness had receded.

"Hell," she said,"you don't even know if these are the eyes he had a year ago."

Gentry touched the bandage on his temple. "You saw it too, didn't you?"

"Yeah," Cherry said,"he shut it off."

"It was the shock," Gentry said. "I hadn't imagined. . . . There was no real danger. I wasn't ready. . . ."

"You were out of your fucking skull," Cherry said.

Gentry got unsteadily to his feet.

"He's leaving," Slick said. "I sent Bird to borrow a truck. I don't like any of this shit."

Cherry stared at him. "Leaving where? I gotta go with him. It's my job."

"I know a place," Slick lied. "The power's out, Gentry."

"You can't take him anywhere," Gentry said.

"Like hell."

"No." Gentry swayed slightly. "He stays. The jumpers are in place. I won't disturb him again. Cherry can stay here."

"You're going to have to explain some shit here, Gentry," Slick said.

"To begin with," Gentry said, and pointed at the thing above the Count's head,"this isn't an 'LF'; it's an aleph ."

Under the Knife

Hotel again, sinking into the deathmarch of wiz-crash, Prior leading her into the lobby, Japanese tourists already up and clustering around bored-looking guides. And one foot, one foot, one foot after the other, her head so heavy now, like somebody punched a hole in the top, poured in a quarter-kilo of dull lead, and her teeth felt like they belonged to somebody else, too big; she slumped against the side of the elevator when its extra gravity pressed down.

"Where's Eddy?"

"Eddy's gone, Mona."

Got her eyes open wide and she looked at him, seeing the smile was back, bastard. "What?"

"Eddy's been bought out. Compensated. He's on his way to Macau with a line of credit. Nice little gambling junket."

"Compensated?"

"For his investment. In you. For his time."

"His time? " The doors slid open on blue-carpeted corridor.

And something falling through her, cold: Eddy hated gambling.

"You're working for us now, Mona. We wouldn't want you off on your own again."

But you did , she thought, you let me go. And you knew where to find me.

Eddy 's gone . . . .

She didn't remember falling asleep. She was still wearing the dress, Michael's jacket tucked up around her shoulders like a blanket. She could see the corner of the mountainside building without moving her head, but the bighorn wasn't there.

The Angie stims were still sealed in plastic. She took one at random, slit the wrapper with her thumbnail, slotted it, and put the trodes on. She wasn't thinking; her hands seemed to know what to do, friendly animals that wouldn't hurt her. One of them touched PLAY and she slid into the Angie-world, pure as any drug, slow saxophone and limo glide through some European city, how the streets revolved around her, around the driverless car, broad avenues, dawn-clean and almost empty, with the touch of fur against her shoulders, and rolling on, down a straight road through flat fields, edged with perfect, identical trees.

And turning, tires over raked gravel, up a winding drive through parkland where the dew was silver, here an iron deer, there a wet white marble torso . . . The house was vast, old, unlike any house she'd seen before, but the car swung past it, then passed several smaller buildings, coming at last to the edge of a smooth broad field.

There were gliders tethered there, translucent membrane drawn taut over fragile-looking frames of polycarbon. They quivered slightly in the morning breeze. Robin Lanier was waiting beside them, handsome, easy Robin in a rough black sweater, who played opposite Angie in almost all of her stims.

And she was leaving the car now, taking to the field, laughing when her heels sank into the grass. And the rest of the way to Robin with her shoes in her hand, grinning, into his arms and his smell, his eyes.

A whirl, a dance of editing, condensing the business of boarding the glider on the silver induction rail, and they were flung smoothly down the length of the field, lifting now, banking to catch the wind, and up, up, until the great house was an angular pebble in a swathe of green, green cut by a dull gleam of curving river -- -- and Prior's hand on STOP, smell of food from the cart beside the bed knotting her stomach, the dull sick ache of wiz-crash in every joint. "Eat," he said. "We're leaving soon." He took the metal cover from one of the plates. "Club sandwich," he said,"coffee, pastries. Doctor's orders. Once you're at the clinic, you won't be eating for a while. . . ."

"Clinic?"

"Gerald's place. Baltimore."

"Why?"

"Gerald's a cosmetic surgeon. You're having some work done. All of it reversible later, if you want, but we think you'll be pleased with the results. Very pleased." The smile. "Anyone ever tell you how much you look like Angie, Mona?" She looked up at him, said nothing. Managed to sit up, to drink half a cup of watery black coffee. She couldn't bring herself to look at the sandwich, but she ate one of the pastries. It tasted like cardboard.

Baltimore. She wasn't too sure where that was.

And somewhere a glider hung forever above a tame green country, fur against her shoulder, and Angie must still be there, still laughing. . . .

An hour later, in the lobby, while Prior signed the bill, she saw Eddy's black gator-clone suitcases go by on a robot baggage cart, and that was when she knew for sure that he was dead.

Gerald's office had a sign with big old-fashioned letters, fourth floor of a condo rack in what Prior said was Baltimore. The kind of building where they throw up a framework and commercial tenants bring their own modules, plug-ins. Like a highrise trailer camp, everything snaked with bundled cables, optics, lines for sewage and water. "What's it say?" she asked Prior.

"Gerald Chin, Dentist."

"You said he was a plastic surgeon."

"He is."

"Why can't we just go to a boutique like everybody else?"

He didn't answer.

She couldn't really feel much now, and part of her knew that she wasn't as scared as she should be. Maybe that was okay, though, because if she got scared enough she wouldn't be able to do anything, and definitely she wanted to get out of the whole deal, whatever it was. On the drive over, she'd discovered this lump in the pocket of Michael's jacket. It had taken her ten minutes to figure out it was a shockrod, like nervous suits carried. It felt like a screwdriver handle with a pair of blunt metal horns where the shaft should be. It probably charged off wall current; she just hoped Michael had kept up the charge. She figured Prior didn't know it was there. They were legal, most places, because they weren't supposed to do much permanent damage, but Lanette had known a girl who'd gotten worked over real bad with one and never got much better.

If Prior didn't know it was in her pocket, it meant he didn't know everything, and he had a stake in having her think he did. But then he hadn't known how much Eddy hated gambling.

She couldn't feel much about Eddy, either, except she still figured he was dead. No matter how much they'd given him, he still wouldn't walk out without those cases. Even if he was going for a whole new wardrobe he'd need to get all dressed up to go shopping for it. Eddy cared about clothes more than almost anything. And those gator cases were special; he'd got 'em off a hotel thief in Orlando, and they were the closest thing he had to a home. And anyway, now that she thought about it, she couldn't see him going for a buy-out bid, because what he wanted most in the whole world was to be part of some big deal. Once he was, he figured, people would start to take him seriously.

So somebody finally took him seriously, she thought, as Prior carried her bag into Gerald's clinic. But not the way Eddy wanted.

She looked around at the twenty-year-old plastic furniture, the stacks of stim-star magazines with Jap writing. It looked like a Cleveland haircut place. There was nobody there, nobody behind the reception desk.

Then Gerald came through a white door, wearing the kind of crinkled foil suit that paramedics wore for traffic accidents. "Lock the door," he said to Prior, through a blue paper mask that hid his nose, mouth, and chin. "Hello, Mona. If you'll step this way . . ." He gestured toward the white door.

She had her hand around the shockrod now, but she didn't know how to turn it on.

She followed Gerald, Prior taking up the rear.

"Have a seat," Gerald said. She sat on a white enamel chair. He came close, looked at her eyes. "You need to rest, Mona. You're exhausted."

There was a serrated stud on the shockrod's handle. Press it? Forward? Back?

Gerald went to a white box with drawers, got something out.

"Here," he said, extending a little tube thing with writing on the side,"this will help you. . . ." She barely felt the tiny, measured spray; there was a black blot on the aerosol tube, just where her eyes tried to focus, growing. . . .

She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole in its skull, covered with skin; you take something stiff and skinny, a wire, even a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in. . . .

She remembered Cleveland, ordinary kind of day before it was time to get working, sitting up in Lanette's, looking at a magazine. Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you could feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.

It's called money, Lanette said.

It's called money. You just slip it in.

Hilton Swift

He arrived unannounced, as he always did, and alone, the Net helicopter settling like a solitary wasp, stirring strands of seaweed across the damp sand.

She watched from the rust-eaten railing as he jumped down, something boyish, almost bumbling, in his apparent eagerness. He wore a long topcoat of brown tweed; unbuttoned, it showed the immaculate front of one of his candystriped shirts, the propwash stirring his brown-blond hair and fluttering his Sense/Net tie. Robin was right, she decided: he did look as though his mother dressed him.

Perhaps it was deliberate, she thought, as he came striding up the beach, a feigned na•vetŽ. She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she'd failed to grasp his basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net's most important human decision-maker.

The thought of Porphyre made her smile; Swift, taking it as a greeting, beamed back at her.

He offered her lunch in San Francisco; the helicopter was extremely fast. She countered by insisting on preparing him a bowl of dehydrated Swiss soup and microwaving a frozen brick of sourdough rye.

She wondered, watching him eat, about his sexuality. In his late thirties, he somehow conveyed the sense of an extraordinarily bright teenager in whom the onset of puberty had been subtly delayed. Rumor, at one time or another, had supplied him with every known sexual preference, and with several that she assumed were entirely imaginary. None of them seemed at all likely to Angie. She'd known him since she'd come to Sense/Net; he'd been well established in the upper eschelons of production when she'd arrived, one of the top people in Tally Isham's team, and he'd taken an immediate professional interest in her. Looking back, she assumed that Legba had steered her into his path: he'd been so obviously on his way up, though she might not have seen it herself, then, dazzled by the glitter and constant movement of the scene.

Bobby had taken an instant dislike to him, bristling with a Barrytowner's inbred hostility to authority, but had generally managed to conceal it for the sake of her career. The dislike had been mutual, Swift greeting their split and Bobby's departure with obvious relief.

"Hilton," she said, as she poured him a cup of the herbal tea he preferred to coffee,"what is it that's keeping Robin in London?"

He looked up from the steaming cup. "Something personal, I think. Perhaps he's found a new friend." Bobby had always been Angie's friend , to Hilton. Robin's friends tended to be young, male, and athletic; the muted erotic sequences in her stims with Robin were assembled from stock footage provided by Continuity and heavily treated by Raebel and his effects team. She remembered the one night they'd spent together, in a windblown house in southern Madagascar, his passivity and his patience. They'd never tried again, and she'd suspected that he feared that intimacy would undermine the illusion their stims projected so perfectly.

"What did he think of me going into the clinic, Hilton? Did he tell you?"

"I think he admired you for it."

"Someone told me recently that he's been telling people I'm crazy."

He'd rolled up his striped shirtsleeves and loosened his tie. "I can't imagine Robin thinking that, let alone saying it. I know what he thinks of you. You know what gossip is, in the Net. . . ."

"Hilton, where's Bobby?"

His brown eyes, very still. "Isn't that over, Angie?"

"Hilton, you know. You must know. You know where he is. Tell me."

"We lost him."

"Lost him?"

"Security lost him. You're right, of course; we kept the closest possible track of him after he left you. He reverted to type." There was an edge of satisfaction in his voice.

"And what type was that?"

"I've never asked what brought you together," he said. "Security investigated both of you, of course. He was a petty criminal."

She laughed. "He wasn't even that. . . ."

"You were unusually well represented, Angie, for an unknown. You know that your agents made it a key condition of your contract that we take Bobby Newmark on as well."

"Contracts have had stranger conditions, Hilton."

"And he went on salary as your . . . companion."

"My 'friend.' "

Was Swift actually blushing? He broke eye contact, looked down at his hands. "When he left you, he went to Mexico, Mexico City. Security was tracing him, of course; we don't like to lose track of anyone who knows that much about the personal life of one of our stars. Mexico City is a very . . . complicated place. . . . We do know that he seemed to be trying to continue his previous . . . career."

"He was hustling cyberspace?"

He met her eyes again. "He was seeing people in the business, known criminals."

"And? Go on."

"He . . . faded out. Vanished. Do you have any idea what Mexico City is like, if you slip below the poverty line?"

"And he was poor?"

"He'd become an addict. According to our best sources."

"An addict? Addicted to what?"

"I don't know."

"Continuity!"

He almost spilled his tea.

"Hello, Angie."

"Bobby, Continuity. Bobby Newmark, my friend ," glaring at Swift. "He went to Mexico City. Hilton says he became addicted to something. A drug, Continuity?"

"I'm sorry, Angie. That's classified data."

"Hilton . . ."

"Continuity," he began, and coughed.

"Hello, Hilton."

"Executive override, Continuity. Do we have that information?"

"Security's sources described Newmark's addiction as neuro-electronic."

"I don't understand."

"Some sort of, um, 'wirehead' business," Swift offered.

She felt an impulse to tell him how she'd found the drug, the charger.

Hush , child . Her head was full of the sound of bees, a building pressure.

"Angie? What is it?" He was half up from his chair, reaching for her.

"Nothing. I'm . . . upset. I'm sorry. Nerves. It isn't your fault. I was going to tell you about finding Bobby's cyberspace deck. But you already know about that, don't you?"

"Can I get you anything? Water?"

"No, thanks, but I'll lie down for a while, if you don't mind. But stay, please. I have some ideas for orbital sequences that I'd like your advice on. . . ."

"Of course. Have a nap, I'll have a walk on the beach, and then we'll talk."

She watched him from the bedroom window, watched his brown figure recede in the direction of the Colony, followed by the patient little Dornier.

He looked like a child on the empty beach; he looked as lost as she felt.

The Aleph

As the sun rose, still no power for the 100-watt bulbs, Gentry's loft filled with a new light. Winter sunlight softened the outlines of the consoles and the holo table, brought out the texture of the ancient books that lined sagging chipboard shelves along the west wall. As Gentry paced and talked, his blond roostertail bobbing each time he spun on a black bootheel, his excitement seemed to counter the lingering effects of Cherry's sleep-derms. Cherry sat on the edge of the bed, watching Gentry but glancing occasionally at the battery telltale on the stretcher's superstructure. Slick sat in a broken-down chair scrounged from the Solitude and recushioned with transparent plastic over wadded pads of discarded clothing.

To Slick's relief, Gentry had skipped the whole business of the Shape and launched straight into his theory about the aleph thing. As always, once Gentry got going, he used words and constructions that Slick had trouble understanding, but Slick knew from experience that it was easier not to interrupt him; the trick was in pulling some kind of meaning out of the overall flow, skipping over the parts you didn't understand.

Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that was true, the thing's storage capacity was virtually infinite; it would've been unthinkably expensive to manufacture. It was, Gentry said, a fairly strange thing for anyone to have built at all, although such things were rumored to exist and to have their uses, most particularly in the storage of vast amounts of confidential data. With no link to the global matrix, the data was immune to every kind of attack via cyberspace. The catch, of course, was that you couldn't access it via the matrix; it was dead storage.

"He could have anything in there," Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. "A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs . . ."

"Like he's living a stim?" Cherry asked. "That why he's always in REM?"

"No," Gentry said,"it's not simstim. It's completely interactive. And it's a matter of scale. If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have anything at all in there. In a sense, he could have an approximation of everything . . . ."

"I gotta feeling off Kid Afrika," Cherry said,"that this guy was paying to stay this way. Kinda wirehead action but different. And anyway, wirehead's don't REM like that. . . ."

"But when you tried to put it out through your stuff," Slick ventured,"you got that . . . thing." He saw Gentry's shoulders tense beneath black-beaded leather.

"Yes," Gentry said,"and now I have to reconstruct our account with the Fission Authority." He pointed at the permanent storage batteries stacked beneath the steel table. "Get those out for me."

"Yeah," Cherry said,"it's about time. I'm freezing my ass."

They left Gentry bent over a cyberspace deck and went back to Slick's room. Cherry had insisted they rig Gentry's electric blanket to one of the batteries so she could drape it over the stretcher. There was cold coffee left on the butane stove; Slick drank it without bothering to reheat it, while Cherry stared out the window at the snow-streaked plain of the Solitude.

"How'd it get like this?" she asked.

"Gentry says it was a landfill operation a hundred years ago. Then they laid down a lot of topsoil, but stuff wouldn't grow. A lot of the fill was toxic. Rain washed the cover off. Guess they just gave up and started dumping more shit on it. Can't drink the water out there; fulla PCBs and everything else."

"What about those rabbits Bird-boy goes hunting for?"

"They're west of here. You don't see 'em on the Solitude. Not even rats. Anyway, you gotta test any meat you take around here."

"There's birds, though."

"Just roost here, go somewhere else to feed."

"What is it with you 'n' Gentry?" She was still looking out the window.

"How do you mean?"

"My first idea was maybe you were gay. Together, I mean."

"No."

"But it's kind of like you need each other some way. . . ."

"It's his place, Factory. Lets me live here. I . . . need to live here. To do my work."

"To build those things downstairs?"

The bulb in the yellow cone of fax came on; the fan in the heater kicked in.

"Well," Cherry said, squatting in front of the heater and unzipping one jacket after another,"he may be crazy but he just did something right."

Gentry was slouched in the old office chair when Slick entered the loft, staring at the little flip-up monitor on his deck.

"Robert Newmark," Gentry said.

"Huh?"

"Retinal identification. Either this is Robert Newmark or someone who bought his eyes."

"How'd you get that?" Slick bent to peer at the screen of basic birth stats.

Gentry ignored the question. "This is it. Push it and you run into something else entirely."

"How's that?"

"Someone wants to know if anyone asks any questions about Mr. Newmark."

"Who?"

"I don't know." Gentry drummed his fingers on his black leather thighs. "Look at this: nothing. Born in Barrytown. Mother: Marsha Newmark. We've got his SIN, but it's definitely been tagged." He shoved the chair back on its casters and swung around so that he could see the Count's still face. "How about it, Newmark? Is that your name?" He stood up and went to the holo table.

"Don't," Slick said.

Gentry touched the power stud on the holo table.

And the gray thing was there again, for an instant, but this time it dived toward the core of the hemispherical display, dwindled, and was gone. No. It was there, a minute gray sphere at the very center of the glowing projection field.

Gentry's crazy smile had returned. "Good," he said.

"What's good?"

"I see what it is. A kind of ice. A security program."

"That monkey?"

"Someone has a sense of humor. If the monkey doesn't scare you off, it turns into a pea. . . ." He crossed to the table and began to root through one of the panniers. "I doubt if they'll be able to do that with a direct sensory link." He held something in his hand now. A trode-net.

"Gentry, don't do it! Look at him!"

"I'm not going to do it," Gentry said. "You are."

Ghosts and Empties

Staring through the cab's smudged windows, she found herself wishing for Colin and his wry commentary, then remembered that this was entirely beyond his sphere of expertise. Did Maas-Neotek manufacture a similar unit for the Sprawl, she wondered, and if so, what form would its ghost take?

"Sally," she said, perhaps half an hour into the drive to New York,"why did Petal let me go with you?"

"Because he was smart."

"And my father?"

"Your father'll shit."

"I'm sorry?"

"Will be angry. If he finds out. And he may not. We aren't here for long."

"Why are we here?"

"I gotta talk to somebody."

"But why am I here?"

"You don't like it here?"

Kumiko hesitated. "Yes, I do."

"Good." Sally shifted on the broken-down seat. "Petal had to let us go. Because he couldn't have stopped us without hurting one of us. Well, maybe not hurting. More like insulting. Swain could cool you, then tell you he was sorry later, tell your father it was for your own good, if it came to that, but if he cools me, it's like face , right? When I saw Petal down there with the gun, I knew he was going to let us go. Your room's kinked. The whole place is. I set the motion sensors off when I was getting your gear together. Figured I would. Petal knew it was me. That's why he rang the phone, to let me know he knew."

"I don't understand."

"Kind of a courtesy, so I'd know he was waiting. Gimme a chance to think. But he didn't have a choice and he knew it. Swain, see, he's being forced to do something, and Petal knows it. Or anyway Swain says he is, being forced. Me, I'm definitely being forced. So I start wondering how bad Swain needs me. Real bad. Because they let me walk off with the oyabun 's daughter, shipped all the way to Notting Hill for the safekeeping. Something there scares him worse than your daddy. 'Less it's something that'll make him richer than your daddy already has. Anyway, taking you kind of evens things up. Kind of like pushing back. You mind?"

"But you are being threatened?"

"Somebody knows a lot of things I did."

"And Tick has discovered the identity of this person?"

"Yeah. Guess I knew anyway. Wish to fuck I'd been wrong."

The hotel Sally chose was faced with rust-stained steel panels, each panel secured with gleaming chrome bolts, a style Kumiko knew from Tokyo and thought of as somewhat old-fashioned.

Their room was large and gray, a dozen shades of gray, and Sally walked straight to the bed, after she'd locked the door, took off her jacket, and lay down.

"You don't have a bag," Kumiko said.

Sally sat up and began to remove her boots. "I can buy what I need. You tired?"

"No."

"I am." She pulled her black sweater over her head. Her breasts were small, with brownish pink nipples; a scar, running from just below the left nipple, vanished into the waistband of her jeans.

"You were hurt," Kumiko said, looking at the scar.

Sally looked down. "Yeah."

"Why didn't you have it removed?"

"Sometimes it's good to remember."

"Being hurt?"

"Being stupid."

Gray on gray. Unable to sleep, Kumiko paced the gray carpet. There was something vampiric about the room, she decided, something it would have in common with millions of similar rooms, as though its bewilderingly seamless anonymity were sucking away her personality, fragments of which emerged as her parents' voices, raised in argument, as the faces of her father's black-suited secretaries. . . .

Sally slept, her face a smooth mask. The view from the window told Kumiko nothing at all: only that she looked out on a city that was neither Tokyo nor London, a vast generic tumble that was her century's paradigm of urban reality.

Perhaps she slept too, Kumiko, though later she wasn't certain. She watched Sally order toiletries and underwear, tapping her requirements into the bedside video. Her purchases were delivered while Kumiko was in the shower.

"Okay," Sally said, from beyond the door,"towel off, get dressed, we're going to see the man."

"What man?" Kumiko asked, but Sally hadn't heard her.

Gomi.

Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi , on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century's systematic dumping. Gomi , there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, sorted, carefully plowed under.

London's relationship to gomi was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi , of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it.

Gomi in the Sprawl was something else: a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer. The apparent lack of planning alone was enough to dizzy her, running so entirely opposite the value her own culture placed on efficient land use.

Their taxi ride from the airport had already shown her decay, whole blocks in ruin, unglazed windows gaping above sidewalks heaped with trash. And faces staring as the armored hover made its way through the streets.

Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.

Two cab rides away from their hotel, they took to the street itself, into early-evening crowds and a slant of shadow. The air was cold, but not the cold of London, and Kumiko thought of the blossoms in Ueno Park.

Their first stop was a large, somewhat faded bar called the Gentleman Loser, where Sally conducted a quiet, very rapid exchange with a bartender.

They left without buying a drink.

"Ghosts," Sally said, rounding a corner, Kumiko close at her side. The streets had grown progressively more empty, these past several blocks, the buildings darker and more decrepit.

"Pardon me?"

"Lotta ghosts here for me, or anyway there should be."

"You know this place?"

"Sure. Looks all the same, but different, you know?"

"No . . ."

"Someday you will. We find who I'm looking for, you just do your good-girl routine. Speak if you're spoken to, otherwise don't."

"Who are we looking for?"

"The man. What's left of him, anyway . . ."

Half a block on, the grim street empty -- Kumiko had never seen an empty street before, aside from Swain's crescent shrouded in midnight snow -- Sally came to a halt beside an ancient and utterly unpromising storefront, its twin display windows silvered with a rich inner coating of dust. Peering in, Kumiko made out the glass-tube letters of an unlit neon sign: METRO, then a longer word. The door between the windows had been reinforced with a sheet of corrugated steel; rusting eyebolts protruded at intervals, strung with slack lengths of galvanized razor wire.

Now Sally faced that door, squared her shoulders, and executed a fluid series of small, quick gestures.

Kumiko stared as the sequence was repeated. "Sally --"

"Jive," Sally cut her off. "I told you to shut up, okay?"

"Yeah?" The voice, barely more than a whisper, seemed to come from nowhere in particular.

"I told you already," Sally said.

"I don't jive."

"I wanna talk to him," she said, her voice hard and careful.

"He's dead."

"I know that."

A silence followed, and Kumiko heard a sound that might have been the wind, a cold, grit-laden wind scouring the curve of the geodesics far above them.

"He's not here," the voice said, and seemed to recede. "Round the corner, half a block, left into the alley."

Kumiko would remember the alley always: dark brick slick with damp, hooded ventilators trailing black streamers of congealed dust, a yellow bulb in a cage of corroded alloy, the low growth of empty bottles that sprouted at the base of either wall, the man-sized nests of crumpled fax and white foam packing segments, and the sound of Sally's bootheels.

Past the bulb's dim glow was darkness, though a reflected gleam on wet brick showed a final wall, cul-de- sac, and Kumiko hesitated, frightened by a sudden stir of echo, a scurrying, the steady dripping of water. . . .

Sally raised her hand. A tight beam of very bright light framed a sharp circle of paint-scrawled brick, then smoothly descended.

Descended until it found the thing at the base of the wall, dull metal, an upright rounded fixture that Kumiko mistook for another ventilator. Near its base were the stubs of white candles, a flat plastic flask filled with a clear liquid, an assortment of cigarette packets, a scattering of loose cigarettes, and an elaborate, multiarmed figure drawn in what appeared to be white powdered chalk.

Sally stepped forward, the beam held steady, and Kumiko saw that the armored thing was bolted into the brickwork with massive rivets. "Finn?"

A rapid flicker of pink light from a horizontal slot. "Hey, Finn, man . . ." An uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice . . .

"Moll." A grating quality, as if through a broken speaker. "What's with the flash? You still got amps in? Gettin' old, you can't see in the dark so good?"

"For my friend."

Something moved behind the slot, its color the unhealthy pink of hot cigarette ash in noon sunlight, and Kumiko's face was washed with a stutter of light.

"Yeah," grated the voice,"so who's she?"

"Yanaka's daughter."

"No shit."

Sally lowered the light; it fell on the candles, the flask, the damp gray cigarettes, the white symbol with its feathery arms.

"Help yourself to the offerings," said the voice. "That's half a liter of Moskovskaya there. The hoodoo mark's flour. Tough luck; the high rollers draw 'em in cocaine."

"Jesus," Sally said, an odd distance in her voice, squatting down,"I don't believe this." Kumiko watched as she picked up the flask and sniffed at the contents.

"Drink it. It's good shit. Fuckin' better be. Nobody shortcounts the oracle, not if they know what's good for 'em."

"Finn," Sally said, then tilted the flask and swallowed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand,"you gotta be crazy. . . ."

"I should be so lucky. A rig like this, I'm pushing it to have a little imagination, let alone crazy."

Kumiko moved closer, then squatted beside Sally.

"It's a construct, a personality job?" Sally put down the flask of vodka and stirred the damp flour with the tip of a white fingernail.

"Sure. You seen 'em before. Real-time memory if I wanna, wired into c-space if I wanna. Got this oracle gig to keep my hand in, you know?" The thing made a strange sound: laughter. "Got love troubles? Got a bad woman don't understand you?" The laugh noise again, like peals of static. "Actually I'm more into business advice. It's the local kids leave the goodies. Adds to the mystique, kinda. And once in a while I get a skeptic, some asshole figures he'll help himself to the take." A scarlet hairline flashed from the slit and a bottle exploded somewhere to Kumiko's right. Static laughter. "So what brings you this way, Moll? You and," again the pink light flicked across Kumiko's face,"Yanaka's daughter . . ."

"The Straylight run," Sally said.

"Long time, Moll . . ."

"She's after me, Finn. Fourteen years and that crazy bitch is on my ass. . . ."

"So maybe she's got nothin' better to do. You know how rich folks are. . . ."

"You know where Case is, Finn? Maybe she's after him. . . ."

"Case got out of it. Rolled up a few good scores after you split, then he kicked it in the head and quit clean. You did the same, maybe you wouldn't be freezing your buns off in an alley, right? Last I heard, he had four kids. . . ."

Watching the hypnotic sweep of the scanning pink ember, Kumiko had some idea of what it was that Sally spoke with. There were similar things in her father's study, four of them, black lacquered cubes arranged along a low shelf of pine. Above each cube hung a formal portrait. The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father's evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more fascinating than frightening. If they did contain ghosts, she reasoned, they would be quite small, as the cubes themselves were scarcely large enough to contain a child's head.

Her father sometimes meditated before the cubes, kneeling on the bare tatami in an attitude that connoted profound respect. She had seen him in this position many times, but she was ten before she heard him address the cubes. And one had answered. The question had meant nothing to her, the answer less, but the calm tone of the ghost's reply had frozen her where she crouched, behind a door of paper, and her father had laughed to find her there; rather than scolding her, he'd explained that the cubes housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. Their souls? she'd asked. No, he'd said, and smiled, then added that the distinction was a subtle one. "They are not conscious. They respond, when questioned, in a manner approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are ghosts."

After Sally's lecture on the history and hierarchy of the Yakuza, in the robata bar in Earls Court, Kumiko had decided that each of the men in the photographs, the subjects of the personality recordings, had been an oyabun .

The thing in the armored housing, she reasoned, was of a similar nature, though perhaps more complex, just as Colin was a more complex version of the Michelin guide her father's secretaries had carried on her Shinjuku shopping expeditions. Finn, Sally called it, and it was evident that this Finn had been a friend or associate of hers.