funny frequency or something. All I can see's the projector and this kinda, kinda ectoplastic, right? Glow, like,"

The man seated between Jude and Mr. Kuwayama, whose name was Ozaki, bobbed apologetically injude's direction. "We regret this very much. We regret deeply. A slight adjustment is required, but it cannot be done at this time,"

"Hey," Jude said, "no big problem. I seen her already. I get all the music channels with these. That one where she's a Mongol princess or something, up in the mountains.

Laney lost a chopstick.

"The most recent single," Ozaki said.

"Yeah," Jude said, "that's pretty good. She wears that gold mask? Okay s.h.i.t." He popped a section of maki into his mouth and chewed.

180 L.

Chia and Masahiko sat facing one another on the white carpet. The room's only chair was a fragile-looking thing with twisted wire legs and a heart-shaped seat upholstered in pink metal-flake plastic. Neither of them wanted to sit on the bed. Chia had her Sandbenders across her knees and was working her fingers into her tip-sets. Masahiko's computer was on the carpet in front of him; he'd put its control-face back on and peeled a very compact pair of tip-sets out of the back of the cube, along with two small black oval cups on fine lengths of optical cable. Another length of the cable ran from his computer to a small open hatch at the back of the Sandbenders.

"Okay," Chia said, settling the last of her tips, "let's go. I've got to get hold of somebody.

"Yes," he said. He picked up the black cups, one in either hand, and placed them over his eyes. When he let go, they stayed there. It looked uncomfortable.

Chia reached up and pulled her own gla.s.ses down, over her eyes "What do I-"

Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. It wasn't even like porting. Software conflict? Faint 'impression of light through a fluttering of rags.

And then the thing before her: building or bioma.s.s or cliff face looming there, in countless unplanned strata, nothing about it even or regular. Accreted patchwork of shallow random balconies, thousands of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles of fog.

26.HakNani Stretching either way to the periphery of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a black (hr of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth of cable. And past this scribbled border a sky where colors crawled like gasoline on water.

"flak Nam," he said, beside her.

"What is it?"

"'City of darkness.' Between the walls of the world."

She remembered the scarf she'd seen, in his room behind the kitchen, its intricate map of something chaotic and compacted, tiny irregular segments of red and black and yellow. And then they were moving forward, toward a narrow opening. "It's a MUD, right?" Something like a larger, permanent version of the site the Tokyo chapter had erected for the meeting, or the tropical forest Kelsey and Zona had put up. But people played games in MUDs; they made up characters for themselves and pretended. Little kids did it, and lonely people.

"No," he said, "not a game." They were inside now, smoothly accelerating, and the squirming density of the thing was continual visual impact, an optical drumming. "Tai Chang Street." Walls scrawled and crawling with scrolling messages, spectral doorways pa.s.sing like cards in a shuffled deck.

And they were not alone: others there, ghost-figures whipping past, and everywhere the sense of eyes .

Fractal filth, bit-rot, the corridor of their pa.s.sage tented with crazy swoops of faintly flickering lines of some kind. "Alms House Backstreet." A sharp turn. Another. Then they were ascending a maze of twisting stairwells, still accelerating, and Chia took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Retinal fireworks bursting there, but the pressure was gone.

When she opened her eyes, they were in a much cleaner but no larger version of his room behind the kitchen in the restaurant. No empty ramen bowls, no piles of clothing. He was beside her on the sleeping ledge, staring at the shifting patterns on his computer's control-face. Beside it on the work-surface, her Sandbenders. The 182 texture-mapping was rudimentary, everything a little too smooth and glossy. She looked at him, curious to see how he'd present. A basic scan job, maybe a year out of date: his hair was shorter. He wore the same black tunic.

On the wall behind the computers was an animated version of the printed scarf, its red, black, and yellow bits pulsing slightly. A bright green line traced a route in from the perimeter; where it ended, bright green, concentric rings radiated from one particular yellow square.

She looked back at him, but he was still staring at the control-face.

Something chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and saw a small white rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge. She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate, up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming to a halt when it was in optimum position to be read. It was in that same font they'd used at Whiskey Clone, or one just like it. It said "Ku Klux Klan Kollectibles," and then some letters and numbers that didn't look like any kind of address she knew.

Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray blur scoot from under it. Flat, whirling, &st. It was on the white rectangle now, something like the shadow of a crab or spider, two-dimensional and multi-legged. It swallowed it, shot for the door.

"I have completed responsibility to Walled City," Masahiko said, turning from the control-face.

"What were those things?" Chia asked him.

"What things?"

"Like a business card, Crawled under the door. Then another thing, like a gray cut-out crab, that ate it."

"An advertis.e.m.e.nt," he decided, "and a sub-program that of fered criticism."3 "It didn't offer criticism; it ate it."o

2.

183.

"Perhaps the person who wrote the sub-program dislikes advertising. Many do. Or dislikes the advertiser. Political, aesthetic, personal reasons, all are possible."

Chia looked around at the reproduction of his tiny room. "Why don't you have a bigger site?" Instantly worried that it was because he was j.a.panese, and maybe they were just used to that. But still it was about the smallest virtual s.p.a.ce she could remember having been in, and it wasn't like a bigger one cost more, not unless you were like Zona and wanted yourself a whole country.

"The Walled City is a concept of scale. Very important. Scale is place, yes? Thirty-three thousand people inhabited original. Two-point-seven hectares. As many as fourteen stories,"

None of which made any sense to Chia. "I have to port, okay?"

"Of course," he said, and gestured toward her Sandbenders.

She was braced for that two-directions-at-once thing, but it didn't happen. The bit-mapped fish were swimming around in the gla.s.s coffee table. She looked out the window at the crayon trees and wondered where the Mumphalumpagus was. She hadn't seen it for a while. It was something her father had made for her when she was a baby, a big pink dinosaur with goof~y eyelashes.

She checked the table for mail, but there was nothing new.

She could phone from here. Call her mother. Sure.

-Hi, I'm in Tokyo. In a "love hotel." People are after me because somebody put something in my bag. So, uh, what do you think I should I do?

She tried porting to Kelsey's address instead, but all she got was that annoying marble anteroom and the voice, not Kelsey's, that said that Kelsey Van Troyer wasn't in at the moment. Chia exited without leaving a message. The next address she tried was Zona's, but Zona's provider was down. That happened a lot, in Mexico, and particularly in Mexico City, where Zona lived. She decided to try Zona's secret place, because it was on a mainframe in Arizona and it was never down. She knew Zona didn't like people just showing up there, because Zona didn't want the company that had built the original 184 website, and then forgotten about it, to discover that Zona had gotten in and set up her own country.

She asked the Sandbenders where she was porting from now and it said Helsinki, Finland. So that re-porting capability at the hotel was working, at least.

Just before twilight at Zona's, like always. Chia scanned rhe floor of a dry swimming pool, looking for Zona's lizards, but she didn't see them. Usually they were right there, waiting for you, bur not this rime. "Zona?"

Chia looked up, wondering if she'd see those spooky condor-things that Zona kept. The sky was beautiful but empty. Originally that sky had been the most important part of this place, and no expense had been spared. Serious sky: deep and clean and a crazy Mexican shade like pale turquoise. They'd brought people here to sell them airplanes, corporate jets, when the jets were still in the design phase. There'd been a white concrete landing strip, but Zona had folded it up into a canyon and mapped over it. All the local color was Zona's stuff: the cooking fires and the dead poois and the broken walls. She'd imported landscape files, maybe even real stuff she knew from somewhere in Mexico. "Zona?"

Something rattled, up the nearest ridge, like pebbles on a sheet of metal.

-It's okay. One of the lizards. She's just not here now. A twig snapped. Closer.

-Don't hick around, Zona.

But she exited.