The bit-mapped fish swam back and forth.

That had been very creepy. She wasn't sure why, exactly, but it had been. Still was, kind of. She looked at the door to her bedroom and found herself wondering what she'd find there if she gestured for it. The bed, her Lo Rez Skyline poster, the agent of Lo greeting her in his mindless friendly way. But what if she found something else?

Something waiting. Like she could still hear that rattle, up the slope. Or what if she went to the wire-framed door where her mother's room would have been? What if she opened it and her mother's room was there after all, and not her mother, waiting, but something else?

She was creeping herself out, that was all. She looked at her stack of Lo/Rez alb.u.ms beside the lithographed lunch box, her virtual Venice beside that. Even her Music Master would seem like company now. She opened it, watching the Piazza decompress like some incredibly intricate paper pop-up book on fast-forward, facades and colonnades springing up around her, with the hour before a winter's dawn for backlight.

Turning from the water, where the prows of black gondolas bobbed like marks in some lost system of musical notation, she lifted her finger and shot forward into the maze, thinking as she did that this place had been as strange, in its way, as Masahiko's Walled City, and what was that all supposed to be about anyway?

And it was only as she crossed her third bridge that she noticed that he wasn't there.

-Hey.

She stopped. A shop window displayed the masks of Carnival, the really ancient ones. Black, p.e.n.i.s-nosed leather, empty eye-holes. A mirror draped with yellowed crepe.

Checking the Sandbenders to make sure she hadn't turned him off. She hadn't.

Chia closed her eyes and counted to three. Made herself feel the carpeted floor she sat on in the Hotel Di. She opened her eyes.

At the end of the narrow Venetian street, down the tilted, stepped cobbles, where it opened out into a small square or plaza, an unfamiliar figure stood beside the central fountain.

She pulled the goggles off without bothering to close Venice

Masahiko sat opposite her, his legs crossed, the black cups sucked up against his eyes. His lips were moving, silently, and his hands, on his knees, in their black tip-sets, traced tiny fingerpatterns in the air.

Maryalice was sitting on the furry pink bed with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She had a little square gray gun in her hand, and 188

Chia saw how the freshly glossed red of her nails contrasted with the pearly plastic of the handle.

'Started again," Maryalice said, around the cigarette. She pulled the trigger, causing a small golden flame to spring up from the muzzle, and used it to light her cigarette. "Tokyo. I'll tell you. Does it every time."

187.

27.That Physical Thing Laney was at a black rubber urinal in the Men's when he noticed the Russian combing his hair in the mirror.

Ar least it looked like black rubber, with sort of flOPPY edges. They obviously had the plumbing working, but he wondered what they'd say if you asked to make your own contribution to the Grotto? On his way here he'd noticed that one of the bars was topped with a slab of something murky green and translucent, lit from below, and he'd hoped they hadn't made that from what they'd sawn our of the stairwell.

Dinner was over and he'd probably had too mLich sake with it. He and Arleigh and Yamazaki had watched Rez meeting this new version of the idoru, the one w.i.l.l.y Jude saw as a big silver thermos. And Blackwell was having to get used to that, because Laney guessed that the bodyguard hadn't had any idea she'd be here, not until he'd walked in and Rez had told him.

Arleigh had talked with Lo through most of it, mainly about real estate. Different properties he owned around the world. Laney had listened to more of Yamazaki's ideas about accessing this teenage fan-club sruff~ and there might actually be something to that, but they'd have to try it to 6nd oLit. Blackwell hadn't said two words to anybody, drinking lager instead of sake and packing his food away as though he were trying to plug something, some gap in security that could be taken care of if you stuffed it methodically with enough

sashimi. The Australian was an ace with chopsticks; he could proba-

189.

r bly stick one in your eye at fifty paces. But the main show had been Rez and the idoru, and to a lesser extent Kuwayama, who'd carried on long conversations with them both. The other one, Ozaki, seemed to be the guy they brought along in case someone had to change the batteries in the silver thermos. And w.i.l.l.y Jude was amiable enough, but in about as content-free a way as possible.

Techs were supposed to be an easy source of whatever pa.s.sed for gossip in a given company, so Laney had tried a few openings in that direction, but Ozaki hadn't said any more than he'd had to. And since Laney couldn't get Rei Toei within his field of vision without starting to slide over into nodal mode, he'd had to conduct his evening's eavesdropping with whatever pick-up visuals were available. Arleigh wasn't too bad for that. There was something about the line of her jaw that he particularly liked, and kept coming back to.

Laney zipped up and went to wash his hands, the basin made of that same floppy-looking black stuff, and noticed that the Russian was still combing his hair. Laney had no way of knowing if the man was literally Russian or not, but he thought of him that way because of the black patent paratrooper boots with contrasting white st.i.tching, the pants with the black silk ribbon down the side, and the white leather evening jacket. Either Russian or one of those related jobs, but very definitely Kombinat-infiected, that mutant commiemafioso thing.

The Russian was combing his hair with a total concentration that made Laney think of a fly grooming itself with its front feet, He was very large, and had a large head, though it was mainly in the vertical, quite tall from the eyebrows up, seeming to taper very slightly toward the crown. For all the attention being given to the combing, the man didn't actually have much hair, not on top anyway, and Laney had thought these guys all went in for implants. Rydell had told him Kombinat types were all over Tokyo. Rydell had seen a doc.u.mentary about it, how they were so singularly and surrealistically brutal that n.o.body wanted to mess with them. Then Rydell had started to tell him about two Russians, San Francisco cops of some

190 kind, who he'd had some sort of run-in with, but Laney had to take a meeting with Rice Daniels and a make-up artist, and never heard the end of it.

Laney checked to see that he didn't have anything stuck in his teeth from dinner.

As he went out, the Russian was still combing.

He saw Yamazaki, blinking and looking lost. "It's back there," he said.

"What is?"

"The can."

"Can'?"

"Men's. The toilet."

"But I was looking for you."

"You found me."

"I observed, as we ate, that you avoided looking directly at the idoru."

"Right."

"I surmise that density of information is sufficient to allow nodal apprehension

"You got it."

Yamazaki nodded. "Ah. But this would not be the case with one of her videos, or even with a 'live' performance."

"Why not?" Laney had started back in the direction of their table.

"Bandwidth," Yamazaki said, "The version here tonight is high-bandwidth prototype."

"Are we compensated for beta-testing?"

"Can you describe the nature of nodal apprehension, please?" "Like memories," Laney said, "or clips from a movie. But something the drummer said made me think I was just seeing her latest video."

Someone shoved Laney out of the way, from behind, and he fell across the nearest table, breaking a gla.s.s. He felt the gla.s.s shatter under him and found himself staring straight down, for a second, into

2.

191.

the taut gray latex lap of a woman who screamed explosively just before the table gave way. Something, probably her knee, clipped him hard in the side of the head.