Chia picked up her gla.s.ses, slid them on, and hit big red.

-My a.s.s out of here.

And it was.

There on the edge of her bed, looking at the Lo Rez Skyline poster. Until Lo noticed. He stroked his half-grown mustache and grinned at .her.

"Hey, Chia."

"Hey." Experience kept it subvocal, for privacy's sake.

"What's up, girl?"

"I'm on an airplane. I'm on my way to j.a.pan."

"j.a.pan? Kicky. You do our Budokan disk?"

"I don't feel like talking, Lo." Not to a software agent, anyway, sweet as he might be.

"Easy." He shot her that catlike grin, his eyes wrinkling at the corners, and became a still image. Chia looked around, feeling disappointed. Things weren't quite the right size, somehow, or maybe she should've used those fractal packets that messed it all up a little, put dust in the corners and smudges around the light switch. Zona Rosa swore by them. When she was home, Chia liked it that the construct was cleaner than her room ever was. Now it made her homesick; made her miss the real thing.0

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She gestured for the living room, phasing past what would've been the door to her mother's bedroom. She'd barely wireframed it, here, and there was no there there, no interiority. The living room had its sketchy angles as well, and furniture she'd imported from a Playmobil system that predated her Sandbenders. Wonkily bitmapped fish swam monotonously around in a gla.s.s coffee table she'd built when she was nine. The trees through the front window were older still: perfectly cylindrical Crayola-brown trunks, each supporting an acid-green cotton ball of undifferentiated foliage. If she looked at these long enough, the Mumphalumphagus would appear outside, wanting to play, so she didn't.

She positioned herself on the Playmobil couch and looked at the programs scattered across the top of the coffee table. The Sandbenders system software looked like an old-fashioned canvas water bag, a sort of canteen (she'd had to consult What Things Are, her icon dictionary, to figure that out). It was worn and spectacularly organic, with tiny beads of water bulging through the tight weave of fabric. If you got in super close you saw things reflected in the individual droplets: circuitry that was like beadwork or the skin on a lizard's throat, a long empty beach under a gray sky, mountains in the rain, creek water over different-colored stones. She loved Sandbenders; they were the best. THE SANDBENDERS, OREGON, was screened faintly across the sweating canvas, as though it had almost faded away under a desert sun. SYSTEM 5.9. (She had all the upgrades, to 6.3. People said 6.4 was buggy.)

Beside the water bag lay her schoolwork, represented by a three-ring binder suffering the indignities of artificial bit-rot, its wire-frame cover festered with digital mung. She'd have to reformat that before she started her new school, she reminded herself. Too juvenile.

Her Lo/Rez collection, alb.u.ms, compilations and bootlegs, were displayed as the original cased disks. These were stacked up, as casually as possible, beside the archival material she'd managed to a.s.semble since being accepted into the Seattle chapter. This looked, thanks to a fortuitous file-swap with a member in Sweden, like a litho 34 Witlian, Gibson graphed tin lunch box, Rez and Lo peering stunned and fuzzy-eyed from its flat, rectangular lid. The Swedish fan had scanned the artwork from the five printed surfaces of the original, then mapped it over wireframe. The original was probably Nepalese, definitely unlicensed, and Chia appreciated the reverse cachet. Zona Rosa coveted a copy, but so far all she'd offered were a set of cheesy tv spots for the fifth Mexico Dome concert. They weren't nearly cheesy enough, and Chia wasn't prepared to 5W~tp. There was a shadowy Brazilian tour doc.u.mentary supposed to have been made by a public-access subsidiary of Globo. Chia wanted that, and Mexico was the same direction as Brazil.

She ran a finger down the stacked disks, her hand wireframed, the finger tipped with quivering mercury, and thought about the Rumor. There had been run~ors before, there were rumors now, there would always be rumors. There had been the rumor about Lo and that Danish model, that they were going to get married, and that had probably been true, ever~ though they never did. And there were always rumors about Rez atid different people. But that was people. The Danish model was people, as much as Chia thought she was a s...o...b..g. The Rumor was Sottiething else.

What, exactly, she was O~ her way to Tokyo to find out.

She selected Lo Rez Skyline

The virtual Venice her father had sent for her thirteenth birthday looked like an old dusty book with leather covers, the smooth brown leather scuffed in places mm a fine suede, the digital equivalent of washing denim in a machine full of golf b.a.l.l.s. It lay beside the featureless, textureless gray file that was her copy of the divorce decree and the custody agreement.

She pulled the Venice tOward her, opened it. The fish flickered out of phase, her system lauochmng a subroutine.

Venice decompressed.

The Piazza in midwinter monochrome, its facades texturemapped in marble, porphyry, polished granite, jasper, alabaster (the

rich mineral names scrolling at will in the menu of peripheral vi- 0

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sion). This city of winged lions and golden horses. This default hour of gray and perpetual dawn.

She could be alone here, or visit with the Music Master.

Her father, phoning from Singapore to wish her a happy birthday, had told her that Hitler, during his first and only visit, had slipped away to range the streets alone, in these same small hours, mad perhaps, and trotting like a dog.

Chia, who had only a vague idea who Hitler might have been, and that mainly from references in songs, understood the urge. The stones of the Piazza flowed beneath her like silk, as she raised a silvered finger and sped into the maze of bridges, water, arches, walls.

She had no idea what this place was meant to mean, the how or why of it, but i~ fit so perfectly into itself and the s.p.a.ce it occupied, water and stone slotting faultlessly into the mysterious whole.

The gnarliest piece of software ever, and here came the opening chords of "Positron Premonition."

Clinton Emory Hiliman, twenty-five: hairdresser, sushi chef, music journalist, p.o.r.no extra, reliable purveyor of proscribed fetal tissue cultures to three of the more endomorphic members of the decidedly meshbacked Dukes of Nuke 'Em, whose "Gulf War Baby" was eighteen with a bullet on the Billboard chart, in heavy rotation on I (heart) America, and had already been the subject of diplomatic protests from several Islamic states.

Kathy Torrance looked as though she might be prepared to be pleased. "And the fetal tissue, Laney?"

"Well," Laney said, putting the 'phones down beside the computer, "I think that might be the good part."

"Why?"

"It has to be Iraqi. They make a point of insisting on that. They won't shoot up any other kind."

"You're hired."

"I am?"

"You must have correlated the calls to Ventura with the parking charges from the garage in the Beverly Center. Although that running gag about 'Gulf War babies' would've been hard to miss."

"Wait a minute," Laney said. "You knew."

"It's the top segment on Wednesday's show." She closed the computer without bothering to turn off Clint Hiliman's detweaked chin. "But now I've had a chance to watch you work, Laney. You're a nat ural. I could almost believe there might actually be something to0

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5.Nodal Points that nodal point bulls.h.i.t. ome o~ your moves made no logical sense whatever, but I've just wached 3ou hone in, cold, on something it took three experienced researchers a month to excavate. You did it in just under half an hour."