The white cup clicking down into its saucer. "Then how can you know that she does? You're looking at her phone records, what she chooses to watch and when, the music she accesses. How could you possibly know that she's aware of your attention?"

The nodal point, he wanted to say. But didn't.

"I think you're working too hard, Laney. Five days off."

"No, I'd rather-"

"I can't afford to let you burn yourself out. I know the signs, Laney. Recreational leave, full pay, five days."

She added a travel bonus. Laney was sent to Slitscan's in-house agency and booked into a hollowed-out hilltop above Ixtapa, a hotel with vast stone spheres ranged across the polished concrete of its gla.s.s-walled lobby. Beyond the gla.s.s, iguanas regarded the registration staff with an ancient calm, green scales bright against dusty brown branches.

49.

Laney met a woman who said she edited lamps for a design house in San Francisco. Tuesday evening. I-Ie'd been in Mexico three hours. Drinks in the lobby bar.

lie asked her what that meant, to edit lamps. Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had t.i.tles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted. if people asked him what he did, he said he was a quant.i.tative a.n.a.lyst. He didn't try to explain the nodal points, or Kathy Torrance's theories about celebrity.

The woman replied that her company produced short-run furniture and accessories, lamps in particular. The actual manufacturing took place at any number of different locations, mainly in Northern California. Cottage industry. One maker might contract to do two hundred granite bases, another to lacquer and distress two hundred steel tubes in a very specific shade of blue. She brought out a notebook and showed him animated sketches. All of the things had a thin, spiky look that made him think of African insects he'd seen on the Nature Channel.

Did she design them? No. They were designed in Russia, in Moscow. She was the editor. She selected the suppliers of components. She oversaw manufacture, transport to San Francisco, a.s.sembly in what once had been a cannery. If the design doc.u.ments specified something that couldn't be provided, she either found a new supplier or negotiated a compromise in material or workmanship.

Laney asked who they sold to. People who wanted things other people didn't have, she said. Or that other people didn't like? That too, she said. Did she enjoy it? Yes. Because she generally liked the things the Russians designed, and she tended to like the people who manufactured the components. Best of all, she told him, she liked the feeling of bringing something new into the world, of watching the sketches from Moscow finally become objects on the floor of the former cannery.

It's there, one day, she said, and you can look at it, and touch it, and know whether or not it's good.

50 Laney considered this. She seemed very calm. Shadows lengthened with almost visible speed across the floor of glossy concrete.

lie put his hand over hers.

And touch it, and know whether or not it's good

Just before dawn, the editor of lamps asleep in his bed, he watched the curve of the bay from the suite's balcony, the moon a milky thing, translucent, nearly gone.

In the night, in the Federal District, somewhere east of here, there had been rocket attacks and rumors of chemical agents, the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.

Birds were waking in the trees around him, a sound he knew from Gainesville, from the orphanage and other mornings there.

Kathy Torrance announced herself satisfied with Laney's recuperation. He looked rested, she said.

He took to the seas of DatAmerica without comment, suspecting that another leave might prove permanent. She was watching him the way an experienced artisan might watch a valued tool that had shown the first signs of metal-fatigue.

The nodal point was different now, though he had no language to describe the change. He sifted the countless fragments that had cl.u.s.tered around Alison Shires in his absence, feeling for the source of his earlier conviction. He called up the music she'd accessed while he'd been in Mexico, playing each song in the order of her selection. He found her choices had grown more life-affirming; she'd moved to a new provider, Upful Groupvine, whose relentlessly positive product was the musical equivalent of the Good News Channel.

Cross-indexing her charges against the records of her creditprovider and its client retailers, he produced a list of everything she'd purchased in the jMtst week. Six-pack, blides, Tokkai carton opener. Did she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he remembered Kathy's advice, that this was the part of esearch most p.r.o.ne to produce serious transference, the point at vhich the researcher's intimacy with the subject could lead to los of per;pective. "It's often easiest for us to identify at the retail lev1, Lane3'. We're a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different )rand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out."

The floor of Laney's apartment was terraed against the original slope of the parking garage. He slept at thedeep erd, on an inflatable guest bed he'd ordered from the Shoppng Char~nel. There were no windows. Regulations required a ugh-pump, and reconst.i.tuted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel inthe ceiling, but he was seldom there during daylight hours.

He sat on the slippery edge of the nflatable, picturing Alison Shires in her Fountain Avenue apartmen. Larger than this, he knew, but not by much. Windows. Her rent vas paid, Slitscan had finally determined, by her married actor. Via a fain) intricate series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. "His reptiI~ fund," Kathy called it.

He could hold Alison Shires' historyin his mind like a single object, like the perfectly detailed scale imdel of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus. He'd never met her, or spoken to her, but he' come tD know her, he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever ha~ or would. Husbands didn't know their wives this way, or wives ther husbands. Stalkers might aspire to know the objects of their obession this way, but never. could.

Until the night he woke after midiight, head throbbing. Too hot, something wrong with the condiioning again. Florida. The blue shirt he slept in clinging to his back aid shoulders. What would she be doing now?

52 William Gibsm~ Was she staring up, awake, at faint bars of reflecte(l light on the ceiling, listening to Upful Groupvine?

Kathy suspected he might be cracking up. He looked at his hands. They could be anybody's. lie looked at them as though he'd never seen them before.

He remembered the 5-SB in the orphanage. The taste of it coming while it was still being injected. Rotting metal. The placebo brought no taste at all.

He got up. The Kitchen Korner, sensing him, woke. The fridge door slid aside. A single ancient leaf of lettuce sagged blackly through the plastic rods of one white shelf. A half-empty bottle of Evian on another. He held his cupped hands above the lettuce, willing himself to feel something radiating from its decay, some subtle life force, orgones, particles of an energy unknown to science.

Alison Shires was going to kill herself. He knew he'd seen it. Seen it somehow in the incidental data she generated in her mild-mannered pa.s.sage through the world of things.

"Hey there," the fnidge said. "You've left me open."

Laney said nothing.-

"Well, do you want the door open, partner? You know it interferes with the automatic de-frost .

"Be quiet." His hands felt better. Cooler.

He stood there until his hands were quite cold, then withdrew them and pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples, the fnidge taking this opportunity to close itself without further comment.

Twenty minutes later he was on the Metro, headed for Hollywood, a jacket over his sleep-creased Malaysian oxford shirt. Isolated figures on station platforms, whipped sideways by perspective in the wind of the train's pa.s.sing.

"We're not talking conscious decision, here?" Blackwell kneaded what was left of his right ear.

"No," Laney said, "I (lorit know what I thought I was doing.

"You were trying to save her. The girl."

"It felt like something snapped. A ruhher hand. It felt like gravity."

"That's what it feels like," Blackwell said, "when you decide."

Somewhere down the hill from the Sunset Metro exit he pa.s.sed a man watering his lawn, a rectangle perhaps twice the size of a pooltahie, illuminated by the medicinal glow of a nearby streetlight. Laney saw the water beading on the perfectly even blades of bright green plastic. The plastic lawn was fenced back from the street with welded steel, upright prison bars supporting bright untarnished coils of razor-wire. The man's house was scarcely larger than his glittering lawn; a survival from a day when this slope to the hills had been covered with bungalows and arbors. There were others like it, tucked between the balconied, carefully varied faces of condos and apartment complexes, tiny properties dating from before the area's incorporation into the city. There was a hint of oranges in the air, but he couldn't see them.

The waterer looked up, and Laney saw that he was blind, eyes hidden by the black lozenges of video units coupled directly to the optic nerve. You never knew what they were watching.

Laney went on, letting whatever drew him set his course through these sleeping streets and the occasional scent of a blooming tree. Distant brakes sounded on Santa Monica.

Fifteen minutes later he was in front of her building on Fountain Avenue. Looking up. Fifth floor. 502.

The nodal point.