“Tokyo, Japan,” Rydell said, and sucked iced latte through a
plastic straw. “Guy I met in San Francisco last year. Yamazaki. He’s
working for ’em. Says they need a serious netrunner,”
Netrunner. Laney, who liked to think of himself as a researcher,
suppressed a sigh. “Contract job?”
“Guess so. Didn’t say.”
“I don’t think I’d want to live in Tokyo.”
Rydell used his straw to stir the foam and ice remaining at the bottom of his tall plastic cup, as though he were hoping to find a secret prize. “He didn’t say you’d have to.” He looked up. “You ever been to Tokyo?”
“No.”
“Must be an interesting place, after that quake and all.” The walkie-talkie ticked and whispered. “I gotta go on out and check the gate by the bungalows now. Feel like coming?”
“No,” Laney said. “Thanks.”
Rydell stood, automatically straightening the creases in his khaki uniform trousers. He wore a black nylon web-belt hung with various holstered devices, all of them black, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a peculiarly immobile black tie. “I’ll leave the number in your box,” he said.
Laney watched the security man cross the terra cotta and the various rugs, to vanish past the darkly polished panels of the registration desk. He’d had something going on cable once, Laney had gathered. Nice guy. Loser.
Laney sat there until dawn came edging in through the tall, arched windows, and Taiwanese stainless could be heard to rattle, but gently, from the darkened cave of the breakfast room. Immigrant voices, in some High Steppe dialect the Great Khans might well have understood. Echoes woke from the tiled floor, from the high beams surviving from an age that must once have seen the advent of Laney’s kind or predecessors, their ecology of celebrity and the terrible and inviolable order of that food chain.
Rydell left a folded sheet of Chateau notepaper in Laney’s box. A Tokyo number. Laney found it there the next afternoon, along with an updated estimate of his final bill from the lawyers.
He took them both up to the room he could no longer even pretend to afford.
A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator’s goldveined mirror for this three-floor ascent of the aggressively nondescript 0 My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube K, apparently a Franz Kafka theme bar. Stepping from the.elevator into a long space announced in acid-etched metal as The Metamorphosis. Where salarimen in white shirts had removed their suit jackets and loosened their dark ties, and sat at a bar of artfully corroded steel, drinking, the high backs of their chairs molded from some brown and chitinous resin. Insectoid mandibles curved above the drinkers’ heads like scythes.
He moved forward into brown light, a low murmur of conversation. He understood no Japanese. The walls, unevenly transparent, repeated a motif of wing cases and bulbous abdomens, spikey brown limbs folded in at regular intervals. He increased his pace, aiming for a curving stairway molded to resemble glossy brown carapaces.
The eyes of Russian prostitutes followed him from tables opposite the bar, flat and doll-like in this roach-light. The Natashas were everywhere, working girls shipped in from Vladivostok by the Kombinat. Routine plastic surgery lent them a hard assembly-line beauty. Slavic Barbies. A simpler operation implanted a tracking device for the benefit of their handlers.
The stairway opened into The Penal Colony, a disco, deserted at this hour, pulses of silent red lightning marking Laney’s steps across the dance floor. A machine of some kind was suspended from the ceiling. Each of its articulated arms, suggestive of antique dental equipment, was tipped with sharp steel. Pens, he thought, vaguely remembering Kafka’s story. Sentence of guilt, graven in the flesh of the condemned man’s back. Wincing at a memory of upturned eyes unseeing. Pushed it down. Moved on.
A second stairway, narrow, more steep, and he entered The Trial, low-ceilinged and dark. Walls the color of anthracite. Small flames shivered behind blue glass. He hesitated, nightblind and jet-lagged.
“Cohn Laney, is it?”
Australian. Enormous. Who stood behind a little table, shoulders sloping bearlike. Something strange about the shape of his shaven head. And another, much smaller figure, seated there. Japanese, in a long-sleeved plaid shirt buttoned up to its oversized collar. Blinking up at Laney through circular lenses. “Have a seat, Mr. Laney,” the big man said.