And Laney saw that this man’s left ear was missing, sheared away, leaving only a convoluted stump.
When Laney had worked for Slitscan, his supervisor was named Kathy Torrance. Palest of pale blonds. A pallor bordering on translucence, certain angles of light suggesting not blood but some fluid the shade of summer straw. On her left thigh the absolute indigo imprint of something twisted and multibarbed, an expensively savage pictoglyph. Visible each Friday, when she made it her habit to wear shorts to work.
She complained, always, that the nature of celebrity was much the worse for wear. Strip-mined, Laney gathered, by generations of her colleagues.
She propped her feet on the ledge of a hotdesk. She wore meticulous little reproductions of lineman’s boots, buckled across the instep and stoutly laced to the ankle. He looked at her legs, their taut sweep from wooly sock tops to the sandpapered fringe of cut-off jeans. The tattoo looked like something from another planet, a sign or message burned in from the depths of space, left there for mankind to interpret.
He asked her what she meant. She peeled a mint-flavored toothpick from its wrapper. Eyes he suspected were gray regarded him through mint-tinted contacts.
“Nobody’s really famous anymore, Laney. Have you noticed that?”
“No.”
“I mean really famous. There’s not much fame left, not in the old sense. Not enough to go around.”
“The old sense?”
“We’re the media, Laney. We make these assholes celebrities. It’s a push-me, pull-you routine. They come to us to be created.” Vibram cleats kicked concisely off the hotdesk. She tucked her boots in, heels 4 William Gibson against denim haunches,~ white knees hiding her mouth. Balanced there on the pedestal of the hotdesk’s articulated Swedish chair.
“Well,” Laney said, going back to his screen, “that’s still fame, isn’t it?”
“But is it real?”
He looked back at her.
“We learned to print money off this stuff,” she said. “Coin of our realm. Now we’ve printed too much; even the audience knows. It shows in the ratings.”
Laney nodded, wishing she’d leave him to his work.
“Except,” she said, parting her knees so he could see her say it, “when we decide to destroy one.”
Behind her, past the anodyzed chainlink of the Cage, beyond a framing rectangle of glass that filtered out every tint of pollution, the sky over Burbank was perfectly blank, like a sky-blue paint chip submitted by the contractor of the universe.
The man’s left ear was edged with pink tissue, smooth a~ wax. Laney wondered why there had been no attempt at reconstruction.
“So I’ll remember,” the man said, reading Laney’s eyes.
“Remember what?”
“Not to forget. Sit down.”
Laney sat on something only vaguely chairlike, an attenuated construction of black alloy rods and laminated Hexcel. The table was round and approximately the size of a steering wheel. A votive flame licked the air, behind blue glass. The Japanese man with the plaid shirt and metal-framed glasses blinked furiously. Laney watched the large man settle himself, another slender chair-thing lost alarmingly beneath a sumo-sized bulk that appeared to be composed entirely of muscle.
“Done with the jet lag, are we?”
“I took pills.” Remembering the SST’s silence, its lack of appar ent motion. “Pills,” the man said. “Hotel adequate?”
“Yes,” Laney said. “Ready for the interview.”
“Well then,” vigorously rubbing his face with heavily scarred hands. He lowered his hands and stared at Laney, as if seeing him for the first time. Laney, avoiding the gaze of those eyes, took in the man’s outfit, some sort of nanopore exercise gear intended to fit loosely on a smaller but still very large man. Of no particular color in the darkness of the Trial. Open from collar to breastbone. Straining against abnormal mass. Exposed flesh tracked and crossed by an atlas of scars, baffling in their variety of shape and texture. “Well, then?”
Laney looked up from the scars. “I’m here for a job interview.”
“Are you?”
“Are you the interviewer?”
“Interviewer’?” The ambiguous grimace revealing an obvious dental prosthesis.
Laney turned to the Japanese in the round glasses. “Cohn Laney.”
“Shinya Yamazaki,” the man said, extending his hand. They shook. “We spoke on the telephone.”