Yamazaki had his notebook out, hightpen poised. Laney found that he didn’t mind. It made the man look so much more comfortable. “Strategic Business Unit,” he said. “A small conference room. Shitscan’s post office.”
“Post office?”
“California plan. People don’t have their own desks. Check a computer and a phone out of the Cage when you come in. Hotdesk it if you need more peripherals. The SBUs are for meetings, but it’s hard to get one when you need it. Virtual meetings are a big thing there, better for sensitive topics. You get a locker to keep your personal stuff in. You don’t want them to see any printouts~ And they hate Post-its.”
“Why?”
“Because you might’ve written something down from the in-house net, and it might get out. That notebook of yours would never have been allowed out of the Cage. If there was no paper, they had a record of every call, every image called up, every keystroke.”
Blackwell nodded now, his stubbled dome catching the red of Amos’s inner-tube lips. “Security.”
“And you were successful, Mr. Laney?” Yamazaki asked. “You found the. . . nodal points?”
29 4. Venice Decompressed “Shut up now,~’ the woman in 23E said, and Chia hadn’t said anything at all. “Sister’s going to tell you a story.”
Chia looked up from the seatback screen, where she’d been working her way through the eleventh level of a lobotomized airline version of Skull Wars. The blond was looking straight ahead, not at Chia. Her screen was down so that she could use the back of it for a tray, and she’d finished another glass of the iced tomato juice she kept paying the flight attendant to bring her. They came, for some reason, with squared-off pieces of celery stuck up in them, like a straw or stir-stick, but the blond didn’t seem to want these. She’d stacked five of them in a square on the tray, the way a kid might build the walls of a little house, or a corral for toy animals.
Chia looked down at her thumbs on the disposable Air Magellan
touchpad. Back up at the mascaraed eyes. Looking at her now.
“There’s a place where it’s always light,” the woman said. “Bright, everywhere. No place dark. Bright like a mist, like something falling, always, every second. All the colors of it. Towers you can’t see the top of, and the light falling. Down below, they pile up bars. Bars and strip clubs and discos. Stacked up like shoe boxes, one on top of the other. And no matter how far you worm your way in, no matter how many stairs you climb, how many elevators you ride, no matter how small a room you finally get to, the light still finds you. It’s a light that blows in under the door, like powder. Fine, so fine.
31 Blows in under your eyelids, if you find a way to get to sleep. But you don’t want to sleep there. Not in Shinjuku. Do you?”
Chia was suddenly aware of the sheer physical mass of the plane, of the terrible unlikeliness of its passage through space, of its airframe vibrating thiough frozen night somewhere above the sea, off the coast of Alaska now-impossible but true. “No,” Chia heard herself say, as Skull Wars, noting her inattention, dumped her back a level.
“No,” the woman agreed, “you don’t. I know. But they make you. They make you. At the center of the world.” And then she put her head back, closed h~r eyes, and began to snore.
Chia exited Skull Wars and tucked the touchpad into the seat-back pocket. She felt like screaming. What had that been about?
The attendant came by, scooped up the corral of celery sticks in a napkin, took the woman’s glass, wiped the tray, and snapped it up into position in the seatback.
“My bag?” Chia said. “In the bin?” She pointed.
He opened the hatch above her, pulled out her bag, and lowered it into her lap.
“How do you undo these?” She touched the loops of tough red jelly that held the Zip-tabs together.
He took a small black tool from a black holster on his belt. It looked like something she’d seen a vet use to trim a dog’s nails. He held his other hand cupped, to catch the little balls the loops became when he snipped them with the tool.