lie asked her what that meant, to edit lamps. Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn’t have wanted. if people asked him what he did, he said he was a quantitative analyst. 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, assembly in what once had been a cannery. If the design documents 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 William Gibson 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 clustered 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 prone 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 reconstituted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel inthe ceiling, but he was seldom there during daylight hours.