Where?’
Where we’re going.” Blackwell consulted an enormous, elaborately dialed, steel-braceleted chronometer that looked as though it had been designed to do double duty as brass knuckles. “Took a month before they’d let me have a go, do what was needed. Then we got him over to a clinic in Paris and they told us what those bastards had been feeding him had made a pig’s breakf~st of his endocrine system. Put him right, in the end, but it needn’t have happened, none of it.”
But you got rid of them?” Laney had no idea what Blackwell was talking about, but it seemed best to keep up the illusion of conversation.
“Told them I was thinking about putting them face-first through a little Honda tree-shredder I’d purchased, just on the off chance,” Blackwell said. “Not necessary. Showed them it, though. In the end, they were sent along with no more than a moderate touch-up.’
Laney looked at the back of the driver’s head. The right-hand drive worried him. He felt like there was nobody in the driver’s seat. “How long did you say you’d worked for the band?’
“Five years.”
Laney thought of the video, Blackwell’s voice in the darkened club. Two years ago. “Where are we going?”
“Be there, soon enough.”
They entered an area of narrower streets, of featureless, vaguely shabby buildings covered with unlit, inactivated advertising. Huge representations of media platforms Laney didn’t recognize. Some of the buildings revealed what he assumed was quake damage. Head-sized gobs of a btownish, glasslike substance protruded from cracks that ran diagonally across one facade, like a cheap toy repaired badly by a clumsy giant. The limo pulled to the curb.
“‘Electric Town,'” Blackwell said. “I’ll page you,” he said to the driver, who nodded in a way that struck Laney as being not particularly Japanese. Blackwell opened the door and got out with that same 106 William Gibson unlikely grace Laney had noted before, the car bucking noticeably with the departure of his weight. Laney, sliding across the gray velour seat, felt tired and wooden.
‘Somehow I was expecting a more upscale destination,” he said to Blackwell. It was true.
‘Stop expecting,” Blackwell said.
The building with the cracks and the brown, saplike knobs opened into a white-and-pastel sea of kitchen appliances. The ceiling was low, laced with temporary-looking pipes and conduits. Laney followed Blackwell down a central aisle. A few figures stood along other aisles to either side, but he had no way of knowing whether these were salespeople or potential customers.
An old-fashioned escalator was grinding away, at the end of the central aisle, the rectilinear steel teeth at the edges of each ascending step worn sharp and bright. Blackwell kept walking. Levitated ahead of Laney, climbing, his feet barely seeming to move. Laney mounted hard behind him.
They rose up to a second level, this one displaying a less consistent range of goods: wallscreens, immersion consoles, automated rediners with massage-modules bulging from their cushions like the heads of giant mechanical grubs.
Along an aisle walled with corrugated plastic cartons, Blackwell with his scarred hands tucked deep in the pockets of his ninja smock. Into a maze of bright blue plastic tarps, slung from pipes overhead. Unfamiliar tools. A worker’s dented thermos standing on a red toolkit that spanned a pair of aluminum sawhorses. Blackwell holding a final tarp aside. Laney ducked, entering.
“We’ve been holding it open for the past hour, Blackwell,” someone said. “Not an easy thing.”
Blackwell let the tarp fall into place behind him. “Had to collect him from the hotel.”
The space, walled off with the blue rarps on three sides, was twice the size of Laney’s hotel room but considerably more crowded. A lot of hardware was assembled there: a collection of black consoles o 2 107 were cabled together in a white swamp of Styrofoam packing-forms, 1 torn corrugated plastic, and crumpled sheets of bubble-pack. Two men and a woman, waiting. It was the woman who had spoken. As Laney shuffled forward, ankle-deep through the packing materials, the stuff creaked and popped, slippery under the soles of his shoes.
Blackwell kicked at it. “You might have tidied up.’
“We aren’t set-dressers,” the woman said. She sounded to Laney as though she was from Northern California. She had short brown hair cut in bangs, and something about her reminded him of the quants who worked at Slitscan. Like the other two, men, one Japanese and one red-haired, she wore jeans and a generic nylon bomber jacket.