hollowed, weird bass notes rumbling in just above the threshold of the subsonic.
It all took about a second to happen, and it took Rydell maybe another second to get the idea that someone wanted his undivided
attention.
“Rydell.” It was one of those voices that they fake up from found -• audio: speech cobbled from wind down skyscraper canyons, the creak ing of Great Lakes ice tree frogs clanging in the Southern night Rydell 77 had heard them before. They grated on the nerves, as they were meant to, and conveniently disguised the voice of the speaker. Assuming the speaker had a voice in the first place.
“Hey,” Rydell said, “I was just trying to click out.”
A virtual screen appeared in front of him, a round-cornered rectangle whose dimensions were meant to invoke the cultural paradigm of twentieth-century video screens. On it, an oddly angled, monochromatic view of some vast shadowy space, dimly lit from above. Nothing there. Impression of decay, great age.
“I have important information for you.” The vowel in you suggested a siren dopplering past, then gone.
“Well,” said Rydell, “if your middle name is ‘F. X.,’you’re sure going to some trouble.”
There was a pause, Rydell staring at the dead, blank space depicted or recorded on the screen. He was waiting for something to move there; probably that was the point of it, that nothing did.
“You’d better take this information very seriously, Mr. Rydell.”
“I’m serious as cancer,” Rydell said. “Shoot.”
“Use the ATM at the Lucky Dragon, near the entrance to the bridge. Then present your identification at the GlobEx franchise at the rear of the store.”
“Why?”
“They’re holding something for you.”
“Tong,” Rydell said, “is that you?”
But there was no answer. The screen vanished, and the corridor was as it had been.
Rydell reached up and disconnected the rented cable from the Brazilian glasses.
Blinked.
A coffee place near Union Square, the kind that had potted plants and hotdesks. An early office crowd was starting to line up for sandwiches.
He got up, folded the glasses, tucked them into the inside pocket of his jacket, and picked up his bag. 78 19. INTERSTITIAL
CHEVETTE moves past the colorless flame of a chestnut vendor’s charcoal fire, powdery gray burning itself down in the inverted, V-nosed hood of some ancient car.
She sees another fire, in memory: coke glow of a smith’s forge, driven by the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. Beside her the old man held the drive chain of some extinct motorcycle, folded neatly into a compact mass and fastened with a twist of rusty wire. To be taken in the smith’s tongs and placed within the forge. To be beaten, finally, incandescent, into a billet of their strangely grained Damascus, ghosts of those links emerging as the blade is forged, quenched, shaped, and polished on the wheel. Where did that knife go? she wonders. She’d watched the maker craft and braise a hilt of brass, rivet slabs of laminated circuit board and shape them on a belt grinder. The rigid, brittle-looking board, layers of fabric trapped in green phenolic resin, was everywhere on the bridge, a common currency of landfills-. Each sheet mapped with dull metallic patterns suggesting cities, streets. When they came from the scavengers they were studded with components, easily stripped with a torch, melting the gray solder. The components fell away, leaving the singed green boards with their inlaid foil maps of imaginary cities, residue of the second age of electronics. And Skinner would tell her that these boards were immortal, inert as stone, proof against moisture and ultraviolet and every form of decay; that they were destined to litter the planet, hence it was good to reuse them, work them when possible into the fabric of things, a resource when something needed to be durable. She knows she needs to be alone now, so she’s left Tessa on the lower level, collecting visual texture with God’s Little Toy. Chevette can’t hear any more about how Tessa’s film has to be more personal, about her, Chevette, and Tessa hasn’t been able to shut up about that, 79 or take no for an answer. Chevette remembers Bunny Malatesta, her dispatcher when she rode here, how he’d say “and what part of ‘no’ is it that you don’t understand?” But Bunny could deliver lines like that as though he were a force of nature, and Chevette knows she can’t, that she lacks Bunny’s gravity, the sheer crunch required to get it across.