When he got it open, he settled down on the foot of the bed with his beef bowl and the plastic spoon they’d given him. He was just inhaling the steam when it came to him he should check on the thermos-thing. The projector, Laney had called it. He sighed, put his beef bowl down, and got up (well, he had to crouch).
The GlobEx box was in the cabinet there, beside his bag, and the spun-metal cylinder was in the GlobEx box.
He sat back down, with the GlobEx box next to him on the bed, and got to work on his beef bowl, which was worth waiting for. It was strange how this kind of shaved, basically overcooked mystery meat, which he guessed really was, probably, beef, could be tastier, under the right circumstances, than a really good steak. He ate the whole thing, every last grain of rice and drop of broth and figured the tourist-trap map had put their three stars and a half in the right place. ALL TOMORROW~S PARTIES 151 Then he opened the GlobEx box and got the thermos-thing out. He looked at the FAMOUS ASPECT sticker again, and it didn’t tell him any more than it had before. He stood the thing up on its base, on the green-and-orange carpet, and crawled back up the bed to get the switchblade. He used that to slice open the plastic envelopes containing the two cables and sat there looking at them.
The one that was standard power just looked like what you used to run a notebook off the wall, he thought, although the end that went into the thermos looked a little more complicated than usual. The other one though, the jacks on either end looked serious. He found the socket that one end of this obviously went into, but what was the other end supposed to fit? If the sumo kid was telling the truth, this was a custom cable, required to jack this thing into something that it might not usually be required to jack to. This one was optical, it looked like.
The power cable, that was easy. What took a while was finding a socket up here, but it turned out there was one (well, actually the end of an industrial-grade yellow extension cord) in the storage cabinet.
No control on the thing, that he could see, no switches. He plugged the power cable into the wall socket, then sat on the bed, the other end in his hand, looking at the silvery cylinder.
“Hell,” he said and plugged the cable into the cylinder. Just as he did, he had the clearest possible vision of the thing being, absolutely and no doubt, brimful of plastic explosive and a detonator, just waiting for this juice- But, no, if it had been, he’d be dead. He wasn’t. But the cylinder wasn’t doing anything either. He thought he could
hear a faint hum from it, and that was it. “I don’t get it,” Rydell said.
Something flickered. Neon butterfly. Torn wings.
And then this girl was there, kneeling, right up close, and he felt his heart roll over, catch itself.
The how of her not being there, then being there. Something hurt in his chest, until he reminded himself to breathe.
If Rydell had had to describe her, he would’ve said beautiful, and been utterly frustrated in the attempt to convey how. He thought she 152 had to be one of Durius’ examples of hybrid vigor, but saying which races had been mixed was beyond him.
“Where are we?” she asked.
He blinked, uncertain as to whether she saw and addressed him, or someone else, in some other reality. “Bed-and-breakfast,” he said, by way of experiment. “San Francisco-Oakland Bay.”
“You are Laney’s friend?”
“I-Well. Yeah.”
She was looking around now, with evident interest, and Rydell felt the hairs stand up along his arms, seeing that she wore an outfit that exactly mirrored his own, though everything she wore fit her perfectly, and of course looked very different on her. Loose khakis, blue workshirt, black nylon jacket with a Velcro rectangle over the heart, where you stuck the logo of your company. Right down to black socks (with holes? he wondered) and miniature versions of the black Work-‘N’-Walks he’d bought for Lucky Dragon. But the hair on his arms was up because he knew, he had seen, he had, that in the first instant of her being there,