“Complex,” Harwood says, and smiles.
175 I 176 42. RED GHOSTS OF EUROPEAN TIME
FONTAINE makes himself a cup of instant miso on the hotplate. This is what he drinks before bed, a soothing saltiness and bits of seaweed at the bottom. Thinking of Skinner’s girl and seeing her again. Usually when people leave the bridge they don’t come back. Weirdness around her departure but he forgets what exactly. Not good for the old man but his time nearly done then anyway.
Tick tick of the silent boy under the eyephones, hunting watches. Fontaine pours his miso into a cup missing its handle, savoring the aromatic steam. Tired now, he wonders where the boy can sleep here or if indeed he will. Maybe sit up all night hunting watches. Fontaine shakes his head. The ticking stops.
Carrying his soup, he turns to see what’s arrested the ceaseless hunt.
There on the screen of the notebook, in the boy’s lap, is a scan of a battered Rolex “Victory,” an inexpensive wartime model for the Canadian market, worth a fair bit now but not in this condition. The steel case looks rough and the dial has faded unevenly. Black Arabics from one to twelve are crisp, but the inner chapter, red, European time, is almost gone.
Fontaine sips his miso, looking down, wondering what it is this boy sees to hold him, in the red ghosts of European time.
Then the boy’s head sags under the weight of the eyephones, and Fontaine hears him start to snore. LANEY finds himself on an island in that mind-wide flow he ceaselessly cruises.
It is not a construct, this place, an environment proper, so much as a knotting, a folding-in of information rooted in the substrates of the oldest codes. It is something like a makeshift raft, random pieces thrown together, but it is anchored, unmoving. He knows that it is no accident, that it has been put in his path for a reason.
The reason, he soon finds, is that Libia and Paco wish to speak with him.
They are associates of the Rooster, junior denizens of the Walled City, and present here as a sphere of mercury in zero gravity and a black, three-legged cat, respectively. The sphere of mercury (Libia) has a lovely voice, a girl’s, and the three-legged cat, who is also missing one eye and one ear (Paco) has a cunningly modulated growl Laney thinks he remembers from a Mexican cartoon. They are almost certainly from Mexico City, these two, if geography needs to be taken into consideration, and very likely belong to that faction of flaming youth currently opting for the re-flooding of the Federal District’s drained lakes, a radical urban reconfiguration that for some reason had obsessed Rei Toei in her final month in Tokyo. She had developed a fascination with large human settlements in general, and Laney had been her guide through certain of the stranger info-prospects presented by what passes, this century, for town planning.
So he hangs here, at the juncture of these old code-roots, in a place devoid of very specific shape or texture, aside from Libia and Paco, and hears them.
“The Rooster tells us you feel someone is watching you watch Cody Harwood,” says the sphere of mercury, pulsing as it speaks, its surface reflecting vehicles passing in some busy street.
“It might be an artifact,” Laney counters, not sure he should have
177 43. LIBIA & PACO I brought it up with the Rooster, whose paranoia is legendary. “Something the 5-SB generates.”
“We think not,” says the cat, its one-eyed filthy head propped atop an arrested drift of data. It yawns, revealing grayish-white gums, the color of boiled pork, and a single orange canine. Its one eye is yellow and hate-filled, unblinking. “We have determined that you are, in fact, being observed in your observation.”
“But not at the moment,” says Libia.
“Because we have constructed this blind,” says the cat.
“Do you know who it is?” Laney asks.
“It is Harwood,” says Libia, the sphere quivering delicately.
“Harwood? Harwood is watching me watch him?”
“Harwood,” says the cat, “dosed himself with 5-SB. Three years after you were released from the orphanage in Gainesville.”