Laney saw the man’s eyes through the transparent visor as they passed. A look of grim patience. The stilts were the kind workers wore to put up ceilings, articulated alloy sprung with steel. “What’s supposed to happen when there’s enough nervous tissue?”
“A new order of being. They don’t talk about it. Rez was inter ested in them, apparently. He tried to arrange an audience with the 3 hunder.” 0 9 145 21. Standower Man “And?”
‘the founder declined. He said that Rn made his living through the manipulation of human nervous tissue, and that that made him untouchable.”
“Rez was unhappy?”
“Not according to Blackwell. Blackwell said it seemed to cheer him up a little.”
“He’s not cheerful, ordinarily?” Laney sidestepped to avoid a bicycle someone was wheeling in the opposite direction.
“Let’s say that the things that bother Rez aren’t the things that bother most people.”
Laney noticed a dark green van edging along beside them. Its wraparound windows were mirrored, its neon license plates framed with animated tubes of mini-Vegas twinklers. “I think we’re being followed,” he said.
“We’d better be. I wanted the kind with the weird chrome curb-feelers that make them look like silverfish, but I had to settle for custom license-plate trim. Where you go, it goes. And parking, around here, is probably more of a challenge than anything you’ll be expected to do tonight. Now,” she said, “down here.”
Steep, narrow stairs, walled with an alarming pink mosaic of glistening tonsil-like nodules. Laney hesitated, then saw a sign, the letters made up of hundreds of tiny pastel oblongs: LE CHICLE. Stepping down, he lost sight of the van.
A chewing-gum theme-bar, he thought, and then: I’m getting too used to this. But he still avoided touching the wall of chewed gum as he followed her down.
Into powdery pinks and grays, but these impersonating the unchewed product, wall-wide slabs of it, hung with archaic signage from the nation of his birth. Screen-printed steel, Framed and ancient cardboard, cunningly lit. Icons of gum. Bazooka Joe featured centrally, a figure unknown to Laney but surely no more displaced.
“Come here often?” Laney asked, as they took stools with bul 146 William Gibson I bous cushions in a particularly lurid bubble-gum pink. The bar was laminated with thousands of rectangular chewing-gum wrappers.
“Yes,” she said, “but mainly because it’s unpopular. And it’s nonsmoking, which is still kind of special here.”
“What’s ‘Black Black’?” Laney asked, looking at a framed poster depicting a stylized l940s automobile hurtling through the faint suggestion of city streets. Aside from “Black Black,” it was lettered in a sort of Art Deco Japanese.
“Gum. You can still buy it,” she said. “The cab drivers all chew it. Lots of caffeine.”
“In gum?”
“They sell pick-me-ups here full of liquid nicotine.”
“I think I’ll have a beer instead.”
When the waitress, in tiny silver shorts and a prehensile pink angora top, had taken their orders, Arleigh opened her purse and removed a notebook. “These are linear topographies of some of the structures you accessed earlier today.” She passed Laney the notebook. “They’re in a format called Realtree 7.2.”
Laney clicked through a series of images: abstract geometrics arranged in vanishing linear perspective. “I don’t know how to read them,” he said.
She poured her sake. “You really were trained by DatAmerica?”
“I was trained by a bunch of Frenchmen who liked to play tennis.”
“Realtree’s from DatAmerica. The best quantitative analysis software they’ve got.” She closed the notebook, put it back in her purse.
Laney poured his beer. “Ever hear of something called TIDAL?”
“Tidal’?”
“Acronym. Maybe.”
“No.” She lifted the china cup and blew, like a child cooling tea.
“It was another DatAmerica tool, or the start of one. I don’t think it reached the market. But that was how I learned to find the nodal points.” I 0
2 147 L “Okay,’ she said.”What are the nodal points?” I Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds,” Laney said. “Except the things you see are really there.”
She put her sake down. “Yamazaki promised me you weren’t crazy.”
“It’s not crazy It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”