“Why?”
“Because they are very large, and dress in a style he associates with the Combine. They are still there.”
“How do you know?”
“If they leave, he must call me. He wants his new phone.”
“Can I port from here? I have to talk to Air Magellan right away about changing my reservations. I want to go home,” And leave Maryalice’s package in that trash cannister she could see behind Gomi Boy.
“You must not port,” Masahiko said. “You must not use the cash-card. If you do, they will find you.”
“But what else am I supposed to do?” she said, startled by her own voice, which sounded like someone else’s. “I just want to go home!”
“Let me see the card,” Gomi Boy said. It was in her parka, with her passport and her ticket home. She took it out and handed it to him. He opened a pocket on his fatigue pants and took out a small rectangular device that seemed to be held together with multiple layers of fraying silver tape. He swiped Chia’s card along a slot and peered into a peephole reader like the one on a fax-beeper. “This is nontransferable and cannot be used to obtain cash. It is also very easy to trace.”
“My friend’s pretty sure they’ve got the number anyway,” Chia said, thinking of Zona.
Gomi Boy began to tap the edge of the cashcard on the rim of his can of Pocari Swear. ‘There is a place where you can use this and not be traced,” he said, Tap tap. “Where Masahiko could access Walled City.” Tap tap. “Where you could phone home.”
“Where’s that?”
“A love hotel.” Tap. “Do you know what that is?”
“No,” Chia said. Tap. 160 William Gibson Emerging from Le Chicle’s pink mosaic gullet into the start of rain, Laney saw that the stilt-walking New Logic disciple was still at his post, his animated sandwich-board illuminated against the evening. As Blackwell held the door of a mini-limo for Arleigh, Laney looked back at the scrolling numerals and wondered how much the planet’s combined weight of human nervous tissue had increased while they’d been in the bar.
Laney got in after her, noticing those Catalan suns again, the three of them, decreasing in size down her inner calf. Blackwell thunked the door behind him, then opened the front, should’ve-beeri driver’s side door and seemed to pour himself into the car, a movement that simultaneously suggested the sliding of a ball of mercury and the settling of hundreds of pounds of liquid concrete. The car waddled and swayed as its shocks adjusted to accommodate his weight.
Laney saw how the brim of Blackwell’s black-waxed hat drooped low in back, but not far enough to conceal a crisscrossing of fine red welts decorating the back of his neck,
Their driver, to judge by the back of his head, might have been the same one who’d driven them to Akihabara. He pulled out into the mirror-image traffic. The rain was running and pooling, tugging reflected neon out of the perpendicular and spreading it in wriggly lines across sidewalk and pavement.
Arleigh McCrae was wearing perfume, and it made Laney wish
2 161 23. Here at the Western World that Blackwell wasn’t there, and that they were on their way somewhere other than wherever it was they were going now, and in another city, and that quite a lot of the last seven months of Laney’s life hadn’t happened at all, or had happened differently, or maybe even as far back as DatAmerica and the Frenchmen, but as it became more complicated, it became depressing.
“I’m not sure you’re going to enjoy this place,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“You don’t seem like the type.”
“Why not?”
“I could be wrong. Lots of people do enjoy it. I suppose if you take it as a very elaborate joke
“What is it?”
“A club. Restaurant. An environment. If we turned up there without Blackwell, I doubt they’d let us in. Or even admit it’s there.”
Laney was remembering the Japanese restaurant in Brentwood, the one Kathy Torrance had taken him to. Not Japanese Japanese. Owned and operated. Its theme an imaginary Eastern European country. Decorated with folk art from that country, and everyone who worked there wore native garb from that country, or else a sort of metallic-gray prison outfit and these big black shoes. The men who worked there all had these haircuts, shaved high on the sides, and the women had big double braids, rolled up like wheels of cheese. Laney’s entrйe had had all kinds of different little sausages in it, the smallest he’d ever seen, and some kind of pickled cabbage on the side, and it hadn’t tasted like it had come from anywhere in particular, but maybe that was the point. And then they’d gone back to her apartment, decorated like a sort of deluxe version of the Cage at Slitscan. And that hadn’t worked out either, and sometimes he wondered whether that had made her even angrier, when he’d gone over to Out of Control.