Arleigh lowered her phone, which apparently was working now. “You’d better come with us, Willy. Some kind of tactical unit is on the way.
“Nothing like it,” Rez said, and Laney turned, to see the singer emerging from the Western World, brushing something white from his dark jacket. “That physical thing. Too much time in the virtual, we forget that, don’t we? You’re Leyner?” Extending his hand.
“Laney,” Laney said, as Arleigh’s dark green van pulled up beside them.
194 William Gibson
j Maryalice opened a curved drawer that was built into the pink bed’s headboard. She was wearing a black skin-suit with big red Ashleigh Modine Carter-style sequin roses on the lapels. She took out a little blue glass dish and balanced it on her knee. “I hate these places,” she said. “There’s lots of ways to make sex ugly, but it’s kind of hard to make it look this ridiculous.” She knocked the gray end off her cigarette, into the blue saucer. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Fourteen,” Chia said.
“About what 1 told ’em. You’re fourteen, fifteen, for real, and no way you were on to me. I was on to you, right? It was my move. I planted on you. But they don’t believe me. Say you’re some kind of operator, say I’m just stupid, say that Rez guy sent you to SeaTac to get the stuff. Say you’re a set-up and I’m crazy to believe a kid couldn’t do that.” She sucked on the cigarette, squinting. “Where is it?” She looked down at Chia’s bag, open on the white carpet. “There?”
“I didn’t mean to take it. I didn’t know it was there.”
“I know that,” Maryalice said. “What I told ’em. I meant to get it back off you at the club.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Chia said. “It just scares me.”
“Sometimes I bring stuff back for Eddie. Party favors for the club. It’s illegal, but it’s not all that illegal, you know? Not hard stuff, really. But this time he was doing something else on the side, something with the Russians, and I didn’t like it. That’s what scares me, that stulf Like its alive.”
-195 28. A Matter of Credit “What stuff?”
“That. Assemblers, they’re called.”
Chia looked at her bag. “That thing in my bag is a nanotech assembler?”
“More like what you start with. Kind of an egg, or a little factory. You plug that thing into another machine that programs ’em, and they start building themselves out of whatever’s handy. And when there’s enough of ’em, they start building whatever it was you wanted them to. There’s some kind of law against selling that stuff to the Kombinat, so they want it bad. But Eddie worked out a way to do it. I met these two creepy German guys in the SeaTac Hyatt. They’d flown in there from wherever, I figured maybe Africa.” She mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the little blue dish, making it smell even worse. “They didn’t want to give it to me, because they were expecting Eddie. Lot of back and forth on the phone. Finally they did. I was supposed to put it in the suitcase with the other stuff, but it made me nervous. Made me wanna self-medicate.” She looked around the room. She put the blue dish with the crushed cigarette on a square black side table and did something that made the front of it open. It was a refrigerator, filled with little bottles. Maryalice bent over, peering in there. The pistol-shaped lighter slid off the pink bed. “No tequila,” Maryalice said. “You tell me why anybody’d name a vodka ‘Come Back Salmon’ Removing a little square bottle with a fish on its side. “Japanese would, though.” She looked down at the lighter. “Like a Russian would make a cigarette lighter that looks like a pistol.”
Chia saw that Maryalice didn’t have her hair-extensions in anymore. “When they were taking DNA samples, in SeaTac,” Chia said, “you stuck the end of your extension in there.
Maryalice cracked the seal on the little bottle, opened it, drained it in a single gulp, and shivered. “Those extensions are all my own hair,” she said. “Grew ’em out when I was on sort of a health diet, understand? They catch people doing recreationals, when they take 196 William Gibson C: those hair samples. Some recreationals, they stay in your hair a long time.” Maryalice put the empty bottle down beside the blue dish. “What’s he doing?” Pointing at Masahiko.