“My God,” Zona said, staring up at St. Mark’s. “Who wrote this?”
“It’s a city in Italy,” Chia said. “It used to be a country. They invented banking. That’s St. Mark’s. Thete’s a module where you can see what they do at Easter, when the Patriarch brings out all these bones and things, set into gold, parts of saints.”
Zona Rosa crossed herself. “Like Mexico … this is where the water comes up to the bottoms of the doors, and the streets, they are water?”
“I think a lot of this is under water now,” Chia said.
“Why is it dark?”
“I keep it that way Chia looked away, searching the shadows beneath archways. “That Walled City, Zona, what is that?”
“They say it began as a shared killfile. You know what a kill- file is?” “No.” “It is an old expression. A way to avoid incoming messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those messages never existed. 220 VViPIian. Gibson They never reached you. This was when the net was new, understand?”
Chia knew that when her mother was born, there had been no net at all, or almost none, but as her teachers in school were fond of pointing out, that was hard to imagine. “How could that become a city? And whys it all squashed in like that?”
‘Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people who founded Hak Nam were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn’t do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made something like a killfile of everything, everything they didn’t like, and they turned that inside out.” Zona’s hands moved like a conjurer’s. ‘And they pushed it through, to the other side
‘The other side of what?”
“This is not how they did it,” Zona said impatiently, “this is the story. How they did it, I don’t know. But that is the story, how they tell it. They went there to get away from the laws- To have no laws, like when the net was new.”
‘But why’d they make it look like that?”
“That I know,” Zona said. “The woman who came to help me build my country, she told me. There was a place near an airport, Kowloon, when Hong Kong wasn’t China, but there had been a mistake, a long time ago, and that place, very small, many people, it still belonged to China. So there was no law there. An outlaw place. And more and more people crowded in; they built it up, higher. No rules, just building, just people living. Police wouldn’t go there. Drugs and whores and gambling. But people living, too. Factories, restaurants. A city. No laws.”
“Is it still there?”
“No,” Zona said, “they tore it down before it all became China
C
221 again. They made a park with concrete. But these people, the ones they say made a hole in the net, they found the data. The history of it. Maps. Pictures. They built it again.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask them. They are all crazy.” Zona was scanning the Piazza. “This place makes me cold …”Chia considered bringing the sun up, but then Zona pointed. “Who is that?”
Chia watched her Music Master, or something that looked like him, stroll toward them from the shadows of the stone arches where the cafes were, a dark greatcoat flapping to reveal a lining the color of polished lead.
“I’ve got a software agent that looks like that,” Chia said, “but he isn’t supposed to be there unless I cross a bridge. And I couldn’t find him, when I was here before.”
“This is not the one you saw?”
“No,” Chia said.
An aura bristled around Zona, who grew taller as the spikey cloud of light increased in resolution. Shifting, overlapping planes like ghosts of broken glass. Iridescent insects whirling there.
As the figure in the greatcoat drew toward them across the Piazza’s patchworked stone, snow resolved behind it; it left footprints.