Arleigh McCrae was staring at him.
“Do they know that?” she asked. “Does Blackwell?”
“No,” Laney said, “not that part, anyway.” He could see Rydell’s fax, folded on the bedside stand. They didn’t know about that, either.
“What happened then? What did you do?”
“I found out I was paying for at least some of the lawyers they’d gotten for me. I didn’t know what to do. I sat out there by the pool a lot. It was sort of pleasant, actually. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. Know what I mean?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Then I heard about this job from one of the security people at the hotel.”
She slowly shook her head.
“What?” he said.
“Never mind,” she said. “You make about as much sense as the rest of it. Probably you’ll fit right in.”
“Into what?” 134 William Gibson She looked at her watch, black-faced stainless on a plain black nylon band. “Dinner’s at eight, but Rez will be late. Come out for a walk and a drink. I’ll try to tell you what I know about it.”
“If you want to,” Laney said.
“They’re paying me to do it,” she said, getting up. “And it probably beats wrestling large pieces of high-end electronics up and down escalators.”
20. Monkey Boxing
Between stations there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial rate, just prior to the emergence of a new order of being.
Chia and Masahiko had found two seats, between a trio of plaid-skirted schoolgirls and a businessman who was reading a fat Japanese comic. There was a woman on the cover with her breasts bound up like balls of twine, but conically, the nipples protruding like the popping eyes of a cartoon victim. Chia noticed that the artist had devoted much more time to drawing the twine, exactly how it was wrapped and knotted, than to drawing the breasts themselves. The woman had sweat running clown her face and was trying to back away from someone or something cut off by the edge of the cover.
Masahiko undid the top two buttons of his tunic and withdrew a six-inch square of something black and rigid, no thicker than a pane of glass. He brushed it purposefully with the fingers of his right hand, beaded lines of colored light appearing at his touch. Though these were fainter here, washed out by the train’s directionless fluorescents, Chia recognized the square as the control-face of the Computer she’d seen in his room.
He studied the display, stroked it again, and frowned at the resuIt. “Someone pays attention to my address,” he said, ‘and to Mitsukos “The restaurant?” 137 “Our user addresses,” ‘What kind of attention?”
“I do not know. We are not linked.”
-Except by me.
“Tell me about Sandbenders,” Masahiko said, putting the control-face away and buttoning his tunic.
“It started with a woman who was an interface designer,” Chia said, glad to change the subject. “Her husband was a jeweller, and he’d died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he’d been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer’s, and put the real parts into cases he’d make in his shop. Say he’d make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there. . . . And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone. . . . And once you had the case, when the manuEcturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.” Masahiko’s eyes were closed, and he seemed to be nodding slightly, though perhaps only with the motion of the train.