»Gentry,« Slick said, »I think you better think twice about this.« Gentry had removed his gloves. He held a pair of optic jumpers in either hand, and Slick could see the splitter fittings trembling. »I mean Kid Afrika’s heavy, Gentry. You don’t know what you’re messing with, you mess with him.« This was not, strictly speaking, true, the Kid being, as far as Slick knew, too smart to value revenge. But who the hell knew what Gentry was about to mess with anyway? »I’m not messing with anything,« Gentry said, approaching the stretcher with the jumpers. »Listen, buddy,« Cherry said, »you interrupt his input, you maybe kill ‘im; his autonomic nervous system’ll go tits-up. Why don’t you just stop him?« she asked Slick. »Why don’t you just knock him on his ass?« Slick rubbed his eyes. »Because . . . I dunno. Because he’s . . . Look, Gentry, she’s saying it’ll maybe kill the poor bastard, you try to tap in. You hear that?« » ‘LF,’ « Gentry said, »I heard that .« He put the jumpers between his teeth and began to fiddle with one of the connections on the featureless slab above the sleeper’s head. His hands had stopped shaking. »Shit,« Cherry said, and gnawed at a knuckle. The connection came away in Gentry’s hand. He whipped a jumper into place with his other hand and began to tighten the connection. He smiled around the remaining jumper. »Fuck this,« Cherry said, »I’m outa here,« but she didn’t move. The man on the stretcher grunted, once, softly. The sound made the hairs stand up on Slick’s arms. The second connection came loose. Gentry inserted the other splitter and began to retighten the fitting. Cherry went quickly to the foot of the stretcher, knelt to check the readout. »He felt it,« she said, looking up at Gentry, »but his signs look okay. . . .« Gentry turned to his consoles. Slick watched as he jacked the jumpers into position. Maybe, he thought, it was going to work out; Gentry would crash soon, and they’d have to leave the stretcher up here until he could get Little Bird and Cherry to help him get it back across the catwalk. But Gentry was just so crazy, probably he should try to get the drugs back, or some of them anyway, get things back to normal. . . . »I can only believe,« Gentry said, »that this was predetermined. Prefigured by the form of my previous work. I wouldn’t pretend to understand how that might be, but ours is not to question why, is it, Slick Henry?« He tapped out a sequence on one of his keyboards. »Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?« »What’s he talking about?« Cherry asked. Slick glumly shook his head. If he said anything, it would only encourage Gentry’s craziness. Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. »There are worlds within worlds,« he said. »Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below. . . . It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I’d not dared to hope. . .« He glanced coyly back at them over a black-beaded shoulder. »And now,« he said, »we’ll see the shape of the little universe our guest’s gone voyaging in. And in that form, Slick Henry, I’ll see . . .« He touched the power stud at the edge of the holo table. And screamed.
Toys
»Here’s a lovely thing,« Petal said, touching a rosewood cube the size of Kumiko’s head. »Battle of Britain.« Light shimmered above it, and when Kumiko leaned forward she saw that tiny aircraft looped and dived in slow motion above a gray Petrie smear of London. »They worked it up from war films,« he said, »gunsight cameras.« She peered in at almost microscopic flashes of antiaircraft fire from the Thames estuary. »Did it for the Centenary.« They were in Swain’s billiard room, ground-floor rear, number 16. There was a faint mustiness, an echo of pub smell. The overall tidiness of Swain’s establishment was tempered here by genteel dilapidation: there were armchairs covered in scuffed leather, pieces of heavy dark furniture, the dull green field of the billiard table. . . . The black steel racks stacked with entertainment gear had caused Petal to bring her here, before tea, shuffling along in his seam-sprung moleskin slippers, to demonstrate available toys. »Which war was this?« »Last but one,« he said, moving on to a similar but larger unit that offered holograms of two Thai boxing girls. One’s callused sole smacked against the other’s lean brown belly, tensed to take the blow. He touched a stud and the projections vanished. Kumiko glanced back at the Battle of Britain and its burning gnats. »All sorts of sporting fiche,« Petal said, opening a fitted pig-skin case that held hundreds of the recordings. He demonstrated half-a-dozen other pieces of equipment, then scratched his stubbled head while he searched for a Japanese video news channel. He found it, finally, but couldn’t cut out the automatic translation program. He watched with her as a cadre of Ono-Sendai executive trainees effaced themselves in a tearful graduation ceremony. »What’s all that then?« he asked. »They are demonstrating loyalty to their zaibatsu . « »Right,« he said. He gave the video unit a swipe with his feather duster. »Tea time soon.« He left the room. Kumiko shut off the audio. Sally Shears had been absent at breakfast, as had Swain. Moss-green curtains concealed another set of tall windows opening onto the same garden. She looked out at a sundial sheathed in snow, then let the curtain fall back. (The silent wallscreen flashed Tokyo accident images, foil-clad medics sawing limp victims from a tangle of impacted steel.) A top-heavy Victorian cabinet stood against the far wall on carved feet resembling pineapples. The keyhole, trimmed with an inlaid diamond of yellowed ivory, was empty, and when she tried the doors, they opened, exhaling a chemical odor of ancient polish. She stared at the black and white mandala at the rear of the cabinet until it became what it was, a dartboard. The glossy wood behind it was pocked and pricked; some players had missed the board entirely, she decided. The lower half of the cabinet offered a number of drawers, each with a small brass pull and miniature, ivory-trimmed keyhole. She knelt in front of these, glanced back toward the doorway (wallscreen showing the lips of a Shinjuku cabaret singer) and drew the upper right drawer out as quietly as possible. It was filled with darts, loose and in leather wallets. She closed the drawer and opened the one to its left. A dead moth and a rusted screw. There was a single wide drawer below the first two; it stuck as she opened it, and made a sound. She looked back again (stock footage of Fuji Electric’s logo illuminating Tokyo Bay) but there was no sign of Petal. She spent several minutes leafing through a pornographic magazine, with Japanese text, which seemed to have mainly to do with the art of knots. Under this was a dusty-looking jacket made of black waxed cotton, and a gray plastic case with WALTHER molded across its lid in raised letters. The pistol itself was cold and heavy; she could see her face in the blue metal when she lifted it from its fitted bed of foam. She’d never handled a gun before. The gray plastic grips seemed enormous. She put it back into the case and scanned the Japanese section in a folder of multilingual instructions. It was an air gun; you pumped the lever below the barrel. It fired very small pellets of lead. Another toy. She replaced the contents of the drawer and closed it. The remaining drawers were empty. She closed the cabinet door and returned to the Battle of Britain.