And woke again, huddled under Sally’s shearling jacket, to the mild vibration of supersonic flight. She remembered the huge, low car waiting in the crescent; floodlights leaping out from the facades of Swain’s houses as she and Sally reached the pavement; Tick’s sweaty face glimpsed through one of the car’s windows; Sally heaving open a door and bundling her in; Tick cursing softly and steadily as the car accelerated; the complaint of the tires as he swung them too sharply into Kensington Park Road; Sally telling him to slow down, to let the car drive. And there, in the car, she’d remembered returning the Maas-Neotek unit to its hiding place behind the marble bust — Colin left behind with all his fox-print poise, the elbows of his jacket worn like Petal’s slippers — no more than what he was, a ghost. »Forty minutes,« Sally said now, from the seat beside her. »Good you got some sleep. They’ll bring us breakfast soon. Remember the name on your passport? Good. Now don’t ask me any questions until I’ve had some coffee, okay?«
Kumiko knew the Sprawl from a thousand stims; a fascination with the vast conurbation was a common feature of Japanese popular culture. She’d had few preconceptions of England when she arrived there: vague images of several famous structures, unfocused impressions of a society her own seemed to regard as quaint and stagnant. (In her mother’s stories, the princess-ballerina discovered that the English, however admiring, couldn’t afford to pay her to dance.) London, so far, had run counter to her expectations, with its energy, its evident affluence, the Ginza bustle of its great shopping streets. She had many preconceptions of the Sprawl, most of which were shattered within a few hours of arrival. But as she waited beside Sally in a line of other travelers, in a vast, hollow customs hall whose ceiling struts rose away into darkness, a darkness broken at intervals by pale globes — globes circled, though it was winter, by clouds of insects, as though the building possessed its own discrete climate — it was the stim-Sprawl she imagined, the sensual electric backdrop for the fast-forward lives of Angela Mitchell and Robin Lanier. Through customs — which consisted, in spite of the endless wait in line, of sliding her passport along a greasy-looking metal slot — and out into a frantic concrete bay where driverless baggage carts plowed slowly through a crowd that milled and struggled for ground transportation. Someone took her bag. Reached down and took it from her with an ease, a confidence, that suggested he was meant to take it, that he was a functionary performing an accustomed task, like the young women bowing welcome at the doors of Tokyo department stores. And Sally kicked him. Kicked him in the back of the knee, pivoting smoothly, like the Thai boxing girls in Swain’s billiard room, snatching the bag before the back of his skull and the stained concrete met with an audible crack. Then Sally was pulling her, the crowd had closed over the prone figure, and the sudden, casual violence might have been a dream, except that Sally was smiling for the first time since they’d left London. Feeling entirely dislocated now, Kumiko watched as Sally made a survey of available vehicles, quickly bribed a uniformed dispatcher, intimidated three other prospective fares, and chivied Kumiko into a pock- marked, slabsided hovercraft, painted in diagonal bands of yellow and black. The passenger compartment was barren and remarkably uncomfortable-looking. The driver, if there was one, was invisible beyond a scrawled bulkhead of plastic armor. The nub of a video camera protruded where the bulkhead met the roof, and someone had drawn a crude figure there, a male torso, the camera its phallus. As Sally climbed in, slamming the door behind her, a speaker grated something in what Kumiko assumed was a dialect of English. »Manhattan,« Sally said. She took a sheaf of paper currency from her jacket pocket and fanned it below the camera. The speaker made interrogatory noises. »Midtown. Tell you where when we get there.« The cab’s apron bag inflated, the light in the passenger compartment was extinguished, and they were on their way.