Tick executed the transit in real time, rather than employing the bodiless, instantaneous shifts ordinarily employed in the matrix. The yellow plain, he explained, roofed the London Stock Exchange and related City entities. He somehow generated a sort of boat to carry them along, a blue abstraction intended to reduce the possibility of vertigo. As the blue boat glided away from the LSE, Kumiko looked back and watched the vast yellow cube recede. Tick was pointing out various structures like a tour guide; Colin, seated beside her with his legs crossed, seemed amused at the reversal of roles. »That’s White’s,« Tick was saying, directing her attention to a modest gray pyramid, »the club in Saint James. Membership registry, waiting list . . .« Kumiko looked up at the architecture of cyberspace, hearing the voice of her bilingual French tutor in Tokyo, explaining humanity’s need for this information-space. Icon, waypoints, artificial realities . . . But it blurred together, in memory, like these towering forms as Tick accelerated. . . .
The scale of the white macroform was difficult to comprehend. Initially, it had seemed to Kumiko like the sky, but now, gazing at it, she felt as though it were something she might take up in her hand, a cylinder of luminous pearl no taller than a chess piece. But it dwarfed the polychrome forms that clustered around it. »Well,« Colin said, jauntily, »this really is very peculiar indeed, isn’t it? Complete anomaly, utter singularity . . .« »But you don’t have to worry about it, do you?« Tick said. »Only if it has no direct bearing on Kumiko’s situation,« Colin agreed, standing up in the boat-shape, »though how can one be certain?« »You must attempt to contact Sally,« Kumiko said impatiently. This thing — the macroform, the anomaly — was of little interest, though Tick and Colin both regarded it as extraordinary. »Look at it,« Tick said. »Could have a bloody world, in there . . .« »And you don’t know what it is?« She was watching Tick; his eyes had the distant look that meant his hands were moving, back in Brixton, working his deck. »It’s a very great deal of data,« Colin said. »I just tried to put a line through to that construct, the one she calls Finn,« Tick said, his eyes refocusing, an edge of worry in his voice, »but I couldn’t get through. I’d this feeling then, something was there, waiting. . . . Think it’s best we jack out now . . .« A black dot, on the curve of pearl, its edges perfectly defined . . . »Fucking hell,« Tick said. »Break the link,« Colin said. »Can’t! ‘S got us. . . .« Kumiko watched as the blue boat-shape beneath her feet elongated, stretched into a thread of azure, drawn across the chasm into that round blot of darkness. And then, in an instant of utter strangeness, she too, along with Tick and Colin, was drawn out to an exquisite thinness —
To find herself in Ueno Park, late autumn afternoon, by the unmoving waters of Shinobazu Pond, her mother seated beside her on a sleek bench of chilly carbon laminate, more beautiful now than in memory. Her mother’s lips were full and richly glossed, outlined, Kumiko knew, with the finest and narrowest of brushes. She wore her black French jacket, with the dark fur collar framing her smile of welcome. Kumiko could only stare, huddled there around the cold bulb of fear beneath her heart. »You’ve been a foolish girl, Kumi,« her mother said. »Did you imagine I wouldn’t remember you, or abandon you to winter London and your father’s gangster servants?« Kumiko watched the perfect lips, open slightly over white teeth; teeth maintained, she knew, by the best dentist in Tokyo. »You are dead,« she heard herself say. »No,« her mother replied, smiling, »not now. Not here, in Ueno Park. Look at the cranes , Kumi .« But Kumiko would not turn her head. »Look at the cranes.« »Fuck right off, you,« said Tick, and Kumiko spun to find him there, his face pale and twisted, filmed with sweat, oily curls plastered to his forehead. »I am her mother.« »Not your mum, understand?« Tick was shaking, his twisted frame quivering as though he forced himself against a terrible wind. »Not . . . your . . . mum . . .« There were dark crescents beneath the arms of the gray suit jacket. His small fists shook as he struggled to take the next step. »You’re ill,« Kumiko’s mother said, her tone solicitous. »You must lie down.« Tick sank to his knees, forced down by an invisible weight. »Stop it!« Kumiko cried. Something slammed Tick’s face against the pastel concrete of the path. »Stop it!« Tick’s left arm shot out straight from the shoulder and began to rotate slowly, the hand still balled in a white-knuckled fist. Kumiko heard something give, bone or ligament, and Tick screamed. Her mother laughed. Kumiko struck her mother in the face, and pain, sharp and real, jolted through her arm. Her mother’s face flickered, became another face. A gaijin face with wide lips and a sharp thin nose. Tick groaned. »Well,« Kumiko heard Colin say, »isn’t this interesting?« She turned to him there, astride one of the horses from the hunting print, a stylized representation of an extinct animal, its neck curved gracefully as it trotted toward them. »Sorry it took me a moment to find you. This is a wonderfully complex structure. A sort of pocket universe. Bit of everything, actually.« The horse drew up before them. »Toy,« said the thing with Kumiko’s mother’s face, »do you dare speak to me?« »Yes, actually, I do. You are Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, or rather the late Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, none too recently deceased, formerly of the Villa Straylight. This rather pretty representation of a Tokyo park is something you’ve just now worked up from Kumiko’s memories, isn’t it?« »Die!« She flung up a white hand: from it burst a form folded from neon. »No,« Colin said, and the crane shattered, its fragments tumbling through him, ghost-shards, falling away. »Won’t do. Sorry. I’ve remembered what I am. Found the bits they tucked away in the slots for Shakespeare and Thackeray and Blake. I’ve been modified to advise and protect Kumiko in situations rather more drastic than any envisioned by my original designers. I’m a tactician.« »You are nothing.« At her feet, Tick began to twitch. »You’re mistaken, I’m afraid. You see, in here, in this . . . folly of yours, 3Jane, I’m as real as you are. You see, Kumiko,« he said, swinging down from the saddle, »Tick’s mysterious macroform is actually a very expensive pile of biochips constructed to order. A sort of toy universe. I’ve run all up and down it and there’s certainly a lot to see, a lot to learn. This . . . person, if we choose to so regard her, created it in a pathetic bid for, oh, not immortality , really, but simply to have her way. Her narrow, obsessive, and singularly childish way. Who would’ve thought it, that Lady 3Jane’s object of direst and most nastily gnawing envy would be Angela Mitchell?« »Die! You’ll die! I’m killing you! Now!« »Keep trying,« Colin said, and grinned. »You see, Kumiko, 3Jane knew a secret about Mitchell, about Mitchell’s relationship to the matrix; Mitchell, at one time, had the potential to become, well, very central to things, though it’s not worth going into. 3Jane was jealous. . . .« The figure of Kumiko’s mother swam like smoke, and was gone. »Oh dear,« Colin said, »I’ve wearied her, I’m afraid. We’ve been fighting something of a pitched battle, at a different level of the command program. Stalemate, temporarily, but I’m sure she’ll rally. . . .« Tick had gotten to his feet and was gingerly massaging his arm. »Christ,« he said, »I was sure she’d dislocated it for me. . . .« »She did,« Colin said, »but she was so angry when she left that she forgot to save that part of the configuration.« Kumiko stepped closer to the horse. It wasn’t like a real horse at all. She touched its side. Cool and dry as old paper. »What shall we do now?« »Get you out of here. Come along, both of you. Mount up. Kumiko in front, Tick on behind.« Tick looked at the horse. »On that?«