He could hold Alison Shires history in his mind like a single object, like the perfectly detailed scale model of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus. Hed never met her, or spoken to her, but hed come to know her, he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever had or would. Husbands didnt know their wives this way, or wives ther husbands. Stalkers might aspire to know the objects of their obsession this way, but never could.
Until the night he woke after midnight, head throbbing. Too hot, something wrong with the conditioning again. Florida. The blue shirt he slept in clinging to his back and shoulders. What would she be doing now?
Was she staring up, awake, at faint bars of reflected light on the ceiling, listening to Upful Groupvine?
Kathy suspected he might be cracking up. He looked at his hands. They could be anybodys. He looked at them as though hed never seen them before.
He remembered the 5-SB in the orphanage. The taste of it coming while it was still being injected. Rotting metal. The placebo brought no taste at all.
He got up. The Kitchen Korner, sensing him, woke. The fridge door slid aside. A single ancient leaf of lettuce sagged blackly through the plastic rods of one white shelf. A half-empty bottle of Evian on another. He held his cupped hands above the lettuce, willing himself to feel something radiating from its decay, some subtle life force, orgones, particles of an energy unknown to science.
Alison Shires was going to kill herself. He knew hed seen it. Seen it somehow in the incidental data she generated in her mild-mannered passage through the world of things.
Hey there, the fridge said. Youve left me open. Laney said nothing.
Well, do you wantthe door open, partner? You know it interferes with the automatic defrost .
Be quiet. His hands felt better. Cooler.
He stood there until his hands were quite cold, then withdrew them and pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples, the fridge taking this opportunity to close itself without further comment.
Twenty minutes later he was on the Metro, headed for Hollywood, a jacket over his sleep-creased Malaysian oxford shirt. Isolated figures on station platforms, whipped sideways by perspective in the wind of the trains passing.
Were not talking conscious decision, here? Blackwell kneaded what was left of his right ear.
No, Laney said, I dont know what I thought I was doing.
You were trying to save her. The girl.
It felt like something snapped. A rubber band. It felt like gravity.
Thats what it feels like, Blackwell said, when you decide.
Somewhere down the hill from the Sunset Metro exit he passed a man watering his lawn, a rectangle perhaps twice the size of a pooltable, illuminated by the medicinal glow of a nearby streetlight. Laney saw the water beading on the perfectly even blades of bright green plastic. The plastic lawn was fenced back from the street with welded steel, upright prison bars supporting bright untarnished coils of razor-wire. The mans house was scarcely larger than his glittering lawn; a survival from a day when this slope to the hills had been covered with bungalows and arbors. There were others like it, tucked between the balconied, carefully varied faces of condos and apartment complexes, tiny properties dating from before the areas incorporation into the city. There was a hint of oranges in the air, but he couldnt see them.
The waterer looked up, and Laney saw that he was blind, eyes hidden by the black lozenges of video units coupled directly to the optic nerve. You never knew what they were watching.
Laney went on, letting whatever drew him set his course through these sleeping streets and the occasional scent of a blooming tree. Distant brakes sounded on Santa Monica.
Fifteen minutes later he was in front of her building on Fountain Avenue. Looking up. Fifth floor. 502.
The nodal point.
You dont want to talk about it?
Laney looked up from his empty cup, meeting Blackwells eyes across the table.
Ive never really told this to anyone, he said, and it was true.
Lets walk, Blackwell said, and stood, his hulk seeming to lift effortlessly, as though he were a helium parade float. Laney wondered what time it might be, here or in L.A. Yamazaki was taking care of the bill.
He left Amos n Andes with them, out into a falling mist that wasnt quite rain, the sidewalk a bobbing stream of black umbrellas. Yamazaki produced a black object no larger than a business card, slightly thicker, and flexed it sharply hetween his thumbs. A black umbrella flowered. Yamazaki handed it to him. The curve of the black handle felt dry and hollow and very slightly warm.
How do you fold it?
You dont, Yamazaki said. It goes away. He opened another for himself. Hairless Blackwell, in his micropore, was evidently immune to rain. Please continue with your account, Mr. Laney.
Through a gap between two distant towers, Laney glimpsed the side of another, taller building. He saw vast faces there, vaguely familiar, contorted in inexplicable drama.
The nondisclosure agreement Laney had signed was intended to cover any incidences of Slitscan using its connections with DatAmerica in ways that might be construed as violations of the law. Such incidences, in Laneys experience, were frequent to the point of being constant, at least at certain advanced levels of research. Since DatAmerica had been Laneys previous employer, he hadnt found any of this particularly startling. DatAmerica was less a power than a territory; in many ways it was a law unto itself.
Laneys protracted survey of Alison Shires had already involved any number of criminal violations, one of which had provided him with the codes required to open the door into her buildings foyer, activate the elevator, unlock the door of her fifth-floor apartment, and cancel the private security alarm that would automatically warrant an armed response if she did these things without keying in two extra digits. This last was intended as insurance against endemic home invasion, a crime in which residents were accosted in parking garages and induced to surrender their codes. Alison Shires code consisted of her month, date, and year of birth, something any security service strongly advised against. Her back-up code was 23, her age the year before, when shed moved in and become a subscriber.
Laney softly reciting these as he stood before her building, its eight-story facade feinting toward someones idea of Tudor Revival. Everything looking so sharply and comprehensively detailed, in these first moments of an L.A. dawn.
23.
So, Blackwell supposed, you just walked in. Punched up her codes and bang, there you were. The three of them waiting to cross at an intersection.
Bang.
No sound at all in the mirrored foyer. A sense of vacuum. A dozen Laneys reflected there as he crossed an expanse of new carpet. Into an elevator smelling of something floral, where he used part of the code again. It took him straight to five. The door slid open. More new carpet. Beneath a fresh coat of cream enamel the corridors walls displayed the faint irregularities of old-fashioned plaster.
502.
What do you think youre doing? Laney asked aloud, though whether to himself or to Alison Shires he did not nor would he ever know.
The brass round of an antique security fish-eye regarded him from the door, partially occluded by a cataract of pale paint.
The key-pad was set flush with the doors steel frame, not quite level with the fish-eye. He watched his finger finding its way through the sequence.
23.
But Alison Shires, naked, opened the door before the code could key, Upful Groupvine soaring joyfully behind her as Laney grabbed her blood-slick wrists. And saw there in her eyes what he took then and forever as a look of simple recognition, not even of blame.