Laney looked at his eggs. Thats right.
During that time, you participated in a number of drug trials? You were an experimental subject?
Yes, Laney said, his eggs looking somehow farther away, or like a picture in a magazine.
This was voluntary on your part?
There were rewards.
Voluntary, Pursley said. You get on any of that 5-SB?
They didnt tell us what they were giving us, Laney said. Sometimes wed get a placebo instead.
You dont mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son, but I think you know that.
Which was true, but Laney just sat there.
Well? Pursley removed his big heavy glasses. His eyes were cold and blue and set into an intricate topography of wrinkles.
I probably had it, Laney said.
Pursley slapped the blue papers on his thigh. Well, there you are. You almost certainly did. Now, do you know how that substance eventually affected many of the test subjects?
Daniels unclamped his glasses and began to knead the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed.
Stuff tends to turn males into fixated homicidal stalkers, Pursley said, putting his glasses back on and stuffing the papers into his case. Comes on years later, sometimes. Go after media faces, politicians Thats why its now one of themost illegal substances, any damn country you care to look. Drug that makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians, well, boy, itll getto be. He grinned dryly.
Im not one, Laney said. Im not like that.
Daniels opened his eyes. It doesnt matter, he said. What matters is that Slitscan can counter all our material by raising the possibility, the merest shadow, however remote, that you are.
You see, son, Pursley said, theyd just make out you got into your line of work because you were predisposed to that, spying on famous people. You didnt tell them about any of it, did you?
No, Laney said, I didnt.
There you go, said Purshey. Theyll say they hired you because you were good at it, but you just got too damn goodat it.
But she wasnt famous, Laney said.
But heis, Rice Daniels said, and theyll say you were after him. Theyll say the whole thing was your idea. Theyll wring their hands about responsibility. Theyll talk about their new screening procedures for quantitative analysts. And nobody, Laney, nobody at allwill be watching us.
Thats about the size of it, Pursley said, standing. He picked up the briefcase. That real bacon there, like off a hog?
They say it is, Laney said.
Damn, Pursley said, these Hollywood hotels are fast-lane. He stuck out his hand. Laney shook it. Nice meeting you, son.
Daniels didnt even bother to say goodbye. And two days later, going over the printout of his charges, Laney would notice that it all began, the billing in his own name, with a large pot of coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, and a 15-percent tip.
Arleigh McCrae was staring at him.
Do they know that? she asked. Does Blackwell?
No, Laney said, not that part, anyway. He could see Rydells fax, folded on the bedside stand. They didnt know about that, either.
What happened then? What did you do?
I found out I was paying for at least some of the lawyers theyd gotten for me. I didnt know what todo. I sat out there by the pool a lot. It was sort of pleasant, actually. I wasnt 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 youll fit right in.
Into what?
She looked at her watch, black-faced stainless on a plain black nylon band. Dinners at eight, but Rez will be late. Come out for a walk and a drink. Ill try to tell you what I know about it.
If you want to, Laney said.
Theyre 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 down 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 trains directionless fluorescents, Chia recognized the square as the control-face of the computer shed seen in his room.
He studied the display, stroked it again, and frowned at the result. Someone pays attention to my address, he said, and to Mitsukos.
The restaurant?
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 hed died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But hed 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 designers, and put the real parts into cases hed make in his shop. Say hed 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 manufacturer 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.
Masahikos eyes were closed, and he seemed to be nodding slightly, though perhaps only with the motion of the train.
And it turned out some people liked that, too, liked it a lot. He started getting commissions to make these things. One of the first was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick
Masahikos eyes opened, and she saw that not only had he been listening, but that he was impatient for more.
So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking about all that, and how she wanted to do something that took what hed been doing into something else. So she cashed out her stock in all the companies shed worked for, and she bought some land on the coast, in Oregon
And the train pulled into Shinjuku, and everyone stood up, heading for the doors, the businessman closing his breast-bondage comic and tucking it beneath his arm.