"It felt like something snapped. A ruhher hand. It felt like gravity."
"That"s what it feels like," Blackwell said, "when you decide."
Somewhere down the hill from the Sunset Metro exit he pa.s.sed a man watering his lawn, a rectangle perhaps twice the size of a pooltahie, 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 man"s 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 area"s incorporation into the city. There was a hint of oranges in the air, but he couldn"t 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 don"t want to talk about it?"
Laney looked up from his empty cup, meeting Blackwell"s eyes across the table.
WUhi~im (Uk "I"ve never really told this to anyone," he said, and it was true.
"Let"s walk," Blackwell said, and stood, his hulk seeming to li"t effirtlessly, as though he were a heliLim Parade float. l.aney 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 wasn"t 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 don"t," Yamazaki said. "It goes away." He opened another for himself. 1-lairless 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 Laney"s experience, were frequent to the point of being constant, at least at certain advanced levels of research. Since DatAmerica had been Laney"s previous employer, he hadn"t found any of this particularly startling. DatAmerica was less a power than a territory; in many ways it was a law unto itself.
Laney"s protracted survey of Alison Shires had already involved any number of crjmiI~a1 violations, one of which had provided him with the codes required to open the door into her
building"s 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 she"d moved in and become a subscriber.
Laney softly reciting these as he stood before her building, its eight-story facade feinting toward someone"s idea of Tudor Revival. Everything looking so sharply and comprehensively detailed, in these first moments of an L.A. dawn.
"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 corridor"s walls displayed the faint irregularities of old- fashioned plaster.
502.
"What do you think you"re doing?" Laney asked aloud, though whether to himself or to Alison Shires he did not nor would he ever know.
The bra.s.s 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 door"s steel frame, not quite 56 NiHiarn Gab~on level with the fish-eye. I-Ic watched his finger finding its way through the sequence.
But Alison Shires, naked, opened the door before the code could key, Upful (iroupvine 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.
"This isn"t working," she said, as though she were indicating a minor appliance, and Laney heard himself whimper, a sound he hadn"t made since childhood. He needed to see those wrists, but couldn"t, holding her. He was walking her backward, toward a wicker armchair he wasn"t even aware he"d seen.
"Sit," he said, as if to a stubborn child, and she did. He let go of her wrists. Ran for where he guessed the bathroom had to be. Towels there and some kind of tape.
And discovered himself kneeling beside her where she sat, red fingers curled in toward red palms, as if in meditation. He rolled a dark green hand towel around her left wrist and whipped the tape around it, some rubbery beige product meant to mask specific areas during the application of aerosol cosmetics. He knew that from her product-purchase data.
Were her fingers turning blue, beneath their coat of red? He looked up. Into that same
recognition. One cheekbone brushed with blood.
"Don"t," he said.
"It"s slowing."
Laney wrapping her right forearm now, the tape-roll dangling from his teeth.
"I missed the artery."
"Don"t move," Laney said, and sprang up, tripping over his own feet, crashing face-first into what he recognized, just before it broke his nose, as the work of the editor of lamps. The carpet seemed to whip up and smack him playfully in the face.
"Alison-"
57.
Her ankle stepping past him, kitchenward. "Alison, sit down!"
"Sorry," he thought he heard her say, and then the shot.
Blackwell"s shoulders heaved as he sighed, making a sound that Laney heard above the traffic, Yamazaki"s gla.s.ses were filled with jittering pastels, the walls here all neon, a glare to shame Vegas, every surface lit and jumping.
Blackwell was staring at Laney. "This way," he said, finally, and rounded a corner, into relative darkness and an edge of urine. Laney followed, Yamazaki behind him. At the far end of the narrow pa.s.sage, they emerged into fairyland.
No neon here at all. Ambient glow from the towers overhead. Austere rectangles of white frosted gla.s.s, the size of large greeting cards, were daubed with black ideograms, each sign marking a tiny structure like some antique bathing cabin on a forgotten beach. Crowded shoulder to shoulder down one side of the cobbled lane, their miniature facades suggested a shuttered sideshow in some secret urban carnival. Age-silvered cedar, oiled paper, matting; nothing to pin the place in time but the fact that the signs were electric.
Laney stared. A street built by leprechauns.
"Golden Street," said Keith Alan Blackwell.