The Bridge Trilogy Part 104

52.

Tissot tank. "But with writing on, like 'Joe Blow, twenty-five years with Blowcorp, congratulations."

The boy looks blank. Presses a key. Another watch appears on the screen. He presses the second key. "A 1960 Vulcain jump-hour, chrome, bra.s.sing at lugs, dial very good."

"'Very good,' "Fontaine advises. "Not good enough. See these spots here?" Indicating certain darker flecks scattered across the scan. "If it were 'very fine,' sure."

"Fine," says the boy, looking up at Fontaine. He presses the key that produces the image of another watch.

"Let me see that watch, okay?" Fontaine points at the watch in the boy's hand. "It's okay. I'll give it back."

The boy looks from the watch to Fontaine. Fontaine puts the Smith & Wesson away in its pocket.

Shows the boy his empty hands.

"I'll give it back."

The boy extends his hand. Fontaine takes the watch.

"You gonna tell me where you got this?"

Blank.

"You want a cup of coffee?"

Fontaine gestures back, toward the simmering pot on the hotplate. Smells its bitter brew, thickening.

The boy understands.

He shakes his head.

Fontaine screws the loupe into his eye and settles into contemplation.

d.a.m.n. He wants this watch.

LATER in the day, when the bento boy brings Fontaine his lunch, the Jaeger LeCoultre military is in the pocket of Fontaine's gray tweed SlaCks, high-waisted and extravagantly pleated, but Fontaine knows that the watch is not his. The boy has been put in the back of the shop, in that cluttered little zone that divides Fontaine's business from his private life, and Fontaine has become aware of the fact that he can, yes, smell his visitor; under the morning's coffee smell a definite and insistent reek of old sweat and unwashed clothes.

53.

As the bento boy exits to his box-stacked bicycle, Fontaine undoes the clips on his own box.

Tempura today, not his favorite for bento, because it cools, but still he's hungry. Steam wafts from the bowl of miso as he un5naps its plastic lid. He pauses.

"Hey" he says, back into the s.p.a.ce behind the shop, "you want some miso?" No reply. "Soup, you hear me?"

Fontaine sighs, climbs off his wooden stool, and carries the steaming soup into the back of the shop.

The boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, the notebook open on his lap. Fontaine sees the image of a large, very complicated chronometer floating there on the screen. Something from the eighties, by the look of it.

"You want some miso?"

"Zenith," says the boy. "El Primero. Stainless case. Thirty-one jewels, 3O19PHC movement. Heavy stainless bracelet with flip lock. Original ;crewdown crown. Crown dial and movement signed."

Fontaine stares at him.

13. SECONDHAND DAYLIGHT.

YAMAZAKI returns with antibiotics, packaged foods, coffee in self-heating tins. He wears a black nylon flight jacket and carries these things, along with his notebook, in a blue mesh bag.

He descends into the station through a crowd of only ordinary density well before the evening rush hour. He has found it difficult to sleep, his dreams haunted by the perfect face of Rei Toei, who is in a sense his employer, and who in another sense does not exist.

She is a voice, a face, familiar to millions. She is a sea of code, the ultimate expression of entertainment software. Her audience knows that she does not walk among them; that she is media, purely. And that is a large part of her appeal.

If not for Rei Toei, Yamazaki considers, Laney would not be here now. It was the attempt to understand her, to second-guess her motivation, that had originally brought Laney to Tokyo. In the employ of Rez's management team, the singer Rez having declared his intention to many her. And how, they asked, was that to be? How could any human, even one so thoroughly mediated, marry a construct, a congeries of software, a dream?

And Rez, the Chinese-Irish singer, the pop star, had tried. Yamazaki knows this. He knows as much about this as any living human, includ

ing Rez, because Rei Toei has discussed it with him. He understands that Rez exists as thoroughly, in the realm of the digital, as it is possible

~ for a living human to exist. If Rez-the-man were to die, today, Rez-the icon would certainly live on. But Rez's yearning was to go there, literally to go where Rei Toei is. Or was, she having now effectively vanished.

The singer had sought to join her in some realm of the digital or in some not-yet-imagined borderland, some intermediate state. And had

failed.

But has she gone there now? And why had Laney fled as well?

Rez tours the Kombinat states now. Insists on traveling by rail.

55.

Station to station, Moscow hts goal, rumors of madness flickering in the band's wake.

It is a dark business, Yaivazaki thinks and wonders, taking the stairs to the cardboard city, what exactly Laney is about here. Speaking of nodal points in history, of son-te emerging pattern in the texture of things. Of everything changing.

Laney is a sport, a mutant, the accidental product of covert clinical trials of a drug that induced something oddly akin to psychic abilities in a small percentage of test subjects. But Laney isn't psychic in any non-rational sense; rather he is able, through the organic changes wrought long ago by 5-SB, this drug, tj somehow perceive change emerging from vast flows of data.

And now Rei Toei is gone, her management claims, and how can that be? Yamazaki suspects that Laney may know why, or where, and that is a factor in Yamazaki's having decided to return here and find him. He has been extremely careful to avoid being followed, but he also knows that that can mean next to nothing.

The smell of the Tokyo 5ubway, familiar as the smell of his mother's apartment, comforts him now.

It is a smell at once utterly distinctive and impossible to describe It is the smell of j.a.panese humanity, of which he very much feels himself a part, as manifested in this singular environment, this world of tubes, of white corridors, of whispering silver trains.

He finds the pa.s.sageway between the two escalators, the tiled columns. He half suspects that the

shelters will be gone.

But they are here, and when he dons a white micropore mask and enters the model-builder's brightly lit hutch, nothing has changed except the kit the old man concentrates on now: a multi-headed dinosaur with robotic hind lmbs in navy and silver. The brush tip works in the eye of one reptilian head. The old man does not look up.

"Laney?"

Nothing from behind the square of melon-yellow blanket.

Yamazaki nods to the old man and crawls past on hands and knees, pushing his mesh bag of supplies before him.

"Laney?"

56.

"Hush," Laney says, from the narrow fetid dark. "He's talking."

"Who is talking?" Pushing the bag past the limp, foam-filled fabric, its touch on his face reminding him of nursery school.

As Yamazaki enters, Laney activates a projector in the clumsy eye-phones: the images he sees splay across Yamazaki, blinding him. Yamazaki twists to avoid the beam. Sees figures framed in secondhand daylight. "-magine he does this on a regular basis?" Hand-held but digitally stabilized. "Something to do with phases of the moon?"