The Bridge Trilogy Part 134

Carrying his soup, he turns to see what's arrested the ceaseless hunt.

There on the screen of the notebook, in the boy's lap, is a scan of a battered Rolex "Victory," an inexpensive wartime model for the Canadian market, worth a fair bit now but not in this condition.

The steel case looks rough and the dial has faded unevenly. Black Arabics from one to twelve are crisp, but the inner chapter, red, European time, is almost gone.

Fontaine sips his miso, looking down, wondering what it is this boy sees to hold him, in the red ghosts of European time.

Then the boy's head sags under the weight of the eyephones, and Fontaine hears him start to snore.

LANEY finds himself on an island in that mind-wide flow he ceaselessly cruises.

It is not a construct, this place, an environment proper, so much as a knotting, a folding-in of information rooted in the substrates of the oldest codes. It is something like a makeshift raft, random pieces thrown together, but it is anch.o.r.ed, unmoving. He knows that it is no accident, that it has been put in his path for a reason.

The reason, he soon finds, is that Libia and Paco wish to speak with him.

They are a.s.sociates of the Rooster, junior denizens of the Walled City, and present here as a sphere of mercury in zero gravity and a black, three-legged cat, respectively. The sphere of mercury (Libia) has a lovely voice, a girl's, and the three-legged cat, who is also missing one eye and one ear (Paco) has a cunningly modulated growl Laney thinks he remembers from a Mexican cartoon. They are almost certainly from Mexico City, these two, if geography needs to be taken into consideration, and very likely belong to that faction of flaming youth currently opting for the re-flooding of the Federal District's drained lakes, a radical urban reconfiguration that for some reason had obsessed Rei Toei in her final month in Tokyo. She had developed a fascination with large human settlements in general, and Laney had been her guide through certain of the stranger info-prospects presented by what pa.s.ses, this century, for town planning.

So he hangs here, at the juncture of these old code-roots, in a place devoid of very specific shape or texture, aside from Libia and Paco, and hears them.

"The Rooster tells us you feel someone is watching you watch Cody Harwood," says the sphere of mercury, pulsing as it speaks, its surface reflecting vehicles pa.s.sing in some busy street.

"It might be an artifact," Laney counters, not sure he should have

177.

43. LIBIA & PACO.

I.

brought it up with the Rooster, whose paranoia is legendary. "Something the 5-SB generates."

"We think not," says the cat, its one-eyed filthy head propped atop an arrested drift of data. It yawns, revealing grayish-white gums, the color of boiled pork, and a single orange canine. Its one eye is yellow and hate-filled, unblinking. "We have determined that you are, in fact, being observed in your observation."

"But not at the moment," says Libia.

"Because we have constructed this blind," says the cat.

"Do you know who it is?" Laney asks.

"It is Harwood," says Libia, the sphere quivering delicately.

"Harwood? Harwood is watching me watch him?"

"Harwood," says the cat, "dosed himself with 5-SB. Three years after you were released from the

orphanage in Gainesville."

Laney is suddenly and terribly aware of his physical being, the condition of his body. His lungs failing in a cardboard carton in the concrete bowels of Shinjuku Station.

Harwood. It is Harwood whom he has sometimes imagined as the presence of G.o.d.

Harwood, who is...

Like him.

Harwood who sees, Laney now sees, the nodal points. Who sees the shapes from which history

emerges. And that is why he is at the very heart of the emergent cusp, this newness Laney cannot quite glimpse. Of course Harwood is there.

Because Harwood, in a sense, is causing it.

"How do you know?" he hears himself ask, and wills himself beyond the failing strictures of his body. "Can you be sure?"

"We've found a way in," Libia chimes, the sphere distorting like a topographic learning aid, turning reflections of moving traffic into animated Escher-fragments that fly together, mirroring one another. "The Rooster set us to it, and we did."

"And does he know?" Laney asks. "Does Harwood know?"

"We don't think he's noticed," growls the cat, purple-brown scabs caked on the absence of its ear.

178.

"Watch this," says Libia, making no effort to conceal her pride. The intricately lobed surface of

the mirrored shape flows and ripples, and Laney is looking into the gray eyes of a young and very serious-looking man.

"You want us to kill him," the young man says. "Or do I misunderstand you?"

"You understand me," says Harwood, his voice familiar, unmistakable, though he sounds tired.

"You know I think it's a very good idea," says the young man, "but it could be done with greater

surety if you gave us time for preparation. I prefer to choose the time and the terrain, if possible."

"Not possible," Harwood says. "Do it when you can."

"You don't have to give me a reason, of course," the young man says, "hut you must realize I'm

curious. We've suggested his removal since you contracted with us."

"It's time," Harwood replies. "The moment."

Wind catches the young man's dark scarf. It flutters, strobing the image. "What about the other

one, the rent-a-cop?"

"Kill him if it seems he's likely to escape. Otherwise, it might be

-useful if he could be questioned. He's in this too, but I don't cee exactly how"

Libia becomes a sphere again, rotating.

Laney closes his eyes and gropes in the close electric dark for the blue cough syrup. He feels the hate-filled yellow eye watching him, but he imagines it as Harwood's.

Harwood knows

Harwood took the 5-SB.

Harwood is like him.

But Harwood has an agenda of his own, and it is from this agenda, in part, that the situation is emerging.

-Laney cracks the seal. Drinks the blue syrup. He must think now.

179.

I.

44. JUST WHEN YOU THINK.

THE rain wasn't coming back, Chevette decided, shrugging her shoulders against the weight of Skinner's jacket.

She was sitting on a bench, behind a stack of empty poultry crates, and she knew she should be going somewhere but she just couldn't. Thinking about Skinner dying here, about what Fontaine had said. The knife in the inside pocket, its handle digging into her left collarbone, the way she was slouched. She straightened her back against the plywood behind her and tried to pull herself together.

She had to find Tessa and get back to the van, and she had to do that, if she could,- without running into Carson. It was possible, she figured, that he hadn't even seen her run out, even though she was sure somehow that when she'd seen him, he'd been looking for n.o.body but her. But if he hadn't seen her, and he wouldn't have found her there, then probably that bar would be the last place she should expect to find him now. And if he had seen her, then he wouldn't think she'd go back there either. Which would also put him somewhere else. And it was possible that Tessa, who liked her beers, would be there still, because she sure hadn't been keen on bedding down in the van. Probably Tessa thought that the bar was way interst.i.tial, so it might just be that Chevette, if she was careful about it, could slip in there and get her, and get her back to the van. Carson wasn't too likely to come sniffing around the foot of Folsom, and if he did he was liable to run into the kind of people who'd take him for easy meat.