The Bridge Trilogy Part 51

The washroom had an old steel sink and a very new, very complicated-looking toilet with at least a dozen b.u.t.tons on top of the tank. These were labeled in j.a.panese. The polymer seat squirmed slightly, taking her weight, and she almost jumped up again. It's okay, she rea.s.sured herself, just foreign technology. When she was done, she chose one of the controls at random, producing a superfine spray of warm, perfumed water that made her gasp and jump back.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then stood well to the side and tried another b.u.t.ton. This one seemed to do the trick: the toilet flushed with a jetstream sound that reminded him of being on the plane.

As she washed her hands, and then her face, at the rea.s.suringly ordinary sink, using pale blue liquid soap from a pump-top dispenser shaped like a one-eyed dinosaur, she heard the flushing stop and another sound begin. She looked back and saw a ring of purplish light oscillating, somewhere below the toilet seat. UV, she supposed, sterilizing it.

There was a poster of the Dukes of Nuke 'Em taped on the wall, this hideous 'roidhead metal band.

They were sweaty and blank-eyed, grinning, and the drummer was missing his front teeth. The lettering was in j.a.panese. She wondered why anyone in j.a.pan would be into that, because groups like the Dukes were all about hating anything that wasn't their idea of American. But Kelsey, who'd been to j.a.pan lots, with her father, had said that you couldn't tell what the j.a.panese would make of anything.

There wasn't anything here to dry your hands on. She got a t-shirt out of her bag and used that, although it didn't work very well. As she was kneeling to stuff the shirt back in, she noticed a corner of something she didn't recognize, but then Calvin cracked the door behind her.

"Excuse me," he said.

"It's okay," Chia said, zipping the bag shut.

"It's not," he said, looking back over his shoulder, then back at her. "You really meet Maryalice at SeaTac?"

"On the plane," Chia said.

"You're not part of it?"

Chia stood up, which made her feel kind of dizzy. "Part of what?"

He looked at her from beneath the brim of the black cap. "Then you really ought to get out of here. I mean right now."

"Why?" Chia asked, although it didn't strike her as a bad idea at all.

"Nothing you want to know anything about." There was a crash, somewhere behind him. He winced.

"It's okay. She's just throwing things.They hven't gotten serious yet. Come on,"and he grabbed her bag by the shoulder strap 78 William Gibson ~ and lifted it up. He was moving fast now, and she had to hustle to keep up with him. Out past the closed door of Eddie's office, past the bank of screens (where she thought she saw people line-dancing in cowboy hats, but she was never sure).

Calvin slapped his hand on the sensor-plate on the elevator door. "Take you to the garage," he said, as the sound of breaking gla.s.s came from Eddie's office. "Hang a left, about twenty feet, there's another elevator. Skip the lobby; we got cameras there. Bottom b.u.t.ton gets you the subway.

Get on a train." He pa.s.sed her her bag.

"Which one?" Chia asked.

Maryalice screamed. Like something really, really hurt.

"Doesn't matter," Calvin said, and quickly said something in j.a.panese to the elevator. The elevator answered, but he was already gone, the door closing, and then she was descending, her bag seeming to lighten slightly in her arms.

Eddie's Graceland was still there when the door slid open, a hulking wedge beside those other black can. She found the second elevator Calvin had told her to take, its door scratched and dented. It had regular b.u.t.tons, and it didn't talk, and it took her down to malls bright as day, crowds moving through them, to escalators and platforms and mag-levs and the eternal logos tethered overhead.

She was in Tokyo at last,

11. Collapse of New Buildings Laney's room was high up in a narrow tower faced with white ceramic tile. It was trapezoidal in cross section and dated from the eighties boomtown, the years of the Bubble. That it had survived the great earthquake was testimony to the skill of its engineers; that it had survived the subsequent reconstruction testified to an arcane tangle of ownership and an ongoing struggle between two of the city's oldest criminal organizations. Yamazaki had explained this in the cab, returning from New Golden Street.

"We were uncertain how you might feel about new buildings,"

he'd said.

"You mean the nanotech buildings?" Laney had been struggling

to keep his eyes open. The driver wore spotless white gloves.

"Yes. Some people find them disturbing." "I don't know. I'd have to see one."

"You can see them from your hotel, I think."

And he could. He knew their sheer brutality of scale from constructs, but virtuality had failed to convey the peculiarity of their apparent texture, a streamlined organicism. "They are like Giger's paintings of New York," Yamazaki had said, but the reference had been lost on Laney.

Now he sat on the edge of his bed, staring blankly out at these

miracles of the new technology, as ba.n.a.l and as sinister as such miracles usually were, and they

were only annoying: the world's largest

inhabited structures. (The Chern.o.byl containment structure was larger, but nothing human would ever live there.) The umbrella Yamazaki had given him was collapsing into itself, shrinking. Going away.

The phone began to ring. He couldn't find it.

"Telephone," he said. "Where is it?"

A nub of ruby light, timed to the rings, began to pulse from a flat rectangle of white cedar

arranged on a square black tray on a bedside ledge. He picked it up. Thumbed a tiny square of mother-of-pearl.

"Hey," someone said. "That Laney?"

"Who's calling?"

"Rydell. From the Chateau. Hans let me use the phone." Hans was the night manager. "1 get the time right? You having breakfast?"

Laney rubbed his eyes, looked out again at the new buildings. "Sure."

"I called Yamazaki," Rydell said. "Got your number."

"Thanks," Laney said, yawning, "but I-"

"Yamazaki said you got the gig."

"I think so," Laney said. "Thanks. Guess I owe-"

"Slitscan," Rydell said. "All over the Chateau,"

"No," Laney said, "that's over."

"You know any Katherine Torrance, Laney? Sherman Oaks address? She's up in the suite you had, with

about two vans worth of sensing gear. Hans figures they're trying to get a read on what you were doing up there, any dope or anything."

Laney stared out at the towers. Part of a facade seemed to move, but it had to be his eyes.

"But Hans says there's no way they can sort the residual molecules out in those rooms anyway.

Place has too much of a history."

"Kathy Torrance? From Slitscan?"

"Not like they said they were, but they've got all these techs, and techs always t'alk too much, and Ghengis down in the garage saw the decals on some of the cases, when they were unloading.

There's about

82 William Gih,ion twenty of 'em, if you don't count the gophers. Got two suites and four singles. Don't tip."

"But what are they doing?"

"That sensor stuff. Trying to figure out what you got up to in the suite. And one of the bellmen