All Tomorrow's Parties

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 marry 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, 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.

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

It is a dark business, Yamazaki thinks and wonders, taking the stairs to the cardboard city, what exactly Laney is about here. Speaking of nodal points in history, of the 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, to 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 subway, 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 Japanese 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 passageway 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 limbs 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?

'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 play across Yamazaki, blinding him. Yamazaki twists to avoid the beam. Sees figures framed in secondhand daylight. 'Imagine he does this on a regular basis? Hand-held but digitally stabilized. 'Something to do with phases of the moon?

Zooms in on one of the figures, lean and male, as all are. Mouth obscured by a dark scarf. Stiff black hair above a high white forehead. 'No evidence of that. Opportunistic. He waits for them to come to him. Then he takes them. These, and the camera swings smoothly to frame the face and bare chest of a dead man, eyes staring, 'are jackers. This one had dancer in his pocket. There is a dark comma on the dead man's pale chest, just below the sternum. 'The other one was stabbed through the throat, but somehow he managed to miss the arteries.

'He would, says the unseen man.

'We have profiles, the man with the scarf says, off-camera, the face of the corpse thrown across Laney's cardboard wall, the melon blanket. 'We have a full forensic psych run-up. But you ignore them!

'Of course I do.

'You're in denial. Two pairs of hands in latex gloves grasp the dead man flip him over. There is a second smaller wound visible beneath one shoulder blade blood has pooled within the body darkened. 'He poses as real a danger to you as to anyone else.

'But he's interesting, isn't he?

The wound in close up is a small unsmiling mouth. The blood reads black. 'Not to me.

'But you aren't interesting, are you?

'No, and the camera pans up light catching a sharp cheekbone above the black scarf, 'and you don't want me to be, do you?

There is a faint chime as the transmission is terminated. Laney throws back his head the image of the man with the scarf in freeze frame across the ceiling of the carton and Yamazaki sees that the cardboard there is shingled with tiny self adhesive printouts, dozens of different images of a bland-looking man, oddly familiar. Yamazaki blinks, his contacts shifting, and misses his glasses. He feels incomplete without them. 'Who was that man, Laney?

'The help, Laney says.

'Help?

'Hard to get good help these days. Laney kills the projector and removes the massive eyephones. In the sudden gloom, his face is reduced to a child's drawing, smudged black eyeholes against a pallid smear. 'The man who was taking that call-

'The one who spoke?

'He owns the world. Near as anyone does.

Yamazaki frowns. 'I have brought medicine-

'That was from the bridge, Yamazaki.

'San Francisco?

'They followed my other man there. They followed him, last night, but they lost him. They always do. This morning they found those bodies.

'Followed who?

'The man who isn't there. The one I'm having to infer.

'These are pictures of Harwood? Of Harwood Levine? Yamazaki has recognized the face replicated on the stickers.

'Spooks are his. Best money can buy, probably, but they can't get close to the man who isn't there.

'What man?

'I think he's someone Harwood… collected. Collects people. Interesting people. I think he might've worked for Harwood, taken commissions. He doesn't leave a trace, none at all. When he crosses someone's path, they're just gone. Then he erases himself.

Yamazaki fumbles the antibiotics from his bag. 'Will you take these, Laney? Your cough-

'Where's Rydell, Yamazaki? He's supposed to be up there now. It's all coming together.

'What is?

'I don't know, Laney says, leaning forward to dig through the contents of the bag. He finds a coffee and activates it, tossing it from hand to hand as it heats. Yamazaki hears the pop, the vacuum hiss, as Laney opens it. Smell of coffee. Laney sips from the steaming can.

'Something's happening, Laney says and coughs into his hand, slopping hot creamed coffee on Yamazaki's wrist. Yamazaki flinches.

'Everything's changing. Or it's not, really. How I see it is changing. But since I've been able to see it the new way, something else has started. There's something building up. Big. Bigger than big. It'll happen soon, then there'll be a cascade effect.

'What will happen?

'I don't know. Another fit of coughing requires that he set aside the coffee. Yamazaki has opened the antibiotics and tries to offer them. Laney waves them aside. 'Have you been back to the island? Do they have any idea where she is?

Yamazaki blinks. 'No. She is simply not present.

Laney smiles, faint gleam of teeth against the darkness of his mouth. 'That's good. She's in it too, Yamazaki. He reaches for the coffee. 'She's in it too.