Pattern Recognition

12. APOPHENIA

Climbing the stairs, she realizes she's forgotten to do the Bond thing, but she finds that recent events have apparently broken the spell of Asian Sluts.

It doesn't even bother her that she knows what's stuffed down behind the pile of magazines on the landing. As long as she doesn't dwell on it.

More worried about what she may just now have gotten into. Walking him to the station she's affirmed that she's up for it: They'll work for Bigend, she'll go to Tokyo and find Taki. Try, with the help of Parkaboy and Musashi, to get the number. Then they'll see.

There's no reason, he says, to regard it as a Faustian bargain with Bigend. They'll be free to end the partnership at any time, and can keep each other honest.

But this argument is somehow familiar from past contexts, past bargains, where things haven't really worked out that well.

But she knows she's going now, and she has the two very black, very odd-looking keys around her neck, and right this minute she isn't worrying about the perimeter.

Fuck Dorotea.

Right now she believes implicitly in German technology.

Which is about to create a problem, she realizes, as she works those fine locks in turn.

She doesn't know where she can leave the new keys, or who to trust with them. Damien will want to be able to unlock his apartment, should he return, and she won't be here. He doesn't have an office, no agency affiliation that she knows of, and she doesn't know any of their mutual acquaintances here well enough to trust them with the valuable and highly portable music-production gear in the room upstairs. She doesn't know how constant Damien's e-mail connection is, at the dig, in Russia. If she e-mails him for advice, will he get it in time, and respond, telling her where to leave the keys?

Then she thinks of Voytek and Magda, who have no idea where this place is. She can leave one set with them, telling Damien how to contact them, and take the other set with her.

And, yes, letting herself in, everything looks fine here, even the nap on the couch, reversed where Boone had sat on it.

The phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Pamela Mainwaring, Cayce. I'm travel for Hubertus. I have you British Airways, Heathrow-Narita, ten fifty-five hours, first class, tomorrow. Works?”

Cayce stares at the robot girls. “Yes. Thanks.”

“Brilliant. I'll come round now and drop off the ticket. I also have a laptop for you, and a phone.”

She's always managed not to acquire either, at least in terms of traveling with them. She has a laptop at home, but uses it, with a full-size keyboard and a monitor, only as her desk machine. And the mirror-world has always been a deliberate cellular vacation. But now she remembers Tokyo's lack of English signage, and her lack of spoken Japanese.

“I'll be there in ten. I'm calling from the car. Bye.” Click.

She locates the piece of cardboard with Voytek's address and e-mails him, giving him the number here and asking him to call as soon as he can, that she has a favor to ask and that it's worth a few ZX 81s. Then she e-mails Parkaboy and tells him she'll be in Tokyo the day after tomorrow, and to start thinking about what she'll need to do to deal with Taki.

She pauses, about to open the latest from her mother, and remembering that she still hasn't replied to the previous two.

Her mother is cynthia@roseoftheworld.com, Rose of the World being an intentional community of sorts, back up in the red-dirt country of Maui.

Cayce has never been there but Cynthia has sent pictures. A sprawling, oddly prosaic sixties rancher set back against a red hillside in long sparse grass, that red showing through like some kind of scalp disease. Up there they scrutinize miles of audiotape, some of it fresh from its factory wrap, unused, listening for voices of the dead: EVP freaks, of which Cayce's mother is one from way back. Used to put Win's Uher reel-to-reel in their very first microwave. She said that blocked out broadcast interference.

Cayce has long managed to have as little to do with her mother's penchant for Electronic Voice Phenomena as she possibly can, and this had been her father's strategy as well. Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. And had never, as far as Cayce knows, said another word about it.

Cayce hesitates, a mouse-click away from opening her mother's message, which is titled HELLO???.

No, she isn't ready.

She goes to the fridge and wonders what she'll eat before her departure, and what she'll throw out.

Apophenia. She stares blankly into the cold, beautifully illuminated interior of Damien's German fridge. What if the sense of nascent meaning they all perceive in the footage is simply that: an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition? She's been over this with Parkaboy and he's taken it places (the neuromechanics of hallucination, August Strindberg's personal account of his psychotic break, and a peak drug experience during his teens in which he, Parkaboy, had felt himself to be “channeling some kind of Linear B angelic machine language”), none of which have really helped.

She sighs and closes the fridge.

The street door buzzes. She goes down to let Pamela Mainwaring in, a twenty-something blonde in a black mini and tartan-print tights, a black ballistic nylon briefcase in either hand. Cayce sees a Blue Ant car waiting in the street. Its driver stands beside it, smoking a cigarette, his ear plugged with plastic, conversing with thin air.

Everything about Pamela Mainwaring is fast, efficient, and intimidatingly clear. Not a woman who'd often have to repeat herself. They aren't even in the apartment yet before she's gotten Cayce to sign off on a suite in the Park Hyatt, Shinjuku, with a view of the Imperial Palace. “Part of one rooftop, at least,” Pamela says, putting the briefcases down, side by side, on the trestle table.

“That's a nice yellow,” glancing into the kitchen.

She unzips one case, exposing a laptop and printer.

“I'll just check this again,” she says, booting up. “You can use the return whenever you like, and on any carrier. But you can also go anywhere you want, anytime. My e-mail and number's in your laptop here. I do all of Hubertus's travel, so I'm seven twenty-four.” The screen fills with a dense frieze of flight schedules. “Yes. You're on.” She takes blank airline tickets from an envelope and feeds them into the rectangular printer. It makes small, energetic buzzing sounds as the tickets emerge from the opposite end. “Minimum two hours check-in.” Adroitly assembling the fresh-minted tickets in a British Airways folder. “We have an iBook for you, loaded, cellular modem. And a phone. It's good here, anywhere in Europe, Japan, and the States. You'll be met at Narita by someone from Blue Ant Tokyo. The Tokyo office is at your complete disposal. The best translators, drivers, anything you feel you need. Literally anything.”

“I don't want to be met.”

“Then you won't.”

“Is Hubertus still in New York, Pamela?”

Pamela consults an Oakley Timebomb, slightly wider than her left wrist. “Hubertus is on his way to Houston, but he'll be back in the Mercer tonight. His e-mail and all of his numbers are on your iBook.” She opens the second case, exposing a flat Mac, a gray cell phone large enough to look either passé or unusually powerful, various cables and small gizmos still sealed in the manufacturer's plastic, and a sheaf of the usual glossy how-to. There's a Blue Ant envelope on top of the computer. Pamela closes her own computer, zips up the case. Picks up the envelope, tears it open, shakes out a loose credit card. “Sign this, please.”

Cayce takes it. CAYCE POLLARD EXP. Platinum Visa customized with the hieratic Blue Ant, which of course is a Heinzi creation, robotic and Egyptianate. Pamela Mainwaring hands her an expensive German roller-point. Cayce puts the card facedown on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily, at the rear of her ethical universe.

“It's been a pleasure meeting you,” Pamela says. “Have a brilliant trip, best of luck, and call or e-mail me if you need anything. Absolutely anything.” She shakes Cayce's hand firmly. “I can show myself out, thanks.”

And then she's gone, Cayce closing and locking the door behind her. She goes back to the table and picks up the cell phone. She sees that it's on. After a few tries she manages to turn it off. She puts it back in the case, which she closes and pushes to the rear of the table.

Takes a deep breath, another, then does a Pilates spine curl, rolling down vertebra by vertebra into a sort of upright fetal crouch. Comes up out of it as smoothly and slowly as she can.

Damien's phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Is Voytek.”

“I need your help with something, Voytek. I'd like you to keep a set of keys, and give them to a friend of mine if he turns up. I'll give you twenty pounds.”

“Is not needed to pay, Casey.”

“It's a donation to your ZX 81 project. I have a new job and I'm on an expense account,” she says, thinking she's lying but then realizing she isn't, necessarily. “Can you meet me in two hours, where we had breakfast?”

“Yes?”

“Good. See you.” Hangs up.

And wonders, for the first time, and indeed for the first time in her life, whether the phone is tapped. Could that be what got the Asian Sluts invader in here in the first place? Dorotea's an industrial espionage bitch, or has been, so it probably isn't entirely unlikely. They do things like that. Bugs. Spy Shop stuff. She mentally reviews her calls since Asian Sluts. The only one of any substance, asking Helena about Trans, she'd made from a phone in Camden High Street. Now this one to Voytek, but unless a listener knew where she'd run into him at breakfast… But then couldn't they trace his number, wherever that is?

She goes into the room where she keeps her luggage and begins the pretravel yoga of folding and packing CPUs, which somehow tells her body that she will soon be free of reliance on this particular perimeter.

Completing these tasks, she lies down on the gray duvet and falls asleep, willing herself to wake in an hour, in time to meet Voytek at the bistro in Aberdeen Street. And knows that she will.

And dreams, though she seldom dreams, or seldom recalls them, that she is alone in the back of a black cab, in London, the transience of late summer leaves accentuating the age of the city, the depth of its history, the simple stubborn vastness of it. Facades of tall houses, pokerfaced and unyielding. She shivers, though the night is warm, the air in the cab close, and the image from Damien's e-mail comes to her: wet gray pyramids of bone rising beside excavations in a Russian swamp. What was that, to do that to the dead, to history? She hears picks ringing, drunken laughter, and she is in the cab, feeling ill, and in the pine forest, the summer swamp, witness she knows to some cannibalization beyond expression, some eating of the dead, and she remembers telling Bigend that the past is mutable too, as mutable as the future, but now she must tell him that it shouldn't be dug up, ravaged, thrown away. She must tell him, but cannot speak, even though she now sees that it is Bigend who is driving this cab, wearing his cowboy hat, and even if she speaks, if she manages to break this thing that so painfully shackles speech, he is separated from her voice by a partition of glass or plastic, entirely bent on driving, driving she knows not where.

And wakes to the rapid beating of her heart.

Gets up, to splash cold water on her face and ascend the steep narrow stairwell to where she's hidden the second set of keys.

And she will be careful, in the street, on her way to meet Voytek. She has never before determined to try to discover whether or not she might be being followed, but now she does, and will.

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.