He takes the laptop back, shuts it down, closes it, leaving his hands resting on the featureless gray metal. Looking down at it, he might be praying. Then he looks up at her. "Your call. If it's real, and you can get it, it might take us somewhere."
"I know," she says, and that's really all she can say, so she just sits there, wondering what she might have set in motion, where it might go, and why.
- /
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 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 knap 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 81's. 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.
