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, poker-faced 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.
- /
Her seat on the upper deck of this British Airways 747 subsides into a bed that makes her think of a little boat, a coracle of Hexcel and teak-finish laminate. She's nearest the nose, no other seating units in her line of sight.
The cabin is like some optimally comfy cube-farm, a cluster of automated, supremely ergonomic workstation enclosures. It feels as though, with just a little more engineering, they could simultaneously tube-feed you and tidily exhaust the resulting wastes.
However many hours in the air now, her watch tucked ritually out of sight, dinner served, lights dimmed, she imagines her soul bobbing stupidly, somewhere back over the concrete of Heathrow, its invisible tether spooling steadily out of her. As does a certain degree of fear, she notes, now that she knows they must be far out over an ocean, where no human agents threaten. For most of her life, flying, she'd felt most vulnerable right here, suspended in a void, above trackless water, but now her conscious flying-fears are about things that might be arranged to happen over populous human settlements, fears of ground-to-air, of scripted CNN moments.
But commercial aircraft have also been problematic for Cayce in another way, with their endless claustrophobic repetition of the carrier's logo. BA has never been particularly difficult, but Virgin, with its multi-pronged product-associations, is completely impossible.
Her biggest problem with BA now, she reminds herself, is a more ordinary one. no movies she'd even consider watching in the armrest DVD, she's under a personally enforced video news ban in effect now for some time, she's neglected to bring anything to read, and sleep refuses to come. With London receding and Tokyo still largely unimagined, un-remembered, she sits up cross-legged in the center of her narrow little bed and knuckles her eyes, feeling like a bedridden child, just well enough to be utterly restless.
Then she remembers Bigend's iBook, with its bright new Heathrow security sticker.
