She hauls the nylon case up from the floor and opens it. She'd spent twenty minutes, the night before, poking around on the desktop, but now for the first time she notices an ummarked CD-ROM that proves, on insertion, to be a searchable database of all of F:F:F. Whoever does these things for Bigend has also provided, on the hard drive, a complete collection of the footage and her three favorite edits, one of them by Filmy and Maurice.
Still sitting cross-legged, she makes a Stickie: COPY CD FOR IVY.
Ivy's wanted a searchable database of the forum almost since the forum began, because the free software that allows her to keep the site up isn't searchable, and she hasn't had anyone willing or able to do the compiling. Posters have bookmarked their favorite threads, and swap them, but there's been no way to trace a particular topic or theme through the site's evolution.
Or, rather, now there is.
Cayce has no idea how many pages of posts have accumulated since the site's first day. She's never gone back and looked at that, at the Ur-site, the early days, but now she enters and searches CayceP.
On the contrary, as I was saying yesterday…
Ah. Not her first post. At first she hadn't even been CayceP. Reen-ters Cayce.
Hi. How many segments, in all? Just downloaded the one where he's on the rooftop. Has anyone been able to do anything with those chimney-pots (is that what you call them?)?
She'd added the P later, because there had briefly been another Cayce, surname, a Marvin, in Wichita, who'd also pronounced it Case, not Casey.
She feels somewhat the way she might if she had uncovered her high-school yearbook.
Here's Parkaboy's first post:
Well suck me raw with a breast-pump! Thought I was the only one out here obsessing about the peculiar beauties of this particularly spotty stretch of anomalous cinematic prairie. Anybody into cowboy poetry as well? Because, let me assure you, I'm not.
This had been prior to La Anarchia's arrival, after three days of which Parkaboy had made the first of his many noisy departures from the site.
She fiddles with the matte alloy buttons on her armrest, converting her bed into a lounger. It feels good when it moves: powerful motors devoted to her comfort. She settles back in her black sweats (having declined the offer of a BA romper suit) and pulls the tartan blanket across her legs, iBook on her stomach. Adjusts the snaky fiber-optic reading lamp, with its head like a policeman's flashlight.
Exits the CD-ROM and clicks on Filmy and Maurice's edit.
It opens on that rooftop, against the oddly shaped chimneys. He is there. Walks to the low parapet. Looks out toward a city that never resolves. A framegrab on what he sees would reveal only a faint arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines. No focus. Definitely a skyline but not enough information to provide any sort of identification. Rule out Manhattan, others; there are lists arguing the places it cannot, might not be.
Maurice cuts to that segment that consists entirely of long shots, the girl in the formal park.
Sometimes, when she watches a good edit, and this is one of the best, it's as though it's all new; she sinks into it with joy and anticipation, and when the edit ends, she's shocked. That's it. All there is. How can that be?
This is one of those times. It ends.
She falls asleep, iBook on her lap.
When she wakes, the cabin is darker, and she needs to pee.
Grateful that she isn't wearing a BA romper, she shuts the iBook down, stows it away, unbuckles her seat belt, puts on BA slippers, and makes her way back toward the toilets.
Passing, as she does, what can only be the sleeping form of Billy Prion, snoring lightly, his still-unparalyzed mouth slightly open. He has his tartan blanket arranged around his shoulders like an old man in a bath chair, his face slack and inert. She blinks, trying to convince herself that this cannot be the former lead singer of BSE, but it quite clearly is, all in what looks to be last season's Agnes B Homme.
In the coracle nearest Prion sleeps a blindfolded blonde, a pair of modest nipple rings clearly visible in outline through the taut black fabric of her top.
This, Cayce decides, further confirming her identification of Prion, is the singer from the former Velcro Kitty, the one the music press had supposed he was no longer with.
She forces herself to shuffle on, in her navy vinyl slippers, to the almost-spacious safety of a first-class toilet, with its fresh flowers and Molton Brown face stuff, where she locks the door and sits, unable to put this together. Prion, at whose gallery Voytek hopes to show his ZX 81
project, is on her flight to Tokyo. Why? If it's that small a world, it starts to smell funny.
Watching that intensely blue fluid pressure-swirl down as she flushes.
Returning to her seat, she sees the nipple-ringed singer awake, seated upright, blindfold discarded, studying a glossy fashion magazine under
