The silver robot said nothing. It was expressionless as ever, but Chia took the clock away just to be sure,

“That’s why I’m here,” Chia said. “To find out if it’s true he wants to marry her.”

She sensed a general uneasiness. The six girls were looking at the texture-mapped tatami, unwilling to meet her eye. She wanted to look at Mitsuko, but it would have been too obvious.

“We are an officialchapter,” Hiromi said. “We have the honor of working closely with actual employees of the band. Their publicists are also concerned with the rumor you mention, and they have requested that we assist them in seeing that it not spread further.”

“Spread? It’s been on the net for a week!”

“It is rumor only.”

“Then they should issue a denial.”

“Denial would add weight to the rumor.”

“The posting said that Rez had announced that he was in love with Rei Toei, that he was going to marry her. There was a long quote.” Chia was definitely starting to get the feeling that something was wrong here. This was not what she’d come all this physical distance for; she might as well have been sitting in her bedroom in Seattle.

“We think that the original posting was a hoax. It would not be the first.”

“You think? Doesn’t that mean you don’t know?”

“Our sources within the organization assure us there is no cause for concern,”

“Spin control,” Chia said.

“You imply that Lo/Rez employees are lying to us?”

“Look,” Chia said, “I’m as into the band as anybody. I came all this way, right? But the people who work for them are just people who work for them. If Rez gets up in a club one night, takes the mike, and announces that he’s in love with this idoru and swears he’s going to marry her, the PR people are going to say whatever they think they have to say.”

“But you have no evidence that any of this occurred. Only an anonymous posting, claiming to be a transcription of a recording made in a club in Shinjuku.”

“ ‘Monkey Boxing.’ We looked it up; it’s there.”

“Really? Perhaps you should go there.”

“Why?”

“There is no longer a club called Monkey Boxing.”

“There isn’t?”

“Clubs in Shinjuku are extremely short-lived. There is no Monkey Boxing.” All of Hiromi’s smug satisfaction came through in the Sandbenders’ translation.

Chia stared at the smooth silver face. Stonewalling bitch. What to do? What would Zona Rosa do if she were in Chia’s place? Something symbolically violent, Chia decided. But that wasn’t her style,

“Thank you,” Chia said. “We just wanted to make sure it wasn’t happening. Sorry I hit on you that way, but we had to be certain. If you say it’s not happening, we’ll accept that. We all care about Rez and the rest of the band, and we know you do too.” Chia added a bow of her own, one that seemed to take Hiromi off guard.

Now it was the robot’s turn to hesitate. She hadn’t expected Chia to just roll over that way. “Our friends in the Lo/Rez organization are very concerned that this pointless hoax not affect the public’s perception of Rez. You are aware that there has always been a tendency to portray him as the most creative but least stable member of the band.”

This last, at least, was true, though Rez’s style of instability was fairly mild, compared with most of his pop-cultural forebears. He had never been arrested, never spent a night in jail. But he was still the one most likely to get into trouble. It had always been part of his charm.

“Sure,” Chia said, playing along, relishing the uncertainty she was sure she was causing Hiromi. “And they try to make Lo out as some kind of boring techie, the practical one, but we know that isn’t true either.” She tagged it with a smile.

“Yes,” Hiromi said, “of course. But you are satisfied, then? You will explain to your chapter that this was all the result of some prank, and that all is well with Rez?”

“If you say so,” Chia said, “absolutely. And if that settles it, then I’ve got three more days to kill in Japan.”

“To kill?”

“Idiom,” Chia said. “Free time. Mitsuko says I ought to see Kyoto.”

“Kyoto is very beautiful.”

“I’m on my way,” Chia said. “Thanks for putting this site together for our meeting. It’s really great, and if you’ll save it, I’d love to access it later with the rest of my chapter. Maybe we could all get together here when I’m back in Seattle, introduce our chapters.”

“Yes…” Hiromi definitely didn’t know what to make of Chia’s attitude.

So worry about it, Chia thought.

“You knew,” Chia said. “You knew she’d do that.”

Mitsuko was blushing, bright red. Looking at the floor, her jelly-bag computer on her lap. “I am sorry. It was her decision.”

“They got to her, right? They told her to get rid of me, hush it up.”

“She communicates with the Lo/Rez people privately. It is one of the privileges of her position.”

Chia still had her tip-sets on. “I have to talk with my chapter now. Can you give me a few minutes alone?” She felt sorry for Mitsuko, but she was still angry. “I’m not angry with you, okay?”

“I will make tea,” Mitsuko said.

When Mitsuko had closed the door behind her, Chia checked that the Sandbenders was still ported, put the goggles back on, and selected the Seattle chapter’s main site.

She never got there. Zona Rosa was waiting to cut her out.

15. Akihabara

Low gray cloud pressing down on the sheer gray city. A glimpse of new buildings, through the scaled-down limo’s tinted, lace-curtained windows.

They passed an Apple Shires ad, a cobbled lane leading away into some hologram nursery land, where smiling juice bottles danced and sang. Laney’s jet lag was back, in some milder but more baroque format. Something compounded of a pervasive sense of guilt and a feeling of physical distance from his own body, as though the sensory signals arrived stale, after too long a passage, through some other country that he himself was never privy to.

“I thought we’d done with all of that when we got rid of those Siberian neuropaths,” Blackwell said. He was dressed entirely in black, which had the effect of somewhat reducing his bulk. He wore a soft, smocklike garment sewn from very black denim, multiple pockets around its wide hem. Laney thought it looked vaguely Japanese, in some medieval way. Something a carpenter might wear. “Bent as a dog’s hind legs. Picked them up touring the Kombinat states.”

“Neuropaths?”

“Filling Rez’s head with their garbage. He’s vulnerable to influences, touring. Combination of stress and boredom. Cities start to look the same. One hotel room after another. It’s a syndrome, is what it is.”

“Where are we going?”

“Akihbara.”

“Where?”

“Where we’re going.” Blackwell consulted an enormous, elaborately dialed, steel-braceleted chronometer that looked as though it had been designed to do double duty as brass knuckles. “Took a month before they’d let me have a go, do what was needed. Then we got him over to a clinic in Paris and they told us what those bastards had been feeding him had made a pig’s breakfast of his endocrine system. Put him right, in the end, but it needn’t have happened, none of it.”

“But you got rid of them?” Laney had no idea what Blackwell was talking about, but it seemed best to keep up the illusion of conversation.

“Told them I was thinking about putting them face-first through a little Honda tree-shredder I’d purchased, just on the off chance,” Blackwell said.

“Not necessary. Showed them it, though. In the end, they were sent along with no more than a moderate touch-up.”

Laney looked at the back of the driver’s head. The right-hand drive worried him. He felt like there was nobody in the driver’s seat. “How long did you say you’d worked for the band?”