“If they had certain resources, yes. It would be illegal.”

“From there, they could go to Kelsey—”

“From there they are in the frequent-flyer files of Air Magellan, which implies very serious resources.”

“There was a woman, on the plane… She had the seat beside me. Then I had to carry her suitcase, and she and her boyfriend gave me a ride into Tokyo.”

“You carried her suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me this story. All of it. When did you first see this woman?”

“In the airport, SeaTac. They were doing noninvasive DNA samples and I saw her do this weird thing…” Chia began the story of Maryalice and the rest of it, while Zona Rosa sat and peeled and sharpened her stick, frowning.

“Fuck your mother,” Zona Rosa said, when Chia had finished her story. The translation rendered her tone as either amazement or disgust, Chia couldn’t tell.

“What?” Chia’s confusion was absolute.

Zona looked at her along the length of the peeled stick. “An idiom. Idioma. Very rich and complicated. It has nothing to do with your mother.” She lowered the stick and did something to her knife, folding the blade away with a triple click. The lizard she’d adjusted earlier came scurrying low across a narrow ledge of rock, clinging so close as to appear two-dimensional. Zona picked it up and stroked it into yet another color-configuration.

“What are you doing?”

“Harder encryption,” Zona said, and put the lizard on the lapel of her jacket, where it clung like a brooch, its eyes tiny spheres of onyx. “Someone is looking for you. Probably they’ve already found you. We must try to insure that our conversation is secure.”

“Can you do that, with him?” The lizards head moved.

“Maybe. He’s new. But those are better.” She pointed up with the stick. Chia squinted into the evening sky, dark cloud tinted with streaks of sunset pink. She thought she saw a sweep of wings, so high. Two things flying. Big. Not planes. But then they were gone. “Illegal, in your country. Colombian. From the data-havens.” Zona put the pointed end of her stick on the ground and began to twirl it one way, then the other, between her palms. Chia had seen a rabbit make fire that way, once, in an ancient cartoon. “You are an idiot.”

“Why?”

“You carried a bag through customs? A stranger’s bag?”

“Yes…”

“Idiot!”

“I am not.”

“She is a smuggler. You are hopelessly naive.”

But you went along with sending me here, Chia thought, and suddenly felt like crying. “But why are they looking for me?”

Zona shrugged. “In the District, a cautious smuggler would not let a mule go free…”

Something silvery and cold executed a tight little flip somewhere behind and below Chia’s navel, and with it came the unwelcome recollection of the washroom at Whiskey Clone, and the corner of something she hadn’t recognized. In her bag. Stuffed down between her t-shirts. When she’d used one to dry her hands.

“What’s wrong?”

“I better go. Mitsuko went to make tea…” Talking too quickly, biting off the words.

“Go? Are you insane? We must—”

“Sorry. ’Bye.” Pulling off the goggles and scrabbling at the wrist-fasteners.

Her bag there, where she’d left it.

17. The Walls of Fame

We had no time to do this right,” the woman said, handing Laney the eyephones. He was sitting on a child-sized pink plastic bench that matched the table. “If there is a way to do it right.”

“There are areas we could not arrange access to,” said the Japanese-American with the ponytail. “Blackwell said you’ve had experience with celebrities.”

“Actors,” Laney said. “Musicians, politicians…”

“You’ll probably find this different. Bigger. By a couple of degrees of magnitude.”

“What can’t you access?” Laney asked, settling the ’phones over his eyes.

“We don’t know,” he heard the woman say. “You’ll get a sense of the scale of things, going in. The blanks might be accountancy, tax-law stuff, contracts… We’re just tech support. He has other people someone pays to make sure parts of it stay as private as possible.”

“Then why not bring themin?” Laney asked.

He felt Blackwell’s hand come down on his shoulder like a bag of sand. “I’ll discuss that with you later. Now get in there and have a look. What we pay you for, isn’t it?”

In the week following Alison Shires’ death, Laney had used Out of Control’s DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her personal data. The nodal point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in.

But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer generating data. There was no credit activity. Even her Upful Groupvine account had been canceled. As her estate was executed, and various business affairs terminated, her data began to take on a neat rectilinearity. Laney thought of the dead bundled squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins and cairns, of the long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had been afforded their own real estate.

The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface.

He’d looked, but only briefly, and very cautiously, to see whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of his own. Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would have set a more careful watch on that.

Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the execution of her estate.

A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of a guesthouse in Ireland. A subcatalog of the products provided in the seventeenth-century walnut commode at bedside there: toothbrush, toothpaste, analgesic tablets, tampons, razor, shaving gel. Someone would check these periodically, restock to the inventory. (The last guest had taken the gel but not the razor.) In the first catalog, there was a powerful pair of Austrian binoculars, tripod-mounted, which also functioned as a digital camera.

Laney accessed its memory, discovering that the recording function had been used exactly once, on the day the manufacturer’s warranty had been activated. The warranty was now two months void, the single recorded image a view from a white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink fence, a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse of grayish-brown beach, and then the gray and silver sea. Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the image’s border, there appeared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated tower. Its stones were the color of the beach.

Laney tried to quit the bedroom, the guesthouse, and found himself surrounded by archaeologically precise records of the restoration of five vast ceramic stoves in an apartment in Stockholm. These were like giant chess pieces, towers of brick faced with elaborately glazed, lavishly molded ceramic. They rose to the fourteen-foot ceilings, and several people could easily have stood upright in one. There was a record of the numbering, disassembly, cleaning, restoration, and reassembly of each brick in each stove. There was no way to access the rest of the apartment, but the proportions of the stoves led Laney to assume that it was very large. He clicked to the end of the stove-record and noted the final price of the work; at current rates it was more than several times his former annual salary at Slitscan.

He clicked back, through points of recession, trying for a wider view, a sense of form, but there were only walls, bulking masses of meticulously arranged information, and he remembered Alison Shires and his apprehension of her data-death.