"I've tried to convince myself of that. I've wanted to believe it, simply in order to let the thing go. But then I go back and look at it again, and there's that sense of… I don't know. Of an opening into something. Universe? Narrative?"

"Eat your noodles. Then we can talk."

AND they do, walking. Up to Camden Lock along the High Street, the weekend's Crusaders all gone home, passing the window of the design-ers of Damien's kitchen cabinets, Boone touching on his childhood in Oklahoma, the highs and lows of his start-up experience, vicissitudes of industry and the broader economy since the previous September. He seems to be making an effort to tell her who he is. Cayce in turn telling him a little about her work and nothing at all about its basis in her peculiar sensitivities.

Until they find themselves on the canal's shabby towpath, under a sky like a gray-scale Cibachrome of a Turner print, too powerfully back-lit. This spot reminding her now of a visit to Disneyland with Win and her mother, when she was twelve. Pirates of the Caribbean had broken down and they'd been rescued by staff wearing hip-waders over their pirate costumes, to be led through a doorway into a worn, concrete-walled, oil-stained subterranean realm of machinery and cables, inhabited by glum mechanics, these backstage workers reminding Cayce of the Mor-locks in The Time Machine.

It had been a difficult trip for her because she couldn't tell her parents that she'd started trying to avoid having Mickey in her field of vision, and by the fourth and final day she'd developed a rash. Mickey hadn't subsequently become a problem, but she still avoided him anyway, out of a sense of having had a close shave.

Now Boone apologizes for having to check his e-mail; says he may have incoming he'd like her to see. Sits on a bench and gets out his laptop. She goes to the canal's edge and looks down. A gray condom, drifting like a jellyfish, a lager can half-afloat, and deeper down swirls something she can't identify, swathed in a pale and billowing caul of ragged builder's plastic. She shudders and turns away.

"Have a look at this," he says, looking up from his screen, the open laptop across his knees. She crosses the towpath and sits beside him. He passes her the laptop. Washed out in the afternoon light, she sees an opened message:

There's something encrypted in each of these but that's all I can tell you. Whatever it is, it's not much data, and that's uniform from segment to segment. If it were bigger, maybe—but as it is this is the best I can do: definitely a needle in your haystack.

"Who's it from?"

"Friend of mine at Rice. I had him look at all hundred and thirty-five segments."

"What's he do?"

"Math. I've never even remotely understood it. Interviews angels for positions on pinheads. We had him onboard for the start-up. Encryption issues, but that's only a by-product of whatever it is he does theoretically. Seems to find it intensely comical that there's any practical application whatever."

And she hears herself say: "It's a watermark."

Then he's looking at her. She can't read the look at all. "How do you know?"

"There's someone in Tokyo who claims to have a number that someone else extracted from segment seventy-eight."

"Who extracted it?"

"Footageheads. Otaku types."

"Do you have the number?"

"No. I'm not even positive that it's true. He might be making it up."

"Why?"

"To impress a girl. But she doesn't exist either."

He stares at her. "What would it take to find out if it's true?"

"An airport," she says, having to admit to herself now that she's already worked it out, already gone there, "a ticket. And a lie."

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.

12. APOPHENIA

- /

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.