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High above, a skylight he guessed to be the size of a large swimming pool
passed grimy sunlight through decades of soot and what he took, at this
distance, to be drifts of something more solid.
Black iron mu!lions divided long rectangles, some of them holed, as by
gunfire, through what he guessed was archaic wire-cored safety glass.
When he lowered his head, they were there, the two of them, seated in strange,
Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there before.
One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era, his
lips pursed primly. He wore glasses with heavy, rectangular frames of black
plastic and a snap-brim hat of a kind that
RydelI knew only from old films. The hat was positioned dead level on his
head, perhaps an inch above the black frames. His legs were crossed, and
Rydell saw that he wore black wingtip oxfords.
His hands were folded in his lap.
The other presented in far more abstract form: an only vaguely human figure,
the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and
on-going explosion of blood and matter, as though a sniper's victim, in the
instant of impact, had been recorded and looped. The halo of blood and brains
flickered, never quite attaining a steady state. Beneath it, an open mouth,
white teeth exposed in a permanent, silent scream. The rest, except for the
hands, clawed as in agony around the gleaming arms of the chair, seemed
constantly to be dissolving in some terrible fiery wind. Rydell thought of
black-and-white footage, ground zero, sb-mo atomic hurricane.
"Mr. Rydell," said the one with the hat, "thank you for coming. You may call
me Klaus. This," and he gestured with a pale, papery-looking hand, which
immediately returned to his lap, "is the
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Rooster."
The one called the Rooster didn't move at all when it spoke, but the open
mouth flickered in and out of focus. Its voice was either the soundcollage
from Tong's or another like it. "Listen to me, Rydell. You are now
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responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible
value. Where is it?"
"I don't know who you are," Rydell said. "I'm not telling you anything."
Neither responded, and then Klaus coughed dryly. "The only proper answer. You
would be wise to maintain that position. Indeed, you have no idea who we are,
and if we were to reappear to you at some later time, you would have no way of
knowing that we were, in fact, us."
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"Then why should I listen to you?"
"In your situation," said the Rooster, and its voice, just then, seemed
composed primarily of the sound of breaking glass, modulated into the
semblance of human speech, "you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares
to address you."
"But whether or not you choose to believe what you are told is another
matter," said Klaus, fussily adjusting his shirt cuffs and refolding his
hands.
"You're hackers," Rydell said.
"Actually," said Klaus, "we might better be described as envoys. We
represent," he paused, "another country."
"Though not, of course," said the perpetually disintegrating Rooster, "in any
obsolete sense of the merely geopolitical-"
"'Hacker,'" interrupted Klaus, "has certain criminal connotations-"
"Which we do not accept," the Rooster cut in, "having long since established
an autonomous reality in which-"
"Quiet," said Klaus, and Rydell had no doubt where the greater authority lay.
"Mr. Rydell, your employer, Mr. Laney, has become, for want of a better term,
an ally of ours. He has brought a certain situation to our attention, and it
is clearly to our advantage to come to his aid."
''\Alhat situation is that?"
"That is difficult to explain," Klaus said. He cleared his throat. "If indeed
possible. Mr. Laney is possessed of a most peculiar talent, one which he has
very satisfactorily demonstrated to us.
We are here to assure you, Mr. Rydell, that the resources of the Walled City
will be at your disposal in the coming crisis."
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"What city," Rydell asked, "what crisis?"
"The nodal point," the Rooster said, its voice like the trickle of water far
down in some unseen cistern.
"Mr. Rydel!," said Klaus, "you must keep the projector with you at all times.
We advise you to use it at the earliest opportunity. Familiarize yourself with
her."
"With who?"
"We are concerned," Klaus went on, "that Mr. Laney, for reasons of health,
will be unable to continue. We number among us some who are possessed of his
talent, but none to such an extraordinary extent. Should Laney be lost to us,
Mr. Rydell, we fear that little can be done."
"Jesus," said Rydell, "you think I know what you're talking about?"
"I'm not being deliberately gnomic, Mr. Rydell, I assure you. There is no time
for explanations now, and for some things, it seems, there may actually be no
explanations. Simply remember what we have told you, and that we are here for
you, at this address. And now you must return, immediately, to wherever you
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have left the projector."
And they were gone, and the black courtyard with them, compacted into a sphere
of pink and green fractal neon that left residuals on Rydell's retinas, as it
shrank and vanished in the dark behind the Brazilian sunglasses.
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30. ANOTHER ONE
FONTAINE had spent most of the late afternoon on the phone, trying to lay
Clarisse's creepy
Japanese baby dolls off on a decreasingly likely list of specialist dealers.
He knew it wasn't the thing to do, in terms of realizing optimum cash, but
dolls weren't one of his areas of expertise; besides, they gave him the
horrors, these Another One replicas.
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Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big
markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist
dealers were nature's way of telling you you had too much money to begin with.
But there was always a chance he'd find one who knew somebody, one specific
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