Part 65 (1/2)

When the waitress, in tiny silver shorts and a prehensile pink angora top, had taken their orders, Arleigh opened her purse and removed a notebook. ”These are linear topographies of some of the structures you accessed earlier today.” She pa.s.sed Laney the notebook. ”They're in a format called Realtree 7.2.”

Laney clicked through a series of images: abstract geometrics arranged in vanis.h.i.+ng linear perspective. ”I don't know how to read them,” he said.

She poured her sake. ”You really were trained by DatAmerica?”

”I was trained by a bunch of Frenchmen who liked to play tennis.”

”Realtree's from DatAmerica. The best quant.i.tative a.n.a.lysis software they've got.” She closed the notebook, put it back in her purse.

Laney poured his beer. ”Ever hear of something called TIDAL?”

”Tidal'?”

”Acronym. Maybe.”

”No.” She lifted the china cup and blew, like a child cooling tea.

”It was another DatAmerica tool, or the start of one. I don't think it reached the market. But that was how I learned to find the nodal points.”

I.

0.

2.

147.

”Okay,' she said.”What are the nodal points?” I Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. ”It's like seeing things in clouds,” Laney said. ”Except the things you see are really there.”

She put her sake down. ”Yamazaki promised me you weren't crazy.”

”It's not crazy It's something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”

”And Slitscan hired you on the basis of that?”

”They hired me when I demonstrated that it works, But I can't do that with the kind of data you showed me today”

”Why not?”

Laney raised his beer. ”Because it's like trying to have a drink with a bank. It's not a person.

It doesn't drink. There's no place for it to sit.” He drank. ”Rez doesn't generate patterns I can read, because everything he does is at one remove. It's like looking in an annual report for the personal habits of the chairman of the board. It's not going to be there. From the outside, it just looks like that Realtree stuff. If I enter a specific area, I don't get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It's got to be relational.” He drummed his fingers on the laminated gum wrappers. ”Somewhere in Ireland. Guesthouse with a beach view. n.o.body there.

Records of how it was kept stocked: stuff for the bathroom, toothpaste, shaving foam.

”I've been there,” she said. ”That's on an estate he bought from an older musician, an Irishman.

It's beautiful. Like Italy, in a way.”

”You think he'll take this idoru back there, when they get hitched?”

”n.o.body has any idea what he's talking about when he says he wants to 'marry' her.”

”Then an apartment in Stockholm. Huge. Great big stoves in each room, made of glazed ceramic bricks.”