"Only in stims."

"Might as well 'ave seen it, then. In any case, you get to see it now." He stood; she followed him across the room to a pair of overstuffed ultrasuede chairs that flanked a low, square, black glass table. "Wireless," he said proudly, taking two trode-sets from the table and handing one to Kumiko. "Cost the world."

Kumiko examined the skeletal matte-black tiara. The Maas-Neotek logo was molded between the temple pieces. She put it on, cold against her skin. He put his own set on, hunched down in the opposite chair. "Ready?"

"Yes," she said, and Tick's room was gone, its walls a flutter of cards, tumbling and receding, against the bright grid, the towering forms of data.

"Nice transition, that," she heard him say. "Built into the trodes, that is. Bit of drama ... "

"Where is Colin?"

"Just a sec ... Let me work this up ... "

Kumiko gasped as she shot toward a chrome-yellow plain of light.

"Vertigo can be a problem," Tick said, and was abruptly beside her on the yellow plain. She looked down at his suede shoes, then at her hands. "Bit of body image takes care of that."

"Well," Colin said, "it's the little man from the Rose and Crown. Been tinkering with my package, have you?"

Kumiko turned to find him there, the soles of his brown boots ten centimeters above chrome yellow. In cyberspace, she noted, there are no shadows.

"Wasn't aware we'd met," Tick said.

"Needn't worry," Colin said. "It wasn't formal. But," he said to Kumiko, "I trust you found your way safely to colorful Brixton."

"Christ," Tick said, "aren't half a snot, are you?"

"Forgive me," Colin said, grinning, "I'm meant to mirror the visitor's expectations."

"What you are is some Jap designer's idea of an Englishman!"

"There were Draculas," she said, "in the Underground. They took my purse. They wanted to take you ... "

"You've come away from your housing, mate," Tick said. "Got you jacked through my deck now."

Colin grinned. "Ta."

"Tell you something else," Tick said, taking a step toward Colin, "you've got the wrong data in you, for what you're meant to be." He squinted. "Mate of mine in Birmingham's just turned you over." He turned to Kumiko. "Your Mr. Chips here, he's been tampered with. D'you know that?"

"No ... "

"To be perfectly honest," Colin said, with a toss of his forelock, "I've suspected as much."

Tick stared off into the matrix as though he were listening to something Kumiko couldn't hear. "Yes," he said, finally, "though it's almost certainly a factory job. Ten major blocks of you." He laughed. "Been iced over ... You're supposed to know fucking everything about Shakespeare, aren't you?"

"Sorry," Colin said, "but I'm afraid that I do know fucking everything about Shakespeare."

"Give us a sonnet, then," Tick said, his face wrinkling in a slow-motion wink.

Something like dismay crossed Colin's face. "You're right."

"Or bloody Dickens either!" Tick crowed.

"But I do know -- "

"Think you do, till you're asked a specific! See, they left those bits empty, the Eng. lit. parts, then filled 'em with something else ... "

"With what, then?"

"Can't say," Tick said. "Boy in Birmingham can't fiddle it. Clever, he is, but you're that bloody Maas biosoft ... "

"Tick," Kumiko interrupted, "is there no way to contact Sally, through the matrix?"

"Doubt it, but we can try. You'll get to see that macroform I was telling you about, in any case. Want Mr. Chips along for company?"

"Yes, please ... "

"Fine, then," Tick said, then hesitated. "But we don't know what's stuffed into your friend here. Something your father paid for, I'd assume."

"He's right," Colin said.

"We'll all go," she said.

Tick executed the transit in real time, rather than employing the bodiless, instantaneous shifts ordinarily employed in the matrix.

The yellow plain, he explained, roofed the London Stock Exchange and related City entities. He somehow generated a sort of boat to carry them along, a blue abstraction intended to reduce the possibility of vertigo. As the blue boat glided away from the LSE, Kumiko looked back and watched the vast yellow cube recede. Tick was pointing out various structures like a tour guide; Colin, seated beside her with his legs crossed, seemed amused at the reversal of roles. "That's White's," Tick was saying, directing her attention to a modest gray pyramid, "the club in Saint James. Membership registry, waiting list ... "

Kumiko looked up at the architecture of cyberspace, hearing the voice of her bilingual French tutor in Tokyo, explaining humanity's need for this information-space. Icon, waypoints, artificial realities ... But it blurred together, in memory, like these towering forms as Tick accelerated ...

The scale of the white macroform was difficult to comprehend.

Initially, it had seemed to Kumiko like the sky, but now, gazing at it, she felt as though it were something she might take up in her hand, a cylinder of luminous pearl no taller than a chess piece. But it dwarfed the polychrome forms that clustered around it.

"Well," Colin said, jauntily, "this really is very peculiar indeed, isn't it? Complete anomaly, utter singularity ... "

"But you don't have to worry about it, do you?" Tick said.

"Only if it has no direct bearing on Kumiko's situation," Colin agreed, standing up in the boat-shape, "though how can one be certain?"

"You must attempt to contact Sally," Kumiko said impatiently. This thing -- the macroform, the anomaly -- was of little interest, though Tick and Colin both regarded it as extraordinary.

"Look at it," Tick said. "Could have a bloody world, in there ... "

"And you don't know what it is?" She was watching Tick; his eyes had the distant look that meant his hands were moving, back in Brixton, working his deck.

"It's a very great deal of data," Colin said.

"I just tried to put a line through to that construct, the one she calls Finn," Tick said, his eyes refocusing, an edge of worry in his voice, "but I couldn't get through. I'd this feeling then, something was there, waiting ... Think it's best we jack out now ... "

A black dot, on the curve of pearl, its edges perfectly defined ...

"Fucking hell," Tick said.

"Break the link," Colin said.

"Can't! 's got us ... "

Kumiko watched as the blue boat-shape beneath her feet elongated, stretched into a thread of azure, drawn across the chasm into that round blot of darkness. And then, in an instant of utter strangeness, she too, along with Tick and Colin, was drawn out to an exquisite thinness -

To find herself in Ueno Park, late autumn afternoon, by the unmoving waters of Shinobazu Pond, her mother seated beside her on a sleek bench of chilly carbon laminate, more beautiful now than in memory. Her mother's lips were full and richly glossed, outlined, Kumiko knew, with the finest and narrowest of brushes. She wore her black French jacket, with the dark fur collar framing her smile of welcome.

Kumiko could only stare, huddled there around the cold bulb of fear beneath her heart.

"You've been a foolish girl, Kumi," her mother said. "Did you imagine I wouldn't remember you, or abandon you to winter London and your father's gangster servants?"

Kumiko watched the perfect lips, open slightly over white teeth; teeth maintained, she knew, by the best dentist in Tokyo. "You are dead," she heard herself say.

"No," her mother replied, smiling, "not now. Not here, in Ueno Park. Look at the cranes, Kumi."

But Kumiko would not turn her head.

"Look at the cranes."

"Fuck right off, you," said Tick, and Kumiko spun to find him there, his face pale and twisted, filmed with sweat, oily curls plastered to his forehead.

"I am her mother."