'Just old, he says, tucking his pistol away now. 'Wouldn't get out of bed, finally. Curled up there like a baby. Clarisse she came to nurse him. She been a nurse, Clarisse. Says when they turn to face the wall, that means it's over soon.

Chevette wants so badly to say something, but it will not come.

'I like your hair, girl, Fontaine says, looking at her. 'Not so fierce now.

'It's changing, Fontaine says, meaning the bridge and how they live on it. He's told her about the tendency to build these shops, how most of them are built with nonresident money, the owners hiring people to live there and maintain possession. 'That Lucky Dragon, he says, cupping a white china mug of his bitter, silted coffee, 'that's there because someone decided the money was there for it to make. Tourists buying what they need to come out here. That wouldn't have happened, before.

'Why do you think it is, that it's changing?

'It just is, he says. 'Things have a time, then they change.

'Skinner, she says, 'he lived out his life here, didn't he? I mean, when this was all what it was. He was here for all of that. Here when they built it.

'Not his whole life. Just the end of it. That jacket you're wearing, he got that in England, when he was younger. He lived there and rode motorcycles. Told me about it. Rode them up to Scotland, rode them all over. Real old ones.

'He told me a little about it, once, she says. 'Then he came back here and the Little Big One came. Cracked the bridge. Pretty soon he was out here.

'Here, he says, 'I'll show you something. Opening a cabinet.

Brings out a sheath knife, greenish handles inlaid with copper abstracts. Draws it from the waxed brown saddle leather. Blade of Damascus steel, tracked with dark patterns.

The knife of Chevette's memories, its grip scaled with belt-ground segments of phenolic circuit board.

'I saw that made, she says, leaning forward.

'Forged from a motorcycle drive chain. Vincent 'Black Lightning, 1952. Rode that in England. It was a good forty years old too, then. Said there wasn't ever a bike to match it. Kept the chain till he found this maker. Passes the knife to her. Five inches of blade, five inches of handle. 'Like you to have it.

Chevette runs her finger along the flat of the blade, the crocodile pattern of light and dark steel that had been formed as the links were beaten out. 'I was thinking about this before, Fontaine. Today. How we went to where the smith worked. Burned coke in an old coffee can.

'Yes. I've seen it done. Hands her the sheath.

'But you need to sell this stuff. Tries to hand it back.

'It wasn't for sale, he says. 'I was keeping it for you.

FONTAINE has a strange boy in the shop's back room. Heavy, Hispanic, hair cut short. He sits the whole time, cross-legged, his head in an old eyephone rig that looks like it came out of some military robotics dump.

With a worn-out old notebook on his lap. Endlessly, steadily, clicking from one screen to the next.

'Who's this? she asks when they're back, Fontaine putting on a fresh pot of his terrible coffee. Thinking the boy can hear her.

'I don't know, Fontaine says, turning to regard the boy in the eye-phones. 'He was outside this morning, breathing on my window.

Chevette looks at Fontaine, not getting it.

'He likes watches, Fontaine says, lighting the butane ring with a spark gun like a toy pistol. 'Showed him how to hunt for watches this morning, hasn't done much since. Fontaine crosses to where the boy sits, looks down at him.

'I'm not sure how much he understands English, Fontaine says. 'Or he understands it but it gets through funny.

'Spanish maybe?

'I had big Carlos by here, Fontaine says. 'Didn't seem to make much difference.

'You live here now, Fontaine?

'Yeah, he says. 'Not getting along with Clarisse.

'How's your kids?

'They're okay. Hell, Tourmaline's okay too, by anybody's standards but her own. I mean, not to live with, understand, but her health's pretty good.

Chevette picks up the sheathed Damascus boot knife and tries it in the inner, zippered pocket of Skinner's jacket. It fit, if you zipped the pocket shut, as far as you could, to hold it upright. 'What's he doing with your notebook?

'He's hunting watches. I started him looking on the net auctions, but now he's looking everywhere. Gets places I don't understand how he does.

'He gonna live here?

Fontaine frowns. 'I hadn't planned on it.

Chevette stands up, stretches, seeing the old man, Skinner, in memory, sitting up in his bed in the room atop the cable tower. What dancer she'd gotten off Creedmore has long since worn off, leaving an edge of tiredness. Long day. Very long day. 'We're sleeping in a van down the foot of Folsom, she says.

'You and who?

'Tessa. Friend of mine.

'Know you're welcome here.

'No, she says, 'Tessa'll be worried. I'm glad I saw you, Fontaine. She zips the jacket. 'Thank you for keeping his knife. Whatever history it was she'd felt herself dodging, she hasn't found it. She just feels tired now; otherwise, she doesn't seem to feel.

'Your knife. Made it for you. Wanted you to have it. Told me. Looking up from beneath his sparse gray dreadlocks now. And gently says: 'Asked us where you were, you know?

Her fit with history, and how that hurts.

LANEY'S progress through all the data in the world (or that data's progress through him) has long since become what he is, rather than something he merely does.

The Hole, that blankness at the core of his being, ceases to trouble him here. He is a man with a mission, though he readily admits to himself that he has no real idea what that mission may finally be.

This all began, he reflects, knocking back his cough syrup in the amniotic darkness of his cardboard hutch, with his 'interest' in Cody Harwood. The first prickings of the so-called stalker syndrome thought to eventually afflict every test subject ever dosed with 5-SB. His initial reaction, of course, had been denial: this couldn't be happening to him, not after all these years. He was interested in Harwood, and for good reason; his awareness of the nodal points, the points from which change was emerging, would repeatedly bring Harwood to his attention. It was not so much that he was focusing on Harwood, as that things swung toward Harwood, gently yet unavoidably, like the needle of a compass. His life, at that point, had been in stasis: employed by the management of Lo/Rez, the pop group, to facilitate the singer Rez's 'marriage' to the Japanese virtual star Rei Toei, Laney had settled into a life in Tokyo that centered around visits to a private, artificially constructed island in Tokyo Bay, an expensive nub of engineered landfill upon which Rez and Rei Toei intended to bring forth some sort of new reality. That Laney had never been able to quite grasp the nature of this reality hadn't surprised him. Rez was a law unto himself, very possibly the last of the pre-posthuman megastars, and Rei Toei, the idoru, was an emergent system, a self continually being iterated from experiential input. Rez was Rez, and thereby difficult, and Rei Toei was that river into which one can never step twice. As she became more herself, through the inputting of experience, through human interaction, she grew and changed. Rez hadn't, and a psychologist employed by the band's management had confided in Laney that Rez, whom the psychologist characterized as having narcissistic personality disorder, wasn't likely to. 'I've met a lot of people, particularly in this industry, the psychologist had said, 'who have that, but I've never met one who had had it.

So Laney had climbed, each working day, from a Tokyo dock into an inflatable Zodiac. To skim across the gray metallic skin of the bay to that nameless and perfectly circular island, and there to interact with ('teach' was not the word, somehow) the idoru. And what he had done, although neither of them had planned it, was to take her with him, into that flow of information where he was most at home (or, really, farthest from his inner Hole). He had shown her, as it were, the ropes, although they were not ropes that he or anyone else had names for. He had shown her nodal points in that flow, and they had watched together as change had emerged from these into the physical world.