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  Luka was waiting for me at the Mermaid Café.

  “Something to show you,” she said and, taking my gloved hand in her gloved hand, whirled me off into the old city she loved so much. “Behold, Purgatorio,” she announced, and pushed me through the low wooden door into the room she had created. Purgatorio; where failure and inadequacy and guilt are burned away. It was harrowing. It was ecstatic. It was a long luxurious plunge into the heart of darkness. It was sex with angels. It was astonishing and horrifying and beautiful and monstrous and disgusting and sad and shocking and funny and sickening and it did not touch me. It could not touch me. Some failures and guilts lie too deep for purgation.

  All that next week while I prepared the termination, I could not avoid the impression that Luka had made that small room-sized hell for me.

  “I wish you could touch me,” she said one evening as we sat on wrought-iron chairs in the fern-filled courtyard garden of her house. Dressed in something black and sleeveless, she smoked Black Cats and practiced aromatic smoke-rings. “I want to feel your hands. I want your hands to feel me. Take off the gloves.”

  “You know I can’t.” I borrowed a draw or two on her thin brown cañabarillo. “It’s not safe.”

  “Can’t. Won’t. You’ve always worn gloves. Emotional gloves. Touch not and be not touched. What are you so afraid of, Ethan?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Suddenly, she had taken my wrists in her hands.

  “But you are, Ethan. Afraid, and cold.” Then she cried, honest, full tears. “I love you. You hurt me. What can I do? Nothing. There’s nothing I can do. It has to be you, Ethan. If you want. I’ll always be here, you’ll always be able to find me, but you have to choose.”

  Did she know me so little that she had forgotten that with me it could never be either/or, but both/and?

  Friday came. A trip to the main dealer had confirmed that full in-car office systems were standard on the Mark Six Séat Albeñiz Bedawi drove; Marrakech directory inquiries obligingly supplied the car’s e-mail code. Thus equipped, I drove the rented Peugeot to a pretty spot I had noticed the previous week on the other side of the valley from a particularly precipitous section of the mountain road. There I waited. I listened to New Wave rai. I ate a bag of prickly pears. When I saw the Mark Six Séat Albeñiz as a red dot in the ochre shatteredness of the Atlas, I fetched the portable fone-fax. As the red Séat started the hairpin ascent, I connected a pocket Olivetti/ICL Mark 88 bioprocessor to the modem. A gasoline truck-trailer combo came grinding down the steep grade. As the red Séat passed the booth where I had bought the prickly pears, I loaded the Sefirah disk and keyed in the fracter commit code. As the car rounded the curve before the very special drop, I called the number directory inquiries had given me, thumbed transmit, and rezzed Keter the Destroying Angel up on his onboard display. From my high place I watched the Mark Six Séat Albeñiz veer toward the oncoming tanker, slew back across the road, crash through the low, drystone wall, and fall with wonderful balletic slowness to detonate in a blossom of flame on the rocks and scrub of the shadowy valley floor. I watched the gas combo stop dead, the driver leap down and stare for a full minute before running down the road, gesticulating wildly, toward the prickly pear booth. On my return to Marrakech I booked a seat on a shuttle to Malaga, packed, paid, and left, without explanation, without a note, without one good-bye for Luka.

  SOME DRAGONS ARE TOO large, weigh too heavily on the landscape to be slain, however deserving of death they may be. Europa, the she-dragon, sprawling across a continent with ski resorts in her mountainous spines, eyes hidden behind red glasses while she seeks virgin nations to lunch upon, is perhaps more deserving of dispatch than many others, but even my Keter hand could not deliver shock enough to burn out its huge, slow, many-brained nervous system. But this saint may perhaps break the chain that binds it to the dragon’s finger.

  In the courtyard garden: early bird song, in darkness dawning. Hurry up now, it’s time. I lay down the scissors, take up my weapons, and go to meet my enemy.

  A BICYCLE IS A friend in a way that an automobile can never be. A car can be a lover: sophisticated, complex, temperamental, but one wrong step and the affair is over. The bicycle is simple, undemanding, faithful, but as with any friendship, you must work at it, maintain it, repair it where necessary, spend time with it, get to know its character. I have come to love this green and purple Dirt Wolf MTB. We started strangers, newly introduced by Mas at the ferry terminal at Osaka, but through mutual misunderstandings—pulled muscles, stripped chains, skinned elbows, dented wheels—we have established a relationship. From the Tanazaki-ya to Tosa Securities headquarters is only fifteen kilometers through dull teleburbia but the pleasure of having a good machine between your thighs, responsive to your touch and need, is a transcendent joy. Following the instructions I pried out of the one akira capable of supplying them, I turn off the tree-lined avenue of Affluent Telecommuter Houses with Slightly Less Affluent Telecommuter Homes built in their gardens and Even Less Affluent Telecommuter Apartments built in their gardens ad infinitum onto the private lane and so come to the gates of Graceland. Cast-aluminum treble clefs surmounted by Spyball cameras and minded by ToSec cops in replica Mr. Nudie suits, even down to the Fender guitars embroidered on the lapels: what else can it be?

  It is always dangerous when your enemy has a sense of humor. Ask Batman.

  I ride up to the gates—the guards growl—dismount (stay there, good and faithful servant), and lift my naked right hand to the security cameras.

  “Hi there.” It is not quite as nonchalant in Japanese as I would like it to be. “Let me in.” And the gates of Graceland open before me. I slap a peel-off/stick-on biodecay label over the camera lens, fracter side down. Binah the time-freezer will take care of whoever is on the monitors. The astonished guards reach for Fiuzzis in inside pockets. Too slow, beefboys. I rip the extruded fracter from the demon box hooked to my belt, slap it to my helmet. And disappear as their pieces come level with my heart. Lost Acres: ’Becca’s Blind Spot fracter. Anything within a two-meter radius vanishes as the perception centers close up space around it. While they are still milling around like a duet for Laurel and Hardy sumo wrestlers, I pop up and slap a couple of Binahs over their Ray Ban data shades. Frozen. Playing statues. A moment to cover my rear with a second Lost Acres on the back of my helmet, and I am ready to continue following the raked gravel drive between its dark banks of rhododendrons. The pairs of guards I encounter never stand a chance against an enemy that can step out of their blind spot and blast them into no-time with freeze fracters. Pray Lord Daishi they don’t have extended sensory rigs on those shades of theirs; I’m as naked as Lady Godiva in infrared, and as vulnerable. The big fear is dogs like the ones I fought in the cane field. Lost Acres won’t fool their noses and to use Keter as I did that time I’ll have to step out of the blind spot.

  I cut through the rhododendrons onto an expanse of beautifully striped lawn punctuated with twice-life-size busts of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochrane, Chuck Berry, Patsy Kline, Little Richard, Bill Haley. Elvis. Rock’n’roll heaven. Gene-tweaked muntjak deer graze among the greats. Surreal, but at least dwarf deer preclude cybercanines. Beyond the lawn, a swath of yellow gravel, beyond the yellow gravel, an antebellum Scarlett O’Hara mansion. The only indication that I am still in Japan and not wet-dream Amerika is the ToSec thunder-eagle riding the portico.

  I glimpsed a guitar-shaped pool around the side.

  My activities have not gone unnoticed—I did not imagine I would gain the sanctus sanctorum unchallenged. Enforcers stand around on the gravel, automatics in hands, eyes fixed on the sky as if expecting an attack by Superman. Nothing for it but to screw my courage to the sticking point, make a fast, low, mad run across the noisy, treacherous gravel and hope to make it to the door before they empty their magazines into the sound of my footsteps. Go for it, Ethan, go…

  They do not even turn. This is too easy. Suspiciously too easy. Inside Graceland, I slam and bol
t the door and tear off my face of invisibility. I have a different weapon here: Gevurah, the destroying fear of God. As I move through the corridors like divine wrath, sending those I meet fleeing from me screaming in terror, I discover that Graceland is an enigma within a joke. The magnolias-and-mint-juleps exterior is a hollow shell of offices and access ways; within, glimpsed through windows and ventilators, is a mansion-sized space roofed with glass and walled with what I can only describe as three-story videowalls. Hundreds of televisions; thousands. On the polished wood floor stand four Neo-Shinto torii gates, each facing a cardinal point. Between them is a shoji-walled tile-roofed Daishi Hall.

  For the first time, my confidence—my arrogance—falters. Lord Daishi walk with me.

  Do I imagine, or are the massed televisions filled with faces?

  Too dangerous to leave lying around: I hold the Fear demon in the flame from my silver Zippo until it crisps and curls in death. Then I mount the steps to the door signed ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS.

  “Good morning,” I announce to the assembled secretaries submanagers PAs account executives and two punky but cute kids in VR bodygloves. “Please don’t be afraid.” Not quite the smooth purr of James Mason in The Wicked Lady, but they look at me and I catch their spirits in my right hand. “The instructions I am about to download into your workstations are absolute and cannot be countermanded, is that clear?” Even the boys in the film-circuit suits bow. I’ve been looking forward to this since the idea came to me on the ride up from the Tanazaki-ya. “You will arrange to have every ToSec accountholder paid the equivalent of five years premiums. You will place all privately held stock in the company on the Pacific Rim market. You will then divide what is left among yourselves, leave the building as quickly as possible, and take a lengthy holiday.” The demon box says it all so much more eloquently in Fracter Kanji onscreen but every guy ought to have a chance to play Robin Hood riding through the glen once in his life. Steal from the rich, give to the poor? It may not be FX courtesy Industrial Light and Magic, but the humble tap dance of Qwerty keys that signals the true destruction, the economic dismemberment, of Tosa Securities. If I go now with my hands full of white heat it is purely personal.

  Double doors open without command from me; I advance silently across the polished wood floor toward the heart of Graceland. Silently, the banked walls of television screens blizzard and fill with faces; men, women, old, young. Children. Westerners; Euros, Americans, not many. Among the faces, the odd blank screen swept by momentary flurries of images with the eye-wrenching flavor of fracters. The pillars of the torii gate are studded with soul-taps.

  Tosa Securities’ dream of empire is created and upheld by the hands of the dead. Stolen souls. Enslaved memories. Dozens—hundreds, perhaps—of expert systems to manage and monitor and administer and operate and observe. Tireless. Constant. Vigilant. Eternal. If the dead are its digits, its senses, who—what—is its guiding intelligence? The door to the Daishi Hall swings open. What else to do, but enter?

  Hanging brass lamps illuminate the serene features of hundreds of Buddhist saints lining the walls; I recognize Kannon, Dainichi, Binzuru forever denied Buddhahood because of his fondness for strong drink. The place of the central image on the altar is occupied by what looks like a suit of antique armor with a television set for a head.

  “Life imitates anime?” I say in English, advancing between the Boddhisattvas and Boddhidharmas. The suit of armor, I see now, is built onto the frame of a ubiquitous Dornier Industrial Robot, identical to Luka’s familiar, Oddjob, that guided us through the Californian undersoul. I close until I can see my face reflected whole in the blank television screen beneath the swooping winged helmet. “Not so very far away there are people eating their breakfast and watching the early news.”

  The blade is a terrifying blur of silver; a steel wind in my face; held poised, still, ready to strike, as my left hand is poised, still, ready.

  “It could as easily have been your head, Mr. Ring.” English. Received Pronunciation. Idiomatic. Perfect as only the top-line taps can be.

  I begin to understand. I begin to be very afraid.

  “It could as easily have been yours.” I close my left hand.

  “Somehow I doubt it, Mr. Ring.”

  Like an old Ray Harryhausen animation, the samurai-machine steps down from the altar, needle feet clicking, clicking on the wooden floor. Two of its four arms terminate in short, sharp blades. Childhood nightmares: television memories of spidercrabs dredged up from the floor of the Sea of Japan, five meters of clicking, chitinous, spindly armor. Fighting primal revulsion, I give ground.

  “All done with computers, isn’t it?” I shout to the Boddhisattvas and Boddhidharmas, to the massed personas in their television screens. To anything that will hear. “How did you die?”

  “Cancer, Mr. Ring. Of course. Some say that the fact that it forewarns you is a grace, a time to square yourself with the Buddha or your ancestors or Allah and find dignity. Not me, Mr. Ring. But then I’ve always been an exception to the common rules. I found anger instead; anger that the body I had trained rigorously to obey my will should so fatally betray me; anger that my ambition, my work, should become the ambition and work of others less able than I. Anger.

  “The death itself was quite painless. My soul-tap was downloaded into the simulator, my children and employees were suitably mournful, I became a simulacrum, an animated memory. Then the strange thing occurred, Mr. Ring, that I cannot properly explain to you, or anyone, because it involves the very unexplainability of self and otherness. I came back to life. I became more than recorded memories, passive, dead. I became aware, Mr. Ring, I became sentient, active, alive. I like to imagine it was my anger, the strength of my indignation that would not die and was reincarnated in the machine. Certainly, it was anger and the acquisitive urge that inspired me to build my company that led me to raid those other simulacra with whom I shared the simulator, and subjugate them, and mold them into tools, weapons, with which I could wrest control of the company away from my heirs. Their dismay when they found that the systems would not obey them, when they saw my face on their monitors!”

  Another few steps across the wooden floor.

  “Every nation has a date, Mr. Ring, a place, a time when everyone remembers exactly what they were doing, because it is the exact moment of cultural synthesis. With you it is the death of Elvis Presley, the destruction of the Challenger. With us it is the early morning light over Hiroshima. I saw that light, Mr. Ring. I saw the back rain of the dust and ashes of Empire. And I saw that Empire rebuild herself, proudly shake off American paternalism, take on that Empire, defeat it. If now we have passed from center stage to the lesser roles, I have no regret; the bit players may yet outperform the headline stars.”

  This house; this cultural schizophrenia; this Neo-Imperial adventure: I understand. Behind the white-painted geisha mask, the soul lies unchanged, unchanging, unchangeable.

  “And now you’re taking up the sword of Mishima.”

  “It requires a special nobility to disembowel yourself on a hotel balcony, but Mishima was an idealist, and idealists are fools. We Takedas are pragmatists: I merely want what was always mine to begin with; my lands, my respect, my name.”

  “If it had been for the soul of Japan, I could have understood,” I say. “But you’re just one more fucking little daimyo.”

  “Who wants, and will have, your head, Mr. Ring.”

  The blade moves. This time I am ready. My right hand is held up before me.

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Takeda.”

  “Lord Takeda, if you please. And, as I have said before, I do think so.”

  The arc of the cut passes so close, my reflex recoil so slow, that I feel the kiss of the steel across my throat. The samurai-robot clicks into combat stance; one blade raised high, the other drawn back for the killing thrust.

  Blood warm on my fingers. I stare at my right hand disbelievingly.

  Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
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  Left hand. Chaos hand. Death hand. The backs of my knuckles are pressed against my face. Die, you diseased fuck.

  “It is written, Mr. Ring, that the way of victory lies in becoming your enemy,” says the cultured BBC accent. He speaks? He sees Keter and lives? How? How? I hardly hear his words for the blood surging red in my brain. “I know you, Mr. Ring. Do you think your European masters would have let their most valuable, most powerful weapon go cycling gaily over hill and dale unchaperoned?”

  “They had you watch me?”

  “We were contacted by the European embassy while you were still shopping for bicycles in Tokyo with your animator friend. Since you stamped your albums at Temple One, ours has been the unseen presence accompanying you on your pilgrimage. We Two, Pilgrims Together. You did manage to evade us at Tokushima but we caught up with you again at Temple Nineteen and put up the Hiyasa checkpoint to lock on. I am still not certain whether it was unfortunate or serendipitous that you left the Approved Tourist Route at Aki. If you hadn’t, you might never have encountered the dog patrol and I would never have seen exactly why your European masters value you so highly.”

  Those dead televisions, those semi-fracters blizzarded with interference. Someone had been monitoring those dogs, as I had suspected, but no one living.

  “Had I been observing you through purely visual channels, my persona would be as hopelessly disrupted as your other victims. But I am hunting you with subtler senses—infrared, sound, motion sensors…”

  “My head does not come easily, Mr. Takeda.” Europeans too can read the masters. Strike in an unexpected manner, writes Miyamoto Musashi. Robot limbs are strong but the muscle joints are fragile. Do my enemy’s sensors register a warp of heat, a flicker of digits as I dart between the splayed legs, wrench down the upraised blade arm, break its joint across my knee, and, as the second blade comes blurring toward me, cleave it cleanly at the first joint with the stolen sword?