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Peter says they’re on vacation, and he himself hasn’t had one, he says, for years. Various recording labels and groups have tried to reach him here, but he simply ignores them. He loves Paris, and says he hasn’t been here since he was someone else, and very stupid.

She doubts that he was ever very stupid.

She goes alone to an Internet café every other day and checks the new hotmail account she’s acquired with her new e-mail address, a .uk one that Voytek arranged.

She wonders about Bigend, and Volkov, and whether Bigend could somehow have known from the start that the maker, makers really, were Volkov’s nieces, but she always comes back to Win’s dictum of there needing always to be room left for coincidence.

She’d gone with Peter to visit Stella and Nora in the squat in Moscow, and then on to the dig, where Damien’s shoot had been winding down, and where she’d found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gray muck and bones, her face streaked with tears. Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why, but she thinks now that if they had she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know.

And now it’s late, close to the wolfing hour of soul-lack. But she knows, lying curled here, behind him, in the darkness of this small room, with the somehow liquid background sounds of Paris, that hers has returned, at least for the meantime, reeled entirely in on its silver thread and warmly socketed.

She kisses his sleeping back and falls asleep.

MY THANKS to the many friends who encouraged and supported me during the more than usually eventful course of the manuscript. Jack Womack, its dedicatee, rescued it countless times, and with the utmost patience, from its author’s habitual lack of faith. Susan Allison and Tony Lacey, Penguin Putnam and Penguin UK respectively, were once again marvelous throughout, as was Martha Millard, my literary agent. Thanks to Douglas Coupland for the coffee so high above Shinjuku, and for fresh insights into Tokyo generally, to Eileen Gunn for sharing in fractal detail her memories of Moscow, to James Dowling for introducing me to the Curta calculator, to OCD for the tale of a duck in the face, to Alan Nazerian for Baranov’s caravan, and to John and Judith Clute, whose hospitality over many years has been by far my best key to London.

And to Deborah and Graeme and Claire, who continue to put up with the process, love always.

—Vancouver, August 17, 2002

Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright

ALSO BY WILLIAM GIBSON

Dedication

Contents

1. THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT

2. BITCH

3. THE ATTACHMENT

4. MATH GRENADES

5. WHAT THEY DESERVE

6. THE MATCH FACTORY

7. THE PROPOSITION

8. WATERMARK

9. TRANS

10. JACK MOVES, JANE FACES

11. BOONE CHU

12. APOPHENIA

13. LITTLE BOAT

14. THE GAIJIN FACE OF BIKKLE

15. SINGULARITY

16. GOING MOBILE

17. MAKING MAYHEM

18. HONGO

19. INTO THE MYSTIC

20. UBER-BONES

21. THE DEAD REMEMBER

22.TARN

23. DICKHEADS

24. CYPRUS

25. SIGIL

26. SIGINT

27. THE SHAPE OF THE ENTHUSIAST

28. WITHIN THE MEANING

29. PROTOCOL

3O. .RU

31. THE PROTOTYPE

32. PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE

33. BOT

34. Z AMOSKVARECH

35.

36. THE DIG

37. KINO

38. PUPPENKOPF

39. RED DUST

40. THE DREAM ACADEMY

41. A TOAST TO MR. POLLARD

42. HIS MISSINGNESS

43.MAIL