Zero History Part 52

"Why tell me now?"

"Bigend told everyone to afford you full human status. And I quote. Excuse me." He scooted away into the crowd.

Milgrim slid his hand inside his jacket, to touch the almost-empty bubble-pack. No more tiny purple notations of date and time. "But I like like a placebo," he said to himself, and then there was a burst of applause. a placebo," he said to himself, and then there was a burst of applause.

The Dottirs and their unpleasant-looking father were descending the spiral, down the thick steps of frosted gla.s.s. Milgrim knew, via Fiona, that their alb.u.m had just gone something. Ermine-haired and glittering, they stepped down, on either side of their glum Dottirs-father. Who Fiona said now owned, in partners.h.i.+p with Bigend, though in some arcane and largely undetectable way, a great deal of Iceland. Most of it, really. It had been Bigend, she said, who'd sold those young Icelandic fiscal cowboys on the idea of internet banking in the first place. "He put them up to it," she'd said, in the cabin, in Milgrim's arms. "He knew exactly what would happen. Out of their heads on E, most of them, which helped."

A toast was being poured. He hurried to find Fiona and his gla.s.s of Perrier.

As he took her hand, Pamela Mainwaring walked quickly past, headed in Bigend's direction.

"Hi, Mum," said Fiona.

Pamela smiled, nodded, made the briefest possible eye contact with Milgrim, and continued on.

87. THE OTHER SIDE

Clockwise, this dream: eighteenth-century marble, winding, worn stone unevenly waxy, tones of smoker's phlegm caught in its depths, profiles of each step set with careful segments of something lifeless as plaster, patching old accidents. Like the scribed, transected, stapled sections of a beloved limb, returned from voyaging: surgery, disaster, a climb up stairs taller still than these. Westernmost, the spiral. Above the lobby, the stripes of Robert's s.h.i.+rt, the Turk's head atop the stapler, above the subtly rude equine monkey-business in the desk's carved thicket, she climbs.

To this floor unvisited, unknown, carpet flowered, faded, antediluvian, beneath incandescent bulbs, an archaic controlled combusion of filaments. Walls hung with madly varied landscapes, unpeopled, each haunted, however dimly, by the spectral finger of the Burj Khalifa.

And at the far end of a vast, perhaps endless room, in a pool of warm light, a figure, seated, in a suit of Klein Blue. As it turns, pale fur, muzzle rouged, the wooden painted teeth- She wakes beside Garreth's slow breathing, in their darkened room, the sheets against her skin.

THANKS:

My wife Deborah and daughter Claire were on-site first readers and sensitive critics, as ever.

Susan Allison, to whom this book is dedicated, and who has been my editor in one sense or another since the start of my career, of course was excellent with this one.

As indeed was Martha Millard, my literary agent since I first required one.

Jack Womack and Paul McAuley read pages almost daily, with Paul keeping very particular track of London. Louis Lapprend was enlisted as Milgrim arrived in Paris, to similar ends.

Cory Doctorow provided Sleight with Milgrim's problematic Neo.

Johan Kugelberg very kindly put me up in the club on which Cabinet is loosely based, and which is very nearly as peculiar.

Sean Crawford kept Winnie honest.

Larry Lunn gave me the order flow, when asked for a macguffin of ultimate scale. I don't know anyone else who could have.

Clive Wilson very kindly offered boots-on-the-ground Melbourne geography and vegan bacon.

Douglas Coupland introduced me to the concept of the Vegas cube by showing me, years ago, the one he'd built to write in.

Bruce Sterling, having been emailed exactly the wrong question about CCTV, graciously extruded the concept of the ugly T-s.h.i.+rt in one of his characteristic, demonically focused bursts of seemingly effortless imagination.

Michaela Sachenbacher and Errolson Hugh introduced me to the architecture of a "secret" brand, and the pa.s.sion behind it.

Everything I know about being a fas.h.i.+on model in the 21st Century I learned from Jenna Sauers' wonderful Jezebel Jezebel memoir, "I Am The Anonymous Model." Meredith's modeling career is based on it. Available with a quick Google. memoir, "I Am The Anonymous Model." Meredith's modeling career is based on it. Available with a quick Google.

Likewise available is Mark Gardiner's very informative "Artful Dodgers," from the February 2009 issue of Motorcyclist Motorcyclist, where I learned everything I know about London motorcycle couriers.

Meredith's line of shoes was modeled after the brand Callous, launched by Thomas Fenning and Tomoaki Kobayas.h.i.+ in 2003, and which I gather met a somewhat similar fate.

Thank you all.

-Vancouver, June 2010