William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

It's ten in the morning now, and Cayce knows that three girls in similar outfits are arguing, outside, in the hotel's security corridor, with the four large, Kevlar-jacketed young men stationed there. Lobbying to be allowed in, Cayce decides, in order to join their impatient coworker.

When she tires of watching the green boots, which have a sort of fairy-tale quality against the autumnal palette of the lobby, she glances instead through an English-language brochure on offer at the beige marble check-in counter. This explains the oranges and browns, as she sees the place had formerly been The Oktobryskaya. And is still, she gathers, reading between the lines, owned by the Kremlin.

HER room, on the twelfth floor, is larger than she had expected, with a deep bay window offering a sweeping view of the Moscow River and the city beyond. On the far shore, a vast cathedral, and on its own little island a statue of quite unthinkable awfulness. Her Lonely Planet tells her it's Peter the Great, and must be guarded, else local aesthetes blow it up. It looks like a champagne fountain rented from caterers for an old-fashioned working-class wedding.

She turns back to the room: more autumnal murkiness and a mud-dark bedspread. A nagging low-level dissonance, as though everything was designed by someone who'd been looking at a picture of a Western hotel room from the eighties, but without ever having seen even one example of the original. The bathroom is tiled in three shades of brown (though none, she's thankful, East German) with a shower, a bathtub, a bidet and toilet, each with its own paper banner declaring it DISINFEKTED.

There is a sign on the desk inviting her to use her laptop from her room, or, if she prefers, to visit the BISNIZ SENTR in the lobby.

She gets out the iBook and cables it to the socket beside the desk. If what she remembers Pamela Mainwaring having said about her phone is right, that'll probably work here, but she's not sure. It's already occurred to her that she hasn't given the cell number to her latest and most mysterious correspondent, and she wonders if there isn't something subconscious going on, there. The link is slow, but finally she gets to hotmail.

Two.

Parkaboy and stellanor.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out as slowly as she can.

You are in Zamoskvareche, it means across Moskow river from Kremlin, district of old apartments, churches. Hotel is on Bolshaya Yakimanka street, it means big Yakimanka. If you will follow Bolshaya Yakimanka toward Kremlin, see map I have made, you will cross Bolshoy Kamennii Most, means Big Stone Bridge, seeing Kremlin. Following marking on map to Caffeine, sign in Russian. Go in at 1700 today and please be seated beside fish so I will see you.

“Fish,” says Cayce.

Yeah well sure yes I do indeed want to know EVERYTHING and preferably yesterday but you are probably in the air and anyway that number you gave me has this really annoying English woman, who says the mobile customer is blah blah. But, anyway, I hear you. You know, I for one have never doubted that we would arrive at this day in history. Never. The maker lives. Maker is there. Has been. Waiting for us. But now I'm waiting for you, to tell me EVERYTHING. The only news I have is relatively pedestrian, though under the circumstances, what wouldn't be? Two items. Judy is gone. Into the arms of love. Yesterday, so she's already there. Got a cheap flight out of SeaTac. Gone to be with Taki. Darryl is ecstatic to be rid of her. I guess this is going to blow our cover with Taki, seeing as how she's twice his idea of actual size and doesn't speak Japanese, but on the other hand I think we were starting to lose Darryl. Now that there's nobody there but him and his bowls of instant yakisoba, he seems to be getting back on track, and that's where item two comes in. That T-thing Taki sent. Darryl got all hacker on that, with this buddy of his in Palo Alto who's on a project to build a new kind of visually based search engine. Buddy has these bots that are CAD-CAM-based, look for things on the basis of how they're shaped. Darryl got him to send two out, one to search for a section of map that would correspond to the streets on the T. That was the one they had high hopes for, but it came up zero. The other one was kind of an afterthought: find something shaped like this T-shaped thing. Well, they got a 100% match-up on 75% of Taki's T. Except for the branch with the ragged edge, this looks exactly like one specific part in the manual arming mechanism of the US Army's M18A1 Claymore mine, which is basically a wad of C4 explosive packed behind 700 steel balls. When the C4 goes off, the balls come out in a 60° pattern that expands to six feet; anything closer than 170 feet (with trees or foliage in the way, mileage may vary) is thereby made hamburger. Used for ambushes, remotely detonated. Looks sort of like an overweight but very compact satellite video-dish, rectangular and slightly concave. Don't ask me: it's what the bot brought home. Will you call me, please, NOW, and tell me EVERYTHING?

But she doesn't phone Parkaboy. She's too excited, too anxious.

But this is a dressy city, in some way she wouldn't care for if she were to be here very long, so she changes into her Parco outfit, and even tries her luck with the makeup the Tokyo spa issued her. The result, she suspects, would have the spa girls trying not to laugh, but at least it's evident she's wearing makeup. She could probably be mistaken, she decides, for the correspondent for some obscure sub-NPR cultural radio operation. Definitely not television.

Making sure she has the room's magnetic key, she puts on her Rickson's, shoulders the Luggage Label bag containing iBook and phone, and finds her way back to the mini-lobby fronting the elevator banks. A uniformed woman sits there, she assumes, twenty-four hours a day, beneath an enormous arrangement of flowers and dried leaves. Cayce nods to her, but she doesn't nod back.

There is a large window between the two elevators, draped ceiling to floor in nubby ocher fabric. Beside this is an upright glass cooler stocked with champagne, mineral water, what must be several exceptionally well-chilled bottles of burgundy, and much Pepsi. Waiting for the elevator, Cayce edges the ocher nubbiness aside and sees ancient-looking apartment buildings, white spires, and one amazing crenellated orange-and-turquoise bell tower. In the deeper distance, golden onion domes.

This, she decides, is the direction she's going now.

No one at all in the vast main lobby, not even a girl in green boots. She finds her way out, past the security cave with its wide boys in Kevlar, and tries to walk around the block, so that she'll be headed in the direction of those onion domes.

And is lost, almost immediately. But doesn't mind, as she's only out here to walk off an excess of nerves. And at some point, she reminds herself, to phone Parkaboy.

But why is she hesitating to do that? The reason, she admits, is that she knows she'll have to tell him about Bigend, and Boone, and the rest of it, and she's afraid to, afraid of what he might say. But if she doesn't, their friendship, which she values deeply, will start to cease to feel genuine.

She stops, staring at the streetscape of this old residential neighborhood, and is acutely aware of her mind doing the but-really-it's-like thing it does when presented with serious cultural novelty: but really it's like Vienna, except it isn't, and really it's like Stockholm, but it's not, really…

She wanders on, feeling like a child anxiously playing hooky, occasionally glancing up in case she finds the golden onions, until her phone starts to ring.

Feeling guilty, she answers. “Yes?”

“Everything. Now.”

“I was just going to call you.”

“Have you met him?”