“Let’s start over,” Laney suggested. “ ‘Paragon-Asia Dataflow.’ You them?”

“Persistent bugger.”

“Goes with the territory,” Laney said. “Professionally, I mean.”

“Fair enough.” The man raised his eyebrows, one of which was bisected by a twisted pink cable of scar tissue. “Rez, then. What do you think of him?”

“You mean the rock star?” Laney asked, after struggling with a basic problem of context.

A nod. The man regarded Laney with utmost gravity.

“From Lo/Rez? The band?” Half Irish, half Chinese. A broken nose, never repaired. Long green eyes.

“What do I thinkof him?”

In Kathy Torrance’s system of things, the singer had been reserved a special disdain. She had viewed him as a living fossil, an annoying survival from an earlier, less evolved era. He was at once massively and meaninglessly famous, she maintained, just as he was both massively and meaninglessly wealthy. Kathy thought of celebrity as a subtle fluid, a universal element, like the phlogiston of the ancients, something spread evenly at creation through all the universe, but prone now to accrete, under specific conditions, around certain individuals and their careers. Rez, in Kathy’s view, had simply lasted far too long. Monstrously long. He was affecting the unity of her theory. He was defying the proper order of the food chain. Perhaps there was nothing big enough to eat him, not even Slitscan. And while Lo/Rez, the band, still extruded product on an annoyingly regular basis, in a variety of media, their singer stubbornly refused to destroy himself, murder someone, become active in politics, admit to an interesting substance-abuse problem or an arcane sexual addiction—indeed to do anything at all worthy of an opening segment on Slitscan. He glimmered, dully perhaps, but steadily, just beyond Kathy Torrance’s reach. Which was, Laney had always assumed, the real reason for her hating him so.

“Well,” Laney said, after some thought, and feeling a peculiar compulsion to attempt a truthful answer, “I remember buying their first album. When it came out.”