All Tomorrow's Parties Page 28

  “I want to see you fix it,” the boy says.

  Silencio twists the loupe from his eye and looks at the boy, as if noticing him for the first time.

  “I want to see you fix it.” The boy points down, indicating the watches arrayed beneath the glass.

  “The bed,” Silencio says. “You were here with Sandro, when we restored that Vacheron.”

  Silencio brings the restoration bed from the rear of the shop, a square cushion, ten inches on a side. He places it on the counter and the boy bends close, to see the velvety green surface made up of millions of manipulators.

  Silencio places the watch on the bed. They watch as it rises smoothly on edge, as if of its own accord, and then seems to sink, impossibly, as if through the shallow bed and the glass beneath. Vanishing like a coin set into soft mud…

  Silencio looks at the watch on his wrist, a military Jaeger-LeCoultre, RAAF. “Nine minutes,” he said. “There's coffee.”

  “I want to watch,” the boy says.

  “Nothing to see.”

  Within the bed, the rusted disk of the watch is being read and disassembled. Molecules are moving. In nine minutes it will rise again, bright and perfect as the day it first left its factory in Switzerland.

  “I want to watch,” the boy says.

  Silencio understands. He goes to get the coffee.

  THANKS

  TO everyone who waited for this one with even greater patience than usual, particularly my publishers, as personally and wonderfully represented by Susan Allison and Tony Lacey.

  To Deb and Graeme and Claire, with love, for putting up with far more than the ordinary basement-dwelling.

  To Julia Witwer, for being this text's first reader and more.

  The following are special friends of this book: Gordon Begg, Judith Beale, Jessica Eastman, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Mark Halyk, Richard Kadrey, Kevin Kelly, Lueza Jean Lamb, Roger Trilling, Jack Womack. Thank you all.

  And to the post-cyberpunk contingent in Mexico City, who, though I declined their thoughtful offer of the definitive alternative tour, encouraged me, with their warm enthusiasm, through the writing of a crucial chapter in the Hotel Camino Real.

  MAY 10, 1999

  VANCOUVER, B.C.