Pattern Recognition

Cayce looks at him and carefully chews a mouthful of stuffed eggplant.

"Of course," he says, "we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile." He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. "We have only risk management. The spi

Cayce blinks.

"Do we have a past, then?" Stonestreet asks.

"History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when," Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. "Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct."

"The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now."

"You sound oracular." White teeth.

"I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we're interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won't seem very relevant." What she's actually doing here is cha

Now it's Bigend's turn to chew, silently, looking at her very seriously.

HE drives a maroon Hummer with Belgian plates, wheel on the left. Not the full-on uber-vehicle like a Jeep with glandular problems, but some newer, smaller version that still manages to look no kinder, no gentler. It's almost as uncomfortable as the bigger ones, though the seats are upholstered with glove-soft skin. What she'd liked, all she'd liked, about the big ones had been the huge transmission hump, broad as a horse's back, separating driver from passenger, but of course their affect had changed entirely, once the actual original Humvee had become a fixture on the streets of New York.

Never her idea of a date vehicle, your old-school ciwie Hummer, and this little one has her closer to Bigend, who's placed his chocolate-brown Stetson on the down-scaled hump between them. Mirror-world traffic has her foot foolishly working a phantom brake, as though she, seated on the British driver's side, should be doing the driving. She clutches her East German envelope, in her lap, and tries not to do that.

Bigend's made it plain that he won't think of her taking a cab (though neither, apparently, would he think of resummoning the Blue Ant car and its natty driver) nor will he countenance her suggestion of the tender mercies of the Bow Street tube. Trains do not arrive at Cam-den Town, this time on a Saturday, he explains; they only depart, the better to thin the ranks of the Children's Crusade. She remembers now that she knew this, vaguely, herself, though imagining the logistics of it, now, after a glass or two too many of Stonestreet's wine, defeats her. How can trains depart without first having arrived?

The rain is done, the air clear as glass.

She spots a cluster of signage denoting things Smithfield as they whip through a roundabout, and thinks that they are near the market.

"We'll have a drink," Hubertus Bigend says, "in Clerkenwell."

7. THE PROPOSITION

- /

He parks the Hummer on a well-lit thoroughfare in what is apparently Clerkenwell, nothing much to distinguish any very individual 'hoodness to Cayce. Street level is routine London retail and services, but the buildings themselves have the look of retrofitted residency, possibly of a more Tribeca-like sort than Stonestreet's match factory.

He opens the glove compartment and removes a rectangular sheet of thick glossy plastic that unfolds to approximately the size of a mirror-world license plate. She sees "EU" there, a British lion, and what seems to be a license number, as he places this, open and face-up, on the dash.

"Permission to park," he explains, and when she gets out she sees that they are parked against a double-lined, yellow-painted curb. Exactly how well co

Putting on his dark brown Stetson, he clicks his key, and the Hummer's lights flash, go dark, flash again, and a brief, truncated lowing issues forth as the vehicle comes to full alert. She wonders if it gets touched a lot, looking like a giant's Matchbox toy. Whether it allows that.

Then walking with him toward what is obviously their destination, a bar-restaurant retrofitted to look as little as possible like a pub, and whose lighting reminds her, as they approach its windows and the thump of bass, of the color of spent flashbulbs, fried steel wool through smoked glass.

Bernard has always said you were very good." His voice reminds her of touring a museum with those earphones on. Strangely compelling. Thank you." As they enter the place, her eye-blink take on the crowd is about white powder, the old-fashioned kind.

But yes, she remembers these too-bright smiles, eyes flashing flat as glass.

Bigend obtains a table instantly, something she assumes not everyone could do under the circumstances, and she recalls that her friend in New York had initially cited this as one of the counterbalances to his Lombardhood: no waiting. Cayce assumes this is not because he's known here, but because of some attitudinal tattoo, something people can read. He's wearing a cowboy hat, a fawn waterproof of archaic hunting cut, gray fla

A waitress takes their orders, Cayce's a Holsten Pils, Bigend's a kir. Cayce looks at him across two feet of circular table and a tiny oil lamp with a floating wick. He removes his hat, looking in that instant quite suddenly and remarkably Belgian, as though the Stetson should be a fedora of some kind.

Their drinks arrive, and he pays with a crisp twenty-pound note extracted from a broad wallet stuffed mainly with unreal-looking high-denomination euros.

The waitress pours Cayce's beer and Bigend leaves the change on the table.

"Are you tired?" he asks.

"Jet lag." Automatically returning Bigend's toast, lager clinking kir.

"It shrinks the frontal lobes. Physically. Did you know that? Clearly visible on a scan."

Cayce swallows some beer, winces. "No," she says, "it's because the soul travels more slowly, and arrives late."

"You mentioned souls earlier."

"Did I?" She can't remember.

"Yes. Do you believe in them?"

"I don't know."

"Neither do I." He sips. "You don't get along with Dorotea?"

"Who told you that?"

"Bernard felt you didn't. She can be very difficult."

Cayce is suddenly aware of her East German plastic envelope, where it rests beneath the table, across her thighs; its weight unaccustomed, uneven, because she's tucked her solid little bit of robot girl knuckleduster in there, against she knows not what possibility.

"Can she?"

"Of course. If she feels that you are about to have something she has long coveted." Bigend's teeth seem to have multiplied, or metastasized perhaps. His lips, wet with the kir, are very red in this light. He shakes his dark forelock away from his eyes. She is on full sexual alert now, Bigend's ambiguity having finally gotten to her. Is this all about that, then? Does Dorotea see her as a sexual competitor? Is she in the sights of Bigend's desire, which she knows, from her friend Margot's stories in New York, to be at once constant and ever-shifting?