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her.
    â€œAnd of course,” said Zak, “as far as that goes, the early roses made no distinction between magnetic north and true north. That’s called deviation. I could go on.”
    â€œI imagine you could.”
    It might have been a putdown, but he didn’t think it was. She seemed happy enough to hear him spout his cartographic expertise. She looked at him approvingly, but then with some concern.
    â€œWe’re both going to have black eyes,” she said. “People will think we’ve been boxing each other.”
    â€œWell, they’ll think you won. Mine’s going to look worse than yours.”
    â€œMaybe we need to get a bag of ice.”
    â€œFunny thing,” said Zak. “Where they have ice they often have alcohol.”
    â€œDon’t tell me you know some sleazy watering hole where cartographers go to lick their wounds?”
    â€œI don’t actually hang out with cartographers,” Zak confessed. “But I do know a sleazy watering hole where I go to lick my wounds.”
    â€œGood enough,” said Marilyn.

 
    11. PLASMA
    Wrobleski didn’t like having to sit in one place in order to be informed, entertained, or sedated: he found the passivity excruciating. That’s why he’d bought the biggest TV he could find—panoramic, high-def, as large as his own bed, all the bells and whistles and klaxons—and wall-mounted—once they’d reinforced the wall of his living room. When there was something he really needed to see, he could watch it while still pacing around the room.
    The screen currently showed two women and a man sitting uncomfortably in gawkily stylish, primary-colored chairs. Behind them an electronic backdrop showed ever-changing “then and now” images of the city. One woman was the interviewer, young, eagerly serious, but unthreatening, unlikely to give the other two a hard time. The other woman was familiar to Wrobleski, and to everybody else in this city. It was the mayor, Margaret “Meg” Gunderson, a big, severe-looking woman, a bruiser with a background in the transport unions, worn only somewhat smooth by her years in city politics. She’d been pushed through media boot camp, taught when and how to smile, to speak slowly and display a certain quirky charm, but she still looked like someone you wouldn’t want to tangle with in a street fight.
    The man, if you wanted Wrobleski’s opinion, was a ludicrous, pretentious clown, albeit one for whom Meg Gunderson apparently had some use at that moment. The interviewer introduced the clown as Marco Brandt, a member of the mayor’s select committee on inner-city regeneration, and described him as a “futurologist with a special interest in speculative urbanism,” but Wrobleski had stopped listening before she’d gotten around to explaining what the fuck that meant.
    Brandt’s exoticism was conspicuous but oddly nonspecific. His voice, when he acknowledged the introduction, seemed to be conducting its own world tour of accents. He was an older man trying to look young. The clothes were all black but featured asymmetrical angles and various fabrics that showed different degrees of luster: velvet, brocade, leather insets. His white hair was spiked and upright, and he wore spectacles that looked like ornate miniature scaffoldings on a long, thin face that would otherwise have appeared bland.
    The three TV heads were talking about the future of the city. Mayor Gunderson was giving it her all, being as genial as she could manage, but also comprehensible, talking about the need for the city to get off its butt and press on with new developments. And she had a pet project. The old Telstar Hotel, which all on-screen agreed was a great example of sixties architecture—though Wrobleski had only ever thought of it as that closed-down dump that used to have a revolving restaurant—was now about to be included on the National