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Rock. Annette stands on the site of the gallows where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her
invisible agents to search for spoor of Manfred. Aineko, overly familiar, drapes over her left shoulder like
a satanic stole and delivers a running stream of cracked cellphone chatter into her ear.
I don't know where to begin, she sighs, annoyed. This place is wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed
carnivorous plant that digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The road has been
pedestrianized and resurfaced in squalidly authentic mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what used
to be the parking lot, there's a permanent floating antique market where you can buy anything from a
brass fire surround to an antique CD player. Much of the merchandise in the shops is generic dotcom
trash, vying for the title of Japanese-Scottish souvenir-from-hell: Puroland tartans, animatronic Nessies
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hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second-hand schleptops. People swarm everywhere, from the
theme pubs (hangings seem to be a running joke hereabouts) to the expensive dress shops with their
fabric renderers and digital mirrors. Street performers, part of the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the
sidewalk: a robotic mime, very traditional in silver face-paint, mimics the gestures of passers-by with
ironically stylized motions.
Try the doss house, Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder bag.
The Annette does a double-take as her thesaurus conspires with her open government firmware and
dumps a geographical database of city social services into her sensorium. Oh, I see. The Grass Market
itself is touristy, but the bits off to one end down a dingy canyon of forbidding stone buildings six stories
high are decidedly downmarket. Okay.
Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper genome explorers: round a gaggle
of teenage girls in the grips of some kind of imported kawai fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop
their pink platform heels probably mistaking her for a school probation inspector and past a stand of
chained and parked bicycles. The human attendant looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a blandly
anonymous ten euro note in her pocket almost before she notices. If you were going to buy a hot bike,
she asks, where would you go? The parking attendant stares at her, and for a moment Annette thinks
she's overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. What?
McMurphy's. Used to be called Bannerman's. Down Cowgate, thataway. The meter maid looks
anxiously at her rack of charges. You didn't
Uh-huh. Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone canyon.Well, okay . This had better
be worth it, Mannymon cher, she mutters under her breath.
McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of blank-faced offices. It was
once a real Irish pub, before the developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a
punk night club, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned out as any star, it left
the main sequence. Now it occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of recycled
imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging from the artificially blackened pine beams
above the log tables in other words, the black-dwarf afterlife of the serious drinking establishment.
Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying
patrons upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with water from the city mains.
Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes into a dodgy pub on the
Cowgate and orders a Coke? And when it arrives, she says hey, where's the mirror?
Shutup , Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. It isn'tfunny . Her personal intruder telemetry has just
emailed her wristphone, and it's displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that
according to the published police crime stats this place is likely to do grievous harm to her insurance
premiums.
Aineko looks up at her and yawns cavernously, baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink
suede. Want to make me? I just pinged Manny's head. The network latency was trivial.
The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with Annette. A Diet Coke,
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