San Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities. — William Gibson

Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here.

That other country, waiting.

He is by trade a keeper of the door to that country.

Drawn, the black blade becomes a key. When he holds it, he holds the wind in his hand.

The door swings gently open.

But he does not draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial…raises his hand to halt a passing cab. Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own.

Harwood considers him from the distance behind his glasses. “Do you believe in the forces of history?”

“I believe in what brings us to the moment,” Konrad says.

“I seem to have come to believe in the moment myself. I believe we are approaching one, drawn to it by the gravity of its strangeness. It is a moment in which everything and nothing will change…If the world is to be reborn, I wish to be reborn in it, as something akin to what I am today.”