Idoru (25 page)

“
You
,” said Gomi Boy to Zona Rosa, “are in Mexico City.
You
are not physically or legally endangered by
any
of this!”

“Physically?” said Zona Rosa, snapping back into a furious version of her previous presentation. “You want
physically,
son of a bitch? I'll fucking kill you, physically! You think I can't do that? You think you live on Mars or something? I fly here Aeronaves direct with my girls, we find you, we cut your Japanese balls off! You think I can't do that?” The saw-toothed, dragon-handled switchblade was out now, quivering, in front of Gomi Boy's face.

“Zona,
please
,” Chia begged. “He hasn't done anything so far but help me! Don't!”

Zona snorted. The blade reversed, vanishing. “You don't push me,” she said to Gomi Boy. “My friend, she is in some bad shit, and I have some ghost-bastard
thing
on my
site
…”

“It's in the software on my Sandbenders, too,” Chia said. “I saw it in Venice.”

“You
saw
it?” The fractured images cycling faster.

“I saw
some
thing—”

“What? You saw
what
?”

“Someone. By the fountain at the end of a street. It might have been a woman. I was scared. I bailed. I left my Venice open—”

“Show me,” Zona said. “In my site I could not see it. My lizards could not see it either, but they grew agitated. The birds flew lower, but could find nothing. Show me this thing!”

“But Zona—”

“Now!” Zona said. “It is part of this shit you are in. It must be.”

“My God,” Zona said, staring up at St. Mark's. “Who wrote this?”

“It's a city in Italy,” Chia said. “It used to be a country. They invented banking. That's St. Mark's. There's a module where you can see what they do at Easter, when the Patriarch brings out all these bones and things, set into gold, parts of saints.”

Zona Rosa crossed herself. “Like Mexico… this is where the water comes up to the bottoms of the doors, and the streets, they are water?”

“I think a lot of this is
under
water now,” Chia said.

“Why is it dark?”

“I keep it that way…” Chia looked away, searching the shadows beneath archways. “That Walled City, Zona, what is that?”

“They say it began as a shared killfile. You know what a kill-file is?”

“No.”

“It is an old expression. A way to avoid incoming messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those messages never existed. They never reached you. This was when the net was new, understand?”

Chia knew that when her mother was born, there had been no net at all, or almost none, but as her teachers in school were fond of pointing out, that was hard to imagine. “How could that become a city? And why's it all squashed in like that?”

“Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people who founded Hak Nam were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn't do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made some-thing like a killfile of everything,
everything
they didn't like, and they turned that inside out.” Zona's hands moved like a conjurer's. “And they pushed it through, to the other side…”

“The other side of
what
?”

“This is not how they did it,” Zona said impatiently, “this is the
story
. How they did it, I don't know. But that is the story, how they tell it. They went there to get away from the laws. To have no laws, like when the net was new.”

“But why'd they make it look like that?”

“That I know,” Zona said. “The woman who came to help me build my country, she told me. There was a place near an airport, Kowloon, when Hong Kong wasn't China, but there had been a mistake, a long time ago, and that place, very small, many people, it still belonged to China. So there was no law there. An outlaw place. And more and more people crowded in; they built it up, higher. No rules, just building, just people living. Police wouldn't go there. Drugs and whores and gambling. But people living, too. Factories, restaurants. A city. No laws.”

“Is it still there?”

“No,” Zona said, “they tore it down before it all became China again. They made a park with concrete. But these people, the ones they say made a hole in the net, they found the data. The history of it. Maps. Pictures. They built it again.”

“Why?”

“Don't ask me. Ask them. They are all crazy.” Zona was scanning the Piazza. “This place makes me cold…” Chia considered bringing the sun up, but then Zona pointed. “Who is that?”

Chia watched her Music Master, or something that looked like him, stroll toward them from the shadows of the stone arches where the cafes were, a dark greatcoat flapping to reveal a lining the color of polished lead.

“I've got a software agent that looks like that,” Chia said, “but he isn't supposed to be there unless I cross a bridge. And I couldn't find him, when I was here before.”

“This is not the one you saw?”

“No,” Chia said.

An aura bristled around Zona, who grew taller as the spikey cloud of light increased in resolution. Shifting, overlapping planes like ghosts of broken glass. Iridescent insects whirling there.

As the figure in the greatcoat drew toward them across the Piazza's patchworked stone, snow resolved behind it; it left footprints.

Zona's aura bristled with gathering menace, a thunderhead of flickering darkness forming above the shattered sheets of light. There was a sound that reminded Chia of one of those blue-light bug-zappers popping a particularly juicy one, and then vast wings cut the air, so close: Zona's Colombian condors, things from the data-havens. And gone. Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.

Behind the advancing figure of her Music Master, Chia saw the facades of the great square vanish entirely behind curtains of snow.

Zona's switchblade seemed the size of a chainsaw now, its toothed spine rippling, alive. The golden dragons from the plastic handles chased their fire-maned double tails around her brown fist, through miniature clouds of Chinese embroidery. “I'll take you
out
,” Zona said, as if savoring each word.

Chia saw the world of snow that had swallowed her Venice abruptly contract, shrinking, following the line of footprints, and the features of the Music Master became those of Rei Toei, the idoru.

“You already have,”

33. Topology

Arleigh was waiting for him by the elevator, on the fifth and lowest of the hotel's parking levels. She'd changed back into the work clothes he'd first seen her in. Despite the patch of micropore on her swollen lip, the jeans and nylon bomber jacket made her look wide-awake and competent, two things Laney felt he might never be again.

“You look terrible,” she said.

The ceiling here was very low, and flocked with something drab and wooly, to reduce noise. Lines of bioluminescent cable were bracketed to it, and the unmoving air was heavy with the sugary smell of exhausted gasohol. Spotless ranks of small Japanese cars glittered like bright wet candy. “Yamazaki seemed to feel it was urgent,” Laney said.

“If you don't do it now,” she said, “we don't know how long it'll take to get it all up and running again.”

“So we'll do it.”

“You don't look like you should even be walking.”

He started walking, unsteadily, as if by way of demonstration. “Where's Rez?”

“Blackwell's taken him back to his hotel. The sweep team didn't find anything. This way.” She led him along a line of surgically clean grills and bumpers. He saw the green van parked with its front to the wall, its hatch and doors open. It was fenced behind orange plastic barricades, and surrounded by the black modules. Shannon, the red-haired tech, was doing something to a red and black cube centered on a folding plastic table.

“What's that?” Laney asked.

“Espresso,” he said, his hand inside the housing, “but I think the gasket's warped.”

“Sit here, Laney,” Arleigh said, indicating the van's front passenger seat. “It reclines.”

Laney climbed up into the seat. “Don't try it,” he said. “You might not be able to wake me up.”

Yamazaki appeared, over Arleigh's shoulder, blinking. “You will access the Lo/Rez data as before, Laney-san, but you will simultaneously access the fan-activity base. Depth of field. Dimensionality. The fan-activity data providing the degree of personalization you require. Parallax, yes?”

Arleigh handed Laney the eyephones. “Have a look,” she said. “If it doesn't work, to hell with it.” Yamazaki flinched. “Either way, we'll go and find you the hotel doctor, after.”

Laney settled his neck against the seat's headrest and put the ‘phones on.

Nothing. He closed his eyes. Heard the phones power up. Opened his eyes to those same faces of data he'd seen earlier, in Akihabara. Characterless. Institutional in their regularity.

“Here comes the fan club,” he heard Arleigh say, and the barren faces were suddenly translucent, networked depths of postings and commentary revealed there in baffling organic complexity.

“Something's—” he started to say, but then he was back in the apartment in Stockholm, with the huge ceramic stoves. But it was a place this time, not just a million tidily filed factoids. Shadows of flames danced behind the narrow mica panes of the stove's ornate iron door.

Candlelight. The floors were wooden planks, each one as broad as Laney's shoulders, spread with the soft tones of old carpets. Some-thing directed his point of view into the next room, past a leather sofa spread with more and smaller rugs, and showed him the black window beyond the open drapes, where snowflakes, very large and ornate, fell with a deliberate gravity past the frosted panes.

“Getting anything?” Arleigh. Somewhere far away.

He didn't answer, watching as his view reversed. To be maneuvered down a central hallway, where a tall oval mirror showed no reflection as he passed. He thought of CD-ROMs he'd explored in the orphanage: haunted castles, monstrously infested spacecraft abandoned in orbit…. Click here. Click there. And somehow he'd always felt that he never found the central marvel, the thing that would have made the hunt worthwhile. Because it wasn't there, he'd finally decided; it never quite was, and so he'd lost interest in those games.

But the central marvel here—click on bedroom—was Rei Toei. Propped on white pillows at the head of a sea of white, her head and gowned shoulders showing above eyelet lace and the glow of fine cottons.

“You were our guest tonight,” she said. “I wasn't able to speak with you. I am sorry. It ended badly, and you were injured.”

He looked at her, waiting for the mountain valleys and the bells, but she only looked back, nothing came, and he remembered what Yamazaki had said about bandwidth.

A stab of pain in his side. “How do you know? That I was injured?”

“The preliminary Lo/Rez security report. Technician Paul Shannon states that you appeared to have been injured.”

“Why are you here?” (“Laney,” he heard Arleigh say, “are you okay?”)

“I found it,” the idoru said. “Isn't it wonderful? But he has not been here since the renovations were completed. So, really, he's never been here. But you've been here before, haven't you? I think that's how I found it.” She smiled. She was very beautiful here, floating in this whiteness. He hadn't been able to really look at her in the Western World.

“I accessed it earlier,” he said, “but it wasn't like this.”

“But then it… rounded out, didn't it? It became so much better. Because one of the artisans who reassembled the stoves had made a record of it all, when it was done. Just for herself, for her friends, but you see what it's done. It was in the data from the fan club.” She gazed in delight at a single taper, banded horizontally in cream and indigo, that burned in a candlestick of burnished brass. Beside it on the bedside table were a book and an orange. “I feel very close to him, here.”

“I'd feel closer to him if you'd put me back, outside.”

“In the street? It's snowing. And I'm not certain the street is there.”

“In the general data-construct. Please. So I can do my job

“Oh,” she said, and smiled at him, and he was staring into the tangled depths of the data-faces.

“Laney?” Arleigh said, touching his shoulder. “Who are you talking to?”

“The idoru,” Laney said.

“In nodal manifestation?” Yamazaki.

“No. She was there in the data, I don't know how. She was in a model of his place in Stockholm. Said she got there because I'd cruised it before. Then I asked her to put me back out here…”

“Out where?” Arleigh asked.

“Where I can see,” Laney said, staring down into intricately overgrown canyons, dense with branchings that reminded him of Arleigh's Realtree 7.2, but organic somehow, every segment thickly patched with commentary. “Yamazaki was right. The fan stuff seems to do it.”

He heard Gerrard Delouvrier, back in the TIDAL labs, urge him
not
to focus.
What you do, it is opposite of the concentration, but we will learn to direct it
.

Drift. Down through deltas of former girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood, personal sightings of Rez or Lo together with whichever woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This being for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspective in which these two loomed. Human in every detail but then not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate, probably, but always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He could
see
celebrity here, not like Kathy's idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band's fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.