31. The Way Things Work

   See how things work, Laney? ‘What goes around, comes around’? ‘You can run, but you can’t hide’? Know those expressions, Laney? How some things get to be clichés because they touch on certain truths, Laney? Talk to me, Laney.”
   Laney lowered himself into one of the miniature armchairs, hugging his ribs.
   “You look like shit, Laney. Where have you been?”
   “The Western World,” he said. He didn’t like watching himself do those things on the screen, but he found he couldn’t look away. He knew that wasn’t him, there. They’d mapped his face onto someone else. But it was his face. He remembered hearing something someone had said about mirrors, a long time ago, that they were somehow unnatural and dangerous.
   “So you’re trying your hand at the Orient now?”
   She hadn’t understood, he thought, which meant she didn’t know where he’d been, earlier. Which meant they hadn’t been watching him here. “That’s that guy,” he said, “that Hillman. From the day I met you. My job interview. He was a porno extra.”
   “Don’t you think he’s being awfully rough with her?”
   “Who is she, Kathy?”
   “Think back. If you can remember Clinton Hillman, Laney…”
   Laney shook his head.
   “Think actor, Laney. Think Alison Shires…”
   “His daughter,” Laney said, no doubt at all.
   “I definitely think that’s too rough. That borders on rape, Laney. Assault. I think we could make a case for assault.”
   “Why would she do that? How could you get her to do that?” Turning from the screen to Kathy. “I mean, unless it really is rape.”
   “Let’s hear the soundtrack, Laney. See what you’re saying, there. Cast some light on motive.”
   “Don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
   “You’re talking about her father the whole time, Laney. I mean, obsession is one thing, but just droning on about him that way, right through a white-knuckle skull-fuck—”
   He almost fell, coming up out of the chair. He couldn’t find the manual controls. Wires back there. He pulled out the first three he found. Third did it.
   “Put it on the Lo/Rez tab, Laney? Rock and roll lifestyle? Aren’t you supposed to throw them out the window, though?”
   “What’s it about, Kathy? You want to just tell me now?”
   She smiled at him. Exactly the smile he remembered from his job interview. “May I call you Colin?”
   “Kathy: fuck you.”
   She laughed. “We may have come full circle, Laney.”
   “How’s that?”
   “Think of this as a job interview.”
   “I’ve got a job.”
   “We’re offering you another, Laney. You can moonlight.”
   Laney made it back to the chair. Lowered himself in as slowly as possible. The pain made him gasp.
   “What’s wrong?”
   “Ribs. Hurt.” He found a way to settle back that seemed to help.
   “Were you in a fight? Is that blood?”
   “I went to a club.”
   “This is Tokyo, Laney. They don’t have fights in clubs.”
   “That was really her, the daughter?”
   “It certainly is. And she’ll be more than happy to talk about it on Slitscan, Laney. Seduced into sadistic sex games by a stalker obsessed with her famous, her loving dad. Who has come around, by the way. Who is one of ours now.”
   “Why? Why would she do that? Because he told her to?”
   “Because,” Kathy said, looking at him as though she were concerned that he might have sustained brain damage as well, “she’s an aspiring actress in her own right, Laney.” She looked at him hopefully, as though he might suddenly start to process. “The big break.”
   “Thatis going to be her big break?”
   “A break,” Kathy Torrance said, “is a break. And you know something? I’m trying, I’m trying really hard, to give youone instead. Right now. And it wouldn’t be the first, would it?”
   The phone began to ring. “You’d better take this,” she said, passing him the white slab of cedar.
   “Yes?”
   “The fan-activity data-base.” It was Yamazaki. “You must access it now.”
   “Where are you?”
   “In hotel garage. With van.”
   “Look, I’m in kind of rough shape, here. Can it wait?”
   “Wait?” Yamazaki sounded horrified.
   Laney looked at Kathy Torrance. She was wearing something black and not quite short enough to show her tattoo. Her hair was shorter now. “I’ll be down when I can. Keep it open for me.” He hung up before Yamazaki could reply.
   “What was that about?”
   “Shiatsu.”
   “You’re lying.”
   “What do you want, Kathy? What’s the deal?”
   “Him, I want him. I want a way in. I want to know what he’s doing. I want to know what he thinks he’s doing, trying to screw a piece of Japanese software.”
   “Marry,” Laney said.
   Her smile vanished. “You don’t correct me, Laney.”
   “You want me to spy on him.”
   “Research.”
   “Balls.”
   “You wish.”
   “If I got anything you could use, you’d want me to set him up.”
   The smile returned. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
   “And I get?”
   “A life. A life in which you haven’t been branded an obsessive stalker who preyed on the attractive daughter of the object of your obsession. A life in which it isn’t public knowledge that a series of disastrous pharmaceutical trials permanently and hideously rewired you. Fair enough?”
   “What about her? The daughter. She do all that with the Hillman guy for nothing?”
   “Your call, Laney. Work for us, get me what I need, she’s shit out of luck.”
   “That easy? She’d go along with that? After what she had to do?”
   “If she wants even the remotest hope of having a career eventually—yes.”
   Laney looked at her. “That isn’t me. It’s a morph. If I could prove it was a morph, I could sue you.”
   “Really? You could afford that, could you? It takes years. And even then, you might not win. We’ve got a lot of money and talent to throw at problems like that, Laney. We do it all the time.” The door chimed. “That’ll be mine,” she said. She got up, went to the door, touched the security screen. Laney glimpsed part of a man’s face. She opened the door. It was Rice Daniels, minus his trademark sunglasses. “Rice is with us now, Laney,” she said. “He’s been a terrific help with your backgrounder.”
   “Out of Control didn’t work out?” Laney asked Daniels.
   Daniels showed Laney a lot of very white teeth. “I’m sure we could work together, Laney. I hope you don’t have any issues around what happened.”
   “Issues,” Laney said.
   Kathy walked back, handed Laney a blank white card with a pencilled number. “Call me. Before nine tomorrow. Leave a message. Yes or no.”
   “You’re giving me a choice?”
   “It’s more fun that way. I want you to thinkabout it.” She reached down and flicked the collar of Laney’s shirt. “Stitch-count,” she said. Turned and walked out, Daniels pulling the door shut behind them.
   Laney sat there, staring at the closed door, until the phone began to ring.
   It was Yamazaki.

32. The Uninvited

   We must attack,” said Zona Rosa, punctuating it with a quick shift to Aztec death’s-head mode. They were with Masahiko and Gomi Boy now, back in Masahiko’s room in the Walled City, away from the hypnotic chaos of the crawling roofscape.
   “Attack?” Gomi Boy’s huge eyes bulged as brightly as ever, but his voice betrayed his tension. “Who will you attack?”
   “We will find a way to carry the fight to the enemy,” Zona Rosa said, gravely. “Passivity is death.”
   Something that looked to Chia like a bright orange drink coaster came gliding in under Masahiko’s door and across the floor, but the shadow-thing gobbled it before she could get a closer look.
   “You,” said Gomi Boy to Zona Rosa, “are in Mexico City. Youare 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 thingon my site.”
   “It’s in the software on my Sandbenders, too,” Chia said. “I saw it in Venice.”
   “You sawit?” The fractured images cycling faster.
   “I saw something—”
   “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 whys 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 something 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,” said the idoru.

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 redhaired 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 requite. 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. Something 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 notto 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.
   “But this is my favorite,” Laney heard the idoru say, and then he was watching Rez mount a low stage in a crowded club of some kind, everything psychedelic Korean pinks, hypersaturated tints like cartoon versions of the flesh of tropical melons. “It is what we feel.” Rez raised a microphone and began to speak of new modes of being, of something he called “the alchemical marriage.”
   And somewhere Arleigh’s hand was on his arm, her voice tense. “Laney? Sorry. We need you back here now. Mr. Kuwayama is here.”

34. Casino

   Chia looked out between the dusty slats, to the street where it was raining. The idoru had done that. Chia had never made it rain, in Venice, but she didn’t mind the way it looked. It seemed to fit. It was like Seattle.
   The idoru said this apartment was called a casino. Chia had seen casinos on television and they hadn’t looked anything like this. This was a few small rooms with flaking plaster walls, and big old-fashioned furniture with gold lion-feet. Everything worked up with fractals so you could almost smell it. It would’ve smelled dusty, she thought, and also like perfume. Chia hadn’t been to many of these modules, the insides of her Venice, because they were all sort of creepy. They didn’t give her the feeling she got in the streets.
   Zona’s head, on the lion-footed table, made that bug-zap sound. She’d reduced herself to that, Zona: this little blue neon miniature of her Aztec skull, about the size of a small apple. Because Chia had told her to shut up and put the switchblade away. And that had pissed her off, and maybe hurt her feelings, but Chia hadn’t known what else to do. Chia had wanted to hear what the idoru had had to say, and Zona’s I’m-dangerous act totally got in the way. And that was all it was, just acting out, because people couldn’t really hurt each other when they were ported. Not physically, anyway. And that had always been a problem, with Zona. That whole swelling-up thunderhead macho thing. Kelsey and the others would make fun of it, but Zona was fierce enough, verbally, that they’d only do it behind her back. Chia had never known what to make of it; it was like Zona’s personality wasn’t together, around acting like that.
   Now Zona wasn’t talking, just making the bug-zap sound every so often, to remind Chia she was still there and still pissed off.
   The idoru was talking, though, telling Chia the old Venetian meaning of the word casino, not some giant sort of mall place where people went to gamble and watch shows, but something that sounded more like what Masahiko had said about love hotels. Like people had houses where they lived, but these casinos, these secret little apartments, hidden around town, were where they went to be with other people. But they hadn’t been too comfortable there, not to judge by this one, even though the idoru kept adding more and more candles. The idoru said she loved candles.
   The idoru had the Music Master’s haircut now; it made her look like a girl pretending to be a boy. She seemed to like his greatcoat, too, because she kept turning on her heel—his heel—to twirl the hem out. “I’ve seen so many new places,” she said, smiling at Chia, “so many different people and things.”
   –So have I, but…
   “He told me it would be this way, but I had no idea, really.” Twirl. “Having seen all this, I’m so much more… Does it feel like that for you, when you travel?”
   The death’s-head emitted a burst of blue light and a sound like a short, sharp fart. “Zona!” Chia hissed. Then all in a rush, to the idoru, “I haven’t traveled much and so far I don’t think I like it, but we just came here to see what you were, because we didn’t know, because you’re in my software, and maybe in Zona’s site, too, and that bothers her because it’s supposed to be private.”
   “The country with the beautiful sky?”
   “Yeah,” Chia said. “You aren’t really supposed to be able to go there unless she asks you.”
   “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” The idoru looked sad. “I thought I could go anywhere—except where you come from.”
   “Seattle?”
   “The hive of dreams,” said the idoru, “windows heaped against the sky. I can see the pictures, but there is no path. I know you’ve come from there, but it’s there… isn’t there!”
   “The Walled City?” It had to be, because that was where she and Zona were coming from now. “We’re only ported through. Zona’s in Mexico City and I’m in this hotel, okay? And we really better go back now, ’cause I don’t know what’s happening—”
   The blue skull expanded and went Zonaform, grim and sullen, “Finally you say something worthwhile. Why do you speak with this thing? She is nothing, only a more expensive version of this toy of yours she’s stolen and taken over. Now that I have seen her, I can only think that Rez is crazy, pathetically deluded…”
   “But he isn’t crazy,” the idoru said. “It is what we feeltogether. He has told me that we will not be understood, not at first, and there will be resistance, hostility. But we mean no harm, and he believes that in the end only good can come from our union.”
   “You synthetic bitch,” Zona said. “You think we don’t see what you’re doing? You aren’t real! You aren’t as real as this imitation of a drowned city! You’re a made-up thing, and you want to suck what’s real out of him!” Chia saw the thunderhead, the aura, starting to build. “This girl crossed the ocean to find you out, and now her life is in danger, and she is too stupid to see that you are the cause!”
   The idoru looked at Chia. “Your life?”
   Chia had to swallow. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m scared.”
   And the idoru was gone, draining from Chia’s Music Master like a color that had no name. He stood there in the light of twenty candles, his expression unreadable. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but what exactly was it we were discussing?”
   “We weren’t,” said Chia, then her goggles were lifted away, taking the Music Master and the room in Venice and Zona with them, and two of the fingers of the hand that held the goggles was ringed with gold, each ring linked to a gold watch’s massive bracelet with its own fine length of chain. Pale eyes looked into hers.
   Eddie smiled. Chia drew her breath in to scream, and another hand, not Eddie’s, but large and white, smelling of metallic perfume, covered her mouth and nose. And a hand on her shoulder, pressing down, as Eddie stepped back, letting the goggles fall to the white carpet.
   Holding her gaze, Eddie raised one finger to his lips, smiled, and said “Shhhh.” Then stepped aside, turning away, so that Chia saw Masahiko sitting there on the floor, the black cups over his eyes, his fingers moving in their tip-sets.
   Eddie took something black from his pocket and reached Masahiko in two silent, exaggerated steps. He did something to the black thing and bent down with it. She saw it touch Masahiko’s neck.
   Masahiko’s muscles all seemed to jerk at once, his legs straightening, throwing him sideways, where he lay on the white carpet, twitching, his mouth open. One of the black cups had come off. The other still covered his right eye.
   Eddie turned back, looking at her.
   “Where is it?” he said.

35. The Testhed of Futurity

   Shannon offered Laney a tall foam cup with half an inch of very hot, very black coffee in it. Beyond him, past the orange barricades, was a long white Land-Rover with integral crash-bars and green-tinted windows. Kuwayama waited there, in a dark gray suit, his rimless glasses glinting in the greenish light from the cable overhead. A black-suited driver stood beside him.
   “What’s he want?” Laney asked Arleigh, tasting Shannon’s espresso. It left grit on his tongue.
   “We don’t know,” said Arleigh, “But apparently Rez told him where to find us.”
   “That’s what he said.”
   Yamazaki appeared at Laney’s elbow. His glasses had either been repaired or replaced, but two of the pins holding the sleeve of his green jacket had come undone. “Mr. Kuwayama is Rei Toei’s creator, in a sense. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Famous Aspect, her corporate entity. He was the initiator of her project. He asks to speak with you.”
   “I thought it was so urgent that I access the combined data for you.”
   “It is, yes,” said Yamazaki, “but I think you should speak with Kuwayama now, please.”
   Laney followed him through the black modules and past the barricades, and watched as the two exchanged bows. “This is Mr. Colin Laney,” Yamazaki said, “our special researcher.” Then, to Laney: “Michio Kuwayama, Chief Executive Officer of Famous Aspect.”
   No one would have guessed that Kuwayama had so recently been up there in the dark at the Western World, the crowd heaving and screaming around him. How had he gotten out, Laney wondered, and wouldn’t the idoru have been lit up like a Christmas tree? Blood had seeped down into Laney’s shoe; it was sticky between his toes. How much had the combined weight of all the human nervous tissue on the planet increased since he and Arleigh had left the bubble-gum bar with Blackwell? He felt like he’d acquired more himself, all of it uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have a card.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” Kuwayama said, in his precise, oddly accented English. He shook Laney’s hand. “I know that you are very busy. We appreciate your taking the time to meet with us.” The plural caused Laney to glance at the driver, who wore the kind of shoes that Rydell had worn at the Chateau, flexible-looking black lace-ups with cleated, rubbery soles, but it didn’t seem as though the driver was the other half of that “we.” “Now,” Kuwayama said to Yamazaki, “if you will excuse us.” Yamazaki bowed quickly and walked back toward the van, where Arleigh, pretending to be doing something to the espresso machine, was watching out of the corner of her eye. The driver opened the Land-Rover’s rear door for Laney, who got in. Kuwayama got in from the other side. When the door closed behind him, they were alone.
   Something that looked like a large silver thermos bottle was mounted between the two seats, in a rack with padded clamps.
   “Yamazaki tells us that you had band-width difficulties during the dinner,” Kuwayama said.
   “That’s true,” Laney said.
   “We have adjusted the band-width…”And the idoru appeared between them, smiling. Laney saw that the illusion even provided a seat for her, melding the two buckets in which he and Kuwayama sat into a third.
   “Did you find what you were looking for, when you left me in Stockholm, Mr, Laney?”
   He looked into her eyes. What sort of computing power did it take to create something like this, something that looked back at you? He remembered phrases from Kuwayama’s conversation with Rez: desiring machines, aggregates of subjective desire, an architecture of articulated longing…“I started to,” he said.
   “And what was it that you saw, that made you unable to look at me, during our dinner?”
   “Snow,” Laney said, and was startled to feel himself begin to blush. “Mountains… But I think it was only a video you’ve made.”
   “We don’t ‘make’ Rei’s videos,” Kuwayama said, “not in the usual sense, They emerge directly from her ongoing experience of the world. They are her dreams, if you will.”
   “You dream as well, don’t you, Mr. Laney?” the idoru said. “That is your talent. Yamazaki says it is like seeing faces in the clouds, except that the faces are really there. I cannot see the faces in clouds, but Kuwayama-san tells me that one day I will. It is a matter of plectics.”
   Yamazaki says? “I don’t understand it,” Laney said. “It’s just something I can do.”
   “An extraordinary talent,” Kuwayama said. “We are most fortunate. And we are fortunate as well in Mr. Yamazaki, who, though hired by Mr. Blackwell, has an open mind.”
   “Mr. Blackwell is not too pleased about Rez and…” Nodding toward her. “Mr. Blackwell might be unhappy that I’m talking with you.”
   “Blackwell loves Rez in his own way,” she said. “It is concern that he feels. But he does not understand that our union has already taken place. Our ‘marriage’ will be gradual, ongoing. We wish simply to grow together. When Blackwell and the others can see that our union is best for both of us, all will be well. And you can do that for us, Mr. Laney.”
   “I can?”
   “Yamazaki has explained what you are attempting with the data from the Lo/Rez fan archives,” Kuwayama said. “But that data says nothing, or very little, about Rei. We propose the addition of a third level of information: we will add Rei to the mix, and the pattern that emerges will be a portrait of their union.”
   But you’re just information yourself, Laney thought, looking at her. Lots of it, running through God knows how many machines. But the dark eyes looked back at him, filled with something for all the world like hope. “Will you do it, Mr. Laney? Will you help us?”
   “Look,” Laney said, “I only work here. I’ll do it if Yamazaki tells me to. If he takes the responsibility. But I want you to tell me something, okay?”
   “What is it that you wish to know?” asked Kuwayama.
   “What is all this about?” The question surprised Laney, who hadn’t quite known what it was he was about to ask.
   Kuwayama’s mild eyes regarded him through the rimless lenses. “It is about futurity, Mr. Laney.”
   “Futurity?”
   “Do you know that our word for ‘nature’ is of quite recent coinage? It is scarcely a hundred years old. We have never developed a sinister view of technology, Mr. Laney. It is an aspect of the natural, of oneness. Through our efforts, oneness perfects itself” Kuwayama smiled. “And popular culture,” he said, “is the testbed of our futurity.”

   Arleigh made a better espresso than Shannon. Laney, squatting in the back of the green van, on popping shreds of bubble-pack, watched Yamazaki over the rim of a foam cup with a fresh double shot. “What do you think you’re doing, Yamazaki? You want us both to wind up wearing smaller shoes, or what? Blackwell likes to nail people’s hands to tables, and you’re making deals with the idoru and her boss?” Laney had insisted that they climb in back here for privacy. Yamazaki squatted opposite him, blinking. “I am not the one making deals,” Yamazaki said. “Rez and Rei Toei are in almost constant contact now, and recent improvements allow her new degrees of freedom. Rez let her into the data, all that you first tried to access. He did this without informing Blackwell.” He shrugged. “Now she accesses the fan data as well. And what they propose may well allow us to bring this to a conclusion. Blackwell is more than ever convinced there is some conspiracy. The attack in the nightclub…”
   “Which was about?”
   “I do not know. An attempted kidnapping? They wished to harm Rez? To abduct the idoru’s peripheral? It was handled with amazing clumsiness, but Blackwell says that is the earmark of the Kombinat… Is that the word, ‘earmark’?”
   “I don’t know,” Laney said.
   “ ‘Hallmark’?”
   “You don’t think Blackwell’s going to cut our toes off, if we do this?”
   “No. We are employed by a Lo/Rez shell corporation—”
   “Paragon-Asia?”
   “—but Blackwell is employed by the Lo/Rez Partnership. If Rez tells us to do something, we must do it,”
   “Even if Blackwell thinks it endangers Rez’s security?”
   Yamazaki shrugged. Past his shoulder, through the van’s rear window, Laney could see Shannon trundling the gray module they’d unloaded from the rear of Kuwayama’s Land-Rover. It was twice the size of the black ones that Arleigh used.
   He watched Shannon push it past the orange barricades.

36. Maryalice

   Not yelling, please,” said the one who held her, and then he took his hand away from her mouth.
   “Where is it?” Eddie’s pale eyes.
   “There,” Chia said, pointing. She could see the ragged edge of blue and yellow plastic sticking up out of her open bag. Then she saw that Maryalice was asleep on the pink bed, curled up with her high-heeled shoes still on, clutching a pillow to her face. The top of the little fridge was covered with empty, miniature bottles.
   Eddie took a black-and-gold pen from his coat pocket and went to the bag. He bent over it and used his pen as a probe, moving the plastic aside so he could see. “It’s here,” he said.
   “Is there?” The other hand was still holding Chia’s shoulder down, where she sat on the carpet.
   “This is it,” Eddie said.
   “Stay putting.” The hand left her shoulder and the man, who must’ve been kneeling behind her, got up and joined Eddie, peering into Chia’s bag. He was taller, and wore a tan suit and fancy Western boots. Big bones in his face, his hair a lighter blond than Eddie’s, a reddish, crescent-shaped birthmark high on his right cheekbone. “How you are being sure?”
   “Jesus, Yevgeni…”
   The man in the tan suit straightened up, looked at Maryalice, bent to pull the pillow away from her face. “How is your woman sleeping on bed in this room, Eddie?”
   Eddie saw that it was Maryalice. “Fuck,” he said.
   “You are telling us girl and your woman, is ‘incidental.’ You are telling us they meet on plane, is only accident. Is accidentyour woman is here? We do not likeaccident.”
   Eddie looked from Maryalice to the man—he must be Russian– to Chia. “What the fuckis this bitch doing here?” Like it had to be Chia’s fault.
   “She found us,” Chia said. “She said she knew somebody at the cab company.”
   “No,” said the Russian, “weknow somebody at cab company. Is too much incident.”
   “We’ve got it, okay?” Eddie said. ‘Why do you want to complicate things?“
   The Russian rubbed his cheek, as though the birthmark might come off on his hand. “Please consider,” he said. “We are giving you isotope. You want to know is isotope, you can test. You are giving us this.” He poked the sharp toe of his cowboy boot into the side of Chia’s bag. “How are we sure?”
   “Yevgeni,” Eddie said, very calmly, “you must know that deals like this require a certain basis of trust.”
   The Russian considered that. “No,” he said, “basis not good. Our people trace this girl to big rocker band. What is she working for, Eddie? Tonight we send people to talk to them, they fall on us like fucking wolfs. One man I am still losing.”
   “I don’t work for Lo/Rez!” Chia said. “I’m just in the club! Maryalice put that thing in my bag when I was asleep on the plane!”
   Masahiko groaned, sighed, and seemed to go back under. Eddie still had the stungun in his hand. “You ready for another jolt?” he asked Masahiko, super-tense and angry.
   “Eddie,” Maryalice said from the bed, “you ungrateful piece of shit…” Sitting up on the edge of the bed with her cigarette lighter held in both hands, pointing it straight at Eddie.
   Eddie stiffened. You could see something run through him, freezing him there.
   “Some basis,” said the Russian.
   “Jesus, Maryalice,” Eddie said. “Whered you get that? You got any idea how illegal that is, here?”
   “Off a Russian boy,” she said. “Exit-holes the size of grapefruit…” Maryalice didn’t sound drunk, exactly, but something about the look in her reddened eyes told Chia she was. Some very scary kind of drunk. ”You think you can just use people up, Eddie? Use ’em up and throw ’em away?” She used the toe of one shoe to get the other off, then used her toe to get the first shoe off. She stood up in her stocking feet, swaying just a little bit, but the gun-shaped lighter stayed straight out from her shoulders, the way cops did it on television.
   Eddie still had the stungun in his hand. “Make him throw that black thing away, Maryalice!” Chia urged.
   “Drop it,” Maryalice said, and it seemed to give her pleasure to say it, something she’d been hearing people say on shows all her life, and now she was getting to say it herself, and mean it. Eddie dropped it. “Now kick it away.”
   That’s the other half of the line, Chia thought.
   The stungun wound up a few feet from Chia’s knee, beside her goggles, which were upside down on the carpet, still cabled to her Sandbenders. She could see the twin flat rectangles on the opaque lens-faces, simple video units; if Zona went to Chia’s systems software and activated those, now, she’d get a bug’s-eye view of Maryalice’s stocking feet, Eddie’s shoes, the Russian’s cowboy boots, and maybe the side of Masahiko’s head.
   “Ungrateful,” Maryalice said. “Ungrateful shit. Get in that bathroom.” She came around so the lighter was pointing at Eddie and the Russian, but with the open bathroom door behind them.
   “I know you’re upset—”
   “Shit. Shit goes in the toilet, Eddie Get in the bathroom.”
   Eddie took a step backward, his palms up in what he probably thought looked like an appeal to reasonableness and understanding. The Russian took a step back too.
   “Seven fucking years,” Maryalice said. “Seven. You weren’t shit when I met you. God. You and that uppity-mobile talk. You make me sick. Who paid the fucking rent? Who bought the meals? Who bought you your fucking clothes, you vain piece of shit? You and your uppity-mobile and your image and you gotta have a smallerfucking phone than the next guy because I’m telling you, honey, you sure as fuckdon’t have a bigger dick!” Maryalice’s hands were shaking now, but really just enough to make the lighter look even more dangerous.
   “Maryalice,” Eddie said, “you know I know everything you’ve done for me, everything you’ve contributed to my career. It doesn’t leave my mind for a minute, baby, believe me, it never does, and all of this is a misunderstanding, baby, just a rough patch on the highway of life, and if you will only just put down that fucking gun and have a nice drink like a civilized person—”
   “Shut the fuck up!” Maryalice screamed, at the top of her lungs, the words all run together.
   Eddie’s mouth snapped shut like a puppet’s.
   “Seven fucking years,” Maryalice said, making it sound like some children’s charm, “seven fucking years and two of ’em here, Eddie, two of ’em here, and flying back and fucking forth for you, Eddie, and coming back. And it’s always light, here…” Tears came, streaking Maryalice’s makeup. “Everywhere. Couldn’t sleep for all the light, like a fog over the city… Get in the bathroom.” Maryalice taking a step forward, Eddie and the Russian taking one back.
   Chia reached over and picked up the stungun, she wasn’t sure why. It had a pair of blunt chrome fangs on one end, a red, ridged stud on one edge. She was surprised at how little it weighed. She remembered the ones the boys at her school had made from those disposable flash-cameras.
   “And it always finds me, that light,” Maryalice said. “Always. No matter what I drink, what I take on top of that, It finds me and it wakes me up. It’s like powder, blows in under the door. Nothing to do about it. Gets in your eyes. And all that brightness, falling…”
   Eddie was half back through the doorway now, the Russian behind him, actually in the bathroom, and Chia didn’t like that because she couldn’t see the Russian’s hands. She heard the ambient birdsong start as the bathroom sensed the Russian, “And you put me there, Eddie. That Shinjuku. You put me where that light could get me, and I could never get away.”
   And then Maryalice pulled the trigger.
   Eddie screamed, a weird shrill sound bouncing off the black and white tiles. That must’ve covered the click of the lighter, which hadn’t even produced a flame.
   Maryalice didn’t panic.
   She held her aim and calmly pulled the trigger again.
   She got a light, that time, but Eddie, with a howl of rage, swatted the lighter aside, grabbed Maryalice by the throat, and started pounding her in the face with his fist, the howl resolving into “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” in sync with each blow.
   And that was when Chia, without really thinking about it, came up from where she’d been sitting for so long that, she found, her legs were asleep, and didn’t work, so that she had to turn her lunge into a roll, and roll again, before she could jam the chrome tips of the stun-gun against Eddie’s ankle and push the red stud.
   She wasn’t sure it would work on an ankle, or through his sock. But it did. Maybe because Eddie wore those really thin socks.
   But it got Maryalice, too, so that they seemed to jerk together, toppling into each other’s arms.
   And the dark blur that flew past Chia then was Masahiko, who pulled the door shut on the Russian, grabbed the knob with both hands and jumped up, jamming one paper-slippered foot against the wall, the other against the door, and hung there. “Run,” he said, his arms and legs straining. Then his hands slipped off the round chrome knob and he landed on his ass.
   Chia saw the knob start to turn.
   She put the fangs of the stungun against the doorknob and pushed the stud. And kept pushing it.

37. Work Experience

   Laney sat in the van’s front passenger seat again, the ’phones on his lap, waiting for Arleigh to connect Kuwayama’s gray module, He looked through the windshield at the concrete wall. His side didn’t hurt quite as much now, but the meeting with Kuwayama and the idoru, and then his huddle in the van with Yamazaki, had left him more confused than ever. If Rez and Rei Toei were making decisions in tandem, and if Yamazaki had decided to go along with them, where did that leave him? He couldn’t see that Blackwell was going to wake up to find some innate wonderfulness in the idea of Rez and Rei together. As far as Blackwell was concerned, Rez was still just trying to marry a software agent—whatever that might turn out to mean.
   But Laney knew now that the idoru was more complex, more powerful, than any Hollywood synthespian. Particularly if Kuwayama were telling the truth about the videos being her “dreams.” All he knew about artificial intelligence came from work he’d done on a Slitscan episode documenting the unhappy personal life of one of the field’s leading researchers, but he knew that true AI was assumed never to have been achieved, and that current attempts to achieve it were supposed to be in directions quite opposite the creation of software that was good at acting like beautiful young women.
   If there were going to be genuine AI, the argument ran, it was most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with pretending to be human. Laney remembered screening a lecture in which the Slitscan episode’s subject had suggested that AI might be created accidentally, and that people might not initially recognize it for what it was.
   Arleigh opened the door on the driver’s side and got in. “Sorry this is taking so long,” she said.
   “You weren’t expecting it,” Laney said.
   “It isn’t the software, it’s an optical valve. A cable-tip. They use a different gauge, one the French use.” She curled her hands around the top of the wheel and rested her chin on them. “So we’re dealing with these huge volumes of information, no problem, but we don’t have the right cable to pour it through.”
   “Can you fix it?”
   “Shannon’s got one in his room, Probably on a porno outfit, but he won’t admit it.” She looked at him sideways. “Shannon’s got a friend on the security team. His friend says that Blackwell ‘questioned’ one of the men who tried to grab Rez tonight.”
   “That’s who they were after? Rez?”
   “Seems like it. They’re Kombinat, and they claim Rez has hijacked something of theirs.”
   “Hijacked what?”
   “He didn’t know.” She closed her eyes.
   “What do you think happened to him, the one Blackwell questioned?”
   “I don’t know,” She opened her eyes, straightened up. “But somehow I don’t think we’ll find out.”
   “Can he do that? Torture people? Kill them?”
   She looked at Laney. “Well,” she said, finally, “he does have a certain advantage, making us think he might. It’s an established fact that he did that in his previous line of work. You know what scares me most about Blackwell?”
   “What?”
   “Sometimes I find myself getting used to him.”
   Shannon rapped on the door beside her. Held up a length of cable.
   “Ready when you are,” she said to Laney, opening the door and sliding from behind the wheel.
   Laney looked through the tinted windshield at the concrete wall and remembered policing the steps outside the Municipal Court in Gainesville with Shaquille and Kenny, two others from the orphanage. Shaquille had gone on to the drug-testing program with Laney, but Kenny had been transferred to another facility, near Denver. Laney had no idea what had become of either of them, but it had been Shaquille who’d pointed out to Laney that when the injection had the real stuff in it, your mouth filled with a taste like corroded metal, aluminum or something. Pl-ceeb–o, Shaquille had said, don’t taste. And it was true. You could tell right away.
   The three of them had had Work Experience there, five or six times, picking up the offerings people left before their day in court. These were considered to be a health hazard, and were usually carefully hidden, and you often found them by the smell, or the buzzing of flies. Parts of chickens, usually, tied up with colored yarn. What Shaquille said was the head of a goat, once. Shaquille said the people who left these things were drug dealers, and they did it because it was their religion. Laney and the others wore pale green latex gloves with orange Kevlar thimbles on the tips that gave you heat rash. They put the offerings in a white snap-top bucket with peeling Biohazard stickers. Shaquille had claimed to know the names of some of the gods these things were offered up to, but Laney hadnt been fooled. The names Shaquille made up, like O’Gunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously just that, and even Shaquille, dropping a white ball of chicken feathers into the bucket, had said an extra lawyer or two was probably a better investment. “But they do it while they waitin’. Hedge they bet.” Laney had actually preferred this to Work Experiences at fast-food franchises, even though it meant they got body-searched for drugs when they got back.
   He’d told Yamazaki and Blackwell about knowing that Alison Shires was going to try to commit suicide, and now they must think he could see the future. But he knew he couldn’t. That would be like those chicken parts the dealers hid around the courthouse steps changing what was going to happen. What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney knew he couldn’t predict it, and something about the experience of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seemed to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. Maybe something as small as Alison Shires buying the blades for a box-cutter. But if an earthquake had come, that night, and pitched her apartment down into Fountain Avenue… Or if she’d lost the pack of blades… But if she’d used credit to buy that Wednesday Night Special, which she couldn’t do because it was illegal, and required cash, then it would’ve been obvious to anybody what she might be on the verge of doing.
   Arleigh opened the passenger door. “You okay?”
   “Sure,” Laney said, picking up the eyephones.
   “Sure?”
   “Let’s do it.” He looked at the ’phones.
   “It’s up to you.” She touched his arm, “We’ll get you a doctor, after, okay?”
   “Thanks,” Laney said, and put the ’phones on, the taste flooding his mouth—
   The Lo/Rez data, translucent and intricately interpenetrated by the archives of the band’s fan-base, was crawling with new textures, maps that resolved, when he focused on them, into—
   Shaquille, in his federal-issue sweats, showing Laney the goat’s head. It had been skinned, and nails had been driven into it, and Shaquille had pried open the jaw to show where the missing tongue had been replaced with a blood-soaked piece of brown paper with writing on it, That would be the name of the prosecutor, Shaquille had explained.
   Laney shut his eyes, but the image remained.
   He opened them on the idoru, her features rimmed with fur. She was looking at him. She wore some kind of embroidered, fur-lined hat, with earflaps, and snow was swirling around her, but then she flattened, dwindling into the texture-maps that ran down through the reef of data, and he let himself go, go with that, and he felt himself pass through the core of it, the very center, and out the other side.
   “Wait—” he said, and there seemed to be a lag before he heard his own voice.
   “Perspective,” the idoru said. “Yamazaki’s parallax.” Something seemed to turn him around, so that he looked directly at the data, but from some new angle, and from a great distance. And all around it, there was… nothing at all.
   But through the data, like some infinitely more complex version of Arleigh’s Realtree, ran two vaguely parallel armatures. Rez and the idoru. They were sculpted in duration, Rez’s beginning, at the far end of it all, as something very minor, the first hints of his career. And growing, as it progressed, to something braided, multistranded… But then it began to get smaller again, Laney saw, the strands loosening… And that would be the point, he thought, where the singer began to become the thing that Kathy hated, the one who took up celebrity space just because he was a celebrity, because he was of a certain order of magnitude…
   The idoru’s data began somewhere after that, and it began as something smoothly formed, deliberate, but lacking complexity. But at the points where it had swerved closest to Rez’s data, he saw that it had begun to acquire a sort of complexity. Or randomness, he thought. The human thing. That’s how she learns.
   And both these armatures, these sculptures in time, were nodal, and grew more so toward the point, the present, where they intertwined…
   He stood beside the idoru on the beach he’d seen recorded on the binoculars in the bedroom of the guesthouse in Ireland. Brownish-green sea flecked with whitecaps, stiff wind catching at the earflaps of her hat. He couldn’t feel that wind, but he could hear it, so loud now that he had trouble hearing her over it. “Can you see them?” she shouted.
   “See what?”
   “The faces in the clouds! The nodal points! I can see nothing! You must indicate them to me!”
   And she was gone, the sea with her, Laney staring into the data again, where the digitized histories of Rez and Rei Toei mingled, on the verge of something else. If he had tried, in Los Angeles, would the box-cutter blade have emerged from Alison Shires’ nodal point?
   He tried.
   He was looking out across a fuzzy, indistinct white plain. Not snow. To where a pair of vast and very ornate brown-on-brown Western boots swung past against a cliff-like backdrop of violent pink. Then the image was gone, replaced by the rotating form of a. three-dimensional object, though Laney had no idea what it was supposed to be. With no clues as to scale, it looked vaguely like a Los Angeles bus with the wheels removed.
   “Suite 17,” the idoru said. “Hotel Di.”
   “Die?” Bus vanished, apparently taking boots with it.
   “What is a ‘love hotel’?”
   “What?”
   “Love. Hotel.”
   “Where people go to make love—I think.”
   “What is ‘Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C-slash-7A’?”
   “I don’t know,” Laney said.
   “But you have just shown it to me! It isour union, our intersection, that from which the rest must unfold!”
   “Wait,” Laney said, “wait, you’ve got anotherone here; they sort of overlap—” The trying made his side hurt, but there were hills in the distance, twisted trees, the low roofline of a wooden house—
   But the idoru was gone, and the house, its fabric eaten from within, was shimmering, folding. And then a glimpse of something towering, mismatched windows and a twisting, moire sky.
   Then Arleigh pulled the ’phones off. “Stop screaming,” she said. Yamazaki was beside her. “Stop it, Laney.”
   He took a long, shuddering breath, braced his palms against the padded cowling of the dash, and closed his eyes. He felt Arleigh’s hand against his neck.
   “We have to go there,” he said.
   “Go where?”
   “Suite 17. We’ll be late, for the wedding…”

38. Star

   When the stungun quit making that zapping sound, Chia dropped it. The doorknob wasn’t turning. No sound from the bathroom but the faint recorded cries of tropical birds. She whipped around. Masahiko was trying to get his computer into the plaid carrier-bag. She dived for her Sandbenders, grabbed it up, still trailing her goggles, and turned to the pink bed. Her bag was beside it on the floor, with the blue and yellow SeaTac plastic showing. She pulled that out, the thing still in it, and tossed it on the bed. She bent to shove her Sandbenders into her bag, but glanced back at the bathroom door when she thought she heard something.
   The knob was turning again.
   The Russian opened the door. When he let go of the knob, she saw that his hand was inside something that looked like a Day-Glo pink hand-puppet. One of the sex toys from the black cabinet. He was using it as insulation. He peeled it off his fingers and tossed it back over his shoulder. The bird sounds faded as he stepped out.
   Masahiko, who’d been trying to get one of his feet into one of his black shoes, was looking at the Russian too. He still had a paper slipper on the other foot.
   “You are going?” the Russian said.
   “It’s on the bed,” Chia said. “We didn’t have anything to dowith it.”
   The Russian noticed the stungun on the carpet, beside the pointed toe of his boot. He raised the boot and brought his heel down. Chia heard the plastic case crack. “Artemi, my friend of Novokuznetskaya, is doing himself great indignity with this.” He prodded the fragments of the stungun with his toe. “Is wearing very tight jeans, Artemi, leather, is fashion. Putting in front pocket, trigger is pressing accident. Artemi is shocking his manhood.” The Russian showed Chia his large, uneven teeth. “Still we are laughing, yes?”
   “Please,” Chia said. “We just want to go.”
   The Russian stepped past Eddie and Maryalice, who lay tangled on the carpet. “You are accident like Artemi to his manhood, yes? You are only happening to this owner of fine nightclub.” He indicated the unconscious Eddie. “Who is smuggler and other things, very complicated, but you, you are only accident?”
   “That’s right,” Chia said.
   “You are of Lo/Rez.” It sounded like Lor-ess. He stepped closer to Chia and looked down into the bag. “You are knowing what this is.”
   “No,” Chia lied. “I’m not.”
   The Russian looked at her. “We are not liking accident, ever. Not allowingaccident.” His hands came up, then, and she saw that the back of the third joint of each of his fingers was pink with those dots, each one the size of the end of a pencil eraser. She’d seen those at her last school and knew they meant a laser had recently been used to remove a tattoo.
   She looked up at his face. He looked like someone who was about to do something that he might not want to do, but that he knew he had to.
   But then she saw his eyes slide past her, narrowing, and she turned in time to see the door to the corridor swing inward. A man wider than the doorway seemed to flow into the room. There was a big X of flesh-colored tape across one side of his face, and he was wearing a coat the color of dull metal. Chia saw one huge, scarred hand slip into his coat; the other held something black that ended in a mag-strip tab.
   “Yob tvoyu mat,” said the Russian, soft syllables of surprise.
   The stranger’s hand emerged, holding something that looked to Chia like a very large pair of chrome-plated scissors, but then unfolded, with a series of small sharp clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glittering, skeletal axe, its leading edge hawk-like and lethal, the head behind it tapering like an icepick.
   “My mother?” said the stranger, who sounded somehow delighted. “Did you say my mother?” His face was shiny with scar tissue. More scars crisscrossed his shaven, stubbled skull.
   “Ah, no,” the Russian said, lifting his hands so that the palms showed. “Figuring of speech, only.”
   Another man stepped in, around the man with the axe, and this one had dark hair and wore a loose black suit. The headband of a monocle-rig crossed his forehead, the unit covering his right eye. The eye she could see was wide and bright and green, but still it took a second before she recognized him.
   Then she had to sit down on the pink bed.
   “Where is it?” this man who looked like Rez asked. (Except he looked thicker, somehow, his cheeks unhollowed.)
   Neither the Russian nor the man with the axe answered. The man with the axe closed the door behind him with his heel.
   The green eye and the video-monocle looked at Chia. “Do you know where it is?”
   “What?”
   “The biomech primer module, or whatever it is you call it…” He paused, touching the phone in his right ear, listening. “Excuse me: ‘Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C=slash-7A.’ I love you.”
   Chia stared.
   “Rei Toei,” he explained, touching the headband, and she knew that it had to be him.
   “It’s here. In this bag.”
   He reached into the blue and yellow plastic and drew the thing out, turning it over in his hands. “This? This is our future, the medium of our marriage?”
   “Excuse, please,” the Russian said, “but you must know this is belonging to me.” He sounded genuinely sorry.
   Rez looked up, the nanotech unit held casually in his hands. “It’s yours?” Rez tilted his head, like a bird, curious. “Where did you get it?”
   The Russian coughed. “An exchange. This gentleman on floor.”
   Rez saw Eddie and Maryalice. “Are they dead?”
   “Volted, yes? Being most-time nonlethal. Your girl on bed.”
   Rez looked at Chia. “Who are you?”
   “Chia Pet McKenzie,” she said automatically. “I’m from Seattle. I’m… I’m in your fan club.” She felt her face burning.
   The brow above the green eye went up. He seemed to be listening to something. “Oh,” he said, and paused. “She did? Really? That’s wonderful.” He smiled at Chia. “Rei says you’ve been totally central to everything, and that we have a great deal to thank you for.”
   Chia swallowed. “She does?”
   But Rez had turned to the Russian. “We have to have this.” He raised the nanotech unit. “We’ll negotiate now. Name your price.”
   “Rozzer,” the man at the door said, “you can’t dothat. This bastard’s Kombinat.”
   Chia saw the green eye close, as if Rez were making a conscious effort to calm himself. When it opened, he said: “But they’re the government, aren’t they, Blackwell? We’ve negotiatedwith governments before.”
   “It’s for the legals,” the scarred man said, but now there was an edge of worry in his voice.
   The Russian seemed to hear it too. He slowly lowered his hands. “What were you planning to dowith this?” Rez asked him. The Russian looked down at the thing in Rez’s hands, as if considering, then raised his eyes. A muscle was jumping, in his cheek. He seemed to come to a decision. “We are developing ambitious public works project,” he said.
   “Oh Jesus,” Maryalice said from the carpet, so hoarsely that at first Chia couldn’t identify the source. “They must’ve putsomething in that. They did. I swear to Godthey did.” And then she threw up.

39. Trans

   Yamazaki lost his balance as the van shot up the narrow ramp, out of the hotel. Laney, holding Arleigh’s phone to the dashboard map, toning the number of the Hotel Di, heard him crash down on the shredded bubble-pack. The display bleeped as Laney completed the number; grid-segments clicked across the screen. “You okay, Yamazaki?”
   “Thank you,” Yamazaki said. “Yes.” Getting to his knees again, he craned around the headrest of Laney’s seat. “You have located the hotel?”
   “Expressway,” Arleigh said, glancing at the display, as they swung right, up an entrance ramp. “Hit speed-dial three. Thanks. Gimme.” She took the phone. “McCrae. Yeah. Priority? Fuckyou, Alex. Ring me through to him.” She listened. “Di? Like D, I? Shit. Thanks.” She clicked off.
   “What is it?” Laney asked, as they swung onto the expressway, the giant bland brow of an enormous articulated freight-hauler pulling up behind and then past them, quilted stainless steel flashing in Laney’s peripheral vision. The van rocked with the big truck’s passage.
   “I tried to get Rez. Alex says he left the hotel, with Blackwell. Headed the same place we are.”
   “When?”
   “Just about the time you were having your screaming fit, when you had the ’phones on,’ ” Arleigh said. She looked grim. “Sorry,” she said.
   Laney had had to argue with her for fifteen minutes, back there, before she’d agreed to this. She’d kept saying she wanted him to see a doctor. She’d said that she was a technician, not a researcher, not security, and that her first responsibility was to stay with the data, the modules, because anyone who got those got almost the entire Lo/Rez Partnership business plan, plus the books, plus whatever Kuwayama had entrusted them with in the gray module. She’d only given in after Yamazaki had sworn to take full responsibility for everything, and after Shannon and the man with the ponytail had promised not to leave the modules. Not even, Arleigh said, to piss. “Go against the wall, God damn it,” she’d said, “and get half a dozen of Blackwell’s boys down here to keep you company.”
   “He knows,” Laney said. “She told him it’s there.”
   “What is there, Laney-san?” asked Yamazaki, around the headrest.
   “I don’t know. Whatever it is, they think it’ll facilitate their marriage.”
   “Do youthink so?” Arleigh asked, passing a string of bright little cars.
   “I guess it must be capable of it,” Laney said, as something under her seat began to clang, loudly and insistently. “But I don’t think that means it’ll necessarily happen. What the hell is that?”
   “I’m exceeding the speed limit,” she said. “Every vehicle in Japan is legally required to be equipped with one of these devices. You speed, it dings.”
   Laney turned to Yamazaki. “Is that true?”
   “Of course,” Yamazaki said, over the steady clanging.
   “And people don’t just disconnect them?”
   “No,” Yamazaki said, looking puzzled. “Why would they?”
   Arleigh’s phone rang. “McCrae. Willy?” Silence as she listened.
   Then Laney felt the van sway slightly. It slowed until the clanging suddenly stopped. She lowered the phone.
   “What is it?” Laney asked.
   “Willy Jude,” she said. “He… He was just watching one of the clubbing channels. They said Rez is dead. They said he was dead. In a love hotel.”

40. The Business

   When nobody did anything to help Maryalice, Chia got up from the bed, squeezed past the Russian and into the bathroom, triggering the ambient bird track. The black cabinet was open, its light on, and there were Day-Glo penis-things scattered across the black and white tile floor. She took a black towel and a black washcloth from a heated chrome rack, wet the washcloth at the black and chrome basin, and went back to Maryalice. She folded the towel, put it down over the vomit on the white carpet, and handed Maryalice the washcloth.
   Nobody said anything, or tried to stop her. Masahiko had sat back down on the carpet, with his computer between his feet. The scarred man, who seemed to take up as much space as anything in the room, had lowered his axe. He held it down, along a thigh wider than Chia’s hips, with the spike jutting from beside his knee.
   Maryalice, who’d managed to sit up now, wiped her mouth with the cloth, taking most of her lipstick with it. When Chia straightened up, a whiff of the Russian’s cologne made her stomach heave.
   “You’re a developer, you say?” Rez still held the nanotech unit.
   “You are asking many questions,” the Russian said. Eddie groaned, then, and the Russian kicked him. “Basis,” the Russian said.
   “A public works project?” Rez raised his eyebrow. “A water filtration plant, something like that?”
   The Russian kept his eye on the big man’s axe. “In Tallin,” he said, “we soon are building exclusive mega-mall, affluent gated suburbs, plus world-class pharmaceutical manufakura. We are unfairly denied most advanced means of production, but we are desiring one hundred percent modern operation.”
   “Rez,” the man with the axe said, “give it up. This goon and his mates need that thing to build themselves an Estonian drug factory. Time I took you back to the hotel.”
   “But wouldn’t they be more interested in… Tokyo real estate?”
   The big man’s eyes bulged, the scars on his forehead reddening. One of the upper arms of the micropore X had come loose, revealing a deep scratch. “What bullshit is that? You don’t haveany real estate here!”
   “Famous Aspect,” Rez said. “Rei’s management company. They invest for her.”
   “You are discussing nanotech exchanged for Tokyo real estate?” The Russian was looking at Rez.
   “Exactly,” Rez said.
   “What kindreal estate?”
   “Undeveloped landfill in the Bay. An island. One of two. Off one of the old ‘Toxic Necklace’ sites, but that’s been cleaned up since the quake.”
   “Wait a minute,” Maryalice said, from the floor. “I know you. You were in that band, the one with the skinny Chinese, the guitar player, wore the hats. I know you. You were huge.”
   Rez stared at her.
   “I think is not good, here to discuss the business,” the Russian said, rubbing his birthmark. “But I am Starkov, Yevgeni.” He extended his hand, and Chia noticed the laser-scars again. Rez shook it.
   Chia thought she heard the big man groan.
   “I used to watch him in Dayton,” Maryalice said, as if that proved something.
   The big man took a small phone from his pocket with his free hand, squinted at the call-display, and put it to his left ear. Which Chia saw was missing. He listened. “Ta,” he said, and lowered the phone. He moved to the window, the one Chia had found behind the wallscreen, and stood looking out. “Better have a look at this, Rozzer,” he said.
   Rez joined him. She saw Rez touch the monocle. “What are they doing, Keithy? What is it?”
   “It’s your funeral,” the big man said.