Idoru. Part 44

"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 pa.s.senger 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. Dimensionabty. 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 h.e.l.l 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. Inst.i.tutional 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 220 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 pa.s.sed. He thought of CD-RUMs he'd explored in the orphanage: haunted castles, monstrously infested s.p.a.cecraft 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, realty, 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."

a -227.

"But then it. . . rounded out, didn't it? It became so much better. Because one of the artisans who rea.s.sembled 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 bra.s.s. 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 Ar-leigh'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 4 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 228 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 a.s.sembled 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 quant.i.ty of data acc.u.mulated 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 p.i.s.sed 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, hut Zona was fierce enough, verbally, that they'd only do it behind 231.

her back. Chia had never known what to make ofiq 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 p.i.s.sed off.

The idoru was talking, though, telling Chia the old Venetian meaning of the word casino, not some giant sort of malt 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, be-cause 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."