Idoru. Part 47

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 Mary-alice's stocking feet, Eddie's shoes, the Russian's cowboy boots, and maybe the side of Masahiko's head.

"Ungrateful," Maryalice said. "Ungrateful s.h.i.+t. 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-"

"s.h.i.+t. s.h.i.+t 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. 0

9.

243.

"Seven flicking years," Maryalice said. "Seven. You weren't s.h.i.+t when I met you. G.o.d. You and that uppity-mobile talk. You make me sick. Who paid the f.u.c.king rent? Who bought the meals? Who bought you your f.u.c.king clothes, you vain piece of s.h.i.+t? You and your uppity-mobile and your image and you gotta have a smaller f.u.c.king phone than the next guy because I'm telling you, honey, you sure as f.u.c.k don't have a bigger d.i.c.k!" 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 flicking gun and have a nice drink like a civilized person-"

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!" Maryalice screamed, at the top of her lungs, the words all run together.

Eddie's mouth snapped shut like a puppet's.

"Seven flicking years," Maryalice said, making it sound like some children's charm, "seven f.u.c.king years and two of 'em here, Eddie, two of 'em here, and flying back and f.u.c.king 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 .

244 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 s.h.i.+njuku. 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 "b.i.t.c.h! b.i.t.c.h! b.i.t.c.h!" 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 k.n.o.b 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 k.n.o.b and he landed on his a.s.s.

Chia saw the k.n.o.b start to turn.

She put the fangs of the stungun against the doork.n.o.b and pushed the stud. And kept pus.h.i.+ng it.

37.Work E~cperience Laney sat in the van's front pa.s.senger seat again, the 'phones on his lap, waiting for Arleigh to connect Kuwayama's gray module, He looked through the winds.h.i.+eld 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 docLimenting the unhappy personal life of one of the field's leading researchers, but he knew that true Al was a.s.sumed 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 Al, 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 Al 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 p.o.r.no 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."

248 Shannon rapped on the door beside her. Held up a length of cable.