Idoru

by William Gibson

  And then he was walking toward Arleigh, smiling, and he saw that she was smiling back.

  44. La Purissima

  Chia was on the bed, watching television. It made her feel more normal. It was like a drug, that way. She remembered how much television her mother had watched, after her father had left.

  But this was Japanese television, where girls who could have been Mitsuko, only a little younger, wearing sailor-suit dresses, were spinning huge wooden tops at a long table. They could really spin them, too; keep them up forever. It was a contest. The console could translate, but it was even more relaxing not to know what they were saying. The most relaxing parts of all were the close-ups of the tops spinning.

  She'd used the translation to check out the NHK coverage of the death hoax on the net and the candlelight vigil at the Hotel Di.

  She'd seen a very satisfyingly pudgy Hiromi Ogama denying she knew who had nuked her chapter's site and then issued the call to mourning from its ruins. It had not been a member of the club, Hiromi had stressed, either locally or internationally. Chia knew Hiromi was lying, because it had to have been Zona, but the Lo/Rez people would be telling her what to say. Arleigh had told Chia the whole thing had been launched out of a disused website that belonged to an aerospace company in Arizona. Which meant that Zona had blown her country, because now she wouldn't be able to go back there. (Nice as Arleigh seemed to be, Chia hadn't told her anything about Zona.)

  And she'd seen the helicopter shots of the vigil, and of the baffled tactical squads facing an estimated twenty-five hundred teary-eyed girls. The injury count was low, everything fairly minor except for one girl who'd slid down a freeway embankment and broken both her ankles. The real problem had been getting everyone out of there, because a lot of them had arrived five or six to a cab, and had no way of getting home. Some had taken the family car and then abandoned it in their hurry to reach the vigil, and that had created another kind of mess. There had been a few dozen arrests, mostly for trespassing.

  And she'd seen the message Rez had recorded, assuring people he was alive and well, and regretting the whole thing, which of course he'd had nothing to do with. He wasn't wearing the monocle-rig, for this, but he had on the same black suit and t-shirt. He looked thinner, though; someone had tweaked it. He'd played it light, at first, grinning, saying he'd never been to the Hotel Di and in fact had never visited a love hotel, but now maybe he should. Then he'd turned serious and said how sorry he was that people had been inconvenienced and even hurt by someone's irresponsible prank. And he'd capped it, smiling, by saying that the whole thing had been quite uniquely moving for him, because how often do you get to watch your own funeral?

  And she'd seen the people who owned and managed the Hotel Di, expressing their regret. They had no idea, they said, how any of this had happened. She got the feeling that expressing regret was a big thing here, but the owners of the Di had also managed to explain how there was no on-site staff at their hotel, in the interest of the guests' greater privacy. Arleigh, watching this, had said that that was the commercial, and that she bet the place was going to be booked solid for the next two months. It was famous, now.

  All in all, the coverage seemed to treat the whole thing as some kind of silly-season item that might have had serious repercussions if the police hadn't acted as calmly and as skillfully as they eventually had, bringing in electric buses from the suburbs to ferry the girls to collection-points around the city.

  Arleigh was from San Francisco and she worked for Lo/Rez and knew Rez personally, and she was the one who'd driven the van out through the crowd. And then she'd lost a police helicopter by doing something completely crazy on that expressway, a kind of u-turn right over the concrete bumper-thing down the middle.

  She'd brought Chia and Masahiko to this hotel, and put them in these adjoining rooms with weirdly angled corners, where they each had a private bath. She'd asked them both to please stay there, and not to port or use the phone without telling her, except for room service, and then she'd gone out.

  Chia had had a shower right away. It was the best shower she'd ever had, and she felt like she never wanted to wear those clothes again as long as she lived. She didn't even want to have to look at them. She found a plastic bag you were supposed to put your clothes in to be laundered, and she put them in that and put it in the wastebasket in the bathroom. Then she'd put on all clean clothes from her bag, everything kind of wrinkled but it felt great, and she'd blow-dried her hair with the machine built into the bathroom wall. The toilet didn't talk and it only had three buttons to figure out.

  Then she lay down on the bed and fell asleep, but not for long.

  Arleigh kept popping in to make sure Chia was okay, and telling her news, so that Chia felt like she was part of it, whatever it was. Arleigh said Rez was back at his own hotel now, but that he'd come later to spend some time with her and thank her for all she'd done.

  That made Chia feel strange. Now she'd seen him in real life, somehow that had taken over from all the other ways she'd known him before, and she felt kind of funny about him. Confused. Like all of this had pegged him in realtime for her, and she kept thinking of her mother complaining that Lo and Rez were nearly as old as she was.

  And there was something else to it, too, that came from what she'd seen when she was crouched down in the back of that van, between the little Japanese guy with the sleeve of his jacket hanging down, and Masahiko: she'd looked out the window and seen the faces, as the van inched away. None of them knowing that that was Rez hunched down in there, under a jacket, but maybe sensing it somehow. And something in Chia letting her know she'd never quite be like that again. Never as comfortably a face in that crowd. Because now she knew there were rooms they never saw, or even dreamed of, where crazy things, or even just boring things, happened, and that was where the stars came from. And it was something like that that worried her now when she thought of Rez coming to see her. That and how he really was her mother's age.

  And all of that made her wonder what she was going to tell the others, back in Seattle. How could they understand it? She thought Zona would understand. She really wanted to talk with Zona, but Arleigh had said it was better not to try to reach her now.

  The longest-running top was starting to teeter, and they were cutting from that to the eyes of the girl who'd spun it.

  Masahiko opened the door that connected their rooms.

  The top gave a last wobble and kicked over. The girl covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes filled with the pain of defeat.

  “You must come with me to Walled City now,” Masahiko said.

  Chia used the manual remote to turn the television off. “Arleigh asked us not to port.”

  “She knows,” Masahiko said. “I've been there all day.” He was wearing the same clothes but everything had been cleaned and pressed, and the legs of his baggy black pants looked strange with creases in them. “And on the phone with my father.”

  “Is he pissed off at you because those gumi guys came?”

  “Arleigh McCrae asked Starkov to have someone speak with our gumi representative. They have apologized to my father. But Mitsuko was arrested near Hotel Di. That has caused him embarrassment and difficulty.”

  “Arrested?”

  “For trespassing. She went to take part in the vigil. She climbed a fence, triggering an alarm. She could not climb back out before the police came.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “My father has arranged her release. But he is not pleased.”

  “I feel like it's my fault,” Chia said.

  He shrugged and went back through the door.

  Chia got up. Her Sandbenders was beside her bag on the luggage rack, with her goggles and tip-sets on top of it. She carried it into the other room.

  It was a mess. Somehow he'd managed to turn it into something like his room at home. The sheets were tangled on the bed. Through the open bathroom door, she saw towels crumpled up on the tiled floor, a spilled bottle of shampoo
on the counter beside the sink. He'd set up his computer on the desk, with his student cap beside it. There were opened mini-cans of espresso everywhere, and at least three room-service trays with half-empty ceramic bowls of ramen.

  “Has anyone there seen Zona?” she asked, shoving a pillow and an open magazine aside on the foot of the bed. She sat down with her Sandbenders on her lap and started putting her tip-sets on.

  She thought he gave her a strange look, then. “I don't think so,” he said.

  “Take me in the way you did the first time,” she said. “I want to see it again.”

  Hak Nam. Tai Chang Street. The walls alive with shifting messages in the characters of every written language. Doorways flipping past, each one hinting at its own secret world. And this time she was more aware of the countless watching ghosts. That must be how people presented here, when you weren't in direct communication with them. A city of ghost-shadows. But this time Masahiko took another route, and they weren't climbing the twisted labyrinth of stairs but winding in at what would have been ground level in the original city, and Chia remembered the black hole, the rectangular vacancy he'd pointed out on the printed scarf in his room at the restaurant.

  “I must leave you now,” he said, as they burst from the maze into that vacancy. “They wish privacy.”

  He was gone, and at first Chia thought there was nothing there at all, only the faint grayish light filtering down from somewhere high above. When she looked up at this, it resolved into a vast, distant skylight, very far above her, but littered with a compost of strange and discarded shapes. She remembered the city's rooftops, and the things abandoned there.

  “It is strange, isn't it?” The idoru stood before her in embroidered robes, the tiny bright patterns lit from within, moving. “Hollow and somber. But he insisted we meet you here.”

  “Who insisted? Do you know where Zona is?”

  And there was a small table or four-legged stand in front of the idoru, very old, its dragon-carved legs thick with flaking, pale green paint. A single dusty glass stood centered there, something coiled inside it. Someone coughed.

  “This is the heart of Hak Nam,” the Etruscan said, that same creaking voice assembled from a million samples of dry old sounds. “Traditionally a place of serious conversation.”

  “Your friend is gone,” the idoru said. “I wished to tell you myself. This one,” indicating the glass, “volunteers details I do not understand.”

  “But they've only shut down her website,” Chia said. “She's in Mexico City, with her gang.”

  “She is nowhere,” the Etruscan said.

  “When you were taken from her,” the idoru said, “taken from the room in Venice, your friend went to your system software and activated the video units in your goggles. What she saw there indicated to her that you were in grave danger. As I believe you were. She must then have decided on a plan. Returning to her secret country, she linked her site with that of the Tokyo chapter of the Lo/Rez group. She ordered Ogawa, the president of the group, to post the message announcing Rez's death at Hotel Di. She threatened her with a weapon that would shatter the Tokyo chapter's site…”

  “The knife,” Chia said. “It was real?”

  “And extremely illegal,” the Etruscan said.

  “When Ogawa refused,” the idoru said, “your friend used her weapon.”

  “A serious crime,” the Etruscan said, “under the laws of every country involved.”

  “She then posted her message through what remained of Ogawa's website,” the idoru said. “It seemed official, and it had the effect of quickly surrounding Hotel Di with a sea of potential witnesses.”

  “Whatever the next stage of her plan,” the Etruscan said, “she had exposed her presence in her website. The original owners became aware of her. She abandoned her site. They pursued her. She was forced to discard her persona.”

  “What ‘persona’?” Chia felt a sinking feeling.

  “‘Zona Rosa,’” said the Etruscan, “was the persona of Mercedes Purissima Vargas-Gutierrez. She is twenty-six years old and the victim of an environmental syndrome occurring most frequently in the Federal District of Mexico.” His voice was like rain on a thin metal roof now. “Her father is an extremely successful criminal lawyer.”

  “Then I can find her,” Chia said.

  “But she would not wish this,” the idoru said. “Mercedes Purissima is severely deformed by the syndrome, and has lived for the past five years in almost complete denial of her physical self.”

  Chia was sitting there crying. Masahiko removed the black cups from his eyes and came over to the bed.

  “Zona's gone,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. He sat down beside her. “You never finished telling me the story of the Sandbenders,” he said. “It was very interesting story.”

  So she began to tell it to him.

  45. Lucky

  “Laney,” he heard her say, her voice blurred with sleep. “What are you doing?”

  The illuminated face of the cedar telephone. “I'm calling the Lucky Dragon, on Sunset.”

  “The what?”

  “Convenience store. Twenty-four hours.”

  “Laney, it's three in the morning…”

  “Have to thank Rydell, tell him the job worked out…”

  She groaned and rolled over, pulling the pillow over her head.

  Through the window he could see the translucent amber, the serried cliffs of the new buildings, reflecting the lights of the city.

  46. Fables of the Reconstruction

  Chia dreamed of a beach pebbled with crushed fragments of consumer electronics; crab-things scuttling low, their legs striped like antique resistors. Tokyo Bay, shrouded in fog from an old movie, a pale gray blanket meant to briefly conceal first-act terrors: sea monsters or some alien armada.

  Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream's logic it grew no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing. Being grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and bulk-lifter in the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies that are sleeping rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy.

  The alarm's infrared stutter. Sunbright halogen illuminating the printed scarf, at its center the rectangle representing an emptiness, an address unknown: the killfile of legend. Zapping the Espressomatic to life with her remote, she curls back into the quilt's dark, waiting for the building hiss of steam. Most mornings, now, she checks into the City, hears the gossip in a favorite barbershop in Sai Shing Road. The Etruscan is there, sometimes, with Klaus and the Rooster and the other ghosts he hangs with, and they tolerate her. She's proud of that, because they'll clam up around Masahiko. Are they old, incredibly ancient, or do they just act that way? Whatever, they tend to know things first, and she's learned to value that. And the Etruscan has been hinting at a vacancy, something really small, but with a window. Looking down into what would have been Lung Chun Road.

  He likes her, the Etruscan. It's weird. They say he doesn't like anybody, really, but he fixed her father's credit, even though she'd forgotten to leave the key. (She keeps the key to Suite 17 in a watered-silk cosmetics case they gave her on the JAL flight home: it's made of white plastic, molded to look like an old-fashioned mechanical key, with a mag-strip down the long part and the flat thing shaped like the crown a princess wears. She gets it out and looks at it sometimes, but it just looks like a cheap white piece of plastic.)

  The Etruscan and the others spy on the Project all the time. That's what they call it. Through them, Chia knows that the idoru's island isn't finished yet. It's there but it isn't stable; something they have to do it before they build, ev
en with nanotech, in case another earthquake comes. She wonders what the Russians will do with theirs, and sometimes she wonders about Maryalice, and Eddie, and Calvin, the guy at Whiskey Clone who got her out of there, for no reason other than he thought he should. But it seems like a long time ago, between the Walled City and school.

  She figures her mother knows by now that she wasn't with Hester, but her mother's never said anything about it, except to talk to her twice about contraceptives and safe sex. And, really, she wasn't there much more than forty-eight hours, if you didn't count the travel-time, because Rez hadn't been able to make it over to thank her, and Arleigh had said that, all in all, it was better if she got home before anybody started asking any questions, but they'd send her first class on Japan Air Lines. So Arleigh had driven her back out to Narita that night, but not in her green van because she said it was a write-off. And she'd still felt so bad about Zona, and it made her feel so stupid, because she felt like her friend was dead, but her friend hadn't even really existed, and there was this other girl in Mexico City, with terrible problems, and so she wound up telling all that to Arleigh and just crying.

  And Arleigh said she should just wait. Because that girl in Mexico City, more than anything else, needed to be somebody else. And it didn't matter that she hadn't been Zona, because she'd made Zona up, and that was just as real. Just wait, Arleigh said, because somebody else would turn up, somebody new, and it would be like they already knew you. And Chia had sat and thought about that, beside Arleigh in her fast little car.

  —But I couldn't ever tell her I knew?

  —That would spoil it.

  When they'd gotten to the airport, Arleigh checked her in at JAL, found somebody to take her to the lounge (which was sort of like a cross between a bar and really fancy business office), and gave her a bag with a roadie-grade Lo/Rez tour jacket in it. The sleeves were made of transparent rayon, and the lining that showed through that looked like liquid mercury. Arleigh said it was really tacky, but maybe she had a friend who'd like it. It was from their Kombinat tour, and it had all the tour dates embroidered on the back in three different languages.