Something waiting. Like she could still hear that rattle, up the slope. Or what if she went to the wire-framed door where her mother’s room would have been? What if she opened it and her mother’s room was there after all, and not her mother, waiting, but something else?
She was creeping herself out, that was all. She looked at her stack of Lo/Rez albums beside the lithographed lunch box, her virtual Venice beside that. Even her Music Master would seem like company now. She opened it, watching the Piazza decompress like some incredibly intricate paper pop-up book on fast-forward, facades and colonnades springing up around her, with the hour before a winter’s dawn for backlight.
Turning from the water, where the prows of black gondolas bobbed like marks in some lost system of musical notation, she lifted her finger and shot forward into the maze, thinking as she did that this place had been as strange, in its way, as Masahiko’s Walled City, and what was that all supposed to be about anyway?
And it was only as she crossed her third bridge that she noticed that he wasn’t there.
–Hey.
She stopped. A shop window displayed the masks of Carnival, the really ancient ones. Black, penis-nosed leather, empty eye-holes. A mirror draped with yellowed crepe.
Checking the Sandbenders to make sure she hadn’t turned him off. She hadn’t.
Chia closed her eyes and counted to three. Made herself feel the carpeted floor she sat on in the Hotel Di. She opened her eyes.
At the end of the narrow Venetian street, down the tilted, stepped cobbles, where it opened out into a small square or plaza, an unfamiliar figure stood beside the central fountain.
She pulled the goggles off without bothering to close Venice.
Masahiko sat opposite her, his legs crossed, the black cups sucked up against his eyes. His lips were moving, silently, and his hands, on his knees, in their black tip-sets, traced tiny fingerpatterns in the air.
Maryalice was sitting on the furry pink bed with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She had a little square gray gun in her hand, and Chia saw how the freshly glossed red of her nails contrasted with the pearly plastic of the handle.
“Started again,” Maryalice said, around the cigarette. She pulled the trigger, causing a small golden flame to spring up from the muzzle, and used it to light her cigarette. “Tokyo. I’ll tell you. Does it every time.”
27. That Physical Thing
Laney was at a black rubber urinal in the Men’s when he noticed the Russian combing his hair in the mirror.
Or least it looked like black rubber, with sort of floppy edges. They obviously had the plumbing working, but he wondered what they’d say if you asked to make your own contribution to the Grotto? On his way here he’d noticed that one of the bars was topped with a slab of something murky green and translucent, lit from below, and he’d hoped they hadn’t made that from what they’d sawn out of the stairwell.
Dinner was over and he’d probably had too much sake with it. He and Arleigh and Yamazaki had watched Rez meeting this new version of the idoru, the one Willy Jude saw as a big silver thermos. And Blackwell was having to get used to that, because Laney guessed that the bodyguard hadn’t had any idea she’d be here, not until he’d walked in and Rez had told him.
Arleigh had talked with Lo through most of it, mainly about real estate. Different properties he owned around the world. Laney had listened to more of Yamazaki’s ideas about accessing this teenage fan-club stuff and there might actually be something to that, but they’d have to try it to find it. Blackwell hadn’t said two words to anybody, drinking lager instead of sake and packing his food away as though he were trying to plug something, some gap in security that could be taken care of if you stuffed it methodically with enough sashimi. The Australian was an ace with chopsticks; he could probably stick one in your eye at fifty paces. But the main show had been Rez and the idoru, and to a lesser extent Kuwayama, who’d carried on long conversations with them both. The other one, Ozaki, seemed to be the guy they brought along in case someone had to change the batteries in the silver thermos. And Willy Jude was amiable enough, but in about as content-free a way as possible.
Techs were supposed to be an easy source of whatever passed for gossip in a given company, so Laney had tried a few openings in that direction, but Ozaki hadn’t said any more than he’d had to. And since Laney couldn’t get Rei Toei within his field of vision without starting to slide over into nodal mode, he’d had to conduct his evening’s eavesdropping with whatever pick-up visuals were available. Arleigh wasn’t too bad for that. There was something about the line of her jaw that he particularly liked, and kept coming back to.
Laney zipped up and went to wash his hands, the basin made of that same floppy-looking black stuff, and noticed that the Russian was still combing his hair. Laney had no way of knowing if the man was literally Russian or not, but he thought of him that way because of the black patent paratrooper boots with contrasting white stitching, the pants with the black silk ribbon down the side, and the white leather evening jacket. Either Russian or one of those related jobs, but very definitely Kombinat-inflected, that mutant commie-mafioso thing.
The Russian was combing his hair with a total concentration that made Laney think of a fly grooming itself with its front feet, He was very large, and had a large head, though it was mainly in the vertical, quite tall from the eyebrows up, seeming to taper very slightly toward the crown. For all the attention being given to the combing, the man didn’t actually have much hair, not on top anyway, and Laney had thought these guys all went in for implants. Rydell had told him Kombinat types were all over Tokyo. Rydell had seen a documentary about it, how they were so singularly and surrealistically brutal that nobody wanted to mess with them. Then Rydell had started to tell him about two Russians, San Francisco cops of some kind, who he’d had some sort of run-in with, but Laney had to take a meeting with Rice Daniels and a make-up artist, and never heard the end of it.
Laney checked to see that he didn’t have anything stuck in his teeth from dinner.
As he went out, the Russian was still combing.
He saw Yamazaki, blinking and looking lost. “It’s back there,” he said.
“What is?”
“The can.”
“Can?”
“Men’s. The toilet.”
“But I was looking for you.”
“You found me.”
“I observed, as we ate, that you avoided looking directly at the idoru.”
“Right.”
“I surmise that density of information is sufficient to allow nodal apprehension…”
“You got it.”
Yamazaki nodded. “Ah. But this would not be the case with one of her videos, or even with a ‘live’ performance.”
“Why not?” Laney had started back in the direction of their table.
“Bandwidth,” Yamazaki said, “The version here tonight is high-bandwidth prototype.”
“Are we compensated for beta-testing?”
“Can you describe the nature of nodal apprehension, please?”
“Like memories,” Laney said, “or clips from a movie. But something the drummer said made me think I was just seeing her latest video.”
Someone shoved Laney out of the way, from behind, and he fell across the nearest table, breaking a glass. He felt the glass shatter under him and found himself staring straight down, for a second, into the taut gray latex lap of a woman who screamed explosively just before the table gave way. Something, probably her knee, clipped him hard in the side of the head.
He managed to get to his knees, holding his head, and found himself recalling an experiment they’d done in Science, back in Gainesville. Surface tension. You sprinkled pepper over the water in a glass. Brought the tip of a needle close to the film of pepper. Watched it spring back from the needle like a live thing. And he saw that happening here, his head ringing, but instead of pepper it was the crowd in the Western World, and he knew that the needle must be pointed at Rez’s
table.
The back of a white leather evening jacket… But then he saw the Sherman tank come unmoored on the shoulders of the recoiling crowd, spinning toward him, huge and weightless, and the lights went out.
The crowd had been screaming anyway, but the dark twisted the communal pitch up into something that had Laney covering his ears. Or trying to, because someone stumbled into him and he went over, backward, instinctively curling into a tight fetal knot and clamping his hands across the back of his neck.
“Hey,” said a voice, very close to his ear, “get on up. You gonna get stepped on.” It was Willy Jude, “I can see.” A hand around his wrist. “Got infrared.”
Laney let the drummer pull him to his feet. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“Dunno, but come on. Gonna get worse—” As if on cue, a terrible squeal of raw animal pain cut through the frenzied crowd-noise. “Blackwell got one,” Willy Jude said, and Laney felt the drummer’s hand grip his belt. He stumbled as he was pulled along. Someone ran into him, shouted in Japanese. After that he kept his hands up, trying to protect his face, and went where the drummer pulled him,
Suddenly they were in a cove or pocket of relative quiet. “Where are we?” Laney asked.
“This way…” Something clipped Laney across the shins. “Stool,” Willy Jude said. “Sorry.” Glass snapped beneath Laney’s shoes.
A curve of greenish light, broken cursive hanging in the dark. Another few steps and he saw the Grotto. Willy Jude let go of his belt. “You can see here, right? That bioluminescent stuff?”
“Yeah,” Laney said. “Thanks,”
“It doesn’t register on my glasses. I get infrared off warm bodies, but I can’t make out the steps. Walk me down.” He took Laney’s hand. They started down the stairs together. A black-clad trio of Japanese shot past them, leaving a high-heeled pump on the encrusted stairs, and vanished around the landing. Laney kicked the shoe out of Willy Jude’s way and kept going.
When they rounded the corner at the landing, Arleigh was there, a green champagne bottle cocked over her shoulder. There was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth, darker than her lipstick. When she saw Laney, she lowered the bottle. “Where were you?” she said.
“The Men’s,” Laney said.
“You missed the show.”
“What happened?”
“Damn it,” she said, “my coat’s up there.”
“Keep moving, keep moving,” Willy Jude said, More stairs, more landings, the rippling walls of the Grotto giving way to concrete. People kept rushing down, past them, knots and singles, taking the stairs too fast. Laney rubbed his ribs where he’d come down on the glass. It hurt, but somehow he hadn’t been cut.
“They looked like Kombinat,” Arleigh said. “Big ugly guys, bad outfits. I couldn’t tell if they were after Rez or the idoru. Like they just thought they could walk in and do it.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Kuwayama had at least a dozen of his own security people at the two closest tables. And Blackwell probably prays for a scene like that every night before he goes to bed. He reached into his jacket, then the lights went out.”
“He put ’em out,” Willy Jude said. “Some kinda remote. He can see better in the dark than I can with these infrareds. Dunno how that is, but he can.”
“How’d you get out?” Laney asked Arleigh.
“Flashlight. In my purse.”
“Laney-san…”
Looking back to see Yamazaki, one sleeve of his green plaid coat pulled free at the shoulder, his glasses missing a lens. Arleigh had taken a phone from her purse and was cursing softly as she tried to get it to work.
Yamazaki caught up with them at the next landing. The four of them continued down together, Laney still holding the blind drummer’s hand.
When they reached the street, the Western World’s sullen crew of doorpeople were nowhere in sight. A single policeman with a plastic rain-cover on his cap was muttering frantically into a microphone clipped to the front of his rain-cape. He was walking in tight circles as he did this, gesturing dramatically with a white baton at nothing in particular. Several kinds of alien siren were converging on the Western World, and Laney thought he could hear a helicopter.
Willy Jude dropped Laney’s hand and adjusted his video-goggles to the street’s light-level. “Where’s my car?”
Arleigh lowered her phone, which apparently was working now. “You’d better come with us, Willy. Some kind of tactical unit is on the way…
“Nothing like it,” Rez said, and Laney turned, to see the singer emerging from the Western World, brushing something white from his dark jacket. “That physical thing. Too much time in the virtual, we forget that, don’t we? You’re Leyner?” Extending his hand.
“Laney,” Laney said, as Arleigh’s dark green van pulled up beside them.
28. A Matter of Credit
Maryalice opened a curved drawer that was built into the pink bed’s headboard. She was wearing a black skin-suit with big red Ashleigh Modine Carter-style sequin roses on the lapels. She took out a little blue glass dish and balanced it on her knee. “I hate these places,” she said. “There’s lots of ways to make sex ugly, but it’s kind of hard to make it look this ridiculous.” She knocked the gray end off her cigarette, into the blue saucer. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Fourteen,” Chia said.
“About what I told ’em. You’re fourteen, fifteen, for real, and no way you were on to me. I was on to you, right? It was my move. I planted on you. But they don’t believe me. Say you’re some kind of operator, say I’m just stupid, say that Rez guy sent you to SeaTac to get the stuff. Say you’re a set-up and I’m crazy to believe a kid couldn’t do that.” She sucked on the cigarette, squinting. “Where is it?” She looked down at Chia’s bag, open on the white carpet. “There?”
“I didn’t mean to take it. I didn’t know it was there.”
“I know that,” Maryalice said. “What I told ’em. I meant to get it back off you at the club.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Chia said. “It just scares me.”
“Sometimes I bring stuff back for Eddie. Party favors for the club. It’s illegal, but it’s not all thatillegal, you know? Not hard stuff, really. But this time he was doing something else on the side, something with the Russians, and I didn’t like it. That’s what scares me, that stuff. Like its alive.”
“What stuff?”
“That. Assemblers, they’re called.”
Chia looked at her bag. “That thing in my bag is a nanotech assembler?”
“More like what you start with. Kind of an egg, or a little factory. You plug that thing into another machine that programs ’em, and they start building themselves out of whatever’s handy. And when there’s enough of ’em, they start building whatever it was you wanted them to. There’s some kind of law against selling that stuff to the Kombinat, so they want it bad. But Eddie worked out a way to do it. I met these two creepy German guys in the SeaTac Hyatt. They’d flown in there from wherever, I figured maybe Africa.” She mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the little blue dish, making it smell even worse. “They didn’t want to give it to me, because they were expecting Eddie. Lot of back and forth on the phone. Finally they did. I was supposed to put it in the suitcase with the other stuff, but it made me nervous. Made me wanna self-medicate.” She looked around the room. She put the blue dish with the crushed cigarette on a square black side table and did something that made the front of it open. It was a refrigerator, filled with little bottles. Maryalice bent over, peering in there. The pistol-shaped lighter slid off the pink bed. “No tequila,” Maryalice said. “You tell me why anybody’d name a vodka ‘Come Back Salmon’… ” Removing a little square bottle with a fish on its side. “Japanese would, though.” She looked down at the lighter. “Like a Russian would make a cigarette lighter that looks like a pistol.”
Chia saw that Maryalice didn’t have her hair-extensions
in anymore. “When they were taking DNA samples, in SeaTac,” Chia said, “you stuck the end of your extension in there.
Maryalice cracked the seal on the little bottle, opened it, drained it in a single gulp, and shivered. “Those extensions are all my own hair,” she said. “Grew ’em out when I was on sort of a health diet, understand? They catch people doing recreationals, when they take those hair samples. Some recreationals, they stay in your hair a long time.” Maryalice put the empty bottle down beside the blue dish. “What’s he doing?” Pointing at Masahiko.
“Porting,” Chia said, unable to think of a quick way to explain the Walled City.
“I can see that. You came here ’cause these places’ll re-post, right?”
“But you found us anyway.”
“I got connections with a cab company. I figured it was worth a try. But the Russians’ll think of it, too, if they haven’t already.”
“But how’d you get in? It was all locked.”
“I know my way around these places, honey. I know my way entirely too well.”
Masahiko removed the black cups that covered his eyes, saw Maryalice, looked down at the cups, then back up at Chia.
“Maryalice,” Chia said.
Gomi Boy presented like a life-size anime of himself, huge eyes and even taller hair. “Who drank the vodka?” he asked.
“Maryalice,” Chia said.
“Who’s Maryalice?”
“She’s in the room at the hotel,” Chia said.
“That was the equivalent of twenty minutes porting,” Gomi Boy said. “How can there be someone in your room at the Hotel Di?”
“It’s complicated,” Chia said. They were back in Masahiko’s room in the Walled City. They’d just clicked back, none of that maze-running like the first time. Past an icon reminding her she’d left her Venice open, but too late for that. Maybe once you were in here, you got back fast. But Masahiko’d said they had to, quick, there was trouble. Maryalice had said she didn’t mind, but Chia didn’t like it at all that Maryalice was in the room with them while they were porting.
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