Idoru Read online

  Zona looked at it. “Fuck your mother,” she said, her tone one of somber respect.

  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.”

  “That is 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 you one 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 doinging. 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 think about 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 lik
e 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. You are 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 thing on my site…”

  “It's in the software on my Sandbenders, too,” Chia said. “I saw it in Venice.”

  “You saw it?” 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 why's 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 some-thing 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,”

  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 red-haired 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 require. 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. Some-thing 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.