Laney shivered. In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.
The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met his.
“We're here.” Arleigh beside him, hand at his elbow. She was indicating two places at the table. “Are you all right?” she asked, under her breath. “Take your shoes off.”
Laney looked at Blackwell, who was staring at the idoru, some-thing like pain in his face, but the expression vanished, sucked away behind the mask of his scars.
Laney did as he was told, kneeling and removing his shoes, moving as if he were drunk, or dreaming, though he knew he was neither, and the idoru smiled, lit from within.
“Laney?”
The table was set above a depression in the floor. Laney seated himself, arranging his feet beneath the table and gripping his cushion with both hands. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
“Okay?”
“You looked… blind.”
Rez was taking his place now at the head of the table, the idoru to his right, someone else—Laney saw that it was Lo, the guitarist—to his left. Next to the idoru sat a dignified older man with rimless glasses, gray hair brushed back from his smooth forehead. He wore a very simple, very expensive-looking suit of some lusterless black material, and a high-collared white shirt that buttoned in a complicated way. When this man turned to address Rei Toei, Laney quite clearly saw the light of her face reflect for an instant in the almost circular lenses.
Arleigh's sharp intake of breath. She'd seen it too.
A hologram. Something generated, animated, projected. He felt his grip relax slightly, on the edges of the cushion.
But then he remembered the stone tombs, the river, the ponies with their iron bells.
Nodal.
Laney had once asked Gerrard Delouvrier, the most patient of the tennis-playing Frenchmen of TIDAL, why it was that he, Laney, had been chosen as the first (and, as it would happen, the only) recipient of the peculiar ability they sought to impart to him. He hadn't applied for the job, he said, and had no reason to believe the position had even been advertised. He had applied, he told Delouvrier, to be a trainee service rep.
Delouvrier, with short, prematurely gray hair and a suntable tan, leaned back in his articulated workstation chair and stretched his legs. He seemed to be studying his crepe-soled suede shoes. Then he looked out the window, to rectangular beige buildings, anonymous landscaping, February snow. “Do you not see? How we do not teach you? We watch. We wish to learn from you.”
They were in a DatAmerica research park in Iowa. There was an indoor court for Delouvrier and his colleagues, but they complained constantly about its surface.
“But why me?”
Delouvrier's eyes looked tired. “We wish to be kind to the orphans? We are an unexpected warmth at the heart of DatAmerica?” He rubbed his eyes. “No. Something was done to you, Laney. In our way, perhaps, we seek to redress that. Is that a word, ‘redress’?”
“No,” Laney said.
“Do not question good fortune. You are here with us, doing work that matters. It is winter in this Iowa, true, but the work goes on.” He was looking at Laney now. “You are our only proof,” he said.
“Of what?”
Delouvrier closed his eyes. “There was a man, a blind man, who mastered echo-location. Clicks with the tongue, you understand?” Eyes closed, he demonstrated. “Like a bat. Fantastic.” He opened his eyes. “He could perceive his immediate environment in great detail. Ride a bicycle in traffic. Always making the tik, tik. The ability was his, was absolutely real. And he could never explain it, never teach it to another…” He wove his long fingers together and cracked his knuckles. “We must hope that this is not the case with you.”
Don't think of a purple cow. Or was it a brown one? Laney couldn't remember. Don't look at the idoru's face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.
He could watch her hands. Watch the way she ate.
The meal was elaborate, many small courses served on individual rectangular plates. Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei, and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was simultaneously veiled with a flawless copy, holo food on a holo plate.
Even the movement of her chopsticks brought on peripheral flickers of nodal vision. Because the chopsticks were information too, but nothing as dense as her features, her gaze. As each “empty” plate was removed, the untouched serving would reappear.
But when the flickering began, Laney would concentrate on his own meal, his clumsiness with his own chopsticks, conversation around the table. Kuwayama, the man with the rimless glasses, was answering something Rez had asked, though Laney hadn't been able to catch the question itself. “—the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as ‘desiring machines.” Rez's green eyes, bright and attentive. “Not in any literal sense,” Kuwayama continued, “but please envision aggregates of subjective desire. It was decided that the modular array would ideally constitute an architecture of articulated longing…” The man's voice was beautifully modulated, his English accented in a way that Laney found impossible to place.
Rez smiled then, his eyes going to the face of the idoru. As did Laney's as well, automatically.
He fell through her eyes. He was staring up at a looming cliff face that seemed to consist entirely of small rectangular balconies, none set at quite the same level or depth. Orange sunset off a tilted, steel-framed window. Oilslick colors crawling in the sky.
He closed his eyes, looked down, opened them. A fresh plate there, more food.
“You're really into your meal,” Arleigh said.
A concentrated effort with the chopsticks and he managed to capture and swallow something that was like a one-inch cube of cold chutney omelet. “Wonderful. Don't want any of that fugu though. Blowfish with the neurotoxins? Heard about that?”
“You've already had seconds,” she said. “Remember the big plate of raw fish arranged like the petals of a chrysanthemum?”
“You're kidding,” Laney said.
“Lips and tongue feel faintly numb? That's it.”
Laney ran his tongue across his lips. Was she kidding? Yamazaki, seated to his left, leaned close. “There may be a way around the problem you face with Rez's data. You are aware of Lo/Rez global fan activity?”
“Of what?”
“Many fans. They report each sighting of Rez, Lo, other musicians involved. There is much incidental detail.”
Laney knew from his day's video education that Lo/Rez were theoretically a duo, but that there were always at least two other “members,” usually more. And Rez had been adamant from the start about his dislike of drum machines; the current drummer, “Blind” Willy Jude, seated opposite Yamazaki, had been with them for years. He'd been turning his enormous black glasses in the idoru's direction throughout the meal; now he seemed to sense Laney's glance. The black glasses, video units, swung around. “Man,” Jude said, “Rozzer's sittin' down there makin' eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle.”
“You can't see her?”
“Holos are hard, man,” the drummer said, touching his glasses with a fingertip. “Take my kids to Nissan County, I'll call ahead, get 'em tweaked around a little. Then I can see 'em. But this lady's on a funny frequency or something. All I can see's the projector and this kinda, kinda ectoplastic, right? Glow, like.”
The man seated between Jude and Mr. Kuwayama, whose name was Ozaki, bobbed apologetically in Jude's direction. “We regret this very much. We regret deeply. A slight adjustment is required, but it cannot be done at this time.”
“Hey,” Jude said, “no big problem. I seen her already. I get all the music channels with these. That one where she's a Mongol princess or something, up in the mountains…”
Laney lost a chops
tick.
“The most recent single,” Ozaki said.
“Yeah,” Jude said, “that's pretty good. She wears that gold mask? Okay shit.” He popped a section of maki into his mouth and chewed.
26. Hak Nam
Chia and Masahiko sat facing one another on the white carpet. The room's only chair was a fragile-looking thing with twisted wire legs and a heart-shaped seat upholstered in pink metal-flake plastic. Neither of them wanted to sit on the bed. Chia had her Sandbenders across her knees and was working her fingers into her tip-sets. Masahiko's computer was on the carpet in front of him; he'd put its control-face back on and peeled a very compact pair of tip-sets out of the back of the cube, along with two small black oval cups on fine lengths of optical cable. Another length of the cable ran from his computer to a small open hatch at the back of the Sandbenders.
“Okay,” Chia said, settling the last of her tips, “let's go. I've got to get hold of somebody…”
“Yes,” he said. He picked up the black cups, one in either hand, and placed them over his eyes. When he let go, they stayed there. It looked uncomfortable.
Chia reached up and pulled her own glasses down, over her eyes. “What do I—”
Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. It wasn't even like porting. Software conflict? Faint impression of light through a fluttering of rags.
And then the thing before her: building or biomass or cliff face looming there, in countless unplanned strata, nothing about it even or regular. Accreted patchwork of shallow random balconies, thousands of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles of fog. Stretching either way to the periphery of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a black fur of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth of cable. And past this scribbled border a sky where colors crawled like gasoline on water.
“Hak Nam,” he said, beside her.
“What is it?”
“‘City of darkness.’ Between the walls of the world.”
She remembered the scarf she'd seen, in his room behind the kitchen, its intricate map of something chaotic and compacted, tiny irregular segments of red and black and yellow. And then they were moving forward, toward a narrow opening. “It's a MUD, right?” Something like a larger, permanent version of the site the Tokyo chapter had erected for the meeting, or the tropical forest Kelsey and Zona had put up. But people played games in MUDs; they made up characters for themselves and pretended. Little kids did it, and lonely people.
“No,” he said, “not a game.” They were inside now, smoothly accelerating, and the squirming density of the thing was continual visual impact, an optical drumming. “Tai Chang Street.” Walls scrawled and crawling with scrolling messages, spectral doorways passing like cards in a shuffled deck.
And they were not alone: others there, ghost-figures whipping past, and everywhere the sense of eyes…
Fractal filth, bit-rot, the corridor of their passage tented with crazy swoops of faintly flickering lines of some kind. “Alms House Backstreet.” A sharp turn. Another. Then they were ascending a maze of twisting stairwells, still accelerating, and Chia took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Retinal fireworks bursting there, but the pressure was gone.
When she opened her eyes, they were in a much cleaner but no larger version of his room behind the kitchen in the restaurant. No empty ramen bowls, no piles of clothing. He was beside her on the sleeping ledge, staring at the shifting patterns on his computer's control-face. Beside it on the work-surface, her Sandbenders. The texture-mapping was rudimentary, everything a little too smooth and glossy. She looked at him, curious to see how he'd present. A basic scan job, maybe a year out of date: his hair was shorter. He wore the same black tunic.
On the wall behind the computers was an animated version of the printed scarf, its red, black, and yellow bits pulsing slightly. A bright green line traced a route in from the perimeter; where it ended, bright green, concentric rings radiated from one particular yellow square.
She looked back at him, but he was still staring at the control-face.
Something chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and saw a small white rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge. She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate, up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming to a halt when it was in optimum position to be read. It was in that same font they'd used at Whiskey Clone, or one just like it. It said “Ku Klux Klan Kol-lectibles,” and then some letters and numbers that didn't look like any kind of address she knew.
Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray blur scoot from under it. Flat, whirling, fast. It was on the white rectangle now, something like the shadow of a crab or spider, two-dimensional and multi-legged. It swallowed it, shot for the door.
“I have completed responsibility to Walled City,” Masahiko said, turning from the control-face.
“What were those things?” Chia asked him.
“What things?”
“Like a business card. Crawled under the door. Then another thing, like a gray cut-out crab, that ate it.”
“An advertisement,” he decided, “and a sub-program that offered criticism.”
“It didn't offer criticism; it ate it.”
“Perhaps the person who wrote the sub-program dislikes advertising. Many do. Or dislikes the advertiser. Political, aesthetic, personal reasons, all are possible.”
Chia looked around at the reproduction of his tiny room. “Why don't you have a bigger site?” Instantly worried that it was because he was Japanese, and maybe they were just used to that. But still it was about the smallest virtual space she could remember having been in, and it wasn't like a bigger one cost more, not unless you were like Zona and wanted yourself a whole country.
“The Walled City is a concept of scale. Very important. Scale is place, yes? Thirty-three thousand people inhabited original. Two-point-seven hectares. As many as fourteen stories.”
None of which made any sense to Chia. “I have to port, okay?”
“Of course,” he said, and gestured toward her Sandbenders.
She was braced for that two-directions-at-once thing, but it didn't happen. The bit-mapped fish were swimming around in the glass coffee table. She looked out the window at the crayon trees and wondered where the Mumphalumpagus was. She hadn't seen it for a while. It was something her father had made for her when she was a baby, a big pink dinosaur with goofy eyelashes.
She checked the table for mail, but there was nothing new.
She could phone from here. Call her mother. Sure.
Hi, I'm in Tokyo. In a “love hotel.” People are after me because somebody put something in my bag. So, uh, what do you think I should I do?
She tried porting to Kelsey's address instead, but all she got was that annoying marble anteroom and the voice, not Kelsey's, that said that Kelsey Van Troyer wasn't in at the moment. Chia exited without leaving a message. The next address she tried was Zona's, but Zona's provider was down. That happened a lot, in Mexico, and particularly in Mexico City, where Zona lived. She decided to try Zona's secret place, because it was on a mainframe in Arizona and it was never down. She knew Zona didn't like people just showing up there, because Zona didn't want the company that had built the original website, and then forgotten about it, to discover that Zona had gotten in and set up her own country.
She asked the Sandbenders where she was porting from now and it said Helsinki, Finland. So that re-porting capability at the hotel was working, at least.
Just before twilight at Zona's, like always. Chia scanned the floor of a dry swimming pool, looking for Zona's lizards, but she didn't see them. Usually they were right there, waiting for you, but not this time. “Zona?”
Chia looked up, wondering if she'd see those spooky condor-things that Zona kept. The sky was beautiful but
empty. Originally that sky had been the most important part of this place, and no expense had been spared. Serious sky: deep and clean and a crazy Mexican shade like pale turquoise. They'd brought people here to sell them airplanes, corporate jets, when the jets were still in the design phase. There'd been a white concrete landing strip, but Zona had folded it up into a canyon and mapped over it. All the local color was Zona's stuff: the cooking fires and the dead pools and the broken walls. She'd imported landscape files, maybe even real stuff she knew from somewhere in Mexico. “Zona?”
Something rattled, up the nearest ridge, like pebbles on a sheet of metal.
—It's okay. One of the lizards. She's just not here now.
A twig snapped. Closer.
—Don't fuck around, Zona.
But she exited.
The bit-mapped fish swam back and forth.
That had been very creepy. She wasn't sure why, exactly, but it had been. Still was, kind of. She looked at the door to her bedroom and found herself wondering what she'd find there if she gestured for it. The bed, her Lo Rez Skyline poster, the agent of Lo greeting her in his mindless friendly way. But what if she found something else? 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?
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