“I am not the one making deals,” Yamazaki said. “Rez and Rei Toei are in almost constant contact now, and recent improvements allow her new degrees of freedom. Rez let her into the data, all that you first tried to access. He did this without informing Blackwell.” He shrugged. “Now she accesses the fan data as well. And what they propose may well allow us to bring this to a conclusion. Blackwell is more than ever convinced there is some conspiracy. The attack in the nightclub…”
“Which was about?”
“I do not know. An attempted kidnapping? They wished to harm Rez? To abduct the idoru's peripheral? It was handled with amazing clumsiness, but Blackwell says that is the earmark of the Kombinat…. Is that the word, ‘earmark’?”
“I don't know,” Laney said.
“‘Hallmark’?”
“You don't think Blackwell's going to cut our toes off, if we do this?”
“No. We are employed by a Lo/Rez shell corporation—”
“Paragon-Asia?”
“—but Blackwell is employed by the Lo/Rez Partnership. If Rez tells us to do something, we must do it.”
“Even if Blackwell thinks it endangers Rez's security?”
Yamazaki shrugged. Past his shoulder, through the van's rear window, Laney could see Shannon trundling the gray module they'd unloaded from the rear of Kuwayama's Land-Rover. It was twice the size of the black ones that Arleigh used.
He watched Shannon push it past the orange barricades.
36. Maryalice
“Not yelling, please,” said the one who held her, and then he took his hand away from her mouth.
“Where is it?” Eddie's pale eyes.
“There,” Chia said, pointing. She could see the ragged edge of blue and yellow plastic sticking up out of her open bag. Then she saw that Maryalice was asleep on the pink bed, curled up with her high-heeled shoes still on, clutching a pillow to her face. The top of the little fridge was covered with empty, miniature bottles.
Eddie took a black-and-gold pen from his coat pocket and went to the bag. He bent over it and used his pen as a probe, moving the plastic aside so he could see. “It's here,” he said.
“Is there?” The other hand was still holding Chia's shoulder down, where she sat on the carpet.
“This is it,” Eddie said.
“Stay putting.” The hand left her shoulder and the man, who must've been kneeling behind her, got up and joined Eddie, peering into Chia's bag. He was taller, and wore a tan suit and fancy Western boots. Big bones in his face, his hair a lighter blond than Eddie's, a reddish, crescent-shaped birthmark high on his right cheekbone. “How you are being sure?”
“Jesus, Yevgeni…”
The man in the tan suit straightened up, looked at Maryalice, bent to pull the pillow away from her face. “How is your woman sleeping on bed in this room, Eddie?”
Eddie saw that it was Maryalice. “Fuck,” he said.
“You are telling us girl and your woman, is ‘incidental.’ You are telling us they meet on plane, is only accident. Is accident your woman is here? We do not like accident.”
Eddie looked from Maryalice to the man—he must be Russian— to Chia. “What the fuck is this bitch doing here?” Like it had to be Chia's fault.
“She found us,” Chia said. “She said she knew somebody at the cab company.”
“No,” said the Russian, “we know somebody at cab company. Is too much incident.”
“We've got it, okay?” Eddie said. “Why do you want to complicate things?”
The Russian rubbed his cheek, as though the birthmark might come off on his hand. “Please consider,” he said. “We are giving you isotope. You want to know is isotope, you can test. You are giving us this.” He poked the sharp toe of his cowboy boot into the side of Chia's bag. “How are we sure?”
“Yevgeni,” Eddie said, very calmly, “you must know that deals like this require a certain basis of trust.”
The Russian considered that. “No,” he said, “basis not good. Our people trace this girl to big rocker band. What is she working for, Eddie? Tonight we send people to talk to them, they fall on us like fucking wolfs. One man I am still losing.”
“I don't work for Lo/Rez!” Chia said. “I'm just in the club! Maryalice put that thing in my bag when I was asleep on the plane!”
Masahiko groaned, sighed, and seemed to go back under. Eddie still had the stungun in his hand. “You ready for another jolt?” he asked Masahiko, super-tense and angry.
“Eddie,” Maryalice said from the bed, “you ungrateful piece of shit…” Sitting up on the edge of the bed with her cigarette lighter held in both hands, pointing it straight at Eddie.
Eddie stiffened. You could see something run through him, freezing him there.
“Some basis,” said the Russian.
“Jesus, Maryalice,” Eddie said. “Where'd you get that? You got any idea how illegal that is, here?”
“Off a Russian boy,” she said. “Exit-holes the size of grapefruit…” Maryalice didn't sound drunk, exactly, but something about the look in her reddened eyes told Chia she was. Some very scary kind of drunk. “You think you can just use people up, Eddie? Use 'em up and throw 'em away?” She used the toe of one shoe to get the other off, then used her toe to get the first shoe off. She stood up in her stocking feet, swaying just a little bit, but the gun-shaped lighter stayed straight out from her shoulders, the way cops did it on television.
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 Maryalice's stocking feet, Eddie's shoes, the Russian's cowboy boots, and maybe the side of Masahiko's head.
“Ungrateful,” Maryalice said. “Ungrateful shit. 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—”
“Shit. Shit 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.
“Seven fucking years,” Maryalice said. “Seven. You weren't shit when I met you. God. You and that uppity-mobile talk. You make me sick. Who paid the fucking rent? Who bought the meals? Who bought you your fucking clothes, you vain piece of shit? You and your uppity-mobile and your image and you gotta have a smaller fucking phone than the next guy because I'm telling you, honey, you sure as fuck don't have a bigger dick!” 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 fucking gun and have a nice drink like a civilized person—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Maryalice screamed, at the top of her lungs, the words all run together.
Eddie's mouth snapped shut like a puppet's.
“Seven fucking years,” Maryalice said, making it sound like some children's charm, “seven fucking years and two of 'em here, Eddie, two of 'em here, and flying back and fucking forth for you, Eddie, and coming back. And it's always light, here…” Tears came, streaking Maryalice's makeup. “Everywh
ere. 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…” 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 Shinjuku. 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 “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” 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 stungun 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 knob 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 knob and he landed on his ass.
Chia saw the knob start to turn.
She put the fangs of the stungun against the doorknob and pushed the stud. And kept pushing it.
37. Work Experience
Laney sat in the van's front passenger seat again, the ‘phones on his lap, waiting for Arleigh to connect Kuwayama's gray module. He looked through the windshield 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 documenting the unhappy personal life of one of the field's leading researchers, but he knew that true AI was assumed 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 AI, 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 AI 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 porno 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.”
Shannon rapped on the door beside her. Held up a length of cable.
“Ready when you are,” she said to Laney, opening the door and sliding from behind the wheel.
Laney looked through the tinted windshield at the concrete wall and remembered policing the steps outside the Municipal Court in Gainesville with Shaquille and Kenny, two others from the orphanage. Shaquille had gone on to the drug-testing program with Laney, but Kenny had been transferred to another facility, near Denver. Laney had no idea what had become of either of them, but it had been Shaquille who'd pointed out to Laney that when the injection had the real stuff in it, your mouth filled with a taste like corroded metal, aluminum or something. Pl-ceeb-o, Shaquille had said, don't taste. And it was true. You could tell right away.
The three of them had had Work Experience there, five or six times, picking up the offerings people left before their day in court. These were considered to be a health hazard, and were usually carefully hidden, and you often found them by the smell, or the buzzing of flies. Parts of chickens, usually, tied up with colored yarn. What Shaquille said was the head of a goat, once. Shaquille said the people who left these things were drug dealers, and they did it because it was their religion. Laney and the others wore pale green latex gloves with orange Kevlar thimbles on the tips that gave you heat rash. They put the offerings in a white snap-top bucket with peeling Biohazard stickers. Shaquille had claimed to know the names of some of the gods these things were offered up to, but Laney hadn't been fooled. The names Shaquille made up, like O'Gunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously just that, and even Shaquille, dropping a white ball of chicken feathers into the bucket, had said an extra lawyer or two was probably a better investment. “But they do it while they waitin'. Hedge they bet.” Laney had actually preferred this to Work Experiences at fast-food franchises, even though it meant they got body-searched for drugs when they got back.
He'd told Yamazaki and Blackwell about knowing that Alison Shires was going to try to commit suicide, and now they must think he could see the future. But he knew he couldn't. That would be like those chicken parts the dealers hid around the courthouse steps changing what was going to happen. What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney knew he couldn't predict it, and something about the experience
of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seemed to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. Maybe something as small as Alison Shires buying the blades for a box-cutter. But if an earthquake had come, that night, and pitched her apartment down into Fountain Avenue…. Or if she'd lost the pack of blades…. But if she'd used credit to buy that Wednesday Night Special, which she couldn't do because it was illegal, and required cash, then it would've been obvious to anybody what she might be on the verge of doing.
Arleigh opened the passenger door. “You okay?”
“Sure,” Laney said, picking up the eyephones.
“Sure?”
“Let's do it.” He looked at the ‘phones.
“It's up to you.” She touched his arm. “We'll get you a doctor, after, okay?”
“Thanks,” Laney said, and put the 'phones on, the taste flooding his mouth—
The Lo/Rez data, translucent and intricately interpenetrated by the archives of the band's fan-base, was crawling with new textures, maps that resolved, when he focused on them, into—
Shaquille, in his federal-issue sweats, showing Laney the goat's head. It had been skinned, and nails had been driven into it, and Shaquille had pried open the jaw to show where the missing tongue had been replaced with a blood-soaked piece of brown paper with writing on it. That would be the name of the prosecutor, Shaquille had explained.
Laney shut his eyes, but the image remained.
He opened them on the idoru, her features rimmed with fur. She was looking at him. She wore some kind of embroidered, fur-lined hat, with earflaps, and snow was swirling around her, but then she flattened, dwindling into the texture-maps that ran down through the reef of data, and he let himself go, go with that, and he felt himself pass through the core of it, the very center, and out the other side.
“Wait—” he said, and there seemed to be a lag before he heard his own voice.
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