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.
“Perspective,” the idoru said. “Yamazaki’s parallax.” Something seemed to turn him around, so that he looked directly at the data, but from some new angle, and from a great distance. And all around it, there was… nothing at all.
But through the data, like some infinitely more complex version of Arleigh’s Realtree, ran two vaguely parallel armatures. Rez and the idoru. They were sculpted in duration, Rez’s beginning, at the far end of it all, as something very minor, the first hints of his career. And growing, as it progressed, to something braided, multistranded… But then it began to get smaller again, Laney saw, the strands loosening… And that would be the point, he thought, where the singer began to become the thing that Kathy hated, the one who took up celebrity space just because he was a celebrity, because he was of a certain order of magnitude…
The idoru’s data began somewhere after that, and it began as something smoothly formed, deliberate, but lacking complexity. But at the points where it had swerved closest to Rez’s data, he saw that it had begun to acquire a sort of complexity. Or randomness, he thought. The human thing. That’s how she learns.
And both these armatures, these sculptures in time, were nodal, and grew more so toward the point, the present, where they intertwined…
He stood beside the idoru on the beach he’d seen recorded on the binoculars in the bedroom of the guesthouse in Ireland. Brownish-green sea flecked with whitecaps, stiff wind catching at the earflaps of her hat. He couldn’t feel that wind, but he could hear it, so loud now that he had trouble hearing her over it. “Can you see them?” she shouted.
“See what?”
“The faces in the clouds! The nodal points! I can see nothing! You must indicate them to me!”
And she was gone, the sea with her, Laney staring into the data again, where the digitized histories of Rez and Rei Toei mingled, on the verge of something else. If he had tried, in Los Angeles, would the box-cutter blade have emerged from Alison Shires’ nodal point?
He tried.
He was looking out across a fuzzy, indistinct white plain. Not snow. To where a pair of vast and very ornate brown-on-brown Western boots swung past against a cliff-like backdrop of violent pink. Then the image was gone, replaced by the rotating form of a. three-dimensional object, though Laney had no idea what it was supposed to be. With no clues as to scale, it looked vaguely like a Los Angeles bus with the wheels removed.
“Suite 17,” the idoru said. “Hotel Di.”
“Die?” Bus vanished, apparently taking boots with it.
“What is a ‘love hotel’?”
“What?”
“Love. Hotel.”
“Where people go to make love—I think.”
“What is ‘Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C-slash-7A’?”
“I don’t know,” Laney said.
“But you have just shown it to me! It isour union, our intersection, that from which the rest must unfold!”
“Wait,” Laney said, “wait, you’ve got anotherone here; they sort of overlap—” The trying made his side hurt, but there were hills in the distance, twisted trees, the low roofline of a wooden house—
But the idoru was gone, and the house, its fabric eaten from within, was shimmering, folding. And then a glimpse of something towering, mismatched windows and a twisting, moire sky.
Then Arleigh pulled the ’phones off. “Stop screaming,” she said. Yamazaki was beside her. “Stop it, Laney.”
He took a long, shuddering breath, braced his palms against the padded cowling of the dash, and closed his eyes. He felt Arleigh’s hand against his neck.
“We have to go there,” he said.
“Go where?”
“Suite 17. We’ll be late, for the wedding…”
38. Star
When the stungun quit making that zapping sound, Chia dropped it. The doorknob wasn’t turning. No sound from the bathroom but the faint recorded cries of tropical birds. She whipped around. Masahiko was trying to get his computer into the plaid carrier-bag. She dived for her Sandbenders, grabbed it up, still trailing her goggles, and turned to the pink bed. Her bag was beside it on the floor, with the blue and yellow SeaTac plastic showing. She pulled that out, the thing still in it, and tossed it on the bed. She bent to shove her Sandbenders into her bag, but glanced back at the bathroom door when she thought she heard something.
The knob was turning again.
The Russian opened the door. When he let go of the knob, she saw that his hand was inside something that looked like a Day-Glo pink hand-puppet. One of the sex toys from the black cabinet. He was using it as insulation. He peeled it off his fingers and tossed it back over his shoulder. The bird sounds faded as he stepped out.
Masahiko, who’d been trying to get one of his feet into one of his black shoes, was looking at the Russian too. He still had a paper slipper on the other foot.
“You are going?” the Russian said.
“It’s on the bed,” Chia said. “We didn’t have anything to dowith it.”
The Russian noticed the stungun on the carpet, beside the pointed toe of his boot. He raised the boot and brought his heel down. Chia heard the plastic case crack. “Artemi, my friend of Novokuznetskaya, is doing himself great indignity with this.” He prodded the fragments of the stungun with his toe. “Is wearing very tight jeans, Artemi, leather, is fashion. Putting in front pocket, trigger is pressing accident. Artemi is shocking his manhood.” The Russian showed Chia his large, uneven teeth. “Still we are laughing, yes?”
“Please,” Chia said. “We just want to go.”
The Russian stepped past Eddie and Maryalice, who lay tangled on the carpet. “You are accident like Artemi to his manhood, yes? You are only happening to this owner of fine nightclub.” He indicated the unconscious Eddie. “Who is smuggler and other things, very complicated, but you, you are only accident?”
“That’s right,” Chia said.
“You are of Lo/Rez.” It sounded like Lor-ess. He stepped closer to Chia and looked down into the bag. “You are knowing what this is.”
“No,” Chia lied. “I’m not.”
The Russian looked at her. “We are not liking accident, ever. Not allowingaccident.” His hands came up, then, and she saw that the back of the third joint of each of his fingers was pink with those dots, each one the size of the end of a pencil eraser. She’d seen those at her last school and knew they meant a laser had recently been used to remove a tattoo.
She looked up at his face. He looked like someone who was about to do something that he might n
ot want to do, but that he knew he had to.
But then she saw his eyes slide past her, narrowing, and she turned in time to see the door to the corridor swing inward. A man wider than the doorway seemed to flow into the room. There was a big X of flesh-colored tape across one side of his face, and he was wearing a coat the color of dull metal. Chia saw one huge, scarred hand slip into his coat; the other held something black that ended in a mag-strip tab.
“Yob tvoyu mat,” said the Russian, soft syllables of surprise.
The stranger’s hand emerged, holding something that looked to Chia like a very large pair of chrome-plated scissors, but then unfolded, with a series of small sharp clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glittering, skeletal axe, its leading edge hawk-like and lethal, the head behind it tapering like an icepick.
“My mother?” said the stranger, who sounded somehow delighted. “Did you say my mother?” His face was shiny with scar tissue. More scars crisscrossed his shaven, stubbled skull.
“Ah, no,” the Russian said, lifting his hands so that the palms showed. “Figuring of speech, only.”
Another man stepped in, around the man with the axe, and this one had dark hair and wore a loose black suit. The headband of a monocle-rig crossed his forehead, the unit covering his right eye. The eye she could see was wide and bright and green, but still it took a second before she recognized him.
Then she had to sit down on the pink bed.
“Where is it?” this man who looked like Rez asked. (Except he looked thicker, somehow, his cheeks unhollowed.)
Neither the Russian nor the man with the axe answered. The man with the axe closed the door behind him with his heel.
The green eye and the video-monocle looked at Chia. “Do you know where it is?”
“What?”
“The biomech primer module, or whatever it is you call it…” He paused, touching the phone in his right ear, listening. “Excuse me: ‘Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C=slash-7A.’ I love you.”
Chia stared.
“Rei Toei,” he explained, touching the headband, and she knew that it had to be him.
“It’s here. In this bag.”
He reached into the blue and yellow plastic and drew the thing out, turning it over in his hands. “This? This is our future, the medium of our marriage?”
“Excuse, please,” the Russian said, “but you must know this is belonging to me.” He sounded genuinely sorry.
Rez looked up, the nanotech unit held casually in his hands. “It’s yours?” Rez tilted his head, like a bird, curious. “Where did you get it?”
The Russian coughed. “An exchange. This gentleman on floor.”
Rez saw Eddie and Maryalice. “Are they dead?”
“Volted, yes? Being most-time nonlethal. Your girl on bed.”
Rez looked at Chia. “Who are you?”
“Chia Pet McKenzie,” she said automatically. “I’m from Seattle. I’m… I’m in your fan club.” She felt her face burning.
The brow above the green eye went up. He seemed to be listening to something. “Oh,” he said, and paused. “She did? Really? That’s wonderful.” He smiled at Chia. “Rei says you’ve been totally central to everything, and that we have a great deal to thank you for.”
Chia swallowed. “She does?”
But Rez had turned to the Russian. “We have to have this.” He raised the nanotech unit. “We’ll negotiate now. Name your price.”
“Rozzer,” the man at the door said, “you can’t dothat. This bastard’s Kombinat.”
Chia saw the green eye close, as if Rez were making a conscious effort to calm himself. When it opened, he said: “But they’re the government, aren’t they, Blackwell? We’ve negotiatedwith governments before.”
“It’s for the legals,” the scarred man said, but now there was an edge of worry in his voice.
The Russian seemed to hear it too. He slowly lowered his hands. “What were you planning to dowith this?” Rez asked him. The Russian looked down at the thing in Rez’s hands, as if considering, then raised his eyes. A muscle was jumping, in his cheek. He seemed to come to a decision. “We are developing ambitious public works project,” he said.
“Oh Jesus,” Maryalice said from the carpet, so hoarsely that at first Chia couldn’t identify the source. “They must’ve putsomething in that. They did. I swear to Godthey did.” And then she threw up.
39. Trans
Yamazaki lost his balance as the van shot up the narrow ramp, out of the hotel. Laney, holding Arleigh’s phone to the dashboard map, toning the number of the Hotel Di, heard him crash down on the shredded bubble-pack. The display bleeped as Laney completed the number; grid-segments clicked across the screen. “You okay, Yamazaki?”
“Thank you,” Yamazaki said. “Yes.” Getting to his knees again, he craned around the headrest of Laney’s seat. “You have located the hotel?”
“Expressway,” Arleigh said, glancing at the display, as they swung right, up an entrance ramp. “Hit speed-dial three. Thanks. Gimme.” She took the phone. “McCrae. Yeah. Priority? Fuckyou, Alex. Ring me through to him.” She listened. “Di? Like D, I? Shit. Thanks.” She clicked off.
“What is it?” Laney asked, as they swung onto the expressway, the giant bland brow of an enormous articulated freight-hauler pulling up behind and then past them, quilted stainless steel flashing in Laney’s peripheral vision. The van rocked with the big truck’s passage.
“I tried to get Rez. Alex says he left the hotel, with Blackwell. Headed the same place we are.”
“When?”
“Just about the time you were having your screaming fit, when you had the ’phones on,’ ” Arleigh said. She looked grim. “Sorry,” she said.
Laney had had to argue with her for fifteen minutes, back there, before she’d agreed to this. She’d kept saying she wanted him to see a doctor. She’d said that she was a technician, not a researcher, not security, and that her first responsibility was to stay with the data, the modules, because anyone who got those got almost the entire Lo/Rez Partnership business plan, plus the books, plus whatever Kuwayama had entrusted them with in the gray module. She’d only given in after Yamazaki had sworn to take full responsibility for everything, and after Shannon and the man with the ponytail had promised not to leave the modules. Not even, Arleigh said, to piss. “Go against the wall, God damn it,” she’d said, “and get half a dozen of Blackwell’s boys down here to keep you company.”
“He knows,” Laney said. “She told him it’s there.”
“What is there, Laney-san?” asked Yamazaki, around the headrest.
“I don’t know. Whatever it is, they think it’ll facilitate their marriage.”
“Do youthink so?” Arleigh asked, passing a string of bright little cars.
“I guess it must be capable of it,” Laney said, as something under her seat began to clang, loudly and insistently. “But I don’t think that means it’ll necessarily happen. What the hell is that?”
“I’m exceeding the speed limit,” she said. “Every vehicle in Japan is legally required to be equipped with one of these devices. You speed, it dings.”
Laney turned to Yamazaki. “Is that true?”
“Of course,” Yamazaki said, over the steady clanging.
“And people don’t just disconnect them?”
“No,” Yamazaki said, looking puzzled. “Why would they?”
Arleigh’s phone rang. “McCrae. Willy?” Silence as she listened.
Then Laney felt the van sway slightly. It slowed until the clanging suddenly stopped. She lowered the phone.
“What is it?” Laney asked.
“Willy Jude,” she said. “He… He was just watching one of the clubbing channels. They said Rez is dead. They said he was dead. In a love hotel.”
40. The Business
When nobody did anything to help Maryalice, Chia got up from the bed, squeezed past the Russian and into the bathroom, triggering the ambient b
ird track. The black cabinet was open, its light on, and there were Day-Glo penis-things scattered across the black and white tile floor. She took a black towel and a black washcloth from a heated chrome rack, wet the washcloth at the black and chrome basin, and went back to Maryalice. She folded the towel, put it down over the vomit on the white carpet, and handed Maryalice the washcloth.
Nobody said anything, or tried to stop her. Masahiko had sat back down on the carpet, with his computer between his feet. The scarred man, who seemed to take up as much space as anything in the room, had lowered his axe. He held it down, along a thigh wider than Chia’s hips, with the spike jutting from beside his knee.
Maryalice, who’d managed to sit up now, wiped her mouth with the cloth, taking most of her lipstick with it. When Chia straightened up, a whiff of the Russian’s cologne made her stomach heave.
“You’re a developer, you say?” Rez still held the nanotech unit.
“You are asking many questions,” the Russian said. Eddie groaned, then, and the Russian kicked him. “Basis,” the Russian said.
“A public works project?” Rez raised his eyebrow. “A water filtration plant, something like that?”
The Russian kept his eye on the big man’s axe. “In Tallin,” he said, “we soon are building exclusive mega-mall, affluent gated suburbs, plus world-class pharmaceutical manufakura. We are unfairly denied most advanced means of production, but we are desiring one hundred percent modern operation.”
“Rez,” the man with the axe said, “give it up. This goon and his mates need that thing to build themselves an Estonian drug factory. Time I took you back to the hotel.”
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