Idoru

After studying the seat and the ominous black bowl, she lowered her pants, positioned herself strategically over the toilet, squatted carefully, and urinated without sitting down. She’d let someone else flush that one, she decided, while she washed her hands at the basin, but then she heard it flush itself.

There was a glossy pink paper bag beside the basin with the words “Teen Teen Toiletry Bag” printed on it in swirly white script. It was sealed at the top with a silver stick-on bow. She removed the bow and looked inside. Lots of different little give-away cosmetics and at least a dozen different kinds of condoms, everything packaged to look more or less like candy.

There was a shiny black cabinet to the left of the mirror above the basin, the only thing in the room that looked Japanese in that old-fashioned way. She opened it; a light came on inside, revealing three glass shelves arranged with shrink-wrapped plastic models of guy’s dicks, all different sizes of them, molded in weird colors. Other objects she didn’t recognize at all: knobby balls, something that looked like a baby’s pacifier, miniature i

Back in the Ring-Ding room, Masahiko was cabling his computer to a black console on a shelf full of entertainment gear. Chia put her bag on the bed. Something chimed softly, twice, and then the surface of the bed began to ripple, slow osmotic waves centering in on the bag, which began to rise slightly, and fall…

“Ick,” she said, and pulled the bag off the bed, which chimed again and began to subside.

Masahiko glanced in her direction, but went back to whatever he was doing with the equipment on the shelf.

Chia found that the room had a window, but it was hidden behind some kind of softscreen. She tried the clips that held the screen in place until she got the one that let her slide the screen aside on hidden tracks. The window looked out on a chainlinked parking lot beside a low, beige building sided with corrugated plastic. There were three trucks parked there, the first vehicles she’d seen in Japan that weren’t new or particularly clean. A wet-looking gray cat emerged from beneath one of the trucks and sprang into the shadow beneath another. It was still raining.

“Good,” she heard Masahiko say, evidently satisfied. “We go to Walled City.”

25. The Idoru

How do you mean, she’s ‘here’?” Laney asked Yamazaki, as they rounded the rear of the Sherman tank. Clots of dry clay clung to the segments of its massive steel treads.

“Mr. Kuwayama is here,” Yamazaki whispered. “He represents her—”

Laney saw that several people were already seated at a low table.

Two men. A woman. The woman must be Rei Toei.

If he’d anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. That was usually the way in Hollywood, and the formula tended to be even more rigid, in the case of software agents—eigenheads, their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity.

She was nothing like that.

Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.

And now her eyes met his.

He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon. The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.

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, something 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 te

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.”