Idoru

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 Kollectibles,” 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 isplace, 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 a

She asked the Sandbenders where she was porting from now and it said Helsinki, Finland. So that reporting capability at the hotel was working, at least.

Just before twilight at Zona’s, like always. Chia sca

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 colo

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?

And it was only as she crossed her third bridge that she noticed that he wasn’t there.

–Hey.

She stopped. A shop window displayed the masks of Carnival, the really ancient ones. Black, penis-nosed leather, empty eye-holes. A mirror draped with yellowed crepe.

Checking the Sandbenders to make sure she hadn’t turned him off. She hadn’t.

Chia closed her eyes and counted to three. Made herself feel the carpeted floor she sat on in the Hotel Di. She opened her eyes.

At the end of the narrow Venetian street, down the tilted, stepped cobbles, where it opened out into a small square or plaza, an unfamiliar figure stood beside the central fountain.

She pulled the goggles off without bothering to close Venice.

Masahiko sat opposite her, his legs crossed, the black cups sucked up against his eyes. His lips were moving, silently, and his hands, on his knees, in their black tip-sets, traced tiny fingerpatterns in the air.

Maryalice was sitting on the furry pink bed with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She had a little square gray gun in her hand, and Chia saw how the freshly glossed red of her nails contrasted with the pearly plastic of the handle.

“Started again,” Maryalice said, around the cigarette. She pulled the trigger, causing a small golden flame to spring up from the muzzle, and used it to light her cigarette. “Tokyo. I’ll tell you. Does it every time.”