Idoru

“The Men’s,” Laney said.

“You missed the show.”

“What happened?”

“Damn it,” she said, “my coat’s up there.”

“Keep moving, keep moving,” Willy Jude said, More stairs, more landings, the rippling walls of the Grotto giving way to concrete. People kept rushing down, past them, knots and singles, taking the stairs too fast. Laney rubbed his ribs where he’d come down on the glass. It hurt, but somehow he hadn’t been cut.

“They looked like Kombinat,” Arleigh said. “Big ugly guys, bad outfits. I couldn’t tell if they were after Rez or the idoru. Like they just thought they could walk in and do it.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “Kuwayama had at least a dozen of his own security people at the two closest tables. And Blackwell probably prays for a scene like that every night before he goes to bed. He reached into his jacket, then the lights went out.”

“He put ’em out,” Willy Jude said. “Some kinda remote. He can see better in the dark than I can with these infrareds. Du

“How’d you get out?” Laney asked Arleigh.

“Flashlight. In my purse.”

“Laney-san…”

Looking back to see Yamazaki, one sleeve of his green plaid coat pulled free at the shoulder, his glasses missing a lens. Arleigh had taken a phone from her purse and was cursing softly as she tried to get it to work.

Yamazaki caught up with them at the next landing. The four of them continued down together, Laney still holding the blind drummer’s hand.

When they reached the street, the Western World’s sullen crew of doorpeople were nowhere in sight. A single policeman with a plastic rain-cover on his cap was muttering frantically into a microphone clipped to the front of his rain-cape. He was walking in tight circles as he did this, gesturing dramatically with a white baton at nothing in particular. Several kinds of alien siren were converging on the Western World, and Laney thought he could hear a helicopter.

Willy Jude dropped Laney’s hand and adjusted his video-goggles to the street’s light-level. “Where’s my car?”

Arleigh lowered her phone, which apparently was working now. “You’d better come with us, Willy. Some kind of tactical unit is on the way…

“Nothing like it,” Rez said, and Laney turned, to see the singer emerging from the Western World, brushing something white from his dark jacket. “That physical thing. Too much time in the virtual, we forget that, don’t we? You’re Leyner?” Extending his hand.

“Laney,” Laney said, as Arleigh’s dark green van pulled up beside them.

28. A Matter of Credit

Maryalice opened a curved drawer that was built into the pink bed’s headboard. She was wearing a black skin-suit with big red Ashleigh Modine Carter-style sequin roses on the lapels. She took out a little blue glass dish and balanced it on her knee. “I hate these places,” she said. “There’s lots of ways to make sex ugly, but it’s kind of hard to make it look this ridiculous.” She knocked the gray end off her cigarette, into the blue saucer. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Fourteen,” Chia said.

“About what I told ’em. You’re fourteen, fifteen, for real, and no way you were on to me. I was on to you, right? It was my move. I planted on you. But they don’t believe me. Say you’re some kind of operator, say I’m just stupid, say that Rez guy sent you to SeaTac to get the stuff. Say you’re a set-up and I’m crazy to believe a kid couldn’t do that.” She sucked on the cigarette, squinting. “Where is it?” She looked down at Chia’s bag, open on the white carpet. “There?”

“I didn’t mean to take it. I didn’t know it was there.”

“I know that,” Maryalice said. “What I told ’em. I meant to get it back off you at the club.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Chia said. “It just scares me.”

“Sometimes I bring stuff back for Eddie. Party favors for the club. It’s illegal, but it’s not all thatillegal, you know? Not hard stuff, really. But this time he was doing something else on the side, something with the Russians, and I didn’t like it. That’s what scares me, that stuff. Like its alive.”

“What stuff?”

“That. Assemblers, they’re called.”

Chia looked at her bag. “That thing in my bag is a nanotech assembler?”

“More like what you start with. Kind of an egg, or a little factory. You plug that thing into another machine that programs ’em, and they start building themselves out of whatever’s handy. And when there’s enough of ’em, they start building whatever it was you wanted them to. There’s some kind of law against selling that stuff to the Kombinat, so they want it bad. But Eddie worked out a way to do it. I met these two creepy German guys in the SeaTac Hyatt. They’d flown in there from wherever, I figured maybe Africa.” She mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the little blue dish, making it smell even worse. “They didn’t want to give it to me, because they were expecting Eddie. Lot of back and forth on the phone. Finally they did. I was supposed to put it in the suitcase with the other stuff, but it made me nervous. Made me wa

Chia saw that Maryalice didn’t have her hair-extensions in anymore. “When they were taking DNA samples, in SeaTac,” Chia said, “you stuck the end of your extension in there.

Maryalice cracked the seal on the little bottle, opened it, drained it in a single gulp, and shivered. “Those extensions are all my own hair,” she said. “Grew ’em out when I was on sort of a health diet, understand? They catch people doing recreationals, when they take those hair samples. Some recreationals, they stay in your hair a long time.” Maryalice put the empty bottle down beside the blue dish. “What’s he doing?” Pointing at Masahiko.

“Porting,” Chia said, unable to think of a quick way to explain the Walled City.

“I can see that. You came here ’cause these places’ll re-post, right?”

“But you found us anyway.”

“I got co

“But how’d you get in? It was all locked.”

“I know my way around these places, honey. I know my way entirely too well.”

Masahiko removed the black cups that covered his eyes, saw Maryalice, looked down at the cups, then back up at Chia.

“Maryalice,” Chia said.

Gomi Boy presented like a life-size anime of himself, huge eyes and even taller hair. “Who drank the vodka?” he asked.

“Maryalice,” Chia said.

“Who’s Maryalice?”

“She’s in the room at the hotel,” Chia said.

“That was the equivalent of twenty minutes porting,” Gomi Boy said. “How can there be someone in your room at the Hotel Di?”

“It’s complicated,” Chia said. They were back in Masahiko’s room in the Walled City. They’d just clicked back, none of that maze-ru

“Your cash card is good for twenty-six more minutes of room-time,” Gomi Boy said. “Unless your friend hits the mini-bar again. Do you have an account in Seattle?”