Idoru

“I’ve got a software agent that looks like that,” Chia said, “but he isn’t supposed to be there unless I cross a bridge. And I couldn’t find him, when I was here before.”

“This is not the one you saw?”

“No,” Chia said.

An aura bristled around Zona, who grew taller as the spikey cloud of light increased in resolution. Shifting, overlapping planes like ghosts of broken glass. Iridescent insects whirling there.

As the figure in the greatcoat drew toward them across the Piazza’s patchworked stone, snow resolved behind it; it left footprints.

Zona’s aura bristled with gathering menace, a thunderhead of flickering darkness forming above the shattered sheets of light. There was a sound that reminded Chia of one of those blue-light bug-zappers popping a particularly juicy one, and then vast wings cut the air, so close: Zona’s Colombian condors, things from the data-havens. And gone. Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.

Behind the advancing figure of her Music Master, Chia saw the facades of the great square vanish entirely behind curtains of snow.

Zona’s switchblade seemed the size of a chainsaw now, its toothed spine rippling, alive. The golden dragons from the plastic handles chased their fire-maned double tails around her brown fist, through miniature clouds of Chinese embroidery. “I’ll take you out,” Zona said, as if savoring each word.

Chia saw the world of snow that had swallowed her Venice abruptly contract, shrinking, following the line of footprints, and the features of the Music Master became those of Rei Toei, the idoru.

“You already have,” said the idoru.

33. Topology

Arleigh was waiting for him by the elevator, on the fifth and lowest of the hotel’s parking levels. She’d changed back into the work clothes he’d first seen her in. Despite the patch of micropore on her swollen lip, the jeans and nylon bomber jacket made her look wide-awake and competent, two things Laney felt he might never be again.

“You look terrible,” she said.

The ceiling here was very low, and flocked with something drab and wooly, to reduce noise. Lines of bioluminescent cable were bracketed to it, and the unmoving air was heavy with the sugary smell of exhausted gasohol. Spotless ranks of small Japanese cars glittered like bright wet candy. “Yamazaki seemed to feel it was urgent,” Laney said.

“If you don’t do it now,” she said, “we don’t know how long it’ll take to get it all up and ru

“So we’ll do it.”

“You don’t look like you should even be walking.”

He started walking, unsteadily, as if by way of demonstration. “Where’s Rez?”

“Blackwell’s taken him back to his hotel. The sweep team didn’t find anything. This way.” She led him along a line of surgically clean grills and bumpers. He saw the green van parked with its front to the wall, its hatch and doors open. It was fenced behind orange plastic barricades, and surrounded by the black modules. Sha

“What’s that?” Laney asked.

“Espresso,” he said, his hand inside the housing, “but I think the gasket’s warped.”

“Sit here, Laney,” Arleigh said, indicating the van’s front passenger seat. “It reclines.”

Laney climbed up into the seat. “Don’t try it,” he said. “You might not be able to wake me up.”

Yamazaki appeared, over Arleigh’s shoulder, blinking. “You will access the Lo/Rez data as before, Laney-san, but you will simultaneously access the fan-activity base. Depth of field. Dimensionality. The fan-activity data providing the degree of personalization you requite. Parallax, yes?”

Arleigh handed Laney the eyephones. “Have a look,” she said. “If it doesn’t work, to hell with it.” Yamazaki flinched. “Either way, we’ll go and find you the hotel doctor, after.”

Laney settled his neck against the seat’s headrest and put the ’phones on.

Nothing. He closed his eyes. Heard the ’phones power up. Opened his eyes to those same faces of data he’d seen earlier, in Akihabara. Characterless. Institutional in their regularity.

“Here comes the fan club,” he heard Arleigh say, and the barren faces were suddenly translucent, networked depths of postings and commentary revealed there in baffling organic complexity.

“Something’s—” he started to say, but then he was back in the apartment in Stockholm, with the huge ceramic stoves. But it was a place this time, not just a million tidily filed factoids. Shadows of flames danced behind the narrow mica panes of the stove’s ornate iron door.

Candlelight. The floors were wooden planks, each one as broad as Laney’s shoulders, spread with the soft tones of old carpets. Something directed his point of view into the next room, past a leather sofa spread with more and smaller rugs, and showed him the black window beyond the open drapes, where snowflakes, very large and ornate, fell with a deliberate gravity past the frosted panes.

“Getting anything?” Arleigh. Somewhere far away.

He didn’t answer, watching as his view reversed. To be maneuvered down a central hallway, where a tall oval mirror showed no reflection as he passed. He thought of CD-ROMs he’d explored in the orphanage: haunted castles, monstrously infested spacecraft abandoned in orbit… Click here. Click there. And somehow he’d always felt that he never found the central marvel, the thing that would have made the hunt worthwhile. Because it wasn’t there, he’d finally decided; it never quite was, and so he’d lost interest in those games.

But the central marvel here—click on bedroom—was Rei Toei. Propped on white pillows at the head of a sea of white, her head and gowned shoulders showing above eyelet lace and the glow of fine cottons.

“You were our guest tonight,” she said. “I wasn’t able to speak with you. I am sorry. It ended badly, and you were injured.”

He looked at her, waiting for the mountain valleys and the bells, but she only looked back, nothing came, and he remembered what Yamazaki had said about bandwidth.

A stab of pain in his side. “How do you know? That I was injured?”

“The preliminary Lo/Rez security report. Technician Paul Sha

“Why are you here?” (“Laney,” he heard Arleigh say, “are you okay?”)

“I found it,” the idoru said. “Isn’t it wonderful? But he has not been here since the renovations were completed. So, really, he’s never been here. But you’ve been here before, haven’t you? I think that’s how I found it.” She smiled. She was very beautiful here, floating in this whiteness. He hadn’t been able to really look at her in the Western World.

“I accessed it earlier,” he said, “but it wasn’t like this.”

“But then it… rounded out, didn’t it? It became so much better. Because one of the artisans who reassembled the stoves had made a record of it all, when it was done. Just for herself, for her friends, but you see what it’s done. It was in the data from the fan club.” She gazed in delight at a single taper, banded horizontally in cream and indigo, that burned in a candlestick of burnished brass. Beside it on the bedside table were a book and an orange. “I feel very close to him, here.”

“I’d feel closer to him if you’d put me back, outside.”

“In the street? It’s snowing. And I’m not certain the street is there.”

“In the general data-construct, Please. So I can do my job…”

“Oh,” she said, and smiled at him, and he was staring into the tangled depths of the data-faces.

“Laney?” Arleigh said, touching his shoulder. “Who are you talking to?”

“The idoru,” Laney said.

“In nodal manifestation?” Yamazaki.

“No. She was there in the data, I don’t know how. She was in a model of his place in Stockholm. Said she got there because I’d cruised it before. Then I asked her to put me back out here.