Idoru

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 ski

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 begi

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.