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 guys dicks, all different sizes of them, molded in weird colors. Other objects she didnt recognize at alclass="underline" knobby balls, something that looked like a babys pacifier, miniature inner-tubes with long rubbery whiskers. In the middle of it all stood a little black-haired doll in a pretty kimono made of bright paper and gold cloth. But when she tried to pick it up, the wig and the kimono came off in one piece, revealing yet another shrink-wrapped replica, this one with delicately painted eyes and a Cupids-bow mouth. When she tried to put the wig and kimono back on, it fell over, knocking over everything on its shelf, so she closed the cabinet. Then she washed her hands again.
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 shed seen in Japan that werent 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, shes 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 hed anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japans 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 agentseigenheads, 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.
Were 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 elseLaney saw that it was Lo, the guitaristto 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.
Arleighs sharp intake of breath. Shed 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 tennis-playing Frenchmen of TIDAL, why it was that he, Laney, had been chosen as the first (and, as it would happen, the only) recipient of the peculiar ability they sought to impart to him. He hadnt applied for the job, he said, and had no reason to believe the position had even been advertised. He had applied, he told Delouvrier, to be a trainee service rep.
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?
Delouvriers 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.
Dont think of a purple cow. Or was it a brown one? Laney couldnt remember. Dont look at the idorus face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.
He could watch her hands. Watch the way she ate.
The meal was elaborate, many small courses served on individual rectangular plates. Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei, and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was simultaneously veiled with a flawless copy, holo food on a holo plate.
Even the movement of her chopsticks brought on peripheral flickers of nodal vision. Because the chopsticks were information too, but nothing as dense as her features, her gaze. As each empty plate was removed, the untouched serving would reappear.