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 didnt 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 dont 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 hadnt 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, Im 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 Kelseys address instead, but all she got was that annoying marble anteroom and the voice, not Kelseys, that said that Kelsey Van Troyer wasnt in at the moment. Chia exited without leaving a message. The next address she tried was Zonas, but Zonas provider was down. That happened a lot, in Mexico, and particularly in Mexico City, where Zona lived. She decided to try Zonas secret place, because it was on a mainframe in Arizona and it was never down. She knew Zona didnt like people just showing up there, because Zona didnt want the company that had built the original website, and then forgotten about it, to discover that Zona had gotten in and set up her own country.
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 Zonas, like always. Chia scanned the floor of a dry swimming pool, looking for Zonas lizards, but she didnt see them. Usually they were right there, waiting for you, bur not this time. Zona?
Chia looked up, wondering if shed 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. Theyd brought people here to sell them airplanes, corporate jets, when the jets were still in the design phase. Thered been a white concrete landing strip, but Zona had folded it up into a canyon and mapped over it. All the local color was Zonas stuff: the cooking fires and the dead pools and the broken walls. Shed 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.
Its okay. One of the lizards. Shes just not here now.
A twig snapped. Closer.
Dont fuck around, Zona.
But she exited.
The bit-mapped fish swam back and forth.
That had been very creepy. She wasnt sure why, exactly, but it had been. Still was, kind of. She looked at the door to her bedroom and found herself wondering what shed 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 mothers room would have been? What if she opened it and her mothers 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 colonnades springing up around her, with the hour before a winters dawn for backlight.
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 Masahikos 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 wasnt 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 hadnt turned him off. She hadnt.
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. Ill tell you. Does it every time.
27. That Physical Thing
Laney was at a black rubber urinal in the Mens when he noticed the Russian combing his hair in the mirror.
Or least it looked like black rubber, with sort of floppy edges. They obviously had the plumbing working, but he wondered what theyd say if you asked to make your own contribution to the Grotto? On his way here hed noticed that one of the bars was topped with a slab of something murky green and translucent, lit from below, and hed hoped they hadnt made that from what theyd sawn out of the stairwell.
Dinner was over and hed probably had too much sake with it. He and Arleigh and Yamazaki had watched Rez meeting this new version of the idoru, the one Willy Jude saw as a big silver thermos. And Blackwell was having to get used to that, because Laney guessed that the bodyguard hadnt had any idea shed be here, not until hed walked in and Rez had told him.