Idoru (10 page)

Chia wasn't sure what she'd expected, but this definitely wasn't it. A messy room jammed with shipping cartons, and a bank of security monitors. The low ceiling was made of those fibery tiles that were hung on little metal rails; about half of them were missing, with wires and cables looping down from dusty-looking shadow. There were a couple of small desk lamps, one of them illuminating a stack of used instant-noodle containers and a black coffee mug filled with white plastic spoons. A Japanese man in a black meshback that said “Whiskey Clone” across the front was sitting in a swivel chair in front of the monitors, pouring himself a hot drink out of a big thermos with pink flowers on the side.

“Yo, Calvin,” Maryalice said, or that was what it sounded like.

“Hey,” the man said.

“Calvin's from Tacoma,” Maryalice said, as Chia watched Eddie, still carrying the suitcase, march straight through the room, through a door, and out of sight.

“Boss looks happy,” the man said, sounding no more Japanese than Maryalice. He took a sip from his thermos cup.

“Yeah,” Maryalice said. “He's so glad to see me, he's beside himself.”

“This too will pass.” Another sip. Looking at Chia from beneath the bill of the meshback. The letters in “Whiskey Clone” were the kind they'd use in a mall when they wanted you to think a place was traditional.

“This is Chia,” Maryalice said. “Met her in SeaTac,” and Chia noticed that she hadn't said she'd met her on the plane. Which made her remember that business with the DNA sampling and the hair-extensions.

“Glad to hear it's still there,” the man said. “Means there's some way back out of this batshit.”

“Now, Calvin,” Maryalice said, “you know you love Tokyo.”

“Sure. Had a place in Redmond had a bathroom the size of the whole apartment I got here, and it wasn't even a big bathroom. I mean, it had a shower. No tub or anything.”

Chia looked at the screens behind him. Lots of people there, but she couldn't tell what they were doing.

“Looks like a good night,” Maryalice said, surveying the screens.

“Just fair,” he said. “Fair to middling.”

“Quit talking like that,” Maryalice said. “You'll have me doing it.”

Calvin grinned. “But you're a good old girl, aren't you, Maryalice?”

“Please,” Chia said, “may I use a dataport?”

“There's one in Eddie's office,” Maryalice said. “But he's probably on the phone now. Why don't you go in the washroom there,” indicating another door, closed, “and have a wash. You're looking a little blurry. Then Eddie'll be done and you can call your friend.”

The washroom had an old steel sink and a very new, very complicated-looking toilet with at least a dozen buttons on top of the tank. These were labeled in Japanese. The polymer seat squirmed slightly, taking her weight, and she almost jumped up again. It's okay, she reassured herself, just foreign technology. When she was done, she chose one of the controls at random, producing a superfine spray of warm, perfumed water that made her gasp and jump back. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then stood well to the side and tried another button. This one seemed to do the trick: the toilet flushed, with a jetstream sound that reminded her of being on the plane.

As she washed her hands, and then her face, at the reassuringly ordinary sink, using pale blue liquid soap from a pump-top dispenser shaped like a one-eyed dinosaur, she heard the flushing stop and another sound begin. She looked back and saw a ring of purplish light oscillating, somewhere below the toilet seat. UV, she supposed, sterilizing it.

There was a poster of the Dukes of Nuke 'em taped on the wall, this hideous 'roidhead metal band. They were sweaty and blank-eyed, grinning, and the drummer was missing his front teeth. The lettering was in Japanese. She wondered why anyone in Japan would be into that, because groups like the Dukes were all about hating anything that wasn't their idea of American. But Kelsey, who'd been to Japan lots, with her father, had said that you couldn't tell what the Japanese would make of anything.

There wasn't anything here to dry your hands on. She got a t-shirt out of her bag and used that, although it didn't work very well. As she was kneeling to stuff the shirt back in, she noticed a corner of something she didn't recognize, but then Calvin cracked the door behind her.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“It's okay,” Chia said, zipping the bag shut.

“It's not,” he said, looking back over his shoulder, then back at her. “You really meet Maryalice at SeaTac?”

“On the plane,” Chia said.

“You're not part of it?”

Chia stood up, which made her feel kind of dizzy. “Part of what?”

He looked at her from beneath the brim of the black cap. “Then you really ought to get out of here. I mean right now.”

“Why?” Chia asked, although it didn't strike her as a bad idea at all.

“Nothing you want to know anything about.” There was a crash, somewhere behind him. He winced. “It's okay. She's just throwing things. They haven't gotten serious yet. Come on,” and he grabbed her bag by the shoulder strap and lifted it up. He was moving fast now, and she had to hustle to keep up with him. Out past the closed door of Eddie's office, past the bank of screens (where she thought she saw people line-dancing in cowboy hats, but she was never sure).

Calvin slapped his hand on the sensor-plate on the elevator door. “Take you to the garage,” he said, as the sound of breaking glass came from Eddie's office. “Hang a left, about twenty feet, there's another elevator. Skip the lobby; we got cameras there. Bottom button gets you the subway. Get on a train.” He passed her her bag.

“Which one?” Chia asked.

Maryalice screamed. Like something really, really hurt.

“Doesn't matter,” Calvin said, and quickly said something in Japanese to the elevator. The elevator answered, but he was already gone, the door closing, and then she was descending, her bag seeming to lighten slightly in her arms.

Eddie's Graceland was still there when the door slid open, a hulking wedge beside those other black cars. She found the second elevator Calvin had told her to take, its door scratched and dented. It had regular buttons, and it didtn't talk, and it took her down to malls bright as day, crowds moving through them, to escalators and platforms and mag-levs and the eternal logos tethered overhead.

She was in Tokyo at last.

11. Collapse of New Buildings

Laney's room was high up in a narrow tower faced with white ceramic tile. It was trapezoidal in cross section and dated from the eighties boomtown, the years of the Bubble. That it had survived the great earthquake was testimony to the skill of its engineers; that it had survived the subsequent reconstruction testified to an arcane tangle of ownership and an ongoing struggle between two of the city's oldest criminal organizations. Yamazaki had explained this in the cab, returning from New Golden Street.

“We were uncertain how you might feel about new buildings,” he'd said.

“You mean the nanotech buildings?” Laney had been struggling to keep his eyes open. The driver wore spotless white gloves.

“Yes. Some people find them disturbing.”

“I don't know. I'd have to see one.”

“You can see them from your hotel, I think.”

And he could. He knew their sheer brutality of scale from constructs, but virtuality had failed to convey the peculiarity of their apparent texture, a streamlined organicism. “They are like Giger's paintings of New York,” Yamazaki had said, but the reference had been lost on Laney.

Now he sat on the edge of his bed, staring blankly out at these miracles of the new technology, as banal and as sinister as such miracles usually were, and they were only annoying: the world's largest inhabited structures. (The Chernobyl containment structure was larger, but nothing human would ever live there.)

The umbrella Yamazaki had given him was collapsing into itself, shrinking. Going away.

The phone began to ring. He couldn't find it.

“Telephone,” he said. “Where is it?”

A nub of ruby light, timed to the rings, began to pulse from a flat rectangle of white cedar arranged on a square black tray on a bedside ledge. He picked it up. Thumbed a tiny square of mother-of-pearl.

“Hey,” someone said. “That Laney?”

“Who's calling?”

“Rydell. From the Chateau. Hans let me use the phone.” Hans was the night manager. “I get the time right? You having breakfast?”

Laney rubbed his eyes, looked out again at the new buildings. “Sure.”

“I called Yamazaki,” Rydell said. “Got your number.”

“Thanks,” Laney said, yawning, “but I—”

“Yamazaki said you got the gig.”

“I think so,” Laney said. “Thanks. Guess I owe—”

“Slitscan,” Rydell said. “All over the Chateau.”

“No,” Laney said, “that's over.”

“You know any Katherine Torrance, Laney? Sherman Oaks address? She's up in the suite you had, with about two vans worth of sensing gear. Hans figures they're trying to get a read on what you were doing up there, any dope or anything.”

Laney stared out at the towers. Part of a facade seemed to move, but it had to be his eyes.

“But Hans says there's no way they can sort the residual molecules out in those rooms anyway. Place has too much of a history.”

“Kathy Torrance? From Slitscan?”

“Not like they said they were, but they've got all these techs, and techs always talk too much, and Ghengis down in the garage saw the decals on some of the cases, when they were unloading. There's about twenty of 'em, if you don't count the gophers. Got two suites and four singles. Don't tip.”

“But what are they
doing?
”

“That sensor stuff. Trying to figure out what you got up to in the suite. And one of the bellmen saw them setting up a camera.”

The entire facade of one of the new buildings seemed to ripple, to crawl slightly. Laney closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, discovering a faint trace of pain residing there from the break. He opened his eyes. “But I never got
up
to anything.”

“Whatever.” Rydell sounded slightly hurt. “I just thought you ought to know, is all.”

Something was definitely happening to that facade. “I know. Thanks. Sorry.”

“I'll let you know if I hear anything,” Rydell said. “What's it like over there, anyway?”

Laney was watching a point of reflected light slide across the distant structure, a movement like osmosis or the sequential contraction of some sea creature's palps. “It's strange.”

“Bet it's interesting,” Rydell said. “Enjoy your breakfast, okay? I'll keep in touch.”

“Thanks,” Laney said, and Rydell hung up.

Laney put the phone back on the lacquer tray and stretched out on the bed, fully clothed. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the new buildings. But they were still there, in the darkness and the light behind his lids. And as he watched, they slid apart, deliquesced, and trickled away, down into the mazes of an older city.

He slid down with them.

12. Mitsuko

Chia used a public dataport in the deepest level of the station. The Sandbenders sent the number they'd given her for Mitsuko Mimura, the Tokyo chapter's “social secretary” (everyone in Tokyo chapter seemed to have a formal title). A girl's sleepy voice in Japanese from the Sandbenders' speakers. The translation followed instantly: “Hello? Yes? May I help you?”

“It's Chia McKenzie, from Seattle.”

“You are still in Seattle?”

“I'm here. In Tokyo.” She upped the scale on the Sandbenders' map. “In a subway station called Shinjuku.”

“Yes. Very good. Are you coming here now?”

“I'd sure like to. I'm really tired.”

The voice began to explain the route.

“It's okay,” Chia said, “my computer can do it. Just tell me the station I have to get to.” She found it on the map, set a marker. “How long will it take to get there?”

“Twenty to thirty minutes, depending on how crowded the trains are. I will meet you there.”

“You don't have to do that,” Chia said. “Just give me your address.”

“Japanese addresses are difficult.”

“It's okay,” Chia said, “I've got global positioning.” The Sand-enders, working the Tokyo telco, was already showing her Mitsuko Mimura's latitude and longitude. In Seattle, that only worked for business numbers.

“No,” Mitsuko said, “I must greet you. I am the social secretary.”

“Thanks,” Chia said. “I'm on my way.”

With her bag over her shoulder, left partly unzipped so she could follow the Sandbenders' verbal prompts, Chia rode an escalator up, two levels, bought a ticket with her cashcard, and found her platform. It was really crowded, as crowded as the airport, but when the train came she let the crowd pick her up and squash her into the nearest car; it would've been harder
not
to get on.

As they pulled out, she heard the Sandbenders announce that they were leaving Shinjuku station.

The sky was like mother-of-pearl when Chia emerged from the station. Gray buildings, pastel neon, a streetscape dotted with vaguely unfamiliar shapes. Dozens of bicycles were parked everywhere, the fragile-looking kind with paper-tube frames spun with carbon fiber. Chia took a step back as an enormous turquoise garbage truck rumbled past, its driver's white-gloved hands visible on the high wheel. As it cleared her field of vision, she saw a Japanese girl wearing a short plaid skirt and black biker jacket. The girl smiled. Chia waved.

Mitsuko's second-floor room was above the rear of her father's restaurant. Chia could hear a steady thumping sound from below, and Mitsuko explained that that was a food-prep robot that chopped and sliced things.

The room was smaller than Chia's bedroom in Seattle, but much cleaner, very neat and organized. So was Mitsuko, who had a razor-edged coppery diagonal bleached into her black bangs, and wore sneakers with double soles. She was thirteen, a year younger than Chia.

Mitsuko had introduced Chia to her father, who wore a white, short-sleeved shirt, a tie, and was supervising three white-gloved men in blue coveralls, who were cleaning his restaurant with great energy and determination. Mitsuko's father had nodded, smiled, said something in Japanese, and gone back to what he was doing. On their way upstairs, Mitsuko, who didn't speak much English, told Chia that she'd told her father that Chia was part of some cultural-exchange program, short-term homestay, something to do with her school.