happening. Sorry I hit on you that way, but we had to be certain. If 3 you say it’s not happening, we’ll accept that. We all care about Rez 0 a 101 and the rest of the band, and we know you do too.” Chia added a bow of her own, one that seemed to take Hiromi off guard.
Now it was the robot’s turn to hesitate. She hadn’t expected Chia to just roll over that way. “Our friends in the Lo/Rez organization are very concerned that this pointless hoax not affect the public’s perception of Rez. You are aware that there has always been a tendency to portray him as the most creative but least stable member of the band.”
This last, at least, was true, though Rez’s style of instability was fairly mild, compared with most of his pop-cultural forebears. He had never been arrested, never spent a night in jail. But he was still the one most likely to get into trouble. It had always been part of his charm.
“Sure,” Chia said, playing along, relishing the uncertainty she was sure she was causing Hirorni. “And they try to make Lo out as some kind of boring techie, the practical one, but we know that isn’t true either.” She tagged it with a smile.
“Yes,” Hiromi said, “of course. But you are satisfied, then? You will explain to your chapter that this was all the result of some prank, and that all is well with Rez?”
“If you say so,” Chia said, “absolutely. And if that settles it, then I’ve got three more days to kill in Japan.”
“To kill?”
“Idiom,” Chia said. “Free time. Mitsuko says I ought to see Kyoto.’,
“Kyoto is very beautiful.
“I’m on my way,” Chia said. “Thanks for putting this site together for our meeting. It’s really great, and if you’ll save it, I’d love to access it later with the rest of my chapter. Maybe we could all get together here when I’m back in Seattle, introduce our chapters.”
“Yes Hiromi definitely didn’t know what to make ofChia’s attitude.
So worry about it, Chia thought. 102 William Gibson . U • “You knew,” Chia said. “You knew she’d do that.”
Mitsuko was blushing, bright red. Looking at the floor, her jelly-bag computer on her lap. “I am sorry. It was her decision.”
“They got to her, right? They told her to get rid of me, hush it up.
“She communicates with the Lo/Rez people privately. It is one of the privileges of her position.”
Chia still had her tip-sets on. “I have to talk with my chapter now. Can you give me a few minutes alone?” She felt sorry for Mitsuko, but she was still angry. “I’m not angry with you, okay?”
“I will make tea,” Mitsuko said.
When Mitsuko had closed the door behind her, Chia checked that the Sandbenders was still ported, put the goggles back on, and selected the Seattle chapter’s main site.
She never got there. Zona Rosa was waiting to cut her out. 15. Akihabara Low gray cloud pressing down on the sheer gray city. A glimpse of new buildings, through the scaled-down limo’s tinted, lace-curtained windows.
They passed an Apple Shires ad, a cobbled lane leading away into some hologram nursery land, where smiling juice bottles danced and sang. Laney’s jet lag was back, in some milder but more baroque format. Something compounded of a pervasive sense of guilt and a feeling of physical distance from his own body, as though the sensory signals arrived stale, after too long a passage, through some other country that he himself was never privy to.
“I thought we’d done with all of that when we got rid of those Siberian neuropaths,” Blackwell said. He was dressed entirely in black, which had the effect of somewhat reducing his bulk. I-Ic wore a soft, smocklike garment sewn from very black denim, multiple pockets around its wide hem. Laney thought it looked vaguely Japanese, in some medieval way. Something a carpenter might wear. “Bent as a dog’s hind legs. Picked them up touring the Kombinat states.”
“Neuropaths?”
“Filling Rez’s head with their garbage. He’s vulnerable to influences, touring. Combination of stress and boredom. Cities start to look the same. One hotel room after another. It’s a syndrome, is what itis.” “Where are we going?” 105 P “Akihbara”