“And Slitscan hired you on the basis of that?”
“They hired me when I demonstrated that it works, But I can’t do that with the kind of data you showed me today”
“Why not?”
Laney raised his beer. “Because it’s like trying to have a drink with a bank. It’s not a person. It doesn’t drink. There’s no place for it to sit.” He drank. “Rez doesn’t generate patterns I can read, because everything he does is at one remove. It’s like looking in an annual report for the personal habits of the chairman of the board. It’s not going to be there. From the outside, it just looks like that Realtree stuff. If I enter a specific area, I don’t get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It’s got to be relational.” He drummed his fingers on the laminated gum wrappers. “Somewhere in Ireland. Guesthouse with a beach view. Nobody there. Records of how it was kept stocked: stuff for the bathroom, toothpaste, shaving foam.
“I’ve been there,” she said. “That’s on an estate he bought from an older musician, an Irishman. It’s beautiful. Like Italy, in a way.”
“You think he’ll take this idoru back there, when they get hitched?”
“Nobody has any idea what he’s talking about when he says he wants to ‘marry’ her.”
“Then an apartment in Stockholm. Huge. Great big stoves in each room, made of glazed ceramic bricks.”
“I don’t know that one. He has places all over, and some of them are kept very quiet. There’s another country place in the south of 148 William Gibson France, a house in London, apartments in New York, Paris, Barcelona. . . . I was working out of the Catalan office, reformatting all their stuff and Spain’s as well, when this idoru thing hit, I’ve been here ever since.”
“But you know him? You knew him before?”
“He’s the navel of the world I work in, Laney. That has a way of making people unknowable.”
“What about Lo?”
“Quiet. Very. Bright. Very.” She frowned at her sake. “I don’t think any of it’s ever really gotten to Lo. He seems to regard their entire career as some freak event unrelated to anything else.”
“Including his partner deciding to marry a software agent?”
“Lo cold me a story once, about a job he’d had. He worked for a soup vendor in Hong Kong, a wagon on the sidewalk. He said the wagon had been in business for over fifty years, and their secret was that they’d never cleaned the kettle. In fact, they’d never stopped cooking the soup. It was the same seafood soup they’d been selling for fifty years, but it was never the same, because they added fresh ingredients every day, depending on what was available. He said that was what his career as musician felt like, and he liked that about it. Blackwell says if Rez were more like Lo, he’d still be in prison.”
“Why?”
“Blackwell was serving a nine-year sentence, in an Australian maximum-security prison, when Rez talked his way in. To give a concert. Just Rez. Lo and the others thought it was too dangerous. They’d been warned that it could turn into a hostage-taking situation. The prison authorities refused to take any responsibility, and they wanted it in writing. Rez signed anything they put in front of him. His security people resigned on the spot. He went in with two guitars, a wireless mike, and a very basic amplification system. During the concert, a riot broke out. Apparently it was orchestrated by a group of Italian prisoners from Melbourne. Five of them took Rez into the prison laundry, which they’d chosen because it was windowless and easily defended. They informed Rez they were going to kill 0 -140 him if they couldn’t negotiate their release in exchange for his. They discussed cutting off at least one of his fingers to demonstrate that they meant business. Or possibly some more intimate part, though that may simply have been to make him more anxious. Which it did.” She signaled the pink angora waitress for more sake. “Black-well, who’d evidently been extremely irritated at the interruption of the concert, which he’d been enjoying enormously, appeared in the laundry approximately forty minutes after Rez was taken prisoner. Neither Rez nor the Italians saw him arrive, and the Italians definitely hadn’t been expecting him.” She paused. “He killed three of them, with a tomahawk. Put the end of it into their heads: one, two, three, Rez says, like that. No fuss whatever.”