“They still … ?”
“Of course not. But they kept the Grotto.” Another flight. Another loop of ghostly undersea light. “What did they do about the solids?” he asked. “I’d rather not know.”
Winded, his ankles sore, Laney emerged from the Grotto. Into a black-walled and indeterminate space defined by blue light and the uprights of gilded girders. After chemically frozen frescoes of piss, the Western World disappointed. A gutted office block dressed with mismatched couches and nondescript bars. Something looming in the middle foreground. He blinked. A tank. American, he thought, and old.
“How did they get that up here?” he asked Arleigh, who was passing her black coat to someone. And why hadn’t the floor collapsed?
“It’s resin,” she said. “Membrane sculpture. Stereo lithogtaphy. Otaku thing: they bring them in in sections and glue them together.”
Blackwell had given up his drover’s coat, exposing a garment that resembled a suit jacket but seemed to have been woven from slightly tarnished aluminum. Whatever this fabric was, there was enough of it there for a double bedspread. He moved forward, through the maze of couches and low tables, with that same effortless determination, Laney and Arleigh drawn along in his wake.
‘That’s a Sherman tank,” Laney said, remembering a CD-ROM from Gainesville, one about the history of armored vehicles, Arleigh
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166 didn’t seem ro have heard him, But then she’d probably never played with CD-ROMs, either, Time in a Federal Orphanage had a way of acquainting you with dead media platforms.
If Arleigh were right, and the Western World were being kept on as a kind of tourist attraction, Laney wondered what the crowd would have been like in the early days, when the sidewalks below were buried in six feet of broken glass.
These people on the couches, now, hunched over the low tables that supported their drinks, seemed unlike any crowd he’d seen so far in Tokyo. There was a definite edged-out quality there, and prolonged eye-contact might have been interesting in some cases, dangerous in others. Distinct impression that the room’s combined mass of human nervous tissue would have been found to be freighted with the odd few colorants. Or else these people were somehow preselected for a certain combination of facial immobility and intensity of glance?
“Laney,” Blackwell said, dropping a hand on Laney’s shoulder and twirling him into the gaze of a pair of long green eyes, “this is Rez. Rez, Cohn Laney. He’s working with Arleigh.”
“Welcome to the Western World,” smiling, and then the eyes slid past him to Arleigh. “Evenin’, Miz MacCrae.”
Laney noticed something then that he knew from his encounters with celebs at Slitscan: that binary flicker in his mind between image and reality, between the mediated face and the face there in front of you. He’d noticed how it always seemed to speed up, that alternation, until the two somehow merged, the resulting composite becoming your new idea of the person. (Someone at Slitscan had told him that it had been clinically proven that celebrity-recognition was handled by one particular area in the brain, but he’d never been sure whether or not they were joking.)
Those had been tame celebrities, the ones Kathy had already had her way with. In the building (but never the Cage) to have various aspects of their public lives scripted, per whatever agreements were already in place. But Rez wasn’t tame, and was a much bigger deal in 166 WIlliam Gibson his own way, although Laney had only been aware of his later career because Kathy had hated him so.
Rez had his arm around Arleigh now, gesturing with the other into the relative darkness beyond the Sherman tank, saying something Laney couldn’t hear.
“Mr. Laney, good evening.” It was Yamazaki, in a green plaid sportscoat that sat oddly on his narrow shoulders. He blinked rapidly,
“Yamazaki.”
“You have met Rez, yes? Good, very good. A table is prepared, to dine.” Yamazaki put two fingers inside the oversized, buttoned collar of his cheap-looking white dress shirt and tugged, as though it were far too tight. ‘1 understand initial attempts to identi~’ nodal points did not meet with success.” He swallowed,
“I can’t pull a personal fix out of something textured like corporate data. He’s just not there.”