After studying the seat and the ominous black bowl, she lowered her pants, positioned herself strategically over the toilet, squatted carefully, and urinated without sitting down. She’d let someone else flush that one, she decided, while she washed her hands at the basin, but then she heard it flush itself.
There was a glossy pink paper bag beside the basin with the words “Teen Teen Toiletry Bag” printed on it in swirly white script. It was sealed at the top with a silver stick-on bow. She removed the bow and looked inside. Lots of different little give-away cosmetics and at least a dozen different kinds of condoms, everything packaged to look more or less like candy.
There was a shiny black cabinet to the left of the mirror above the basin, the only thing in the toom that looked Japanese in that old-fashioned way. She opened it; a light came on inside, revealing three glass shelves arranged with shrink-wrapped plastic models of guy’s dicks, all different sizes of them, molded in weird colors. Other
objects she didn’t recognize at all: knobby balls, something that 3
173 looked like a baby’s pacifier, miniature inner-tubes with long rubbery whiskers. In the middle of it all stood a little black-haired doll in a pretty kimono made of bright paper and gold cloth. But when she tried to pick it up, the wig and the kimono came off in one piece, revealing yet another shrink-wrapped replica, this one with delicately painted eyes and a Cupid’s-bow mouth. When she tried to put the wig and kimono back on, it fell over, knocking over everything on its shelf, so she closed the cabinet, Then she washed her hands again.
Back in the Ring-Ding room, Masahiko was cabling his computer to a black console on a shelf full of entertainment gear. Chia put her bag on the bed. Something chimed softly, twice, and then the surface of the bed began to ripple, slow osmotic waves centering in on the bag, which began to rise slightly, and fall .
“Ick,” she said, and pulled the bag off the bed, which chimed again and began to subside.
Masahiko glanced in her direction, but went back to whatever he was doing with the equipment on the shelf.
Chia found that the room had a window, but it was hidden be-hind some kind of softscreen. She tried the clips that held the screen in place until she got the one that let her slide the screen aside on hidden tracks. The window looked out on a chainlinked parking lot beside a low, beige building sided with corrugated plastic. There were three trucks parked there, the first vehicles she’d seen in Japan that weren’t new or particularly clean. A wet-looking gray cat emerged from beneath one of the trucks and sprang into the shadow beneath another. It was still raining.
“Good,” she heard Masahiko say, evidently satisfied. “We go to Walled City.” 174 William Gibson IIiIlllsl__ “How do you mean, she’s ‘here’?” Laney asked Yamazaki, as they rounded the rear of the Sherman tank. Clots of dry clay clung to the segments of its massive steel treads.
“Mr. Kuwayama is here,” Yamazaki whispered. “He represents her-”
Laney saw that several people were already seated at a low table.
Two men. A woman. The woman must be Rei Toei.
If he’d anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. That was usually the way in Hollywood, and the formula tended to be even more rigid, in the case of software agents-.eigenheads, their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity.
She was nothing like that.
Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.
And now her eyes met his.
He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon. 25. The Idoru The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.