Laney shivered. In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.
The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met his. “We’re here.” Arleigh beside him, hand at his elbow. She was indicating two places at the table. “Are you all right?” she asked, under her breath. “Take your shoes off.”
Laney looked at Blackwell, who was staring at the idoru, something like pain in his face, but the expression vanished, sucked away behind the mask of his scars.
Laney did as he was told, kneeling and removing his shoes, moving as if he were drunk, or dreaming, though he knew he was neither, and the idoru smiled, lit from within.
“Laney?”
The table was set above a depression in the floor. Laney seated himself, arranging his feet beneath the table and gripping his cushion with both hands. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
“Okay?”
“You looked.., blind.”
Rez was taking his place now at the head of the table, the idoru to his right, someone else-Laney saw that it was I.o, the guitarist-to his left. Next to the idoru sat a dignified older man with rimless glasses, gray hair brushed back from his smooth forehead. He wore a very simple, very expensive-looking suit of some lusterless black material, and a high-collared white shirt that buttoned in a complicated way. When this man turned to address Rei Toei, Laney quite clearly saw the light of her face reflect for an instant in the almost circular lenses.
Arleigh’s sharp intake of breath. She’d seen it too.
A hologram. Something generated, animated, projected. He felt his grip relax slightly, on the edges of the cushion,
But then he remembered the stone tombs, the river, the ponies with their iron bells.
Nodal. 176 William Gibson . . . Laney had once asked Gerrard Delouvrier, the most patient of the tennis-playing Frenchmen of TIDAL, why it was that he, Laney, had been chosen as the first (and, as it would happen, the only) recipient of the peculiar ability they sought to impart to him. He hadn’t applied for the job, he said, and had no reason to believe the position had even been advertised. He had applied, he told Delouvrier, to be a trainee service rep.
Delouvrier, with short, prematurely gray hair and a suntable tan, leaned back in his articulated workstation chair and stretched his legs. He seemed to be studying his crepe-soled suede shoes. Then he looked out the window, to rectangular beige buildings, anonymous landscaping, February snow. “Do you not see? How we do not teach you? We watch. We wish to learn from you.”
They were in a DatAmerica research park in Iowa. There was an indoor court for Delouvrier and his colleagues, but they complained constantly about its surface.
“But why me?”
Delouvrier’s eyes looked tired. “We wish to be kind to the orphans? We are an unexpected warmth at the heart of DatAmerica?” He rubbed his eyes. “No. Something was done to you, Laney. In our way, perhaps, we seek to redress that. Is that a word, ‘redress’?”
“No,” Laney said.
“Do not question good fortune. You are here with us, doing work that matters. It is winter in this Iowa, true, but the work goes on.” He was looking at Laney now. “You are our only proof,” he said.
“Of what?”
Delouvrier closed his eyes. “There was a man, a blind man, who mastered echo-location. Clicks with the tongue, you understand?” Eyes closed, he demonstrated. “Like a bat. Fantastic,” He opened his eyes. “He could perceive his inirnediate environment in great detail, Ride a bicycle in traffic. Always making the :1k, :1k. The ability was his, was absolutely real. And he could never explain it, never teach it to another He wove his long fingers together and cracked his knuckles. “We must hope that this is not the case with you.”
Don’t think of a purple cow. Or was it a brown one? Laney couldn’t remember. Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.