“Getting anything?” Arleigh. Somewhere far away.
He didn’t answer, watching as his view reversed. To be maneuvered down a central hallway, where a tall oval mirror showed no reflection as he passed. He thought of CD-RUMs he’d explored in the orphanage: haunted castles, monstrously infested spacecraft abandoned in orbit. . , . Click here. Click there. And somehow he’d always felt that he never found the central marvel, the thing that would have made the hunt worthwhile. Because it wasn’t there, he’d finally decided; it never quite was, and so he’d lost interest in those games.
But the central marvel here-click on bedroom-was Rei Toei. Propped on white pillows at the head of a sea of white, her head and gowned shoulders showing above eyelet lace and the glow of fine cottons.
“You were our guest tonight,” she said. “I wasn’t able to speak with you. I am sorry. It ended badly, and you were injured.”
He looked at her, waiting for the mountain valleys and the bells, but she only looked back, nothing came, and he remembered what Yamazaki had said about bandwidth.
A stab of pain in his side. “How do you know? That I was injured?”
“The preliminary Lo/Rez security report. Technician Paul Shannon states that you appeared to have been injured.”
“Why are you here?” (“Laney,” he heard Arleigh say, “are you okay?”)
“I found it,” the idoru said. “Isn’t it wonderful? But he has not been here since the renovations were completed. So, realty, he’s never been here. But you’ve been here before, haven’t you? I think that’s how I found it.” She smiled. She was very beautiful here, floating in this whiteness. He hadn’t been able to really look at her in the Western World.
“I accessed it earlier,” he said, “but it wasn’t like this.” a -227 “But then it. . . rounded out, didn’t it? It became so much better. Because one of the artisans who reassembled the stoves had made a record of it all, when it was done. Just for herself, for her friends, but you see what it’s done. It was in the data from the fan club.” She gazed in delight at a single taper, banded horizontally in cream and indigo, that burned in a candlestick of burnished brass. Beside it on the bedside table were a book and an orange. “I feel very close to him, here.”
“I’d feel closer to him if you’d put me back, outside.”
“In the street? It’s snowing. And I’m not certain the street is there.”
“In the general data-construct, Please. So I can do my job
“Oh,” she said, and smiled at him, and he was staring into the tangled depths of the data-faces.
“Laney?” Arleigh said, touching his shoulder. “Who are you talking to?”
“The idoru,” Laney said.
“In nodal manifestation?” Yamazaki.
“No. She was there in the data, I don’t know how. She was in a model of his place in Stockholm. Said she got there because I’d cruised it before. Then I asked her to put me back out here.
“Out where?” Arleigh asked.
“Where I can see,” Laney said, staring down into intricately overgrown canyons, dense with branchings that reminded him of Ar-leigh’s Realtree 7.2, but organic somehow, every segment thickly patched with commentary. “Yamazaki was right. The fan stuff seems to do it.”
He heard Gerrard Delouvrier, back in the TIDAL labs, urge him not to focus. What you 4 it is opposite of the concentration, but we will learn to direct it. Drift. Down through deltas of former girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood, personal sightings of Rez or Lo together 228 William Gibson with whichever woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This being for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspective in which these two loomed. Human in every detail but then not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate, probably, but always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the