• band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos,
• was the merest fragment of that.
“But this is my favorite,” Laney heard the idoru say, and then he was watching Rez mount a low stage in a crowded club of some kind, everything psychedelic Korean pinks, hypersaturated tints like cartoon versions of the flesh of tropical melons. “It is what we feel.” Rez raised a microphone and began to speak of new modes of being, of something he called “the alchemical marriage.”
And somewhere Arleigh’s hand was on his arm, her voice tense. “Laney? Sorry. We need you back here now. Mr. Kuwayama is here.” 34. Casino
Chia looked out between the dusty slats, to the street where it was raining. The idoru had done that. Chia had never made it rain, in Venice, but she didn’t mind the way it looked. It seemed to fit. It was like Seattle.
The idoru said this apartment was called a casino. Chia had seen casinos on television and they hadn’t looked anything like this. This was a few small rooms with flaking plaster walls, and big old-fashioned furniture with gold lion-feet. Everything worked up with fractals so you could almost smell it. It would’ve smelled dusty, she thought, and also like perfume. Chia hadn’t been to many of these modules, the insides of her Venice, because they were all sort of creepy. They didn’t give her the feeling she got in the streets.
Zona’s head, on the lion-footed table, made that bug-zap sound. She’d reduced herself to that, Zona: this little blue neon miniature of her Aztec skull, about the size of a small apple. Because Chia had told her to shut up and put the switchblade away. And that had pissed her off, and maybe hurt her feelings, but Chia hadn’t known what else to do. Chia had wanted to hear what the idoru had had to say, and Zona’s I’m-dangerous act totally got in the way. And that was all it was, just acting out, because people couldn’t really hurt each other when they were ported. Not physically, anyway. And that had always been a problem, with Zona. That whole swelling-up thunderhead macho thing. Kelsey and the others would make fun of ~ it, hut Zona was fierce enough, verbally, that they’d only do it behind 231 her back. Chia had never known what to make ofiq it was like Zona’s personality wasn’t together, around acting like that.
Now Zona wasn’t talking, just making the bug-zap sound every so often, to remind Chia she was still there and still pissed off.
The idoru was talking, though, telling Chia the old Venetian meaning of the word casino, not some giant sort of malt place where people went to gamble and watch shows, but something that sounded more like what Masahiko had said about love hotels. Like people had houses where they lived, but these casinos, these secret little apartments, hidden around town, were where they went to be with other people. But they hadn’t been too comfortable there, not to judge by this one, even though the idoru kept adding more and more candles. The idoru said she loved candles.
The idoru had the Music Master’s haircut now; it made her look like a girl pretending to be a boy. She seemed to like his greatcoat, too, because she kept turning on her heel-his heel-to twirl the hem out. “I’ve seen so many new places,” she said, smiling at Chia, “so many different people and things”
-So have I, but .
“He told me it would be this way, but I had no idea, really.” Twirl. “Having seen all this, I’m so much more … Does it feel like that for you, when you travel?”
The death’s-head emitted a burst of blue light and a sound like a short, sharp fart. “Zona!” Chia hissed. Then all in a rush, to the idoru, “I haven’t traveled much and so far I don’t think I like it, but we just came here to see what you were, because we didn’t know, be-cause you’re in my software, and maybe in Zona’s site, too, and that bothers her because it’s supposed to be private.”