“The country with the beautiful sky?”
“Yeah,” Chia said. “You aren’t really supposed to be able to go there unless she asks you.”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” The idoru looked sad. “I thought I could go anywhere-except where you come from.”
“Seattle?” 232 William Gibson ‘The hive of dreams,” said the idoru, “windows heaped against the sky. I can see the pictures, but there is no path. I know you’ve conic from there, but it’s there , . . isn’t there!” “The Walled City?” It had to be, because that was where she and Zona were coming from now. ‘We’re only ported through. Zona’s in Mexico City and I’m in this hotel, okay? And we really better go back now, ’cause I don’t know what’s happening-”
The blue skull expanded and went Zonaform, grim and sullen, “Finally you say something worthwhile. Why do you speak with this thing? She is nothing, only a mote expensive version of this toy of yours she’s stolen and taken over. Now that I have seen her, I can only think that Rez is crazy, pathetically deluded
“But he isn’t crazy,” the idoru said. “It is what we feel together. He has told me that we will not be understood, not at first, and there will be resistance, hostility. But we mean no harm, and he believes that in the end only good can come from our union.”
“You synthetic bitch,” Zona said. “You think we don’t see what you’re doing? You aren’t real! You aren’t as real as this imitation of a drowned city! You’re a made-up thing, and you want to suck what’s real out of him!” Chia saw the thunderhead, the aura, starting to build. “This girl crossed the ocean to find you out, and now her uS is in danger, and she is too stupid to see that you are the cause!”
The idoru looked at Chia. “Your life?”
Chia had to swallow. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m scared.”
And the idoru was gone, draining from Chia’s Music Master like a color that had no name. He stood there in the light of twenty candles, his expression unreadable. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but what exactly was it we were discussing?”
“We weren’t,” said Chia, then her goggles were lifted away, taking the Music Master and the room in Venice and Zona with them, and two of the fingers of the hand that held the goggles was ringed with gold, each ring linked to a gold watch’s massive bracelet with its own fine length of chain. Pale eyes looked into hers.
233 Eddie smiled. Chia drew her breath in to scream, and another hand, not Eddie’s, but large and white, smelling of metallic perfume, covered her mouth and nose. And a hand on her shoulder, pressing down, as Eddie stepped back, letting the goggles fall to the white carpet.
Holding her gaze, Eddie raised one finger to his lips, smiled, and said “Shhhh.” Then stepped aside, turning away, so that Chia saw Masahiko sitting there on the floor, the black cups over his eyes, his fingers moving in their tip-sets.
Eddie took something black from his pocket and reached Masahiko in two silent, exaggerated steps. He did something to the black thing and bent down with it. She saw it touch Masahiko’s neck.
Masahiko’s muscles all seemed to jerk at once, his legs straightening, throwing him sideways, where he lay on the white carpet, twitching, his mouth open. One of the black cups had come off. The other still covered his right eye.
Eddie turned back, looking at her.
“Where is it?” he said.
234 William Gibson
j Shannon offered Laney a tall foam cup with half an inch of very hot, very black coffee in it. Beyond him, past the orange barricades, was a long white Land-Rover with integral crash-bars and green-tinted windows. Kuwayama waited there, in a dark gray suit, his rimless glasses glinting in the greenish light from the cable overhead. A black-suited driver stood beside him.
“What’s he want?” Laney asked Arleigh, tasting Shannon’s espresso. It left grit on his tongue.
“We don’t know,” said Arleigh, “But apparently Rez told him where to find us.”
“That’s what he said.”