The three of them had had Work Experience there, five or six times, picking up the offerings people left before their day in court. These were considered to be a health hazard, and were usually carefully hidden, and you often found them by the smell, or the buzzing of flies. Parts of chickens, usually, tied up with colored yatn. What Shaquille said was the head of a goat, once. Shaquille said the people who left these things were drug dealers, and they did it because it was their religion. Laney and the others wore pale green latex gloves with orange Kevlar thimbles on the tips that gave you heat rash. They put the offerings in a white snap-top bucket with peeling Biohazard stickers. Shaquille had claimed to know the names of some of the gods these things were offered up to, but Laney hadnt been fooled. The names Shaquille made up, like O’Gunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously just that, and even Shaquille, dropping a white ball of chicken feathers into the bucket, had said an extra lawyer or two was probably a better investment. ‘But they do it while they waitin’. Hedge they bet.’ Laney had actually preferred this to Work Experiences at fast-food franchises, even though it meant they got body-searched for drugs when they got back.
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L He’d told Yamazaki and Blackwell about knowing that Alison Shires was going to try to commit suicide, and now they must think he could see the future. But he knew he couldn’t. That would be like those chicken parts the dealers hid around the courthouse steps changing what was going to happen. What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney knew he couldn’t predict it, and something about the experience of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seemed to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. Maybe something as small as Alison Shires buying the blades for a box-cutter. But if an earthquake had come, that night, and pitched her apartment down into Fountain Avenue. . . . Or if she’d lost the pack of blades, . . . But if she’d used credit to buy that Wednesday Night Special, which she couldn’t do because it was illegal, and required cash, then it would’ve been obvious to anybody what she might be on the verge of doing.
Arleigh opened the passenger door. “You okay?”
“Sure,” Laney said, picking up the eyephones.
“Sure?”
“Let’s do it.” He looked at the ‘phones.
“It’s up to you.” She touched his arm, “We’ll get you a doctor, after, okay?”
“Thanks,” Laney said, and put the ‘phones on, the taste flooding his mouth- The Lo/Rez data, translucent and intricately interpenetrated by
the archives of the band’s fan-base, was crawling with new textures, maps that resolved, when he focused on them, into- Shaquille, in his federal-issue sweats, showing Laney the goat’s
head. It had been skinned, and nails had been driven into it, and Shaquille had pried open the jaw to show where the missing tongue had been replaced with a blood-soaked piece of brown paper with writing on it, That would be the name of the prosecutor, Shaquille had explained.
250 William Gibson Laney shut his eyes, but the image remained.
He opened them on the idoru, her features rimmed with flit. She was looking at him. She wore some kind of embroidered, fur-lined hat, with earfiaps, and snow was swirling around her, but then she flattened, dwindling into the texture-maps that ran down through the reef of data, and he let himself go, go with that, and he felt himself pass through the core of it, the very center, and out the other side.
“Wait-” he said, and there seemed to be a lag before he heard his own voice.
“Perspective,” the idoru said. “Yamazaki’s parallax.” Something seemed to turn him around, so that he looked directly at the data, but from some new angle, and from a great distance. And all around it, there was . . . nothing at all.
But through the data, like some infinitely more complex version of Arleigh’s Realtree, ran two vaguely parallel armatures. Rez and the idoru. They were sculpted in duration, Rez’s beginning, at the far end of it all, as something very minor, the first hints of his career. And growing, as it progressed, to something braided, multistranded. . . . But then it began to get smaller again, Laney saw, the strands loosening. . . . And that would be the point, he thought, where the singer began to become the thing that Kathy hated, the one who took up celebrity space just because he was a celebrity, because he was of a certain order of magnitude .