The idoru’s data began somewhere after that, and it began as something smoothly formed, deliberate, but lacking complexity. But at the points where it had swerved closest to Rez’s data, he saw that it had begun to acquire a sort of complexity. Or randomness, he thought. The human thing. That’s how she learns.
And both these armatures, these sculptures in time, were nodal, and grew more so toward the point, the present, where they intertwined , .
He stood beside the idoru on the beach he’d seen recorded on the binoculars in the bedroom of the guesrhouse in Ireland. Brownish- g
251 green sea flecked with whitecaps, stiff wind catching at the earfiaps of her hat. He couldn’t feel that wind, but he could hear it, so loud now that he had trouble hearing her over it. “Can you see them?” she shouted.
“See what?”
“The faces in the clouds! The nodal points! I can see nothing! You must indicate them to me!”
And she was gone, the sea with her, Laney staring into the data again, where the digitized histories of Rez and Rei Toei mingled, on the verge of something else. If he had tried, in Los Angeles, would the box-cutter blade have emerged from Alison Shires’ nodal point?
He tried.
He was looking out across a fuzzy, indistinct white plain. Not snow. To where a pair of vast and very ornate brown-on-brown Western boots swung past against a cliff-like backdrop of violent pink. Then the image was gone, replaced by the rotating form of a. three-dimensional object, though Laney had no idea what it was supposed to be. With no clues as to scale, it looked vaguely like a Los Angeles bus with the wheels removed.
“Suite 17,” the idoru said. “Hotel Di.”
“Die?” Bus vanished, apparently taking boots with it.
“What is a ‘love hotel’?”
‘What?”
“Love. Hotel.”
“Where people go to make love-I think.
“What is ‘Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C-slash-7A’?”
“I don’t know,” Laney said.
“But you have just shown it to me! It is our union, out intersection, that from which the rest must unfold!”
“Wait,” Laney said, “wait, you’ve got another one here; they sort of overlap-” The trying made his side hurt, but there were hills in the distance, twisted trees, the low roofline of a wooden house- But the idoru was gone, and the house, its fabric eaten from 252 William Gibson within, wu shimmering, folding. And then a glimpse of something towering, mismatched windows and a twisting, moire sky.
Then Arleigh pulled the ‘phones off. “Stop screaming,” she said. Yamazaki was beside her. “Stop it, Laney.”
He took a long, shuddering breath, braced his palms against the padded cowling of the dash, and closed his eyes. He felt Arleigh’s hand against his neck.
‘We have to go there,” he said.
“Go where?”
“Suite 17 We’ll be late, for the wedding . . 38. Star
When the stungun quit making that zapping sound, Chia dropped it. The doorknob wasn’t turning. No sound from the bathroom but the faint recorded cries of tropical birds. She whipped around. Masahiko was trying to get his computer into the plaid carrier-bag. She dived for her Sandbenders, grabbed it up, still trailing her goggles, and turned to the pink bed. Her bag was beside it on the floor, with the blue and yellow SeaTac plastic showing. She pulled that out, the thing still in it, and tossed it on the bed. She bent to shove her Sandbenders into her bag, but glanced back at the bathroom door when she thought she heard something.
The knob was turning again.
The Russian opened the door. When he let go of the knob, she saw that his hand was inside something that looked like a Day-Gb pink hand-puppet. One of the sex toys from the black cabinet. He was using it as insulation. He peeled it off his fingers and tossed it back over his shoulder. The bird sounds faded as he stepped out.
Masahiko, who’d been trying to get one of his feet into one of his
black shoes, was looking at the Russian too. He still had a paper slipper on the other foot.
“You are going?” the Russian said.