William Gibson Br

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Federal District of Mexico." His voice was like rain on a thin metal roof now.
"Her father is an extremely successful criminal lawyer."
"Then I can find her," Chia said.
"But she would not wish this," the idoru said. "Mercedes Punssima is severely
deformed by the syndrome, and has lived for the past five years in almost
complete denial of her physical self."
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Chia was sitting there crying. Masahiko removed the black cups from his eyes
and came over to the bed.
"Zona's gone," she said.
"I know," he said. He sat down beside her. "You never finished telling me the
story of the
Sandbenders," he said. "It was very interesting story."
So she began to tell it to him.
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45. Lucky
"Laney," he heard her say, her voice blurred with sleep. "What are you doing?"
The illuminated face of the cedar telephone. "I'm calling the
Lucky Dragon, on Sunset."
"The what?"
"Convenience store. Twenty-four hours."
"Laney, it's three in the morning .
"Have to thank Rydell, tell him the job worked out. She groaned and rolled
over, pulling the pillow over her head. Through the window he could see the
translucent amber, the serned cliffs of the new buildings, reflecting the
lights of the city.
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46. Fables of the Reconstruction
Chia dreamed of a beach pebbled with crushed fragments of consumer
electronics; crab-things scuttling low, their legs striped like antique
resistors. Tokyo Bay, shrouded in fog from an old movie, a pale gray blanket
meant to briefly conceal first-act terrors: sea monsters or some alien armada.
Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream's logic it grew
no closer.
Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing. Being
grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before
things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and bulk-lifter in
the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of
Rodel-van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies that are sleeping
rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back
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against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it
is being reconstituted here, retranslated from its later incarnation as a
realm of consensual fantasy.
The alarm's infrared stutter. Sunbright halogen illuminating the printed
scarf, at its center the rectangle representing an emptiness, an address
unknown: the kilifile of legend. Zapping the
Espressomatic to life with her remote, she curls back into the quilt's dark,
waiting for the building hiss of steam. Most mornings, now, she checks into
the City, hears the gossip in a favorite barbershop in Sai Shing Road. The
Etruscan is there, sometimes, with Klaus and the
Rooster and the other ghosts he hangs with, and they tolerate her.
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She's proud of that, because they'll clam up around Masahiko. Are they old,
incredibly ancient, or do they just act that way? Whatever, they tend to know
things first, and she's learned to value that. And the Etruscan has been
hinting at a vacancy, something really small, but with a window.
Looking down into what would have been Lung Chun Road.
He likes her, the Etruscan. It's weird. They say he doesn't like anybody,
really, but he fixed her father's credit, even though she'd forgotten to leave
the key. (She keeps the key to Suite 17 in a watered-silk cosmetics case they
gave her on the JAL flight home: it's made of white plastic, molded to look
like an old-fashioned mechanical key, with a mag-strip down the long part and
the flat thing shaped like the crown a princess wears. She gets it out and
looks at it sometimes, but it just looks like a cheap white piece of plastic.)
The Etruscan and the others spy on the Project all the time. That's what they
call it. Through them, Chia knows that the idoru's island isn't finished yet.
It's there but it isn't stable;
something they have to do it before they build, even with nanotech, in case
another earthquake comes. She wonders what the Russians will do with theirs,
and sometimes she wonders about
Maryalice, and Eddie, and Calvin, the guy at Whiskey Clone who got her out of
there, for no reason other than he thought he should. But it seems like a long
time ago, between the Walled City and school.
She figures her mother knows by now that she wasn't with Hester, but her
mother's never said anything about it, except to talk to her twice about
contraceptives and safe sex. And, really, she wasn't there much more than
forty-eight hours, if you didn't count the travel-time, because Rez hadn't
been able to make it over to thank her, and Arleigh had said that, all in all,
it was better if she got home before anybody started asking any questions, but
they'd send her first class on Japan Air Lines. So Arleigh had driven her back
out to Narita that night, but not in her green van because she said it was a
writeoff. And she'd still felt SO bad about Zona, and it made'
her feel SO stupid, because she felt like her friend was dead, but her friend
hadn't
!90 William Gib9on even really existed, and there was this other girl in
Mexico City, with terrible problems, and so she wound up telling all that to
Arleigh and just cryin~g.
And Arleiigh said she should just wait. Because that girl in Mexico City, more
than anything else, needed to be somebody else. And it didn't matter that she
hadn't been Zona, because she'd made
Zona up, and that was just as real. Just wait, Arleigh said, because somebody
else would turn up, somebody new, and it would be like they already knew you.
And Chia had sat and thought about that, beside Arleigh in heir fast little
car.
-But I c:ouldn't ever tell her I knew?
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-That would spoil it.
When they'd gotten to the airport, Arleigh checked her in at JAL, found
somebody to take her to the lounge (which was sort of like a cross between a
bar and really fancy business office), and gave her a bag with a roadie-grade
Lo/Rez tour jacket in it. The sleeves were made of transparent rayon, and the
lining that showed through that looked like liquid mercury. Arleigh said it
was really tacky, but maybe she had a friend who'd like it. It was from their
Kombinat tour, and it had all the tour dates embroidered on the back in three
different languages.
She hadn't ever worn it, and she'd never really shown it to anybody either. It
was hanging in her closet, under a piece of drycleaner's plastic. She hadn't
really been that active in the chapter lately. (Kelsey had dropped right out.) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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