Idoru. Part 54

That made Chia feel strange. Now she'd seen him in real life, somehow that had taken over from all the other ways she'd known him before, and she felt kind of funny about him. Confused. Like all of this had pegged him in realtime for her, and she kept thinking of her mother complaining that Lo and Rez were nearly as old as she was.

And there was something else to it, too, that came from what she'd seen when she was crouched down in the back of that van, between the little j.a.panese guy with the sleeve of his jacket hanging down, and Masahiko: she'd looked out the window and seen the faces, as the van inched away. None of them knowing that that was 0 281.

Rez hunched down in there, under a jacket, but maybe sensing it somehow. And something in Chia letting her know she'd never quite be like that again. Never as comfortably a face in that crowd. Because now she knew there were rooms they never saw, or even dreamed of, where crazy things, or even just boring things, happened, and that was where the stars came from. And it was something like that that worried her now when she thought of Rez coming to see her. That and how he really was her mother's age.

And all of that made her wonder what she was going to tell the others, back in Seattle. How could they understand it? She thought Zona would understand. She really wanted to talk with Zona, but Arleigh had said it was better not to try to reach her now.

The longest-running top was starting to teeter, and they were cutting from that to the eyes of the girl who'd spun it.

Masahiko opened the door that connected their rooms.

The top gave a last wobble and kicked over. The girl covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes filled with the pain of defeat.

"You must come with me to Walled City now," Masahiko said.

Chia used the manual remote to turn the television off. "Arleigh asked us not to port."

"She knows," Masahiko said. "I've been there all day." He was wearing the same clothes but everything had been cleaned and pressed, and the legs of his baggy black pants looked strange with creases in them. "And on the phone with my father."

"Is he p.i.s.sed off at you because those gumi guys came?"

"Arleigh McCrae asked Starkov to have someone speak with our gumi representative. They have apologized to my father. But Mitsuko was arrested near Hotel Di. That has caused him embarra.s.sment and difficulty."

"Arrested?"

"l~or trespa.s.sing. She went to take part in the vigil. She climbed a fence, triggering an alarm. She could not climb back out before the police came."

"Is she okay?

282 "My father has arranged her release. But he is not pleased."

"I feel like it's my fault," Chia said.

He shrugged and went back through the door.

Chia got up. Her Sandbenders was beside her bag on the luggage rack, with her goggles and tip-sets on top of it. She carried it into the other room.

It was a mess. Somehow he'd managed to turn it into something like his room at home. The sheets were tangled on the bed. Through the open bathroom door, she saw towels crumpled up on the tiled floor, a spilled bottle of shampoo on the counter beside the sink. He'd set up his computer on the desk, with his student cap beside it. There were opened mini-cans of espresso everywhere, and at least three room-service trays with half-empty ceramic bowls of ramen.

"Has anyone there seen Zona?" she asked, shoving a pillow and an open magazine aside on the foot of the bed. She sat down with her Sandbenders on her lap and started putting her tip-sets on.

She thought he gave her a strange look, then. "I don't think so," he said.

"Take me in the way you did the first time," she said. "I want to see it again."

Hak Nam. Tai Chang Street. The walls alive with s.h.i.+fting messages in the characters of every written language. Doorways flipping past, each one hinting at its own secret world. And this time she was more aware of the countless watching ghosts. That must be how people presented here, when you weren't in direct communication with them. A city of ghost-shadows. But this time Masahiko took another route, and they weren't climbing the twisted labyrinth of stairs but winding in at what would have been ground level in the original city, and Chia remembered the black hole, the rectangular vacancy he'd pointed out on the printed scarf in his room at the restaurant.

"I must leave you now," he said, as they burst from the maze into that vacancy. "They wish privacy."0 283.

He was gone, and at first Chia thought there was nothing there at all, only the faint grayish light filtering down from somewhere high above. When she looked up at this, it resolved into a vast, distant skylight, very far above her, but littered with a compost of strange and discarded shapes. She remembered the city's rooftops, and the things abandoned there.

"It is strange, isn't it?" The idoru stood before her in embroidered robes, the tiny bright patterns lit from within, moving. "Ho!low and somber. But he insisted we meet you here."

"Who insisted? Do you know where Zona is?"

And there was a small table or four-legged stand in front of the idoru, very old, its dragon-carved legs thick with flaking, pale green paint. A single dusty gla.s.s stood centered there, something coiled inside it. Someone coughed.

"This is the heart of Hak Nam," the Etruscan said, that same creaking voice a.s.sembled from a million samples of dry old sounds. "Traditionally a place of serious conversation."

"Your friend is gone," the idoru said. "I wished to tell you myself. This one," indicating the gla.s.s, "volunteers details I do not understand."

"But they've only shut down her website," Chia said. "She's in Mexico City, with her gang."

"She is nowhere," the Etruscan said.

"When you were taken from her," the idoru said, "taken from the room in Venice, your friend went to your system software and activated the video units in your goggles. What she saw there indicated to her that you were in grave danger. As I believe you were. She must then have decided on a plan. Returning to her secret country, she linked her site with that of the Tokyo chapter of the Lo/Rez group. She ordered Ogawa, the president of the group, to post the message announcing Rez's death at Hotel Di. She threatened her with a weapon that would shatter the Tokyo chapter's site. .

"The knife," Cliia said. "It was real?"

"And extremely illegal," the Etruscan said.

284 "When Ogawa refused," the idoru said, "your friend used her weapon.

"A serious crime," the Etruscan said, "under the laws of every country involved."

"She then posted her message through what remained of Ogawa's website," the idoru said. "It seemed official, and it had the effect of quickly surrounding Hotel Di with a sea of potential witnesses."

"Whatever the next stage of her plan," the Etruscan said, "she had exposed her presence in her website. The original owners became aware of her. She abandoned her site. They pursued her. She was forced to discard her persona."

"What 'persona'?" Chia felt a sinking feeling.

"Zona Rosa," said the Etruscan, "was the persona of Mercedes Purissima Vargas-Gutierrez. She is twenty-six years old and the victim of an environmental syndrome occurring most frequently in the 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."

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.

285.

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