If he'd antic.i.p.ated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of j.a.pan's last three dozen top female media faces. That was usually the way in Hollywood, and the formula tended to be even more rigid, in the case of software agents-.eigenheads, their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity.

She was nothing like that.

Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.

And now her eyes met his.

He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of s.h.a.ggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon.

25.The Idoru The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.

Laney shivered. In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.

The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met his. "We're here." Arleigh beside him, hand at his elbow. She was indicating two places at the table. "Are you all right?" she asked, under her breath. "Take your shoes off."

Laney looked at Blackwell, who was staring at the idoru, something like pain in his face, but the expression vanished, sucked away behind the mask of his scars.

Laney did as he was told, kneeling and removing his shoes, moving as if he were drunk, or dreaming, though he knew he was neither, and the idoru smiled, lit from within.

"Laney?"

The table was set above a depression in the floor. Laney seated himself, arranging his feet beneath the table and gripping his cushion with both hands. "What?"

"Are you okay?"

"Okay?"

"You looked.., blind."

Rez was taking his place now at the head of the table, the idoru to his right, someone else-Laney saw that it was I.o, the guitarist-to his left. Next to the idoru sat a dignified older man with rimless gla.s.ses, gray hair brushed back from his smooth forehead. He wore a very simple, very expensive-looking suit of some l.u.s.terless black material, and a high-collared white shirt that b.u.t.toned in a complicated way. When this man turned to address Rei Toei, Laney quite clearly saw the light of her face reflect for an instant in the almost circular lenses.

Arleigh's sharp intake of breath. She'd seen it too.

A hologram. Something generated, animated, projected. He felt his grip relax slightly, on the edges of the cushion,

But then he remembered the stone tombs, the river, the ponies with their iron bells.

Nodal.

176 .. .

Laney had once asked Gerrard Delouvrier, the most patient of the tennis-playing Frenchmen of TIDAL, why it was that he, Laney, had been chosen as the first (and, as it would happen, the only) recipient of the peculiar ability they sought to impart to him. He hadn't applied for the job, he said, and had no reason to believe the position had even been advertised. He had applied, he told Delouvrier, to be a trainee service rep.

Delouvrier, with short, prematurely gray hair and a suntable tan, leaned back in his articulated workstation chair and stretched his legs. He seemed to be studying his crepe-soled suede shoes. Then he looked out the window, to rectangular beige buildings, anonymous landscaping, February snow. "Do you not see? How we do not teach you? We watch. We wish to learn from you."

They were in a DatAmerica research park in Iowa. There was an indoor court for Delouvrier and his colleagues, but they complained constantly about its surface.

"But why me?"

Delouvrier's eyes looked tired. "We wish to be kind to the orphans? We are an unexpected warmth at the heart of DatAmerica?" He rubbed his eyes. "No. Something was done to you, Laney. In our way, perhaps, we seek to redress that. Is that a word, 'redress'?"

"No," Laney said.

"Do not question good fortune. You are here with us, doing work that matters. It is winter in this Iowa, true, but the work goes on." He was looking at Laney now. "You are our only proof," he said.

"Of what?"

Delouvrier closed his eyes. "There was a man, a blind man, who mastered echo-location. Clicks with the tongue, you understand?" Eyes closed, he demonstrated. "Like a bat. Fantastic," He opened his eyes. "He could perceive his inirnediate environment in great detail, Ride a bicycle in traffic. Always making the :1k, :1k. The ability was his, was absolutely real. And he could never explain it, never teach it to another He wove his long fingers together and cracked his knuckles. "We must hope that this is not the case with you."

Don't think of a purple cow. Or was it a brown one? Laney couldn't remember. Don't look at the idoru's face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.

He could watch her hands. Watch the way she ate.

The meal was elaborate, many small courses served on individual rectangular plates. Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei, and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was simultaneously veiled with a flawless copy, holo food on a holo plate.

Even the movement of her chopsticks brought on peripheral flickers of nodal vision. Because the chopsticks were information too, but nothing as dense as her features, her gaze. As each "empty" plate was removed, the untouched serving would reappear.

But when the flickering began, Laney would concentrate on his own meal, his clumsiness with his own chopsticks, conversation around the table. Kuwayama, the man with the rimless gla.s.ses, was answering something Rez had asked, though Laney hadn't been able to catch the question itself. "-the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as 'desiring machines." Rez's green eyes, bright and attentive. "Not in any literal sense," Kuwayama continued, "but please envision aggregates of subjective desire. It was decided that the modular array would ideally const.i.tute an architecture of articulated longing The man's voice was beautifully modulated, his English accented in a way that Laney found impossible to place.

Rez smiled then, his eyes going to the face of the idoru. As did Laney's as well, automatically.

He fell through her eyes. He was staring up at a looming cliff face that seemed to consist entirely of small rectangular balconies, 178 none set at quite the same level or depth. Orange sunset off a tilted, steel-framed window. Oilslick colors crawling in the sky.

He closed his eyes, looked down, opened them. A fresh plate there, more food.

"You're really into your meal," Arleigh said.

A concentrated effort with the chopsticks and he managed to capture and swallow something that was like a one-inch cube of cold chutney omelet. "Wonderful. Don't want any of that fugu though. Blowfish with the neurotoxins? Heard about that?"

"You've already had seconds," she said. "Remember the big plate of raw fish arranged like the petals of a chrysanthemum?"

"You're kidding," Laney said.

"Lips and tongue feel faintly numb? That's it."

Laney ran his tongue across his lips. Was she kidding? Yamazaki, seated to his left, leaned close. "There may be a way around the problem you face with Rez's data. You are aware of Lo/Rez global fan activity?"

"Of what?"

"Many fans. They report each sighting of Rez, Lo, other musicians involved. There is much incidental detail."

Laney knew from his day's video education that Lo/Rez were theoretically a duo, but that there were always at least two other "members," usually more. And Rez had been adamant from the start about his dislike of drum machines; the current drummer, "Blind" w.i.l.l.y Jude, seated opposite Yamazaki, had been with them for years. He'd been turning his enormous black gla.s.ses in the idoru's direction throughout the meal; now he seemed to sense Laney's glance. The black gla.s.ses, video units, swung around. "Man," Jude said, "Rozzer's sittin' down there makin' eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle."

"You can't see her?"

"Holos are hard, man," the drummer said, touching his gla.s.ses with a fingertip "Take my kids to Nissan County, I'll call ahead, get 'em tweaked around a little. Then I can see 'em. But this lady's on a 0

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