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 William Gibson "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.

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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287.

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 against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconst.i.tuted 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.

289.

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 s.e.x. 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 cla.s.s on j.a.pan 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?

-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.) Chia didn't really feel that anybody in the chapter would get it, if she tried to tell them what had happened, plus there were all the bits she couldn't tell them anyway.

But mainly it was the City taking up her time, because Rez and Rei were there, shadows among the other shadows but still you could tell. Working on their Project.

Plenty there who didn't like the idea, but plenty who did. The Erruscan did. He said it was the craziest thing since they'd turned that first kilifile inside out.

Sometimes Chia wondered if they all weren't just joking, because

it just seemed impossible that anyone could ever do that. Build that, on an island in Tokyo Bay.

But the idoru said that that was where they wanted to live, now