William Gibson - Idoru

The Russian considered that. “No,” he said, “basis not good. Our people trace this girl to big rocker band. What is she working for, Eddie? Tonight we send people to talk to them, they fall on us like fucking wolfs. One man I am still losing.”

“I don’t work for Lo/Rez!” Chia said. “I’m just in the club! Maryalice put that thing in my bag when I was asleep on the plane!”

Masahiko groaned, sighed, and seemed to go back under. Eddie still had the stungun in his hand. “You ready for another jolt?” he asked Masahiko, super-tense and angry.

“Eddie,” Maryalice said from the bed, “you ungrateful piece of shit…” Sitting up on the edge of the bed with her cigarette lighter held in both hands, pointing it straight at Eddie.

Eddie stiffened. You could see something run through him, freezing him there.

“Some basis,” said the Russian.

“Jesus, Maryalice,” Eddie said. “Whered you get that? You got any idea how illegal that is, here?”

“Off a Russian boy,” she said. “Exit-holes the size of grapefruit…” Maryalice didn’t sound drunk, exactly, but something about the look in her reddened eyes told Chia she was. Some very scary kind of drunk. ”You think you can just use people up, Eddie? Use ’em up and throw ’em away?” She used the toe of one shoe to get the other off, then used her toe to get the first shoe off. She stood up in her stocking feet, swaying just a little bit, but the gun-shaped lighter stayed straight out from her shoulders, the way cops did it on television.

Eddie still had the stungun in his hand. “Make him throw that black thing away, Maryalice!” Chia urged.

“Drop it,” Maryalice said, and it seemed to give her pleasure to say it, something she’d been hearing people say on shows all her life, and now she was getting to say it herself, and mean it. Eddie dropped it. “Now kick it away.”

That’s the other half of the line, Chia thought.

The stungun wound up a few feet from Chia’s knee, beside her goggles, which were upside down on the carpet, still cabled to her Sandbenders. She could see the twin flat rectangles on the opaque lens-faces, simple video units; if Zona went to Chia’s systems software and activated those, now, she’d get a bug’s-eye view of Maryalice’s stocking feet, Eddie’s shoes, the Russian’s cowboy boots, and maybe the side of Masahiko’s head.

“Ungrateful,” Maryalice said. “Ungrateful shit. Get in that bathroom.” She came around so the lighter was pointing at Eddie and the Russian, but with the open bathroom door behind them.

“I know you’re upset—”

“Shit. Shit goes in the toilet, Eddie Get in the bathroom.”

Eddie took a step backward, his palms up in what he probably thought looked like an appeal to reasonableness and understanding. The Russian took a step back too.

“Seven fucking years ,” Maryalice said. “Seven. You weren’t shit when I met you. God. You and that uppity-mobile talk. You make me sick. Who paid the fucking rent? Who bought the meals? Who bought you your fucking clothes, you vain piece of shit? You and your uppity-mobile and your image and you gotta have a smaller fucking phone than the next guy because I’m telling you, honey, you sure as fuck don’t have a bigger dick!” Maryalice’s hands were shaking now, but really just enough to make the lighter look even more dangerous.

“Maryalice,” Eddie said, “you know I know everything you’ve done for me, everything you’ve contributed to my career. It doesn’t leave my mind for a minute, baby, believe me, it never does, and all of this is a misunderstanding, baby, just a rough patch on the highway of life, and if you will only just put down that fucking gun and have a nice drink like a civilized person—”

“Shut the fuck up !” Maryalice screamed, at the top of her lungs, the words all run together.

Eddie’s mouth snapped shut like a puppet’s.

“Seven fucking years,” Maryalice said, making it sound like some children’s charm, “seven fucking years and two of ’em here, Eddie, two of ’em here, and flying back and fucking forth for you, Eddie, and coming back. And it’s always light , here…” Tears came, streaking Maryalice’s makeup. “Everywhere. Couldn’t sleep for all the light, like a fog over the city… Get in the bathroom.” Maryalice taking a step forward, Eddie and the Russian taking one back.

Chia reached over and picked up the stungun, she wasn’t sure why. It had a pair of blunt chrome fangs on one end, a red, ridged stud on one edge. She was surprised at how little it weighed. She remembered the ones the boys at her school had made from those disposable flash-cameras.

“And it always finds me, that light,” Maryalice said. “Always. No matter what I drink, what I take on top of that, It finds me and it wakes me up. It’s like powder, blows in under the door. Nothing to do about it. Gets in your eyes. And all that brightness, falling…”

Eddie was half back through the doorway now, the Russian behind him, actually in the bathroom, and Chia didn’t like that because she couldn’t see the Russian’s hands. She heard the ambient birdsong start as the bathroom sensed the Russian, “And you put me there, Eddie. That Shinjuku. You put me where that light could get me, and I could never get away.”

And then Maryalice pulled the trigger.

Eddie screamed, a weird shrill sound bouncing off the black and white tiles. That must’ve covered the click of the lighter, which hadn’t even produced a flame.

Maryalice didn’t panic.

She held her aim and calmly pulled the trigger again.

She got a light, that time, but Eddie, with a howl of rage, swatted the lighter aside, grabbed Maryalice by the throat, and started pounding her in the face with his fist, the howl resolving into “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” in sync with each blow.

And that was when Chia, without really thinking about it, came up from where she’d been sitting for so long that, she found, her legs were asleep, and didn’t work, so that she had to turn her lunge into a roll, and roll again, before she could jam the chrome tips of the stun-gun against Eddie’s ankle and push the red stud.

She wasn’t sure it would work on an ankle, or through his sock. But it did. Maybe because Eddie wore those really thin socks.

But it got Maryalice, too, so that they seemed to jerk together, toppling into each other’s arms.

And the dark blur that flew past Chia then was Masahiko, who pulled the door shut on the Russian, grabbed the knob with both hands and jumped up, jamming one paper-slippered foot against the wall, the other against the door, and hung there. “Run,” he said, his arms and legs straining. Then his hands slipped off the round chrome knob and he landed on his ass.

Chia saw the knob start to turn.

She put the fangs of the stungun against the doorknob and pushed the stud. And kept pushing it.

Laney sat in the van’s front passenger seat again, the ’phones on his lap, waiting for Arleigh to connect Kuwayama’s gray module, He looked through the windshield at the concrete wall. His side didn’t hurt quite as much now, but the meeting with Kuwayama and the idoru, and then his huddle in the van with Yamazaki, had left him more confused than ever. If Rez and Rei Toei were making decisions in tandem, and if Yamazaki had decided to go along with them, where did that leave him? He couldn’t see that Blackwell was going to wake up to find some innate wonderfulness in the idea of Rez and Rei together. As far as Blackwell was concerned, Rez was still just trying to marry a software agent—whatever that might turn out to mean.

But Laney knew now that the idoru was more complex, more powerful, than any Hollywood synthespian. Particularly if Kuwayama were telling the truth about the videos being her “dreams.” All he knew about artificial intelligence came from work he’d done on a Slitscan episode documenting the unhappy personal life of one of the field’s leading researchers, but he knew that true AI was assumed never to have been achieved, and that current attempts to achieve it were supposed to be in directions quite opposite the creation of software that was good at acting like beautiful young women.