Idoru

11. Collapse of New Buildings

Laney’s room was high up in a narrow tower faced with white ceramic tile. It was trapezoidal in cross section and dated from the eighties boomtown, the years of the Bubble. That it had survived the great earthquake was testimony to the skill of its engineers; that it had survived the subsequent reconstruction testified to an arcane tangle of ownership and an ongoing struggle between two of the city’s oldest criminal organizations. Yamazaki had explained this in the cab, returning from New Golden Street.

“We were uncertain how you might feel about new buildings,” he’d said.

“You mean the nanotech buildings?” Laney had been struggling to keep his eyes open. The driver wore spotless white gloves.

“Yes. Some people find them disturbing.”

“I don’t know. I’d have to see one.”

“You can see them from your hotel, I think.”

And he could. He knew their sheer brutality of scale from constructs, but virtuality had failed to convey the peculiarity of their apparent texture, a streamlined organicism. “They are like Giger’s paintings of New York,” Yamazaki had said, but the reference had been lost on Laney.

Now he sat on the edge of his bed, staring blankly out at these miracles of the new technology, as banal and as sinister as such miracles usually were, and they were only annoying: the world’s largest inhabited structures. (The Chernobyl containment structure was larger, but nothing human would ever live there.)

The umbrella Yamazaki had given him was collapsing into itself, shrinking. Going away.

The phone began to ring. He couldn’t find it.

“Telephone,” he said. “Where is it?”

A nub of ruby light, timed to the rings, began to pulse from a flat rectangle of white cedar arranged on a square black tray on a bedside ledge. He picked it up. Thumbed a tiny square of mother-of-pearl.

“Hey,” someone said. “That Laney?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Rydell. From the Chateau. Hans let me use the phone.” Hans was the night manager. “I get the time right? You having breakfast?”

Laney rubbed his eyes, looked out again at the new buildings. “Sure.”

“I called Yamazaki,” Rydell said. “Got your number.”

“Thanks,” Laney said, yawning, “but I—”

“Yamazaki said you got the gig.”

“I think so,” Laney said. “Thanks. Guess I owe—”

“Slitscan,” Rydell said. “All over the Chateau,”

“No,” Laney said, “that’s over.”

“You know any Katherine Torrance, Laney? Sherman Oaks address? She’s up in the suite you had, with about two vans worth of sensing gear. Hans figures they’re trying to get a read on what you were doing up there, any dope or anything.”

Laney stared out at the towers. Part of a facade seemed to move, but it had to be his eyes.

“But Hans says there’s no way they can sort the residual molecules out in those rooms anyway. Place has too much of a history.”

“Kathy Torrance? From Slitscan?”

“Not like they said they were, but they’ve got all these techs, and techs always talk too much, and Ghengis down in the garage saw the decals on some of the cases, when they were unloading. There’s about twenty of ’em, if you don’t count the gophers. Got two suites and four singles. Don’t tip.”

“But what are they doing?”

“That sensor stuff. Trying to figure out what you got up to in the suite. And one of the bellmen saw them setting up a camera.”

The entire facade of one of the new buildings seemed to ripple, to crawl slightly. Laney closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, discovering a faint trace of pain residing there from the break. He opened his eyes. “But I never got upto anything.”

“Whatever.” Rydell sounded slightly hurt. “I just thought you ought to know, is all.”

Something was definitely happening to that facade. “I know. Thanks. Sorry.”

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything,” Rydell said. “What’s it like over there, anyway?”

Laney was watching a point of reflected light slide across the distant structure, a movement like osmosis or the sequential contraction of some sea creature’s palps. “It’s strange.”

“Bet it’s interesting,” Rydell said. “Enjoy your breakfast, okay? I’ll keep in touch.”

“Thanks,” Laney said, and Rydell hung up.

Laney put the phone back on the lacquer tray and stretched out on the bed, fully clothed. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the new buildings. But they were still there, in the darkness and the light behind his lids. And as he watched, they slid apart, deliquesced, and trickled away, down into the mazes of an older city.

He slid down with them.