Idoru

28. A Matter of Credit

Maryalice opened a curved drawer that was built into the pink bed’s headboard. She was wearing a black skin-suit with big red Ashleigh Modine Carter-style sequin roses on the lapels. She took out a little blue glass dish and balanced it on her knee. “I hate these places,” she said. “There’s lots of ways to make sex ugly, but it’s kind of hard to make it look this ridiculous.” She knocked the gray end off her cigarette, into the blue saucer. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Fourteen,” Chia said.

“About what I told ’em. You’re fourteen, fifteen, for real, and no way you were on to me. I was on to you, right? It was my move. I planted on you. But they don’t believe me. Say you’re some kind of operator, say I’m just stupid, say that Rez guy sent you to SeaTac to get the stuff. Say you’re a set-up and I’m crazy to believe a kid couldn’t do that.” She sucked on the cigarette, squinting. “Where is it?” She looked down at Chia’s bag, open on the white carpet. “There?”

“I didn’t mean to take it. I didn’t know it was there.”

“I know that,” Maryalice said. “What I told ’em. I meant to get it back off you at the club.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Chia said. “It just scares me.”

“Sometimes I bring stuff back for Eddie. Party favors for the club. It’s illegal, but it’s not all thatillegal, you know? Not hard stuff, really. But this time he was doing something else on the side, something with the Russians, and I didn’t like it. That’s what scares me, that stuff. Like its alive.”

“What stuff?”

“That. Assemblers, they’re called.”

Chia looked at her bag. “That thing in my bag is a nanotech assembler?”

“More like what you start with. Kind of an egg, or a little factory. You plug that thing into another machine that programs ’em, and they start building themselves out of whatever’s handy. And when there’s enough of ’em, they start building whatever it was you wanted them to. There’s some kind of law against selling that stuff to the Kombinat, so they want it bad. But Eddie worked out a way to do it. I met these two creepy German guys in the SeaTac Hyatt. They’d flown in there from wherever, I figured maybe Africa.” She mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the little blue dish, making it smell even worse. “They didn’t want to give it to me, because they were expecting Eddie. Lot of back and forth on the phone. Finally they did. I was supposed to put it in the suitcase with the other stuff, but it made me nervous. Made me wanna self-medicate.” She looked around the room. She put the blue dish with the crushed cigarette on a square black side table and did something that made the front of it open. It was a refrigerator, filled with little bottles. Maryalice bent over, peering in there. The pistol-shaped lighter slid off the pink bed. “No tequila,” Maryalice said. “You tell me why anybody’d name a vodka ‘Come Back Salmon’… ” Removing a little square bottle with a fish on its side. “Japanese would, though.” She looked down at the lighter. “Like a Russian would make a cigarette lighter that looks like a pistol.”

Chia saw that Maryalice didn’t have her hair-extensions in anymore. “When they were taking DNA samples, in SeaTac,” Chia said, “you stuck the end of your extension in there.

Maryalice cracked the seal on the little bottle, opened it, drained it in a single gulp, and shivered. “Those extensions are all my own hair,” she said. “Grew ’em out when I was on sort of a health diet, understand? They catch people doing recreationals, when they take those hair samples. Some recreationals, they stay in your hair a long time.” Maryalice put the empty bottle down beside the blue dish. “What’s he doing?” Pointing at Masahiko.

“Porting,” Chia said, unable to think of a quick way to explain the Walled City.

“I can see that. You came here ’cause these places’ll re-post, right?”

“But you found us anyway.”

“I got connections with a cab company. I figured it was worth a try. But the Russians’ll think of it, too, if they haven’t already.”

“But how’d you get in? It was all locked.”

“I know my way around these places, honey. I know my way entirely too well.”

Masahiko removed the black cups that covered his eyes, saw Maryalice, looked down at the cups, then back up at Chia.

“Maryalice,” Chia said.

Gomi Boy presented like a life-size anime of himself, huge eyes and even taller hair. “Who drank the vodka?” he asked.

“Maryalice,” Chia said.

“Who’s Maryalice?”

“She’s in the room at the hotel,” Chia said.

“That was the equivalent of twenty minutes porting,” Gomi Boy said. “How can there be someone in your room at the Hotel Di?”

“It’s complicated,” Chia said. They were back in Masahiko’s room in the Walled City. They’d just clicked back, none of that maze-running like the first time. Past an icon reminding her she’d left her Venice open, but too late for that. Maybe once you were in here, you got back fast. But Masahiko’d said they had to, quick, there was trouble. Maryalice had said she didn’t mind, but Chia didn’t like it at all that Maryalice was in the room with them while they were porting.

“Your cash card is good for twenty-six more minutes of room-time,” Gomi Boy said. “Unless your friend hits the mini-bar again. Do you have an account in Seattle?”

“No,” Chia said, “just my mother…”

“We’ve already looked at that,” Masahiko said. “Your mother’s credit would not sustain rental of the room plus porting charges. Your father—”

“My father?”

“Has an expense account with his employer in Singapore, a merchant bank—”

“How do you know that?”

Gomi Boy shrugged. “Walled City. We find things out. There are people here who know things.”

“You can’t tap into my father’s account,” Chia said. “It’s for his job.”

“Twenty-five minutes remaining,” Masahiko said.

Chia pulled her goggles off. Maryalice was taking another miniature bottle from the little fridge. “Don’t open that!”

Maryalice gave a guilty little shriek and dropped the bottle. “Just maybe some rice crackers,” she said.

“Nothing,” Chia said. “It’s too expensive! We’re running out of money!”

“Oh,” Maryalice said, blinking. “Right. I don’t have any, though. Eddie’s cut my cards off, for sure, and the first time I plug one, he’ll know exactly where I am.”

Masahiko spoke to Chia without removing the eyecups. “We have your father’s expense account on line…”

Maryalice smiled. “What we like to hear, right?”

Chia was pulling off her tip-sets. “You’ll have to take it to them,” she said to Maryalice, “the nano-thing. I’ll give it to you now, you take it to them, give it to them, tell them it was all a mistake.” She scooted on her hands and knees over to where her bag sat open on the floor. She dug for the thing, found it, held it out to Maryalice in what was left of the blue and yellow bag from the SeaTac duty-free. The dark gray plastic and the rows of little holes made it look like some kind of deformed designer pepper grinder. “Take it. Explain to them. Tell them it was just a mistake.”

Maryalice cringed. “Put it back, okay?” She swallowed. “See, the problem isn’t whether or not there’s been a mistake. The problem’s they’ll kill us now anyway, because we know about it. And Eddie, he’ll let ’em. ’Cause he has to. And ’cause he’s just sort of generally fed up with me, the ungrateful little greasy shithead motherfucker…” Maryalice shook her head sadly. “It’s about the end of our relationship, you ask me.”

“Account accessed,” Masahiko said. “Join us here now, please. You have another visitor.”