Idoru

34. Casino

Chia looked out between the dusty slats, to the street where it was raining. The idoru had done that. Chia had never made it rain, in Venice, but she didn’t mind the way it looked. It seemed to fit. It was like Seattle.

The idoru said this apartment was called a casino. Chia had seen casinos on television and they hadn’t looked anything like this. This was a few small rooms with flaking plaster walls, and big old-fashioned furniture with gold lion-feet. Everything worked up with fractals so you could almost smell it. It would’ve smelled dusty, she thought, and also like perfume. Chia hadn’t been to many of these modules, the insides of her Venice, because they were all sort of creepy. They didn’t give her the feeling she got in the streets.

Zona’s head, on the lion-footed table, made that bug-zap sound. She’d reduced herself to that, Zona: this little blue neon miniature of her Aztec skull, about the size of a small apple. Because Chia had told her to shut up and put the switchblade away. And that had pissed her off, and maybe hurt her feelings, but Chia hadn’t known what else to do. Chia had wanted to hear what the idoru had had to say, and Zona’s I’m-dangerous act totally got in the way. And that was all it was, just acting out, because people couldn’t really hurt each other when they were ported. Not physically, anyway. And that had always been a problem, with Zona. That whole swelling-up thunderhead macho thing. Kelsey and the others would make fun of it, but Zona was fierce enough, verbally, that they’d only do it behind her back. Chia had never known what to make of it; it was like Zona’s personality wasn’t together, around acting like that.

Now Zona wasn’t talking, just making the bug-zap sound every so often, to remind Chia she was still there and still pissed off.

The idoru was talking, though, telling Chia the old Venetian meaning of the word casino, not some giant sort of mall place where people went to gamble and watch shows, but something that sounded more like what Masahiko had said about love hotels. Like people had houses where they lived, but these casinos, these secret little apartments, hidden around town, were where they went to be with other people. But they hadn’t been too comfortable there, not to judge by this one, even though the idoru kept adding more and more candles. The idoru said she loved candles.

The idoru had the Music Master’s haircut now; it made her look like a girl pretending to be a boy. She seemed to like his greatcoat, too, because she kept turning on her heel—his heel—to twirl the hem out. “I’ve seen so many new places,” she said, smiling at Chia, “so many different people and things.”

–So have I, but…

“He told me it would be this way, but I had no idea, really.” Twirl. “Having seen all this, I’m so much more… Does it feel like that for you, when you travel?”

The death’s-head emitted a burst of blue light and a sound like a short, sharp fart. “Zona!” Chia hissed. Then all in a rush, to the idoru, “I haven’t traveled much and so far I don’t think I like it, but we just came here to see what you were, because we didn’t know, because you’re in my software, and maybe in Zona’s site, too, and that bothers her because it’s supposed to be private.”

“The country with the beautiful sky?”

“Yeah,” Chia said. “You aren’t really supposed to be able to go there unless she asks you.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” The idoru looked sad. “I thought I could go anywhere—except where you come from.”

“Seattle?”

“The hive of dreams,” said the idoru, “windows heaped against the sky. I can see the pictures, but there is no path. I know you’ve come from there, but it’s there… isn’t there!”

“The Walled City?” It had to be, because that was where she and Zona were coming from now. “We’re only ported through. Zona’s in Mexico City and I’m in this hotel, okay? And we really better go back now, ’cause I don’t know what’s happening—”

The blue skull expanded and went Zonaform, grim and sullen, “Finally you say something worthwhile. Why do you speak with this thing? She is nothing, only a more expensive version of this toy of yours she’s stolen and taken over. Now that I have seen her, I can only think that Rez is crazy, pathetically deluded…”

“But he isn’t crazy,” the idoru said. “It is what we feeltogether. He has told me that we will not be understood, not at first, and there will be resistance, hostility. But we mean no harm, and he believes that in the end only good can come from our union.”

“You synthetic bitch,” Zona said. “You think we don’t see what you’re doing? You aren’t real! You aren’t as real as this imitation of a drowned city! You’re a made-up thing, and you want to suck what’s real out of him!” Chia saw the thunderhead, the aura, starting to build. “This girl crossed the ocean to find you out, and now her life is in danger, and she is too stupid to see that you are the cause!”

The idoru looked at Chia. “Your life?”

Chia had to swallow. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m scared.”

And the idoru was gone, draining from Chia’s Music Master like a color that had no name. He stood there in the light of twenty candles, his expression unreadable. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but what exactly was it we were discussing?”

“We weren’t,” said Chia, then her goggles were lifted away, taking the Music Master and the room in Venice and Zona with them, and two of the fingers of the hand that held the goggles was ringed with gold, each ring linked to a gold watch’s massive bracelet with its own fine length of chain. Pale eyes looked into hers.

Eddie smiled. Chia drew her breath in to scream, and another hand, not Eddie’s, but large and white, smelling of metallic perfume, covered her mouth and nose. And a hand on her shoulder, pressing down, as Eddie stepped back, letting the goggles fall to the white carpet.

Holding her gaze, Eddie raised one finger to his lips, smiled, and said “Shhhh.” Then stepped aside, turning away, so that Chia saw Masahiko sitting there on the floor, the black cups over his eyes, his fingers moving in their tip-sets.

Eddie took something black from his pocket and reached Masahiko in two silent, exaggerated steps. He did something to the black thing and bent down with it. She saw it touch Masahiko’s neck.

Masahiko’s muscles all seemed to jerk at once, his legs straightening, throwing him sideways, where he lay on the white carpet, twitching, his mouth open. One of the black cups had come off. The other still covered his right eye.

Eddie turned back, looking at her.

“Where is it?” he said.