Idoru

38. Star

When the stungun quit making that zapping sound, Chia dropped it. The doorknob wasn’t turning. No sound from the bathroom but the faint recorded cries of tropical birds. She whipped around. Masahiko was trying to get his computer into the plaid carrier-bag. She dived for her Sandbenders, grabbed it up, still trailing her goggles, and turned to the pink bed. Her bag was beside it on the floor, with the blue and yellow SeaTac plastic showing. She pulled that out, the thing still in it, and tossed it on the bed. She bent to shove her Sandbenders into her bag, but glanced back at the bathroom door when she thought she heard something.

The knob was turning again.

The Russian opened the door. When he let go of the knob, she saw that his hand was inside something that looked like a Day-Glo pink hand-puppet. One of the sex toys from the black cabinet. He was using it as insulation. He peeled it off his fingers and tossed it back over his shoulder. The bird sounds faded as he stepped out.

Masahiko, who’d been trying to get one of his feet into one of his black shoes, was looking at the Russian too. He still had a paper slipper on the other foot.

“You are going?” the Russian said.

“It’s on the bed,” Chia said. “We didn’t have anything to dowith it.”

The Russian noticed the stungun on the carpet, beside the pointed toe of his boot. He raised the boot and brought his heel down. Chia heard the plastic case crack. “Artemi, my friend of Novokuznetskaya, is doing himself great indignity with this.” He prodded the fragments of the stungun with his toe. “Is wearing very tight jeans, Artemi, leather, is fashion. Putting in front pocket, trigger is pressing accident. Artemi is shocking his manhood.” The Russian showed Chia his large, uneven teeth. “Still we are laughing, yes?”

“Please,” Chia said. “We just want to go.”

The Russian stepped past Eddie and Maryalice, who lay tangled on the carpet. “You are accident like Artemi to his manhood, yes? You are only happening to this owner of fine nightclub.” He indicated the unconscious Eddie. “Who is smuggler and other things, very complicated, but you, you are only accident?”

“That’s right,” Chia said.

“You are of Lo/Rez.” It sounded like Lor-ess. He stepped closer to Chia and looked down into the bag. “You are knowing what this is.”

“No,” Chia lied. “I’m not.”

The Russian looked at her. “We are not liking accident, ever. Not allowingaccident.” His hands came up, then, and she saw that the back of the third joint of each of his fingers was pink with those dots, each one the size of the end of a pencil eraser. She’d seen those at her last school and knew they meant a laser had recently been used to remove a tattoo.

She looked up at his face. He looked like someone who was about to do something that he might not want to do, but that he knew he had to.

But then she saw his eyes slide past her, narrowing, and she turned in time to see the door to the corridor swing inward. A man wider than the doorway seemed to flow into the room. There was a big X of flesh-colored tape across one side of his face, and he was wearing a coat the color of dull metal. Chia saw one huge, scarred hand slip into his coat; the other held something black that ended in a mag-strip tab.

“Yob tvoyu mat,” said the Russian, soft syllables of surprise.

The stranger’s hand emerged, holding something that looked to Chia like a very large pair of chrome-plated scissors, but then unfolded, with a series of small sharp clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glittering, skeletal axe, its leading edge hawk-like and lethal, the head behind it tapering like an icepick.

“My mother?” said the stranger, who sounded somehow delighted. “Did you say my mother?” His face was shiny with scar tissue. More scars crisscrossed his shaven, stubbled skull.

“Ah, no,” the Russian said, lifting his hands so that the palms showed. “Figuring of speech, only.”

Another man stepped in, around the man with the axe, and this one had dark hair and wore a loose black suit. The headband of a monocle-rig crossed his forehead, the unit covering his right eye. The eye she could see was wide and bright and green, but still it took a second before she recognized him.

Then she had to sit down on the pink bed.

“Where is it?” this man who looked like Rez asked. (Except he looked thicker, somehow, his cheeks unhollowed.)

Neither the Russian nor the man with the axe answered. The man with the axe closed the door behind him with his heel.

The green eye and the video-monocle looked at Chia. “Do you know where it is?”

“What?”

“The biomech primer module, or whatever it is you call it…” He paused, touching the phone in his right ear, listening. “Excuse me: ‘Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C=slash-7A.’ I love you.”

Chia stared.

“Rei Toei,” he explained, touching the headband, and she knew that it had to be him.

“It’s here. In this bag.”

He reached into the blue and yellow plastic and drew the thing out, turning it over in his hands. “This? This is our future, the medium of our marriage?”

“Excuse, please,” the Russian said, “but you must know this is belonging to me.” He sounded genuinely sorry.

Rez looked up, the nanotech unit held casually in his hands. “It’s yours?” Rez tilted his head, like a bird, curious. “Where did you get it?”

The Russian coughed. “An exchange. This gentleman on floor.”

Rez saw Eddie and Maryalice. “Are they dead?”

“Volted, yes? Being most-time nonlethal. Your girl on bed.”

Rez looked at Chia. “Who are you?”

“Chia Pet McKenzie,” she said automatically. “I’m from Seattle. I’m… I’m in your fan club.” She felt her face burning.

The brow above the green eye went up. He seemed to be listening to something. “Oh,” he said, and paused. “She did? Really? That’s wonderful.” He smiled at Chia. “Rei says you’ve been totally central to everything, and that we have a great deal to thank you for.”

Chia swallowed. “She does?”

But Rez had turned to the Russian. “We have to have this.” He raised the nanotech unit. “We’ll negotiate now. Name your price.”

“Rozzer,” the man at the door said, “you can’t dothat. This bastard’s Kombinat.”

Chia saw the green eye close, as if Rez were making a conscious effort to calm himself. When it opened, he said: “But they’re the government, aren’t they, Blackwell? We’ve negotiatedwith governments before.”

“It’s for the legals,” the scarred man said, but now there was an edge of worry in his voice.

The Russian seemed to hear it too. He slowly lowered his hands. “What were you planning to dowith this?” Rez asked him. The Russian looked down at the thing in Rez’s hands, as if considering, then raised his eyes. A muscle was jumping, in his cheek. He seemed to come to a decision. “We are developing ambitious public works project,” he said.

“Oh Jesus,” Maryalice said from the carpet, so hoarsely that at first Chia couldn’t identify the source. “They must’ve putsomething in that. They did. I swear to Godthey did.” And then she threw up.