Idoru (32 page)
And Arleigh said she should just wait. Because that girl in Mexico City, more than anything else, needed to be somebody else. And it didn't matter that she hadn't
been
Zona, because she'd made Zona
up
, and that was just as real. Just wait, Arleigh said, because somebody else would turn up, somebody new, and it would be like they already knew you. And Chia had sat and thought about that, beside Arleigh in her fast little car.
—But I couldn't ever tell her I knew?
—That would spoil it.
When they'd gotten to the airport, Arleigh checked her in at JAL, found somebody to take her to the lounge (which was sort of like a cross between a bar and really fancy business office), and gave her a bag with a roadie-grade Lo/Rez tour jacket in it. The sleeves were made of transparent rayon, and the lining that showed through that looked like liquid mercury. Arleigh said it was really tacky, but maybe she had a friend who'd like it. It was from their Kombinat tour, and it had all the tour dates embroidered on the back in three different languages.
She hadn't ever worn it, and she'd never really shown it to anybody either. It was hanging in her closet, under a piece of drycleaner's plastic. She hadn't really been that active in the chapter lately. (Kelsey had dropped right out.) Chia didn't really feel that anybody in the chapter would get it, if she tried to tell them what had happened, plus there were all the bits she couldn't tell them anyway.
But mainly it was the City taking up her time, because Rez and Rei were there, shadows among the other shadows but still you could tell. Working on their Project.
Plenty there who didn't like the idea, but plenty who did. The Etruscan did. He said it was the craziest thing since they'd turned that first killfile inside out.
Sometimes Chia wondered if they all weren't just joking, because it just seemed impossible that anyone could ever do that. Build that, on an island in Tokyo Bay.
But the idoru said that that was where they wanted to live, now that they were married. So they were going to do it.
And if they do, Chia thought, hearing the hiss of the Espressomatic, I'll go there.
Table of Contents
1. Death Cube K
2. Lo Rez Skyline
3. Almost a Civilian
4. Venice Decompressed
5. Nodal Points
6. DESH
7. The Wet, Warm Life in Alison Shires
8. Narita
9. Out of Control
10. Whiskey Clone
11. Collapse of New Buildings
12. Mitsuko
13. Character Recognition
14. Tokyo Chapter
15. Akihabara
16. Zona
17. The Walls of Fame
18. The Otaku
19. Arleigh
20. Monkey Boxing
21. Standover Man
22. Gomi Boy
23. Here at the Western World
24. Hotel Di
25. The Idoru
26. Hak Nam
27. That Physical Thing
28. A Matter of Credit
29. Her Bad Side
30. The Etruscan
31. The Way Things Work
32. The Uninvited
33. Topology
34. Casino
35. The Testbed of Futurity
36. Maryalice
37. Work Experience
38. Star
39. Trans
40. The Business
41. Candlelight and Tears
42. Checking Out
43. Toecutter's Breakfast
44. La Purissima
45. Lucky
46. Fables of the Reconstruction
