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"1 lave you called the police?"
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"We did, we did, but it's all flicking Martian, all these forms they tick
through on their notebooks, and what blood type was she. . . . You don't know
what blood type she is, do you, Laney?"
"Thin," Laney said. "Sort of straw-colored."
But Daniels didn't seem to hear. He seized Laney's shoulder and showed him
teeth, a rictus intended somehow to indicate friendship. "I have real respect
for you, man. How you don't have any issues."
Laney saw Arleigh wave to him from the entrance to the lounge. She was wearing
something short and black.
"You take care, Rice." Shaking the man's cold hand. "She'll turn up. I'm sure
of it."
And then he was walking toward Arleigh, smiling, and he saw that she was
smiling back.
278 William Gibson
Chia was on the bed, watching television. It made her feel more normal. It was
like a drug, that way. She remembered how much television her mother had
watched, after her father had left.
But this was Japanese television, where girls who could have been Mitsuko,
only a little younger, wearing sailor-suit dresses, were spinning huge wooden
tops at a long table. They could really spin them, too; keep them up forever.
It was a contest. The console could translate, but it was even more relaxing
not to know what they were saying. The most relaxing parts of all were the
close-ups of the tops spinning.
She'd used the translation to check out the NHK coverage of the death hoax on
the net and the candlelight vigil at the Hotel Di.
She'd seen a very satisfyingly pudgy Hiromi Ogama denying she knew who had
nuked her chapter's site and then issued the call to mourning from its ruins.
It had not been a member of the club, Hiromi had stressed, either locally or
internationally. Chia knew Hiromi was lying, because it had to have been Zona,
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but the Lo/Rez people would be telling her what to say. Arleigh had told Chia
the whole thing had been launched out of a disused website that belonged to an
aerospace company in Arizona. Which meant that Zona had blown her country,
because now she wouldn't be able to go back there. (Nice as Arleigh seemed to
be, Chia hadn't told her anything about Lona.)
And she'd seen the helicopter shots of the vigil, afld of the baf- 0
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S4. La Puirissima fled tactical squads facing an estimated twenty-five hundred
tearyeyed girls. The injury count was low, everything fairly minor except for
one girl who'd slid down a freeway embankment and broken both her ankles. The
real problem had been getting everyone out of there, because a lot of them had
arrived five or six to a cab, and had no way of getting home. Some had taken
the family car and then abandoned it in their hurry to reach the vigil, and
that had created another kind of mess. There had been a few dozen arrests,
mostly for trespassing.
And she'd seen the message Rez had recorded, assuring people he was alive and
well, and regretting the whole thing, which of course he'd had nothing to do
with. He wasn't wearing the monocle-rig, for this, but he had on the same
black suit and t-shirt. He looked thinner, though; someone had
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it. He'd played it light, at first, grinning, saying he'd never been to the
Hotel Di and in fact had never visited a love hotel, but now maybe he should.
Then he'd turned serious and said how sorry he was that people had been
inconvenienced and even hurt by someone's irresponsible prank. And he'd capped
it, smiling, by saying that the whole thing had been quite uniquely moving for
him, because how often do you get to watch your own funeral?
And she'd seen the people who owned and managed the Hotel Di, expressing their
regret. They had no idea, they said, how any of this had happened. She got the
feeling that expressing regret was a big thing here, but the owners of the Di
had also managed to explain how there was no on-site staff at their hotel, in
the interest of the guests' greater privacy. Arleigh, watching this, had said
that that was the commercial, and that she bet the place was going to be
booked solid for the next two months. It was famous, now.
All in all, the coverage seemed to treat the whole thing as some kind of
silly-season item that might have had serious repercussions if the police
hadn't acted as calmly and as skillfully as they eventually had, bringing in
electric buses from the suburbs to ferry the girls to collection-
points around the city.
Arleigh was from San l~ranc1sc() and she worked for Lo/Rez and
280 William Gibson knew Rez personally, and she was the one who'd driven the
van out through the crowd. And then she'd lost a police helicopter by doing
something completely crazy on that expressway, a kind of u-
turn right over the concrete bumper-thing down the middle.
She'd brought Chia and Masahiko to this hotel, and put them in these adjoining
rooms with weirdly angled corners, where they each had a private bath. She'd
asked them both to please stay there, and not to port or use the phone without
telling her, except for room service, and then she'd gone out.
Chia had had a shower right away. It was the best shower she'd ever had, and
she felt like she never wanted to wear those clothes again as long as she
lived. She didn't even want to have to look at them. She found a plastic bag
you were supposed to put your clothes in to be laundered, and she put them in
that and put it in the wastebasket in the bathroom. Then she'd put on all
clean clothes from her bag, everything kind of wrinkled but it felt great, and
she'd blow-dried her hair with the machine built into the bathroom wall. The
toilet didn't talk and it only had three buttons to figure out.
Then she lay down on the bed and fell asleep, but not for long.
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Arleigh kept popping in to make sure Chia was okay, and telling her news, so
that Chia felt like she was part of it, whatever it was. Ar-leigh said Rez was
back at his own hotel now, but that he'd come later to spend some time with
her and thank her for all she'd done.
That made Chia feel strange. Now she'd seen him in real life, somehow that had
taken over from all the other ways she'd known him before, and she felt kind
of funny about him. Confused. Like all of this had pegged him in realtime for
her, and she kept thinking of her mother complaining that Lo and Rez were
nearly as old as she was.
And there was something else to it, too, that came from what she'd seen when
she was crouched down in the back of that van, between the little Japanese guy
with the sleeve of his jacket hanging down, and Masahiko: she'd looked out the
window and seen the faces, as the van inched away. None of them knowing that
that was 0
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