idoru by Idoru

Author:Idoru
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141910017
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

21. Standover Man

There was a man on stilts at the intersection nearest the hotel. He wore a hooded white paper suit, a gas mask, and a pair of rectangular sign-boards. Messages scrolled down the boards in Japanese as he shifted his weight to maintain balance. Streams of pedestrian traffic flowed around and past him.

“What's that?” Laney asked, indicating the man on stilts.

“A sect,” Arleigh McCrae said. “‘New Logic.’ They say the world will end when the combined weight of all the human nervous tissue on the planet reaches a specific figure.”

A very long multi-digit number went scrolling down.

“Is that it?” Laney asked.

“No,” she said, “that's their latest estimate of the current total weight.” She'd gone back to her room for the black coat she now wore, leaving Laney to change into clean socks, underwear, a blue shirt. He didn't have a tie, so he'd buttoned the shirt at the collar and put his jacket back on. He'd wondered if everyone who worked for Lo/Rez stayed in that same hotel.

Laney saw the man's eyes through the transparent visor as they passed. A look of grim patience. The stilts were the kind workers wore to put up ceilings, articulated alloy sprung with steel. “What's supposed to happen when there's enough nervous tissue?”

“A new order of being. They don't talk about it. Rez was interested in them, apparently. He tried to arrange an audience with the founder.”

“And?”

“The founder declined. He said that Rez made his living through the manipulation of human nervous tissue, and that that made him untouchable.”

“Rez was unhappy?”

“Not according to Blackwell. Blackwell said it seemed to cheer him up a little.”

“He's not cheerful, ordinarily?” Laney sidestepped to avoid a bicycle someone was wheeling in the opposite direction.

“Let's say that the things that bother Rez aren't the things that bother most people.”

Laney noticed a dark green van edging along beside them. Its wraparound windows were mirrored, its neon license plates framed with animated tubes of mini-Vegas twinklers. “I think we're being followed,” he said.

“We'd better be. I wanted the kind with the weird chrome curb-feelers that make them look like silverfish, but I had to settle for custom license-plate trim. Where you go, it goes. And parking, around here, is probably more of a challenge than anything you'll be expected to do tonight. Now,” she said, “down here.”

Steep, narrow stairs, walled with an alarming pink mosaic of glistening tonsil-like nodules. Laney hesitated, then saw a sign, the letters made up of hundreds of tiny pastel oblongs: LE CHICLE. Stepping down, he lost sight of the van.

A chewing-gum theme-bar, he thought, and then: I'm getting too used to this. But he still avoided touching the wall of chewed gum as he followed her down.

Into powdery pinks and grays, but these impersonating the unchewed product, wall-wide slabs of it, hung with archaic signage from the nation of his birth. Screen-printed steel. Framed and ancient cardboard, cunningly lit. Icons of gum. Bazooka Joe featured centrally, a figure unknown to Laney but surely no more displaced.

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