William Gibson - Idoru

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam's Sons 1996

Published in Great Britain by Viking 1996

Published in Penguin Books 1997

Copyright William Gibson, 1996

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-191001-7

for Claire

Sogho Ishii, the Japanese director, introduced me to Kowloon Walled City via the photographs of Ryuji Miyamoto. It was Ishii-san's idea that we should make a science fiction movie there. We never did, but the Walled City continued to haunt me, though I knew no more about it than I could gather from Miyamoto's stunning images, which eventually provided most of the texture for the Bridge in my novel Virtual Light.

Architect Ken Vineberg drew my attention to an article about the Walled City in Architectural Review, where I first learned of City of Darkness, the splendid record assembled by Greg Girard and Ian Lambrot (Watermark, London, 1993). From London, John Jarrold very kindly arranged for me to receive a copy.

Anything I know of the toecutting business, I owe to the criminal memoirs of Mark Brandon Chopper Read (Chopper from the Inside, Sly Ink, Australia, 1991). Mr. Read is a great deal scarier than Blackwell, and has even fewer ears.

Karl Taro Greenfeld's Speed Tribes (HarperCollins, New York, 1994) richly fed my dreams of Laney's jet lag.

Stephen P. (Plausibility) Brown rode shotgun on the work in progress for many months, commenting daily, sometimes more often, and always with a fine forbearance, as I faxed him a bewildering flurry of disconnected fragments he was somehow expected to interpret as progress. His constant encouragement and seemingly endless patience were absolutely essential to this book's completion.

My publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic, also demonstrated great patience, and I thank them.

After Slitscan, Laney heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau. Rydell was a big quiet Tennessean with a sad shy grin, cheap sunglasses, and a walkie-talkie screwed permanently into one ear.

Paragon-Asia Dataflow, Rydell said, around four in the morning, the two of them seated in a pair of huge old armchairs. Concrete beams overhead had been hand-painted to vaguely resemble blond oak. The chairs, like the rest of the furniture in the Chateau's lobby, were oversized to the extent that whoever sat in them seemed built to a smaller scale.

Really? Laney asked, keeping up the pretense that someone like Rydell would know where he could still find work.

Tokyo, Japan, Rydell said, and sucked iced latte through a plastic straw. Guy I met in San Francisco last year. Yamazaki. He's working for 'em. Says they need a serious netrunner.

Netrunner. Laney, who liked to think of himself as a researcher, suppressed a sigh. Contract job?

Guess so. Didn't say.

I don't think I'd want to live in Tokyo.

Rydell used his straw to stir the foam and ice remaining at the bottom of his tall plastic cup, as though he were hoping to find a secret prize. He didn't say you'd have to. He looked up. You ever been to Tokyo?

No.

Must be an interesting place, after that quake and all. The walkie-talkie ticked and whispered. I gotta go on out and check the gate by the bungalows now. Feel like coming?

No, Laney said. Thanks.

Rydell stood, automatically straightening the creases in his khaki uniform trousers. He wore a black nylon web-belt hung with various holstered devices, all of them black, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a peculiarly immobile black tie. I'll leave the number in your box, he said.

Laney watched the security man cross the terra cotta and the various rugs, to vanish past the darkly polished panels of the registration desk. He'd had something going on cable once, Laney had gathered. Nice guy. Loser.

Laney sat there until dawn came edging in through the tall, arched windows, and Taiwanese stainless could be heard to rattle, but gently, from the darkened cave of the breakfast room. Immigrant voices, in some High Steppe dialect the Great Khans might well have understood. Echoes woke from the tiled floor, from the high beams surviving from an age that must once have seen the advent of Laney's kind or predecessors, their ecology of celebrity and the terrible and inviolable order of that food chain.

Rydell left a folded sheet of Chateau notepaper in Laney's box. A Tokyo number. Laney found it there the next afternoon, along with an updated estimate of his final bill from the lawyers.

He took them both up to the room he could no longer even pretend to afford.

A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator's gold-veined mirror for this three-floor ascent of the aggressively nondescript O My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube K, apparently a Franz Kafka theme bar.