The Bridge Trilogy Part 54

Laney stared glumly at the grinning bulldog, missing the girl with pigtails. "Like doc.u.mentaries about themselves?"

"The doc.u.mentaries were not made subject to the band's approval, They are not Lo/Rez corporate doc.u.ments."

"Well, I guess we've got that to be thankful for."

"You are welcome." Yamazaki hung up.

The virtual POV zoomed, rotating in on one of the spikes on the dog's collar: in close-up, it was a shining steel pyramid. Reflected clouds whipped past in time-lapse on the towering triangular face as the Universal Copyright Agreement warning scrolled into view.

Laney watched long enough to see that the video was spliced together from bits and pieces of the band's public relations footage, "Art-warning," he said, and went into the bathroom to decipher the shower controls.

He managed to miss the first six minutes, showering and brushing his teeth. He'd seen things like that before, art videos, but he'd never actually tried to pay attention to one. Putting on the hotel's white terry robe, he told himself he'd better try. Yamazaki seemed capable of quizzing him on it later.

Why did people make things like this? There was no narration, no apparent structure; some of the same fragments kept repeating throughout, at different speeds.

In Los Angeles there were whole public-access channels devoted to things like this, and home-made

talkshows hosted by naked Encino witches, who sat in front of big paintings of the G.o.ddess they'd done in their garages. Except you could watch that. The logic of these cut-ups, he supposed, was that by making one you could somehow push back at the medium. Maybe it was supposed to be something like treading water, a simple repet.i.tive human activity that temporarily provided at least an illusion of parity with the sea. But to Laney, who had spent many of his waking hours down in the deeper realms of data that underlay the worlds of media, it only looked hopeless. And tedious, too, although he supposed that that boredom was somehow meant to be harnessed, here, another way of pushing back.

Why else would anyone have selected and edited all these bits of Lo and Rez, the Chinese guitarist and the half-Irish singer, saying stupid things in dozens of different television spots, most of them probably intended for translation? Greetings seemed to be a theme. "We're happy to be here in Vladivostok, We hear you've got a great new aquarium!" "We congratulate you on your free elections and your successftil dengue-abatement campaign!" "We've always loved London!" "New York, you're ...pragmatic!"

Laney explored the remains of his breakfast, finding a half-eaten slice of cold brown toast under a steel plate cover. There was an inch of coffee lefr in the pot. He didn't want to think about the call from Rydell or what it might mean. He'd thought he was done with Slitscan, done with the lawyers .

"Singapore, you're beautiful!" Rez said, Lo chiming in with "h.e.l.l-o, Lion City!"

He picked up the remote and hopefully tried the last-forward, No. Mute? No. Yamazaki was having this stuff piped in for his bene 94 William Gibson fit. He considered unplugging the console, but he was afraid they'd be able to tell.

It was speeding up now, the cuts more frequent, the whole more content-free, a numbing blur. Rez's grin was starting to look sinister, something with an agenda of its own that jumped unchanged from one cut to the next,

Suddenly it all slid away, into handheld shadow, highlights on rococo gilt. There was a clatter of gla.s.sware. The image had a peculiar flattened quality that he knew from Slitscan: the smallest lapel-cameras did that, the ones disguised as flecks of lint.

A restaurant? Club? Someone seated opposite the camera, beyond a phalanx of green bottles. The darkness and the bandwidth of the tiny camera making the features impossible to read. Then Rez leaned forward, recognizable in the new depth of focus. He gestured toward the camera with a gla.s.s of red wine.

"If we could ever once stop talking about the music, and the industry, and all the politics of that, I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us."

Someone, a woman, said something in French. Laney guessed that she was the one wearing the camera.

"Ease up, Rozzer. She doesn't understand half you're saying." Laney sat forward. The voice had been Blackwell's.

"Doesn't she?" Rez receded, out of focus. "Because if she did, I think I'd tell her about the loneliness of being misunderstood. Or is it the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be understood?"

And the frame froze on the singer's blurred face. A date and time-stamp. Two years earlier. The word "Misunderstood" appeared.

The phone rang.

"Yeah?"

"Blackwell says there is a window of opportunity. The schedule has been moved up. You can access

now." It was Yamazaki.

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"Good," Laney said. "I don't think I'm getting very far with this first video."

"Rez's quest for renewed artistic meaning? Don't worry; we will screen it for you again, later."

"I'm relieved," Laney said. "Is the second one as good?"

"Second doc.u.mentary is more conventionally structured. In-depth interviews, biographical detail, BBC, three years ago."

"Wonderful."

"Blackwell is on his way to the hotel. Goodbye."

96 William Gibson The site Mitsuko's chapter had erected for the meeting reminded Chia ofj.a.panese prints she'd seen on a school trip to the museum in Seattle; there was a brownish light that seemed to arrive through layers of ancient varnish. There were hills in the distance with twisted trees, their branches like quick black squiggles of ink. She came vectoring in, beside Mitsuko, toward a wooden house with deep overhanging eaves, its shape familiar from anime. It was the sort of house that ninjas crept into in the dark, to wake a sleeping heroine and tell her that all was not as she thought, that her uncle was in league with the evil warlord. She checked how she was presenting in a small peripheral window; put a nudge more depth into her lips.

Nearing the house, she saw that everything had been worked up out of club archives, so that the whole environment was actually made of Lo/Rez material. You noticed it first in the wood-and-paper panels of the walls, where faint image-fragments, larger than life, came and went with the organic randomness of leaf-dappled sun and shadow: Rez's cheekbone and half a pair of black gla.s.ses, La's hand chording the neck of his guitar. But these changed, were replaced with a mothlike flicker, and there would be more, all the way down into the site's finest resolution, its digital fabric.

She wasn't sure if you could do that with enough of the right kind of fractal packets, or if you needed some kind of special computer. Her Sandbenders man aged a few effects like that, but mainly in its presentation of Sand-3 benders software. 0

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14. Tokyo Chapter Screens slid aside as she and Mitsuko, seated crosslegged, entered the house. Coming to a neat halt side by side, still seated, floating about three inches off the tatami (which Chia avoided focusing on after she'd seen that it was woven from concert-footage; too distracting). It was a nice way to make an entrance. Mitsuko was wearing the kimono and the wide belt-thing, the whole traditional outfit, except there was some low-key animation going on in the weave of the fabric.

Chia herself had downloaded this black Silke-Marie KoIb blousonand-tights set, even though she hated paying for virtual designer stuff that they wouldn't even let you keep or copy. She'd used Kelsey's cashcard number for that, though, which had made her feel better about it.

There were seven girls waiting there, all in kimonos, all floating just off the tatami. Except the one sitting by herself, at the head of the imaginary table, was a robot. Not like any real robot, but a slender, chrome-skinned thing like mercury constrained within the form of a girl. The fice was smooth, only partially featured, eyeless, with twin straight rows of small holes where a mouth should have been. That would be Hiromi Ogawa, and Chia immediately decided to believe that she was overweight.

Hiromi's kimono was crawling with animated sepia-tone footage from band interviews.

The introductions took a while, and everyone there definitely had a t.i.tle, but Chia had stopped paying attention after Hiromi's introduction, except to bow when she thought she was supposed to.

She didn't like it that Hiromi would turn up that way for a first meeting. It was rude, she thought, and it had to be deliberate, and the trouble they'd gone to with the s.p.a.ce just seemed to

make it more deliberate.

"We are honored to welcome you, Chia McKenzie. Our chapter looks forward to affording you every a.s.sistance. We are proud to be a part of the ongoing global appreciation of Lo/Rez, their music and their art."

"Thank you," Chia said, and sat there as a silence lengthened.

93 William Gibson