Free Idoru by William Gibson Page B

forgotten and finally unknowable.
    But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasn't sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be.
    He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps she'd become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth.
    It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.
    “Get me out of here,” he said to Daniels, who smiled beneath his surgical clamp, whipping the card triumphantly away from the plastic.
    “Steady,” said Blackwell, laying his huge hand, with its silvery-pink fretwork of scars, over Laney's wrist. “You haven't even had your drink yet.”
    Laney had met Rydell when the Out of Control team installed him in a suite at the Chateau, that ancient simulacrum of a still more ancient original, its quaint concrete eccentricities pinched between the twin brutalities of a particularly nasty pair of office buildings dating from the final year of the previous century. These reflected all the Millennial anxiety of the year of their creation, while refracting it through some other, more mysterious, weirdly muted hysteria that seemed somehow more personal and even less attractive.
    Laney's suite, much larger than his apartment in Santa Monica, was like an elongated 1920s apartment following the long, shallow concrete balcony that faced Sunset, this in turn overlooking a deeper balcony on the floor below and the tiny circular lawn that was all that remained of the original gardens.
    Laney thought it was a strange choice, considering his situation. He would have imagined they'd choose something more corporate, more fortified, more heavily wired, but Rice Daniels had explained that the Chateau had advantages all its own. It was a good choice in terms of image, because it humanized Laney; it looked like a habitation , basically, something with walls and doors and windows, in which a guest could be imagined to be living something akin to a life—not at all the case with the geometric solids that were serious business hotels. It also had deeply rooted associations with the Hollywood star system, and with human tragedy as well. Stars had lived here, in the heyday of old Hollywood, and, later, certain stars had died here. Out of Control planned to frame the death of Alison Shires as a tragedy in a venerable Hollywood tradition, but one that had been brought on by Slitscan, a very contemporary entity. Besides, Daniels explained, the Chateau was far more secure than it might at first look. And at this point Laney had been introduced to Berry Rydell, the night security man.
    Daniels and Rydell, it seemed to Laney, had known one another prior to Rydell working at the Chateau, though how, exactly, remained unclear. Rydell seemed oddly at home with the workings of the infotainment industry, and at one point, when they'd found themselves alone together, he'd asked Laney who was representing him.
    “How do you mean?” Laney had said.
    “You've got an agent, don't you?”
    Laney said he didn't.
    “You better get one,” Rydell had said. “Not that it'll necessarily come out the way you'd wanted, but, hey, it's show business, right?”
    It was indeed show business, to an extent that very quickly made Laney wonder if he'd made the right decision. There had been sixteen people in his suite, for a four-hour meeting, and he'd only been out of the lock-up for six hours. When they'd finally gone, Laney had staggered the length of the place, mistakenly trying several closet doors in his search for the bedroom. Finding it, he'd crawled onto the bed and fallen asleep in the clothes they'd sent Rydell to the Beverly Center to buy for him.
    Which he thought he might well do right here, now, in this Golden Street bar, thereby answering the question of what the