Zero History

by William Gibson

  “Be a dear,” Bigend called to her, not bothering to look up. “Swim it away. Try the penguin now.”

  The thing’s wingtips silently flexed, catching the air, for all the world like a real ray, as it swam slowly up, wheeling gracefully, barely missing the hanging stairway. “Utterly addictive,” Bigend said to Hollis. “Your locative art will morph again, with cheap aerial video drones.”

  “That doesn’t look cheap to me.”

  “No,” said Bigend, “not at all, but cheaper platforms will be in the High Street by Christmas. But the Festos are genius. We opted for their sheer strangeness, the organic movement, modeled from nature. They aren’t very fast, but if people see them, their first thought is that they’re hallucinating.”

  Milgrim nodded. “He’s coming,” he said. “Gracie.”

  “To London?”

  “She said he’ll be here soon.”

  “He has Sleight,” Bigend said, “so he knows that having a look at his pants was simply basic strategic business intelligence. It isn’t as though we’ve done anything to harm him. Or ‘Foley’ either, for that matter.”

  Milgrim looked from Bigend to Hollis, eyes wide.

  “A friend of mine has been in a traffic accident,” Hollis said. “I have to stay in town until I know how he is.”

  Bigend frowned. “Anyone I know?”

  “No,” said Hollis.

  “That’s not a problem. I wasn’t planning on sending you immediately. Say four more days. Will you know by then whether or not your friend is out of the woods?”

  “I hope so,” said Hollis.

  48. SHOTGUN

  You’re shotgun,” Heidi said to Milgrim as they neared the truck. Milgrim saw the pink Mossberg-Taser collaboration in Bigend’s gloved hands, in the office at Blue Ant, and almost said that he didn’t have one. “Hollis and I need a talk,” she said, clarifying things. He’d be in front with Aldous, his accustomed seat.

  Aldous, alerted to their exit, had the motor running. Locks clunked open for them. Milgrim and Heidi hauled their respective doors open. He scrambled up while Heidi helped Hollis. He managed to close his door before Heidi had closed hers. The locks clunked solidly into place. Aldous had proudly pointed out the narrowness, the extreme evenness, of the gaps between the doors and the bodywork. These were too narrow for the insertion of any pry bar, he’d said, too narrow even for “the jaws of life,” an expression Milgrim was unfamiliar with, but which he took to be Jamaican, some potent icon of existential dread.

  He fastened his seat belt, a bulky, complicated thing, and sat back, taking stock. Where, exactly, was he now, vis à vis the snapping jaws of life? Bigend had seemed to have virtually no reaction at all to the news of Milgrim having a federal agent in his life, or for that matter to Winnie’s alert regarding Gracie. Milgrim’s panic attack, only his second in recovery, not counting his initial reaction to having been photographed by Winnie in the Caffè Nero, had been for naught. As indeed had been every other panic attack he’d ever suffered, his therapist had repeatedly pointed out. His limbic mind was grooved by irrational fear, a sort of permanent roller coaster, always ready for a ride. “Don’t tell yourself that you’re afraid,” she’d advised him, “but that you have fear. Otherwise, you believe that you are fear.”

  “You didn’t quit,” said Heidi, behind him.

  “No,” said Hollis. “It wasn’t the right time.”

  “You’ve got to try those balloons. They fucking rock.”

  They were rolling now, the run-flats juddering over City tarmac, not so much old as recently resurfaced, piecemeal, in the course of much building.

  Milgrim sighed reflexively and let himself settle forward, slightly, into the seat belt harness. Let go of the tension, he told himself. Be, as his therapist said, in the moment.

  In the moment, a shiny black car, coming in the opposite direction, swerved diagonally into their path. Aldous instantly swinging right, into a much narrower street, the City equivalent of an alley, dark windowless walls of stone or concrete. Behind them, tires squealed. Milgrim glanced back, saw headlights plunging after them. “Look sharp,” advised Aldous, speeding up. Threads burst in the straps across Milgrim’s lap and chest, black shapes birthing instantly, a conjurer’s trick, hauling him upright.

  “Motherfuck,” observed Heidi, from the back seat, as Aldous continued to accelerate.

  And Milgrim fell, amazed and unthinking, into his mysterious joy at the Hanger Lane Gyratory, lost in the basso howl of the Hilux’s supercharger.

  Constrained by the inflated crash-harness, he struggled to look back. Saw headlights. The black car.

  Aldous stamped on the brakes, momentum whipping Milgrim around. A second set of headlights, ahead of them, approaching.

  “Well, then,” said Aldous, his teeth very white in the beams of the approaching vehicle.

  Milgrim looked to the side, seeing a blank and ancient wall, perhaps two feet away.

  “Aldous,” said Hollis.

  “Moment, please, Miss Henry,” said Aldous.

  The car in front of them was only a few feet away now. Squinting against the glare of the other’s lights, Milgrim saw, through the car’s windshield, two men. One, the driver, masked in a black balaclava. The other was masked in white, though weirdly and only partially. And was holding something up to the windshield in front of him. For Milgrim to see.

  Milgrim’s Neo.

  Foley, his short-billed cap low over his bandaged head, fixed Milgrim with the one eye Milgrim could see, raised his other hand, and slowly shook an admonitory finger, his expression changing abruptly as Aldous floored the truck, popped the clutch, and crashed into the car, still accelerating. Foley’s car began to move backward as its masked driver twisted the wheel, a few sparks popping as if off a grindstone, and still Aldous accelerated, the truck’s unnatural mass and abnormal power, Milgrim now realized, being central to that cartel-readiness of which Aldous was so proud. Milgrim saw the other driver abandon the wheel, actually cover his eyes. The car struck the opposite wall, producing more sparks, and suddenly they were in the street at the far end, back in the world. Foley’s car, patches of paintwork scoured to raw plastic, grille shattered, sat in the street, at a diagonal, its driver struggling, around an inflated airbag, with the wheel.

  Aldous backed up slightly, then drove carefully, at an angle and at speed, into Foley’s car. Then calmly and neatly reversed, backing up until the bed of the truck blocked the passage. Milgrim heard brakes behind them, and turned to see the black car reversing, its headlights receding. He heard it scrape the wall.

  “Fiona will take you home, Miss Henry,” said Aldous, as Milgrim turned to see him rapidly thumbing the screen of his iPhone.

  “Fiona,” said Milgrim, hopefully.

  “You must all leave now, quickly,” said Aldous. “The police are coming. Please go with Mr. Milgrim, Miss Hyde.” He touched something on the dash, causing their inflated harnesses to simultaneously unlatch. Milgrim looked down at the thing that lay across his chest, like a rubber bat, a goth party favor. He heard the doors unlatch.

  “Let’s roll,” said Heidi.

  “Ouch,” said Hollis. “Don’t hit me!”

  “Move!”

  Milgrim did as told, shoving the door open and jumping down, managing to bite the corner of his tongue in the process. He tasted blood, metallic and scary, then knew, in some new way, that he was simply here, alive for the moment, and that that was that. He blinked.

  And saw Foley lunge around the back of his ruined car, his fists balled, headed straight for him. While simultaneously, it seemed, the narrow space between them was bisected by the arrival of Fiona’s duct-taped cowling, like an intrusion from another dimension, impossible but there it was. Foley seems to vanish as Fiona, in her yellow helmet, somehow slewed the big bike around in an amazingly tight circle, motor revving. Heidi stepped forward then, driving Hollis before her, then suddenly picked her up and sat her on the back of the bike, like someone putting a child on
a pony. Milgrim saw Fiona toss Heidi the spare helmet, and hallucinated hairspray as Heidi popped it on Hollis’s head, giving Fiona’s yellow helmet a rap with her knuckles. He saw Fiona make a thumbs-up gesture without taking her hand off the throttle, and then she roared away, Hollis throwing her arms around her.

  “Where’s Foley?” Milgrim asked, trying to look in every direction at once.

  “That way,” said Heidi, pointing down the street. “His driver grabbed him. We’re this way. Move.” She pointed past the truck, into the passage.

  “My laptop,” Milgrim said, remembering. He ran around the back of the truck, reached into the cab, hauling his bag out.

  “Hang tough,” said Heidi to Aldous, who was lighting a cigarette now, with an elegant silver lighter. She fist-bumped his black-suited shoulder as she passed.

  And for the first time, Milgrim heard the sirens, foreign, British, and so many.

  As quickly as he could, he followed Heidi’s tall, straight back.

  49. GREAT MARLBOROUGH

  All was forward, turn, forward, turn again, and a sharp smell of hairspray.

  Her body remembering to lean into the turns, hugging what she took to be a strong thin girl, definitely breasts in there, through layers of armored Cordura. Very little she could see, past the smudged plastic of the visor, under wing-beat strobings of streetlight. Ahead, the yellow of the rider’s helmet, scratched diagonally, as by something with three large claws. To either side a blur of abstracted London texture, as free of meaning as sampled skins in a graphics program. The awning of a Pret A Manger, brick, possibly the green round of a Starbucks sign, more brick, something in that one official shade of red. And most of it, she guessed, in the service of evasion, a route no car could follow. At least there seemed to be relatively little traffic now.

  And then they slowed, stopped, the rider reversing into a parking place. When the ignition was cut, London was instantly, strangely quiet. The rider was removing her yellow helmet, so Hollis released her, then reached up and removed her own, which she now saw was black.

  “You might need the loo,” said the girl, twenty-something, fox-faced, pale brown hair mussed by the helmet. The hairspray wouldn’t have been hers.

  “Loo?”

  “Downstairs,” the girl said, indicating a sign: women. “Clean. Open till two. Free.” She looked very serious.

  “Thank you,” said Hollis.

  “Fiona,” said the girl, over her shoulder.

  “Hollis.”

  “I know. Hurry, please. I’ll check my messages.” Hollis dismounted, watched as Fiona did the same. Fiona frowned. “Please,” she said, “hurry.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Hollis, “my head’s not working.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Fiona, who sounded neither British nor anything else in particular. “If you’re not right back up, I’ll come and find you.”

  “Good,” said Hollis, and took the stairs, her knees behaving oddly, down into bright cheap light, white tile, the smell of some very modern disinfectant.

  Seated in a stall, the door shut, she briefly considered screaming. She tried to remember if she’d hit her head on anything, because her brain felt too large for it, but she didn’t think she had. It wouldn’t have been possible, with what Aldous had made the seat belts do, which she recalled as having involved a sort of neck brace, as well as some biomorphically triangular cushion across her chest. If you were going to be bashing into cars, she supposed, you’d want that.

  “My God,” she said, remembering, “that was Foley.” Milgrim’s Foley, from the blue-lit grotto beneath the Salon du Vintage, simultaneously looking the worse for wear and somehow like a scarily adult version of that Diane Arbus photograph of the emotionally disturbed boy, the one with the grenade. Bandaged, as from a head injury.

  They had startlingly slick toilet paper here. In a club, she’d have assumed it was deliberately retro.

  Upstairs, on the small concrete island that she guessed might be a tiny public square, though it wasn’t square, the girl called Fiona stood near her motorcycle, pinching at pixels on her iPhone’s screen. The half-dozen other bikes parked there were all equally large and rough-looking. A pair of couriers stood on the tarmac, smoking, past the end of the row of bikes, like knights in smudged primary colors, serrated plates of carbon fiber giving their backs a Jurassic look. Shapeless hair and beards, like extras in a Robin Hood movie. Beyond them, she recognized the mock Tudor façade of Liberty. Great Marlborough Street. Not so far from Portman Square. It felt like days since she’d left there.

  “Ready,” said Fiona, behind her.

  She turned as Fiona was slipping her phone into a pocket on the front of her black coat. “Where are Heidi and Milgrim?”

  “My next job,” Fiona said, “after I run you to your hotel.”

  “You know where they are?”

  “We can find them,” Fiona said, throwing her leg over her bike. She wore knee-high black boots, side-buckled from top to bottom, their toes abraded to a pale gray. She held out the helmet.

  “It’s giving me a headache,” she said.

  “Sorry,” said Fiona, “it’s Mrs. Benny’s. Borrowed it.”

  Hollis put it on and climbed on behind her, without waiting for further explanation.

  50. BANK-MONUMENT

  Milgrim had never liked the City. It had always seemed too monolithic, though to some older scale of monolith. Too few hiding places. A lack of spaces in between. It had been turning its back on people like himself for centuries, and made him feel like a rat running along a baseboard devoid of holes. He felt that now, very strongly, though they weren’t running. Walking, but briskly, owing to Heidi’s long legs.

  He was wearing a black “Sonny” jacket that Heidi had purchased off the back of an agreeable Turkish-looking office cleaner, here in Lombard Street, paying with a fold of bills. Or at least that was what it had embroidered on the left breast, in white, in an otherwise very good approximation of the Sony logo. His own jacket was stuffed into his bag, on top of his laptop. The transaction had also yielded a gray knit acrylic hat, which Heidi wore pulled very low, her black hair tucked completely out of sight. She’d turned her jacket inside out, revealing an impressive scarlet silk lining. The fringed epaulets had become padding, exaggerating her already formidable shoulders. This would be out of concern, Milgrim assumed, with being recognized, either by any remaining associates of Foley’s or by the ever-watchful cameras, which Milgrim now noticed everywhere.

  Immediately he regretted thinking of Foley. That had been very bad, the business with the truck and the two cars, and he couldn’t help but believe it to have been his fault. That had definitely been a bandage on Foley’s head, under the cap, and Milgrim could only assume that it had had something to do with that young Russian mother’s bodyguard, in Paris. If Sleight had sent Foley after the Neo, as Milgrim had intended, he would in fact have sent him after that ominous-looking pram. And it had happened because he, Milgrim, had given in to some unfamiliar impulse to rebellion. He’d done it out of anger, really, resentment, and because he could.

  Now Heidi produced her iPhone. Thumbed the screen once. Listened, then held the phone away, as if to ignore a message she’d heard before. When she put it to her mouth, she said: “Listen up, Garreth. Hollis Henry’s in deep shit now. Kidnap attempt, looked to me. Call her.” She tapped the phone again.

  “Who was that?”

  “Hollis’s ex,” said Heidi, “voice mail. I hope.”

  “The one who jumps off buildings?”

  “The one who doesn’t return his fucking calls,” said Heidi, putting her phone away.

  “Why don’t we get a cab?” He’d seen several pass.

  “Because they can’t stop a train.”

  In the canyon of King William now, more traffic, more cabs, the strap of his bag digging into his shoulder, the Sonny jacket scented faintly and not unpleasantly with cooking spices, perhaps from a recent meal. He was hungry now, in spite of the Vietnamese
with Winnie. He remembered Hollis’s dongle, the cellular connection, in the Chunnel. He wondered if phones worked on the London subway. He didn’t think they did in New York; he’d never had one there. If they did, he could send Winnie a message, once they were on the train. Tell her about Foley and the Hilux. Had it been an attempted kidnapping? He supposed it had, if not worse, but why would anyone attempt that on the passengers of a cartel-grade Jankel-armored truck? But then it occurred to him that graduates of Parsons School of Design probably weren’t necessarily up on that sort of thing.

  An entrance to Bank Station ahead, pedestrian traffic picking up around them, and that was the Central Line, they’d ride straight to Marble Arch, close to Portman Square, and walk to the hotel. Quicker than a cab, probably, and maybe he could get on Twitter.

  Heidi swung suddenly around, whisking back one side of her inside-out jacket. As if to show him the large brooch he now saw she wore there, three rocketships, perhaps, nose-down, silver with crimson tails. And plucking part of this away, she flung it behind them, the entirety of her long body pivoting behind it.

  Someone shrieked, as terrible a sound as Milgrim had heard, and continued to as Heidi, rough as any policeman, rushed him down the stairs and into Bank-Monument.

  51. SOMEONE

  Hollis lay fully dressed on the embroidered velvet spread of the Piblokto Madness bed, watching the faint oscillation of huge curved shadows thrown by the halogens in the birdcage library, dialed down until they were almost off. In some sense, she decided, she literally no longer knew where she was. In Number Four, in Cabinet, certainly, but if she’d just been one of the subjects of an abduction attempt, as Fiona seemed to believe she had, was Number Four still the same place? A matter of context. The same place, but meaning differently.

  Fiona had insisted on bringing her up here, and then had looked in the bathroom, and in the wardrobe, where in any case there was no room to hide. If the wooden sides of the bed hadn’t gone straight down to the carpet, Hollis guessed, Fiona would have looked under it as well. Put the chain on, Fiona had ordered, leaving to find Milgrim and Heidi, something she seemed relatively certain of being able to do. As far as she knew, Fiona had said, both were okay. She’d had no more idea about what the attempted truck-trapping had been about than Hollis did, it seemed, though she too had identified Milgrim’s Foley, their shadow from Salon du Vintage. What had Bigend called him? A fantasist? How would he have expected to get inside Aldous’s super-truck? The thing was capable of being sealed hermetically, she knew, because Aldous delighted in explaining its many features. It carried tanks of compressed air, and could be driven through clouds of tear or any other gas. He’d also told her that it could drive underwater, with a snorkel extended. A bank vault on wheels, its “glass” some hush-hush Israeli nano stuff that Aldous was particularly proud of Bigend’s having been able to source. Was it possible that Foley had simply had no idea what the silver pickup was about? It looked, after all, at least to Hollis, like any other truck, of that stretched, four-door, overly masculine sort, its bed shortened by half through the extension of the cab. The bed was covered with a ribbed lid, painted to match the bodywork. Perhaps that was where they kept the air supply. And what had happened to Foley since she’d seen him in Paris? An accident? A head injury?