Virtual light b-1

by William Gibson

  He got out first, helped her over. A wind was rising and you could feel the harmonics coming up through your soles, the bridge starting to hum like a muffled harp. She could hear people laughing, somewhere.

  'Where?' he said.

  She pointed to where her bike stood, cabled to Sammy Sal's. 'The pink and black one.'

  He gestured with the gun.

  'Back off,' her bike said when she was five feet from it.

  'What's that?' The gun in her back.

  'This other bike. Clunker with a voice-alarm. Keeps people off mine.' She bent to thumb the tab that released Sammy Sal's bike, but she didn't touch the recognition-loop behind the seat of her own.

  'I fucking mean it, shithead,' her bike said.

  'Shut it off,' he said.

  'Okay.'

  She knew she had to do it in one go, flip it sideways and over, just her thumb and forefinger on the nonconductive rubber of the tire.

  But it was really just an accident that the frame hit his gun. She saw an inch of lightning arc between her bike and the pistol, hot purple and thick as your finger, the particle-brake capacitors in the up-tube emptying their stored charge into the anti-theft system worked into the fake rust and the carefully frayed silver duct-tape. He went down on his knees, eyes unfocused, a single silver bubble of spit forming and bursting between his half-open lips. She thought she saw steam curl from the gun in his hand.

  Proj. she thought, crouching to run, but then the black thing hit him and knocked him flat, flapping down out of the dark above them with a sound like broken wings. A roll of tarpaper. She made out Sammy Sal then, standing up there on a dark carbon cross-brace, his arm around an upright. She thought she saw his white smile.

  'Forgot this,' he said, and tossed something down. The glasses in their case. Hands tied, she caught them anyway, like they knew where they wanted to go. She'd never know why he did that.

  Because the little pistol made a chewing sound then, blue pops like a dozen backfires run together, and Sammy Sal went over backward off the brace, just gone.

  And then she was running.

  Yamazaki heard gunfire, where he knelt on the floor, his wrists joined by glistening plastic behind the rough metal brace that supported Skinner's wall-table. Or was it only the sound of some hydraulic tool?

  There was a smell in the room, high and acrid. He thought it must be the smell of his own fear.

  His eyes were level with a chipped white plate, a smear of pulped avocado blackening on its edge.

  'Told him what I had,' Skinner said, struggling to his feet, his arms fastened behind him. 'Didn't want it. Want what they want, don't they?' The little television slid off the edge of the bed and hit the floor, its screen popping out on a rainbow ribbon of flat cable. 'Shit.' He swayed, wincing as his bad hip took his weight, and Yamazaki thought he would fall. Skinner took one step, another, leaning forward to maintain his balance.

  Yamazaki strained at the plastic bonds. Yelped as he felt them tighten. Like something alive.

  'You tug, twist 'em,' Skinner said, behind him, 'bastards'll clinch up on you. Cops used to carry those. Got made unconstitutional.' There was a crash that shook the room and made the light flicker. Yamazaki looked over his shoulder and saw Skinner sitting on the floor, his knees drawn half up, leaning k)rWard. 'There's a pair of twenty-inch bolt-cutters in here,' the old man said, indicating a dented, rust-scarred green toolkit with his left foot. 'That'll do it, if I can get 'em

  19 Superball

  out.' Yamazaki watched as he began to work his toes through the holes in his ragged gray socks. 'Not sure I can do shit with 'em, once I do …' He stopped. Looked at Yamazaki. 'Better idea, but you won't like it.'

  'Skinner-san?'

  'Look at that brace there.'

  Discolored blobs of puddled welding-rod held the thing together, but it looked sturdy enough. He counted the mismatched heads of nine screws. The diagonal brace itself seemed to be made up of thin metal shims, lashed together top and bottom with rusting twists of wire.

  'I made that,' Skinner said. 'Those're three sections of blade off a factory saw. Never did grind the teeth off. On top there.'

  Yamazaki's fingertips moved over hidden roughness.

  'Shot, Scooter. Wouldn't cut for shit. Why I used 'em.'

  'I saw plastic?' Poising his wrists.

  'Wait up. You start sawing on that crazy-goo, it isn't gonna like it. Have to get through it quick or it's gonna close up right down to the bone. I said wait…'

  Yamazaki froze. He looked back.

  'You're too close to the center. You cut through there, you'll have a ring around each wrist and the suckers'll still close up. You want to go through as close to one side as possible, get over here and get the cutter on the other one before it does you. I'll try to get this open . ..' He bumped the case with his toes. It rattled.

  Yamazaki brought his face close to the red restraint. It had a faint, medicinal smell. He took a breath, set his teeth, and sawed furiously with his wrists. The thing began to shrink. Bands of iron, the pain hot and impossible. He remembered

  Loveless's hand around his wrist.

  'Do it,' Skinner said.

  The plastic parted with an absurdly loud pop, like some sound-effect in a child's cartoon. He was free and, for an ISO instant, the rec band around his left wrist loosened, absorbing the rest of the mass.

  'Scooter!'

  It tightened. He scrambled for the toolkit, amazed to see it open, as Skinner kicked it over with his heel, spilling a hundred pieces of tooled metal.

  'Blue handles!'

  The bolt-cu:ter was long, clumsy, its handles wrapped in greasy blue tape. He saw the red band narrowing, starting to sink below the level of his flesh. Fumbled the cutter one-handed from the tangle, sank its jaws blindly into his wrist and brought all his weight down on the uppermost handle. A stab of pain. The detonation.

  Skinner blew air out between his lips, a long low sound of relief. 'You okay?'

  Yamazaki looked at his wrists. There was a deep, bluish gouge in the left one. It was starting to bleed, but no more than he woulc have expected. The other had been scratched by the saw. He glanced around the floor, looking for the remains of the restraint.

  'Do me,' Skinner said. 'But hook it under the plastic, okay? Try not to take a hunk out. And do the second one fast.'

  Yamazaki tested the action of the cutter, knelt behind Skinner, slid one of the blades beneath the plastic around the old man's right wrist. The skin translucent there, blotched and discolored, the veins swollen and twisted. The plastic parted easily, with that same ridiculous noise, instantly whipping itself around 5kinner's other wrist, writhing like a live thing. He severed it before it could tighten, but this time, with the cartoon pop, it simply vanished.

  Yamazaki stared at the space where the restraint had been.

  'Katey bar tie door!' Skinner roared.

  'What?'

  'Lock the fucking hatch!'

  Yamazaki scrambled across the floor on hands and knees, dropped the hatch into place, and bolted it with a flat device of dull bronze, something that might once have been part of a ship. 'The girl,' he said, looking back at Skinner.

  'She can knock,' Skinner said. 'You want that dickhead with the gun back in here?'

  Yamazaki didn't. He looked up at the ceiling-hatch, the one that opened onto the roof. Open now.

  'Go up there and look for the 'mo.'

  'Skinner-san? Pardon?'

  'Big fag buddy. The black one, right?'

  Not knowing what or whom Skinner was talking about, Yamazaki climbed the ladder. A gust of wind threw rain into his face as he thrust his head up through the opening. He had the sudden intense conviction that he was high atop some ancient ship, some black iron schooner drifting derelict on darkened seas, its plastic sails shredded and its crew mad or dead, with Skinner its demented captain, shouting orders from his cell below.

  'There is nobody here, Skinner-san!'

  The rain came down in a
n explosive sheet, hiding the lights of the city.

  Yamazaki withdrew his head, feeling for the hatch, and closed it above him. He fastened the catch, wishing it were made of stronger stuff.

  He descended the ladder.

  Skinner was on his feet now, swaying toward his bed. 'Shit,' he said, 'somebody's broken my tv.' He toppled forward onto the mattress.

  'Skinner?'

  Yamazaki knelt beside the bed. Skinner's eyes were closed, his breath shallow and rapid. His left hand came up, fingers spread, and scratched fitfully at the tangled thatch of white hair at the open collar of his threadbare flannel shirt.

  Yamazaki smelled the sour tang of urine above the acrid edge of whatever explosive had propelled Loveless's bullet. He looked at Skinner's jeans, blue gone gray with wear, wrinkles sculpted permanently, shining faintly with grease, and saw that Skinner had wet himself.

  He stood there for several minutes, uncertain of what he should do. Finally he took a seat on the paint-splattered stool beside the little table where he had so recently been a prisoner. He ran his fingertips over the teeth of the saw blades. Looking down, he noticed a neat red sphere. It lay on the floor beside his left foot.

  He picked it up. A glossy marble of scarlet plastic, cool and slightly yielding. One of the restraints, either his or Skinner's.

  He sat there, watching Skinner and listening to the bridge groan in the storm, a strange music emerging from the bundled cables. He wanted tc press his ear against them, but some fear he couldn't name heli him from it.

  Skinner woke once, or seemed to, and struggled to sit up, calling, Yamazaki thought, for the girl.

  'She isn't here,' Yamazaki said, his hand on Skinner's shoulder. 'Don't you remember?'

  'Hasn't been,' Skinner said. 'Twenty, thirty years. Motherfucker. Time.'

  'Skinner?'

  'Time. That's the total fucking mother fucker, isn't it?'

  Yamazaki held the red sphere before the old man's eyes. 'Look, Skinner. See what it became?'

  'Superball,' Skinner said.

  'Skinner-san?'

  'You go and fucung bounce it, Scooter.' He closed his eyes. 'Bounce it high…'

  20 The big empty

  'Swear to God,' Nigel said, 'this shit just moved.'

  Chevette, with her eyes closed, felt the blunt back of the ceramic knife press into her wrist; there was a sound like an inner-tube letting go when you've patched it too many times, and then that wrist was free.

  'Shit. Jesus-' His hands rough and quick, Chevette's eyes opening to a second pop, a red blur whanging back and forth around the stacked scrap. Nigel's head following it, like the counterweighted head of a plaster dog that Skinner had found once and sent her down to sell.

  Every wall in this narrow space racked with metal, debraised sections of old Reynolds tubing, dusty jam jars stuffed with rusting spokes. Nigel's workshop, where he built his carts, did what shadetree fixes he could to any bike came his way. The salmon-plug that dangled from his left ear ticked in counterpoint to his swiveling head, then jingled as he snatched the thing in mid-bounce. A ball of red plastic.

  'Man,' he said, impressed, 'who put this on you?'

  Chevette stood up and shivered, this tremor running down through her like a live thing, the way those red bracelets had moved.

  How she felt, now, was just the way she'd felt that day she'd come back to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there hut a can of ravioli in a pot on the Stove, with the can-opener propped up beside it.

  She hadn't eaten that ravioli and she hadn't eaten any since and she knew she never would.

  But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn't really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she'd moved around in it, whatever it was, from one point to another, 'til she'd wound up behind that wire in Beaverton, in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken glass to rub against that big empty. And thereby growing aware of the thing that had swallowed the world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of gas, something she could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her subsequent passage.

  'You okay?' Nigel's greasy hair in his eyes, the red ball in his hand, a cocktail toothpick with a spray of amber cellophane stuck in the corner of his mouth.

  For a long time she'd wondered if maybe the fever hadn't burned it out, hadn't accidentally fried whatever circuit in her it fed back on. But as she'd gotten used to the bridge, to Skinner, to messing at Allied, it had just come to seem like the emptiness was filled with ordinary things, a whole new world grown up in the socket of the old, one day rolling into the next-whether she danced in Dissidents, or sat up all night talking with her friends, or slept curled in her bag up in Skinner's room, where wind scoured the plywood walls and the cables thrummed down into rock that drifted (Skinner said) like the slowest sea of all.

  Now that was broken.

  'Vette?'

  That jumper she'd seen, a girl, hauled up and over the side of a Zodiac with a pale plastic hook, white and limp, water running from nose and mouth. Every hone broken or dislocated, Skinner said, if you hit just right. Ran through the bar naked and took a header off some tourist's table nearest the railing, out and over, tangled in Haru's Day-Gb net and imitation Japanese fishing floats. And didn't Sammy Sal drift that way now, maybe already clear of the dead zone that chased the fish off the years of toxic lead fallen there from uncounted coats of paint, out into the current that sailed the bridge's dead, people said, past Mission Rock, to wash up at the feet of the micropored wealthy jogging the concrete coast of China Basin?

  Chevette bent over and threw up, managing to get most of it into an open, empty paint can, its lip thickly scabbed with the gray primer that Nigel used to even out his dodgier mends.

  'Hey, hey,' Nigel dancing around her, unwilling in his shy bearish way to touch her, his big hands hovering, anxious that she was sick and worried she'd puke over his work, something that might ultimately require the in-depth, never-bef ore-attempted act of cleaning out, rather than up, his narrow nest. 'Water? Want water?' Offering her the old coffee can he kept there to quench hot metal. Oily flux afloat atop it like gas beside a dock, and she nearly heaved again, but sat down instead.

  Sammy Sal dead, maybe Skinner, too. Him and that grad student tied up up there with the plastic worms.

  'Chev?'

  He'd put the coffee can down and was offering her an open can of beer instead. She waved it aside, coughing.

  Nigel shifted, foot to foot, then turned and peered through the triangular shard of lucite that served as his one window. It was vibrating with the wind. 'Stormin',' he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. 'Stormin' down rain.'

  Running from Skinner's and the gun in the killer's hand, from his eyes and the gold in the corners of his smile, bent low for balance over her bound hands and the case that held the asshole's glasses, Chevette had seen all the others running, too, racing, it must have been, against the breaking calm, the first slap of rain almost warm when it came. Skinner would've known it was coming; hed have watched the barometer in its corny wooden case like tw wheel of some old boat; he knew his weather, Skinner, pe:ched in his box on the top of the bridge. Maybe the other; knew, too, but it was the style to wait and then race it, biding out for a last sale, another smoke, some bit of business. The hour before a storm was good for that, people naking edgy purchases against what was ordinarily a bearahe uncertainty. Though a few were lost, if the storm was big enough, and not always the unestablished, the newconers lashed with their ragged baggage to whatever freehold they might have managed on the outer structure; sometimes a wiole patchwork section would just let go, if the wind caught it right; she hadn't seen that but there were stories. There was iothing to stop the new people from coming in to the shelter cf the decks,
but they seldom did.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took the beer from Nigel. Took a sip. It was warm. She handed it back to him. He took the toothpick from his mouth, started to raise the can for a swallw, thought better of it, put it down beside his welding-torch.

  'Somethin's wrong,' he said. 'I can tell.'

  She massaged her wrsts. Twin rings of rash coming up, pink and moist, where t~~e plastic had gripped her. Picked up the ceramic knife and clesed it automatically.

  'Yeah,' she said, 'yeah Something's wrong. . .'

  'What's wrong, Chevette?' He shook hair out of his eyes like a worried dog, fing~rs running nervously over his tools. His hands were like pali dirty animals, capable in their mute and agile way of solvingproblems that would have hopelessly baffled the man himself. 'That Jap shit delaminated on you,' he decided, 'and you're pssed . .

  'No,' she said, not realy hearing him.

  'Steel's what you wait for a messenger bike. Weight. Big basket up front. Not cadhoard with some crazy aramid shit wrapped around it, weghs about as much as a sandwich.

  What if you hit a b-bus? Bang into the back of it? You got more m-mass than the b-bike, you flip over and c-crack open crack your.. .' His hands twisting, trying more accurately to frame the physics of the accident he was seeing. Chevette looked up and saw that he was trembling.

  'Nigel,' she said, standing up, 'somebody just put that thing on me for a joke, understand?'

  'It moved,' he said. 'I saw it.'

  'Well, not a funny joke, okay? But I knew where to come. To you, right? And you took it off.'

  Nigel shook his hair back into his eyes, shy and pleased. 'You had that knife. Cuts good.' Then he frowned. 'You need a steel knife…'

  'I know,' she said. 'I gotta go now …' Bending to pick up the paint can. 'I'll toss this. Sorry.'