Virtual light b-1

by William Gibson

'It's a storm,' Nigel said. 'Don't go out in a storm.'

  'I've got to,' she said. 'I'll be okay.' Thinking how he'd kill Nigel, too, if he found her here. Hurt him. Scare him.

  'I cut them off.' Holding up the red ball.

  'Get rid of that,' she said.

  'Why?'

  'Look at this rash.'

  Nigel dropped the bali like it was poison. It bounced out of sight. He wiped his fingers down the filthy front of his t-shirt.

  'Nigel, you got a screwdriver you'll give me? A flathead?'

  'Mine are all worn down …' The white animals running over a shoal of tools, happy to be hunting, while Nigel gravely watched them. 'I throw those flathead screws away as soon as I get 'em off. Hex is how you want to go-'

  'I want one that's all worn down.'

  The right hand pounced, came up with its prize, blackhandled and slightly bent.

  'That's the one,' she said, zipping up Skinner's jacket. Both hands offered it to her, Nigel's eyes hiding behind his hair, watching. 'I. . . like you, Chevette.'

  'I know,' she said, standing there with a paint can with vomit in it in one hand, a screwdriver in the other. 'I know you do.'

  Baffled by the patchwork of plastic that roofed the upper deck, the rain was following waste-lines and power-cables, emerging overhead at crazy angles, in random cascades, miniature Niagaras rushing off corrugated iron and plywood. From the entrance to Nigel's workshop, Chevette watched an awning collapse, gallons of silver water splashing all at once from what had been a taut concavity, a bulging canvas bathtub that gave way with a sharp crack, instantly becoming several yards of flapping, sodden cloth. Nothing here was ever planned, in any overall sense, and problems of drainage were dealt with as they emerged. Or not, more likely.

  Half the lights were out, she saw, but that could be because people had shut them down, had pulled as many plugs as possible. But then she caught the edge of that weird pink flash you got when a transformer blew, and she heard it boom. Out toward

  Treasure. That took care of most of the remaining lights and suddenly she stood in near darkness. There was nobody in sight, nobody at all. Just a hundred-watt bulb in an orange plastic socket, twirling around in the wind.

  She moved out into the center of the deck, trying to watch out for fallen wires. She remembered the can in her hand and flung it sideways, hearing it hit and roll.

  She thought of her bike lying there in the rain, its capacitors drained. Somebody was going to take it, for sure, and Sammy Sal's, too. It was the biggest thing, the most valuable thing she'd ever owned, and she'd earned every dollar she'd put down on the counter at City Wheels. She didn't think about it like it was a thing, more the way she figured people thought about horses. There were messengers who named their bikes, but Chevette never would have done that, and somehow because she did think about it like it was something alive.

  Proj, she told herself, they'll get you if you stay here. Her back to San Francisco, she set out toward Treasure.

  They who? That one with his gun. He'd come for the glasses. Came for the glasses and killed Sammy. Had those people sent him, the ones who called up Bunny and Wilson the owner? Rentacops. Security guys.

  The case in her pocket. Smooth. And that weird cartoon of the city, those towers with their spreading tops. Sunflower.

  'Jesus,' she said, 'where? Where'm I going?'

  To Treasure, where the wolf-men and the death-cookies hung, the bad crazies chased off the bridge to haunt the woods there? Been a Navy base there, Skinner said, but a plague put paid to that just after the Little Grande, something that turned your eyes to mush, then your teeth fell out. Treasure Island fever, like maybe something crawled out of a can at that Navy place, after the earthquake. So nobody went there now, nobody normal. You saw their fires at night, sometimes, and smoke in the daytime, and you walked straight over to the Oakland span, the cantilever, and the people who lived there weren't the same, really, as the people over here in the suspension.

  Or should she go back, try to get her bike? An hour's riding and the brakes would be charged again. She saw herself just riding, maybe east, riding forever into whatever country that was, deserts like you saw on television, then flat green farms where big machines came marching along in rows, doing whatever it was they did. But she remembered the road down from Oregon, the trucks groaning past in the night like lost mad animals, and she tried to picture herself riding down that. No, there wasn't any place out on a road like that, nothing human-sized, and hardly ever even a light, in all the fields of dark. Where you could walk and walk forever and never come to anything, not even a place to sit down. A bike wouldn't get her anywhere out there.

  Or she could go hack to Skinner's. Co up there and see— No. She shut that down, hard.

  The empty rose out of the rain-rattled shadws like a gas, and she held her breath, not to breathe it in.

  How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you'd ever had them. Took a mother's leaving for you to know she'd ever been there, because otherwise she was that place, everythin~, like weather. And Skinner and the Coleman stove and the oil she had to drop into the little hole to keep its leather gasket soft so the pump would work. You didn't wake up ever~' morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up. Or Lowell. When she'd had Lowel.-if she could say she ever had, and she guessed she hadn't, really-but while he'd been there, anyway, he'd been a little like that— 'Chev? That you?'

  And there he was. Lowell. Sitting up cross-legged on top of a rusty cooler said SHRIMP across the froit, smoking a cigarette and watching rain run off the shrimp man's awning. She hadn't seen him for three weeks now, and the only thing she could think of was how she really must look like total shit. That skinhead boy they called Codes was sitting up beside him, black hood of a sweatshirt pulled up and his hands hidden in the long sleeves. Codes hadn't ever liked her.

  But Lowell, he was grinning around the glow of that cigarette. 'Well,' he said, 'you gonna say "hi" 0: what?'

  'Hi,' Chevette said.

  21 Cognitive dissidents

  Rydell wasn't too sure about this whole bridge thing, and less sure about what Freddie had had to say about it, in Food Fair and on the way back from North Beach. He kept remembering that documentary he'd seen in Knoxville and he was pretty sure there hadn't been anything on that about cannibals or cults. He thought that had to be Freddie wanting him to think that, because he, Rydell, was the one who had to go out there and get this girl, Chevette Washington.

  And now he was actually out on it, watching people hurry to get their stuff out of the way of the weather, it looked even less like what Freddie had said it was all about. It looked like a carnival, sort of. Or a state fair midway, except it was roofed over, on the upper level, with crazy little shanties, just boxes, and whole house-trailers winched up and glued into the suspension with big gobs of adhesive, like grasshoppers in a spider-web. You could go up and down, between the two original deck levels, through holes they'd cut in the upper deck, all different kinds of stairs patched in under there, plywood and welded steel, and one had an old airline gangway, just sitting there with its tires flat.

  Down on the bottom deck, once you got in past a lot of food-wagons, there were mostly bars, the smallest ones Rydell had ever seen, some with only four stools and not even a door, just a big shutter they could pull down and lock.

  But none of it done to any plan, not that he could see. Not like a mall, where they plug a business into a slot and wait to see whether it works or not. This place had just grcwn, it looked like, one thing patched onto the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and io two pieces of it matched. There was a different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been intended for. He passed stalls faced with turquoise Formica, fake brick, fragments of broken tile vorked into swirls and sunbursts and flowers. One pla
ce, dready shuttered, was covered with green-and-copper skbs of desoldered component-board.

  He found himself grinning at it all, and at the peopli, none of them paying him the least attention, cannibaliitic or otherwise. They looked to be as mixed a bunch a; their building materials: all ages, races, colors, and all & them rushing ahead of the storm that very definitely was coming now, wind stiffening as he threaded his way past carts and old ladies lugging straw suitcases. A little kid, staggering with his arms wrapped around a big red fire-extinguisher, bumped into his legs. Rydell hadn't ever seen a little kid with tattons like that. The boy said something in some other language aid then he was gone.

  Rydell stopped and got Warbaby's map out of his jacket pocket. It showed where this girl lived and how to get up there. Right up on the roof of the damned thing, in a little shanty stuck to the top of one of the towers they hing the cables from.

  Warbaby had beautiful handwriting, really graceful, and he'd drawn this map out in the back of the patriot, and labelled it for Rydell. Stairs here, then you weni along this walkway, took some kind of elevator.

  Finding that first set of stairs was going to be a bitch, though, because, now that he looked around, he saw lots of narrow little stairways snaking up between stalls and shattered micro-bars, and no pattern to it at all. He guessed they all led up into the same rats-nest, hut there was no guarantee they'd all connect up.

  Exhaustion hit him, then, and he just wanted to know where and when he was supposed to sleep, and what was all this bullshit about, anyway? What had he let Hernandez get him in for?

  Then the rain hit, the wind upping its velocity a couple of notches and the locals diving seriously for cover, leaving Rydell to hunch in the angle between a couple of old-fashioned Japanese vending-machines. The overall structure, if you could call it that, was porous enough to let plenty of rain in, but big enough and clumsy enough to tangle seriously with the wind. The whole thing started creaking and popping and sort of groaning. And the lights started going out.

  He saw a burst of white sparks and a wire came down, out of that crazy tangle. Somebody yelled, but the words were pulled away into the wind and he couldn't make them out. He looked down and saw water rising around his SWAT shoes. Not good, he thought: puddles, wet shoes, alternating current.

  There was a fruitstand next to one of the vending-machines, knocked together from scavenged wood like a kid's fort. But it had a sort of shelf under it, raised up six inches, and it looked dry under there. He hunched himself in, on top of it, with his feet up out of the water. It smelled like overripe tangerines, but it was ninety-percent dry and the vending-machine took most of the wind.

  He zipped his jacket as high as it went, balled his fists into the pockets, and thought about a hot bath and a dry bed. He thought about his Futon Mouth futon, down in Mar Vista, and actually felt homesick. Jesus, he thought, be missing those stick-on flowers next.

  A canvas awning came down, its wooden braces snapping like toothpicks, spilling maybe twenty gallons of rain. And right then was when he saw her, Chevette Washington, right out in plain sight. Just like he was dreaming. Not twenty feet away. Just standing there.

  Rydell had sort of had this girlfriend down in Florida, after his father had moved down there and gotten sick. Her name was Claudia Marsalis and she was from Boston and her mother had her RV in the same park as Rydell's father, right near Tampa Bay.

  Rydell was in his first year at the Academy, but you got a couple of breaks and his father knew ways to get a deal on plane tickets.

  So Rydell would go down there on breaks and stay with his father and sometimes at night he'd go out and ride around with Claudia Marsalis in her mother's ~ Lincoln, which Claudia said had been cherry when they brought it down but now the salt was starting to get to it. Evidently up in Boston she'd only ever taken it out on the road in the summer, so the chemicals wouldn't eat it out. It had these blue-and-white MASS. HERITAGE plates on it because it was a collector's item. They were the old-fashioned kind, stamped metal, and they didn't light up from inside.

  It was kind of rough, around that part of Tampa, with the street signs all chewed up for target practice or the late-night demonstration of the choke on somebody's shotgun. There were plenty of shotguns around to be demonstrated, too; a few in the window-rack of every pick-up and 4X4, and usually a couple of big old dogs. Claudia used to give Rydell a hard time about that, about these Florida boys in gimme hats, riding around with their guns and dogs. Rydell told her it didn't have anything to do with him, he was from Knoxville, and people didn't drive around Knoxville with their guns showing. Or shoot holes in street signs either, not if the Department could help it. But Claudia was one of those people thought everything south of D.C. was all just the same, or maybe she just pretended to to tease him.

  But at night it smelled like salt and magnolia and swamp, and they'd drive around in that Lincoln with the windows down and listen to the radio. When it got dark you could watch the lights on ships, and on the big bulk-lifters that went drumming past like the world's slowest UFOs. They'd maybe get in a little listless boogy in the back seat, sometimes, but Claudia said it just got you too sweaty in Florida and Rydell tended to agree. It was just they were both down there and alone and there wasn't much else to do.

  One night they were listening to a country station out of Georgia and 'Me And Jesus'll Whup Your Heathen Ass' came on, this hardshell Pentecostal Metal thing about abortion and ayatollahs and all the rest of it. Claudia hadn't ever heard that one before and she about wet her pants, laughing. She just couldn't believe that song. When she'd gotten hold of herself and wiped the tears out of her eyes, she'd asked Rydell why he wanted to be a policeman anyway? And he'd felt kind of uncomfortable about that, because it was like she thought his going to the Academy was funny, too, as funny as she thought that dumb-ass song was. But also because it wasn't actually something he'd thought about, much.

  The truth was, it probably had a lot to do with how he and his father had always watched Cops in Trouble together, because that show seriously did teach you respect. You got to see what kind of problems the police were flat up against. Not just tooled-up slimeballs high on shit, either, but the slimeballs' lawyers and the damn courts and everything. But if he told her it was because of a tv show, he knew she'd just laugh at that, too. So he thought about it a while and told her it was because he liked the idea of being in a position to help out people when they were really in trouble. When he'd said that, she just looked at him.

  'Berry,' she said, 'you really mean that, don't you?'

  'Sure,' he said, 'guess I do.'

  'But Berry, when you're a cop, people are just going to lie to you. People will think of you as the enemy. The only time they'll want to talk to you is when they're in trouble.'

  Driving, he glanced sideways at her. 'How come you know SO much about it, then?'

  'Because that's what my father does,' she said, end of :onversation, and she never did bring it up again~

  But he'd thought about that, driving Gunhead for IntenSecure, because that was like being a top except it wasn't. The people you were there to help didn't even give enough of a shit to lie to you, mostly, because they were the ones paying the bill.

  And here he was, out on this bridge, craw~ing out from under a fruitstand to follow this girl that ~Varbaby and Freddie-who Rydell was coming to decide lie didn't trust worth a rat's ass-claimed had butchered that German or whatever he was up in that hotel. And stolen these glasses Rydell was supposed to get back, ones like Wa:baby's. But if she'd stolen them before, how come she'd gone back to kill the guy later? But the real question was, what did that have to do with anything, or even with watching Cops in Trouble all those times with his father? And the answer, he guessed, was that he, like anybody else in his position, was just trying to make a living.

  Solid streams of rain were coming down cut of various points in all that jackstraw stuff upstairs, sphshing on the deck. There was a pink flash, like lightning, off down the bri
dge. He thought he saw her fling something t the side, but if he stopped to check it out he might lose her. She was moving now, avoiding the waterfalls.

  Street-surveillance technique wasn't something you got much training in, at the Academy, not unless yu looked like such good detective material that they streamlined you right into the Advanced CI courses. But Rydell bad gone and bought the textbook anyway. Trouble was, because of that he knew you pretty well needed at least one partnei to do it with, and that was assuming you had a radio link anc some citizens going about their business to give you a little uver. I)oing it this way, how he had to do it now, about the best you could hope for was just to sneak along behind her.

  He knew it was her because of that crazy hair, that ponytail ;tuck up in the back like one of those fat Japanese wrestlers. The wasn't fat, though. Her legs, sticking out of a big old biker jacket that might've been hanging in a barn for a couple of years, looked like she must work out a lot. They were covered with some tight shiny black stuff, like Kevin's micropore outfits from Just Blow Me, and they went down into some kind of dark boots or high-top shoes.

  Paying that much attention to her, and trying to stay out of sight in case she turned around, he managed to walk right under one of those waterfalls. Right down the back of his neck. Just then he heard somebody call to her, 'Chev, that you?' and he went down on one knee in a puddle, behind this stack of salvaged lumber, two-by-fours with soggy plaster sticking to them. ID positive.

  The waterfall behind him was making too much noise for him to hear what was said then, but he could see them: a young guy with a black leather jacket, a lot newer than hers, and somebody else in something black, with a hood pulled up. They were sitting up on a cooler or something, and the guy with the leather was dragging on a cigarette. Had his hair combed up in sort of a crest; good trick, in that rain. The cigarette arced out and winked off in the wet, and the guy got down from there and seemed to be talking to the girl. The one with the black hood got down, too, moving like a spider. It was a sweatshirt, Rydell saw, with sleeves that hung down six inches past his hands. He looked like a floppy shadow from some old movie Rydell had seen once, where shadows got separated from people and you had to catch them and sew them back on. Probably Sublett could tell him what that was called.