Virtual light b-1

by William Gibson

  He worked hard on not moving, kneeling there in that puddle, and then they were moving, the two of them on either side of her and the shadow glancing hack to check behind them. He caught a fraction of white face and a pair of hard, careful eyes.

  He counted: one, two, three. Then he got up and followed them.

  He couldn't say how far they'd gone before he saw them drop, it looked like, straight out of sight. He wiped rain from his eyes and tried to figure it, but then he saw that they'd gone down a flight of stairs, this one cut into the lower deck, which was the first time he'd seen that. He could hear music as he came up on it, and see this bluish glow. Which proved to be from this skinny little neon sign that said, in blue capital letters: COGNITIVE DISSIDENTS.

  He stood there for a second, hearing water sizzle off the sign's transformer, and then he just took those stairs.

  They were plywood, stapled with that sandpapery no-slip stuff, but he almost slipped anyway. By the time he'd gotten halfway to the bottom, he knew it was a bar, because he could smell beer and a couple of different kinds of smoke.

  And it was warm, down there. It was like walking into a steam bath. And crowded. Somebody threw a towel at him. It was soaking wet and hit him in the chest, but he grabbed it and rubbed at his hair and face with it, tossed it back in the direction it had come from. Somebody else, a woman by the sound, laughed. He went over to the bar and found an empty space at the end. Fished in his soggy pockets for a couple of fives and clicked them down on the counter. 'Beer,' he said, and didn't look up when somebody put one down in front of him and swept the coins out of sight. It was one of those brewed-in-America Japanese brands that people in places like Tampa didn't drink much. He closed his eyes and drank about half of it at a go. As he opened his eyes and put it down, somebody beside him said 'Tumble?'

  He looked over and saw this jawless character with little pink glasses and a little pink mouth, thinning sandy hair comhed straight back and shining with something more than the damp in the rooni.

  'What?' Rydell said.

  'I said "tumble."'

  'I heard you,' Rydell said.

  'So? Need the service?'

  'Uh, look,' Rydell said, 'all I need right now's this beer, okay?'

  'Your phone,' the pink-mouthed man said. 'Or fax. Guaranteed tumble, one month. Thirty days or your next thirty free. Unlimited long, domestic. You need overseas, we can talk overseas. But three hundred for the basic tumble.' All of this coming out in a buzz that reminded Rydell of the kind of voice-chip you got in the cheapest possible type of kid's toy.

  'Wait a sec,' Rydell said.

  The man blinked a couple of times, behind his pink glasses.

  'You talking about doing that thing to a pocket phone, right? Where you don't have to pay the company?'

  The man just looked at him.

  'Well, thanks,' Rydell said, quickly. 'I appreciate it, but I just don't have any phone on me. If I did, I'd be happy to take you up on it.'

  Still looking at him. 'Thought I saw you before …' Doubt.

  'Naw,' Rydell said. 'I'm from Knoxville. Just come in out of the rain.' He decided it was time to risk turning around and checking the place out, because the mirrors behind the bar were steamed up solid and running with drops. He swung his shoulder around and saw that Japanese woman, the one he'd seen that time up in the hills over Hollywood, when he'd been cruising with Sublett. She was standing up on a little stage, naked, her long curly hair falling around her to her waist. Rydell heard himself grunt.

  'Hey,' the man was saying, 'hey…'

  Rydell shook himself, a weird automatic thing, like a wet dog, hut she was still there.

  'Hey. Credit.' The drone again. 'Got prohlems? Maybe just wanna see what they've got on you? Anybody else, you got the right numbers-'

  'Hey,' Rydell said, 'wait up. That woman up there?'

  The pink glasses tilted.

  'Who is that?' Rydell asked.

  'That's a hologram,' the man said, in a completely different voice, and walked away.

  'Damn,' said the bartender, behind him. 'You just set a record for blowing off Eddie the Shit. Earned yourself a beer, my man.'

  The bartender was a black guy with copper beads in his hair. He was grinning at Rydell. 'Call him Eddie the Shit cause he ain't worth one, don't give another. Hook your phone up to some box doesn't have a battery, push a few buttons, pass a dead chicken over it, take your money. That's Eddie.' He uncapped a beer and put it down beside the other one.

  Rydell looked back at the Japanese woman. She hadn't moved. 'I just came in out of the rain,' he said, all he could think to say.

  'Good night for it,' the bartender said.

  'Say,' Rydell said, 'that lady up there-'

  'That's Josie's dancer,' the bartender said. 'You watch. She'll dance her in a minute, soon as there's a song she likes.'

  'Josie?'

  The bartender pointed. Rydell looked where he was pointing. Saw a very fat woman in a wheelchair, her hair the color and texture of coarse steel wool. She wore brand-new blue denim bib overalls and an XXL white sweatshirt, and both her hands were hidden inside something that sat on her lap like a snюooth gray plastic muff. Her eyes were closed, face expressionless. He couldn't have said for sure that she wasn't asleep.

  'Hologram?' The Japanese woman hadn't moved at all. Rydell was remembering what he'd seen, that night. l'he horned crown, all silver. Her pubic hair, shaved like an exclamation point. This one didn't have either of those, but it was her. It was.

  'Josie's always projectin',' the bartender said, like it was something that couldn't really be helped.

  'From that thing on her lap?'

  'That's the interface,' the bartender said. 'Projector's, well, there.' He pointed. 'Top of that NEC sign.'

  Rydell saw a little black gizmo clamped to the top of this Did illuminated sign. It looked kind of like an old camera, the )ptical kind. He didn't know if NEC was a beer or what. The whole wall was covered with these signs, all different brands, md now he recognized a few of the names he decided they were ads for old electronics companies.

  He looked at the gizmo, back at the fat woman in the wheelchair, and felt sad. Angry, too. Like he'd lost something. 'Not like I knew what I thought it was,' he said to himself.

  'Fool anybody,' said the bartender.

  Rydeil thought about somebody sitting out there by that valley road. Waiting for cars. Like he and his friends would lie under the bushes down Jefferson Street and toss cans under people's tires. Sounded like a hubcap had come off. See them get out and look, shake their heads. So what he'd seen had just been a version of that, somebody playing with an expensive toy.

  'Shit,' he said, and put his mind to looking for Chevette Washington in all this crowd. He didn't notice the beer-smell now, or the smoke, more the wet hair and clothes and just bodies. And there she was, her and her two friends, hunched over a little round table in a corner. The sweatshirt's hood was down now, showing Rydell a white, stubbled head with some kind of bat or bird tattooed Ofl the side, up where it would he hidden if the hair grew in. It was the kind of tattoo somebody had done by hand, not the kind you got done on a computer-driven table. Baldhead had a hard little face, in profile, and he was wasn't talking. Chevette Washington was telling something to the other one and not looking happy.

  Then the music changed, these drums coming in, like there were millions of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and weird waves of static riding in on that, failing back, riding in again, and women's voices, crying like birds, and none of it natural, the voices dopplering past like sirens on a highway, and the drums, when you listened, made up of little snipped bits of sound that weren't drums at all.

  The Japanese woman-the hologram, Rydell reminded himself-raised her arms and began to dance, a sort of looping shuffle, timed not to the tempo of the drums but to the waves of static washing back and forth across the sound, and when Rydell thought to look he saw the fat woman's eyes were open, her hands moving insi
de that plastic muff.

  Nobody else in the bar was paying it any attention at all, just Rydell and the woman in the wheelchair. Rydell leaned there on the bar, watching the hologram dance and wondering what he should do next.

  Warbaby's shopping list went like this: best he got the glasses and the girl, next best was the glasses, just the girl was definitely third, but a must if that was all that was going.

  Josie's music slid out and away for the last time and the hologram's dance ended. There was some drunken applause from a couple of the tables, Josie nodding her head a little like she was thanking them.

  The terrible thing about it, Rydell thought, was that there Josie was, shoehorned into that chair, and she just wasn't much good at making that thing dance. It reminded him of this blind man in the park in Knoxville, who sat there all day strumming an antique National guitar. There he was, blind, had this old guitar, and he just couldn't chord for shit. Never seemed to get any better at it, either. I)idn't seem fair.

  Now some people got up from a table near where Chevette Washington was sitting. Rydell was in there quick, bringing the beer he'd won for getting rid of Eddie the Shit. He still wasn't close enough to pick out what they were saying, but he could try. He tried to think up ways to maybe start up a conversation, but it seemed pretty hopeless. Not that he looked particularly out of place, because he had the impression that most of this crowd weren't regulars here, just a random sampling, come in out of the rain. But he just didn't have any idea what this place was about. He couldn't figure out what 'Cognitive Dissidents' meant; it wouldn't help him figure out what the theme, or whatever, was. And besides, whatever Chevette Washington and her guy were discussing, it looked to be getting sort of heated.

  Her guy, he thought. Something there in her body-language that said Pissed-Off Girlfriend, and something in how hard this boy was studying to show how little any of it bothered him, like maybe she was the Ex-All this abruptly coming to nothing at all as every conversation died and Rydell looked up from his beer to see Lt. Orlovsky, the vampire-looking cop from SFPD Homicide, stepping in from the stairwell in his London Fog, some kind of fedora that looked like it was molded from flesh-colored plastic on his head, and those scary half-frame glasses. Orlovsky stood there, little streams running off the hem of his rain-darkened coat and pooling around his wingtips, while he unbuttoned the coat with one hand. Still had his black flak vest on underneath, and now that hand came up to rest on the smooth, injection-molded, olive-drab butt of his floating-breech H&K. Rydell looked for the badge-case on the nylon neck-thong, but didn't see it.

  The whole bar was looking at Orlovsky.

  Orlovsky looked around the room, over the tops of his glasses, taking his time, giving them all a good dose of Cop Eye. The music, some weird hollow techie stuff that sounded like bombs going off in echo-chambers, started to make a different kind of sense.

  Rydell saw Josie the wheelchair woman looking at the Russian with an expression Rydell couldn't process.

  Spotting Chevette Washington in her corner, Orlovsky walked over to her table, still taking his time, making the rest of the room take that same time. His hand still on that gun.

  It seemed to Rydell like the Russian just might be about to haul out and shoot her. Sure looked like it, but what kind of cop would do that?

  Now Orlovsky stopped in front of their table, just the right distance, too far for them to reach him and far enough to allow room to pull that big gun if he was going to.

  The Boyfriend, Rydell was somehow pleased to see, looked fit to shit himself. Baldhead looked like he'd been cast in plastic, just frozen there, hands on the table. Between his hands, Rydell saw a pocket phone.

  Orlovsky locked the girl with his full current of Eye-thing, his face lined, gray in this light, unsmiling. He jerked the brim of the plastic fedora, just this precise little fraction, and said 'Get up.'

  Rydell looked at her and saw her trembling. There was never any question the Russian meant her and not her friends-Boyfriend looking like he might faint any second and Baldhead playing statue.

  Chevette Washington stood up, shaky, the rickety little wooden chair going over behind her.

  'Out.' The hat-brim indicated the stairs. The hairy back of Orlovsky's hand covered the butt of the H&K.

  Rydell heard his own knees creak with tension. He was leaning forward, gripping the edges of the table. He could feel old dried pads of gum under there.

  The lights went out.

  Much later, trying to explain to Sublett what it had been like when Josie whipped her hologram on Orlovsky, Rydell said it looked sort of like the special effect at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, that part where those angels or whatever they were came swirling out of that box and got all over those Nazis.

  But it had all been happening at once, for Rydell. When the lights went, they all went, all those signs on the wall, everything, and Rydell just tossed that table sideways, without even thinking about it, and Went For where she'd been standing. And this ball of light had shot down, expanding, from a point on the wall that must've marked the upper edge of that NEC sign. It was the color of the hologram's skin, kind of honey and ivory, all marbled through with the dark of her hair and eyes, like a fast-forward of a satellite storm-system. All around that Russian, a three-foot sphere around his head and shoulders, and as it spun, her eyes and mouth, open in some silent scream, blinked by, all magnified. Each eye, for a fraction of a second, the size of the ball itself, and the white teeth big, too, each one long as a man's hand.

  Orlovsky swatted at it, and that kept him, for some very little while, from getting his gun out.

  But it also gave off enough light to let Rydell see he was grabbing the girl and not Boyfriend. Just sort of picking her up, forgetting everything he'd ever been taught about comealongs and restraints, and running, best he could, for the stairs.

  Orlovsky yelled something, but it must've been in Russian.

  His uncle, the one who'd gone off to Africa in the Army, used to say, if he liked how a woman's ass moved when she walked, that it looked like two baby bobcats in a croker sack. And that was the expression that popped into Rydell's mind as he ran up those stairs with Chevette Washington held out in front of him like a big bunch of groceries. But it didn't have anything to do with sexy.

  He was just lucky she didn't get an eye or break any of his ribs.

  22 Rub-a-dub

  Whoever had grabbed her, she just kept kicking and punching, right up the stairs, backward. But he had her held out so far in front of him that he almost fell on top of her.

  Then she was out on the deck, in what light there was, and looking at some kind of plastic machine gun, the color of a kid's army toy, in the hands of another one of these big ugly raincoat guys, this one with no hat and his wet hair slicked back from a face with the skin on too tight.

  'You drop her now, fuckhead,' this one with the gun said. Had an accent out of an old monster movie. She barely kept to her feet when the one who was holding her let go.

  'Fuckhead,' the gun-guy said, like Pock Ed, 'you try to make move or what?'

  'War,' the one who'd grabbed her said, then doubled over, coughing. 'Baby,' he said, straightening, then winced, hugging his ribs, looking at her. 'Jesus fuck, you got a kick on you.' Sounded American, but not West Coast. In a cheap nylon jacket with one sleeve half ripped off at the shoulder, white fuzzy stuff hanging out~

  'You try to make a move …' And the plastic gun was pointing right at the guy's face.

  'War-baby, war-baby,' the guy said, or anyway it sounded like that, 'war-baby seilt me to get her. He's parked back out there past those tank-ttap things, waiting for me to bring her Out.'

  'Arkady …' It was the ofle in the plastic hat, coming up the stairs behind the guy who'd grabbed her. He had a pair of night-vision glasses on, that funny-looking center-tube poking out from beneath the brim of his hat. He was holding up something that looked like a miniature aerosol can. He said something in this language. Russian? He gestur
ed with the little can, back down the stairs.

  'You use capsicum in an enclosed space like that,' said the one who'd grabbed her, 'people'll get hurt. Get you some permanent sinus problems.'

  The tight-faced man looked at him like he was something crawled out from under a rock. 'You drive, yes?' he said, gesturing for the hat-man to put the thing away, whatever it was.

  'We had a coffee. Well, you had tea. Svobodov, right?'

  Chevette caught the tight-faced man's glance at her, like he hadn't liked her hearing his name. She wanted to tell him she'd heard it Rub-a-Dub, how this other guy talked, so that couldn't really be it, could it?

  'Why you grab her?' asked the tight-faced man, Rub-a-Dub.

  'She coulda got away in the dark, couldn't she? Didn't know your partner here had night vision. Besides, he sent me to get her. Didn't mention you. In fact, they said you didn't come out here.'

  The one with the hat was behind her now, jerking her arm up in a hold. 'Lemme go-'

  'Hey,' the one who'd grabbed her said, like it made things okay, 'these men are police officers. SFPD Homicide, right?'

  Rub-a-Dub whistled softly. 'Fuckhead.'

  'Cops?' she asked.

  'Sure are.'

  Which produced a little snort of exasperation from Rub-aDub.

  'Arkady, now we go. These dirthags try to spy us from below . . .' The hat-man pulling off his night-glasses and dancing like he had to pee.

  'Hey,' she said, 'somebody's killed Sammy. If you're cops, listen, he killed Sammy Sal!'

  'Who's Sammy?' the one in the torn jacket said.

  'I work with him! At Allied. Sammy DuPree. Sammy. He got shot.'

  'Who shot him?'

  'Ry-dell. Shut fuck up.' Shot, Pock, Op. 'She's tellin' us she's got-information-regarding-a-possiblehomicide, and you're telling me to shut up?'