Virtual light b-1

by William Gibson

  'I never saw that,' Chevette said, flipping through the pages of a magazine all about Reverend Fallon. There was this has-been actress, Gudrun Weaver, and she was up there hugging Fallon on a stage somewhere. If he'd turned around, Chevette thought, his nose would've barely come up to her breastbone. Looked like he'd had some kind of pink wax injected, all under his skin; had the creepiest-looking hair she'd ever seen, like a really short wig but it sort of looked like it might get up and walk off by itself.

  'All about television,' Mrs. Sublett said, 'so naturally it's of special significance to the Church.'

  'What's it about?'

  'Talitha Morrow is this newswoman, and Todd Probert is a bank robber. But he's a good bank robber, because he only needs the money to pay for a heart-transplant for his wife. Carrie Lee. Remember her? In a mature role, honey. More like a cameo. Well, Gary Underwood is Talitha's ex, but he's still got it for her, bad. In fact he's got-whatcha callit?-erotomania, like it's all he ever thinks about and, honey, it's turned pure evil. First he's sending her these chopped up Barbie dolls; sends her a dead white rahhit, then all this fancy underwear with hlood on it. . .'

  34 Punching out of paradise

  Chevette let the old lady talk. She could just sort of tune her out, the way she used to do with her own mother, sometimes. She wondered what it was Rydell and Sublett were so worked up about. Up to something; whispering in the kitchen.

  She watched a fly buzz around the stuff on Mrs. Sublett's shelves. It looked slow, like maybe the air-conditioning was too much for it.

  She wondered if maybe she wasn't starting to fall for Rydell. Maybe it was just that he'd showered and shaved and put on clean clothes from his stupid-looking suitcase. The clothes were exactly the same as the ones he'd been wearing before. Maybe he never wore anything else. But she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. Sublett's mother said he looked like a young Tommy Lee Jones. Who was Tommy Lee Jones? Or maybe it was because she had the idea somehow he was going to do something mean to Lowell. She'd thought she was still in love with Lowell, or something anyway, but now she didn't think so, not at all. If Lowell just hadn't started doing dancer. She'd thought about how that Loveless had got when she'd dumped all that dancer in his Coke. She'd asked Rydell if that was enough to have killed him, and Rydell had said no. Said it was enough to keep him stone crazy for a while, and when he got back together, he was going to be hurting. Then she'd asked Rydell why Loveless had done that, banging his gun into his crotch that way. Rydell had sort of scratched his head and said he wasn't sure, but he thought it had something to do with what it did to your nervous system. Said he'd heard it induced priapism, for one thing.

  She'd asked him what that was. Well, he'd said, it's when the man is, like, overstimulated. She didn't know about that, but it had given Lowell these total brickbat boners that just didn't want to go away. And that would've been just fine, or anyway okay, except he got all mean with it, too, SO she'd wind up all sore and then he'd he badmouthing her in front of these people he hung out with, like Codes. Anyway, she wasn't going to waste any time worrying about what Rydell might have in mind for Lowell, no way. What she did worry about was Skinner, whether he was okay, whether he was being taken care of. She was kind of scared to try phoning Fontaine now; every time Rydell made a call out, she worried it might get traced back or something. And it made her sad to think about her bike. She was sure somebody would've gotten it by now. She kind of hated to admit it, but that was starting to make her nearly as sad as Sammy getting killed that way. And Rydell had said he thought maybe Nigel had gotten shot, too.

  'And then,' Sublett's mother was saying, 'Gary Underwood goes through this window. And he falls on one of those fences? Kind with spikes on top.'

  'Hey, Mom,' Sublett said, 'you're bending Chevette's ear.'

  'Just telling her about Inner Tube,' Mrs. Sublett said, from under the washcloth.

  '1996,' Sublett said. 'Well, Rydell and I, we need her for something.' Sublett gestured for her to follow him back into the kitchen.

  'I don't think it's a real good idea for her to go outside, Berry,' he said to Rydell. 'Not in the daytime.'

  Rydell was sitting at the little plastic table where she'd had breakfast. 'Well, you can't go, Sublett, because of your apostasy. And I don't want to be in there by myself, not with my head stuck in one of those eyephone things. His parents could walk in. He might listen.'

  'Can't you just call them on the regular phone, Berry?' Sublett sounded unhappy.

  'No.' Rydell said, 'I can't. They just don't like that. He says they'll at least talk to me if I call them on an eyephone rig.'

  'What's the problem?' Chevette said.

  'Sublett's got a friend here who's got a pair of eyephones.'

  'Buddy,' Sublett said.

  'Your buddy?' she asked.

  'Name's Buddy,' Sublett said, 'but that VR, eyephones 'n' stuff, it's against Church law. It's been revealed to Reverend Fallon that virtual reality's a medium of Satan, 'cause you don't watch enough tv after you start doing it…~

  'You don't believe that,' Rydell said.

  'Neither does Buddy,' Sublett said, 'but his daddy'll whip his head around if he finds that VR stuff he's got under the bed.'

  'Just call him up,' Rydell said, 'tell him what I told you. Two hundred dollars cash, plus the time and charges.'

  'People'll see her,' Sublett said, his shy silver gaze bouncing in Chevette's direction, then back to Rydell.

  'What do you mean, "see" me?'

  'Well, it's your haircut,' Sublett said. 'It's too unusual for 'em, I can tell you that.'

  'Now, Buddy,' Rydell said to the boy, 'I'm going to give you these two hundred-dollar bills here. Now when'd you say your father's due back?'

  'Not for another two hours,' Buddy said, his voice cracking with nervousness. He took the money like it might have something on it. 'He's helping pour a new pad for the fuel cells they're bringing from Phoenix on the Church's bulk-lifter.' Buddy kept looking at Chevette. She had on a straw sun-hat that belonged to Sublett's mother, with a big floppy brim, and a pair of these really strange old-lady sunglasses with lemon-yellow frames and lenses that sort of swooped up at the side. Chevette tried smiling at him, but it didn't seem to help.

  'You're friends of Joel's, right?' Buddy had a haircut that wasn't quite skin, some kind of gadget in his mouth to straighten his teeth, and an Adam's apple ahout a third the size of his head. She watched it bob up and down. 'From L.A.?'

  'That's right,' Rydell said.

  'I. . . I wanna g-go there,' Buddy said.

  'Good,' Rydell said. 'This is a step in the right direction, you just believe it. Now you wait out there like I said, and tell Chevette here if anybody's coming.'

  Buddy went out of his tiny bedroom, closing the door behind him. It didn't look to Chevette like anybody Buddy's age lived there at all. Too neat, with these posters of Jesus and Fallon. She felt sorry for him. It was close and hot and she missed Sublett's mother's air-conditioning. She took off that hat.

  'Okay,' Rydell said, picking up the plastic helmet, 'you sit on the bed here and pull the plug if we get interrupted.' Buddy had already hooked up the jack for them. Rydell sat down on the floor and put the helmet on, so she couldn't see his eyes.

  Then he pulled on one of those gloves you use to dial with and move stuff around in there.

  She watched his index finger, in that glove, peck out something on a pad that wasn't there. Then she listened to him talking to the telephone company's computer about getting the time and charges after he was done.

  Then his hand came up again. 'Here goes,' he said, and started punching out this number he said Lowell had given him, his finger coming down on the empty air. When he was done, he made a fist, sort of wiggled it around, then lowered the gloved hand to his lap.

  He just sat there for a few seconds, the helmet kind of swiveling around like he was looking at stuff, then it stopped moving.

  'Okay,' he said, his voice kind of funn
y, but not to her, 'but is there anybody here?'

  Chevette felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  'Oh,' he said, the helmet turning, 'Jesus-'

  Rydell had liked doing Dream Walls, when he was a kid in high school. It was this Japanese franchise operation they set up in different kinds of spaces, mostly in older malls; some were in places that had been movie theaters, some were in old department stores. He'd gone to one once that they'd put into an old bowling alley; made it real long and narrow and the stuff sort of distorted on you if you tried to move it too fast.

  There were a lot of different ways you could play with it, the most popular one in Knoxville being gunfights, where you got these guns and shot at all kinds of bad guys, and they shot back and then you got the score. Sort of like FATSS at the Academy, but only about half the rez. And none of the, well, color.

  But the one Rydell had liked most was where you just went in and sort of sculpted things out of nothing, out of that cloud of pixels or polygons or whatever they were, and you could see what other people were doing at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if you both wanted to. He'd been kind of self-conscious about it, because it seemed like something that mostly girls did. And the girls were always doing these unicorns and rainbows and things, and Rydell liked to do cars, kind of dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan somewhere and he could build anything he wanted. You could get these full-color printouts when you were done, or a cassette, if you'd animated it. There'd always he a couple of girls down at the far end, doing

  35 The republic of desire

  plastic surgery on pictures of themselves, fiddling around with their faces and hair, and they'd get printouts of those if they did one they really liked.

  Rydell would be up closer to the entrance, molding these grids of green light around a frame he'd drawn, and laying color and texture over that to see how different ones looked. But what he remembered when he clicked into the Republic of Desire's eyephone-space was the sense you got, doing that, of what the space around Dream Walls was like. And it was a weird thing, because if you looked up from what you were doing, there really wasn't anything there; nothing in particular, anyway. But when you were doing it, designing your car or whatever, you could get this funny sense that you were leaning out, over the edge of the world, and the space beyond that sort of fell away, forever.

  And you felt like you weren't standing on the floor of an old movie theater or a bowling alley, but on some kind of plain, or maybe a pane of glass, and you felt like it just stretched away behind you, miles and miles, with no real end.

  So when he went from looking at the phone company's logo to being right out there on that glassy plain, he just said 'Oh,' because he could see its edges, and see that it hung there, level, and around and above it this cloud or fog or sky that was no color and every color at once, just sort of seething.

  And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain, so that Rydell got to feel like a bug, or a little toy.

  One of them was a dinosaur, this sort of T. Rex job with the short front legs, except they ended in something a lot more like hands. One was a sort of statue, it looked like, or more like some freak natural formation, all shot through with cracks and fissures, but it was shaped like a wide-faced man with dreadlocks, the face relaxed and the lids half-closed. But all stone and moss, the dreadlocks somehow stacked from whole mountains of shale.

  Then he looked and saw the third one there, and just said

  'Jesus.'

  This was a figure, too, and just as big, but all made up of television, these moving images winding and writhing together, and barely, it seemed, able to hold the form they took: something that might either have been a man or a woman. It hurt his eyes, to try to look too close at any one part of it. It was like trying to watch a million channels at once, and this noise was rushing off it like a waterfall off rocks, a sort of hiss that somehow wasn't a sound at all.

  'Welcome to the Republic,' said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. It smiled, the ivory of its teeth carved into whole temples. Rydell tried to look at the carvings; they got really clear for a second, and then something happened.

  'You don't have a third the bandwidth you need,' the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you'd expect from a mountain. 'You're in K-Tel space…'

  'We could turn off the emulator,' the thing made of television suggested, its voice modulating up out of the waterfall-hiss.

  'Don't bother,' said the dinosaur. 'I don't think this is going to be much of a conversation.'

  'Your name,' said the mountain.

  Rydell hesitated.

  'Social Security,' said the dinosaur, sounding bored, and for some reason Rydell thought about his father, how he'd always gone on about what that had used to mean, and what it meant now.

  'Name and number,' said the mountain, 'or we're gone.'

  'Rydell, Stephen Berry,' and then the string of digits. He'd barely gotten the last one out when the dinosaur said 'Former policeman, I see.'

  'Oh dear,' said the mountain, who kept reminding Rydell of something.

  'Well,' said the dinosaur, 'pretty permanently former, by the look of it. Worked for IntenSecure after that.'

  'A sting,' said the mountain, and brought a hand up to point at Rydell, except it was this giant granite lobster-claw, crusted with lichen. It seemed to fill half the sky, like the side of a space ship. 'The narrow end of the wedge?'

  'They don't come much narrower, if you ask me,' the storm of television said. 'You seem to have gotten our Lowell's undivided attention, Rydell. And he wouldn't even tell us what your name was.'

  'Doesn't know it,' Rydell said.

  'Don't know his ass from a hole in the ground, hee haw,' said the mountain, lowering the claw, its voice a sampled parody of Rydell's. Rydell tried to get a good look at its eyes; got a flash of still blue pools, waving ferns, some kind of tan rodent hopping away, before the focus slipped. 'People like Lowell imagine we need them more than they need us.'

  'State your business, Stephen Berry,' said the dinosaur.

  'There was something happened, up Benedict Canyon-'

  'Yes, yes,' said the dinosaur, 'you were the driver. What does it have to do with us?'

  That was when it dawned on Rydell that the dinosaur, or all of them, could probably see all the records there were on him, right then, anywhere. It gave him a funny feeling. 'You're looking at all my stuff,' he said.

  'And it's not very interesting,' said the dinosaur. 'Benedict Canyon?'

  'You did that,' Rydell said.

  The mountain raised its eyebrows. Windblown scrub shifting, rocks tumbling down. But just on the edge of Rydell's vision. 'For what it's worth, that was not us, not exactly. We would've gone a more elegant route.'

  'But why did ~OU do it?'

  'Well,' said the dinosaur, 'to the extent that anyone did it, or caused it to he done, I imagine you might look to the lady's husband, who I see has since filed for divorce. On very solid grounds, it seems.'

  'Like he set her up? With the gardener and everything?'

  'Lowell has some serious explaining to do, I think,' the mountain said.

  'You haven't told us what it is you want, Mr. Rydell.' This from the television-thing.

  'A job like that. Done. I need you to do one of those. For me.'

  'Lowell,' the mountain said, and shook its dreadlocked head. Cascades of shale in Rydell's peripheral vision. Dust rising on a distant slope.

  'That sort of thing is dangerous,' the dinosaur said. 'Dangerous things are very expensive. You don't have any money, Rydell.'

  'How about if Lowell pays you for it?'

  'Lowell,' from that vast blank face twisting with images, 'owes us.'

  'Okay,' Rydell said, 'I hear you. And I think I know somebody else might pay you.' He wasn't even sure if that was bullshit or not. 'But you're going to have
to listen to me. Hear the story.'

  'No,' the mountain said, and Rydell remembered who it was he figured the thing was supposed to look like, that guy you saw on the history shows sometimes, the one who'd invented eyephones or something, 'and if Lowell thinks he's the only pimp out there, he might have to think again.'

  And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.

  'Wait,' he said. 'Any of you live in San Francisco?'

  The dinosaur came flickering back. 'What if we did?'

  'Well,' Rydell said, 'do you like it?'

  'Why do you ask?'

  'Because it's all going to change. They're going to do it like they're doing Tokyo.'

  'Tokyo?' The television-storm, coming back now as this big ball, like that hologram in Cognitive Dissidents. 'Who told you that?' Now the mountain was back, too. 'There's not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…'

  'Tell us,' the dinosaur said.

  So Rydell did.

  She had the hat back on, when he took the helmet off, but she was holding those sunglasses in her hand. Just looking at him.

  'I don't think I made sense of much of that,' she said. She'd only been able to hear his side of it, but it had been mostly him talking, there at the end. 'But I think you're flat fucking crazy.'

  'I probably am,' he said.

  Then he got the time and charges on the call. It came to just about all the money he had left.

  'I don't see why they had to put the damn thing through Paris,' he said.

  She just put those glasses back on and slowly shook her head.

  36 Notebook (2)

  The city in sunlight, from the roof of this box atop the tower. The hatch open. Sound of Skinner sorting and resorting his belongings. A cardboard box, slowly filling with objects I will take below, to the sellers of things, their goods spread on blankets, on greasy squares of ancient canvas. Osaka far away. The wind brings sounds of hammering, song. Skinner, this morning, asking if I had seen the pike in the Steiner Aquarium.