Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  Then there was the damage to the house itself, mostly to the living-room windows (which he’d driven through) and the furniture (which he’d driven over).

  But there had to be something for the Schonbrunns on top of that, Hernandez explained. Something for emotional pain, he said, pumping Rydell a cup of old nasty coffee from the big stainless thermos behind his desk. There was a fridge-magnet on the thermos that said I’M NOT OKAY, YOU’RE NOT OKAY—BUT, HEY, THAT’S OKAY.

  It was two weeks since the night in question, ten in the morning, and Rydell was wearing a five-day beard, a fine-weave panama Stetson, a pair of baggy, faded orange trunks, a KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT t-shirt that was starting to disintegrate at the shoulder-seams, the black SWAT-trainers from his IntenSecure uniform, and an inflated transparent cast on his left arm. ‘Emotional pain,’ Rydell said.

  Hernandez, who was very nearly as wide as his desk, passed Rydell the coffee. ‘You way lucky, all I can say.’

  ‘I’m out a job, arm in a cast, I’m “way lucky”?’

  ‘Seriously, man,’ Hernandez said, ‘you coulda killed yourself. LAPD, they coulda greased your ass down dead. Mr. and Mrs. Schonbrunn, they been very nice about this, considering Mrs. Schonbrunn’s embarrassment and everything. Your arm got hassled, hey, I’m sorry…’ Hernandez shrugged, enormously. ‘Anyway, you not fired, man. We just can’t let you drive now. You want us put you on gated residential, no problem.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Retail properties? You wanna work evenings, Encino Fashion Mall?’

  ‘No.’

  Hernandez narrowed his eyes. ‘You seen the pussy over there?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Hernandez sighed. ‘Man, what happen with all that shit coming down on you in Nashville?’

  ‘Knoxville. Department came down for permanent suspension. Going in without authorization or proper back-up.’

  ‘And that bitch, one’s suing your ass?’

  ‘She and her son got caught sticking up a muffler shop in Johnson City, last I heard…’ Now it was Rydell’s turn to shrug, except it made his shoulder hurt.

  ‘See,’ Hernandez said, beaming, ‘you lucky.’

  In the instant of putting Gunhead through the Schonbrunns’ locked-and-armed Benedict Canyon gate, Rydell had experienced a fleeting awareness of something very high, very pure, and quite clinically empty; the doing of the thing, the not-thinking; that weird adrenal exultation and the losing of every more troublesome aspect of self.

  And that—he later recalled remembering, as he’d fought the wheel, slashing through a Japanese garden, across a patio, and through a membrane of armored glass that gave way like something in a dream—had been a lot like what he’d felt as he’d drawn his gun and pulled the trigger, emptying Kenneth Turvey’s brain-pan, and most copiously, across a seemingly infinite expanse of white-primered wallboard that nobody had ever bothered to paint.

  Rydell went over to Cedars to see Sublett.

  IntenSecure had sprung for a private cubicle, the better to keep Sublett away from any cruising minions of the media. The Texan was sitting up in bed, chewing gum, and watching a little liquid-crystal disk-player propped on his chest.

  ‘Warlords of the 21st Century,’ he said, when Rydell edged in, ‘James Wainwright, Annie McEnroe, Michael Beck.’

  Rydell grinned. ‘When’d they make it?’

  ‘1982.’ Sublett muted the audio and looked up. ‘But I’ve seen it a couple times already.’

  ‘I been over at the shop seein’ Hernandez, man. He says you don’t have to worry any about your job.’

  Sublett looked at Rydell with his blank silver eyes. ‘How ’bout yours, Berry?’

  Rydell’s arm started to itch, inside the inflated cast. He bent over and fished a plastic drinking-straw from the little white wastebasket beside the bed. He poked the straw down inside the cast and wiggled it around. It helped some. ‘I’m history, over there. They won’t let me drive anymore.’

  Sublett was looking at the straw. ‘You shouldn’t ought to touch used stuff, not in a hospital.’

  ‘You don’t have nothin’ contagious, Sublett. You’re one of the cleanest motherfuckers ever lived.’

  ‘But what you gonna do, Berry? You gotta make a living, man.’

  Rydell dropped the straw back into the basket. ‘Well, I don’t know. But I know I don’t wanna do gated residential and I know I don’t wanna do any malls.’

  ‘What about those hackers, Berry? You figure they’ll get the ones set us up?’

  ‘Nope. Too many of ’em. Republic of Desire’s been around a while. The Feds have a list of maybe three hundred “affiliates,” but there’s no way to haul ’em all in and figure out who actually did it. Not unless one of ’em rats on somebody, which they do tend to do on a pretty regular basis.’

  ‘But how come they’d want to do that to us anyway?’

  ‘Hell, Sublett, how should I know?’

  ‘Just mean,’ Sublett said.

  ‘Well, that, for sure, and Hernandez says the LAPD told him they figured somebody wanted Mrs. Schonbrunn caught more or less with her pants down.’ Neither Sublett nor Rydell had actually seen Mrs. Schonbrunn, because she was, as it turned out, in the nursery. Although her kids weren’t, having gone up to Washington State with their daddy to fly over the three newest volcanoes.

  Nothing that Gunhead had logged that night, since leaving the car wash, had been real. Someone had gotten into the Hotspur Hussar’s on-board computer and plugged a bunch of intricately crafted and utterly spurious data into the communications bundle, cutting Rydell and Sublett off from IntenSecure and the Death Star (which hadn’t, of course, been down). Rydell figured a few of those good ol’ Mongol boys over at the car wash might know a little bit about that.

  And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead’s crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains of a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Kenneth Turvey’s death finally real before him, Rydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasn’t always quite entirely to be trusted.

  ‘But, man,’ Sublett had said, as if to himself, ‘they gonna kill those little babies.’ And, with that, he’d snapped his harness open and was out of there, Glock in hand, before Rydell could do anything at all. Rydell had had him shut the siren and the strobes off a block away, but surely anybody in the house was now aware that IntenSecure had arrived.

  ‘Responding,’ Rydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of fire was probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked the door open and jumped out, his trainers going straight through the inch-thick glass top of a coffee-table. (Needed twelve stitches, but it wasn’t deep.) He couldn’t see Sublett. He stumbled forward, cradling the yellow bulk of the chunker, vaguely aware that there was something wrong with his arm.

  ‘Freeze, cocksucker!’ said the biggest voice in the world, ‘LAPD! Drop that shit or we blow your ass away!’ Rydell found himself the focus of an abrupt and extraordinarily painful radiance, a light so bright that it fell into his uncomprehending eyes like hot metal. ‘You hear me, cocksucker?’ Wincing, fingers across his eyes, Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was flattening everything in the Japanese garden that Gunhead hadn’t already taken care of.

  Rydell dropped the chunker.

  ‘The pistol, too, asshole!’

  Rydell grasped the Glock’s handle between thumb and forefinger. It came away, in its plastic holster, with a tiny but distinct skritch of Velcro, somehow audible through the drumming of the helicopter’s combat-muffled engine.

  He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to. The left one was broken.

  They found Sublett fifteen feet from Gunhead. His face and hands were swelling like bright pink toy balloons and he seemed to be suffocating, Schon
brunn’s Bosnian housekeeper having employed a product that contained xylene and chlorinated hydrocarbons to clean some crayon-marks off a bleached-oak end table.

  ‘What the fuck’s wrong with him?’ asked one of the cops.

  ‘He’s got allergies,’ Rydell said through gritted teeth; they’d cuffed his hands behind his back and it hurt like hell. ‘You gotta get him to Emergency.’

  Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.

  ‘Berry…’

  Rydell remembered the name of the movie he’d seen on television. ‘Miracle Mile,’ he said.

  Sublett squinted up at him. ‘Never seen it,’ Sublett said, and fainted.

  Mrs. Schonbrunn had been entertaining her Polish landscape gardener that evening. The cops found her in the nursery. Angered beyond speech, she was cinched quite interestingly up in a couple of thousand dollars worth of English latex, North Beach leather, and a pair of vintage Smith & Wesson handcuffs that someone had paid to have lovingly buffed and redone in black chrome—the gardener evidently having headed for the hills when he heard Rydell parking Gunhead in the living room.

  3 Not a nice party

  Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and definitely not when she was pulling tags. Except this one bad Monday when she took this total asshole’s sunglasses, but that was because she just didn’t like him.

  How it was, she was standing up there by this ninth-floor window, just looking out at the bridge, past the gray shells of the big stores, when he’d come up behind her. She’d almost managed to make out Skinner’s room, there, high up in the old cables, when the tip of a finger found her bare back. Under Skinner’s jacket, under her t-shirt, touching her.

  She wore that jacket everywhere, like some kind of armor. She knew that nanopore was the only thing to wear, riding this time of year, but she wore Skinner’s old horsehide anyway, with her bar-coded Allied badges on the lapels. The little ball-chains on the zippers swinging as she spun to knock that finger aside.

  Bloodshot eyes. A face that looked as though it were about to melt. He had a short little greenish cigar in his mouth but it wasn’t lit. He took it out, swirled its wet end in a small glass of clear liquor, then took a long suck on it. Grinning at her around it. Like he knew she didn’t belong here, not at a party like this and not in any old but seriously expensive hotel up over Geary.

  But it had been the last tag of the day, a package for a lawyer, with Tenderloin’s trash-fires burning so close by, and around them, huddled, all those so terminally luckless, utterly and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy illumination of the tiny glass pipes. Eyes canceled in that terrible and fleeting satisfaction. Shivers, that gave her, always.

  Locking and arming her bike in the hollow sound of the Morrisey’s underground lot, she’d taken a service elevator to the lobby, where the security grunts tried to brace her for the package, but there was no way. She wouldn’t deliver to anyone at all except this one very specific Mr. Garreau in 808, as stated right here on the tag. They ran a scanner across the bar-code on her Allied badge, x-rayed the package, put her through a metal-detector, and waved her into an elevator lined with pink mirrors and trimmed in bank-vault bronze.

  So up she’d gone, to eight, to a corridor quiet as the floor of some forest in a dream. She found Mr. Garreau there, his shirt-sleeves white and his tie the color of freshly poured lead. He signed the tab without making eye-contact; package in hand, he’d closed the door’s three brass digits in her face. She’d checked her hair in the mirror-polished italic zero. Her tail was sticking up okay, in back, but she wasn’t sure they’d got the front right. The spikes were still too long. Wispy, sort of. She headed back down the hall, the hardware jingling on Skinner’s jacket, her new SWAT-trainers sinking into freshly vacuumed pile the color of rain-wet terracotta.

  But when the elevator doors opened, this Japanese girl fell out. Or near enough, Chevette grabbing her beneath both arms and propping her against the edge of the door.

  ‘Where party?’

  ‘What folks gonna ask you,’ Chevette said.

  ‘Floor nine! Big party!’

  The girl’s eyes were all pupil, her bangs glossy as plastic.

  So Chevette, with a real glass wine-glass full of real French wine in one hand, and the smallest sandwich she’d ever seen in the other, came to find herself wondering how long she still had before the hotel’s computer noticed she hadn’t yet left the premises. Not that they were likely to come looking for her here, because someone had obviously put down good money to have this kind of party.

  Some really private kind, because she could see these people in a darkened bathroom, smoking ice through a blown-glass dolphin, its smooth curves illuminated by the fluttering bluish tongue of an industrial-strength lighter.

  Not just one room, either, but lots of them, all connected up. And lots of people, too, the men mostly gotten up in those suits with the four-button jackets, stiff shirts with those choker collars, and no tie but a little jeweled stud. The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.

  She’d managed to get the Japanese girl horizontal on a long green couch, where she was snoring now, and safe enough unless somebody sat on her.

  Looking around, Chevette had seen that she wasn’t the only underdressed local to have somehow scammed entry. The guy in the bathroom working the big yellow Bic, for starters, but he was an extreme case. Then there were a couple of pretty obvious Tenderloin working-girls, too, but maybe that was no more than the accepted amount of local color for whatever this was supposed to be.

  But then this asshole’s right in her face, grinning his mean-ass drunken grin, and she’s got her hand on a little folding-knife, something else she’s borrowed from Skinner. It has a hole in the blade that you can press the tip of your thumb into and snap it open, one-handed. That blade’s under three inches, broad as a soup-spoon, wickedly serrated, and ceramic. Skinner says it’s a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself.

  ‘You’re not enjoying yourself, I think,’ he says. European, but she’s not sure which flavor. Not French or German. His jacket’s leather, too, but nothing like Skinner’s. Some thin-skinned animal whose hide drapes like heavy silk, the color of tobacco. She thinks of the smell of the yellow-spined magazines up in Skinner’s room, some so old the pictures are only shades of gray, the way the city looks, sometimes, from the bridge.

  ‘Doing fine ’til you showed up,’ Chevette says, thinking it’s probably time to go, this guy’s bad news.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says, looking appraisingly at the jacket and the t-shirt and the bike-pants, ‘what services you offer.’

  ‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Clearly,’ he says, pointing at the Tenderloin girls across the room, ‘you offer something more interesting,’ and he rolls his tongue wetly around the word, ‘than these two.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ Chevette says, ‘I’m a messenger.’

  And a funny pause crosses his face, like something’s gotten past his drunk, nudged him. Then he throws back his head and laughs like it’s the biggest joke in the world. She gets a look at a lot of very white, very expensive-looking teeth. Rich people never have any metal in their teeth, Skinner’s told her.

  ‘I say something funny?’

  The asshole wipes his eyes. ‘But we have something in common, you and I…’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘I am a messenger,’ he says, though he looks to Chevette like a moderate hill would put him in line for a pig-valve.

  ‘A courier,’ he says, like he’s reminding himself.

  ‘So proj on,’ she says, and steps around him, but just then the lights go out, the music starts, and it’s the intro to Chrome Koran’s ‘She God’s Girlfriend.’ Chevette, who has kind of a major thing for Chrome Koran, and cranks them on her bike whenever she needs a boost to proj on, just moves with it now, everybody d
ancing, even the icers from the bathroom.

  With the asshole gone, or anyway forgotten she notices how much better these people look dancing. She finds herself opposite this girl in a leather skirt, little black boots with jingling silver spurs. Chevette grins; the girl grins back.

  ‘You’re from the city?’ the girl asks, as ‘She God’s Girlfriend’ ends, and for a second Chevette thinks she’s being asked if she’s a municipal messenger. The girl—woman—is older than she’d thought; late twenties maybe, but definitely older than Chevette. Good-looking without looking like it came out of a kit; dark eyes, dark hair cut short. ‘San Francisco?’

  Chevette nods.

  The next tune’s older than she is; that black guy who turned white, and then his face fell in, she guesses. She looks down for her drink but they all look alike. Her Japanese doll dances past, bangs swinging, no recognition in her eyes as she sees Chevette.

  ‘Cody can usually find all he needs, in San Francisco,’ the woman says, a tiredness behind her voice but at the same time you can tell she thinks it’s all pretty funny. German, Chevette thinks by her accent.

  ‘Who?’

  The woman raises her eyebrows. ‘Our host.’ But she’s still got her wide easy grin.

  ‘Just sort of walked in…’

  ‘Could I only say the same!’ The woman laughs.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Then I could walk out again.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’ Up close, she smells expensive. Chevette’s suddenly worried about how she must smell herself, after a day on the bike and no shower. But the woman takes her elbow and leads her aside.

  ‘You don’t know Cody?’

  ‘No.’ Chevette sees the drunk, the asshole, through the doorway into the next room, where the lights are still on. He’s looking right at her. ‘And I think maybe I should leave now, okay?’

  ‘You don’t have to. Please. I only envy you the option.’