Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  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 inside 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. Didn’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 come-alongs 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 Fock 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 sent
me to get her. He’s parked back out there past those tank-trap things, waiting for me to bring her out.’

  ‘Arkady…’ It was the one 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 gestured 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-a-Dub.

  ‘Arkady, now we go. These dirtbags 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, Fock, Op.

  ‘She’s tellin’ us she’s got-information-regarding-a-possible-homicide, and you’re telling me to shut up?’

  ‘Yes, I tell you shut fuck up. War-baby. He will explain.’

  And her arm twisted up so she’d go with them.

  23 Gone and done it

  Svobodov had insisted on cuffing him to Chevette Washington. They were Beretta cuffs, just like he’d carried on patrol in Knoxville. Svobodov said he and Orlovsky needed their hands free in case any of these bridge people caught on they were taking the girl off.

  But if they were taking her in, how come they hadn’t read her any Miranda, or even told her she was under arrest? Rydell had already decided that if it got to court and he was called to witness, no way was he going to perjure himself and say he’d heard any fucking Miranda. These Russians were balls-out cowboys as far as he could see, just exactly the kind of officers the Academy had tried hard to train Rydell not to be.

  In a way, though, what they were reflected what a lot of people more or less unconsciously expected cops to be and do, and that, this one lecturer at the Academy had said, was because of mythology. Like what they called the Father Mulcahy Syndrome, in barricaded hostage situations. Where somebody took a hostage and the cops tried to decide what to do. And they’d all seen this movie about Father Mulcahy once, so’d they’d say, yeah, I got it, I’ll get a priest, I’ll get the guy’s parents, I’ll lay down my gun and I’ll go in there and talk him out. And he’d go in there and get his ass drilled out real good. Because he forgot, and let himself think a movie was how you really did it. And it could work the other way, too, so you gradually became how you saw cops were in movies and on television. They’d all been warned about that. But people like Svobodov and Orlovsky, people who’d come here from other countries, maybe that media stuff worked even stronger on them. Check how they dressed, for one thing.

  Man, he was going to have him a shower. Hot shower. He was going to stay in there until he couldn’t stand it anymore, or until the hot ran out. Then he was going to get out and towel off and put on all brand-new, totally dry clothes, in whatever hotel room Warbaby had got for him. He was going to send down for a couple of club sandwiches and an ice-bucket with about four–five of those long-neck Mexican beers like they drank in L.A. And he’d sit there with a remote and watch some television. Maybe see Cops in Trouble. Maybe he’d even call up Sublett, shoot the shit, tell him about this wild-ass time up in Northern California. Sublett always worked deep graveyard because he was light-sensitive, so if it happened to be his night off, he’d be up watching his movies.

  ‘Watch where you’re walking—’ Yanking his cuffed hand so hard he nearly fell over. He’d been about to go one side of an upright as she was about to go the other. ‘Hey. Sorry,’ he said.

  She wouldn’t look at him. But she just didn’t look to Rydell like she’d sit down on some guy’s chest with a razor and haul his tongue out the hard way. Well, she did have that ceramic knife, when Svobodov shook her down, plus a pocket phone and the damn glasses everybody was after. Those looked just like Warbaby’s, and had this case. The Russians were real happy about that, and now they were tucked away safe in the inside pocket of Svobodov’s flak vest.

  She wasn’t the right kind of scared, either, something kept telling him. She wasn’t giving off that vibe of perp fear that you got to know by about your third day on the job. It was like victim fear, what it was, even though she’d already flat-out admitted to Orlovsky that she’d stolen those glasses. Said she’d done that up at a party in that hotel, the night before. But neither of the Russians had said shit about any homicide beef, or any Blix or whatever the victim’s name had been. Or even larceny. And she’d said that about somebody killing Sammy, whoever Sammy was. Maybe Sammy was the German. But the Russians had just dropped it, and shut Rydell up, and now she’d clammed up except to bitch at him if he started to fall asleep on his feet.

  The place was coming back to life, sort of, now that the storm had quit, but it was God knows when in the morning and there weren’t exactly a lot of people swarming out yet to check the damage. Lights kept coming back on, here and there, and there were a few people sweeping water off decks and things, and a few drunks, and this guy who looked like he was on dancer, talking to himself a mile a minute, who kept following them until Svobodov pulled out his H&K and spun around and said he’d grease him to fucking catfood if he didn’t get his dancer ass to Oakland like yesterday, fuckhead, and the guy did, naturally, his eyes about to bug right out of his head, and Orlovsky laughing at him.

  They came out into some more lights, about where Rydell had first laid his eyes on Chevette Washington. Looking down to keep track of his footing, Rydell saw she was wearing black SWAT trainers just like his. Lexan insoles.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘major footwear.’

  And she just looked up at him like he was crazy, and he saw tears running down her face.

  And Svobodov jammed the muzzle of that H&K, hard, into the joint of Rydell’s jaw, just in front of his right ear, and said: ‘Fuckhead. You don’t talk to her.’

  Rydell looked at Svobodov, edgewise, down the top of the barrel. Waited until he thought it was safe to say okay.

  After that, he didn’t try to say anything to her, or even look at her. When he thought he could get away with it, he looked at Svobodov. When they took that cuff off, he just might deck that son of a bitch.

  But just after the Russian had pulled the gun out of his ear, Rydell had registered something behind him. Not registered big-time, but it clicked for him later: this big bear of a longhair, blinking out at them, where they stood in the light, from this little doorway looked like it wasn’t more than a foot wide.

  Rydell didn’t ha
ve anything special going about black people or immigrants or anything, not like a lot of people did. In fact, that had been one of the things that had gotten him into the Academy when he hadn’t exactly had great grades from high school. They’d run all these tests on him and decided he wasn’t racist. He wasn’t, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn’t see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn’t be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we’d all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.

  He had to admit, though, as he and Chevette Washington walked out between those tank-trap slabs, their cuffed wrists swinging in that stupid prom-night unison that you get with handcuffs, that currently he was feeling a little put upon by a few very specific blacks and immigrants. Warbaby’s tv-preacher melancholy had worn thin on him; he thought Freddie was, as his father would have put it, a jive-ass motherfucker; Svobodov and Orlovsky, they must be what his uncle, the one who went in the army, had meant by stone pigs.

  And here he could see Freddie with his butt propped against the front fender of the Patriot, bobbing his head to something on earphones, the lyrics or whatever sliding around the edges of his sneakers, animated in red LEDs. Must’ve sat out the rain in the car, because his pistol-print shirt and his big shorts weren’t even wet.

  And Warbaby there in his long quilted coat, his hat jammed down level with those VL glasses. Looked like a refrigerator, if a refrigerator could lean on a cane.

  And the Russians’ gray tanker of an unmarked, pulled up nose to nose with the Patriot, armored tires and that graphite mesh rhino-chaser screaming Cop Car at anybody who was interested. As indeed some were, Rydell saw, a thin crowd of bridge-people watching from various perches on the concrete slabs and battened food-wagons. Little kids, a couple of Mexican-looking women with hairnets like they worked in food-preparation, some rough-looking boys in muddy workclothes and leaning on shovels and push-brooms there. Just looking, their faces carefully neutral, the way people’s faces got when they saw cops working and were curious.