Zero History

by William Gibson

  “The Chinese are faking it?”

  “Chinese are faking everything,” Clammy said. “You get a real Hounds piece on eBay, someone makes an offer high enough to stop it. Never seen an auction for real Hounds run off.”

  “It’s an Australian brand?”

  He looked disgusted, which was how he’d looked in whatever few previous brief conversations they’d had. “Fuck no,” he said, “it’s Hounds.”

  “Tell me about it, Clammy,” she said. “I need to know.”

  6. AFTER THE GYRATORY

  The Neo’s plastic case reminded Milgrim of one of those electronic stud-finders they sold in hardware stores, its shape simultaneously simple and clumsy, awkward against his ear.

  “Gussets?” demanded Rausch, on the Neo.

  “He said they needed them. One in each inner thigh.”

  “What are they?”

  “An extra piece of material, between two seams. Usually triangular.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Milgrim considered. “I like details,” he said.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Football player,” Milgrim said. “With a sort of mullet.”

  “A what?”

  “I have to go,” Milgrim said. “We’re at the Hanger Lane Gyratory System.”

  “Wha—”

  Milgrim clicked off.

  Pocketing the Neo, he brought himself more upright, feeling the Jankel-armored, four-doored, short-bedded Toyota Hilux’s ferocious engine-transplant gather itself for their plunge into England’s most famously intimidating roundabout, seven lanes of fiercely determined traffic.

  According to Aldous, the Hilux’s other driver, this route from Heathrow, decidedly nonoptimal, was part of his job requirement, meant to maintain certain skills one was otherwise unable to practice in London traffic.

  Braced for the discomfort of rapid acceleration on run-flat tires, from a standing stop, Milgrim glanced down, to his right, glimpsing the pinstriped thigh of the driver in the adjacent lane, and missed seeing the light change.

  Then they were in it, fully gyratory, the driver expertly and repeatedly inserting the Hilux’s secretly massive but oddly skittish bulk sideways, it seemed, into absurdly tiny lane-change gaps.

  Milgrim had no idea why he’d come to enjoy this so much. Prior to his stay in Basel, he’d have kept his eyes shut for the whole thing; if he’d been expecting it, he’d have upped his medication. But now, grinning, he sat with the red cardboard tube upright between his legs, holding it with the fingertips of both hands, as though it were a joystick.

  Then they were out of it. He sighed, deeply if mysteriously satisfied, and felt the driver’s glance.

  This driver wasn’t as talkative as Aldous, but that might have something to do with the urine test. Aldous had never had to administer the urine test, or drive back to London with a vial cooling in his overcoat pocket.

  Aldous had told Milgrim all about the Toyota Hilux, about the Jankel armor and the bulletproof glass and the run-flats. “Cartel grade,” Aldous had assured him, and unusual for London, at least as far as a silver-gray pickup truck went. Milgrim hadn’t asked why these particular features had been deemed necessary, but he suspected that that might be a sensitive area.

  Eventually, now, after a much less entertaining stretch of the journey, it became Euston Road, and the beginnings of his idea of actual London.

  Like entering a game, a layout, something flat and mazed, arbitrarily but fractally constructed from beautifully detailed but somehow unreal buildings, its order perhaps shuffled since the last time he’d been here. The pixels that comprised it were familiar, but it remained only provisionally mapped, a protean territory, a box of tricks, some possibly even benign.

  The run-flats were nasty on mixed pavement, worse on cobbles. He sat back and held on to the red cardboard tube as the driver began taking an endless series of corners, keeping roughly parallel, Milgrim guessed, to Tottenham Court Road. Headed for the heart of town, and Soho.

  >>>

  Rausch, his translucently short black hair looking like something sprayed from a nozzle, was waiting for them in front of Blue Ant, the driver having phoned ahead as they’d crept along through the traffic on Beak Street. Rausch held a magazine above his head, to ward off the drizzle. He looked characteristically disheveled, but in his own peculiar way. Everything about his personal presentation was intended to convey an effortless concision, but nothing quite did. His tight black suit was wrinkled, bagged at the knees, and in extending his arm above his head to hold the magazine, he’d untucked one side of his white shirt. His glasses, whose frames came equipped with their own squint, would be in need of cleaning.

  “Thanks,” Milgrim said when the driver pushed a button, unlocking the passenger-side door. The driver said nothing. They were behind a black cab, not quite there yet.

  When Milgrim opened the door, it swung out with an alarming, weight-driven velocity, to be stopped by a short pair of heavy nylon straps that prevented it from tearing itself off its hinges. He climbed down, with the red tube and his bag, briefly glimpsing the red tank of fire-extinguishing foam beneath the passenger seat, and tried to bump the door shut with his shoulder. “Ouch,” he said. He put the bag down, tucked the tube under his arm, and used the other hand to heave the armored door shut.

  Rausch was bending to pick up his bag.

  “He’s got the pee,” Milgrim said, indicating the truck.

  Rausch straightened, grimacing fastidiously. “Yes. He takes it to the lab.”

  Milgrim nodded, looking around at the pedestrian traffic, which tended to interest him in Soho.

  “They’re waiting,” said Rausch.

  Milgrim followed him into Blue Ant, Rausch holding a security badge over a metal plate to unlock the door, a single sheet of greenish two-inch-thick glass.

  The lobby here suggested some combination of extremely expensive private art school and government defense establishment, though when he thought about it, he’d never been in either. There was a massive central chandelier, constructed from thousands of pairs of discarded prescription eyeglasses, that contributed very handsomely to the art school part, but the Pentagon part (or would it be Whitehall?) was harder to pin down. Half a dozen large plasma screens constantly showed the latest house product, mostly European and Japanese automobile commercials with production budgets dwarfing those of many feature films, while beneath these moved people wearing badges like the one Rausch had used to open the door. These were worn around the neck, on lanyards in various shades, some bearing the repeated logos of various brands or projects. There was a smell of exceptionally good coffee.

  Milgrim looked obediently at a large red plus sign, on the wall behind the security counter, while an automated camera moved lazily behind a small square window, like something in a very technical reptile house. He was shortly presented with a large square photograph of himself, very low in resolution, on a hideous chartreuse lanyard minus any branding. As always, he suspected that this was at least partially intended to serve as a high-visibility target, should the need arise. He put it on. “Coffee,” he said.

  “No,” said Rausch, “they’re waiting,” but Milgrim was already on his way to the lobby’s cappuccino station, the source of that fine aroma.

  “Piccolo, please,” said Milgrim to the blond barista, her hair only slightly longer than Rausch’s.

  “He’s waiting,” said Rausch, beside him, tensely stressing the first syllable of “waiting.”

  “He’ll expect me to be able to talk,” said Milgrim, watching the girl expertly draw the shot. She foamed milk, then poured an elaborate Valentine’s heart into the waiting shot in Milgrim’s white cup. “Thank you,” he said.

  Rausch fumed silently in the elevator to the fourth floor, while Milgrim was mainly concerned with keeping his cup and saucer level and undisturbed.

  The doors slid aside, revealing Pamela Mainwaring. Looking, Milgrim thought, like some very tasteful pornogra
pher’s idea of “mature,” her blond hair magnificently banged.

  “Welcome back,” she said, ignoring Rausch. “How was South Carolina?”

  “Fine,” said Milgrim, who held the red cardboard tube in his right hand, the piccolo in his left. He raised the tube slightly. “Got it.”

  “Very good,” she said. “Come in.”

  Milgrim followed her into a longish room with a long central table. Bigend was seated at the table’s far end, a window behind him. He looked like something that had gone wrong on a computer screen, but then Milgrim realized that that was the suit he was wearing, in a weirdly electric cobalt blue.

  “If you don’t mind,” Pamela said, taking the red cardboard tube and handing it on to Milgrim’s favorite in Bigend’s clothing design team, a French girl, today in a plaid kilt and cashmere pullover. “And the photographs?”

  “In my bag,” Milgrim said.

  While his bag was placed on the table and opened, motorized shades tracked silently shut across the window behind Bigend. Overhead, fixtures came on, illuminating the table, where Milgrim’s tracings were being carefully unfurled. He’d remembered to leave his camera atop his clothes, and now it was being passed from hand to hand, up the table.

  “Your medication,” said Pamela, handing him a fresh bubble-pack.

  “Now, then,” said Bigend, rising, “be seated.”

  Milgrim took the chair to the right of Pamela’s. They were extremely fine workstation chairs, either Swiss or Italian, and he had to restrain himself from fiddling with the various knobs and levers projecting from beneath the seat.

  “I see the Bundeswehr NATO pattern,” someone said. “The legs are pure 501.”

  “But not the box,” said the girl in kilt and cashmere. The box, he had learned, was everything, in a pair of jeans, above the top of the leg. “The two small pleats are absent, the rise lower.”

  “The photographs,” said Bigend, from behind her chair. A plasma screen, above the window he’d been sitting in front of, flared turquoise, around coppery coyote brown, the Formica counter in Edge City Family Restaurant making itself known in this darkened room in central London.

  “Knee pads,” said a young man, American. “Absent. No pockets for them.”

  “We hear they have a new pad-retention system,” said the French girl, with a surgeon’s seriousness. “But I don’t see that here.”

  They watched, then, silently, while Milgrim’s photographs cycled.

  “How tactical are they?” asked Bigend as the first photograph reappeared. “Are we looking at a prototype for a Department of Defense contract?”

  A silence. Then: “Streetwear.” The French girl, much more confident than the others. “If these are for the military, it isn’t the American military.”

  “He said they needed gussets,” said Milgrim.

  “What?” asked Bigend, softly.

  “He said they were too tight in the thighs. For rappelling.”

  “Really,” said Bigend. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

  Milgrim allowed himself a first careful sip of his coffee.

  7. A HERF GUN IN FRITH STREET

  Bigend was telling a story, over drinks in a crowded Frith Street tapas place Hollis suspected she’d been to before. A story about someone using something called a “herf” gun, high-energy radio frequency, in Moscow, to erase someone else’s stored data, in a drive in an adjacent building, on the opposite side of a party wall. So far the best thing about it was that Bigend kept using the British expression “party wall,” and she’d always found it mildly if inexplicably comical. The herf gun, he was explaining now, the electromagnetic radiation device, was the size of a backpack, putting out a sixteen-megawatt pulse, and she suddenly found herself afraid, boys being boys, of some punch-line involving accidentally baked internal organs. “Were any animals harmed, Hubertus,” she interrupted, “in the making of this anecdote?”

  “I like animals,” said Milgrim, the American Bigend had introduced at Blue Ant, sounding as though he were more than mildly surprised to discover that he did. He seemed to have only the one name.

  After Clammy had decided to go back to the studio, her white plastic bottle of Cold-FX wedged precariously into a back pocket of his Hounds, departing the Golden Square Starbucks during an unexpected burst of weak but thoroughly welcome sunlight, Hollis had gone out to stand for a few moments amid the puddles in Golden Square, before walking (aimlessly, she’d pretended to herself) back up Upper James to Beak Street. Turning right, crossing the first intersection on her side of Beak, she’d found Blue Ant exactly where she remembered it, while simultaneously realizing that she’d been hoping it somehow wouldn’t be there.

  When she’d pressed the annunciator button, a square pattern of small round holes had said hello. “Hollis Henry, for Hubertus.” Was she expected? “Not at all, no.”

  A handsome, bearded child, in a corduroy sports coat considerably older than he was, had opened the thick glass door almost immediately. “I’m Jacob,” he’d said. “We’re just trying to find him.” He’d offered his hand.

  “Hollis,” she’d said.

  “Come in, please. I’m a huge fan of The Curfew.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like coffee, while you wait?” He’d indicated a sort of guardhouse, diagonally striped in artfully battered yellow and black paint, in which a girl with very short blond hair was polishing an espresso maker that looked set to win at Le Mans. “They sent three men from Turin, to install the machine.”

  “Shouldn’t I be being photographed?” she’d asked him. Inchmale hadn’t liked Blue Ant’s new security measures at all when they’d last come here, to sign contracts. But then the phone in Jacob’s right hand had played the opening chords of “Box 1 of 1,” one of her least favorite Curfew songs. She’d pretended not to notice. “In the lobby,” he’d said to the phone.

  “Have you been with Blue Ant long?” she’d asked.

  “Two years now. I actually worked on your commercial. We were gutted when it fell through. Do you know Damien?” She didn’t. “The director. Gutted, absolutely.” But then Bigend had appeared, in his very blue suit, shoulder-draped in the bivouac-tent yardage of the trench coat, and accompanied by Pamela Mainwaring and a nondescript but unshaven man in a thin cotton sportscoat and wrinkled slacks, a black nylon bag slung over his shoulder. “This is Milgrim,” Bigend had said, then “Hollis Henry” to the man, who’d said “Hello,” but scarcely anything since.

  “What kinds of animals?” she asked him now, in a still more naked bid to derail Bigend’s narrative.

  Milgrim winced. “Dogs,” he said, quickly, as though surprised in some guilty pleasure.

  “You like dogs?” She was sure that Bigend had been paying whatever lowlife had been wielding that herf gun, though he’d never come right out and tell you that, unless he had some specific reason to.

  “I met a very nice dog in Basel,” Milgrim said, “at …” A micro-expression of anxiety. “At a friend’s.”

  “Your friend’s dog?”

  “Yes,” said Milgrim, nodding once, tightly, before taking a sip of his Coke. “You could have used a spark coil generator instead,” he said to Bigend, blinking, “made from a VCR tuner. They’re smaller.”

  “Who told you that?” asked Bigend, suddenly differently focused.

  “A … roommate?” Milgrim extended an index finger, to touch his stack of tiny, elongated white china tapas dishes, as if needing to assure himself that they were there. “He worried about things like that. Out loud. They made him angry.” He looked apologetically at Hollis.

  “I see,” said Bigend, although Hollis certainly didn’t.

  Now Milgrim took a pharmacist’s folded white bubble-pack from an inside jacket pocket, flattened it, and frowned with concentration. All of the pills, Hollis saw, were white as well, white capsules, though of differing sizes. He carefully pushed three of them through the foil backing, put them in his mouth, and washed them do
wn with a swig of Coke.

  “You must be exhausted, Milgrim,” said Pamela, seated beside Hollis. “You’re on east coast time.”

  “Not too bad,” Milgrim said, putting the bubble-pack away. There was a curious lack of definition to his features, Hollis thought, something adolescent, though she guessed he was in his thirties. He struck her as unused to inhabiting his own face, somehow. As amazed to find himself who he was as to find himself here in Frith Street, eating oysters and calamari and dry shaved ham.

  “Aldous will take you back to the hotel,” Pamela said. Aldous, Hollis guessed, was one of the two black men who’d walked over with them from Blue Ant, carrying long, furled umbrellas with beautifully lacquered cane handles. They were waiting outside now, a few feet apart, silently, keeping an eye on Bigend through the window.

  “Where is it?” Milgrim asked.

  “Covent Garden,” said Pamela.

  “I like that one,” he said. He folded his napkin, put it beside the white china tower. He looked at Hollis. “Nice meeting you.” He nodded, first to Pamela, then to Bigend. “Thanks for dinner.” Then he pushed back his chair, bent to pick up his bag, stood up, shouldering the bag, and walked out of the restaurant.

  “Where did you find him?” Hollis asked, watching Milgrim, through the window, speak to the one she supposed was Aldous.

  “In Vancouver,” Bigend said, “a few weeks after you were there.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Translation,” Bigend said, “simultaneous and written. Russian. Brilliant with idioms.”

  “Is he … well?” She didn’t know how else to put it.

  “Convalescing,” said Bigend.

  “Recovering,” said Pamela. “He translates for you?”

  “Yes. Though we’re beginning to see that he may actually be more useful in other areas.”

  “Other areas?”

  “Good eye for detail,” said Bigend. “We have him looking at clothing.”

  “Doesn’t look like a fashion plate.”