Zero History

by William Gibson

  “Pushing the envelope,” said Ajay, “is what we’re about. High speed, low drag.” He toweled his head.

  “Do these people know you’re a perfect idiot?” asked Chandra.

  “Ajay,” said Garreth, through the door.

  Ajay flung the towel in a corner and went out, closing the door behind him.

  “He was always like that,” said Chandra, Milgrim not knowing how that was supposed to have been. “It wasn’t entirely the army.” She gave the hair on top of his head a few brisk snips with her scissors, then removed the towel she’d draped around his neck. “Stand up. Have a look.”

  Milgrim stood. A different Milgrim, oddly military, perhaps younger, looked back at him from the wall of fogged mirror above the twin sinks. He’d buttoned the collar of his new shirt, to keep hair from getting inside, and this contributed to the unfamiliarity. A stranger, in an air tie. “That’s good,” said Milgrim. And it was. “I wouldn’t have thought to do that. Thank you.”

  “Thank your friend on the bed,” said Chandra. “Most expensive cut you’ll have had. Easily.”

  Ajay opened the door. He was wearing Milgrim’s wrinkled cotton jacket. His shoulders were slightly too wide for it, Milgrim thought. “Your shoes are a bit too long,” Ajay said, “but I can put something in the toes.”

  “Milgrim,” said Garreth, from the bed, “come and sit. Fiona here tells me you’re a natural with the balloons.”

  “I have good hand-eye coordination,” Milgrim volunteered. “They told me in Basel.”

  69. THE GIFTING SUITE

  Here?” She recognized the nameless denim shop in Upper James Street. Dark, faintly candlelit. A pulsing glow, almost invisible.

  “They’re hosting a pop-up,” said Meredith.

  “Won’t start for an hour,” said Clammy, who struck Hollis as uncharacteristically cheery. “But I’m first.”

  “It’s a gifting suite, as far as you’re concerned,” Meredith told him. “Then we’re even. But no questions. And no bothering Bo later. Ever. Go there again, she won’t know you.”

  “Perfect,” said Clammy, drumming a signal of pleased anticipation on the steering wheel.

  “Who’s Bo?”

  “You’ve met her,” said Meredith. “Come on. Out with you. They’re waiting.” She opened the little wagon’s passenger-side door, pulled herself out and up, tipped the passenger seat forward. Hollis struggled out. “You’ll have a little time before we arrive,” said Meredith, and got back in. She closed the door and Clammy pulled away, rain beading on the enamel of the wagon’s low roof.

  The handsome graying woman opened the door as Hollis reached it, gestured her in, then closed and locked it.

  “You’re Bo,” said Hollis. The woman nodded. “I’m Hollis.”

  “Yes,” said the woman.

  It smelled of vanilla and something else, masking jungle indigo. Candles pulsed in retail twilight, along the massive slab of polished wood that Hollis remembered from her previous visit. Aromatherapy candles, their complicated tallow poured into expensive-looking glasses with vertical sides, their wicks paper-thin slabs of wood, crackled softly as their flames pulsed. Faintly sandblasted on each glass, she saw, the Hounds logo. Between the candles were a folded pair of jeans, a folded pair of khaki pants, a folded chambray shirt, and a black ankle-boot. The boot’s smooth leather caught the candlelight. She touched it with a fingertip.

  “Next year,” said Bo. “Also an oxford, brown, but samples not ready.”

  Hollis picked up the folded jeans. They were black as ink, unusually heavy. She turned them over and saw the baby-headed dog, dimly branded into a leather patch on the waistband. “They’re for sale? Tonight?”

  “Friends will come. When you were here, I could not help you. I hope you understand.”

  “I do,” said Hollis, not sure that she did.

  “In rear, please. Come.”

  Hollis followed her, ducking through a doorway partially concealed by a dark noren decorated with white fish. There was no white Ikea desk here, no decrease in the shop’s simple elegance at all. It was a smaller space, but as cleanly uncluttered, with the same sanded, unstained floor, the same candles. A woman was seated on one of two old, paint-scarred, mismatched wooden kitchen chairs, stroking the screen of an iPhone. She looked up, smiled, stood. “Hello, Hollis. I—”

  Hollis raised her hand. “Don’t tell me.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. Her hair was dark brown, glossy in candlelight, nicely cut, but mussed.

  “Deniability,” Hollis said. “I could figure it out, from what Meredith told me. Or I could just ask Reg. But if you don’t tell me, and I don’t do either of those things, I can continue to tell Hubertus that I don’t know your name.” She looked around, saw that Bo was gone. She turned back to the woman. “I’m not good at lying.”

  “Neither am I. Good at hiding, not at lying. Please, sit down. Would you like some wine? We have some.”

  Hollis took the other chair. “No, thank you.”

  She was wearing jeans that Hollis took to be the ones she’d seen on the table. That same absolute black. A blue shirt, rumpled and untucked. A very worn pair of black Converse sneakers, their rubber sides abraded and discolored.

  “I don’t understand why you’d want to see me,” Hollis said. “Under the circumstances.”

  The woman smiled. “I was a huge fan of the Curfew, by the way, though that’s not it.” She sat. Glanced down at the iPhone’s glowing screen, then looked at Hollis. “I think it was my sense of once having been where you are.”

  “Which is … ?”

  “I worked for Bigend myself. Identical arrangement, from what Mere tells me. There was something he wanted, the missing piece of a puzzle, and he talked me into finding it for him.”

  “Did you?”

  “I did. Though it wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Eventually he did do something, repurposing aspects of what I’d helped him learn. Something ghastly, in marketing. I used to be in marketing myself, but then I wasn’t, after him.”

  “What did you do, in marketing?”

  “I had a very peculiar and specific talent, which I didn’t understand, never have understood, which now is gone. Though that hasn’t been a bad thing, the gone part. It stemmed from a sort of allergy I’d had, since childhood.”

  “To what?”

  “Advertising,” the woman said. “Logos, in particular. Corporate mascot figures. I still dislike those, actually, but not much more than some people dislike clowns, or mimes. Any concentrated graphic representation of corporate identity.”

  “But don’t you have your own now?”

  The woman looked down at her iPhone, stroked the screen. “I do, yes. Forgive me for keeping this on. I’m doing something with my kids. Difficult to keep in touch, with the time difference.”

  “Your logo worries me, a little.”

  “It was drawn by the woman Bigend had sent me to find. She was a filmmaker. She died, a few years after I found her.”

  Hollis was watching emotion in the woman’s face, a transparency that easily trumped her beauty, which was considerable. “I’m sorry.”

  “Her sister sent me some of her things. There was this unnerving little doodle, at the bottom of a page of notes. When we had the notes translated, they were about the legend of the Gabriel Hounds.”

  “I’d never heard of them.”

  “Neither had I. And when I began making my own things, I didn’t want a brand name, a logo, anything. I’d always removed branding from my own clothes, because of that sensitivity. And I couldn’t stand anything that looked as though a designer had touched it. Eventually I realized that if I felt that way about something, that meant it hadn’t been that well designed. But my husband made a compelling case for there being a need to brand, if we were going to do what I was proposing to do. And there was her squiggle, at the bottom of that page.” She looked down at the horizonal screen again, then up at Hollis. “My husband is from Chicago. We lived
there, after we met, and I discovered the ruins of American manufacturing. I’d been dressing in its products for years, rooting them out of warehouses, thrift shops, but I’d never thought of where they’d come from.”

  “Your things are beautifully made.”

  “I saw that an American cotton shirt that had cost twenty cents in 1935 will often be better made than almost anything you can buy today. But if you re-create that shirt, and you might have to go to Japan to do that, you wind up with something that needs to retail for around three hundred dollars. I started bumping into people who remembered how to make things. And I knew that how I dressed had always attracted some attention. There were people who wanted what I wore. What I curated, Bigend would have said.”

  “He’s curating suits that do retinal damage, these days.”

  “He has no taste at all, but he behaves as if he’s had it removed, elective surgery. Perhaps he did. That search he sent me on somehow removed my one negotiable talent. I’d been a sort of coolhunter as well, before that had a name, but now it’s difficult to find anyone who isn’t. I suspect he’s responsible for that, somehow. Some kind of global contagion.”

  “And you began to make clothing, in Chicago?”

  “We were having children.” She smiled, glanced down at the screen, stroked it with a fingertip. “So it wasn’t as though I had much time. But my husband’s work was going well. So I could afford to experiment. And I discovered I really loved doing that.”

  “People wanted the things you made.”

  “That was frightening, at first. I just wanted to explore processes, learn, be left alone. But then I remembered Hubertus, ideas of his, things he’d done. Guerrilla marketing strategies. Weird inversions of customary logic. That Japanese idea of secret brands. The deliberate construction of parallel microeconomies, where knowledge is more congruent than wealth. I’d have a brand, I decided, but it would be a secret. The branding would be that it was a secret. No advertising. None. No press. No shows. I’d do what I was doing, be as secretive as I could about it, and avoid the bullshit. And I was very good at being secretive about it. I’d gotten that from my father as well.”

  “It seems to have worked.”

  “Too well, possibly. It’s at that point, now, where it either has to go to another level or stop. Does he know? That it’s me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Does he suspect?”

  “If he does, he’s doing a good job of pretending he doesn’t. And right now he’s focused on a crisis that has nothing to do with either of us.”

  “He must be in his element, then.”

  “He was. Now I’m not so sure. But I don’t think he’s giving Gabriel Hounds much attention.”

  “He’ll know it’s me soon enough. We’re coming out. It’s time. Tonight’s pop-up is part of a that.”

  “He’ll still be dangerous.”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted to say to you. When Mere told me about you, I realized you’d already had the Bigend experience, but you were back for more, even though you struck her as a good person.”

  “I never planned it that way.”

  “Of course not. He has a kind of dire gravity. You need to get further away. I know.”

  “I’ve already taken steps.”

  The woman looked at her carefully. “I believe you. And good luck. We have the pop-up starting now, and I have to help Bo, but I wanted to thank you personally. Mere told me what you did, or rather what you weren’t willing to do, and of course I’m very grateful.”

  “I only did what I had to do. Didn’t do what I couldn’t do, more like it.”

  They both stood.

  “Totally fucking next level,” Hollis heard Clammy declare, from beyond the noren.

  70. DAZZLE

  The penguin smelled of Krylon, an aerosol enamel Fiona had used to camouflage it, so to speak. Milgrim knew more about camouflage, now, than he would ever have expected to, via Bigend’s interest in military clothing. Prior to that, he had only been familiar with two kinds, the one with the Lava Lamp blobs in nature shades, that the U.S. Army had featured when he was a boy, and the creepy photorealist turkey-hunter stuff that a certain kind of extra-scary New Jersey drug dealer sometimes affected. What Fiona called “dazzle,” though, was new to him. Fiona said it had been invented by a painter, a Vorticist. He’d Google it, when he had time. It had been Garreth’s suggestion, and Fiona had told Milgrim that it didn’t actually make a lot of sense, in their situation, though anything was better than silver Mylar. She liked Garreth having suggested it, though, because it seemed to her to be part of some performance-art aspect of what he was doing. She said she’d never seen anything quite like it, what Garreth was doing, and particularly the speed with which it was being put together.

  Out in the bike yard, she’d sprayed the penguin’s silver Mylar with black, random, wonky geometrics, their edges fuzzy, like graffiti. Real dazzle had sharp edges, she said, but there was no way to mask the inflated balloon. She used a piece of brown cardboard, cut in a concave curve, to mask approximately, then went back with a dull gray, to fill in the remaining silver. When that had dried a little, she’d further confused it with an equally dull beige, ghosting lines in with the cardboard mask. The result wouldn’t conceal the penguin against any background at all, particularly the sky, but broke it up visually, made it difficult to read as an object. Still a penguin, though, a swimming one, and now with the Taser and the extra electronics that Voytek had taped to its tummy.

  There was an arming sequence, on the iPhone now, that required a thumb and forefinger, with the other forefinger needed to fire the thing. Milgrim hadn’t been entirely sure what a Taser was before, but he was getting an idea. If he accidentally fired it, here in the Vegas cube, a pair of barbed electrodes would shoot out, on two thin fifteen-foot cables, propelled by compressed gas. That was strictly once-only, the barb-shooting. If the barbs went into Bigend’s spotless plasterboard wall, the penguin was anchored there, he supposed, and there was a lot of fine cable around. But if you tapped the iPhone again, in the firing circle on the screen, the wall got shocked. Which wouldn’t bother the wall, but if those barbs happened to get into anybody, which was what they were actually for, that person got a shock, a big one. Not the kind that would kill you, but one that could knock you down, stun you. And there was more than one shock stored in the toy airship cabin Voytek had taped under there.

  Fiona said that he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that when he flew the penguin. She said it was just extra bells and whistles, something Garreth had tossed in because he’d happened to run across the Taser. That was what Voytek had indicated, grumpily, on his way out, when they’d gotten back here on the Yamaha.

  But that wasn’t what Garreth had told him, in Hollis’s hotel room. Garreth had said that he needed Fiona to operate the other drone, the one with the little helicopters, so he needed Milgrim to operate the penguin. To keep an eye on the general area, he said. When Milgrim asked which area that was, Garreth had said that he didn’t know yet, but that he was sure Milgrim would do very well. Milgrim, remembering the pleasure he’d taken in rolling the black ray, decided that simply nodding was the best course. Though the idea of anyone wanting him to operate anything was new. Other people operated things, and Milgrim observed them doing it. But, he supposed, he was really only being asked to observe something, whatever it was, through the cameras in the penguin, and it was best, as Fiona suggested, to regard the Taser as a random add-on.

  It was harder to get the penguin to do anything, in the constrained space of the Vegas cube, than it had been to get the ray to do those rhythmic somersaults, but he was starting, now, to manage a repeated stationary roll. If he bumped the wall, Fiona noticed, and didn’t like it, so he tried to be as careful as he could. She said that the robotics in the wings were fragile, and the penguin was helpless without them. It didn’t really fly, because penguins don’t, and it was a balloon; rather, it swam, through air instead of water,
and once you had it going where you wanted it to, it knew how to swim by itself. He was careful to keep that overridden now. He wished they could take the thing out and really fly it, the way he’d seen her fly the other one in Paris, but she said that they couldn’t, because people might see it and get excited, and because Garreth had ordered her to keep him inside.

  Being kept inside with Fiona was an excellent thing, as far as Milgrim was concerned, but he was starting to recall Hollis’s scary-looking shower with something other than fear. “I wish there was a shower here,” he said, slowing the penguin’s roll, bringing the Taser around until it was on the bottom, stopping it. There was something wonderfully satisfying about this thing, something silky about the way it worked.

  “There is,” said Fiona, looking up from his Air, where she sat at the table.

  “There is?” Milgrim, on his back on the white foam, glanced around the blank white walls, thinking he’d missed a door.

  “Benny has one rigged up. Drivers use it, sometimes. It has a geyser so old that it has a box that used to take coins. I could do with one myself.”

  Milgrim was simultaneously aware of the stickiness of his armpits and what even the briefest image of Fiona in a shower did to him. “You go first, then.”

  “You can’t trust Benny’s geyser,” said Fiona. “Get it working, it’ll go once, then stop. We should shower together.”

  “Together,” said Milgrim, and heard the voice he only had in police custody. He coughed.

  “We’ll leave the light out,” said Fiona, who was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t identify at all. “I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight. Literally. That was what he said.”

  “Who?” asked Milgrim, in his own voice.

  “Garreth.” She was wearing her armored pants, low on her hips as she sat on one of Bigend’s elegant chairs, and a tight T-shirt, white, that said RUDGE at the top of a round black emblem, the size of a dinner plate, and COVENTRY at the bottom. Between these names was a red heraldic hand, open and upright, its palm presented as if to warn anyone off the small but prominent breasts behind it.