Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  ‘You German?’

  ‘Padanian.’

  Chevette knows that’s part of what used to be Italy. The northern part, she thinks. ‘Who’s this Cody?’

  ‘Cody likes a party. Cody likes this party. This party’s been going on for several years now. When it isn’t here, it’s in London, Prague, Macau…’ A boy is moving through the crowd with a tray of drinks. He doesn’t look to Chevette like he works for the hotel. His stiff white shirt’s not so stiff anymore; it’s open all the way, wrinkled tails hanging loose, and she sees he has one of those things like a little steel barbell through one nipple. His stiff collar’s popped off at the front and sticks up behind his neck like a slipped halo. The woman takes a glass of white wine when he offers the tray. Chevette shakes her head. There’s a white saucer on the tray, with pills and what look like twists of dancer.

  The boy winks at Chevette and moves on.

  ‘You find this strange?’ The woman drinks her wine off and tosses the empty glass over her shoulder. Chevette hears it break.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Cody’s party.’

  ‘Yeah. I guess. I mean, I just walked in…’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘The bridge.’ Watching for the reaction.

  The grin widens. ‘Really? It looks so… mysterious. I’d like to go there, but there are no tours, and they say it’s dangerous…’

  ‘It’s not,’ Chevette says, then hesitates. ‘Just don’t… dress up so much, right? But it’s not dangerous, not even as much as the neighborhood around here.’ Thinking of the ones around the trash-fires. ‘Just don’t go out on Treasure Island. Don’t try to go all the way to Oakland. Stay over on the suspension side.’

  ‘You like it, living there?’

  ‘Shit, yes. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.’

  The woman smiles. ‘You’re very lucky then, I think.’

  ‘Well,’ Chevette says, feeling clumsy, ‘I gotta go.’

  ‘My name is Maria…’

  ‘Chevette,’ offering her hand. Almost like her own other name. Chevette-Marie.

  They shake.

  ‘Goodbye, Chevette.’

  ‘You have a nice party, okay?’

  ‘This is not a nice party.’

  Settling the wide shoulders of Skinner’s jacket, Chevette nods to the woman Maria and begins to work her way through the crowd. Which is tighter now by several degrees, like maybe this Cody’s friends are still arriving. More Japanese here now, she notices, all of them serious suits; their wives or secretaries or whatever are all wearing pearls. But evidently this doesn’t prevent them getting into the spirit of the thing. It’s gotten noisier, too, as people have gotten more whacked. There’s that loud constant burr of party-noise you get when the drinks kick in, and now she wants to be out of there all that much faster.

  She finds herself stuck near the door to the bathroom where she’d seen the icers, but it’s closed now. A bunch of French people are talking French and laughing and waving their hands around, but Chevette can hear somebody vomiting in there. ‘Coming through,’ she says to a man with a bowtie and a gray crewcut, and just pushes past him, spilling part of his drink. He says something after her in French.

  She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth. Or maybe the wine’s gotten to her, a little, because drinking isn’t something she does much, and now she doesn’t like the taste of it in the back of her throat.

  And suddenly there’s her drunk, her Euro with his unlit cigar, sweaty brow too close to the dull-eyed, vaguely worried face of one of the Tenderloin girls. He’s got her backed into a corner. And everyone’s jammed so tight, this close to the door and the corridor and freedom, that Chevette finds herself pressed up against his back for a second, not that that interrupts whatever infinitely dreary shit he’s laying down for the girl, no, though he does jam his elbow, hard, back into Chevette’s ribs to get himself more space.

  And Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out of a pocket in the tobacco-colored leather.

  Then it’s in her hand, down the front of her bike-pants, she’s out the door, and the asshole hasn’t even noticed.

  In the sudden quiet of the corridor, party sounds receding as she heads for the elevator, she wants to run. She wants to laugh, too, but now she’s starting to feel scared.

  Walk.

  Past the party’s build-up of trays, dirty glasses, plates.

  Remembering the security grunts in the lobby.

  The thing stuck down her pants.

  Down a corridor that opens off this one, she sees the doors of a service elevator spread wide now and welcoming. A Central Asian kid with a paint-splattered steel cart stacked up with flat rectangles that are television screens. He gives her a careful look as she edges in beside him. His face is all cheekbones, bright hooded eyes, his hair shaved up high in one of those near-vertical dos all these guys favor. He has a security badge clipped to the front of his clean gray workshirt and a VirtuFax slung around his neck on a red nylon cord.

  ‘Basement,’ Chevette says.

  His fax buzzes. He raises it, pushes the button, peers into the eyepiece. The thing in her bike-pants starts to feel huge. Then he drops the fax back to his chest, blinks at her, and pushes a button marked B-6. The doors rumble shut and Chevette closes her eyes.

  She leans back against the big quilted pads hung on the walls and wishes she were up in Skinner’s room, listening to the cables creak. The floor there’s a layer of two-by-fours laid on edge; the very top of the hump of the cable, riding its steel saddle, sticks up through the middle, and Skinner says there are 17,464 strands of wire in that cable. Each one is about as thick as a pencil. You can press your ear against it and hear the whole bridge sing, when the wind’s just right.

  The elevator stops at four for no reason at all. Nobody there when the door opens. Chevette wants to press B-6 again but she makes herself wait for the kid with the fax to do it. He does.

  And B-6 is not the garage she so thoroughly wants now, but this maze of hundred-year-old concrete tunnels, floored in cracked asphalt tile, with big old pipes slung in iron brackets along the ceiling. She slips out while he’s fiddling with one of the wheels on his cart.

  A century’s-worth of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls of broadloom stacked like logs. More people in work clothes, some in kitchen whites, but she’s trying for tag-pulling attitude and looks, she hopes, like she’s making a delivery.

  She finds a narrow stairway and climbs. The air is hot and dead. Motion-sensors click the lights for her at the start of each flight. She feels the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.

  But her bike is there, on B-2, behind a column of nicked concrete.

  ‘Back off,’ it says when she’s five feet away. Not loud, like a car, but it sounds like it means it.

  Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging of silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbon-wrapped frame makes Chevette’s thighs tremble. She slips her left hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat. There’s a little double zik as the particle-brakes let go, then she’s up and on it.

  It’s never felt better, as she pumps up the oil-stained ramp and out of there.

  4 Career opportunities

  Rydell’s roommate, Kevin Tarkovsky, wore a bone through his nose and worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.

  Monday morning, when Rydell told him he’d quit his job with IntenSecure, Kevin offered to try to find him something in sales, in the beach-culture line.

  ‘You got an okay build, basically,’ Kevin said, looking at Rydell’s bare chest and shoulders. Rydell was still wearing the orange trunks he’d worn when he’d gone to see Hernandez. He�
��d borrowed them from Kevin. He’d just taken his cast off, deflating it and crumpling it into the five-gallon plastic paint bucket that served as a wastebasket. The bucket had a big self-adhesive daisy on the side. ‘You could work out a little more regularly. And maybe get some tats. Tribal black-work.’

  ‘Kevin, I don’t know how to surf, wind-surf, anything. Hardly been in the ocean in my life. Couple of times down Tampa Bay.’ It was about ten in the morning. Kevin had the day off work.

  ‘Sales is about providing an experience, Berry. The customer needs information, you provide it. But you give ’em an experience, too.’ Kevin tapped his two-inch spindle of smooth white beef-bone by way of illustration. ‘Then you sell them a new outfit.’

  ‘But I don’t have a tan.’

  Kevin was the approximate color and sheen of a pair of mid-brown Cole-Haan loafers that Rydell’s aunt had given him for his fifteenth birthday. This had nothing to do with either genetics or exposure to unfiltered sunlight, but was the result of regular injections and a complicated regimen of pills and lotions.

  ‘Well,’ Kevin admitted, ‘you would need a tan.’

  Rydell knew that Kevin didn’t wind-surf, and never had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved, and Rydell had no doubt that Kevin could provide every bit of information a prospective buyer might desire. And that all-important experience; with his cordovan tan, gym-tuned physique, and that bone through his nose, he got a lot of attention. Mainly from women, though it didn’t actually seem to do that much for him.

  What Kevin sold, primarily, was clothing. Expensive kind that supposedly kept the UV and the pollutants in the water off you. He had two whole cartons full of the stuff, stacked in their room’s one closet. Rydell, who currently didn’t have much in the way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw through there and borrow whatever took his fancy. Which wasn’t a lot, as it turned out, because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Glo, black nanopore, or mirrorflex. A few of the jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW ME logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly shabby shape, as Rydell had discovered the last time he’d gone to the farmers market.

  He and Kevin were sharing one of two bedrooms in a sixties house in Mar Vista, which meant Sea View but there wasn’t any. Someone had rigged up a couple of sheets of drywall down the middle of the room. On Rydell’s side, the drywall was covered with those same big self-adhesive daisies and a collection of souvenir bumper-stickers from places like Magic Mountain, Nissan County, Disneyland, and Skywalker Park. There were two other people sharing the house, three if you counted the Chinese girl out in the garage (but she had her own bathroom in there).

  Rydell had bought a futon with most of his first month’s pay from IntenSecure. He’d bought it at this stall in the market; they were cheaper there, and the stall was called Futon Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty funny. The Futon Mouth girl had explained how you could slip the Metro guy on the platform a twenty, then he’d let you get on the train with the rolled-up futon, which came in a big green plastic sack that reminded Rydell of a bodybag.

  Lately, waiting to take the cast off, he’d spent a lot of time on that futon, staring up at those bumper-stickers. He wondered if whoever had put them there had actually bothered to go to all those places. Hernandez had once offered him work at Nissan County. IntenSecure had the rentacop franchise there. His parents had honeymooned at Disneyland. Skywalker Park was up in San Francisco; it had been called Golden Gate, before, and he remembered a couple of fairly low-key riots on television when they’d privatized it.

  ‘You on line to any of the job-search nets, Berry?’

  Rydell shook his head.

  ‘This one’s on me,’ Kevin said, passing Rydell the helmet. It wasn’t anything like Karen’s slick little goggles; just a white plastic rig like kids used for games. ‘Put it on. I’ll dial for you.’

  ‘Well,’ Rydell said, ‘this is nice, Kevin, but you don’t have to go to all this trouble.’

  Kevin touched the bone in his nose. ‘Well, there’s the rent.’

  There was that. Rydell put the helmet on.

  ‘Now,’ Sonya said, just as perky as could be, ‘we’re showing that you did graduate from this post-secondary training program—’

  ‘Academy,’ Rydell corrected. ‘Police.’

  ‘Yes, Berry, but we’re showing that you were then employed for a total of eighteen days, before being placed on suspension.’ Sonya looked like a cartoon of a pretty girl. No pores. No texture anywhere. Her teeth were very white and looked like a single unit, something that could be snapped out intact for closer inspection. But not for cleaning, because there was no need; cartoons didn’t eat. She had wonderful tits, though; she had the tits Rydell would have drawn for her if he’d been a talented cartoonist.

  ‘Well,’ Rydell said, thinking of Turvey, ‘I got into some trouble after they assigned me to Patrol.’

  Sonya nodded brightly. ‘I see, Berry.’ Rydell wondered what she did see. Or what the expert system that used her as a hand-puppet could see. Or how it saw. What did someone like Rydell look like to an employment agency’s computer system? Not like much, he decided.

  ‘Then you moved to Los Angeles, Berry, and we show ten weeks of employment with the IntenSecure Corporation’s residential armed-response branch. Driver with experience of weapons.’

  Rydell thought of the rocket-pods slung under the LAPD chopper. Probably they’d had one of those CHAIN guns in there, too. ‘Yep,’ he agreed.

  ‘And you’ve resigned your position with IntenSecure.’

  ‘Guess so.’

  Sonya beamed at Rydell as though he’d just admitted, shyly, to a congressional appointment or a post-doctoral degree. ‘Well, Berry,’ she said, ‘let me put my thinking cap on for just a second!’ She winked, then closed her big cartoon eyes.

  Jesus, Rydell thought. He tried to glance sideways, but Kevin’s helmet didn’t have any peripherals, so there was nothing there. Just Sonya, the empty rectangle of her desk, sketchy details suggesting an office, and the employment agency’s logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her look like the anchorwoman on a channel that only reported very good news.

  Sonya opened her eyes. Her smile became incandescent. ‘You’re from the South,’ she said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Plantations, Berry. Magnolias. Tradition. But a certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality. Faulkner.’

  Fawk—? ‘Huh?’

  ‘Nightmare Folk Art, Berry. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.’

  Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last week’s People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family.

  ‘Something for you, Berry?’ Kevin looked hopeful.

  ‘Maybe,’ Rydell said. ‘This place in Sherman Oaks. I’ll call ’em up, check it out.’

  Kevin fiddled with his nose-bone. ‘I can give you a lift,’ he said.

  There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody car-wrecks and disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an old lady.

  Kevin had let him off at the corner of Sepulveda and he’d walked back two blocks, looking for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had had real ones before the virus; the rep
lacements were so popular now, people wanted them put in everywhere.

  Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he must’ve driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he could count, but these streets looked completely different when you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty spaces behind dirty glass, with a yellowing pile of junk-mail on the floor inside and maybe a puddle of what couldn’t be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. You’d pass a couple of those, then a place selling sunglasses for six times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista. The sunglasses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.

  Nightmare Folk Art was like that, sandwiched between a dead hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART—SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters hand-painted all lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But with a couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and one of those little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a wide berth; cars like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not to mention hyper-aggressive.

  There was a rentacop looking at him through the armored glass of the door; not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed a pair of pressed chinos from Kevin. They were a little tight in the waist, but they beat hell out of the orange trunks. He had on a black IntenSecure uniform-shirt with the patches ripped off, his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasn’t sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the button. The rentacop buzzed him in.

  ‘Got an appointment with Justine Cooper,’ he said, taking his sunglasses off.

  ‘With a client,’ the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he should’ve been out on a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and saw a skinny woman with black hair. She was talking to a fat man who had no hair at all. Trying to sell him something, it looked like.