Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  And somebody in the Russians’ car, hunched down knees-up in the shotgun seat.

  The Russians closing in tight on either side of Rydell and the girl, walking them out. Rydell could feel them responding to the presence of the crowd. Shouldn’t’ve left the car out there like that.

  Svobodov, this close, sort of creaked when he walked, and that was the armor under his shirt that Rydell had noticed before, back in that greasy spoon. Svobodov was smoking one of his Marlboro cigarettes, hissing out clouds of blue smoke. Had the gun out of sight now.

  And right up to Warbaby, Freddie shining the whole scene on with a grin that made Rydell want to kick him, but Warbaby looking sad as ever.

  ‘Get this fucking cuff off,’ Rydell said to Warbaby, raising his wrist, Chevette Washington’s coming up with it. The crowd saw the cuffs then; there was a ripple of reaction, voices.

  Warbaby looked at Svobodov. ‘You get it?’

  ‘Here.’ Svobodov touched the front of his London Fog.

  Warbaby nodded, looked at Chevette Washington, then at Rydell. ‘Good then.’ To Orlovsky: ‘Take the cuffs off.’

  Orlovsky took Rydell’s wrist, slid a mag-strip into the slot in the cuff.

  ‘Get in the car,’ Warbaby said to Rydell.

  ‘They haven’t read her any Miranda,’ Rydell said.

  ‘Get in the car. You’re driving, remember?’

  ‘She under arrest, Mr. Warbaby?’

  Freddie giggled.

  Chevette Washington was holding her wrist up for Orlovsky, but he was putting the mag-strip away.

  ‘Rydell,’ Warbaby said, ‘get in the car now. We’ve done our part here.’

  The passenger-side door of the gray car opened. A man got out. Black cowboy boots and a long black waterproof. Sandy hair, no particular length. He had those deep smile-creases down his cheeks, like somebody had carved them there. Light-colored eyes. Then he did smile, and it was about two-thirds gum and a third teeth, with gold at the corners.

  ‘That’s him,’ Chevette Washington said, in this hoarse voice, ‘he killed Sammy.’

  And that was when the big longhair, the one in the dirty shirt, the one Rydell had noticed back on the bridge, plowed this bicycle square into Svobodov’s back. Not any regular bicycle, either, but this big old rusty coaster-brake number with a heavy steel basket welded in front of the bars. The bike and the basket probably weighed a hundred pounds between them, and there must’ve been another hundred pounds of scrap metal piled up in the basket when Svobodov got nailed. Put him face-down across the hood of the Patriot, Freddie jumping like a scalded cat.

  The longhair landed on top of Svobodov and all that junk like a bear with rabies, grabbed him by the ears, and starting slamming his face into the hood. Orlovsky was pulling out his H&K and Rydell saw Chevette Washington bend down, tug something out of the top of one SWAT shoe. Jab it into Orlovsky’s back. Looked like a screwdriver. Hit whatever armor he was wearing, but it put him off-balance as he pulled the trigger.

  Nothing in the world ever sounded like caseless ammunition, at full-auto, out of a floating breech. It wasn’t the sound of a machine gun, but a kind of ear-shattering, extended whoop.

  The first burst didn’t seem to hit anything, but with Chevette Washington clawing at his gun arm, Orlovsky tried to turn it on her. Second burst went in the general direction of the crowd. People screaming, grabbing up kids.

  Warbaby’s mouth was just open, like he couldn’t believe it.

  Rydell was behind Orlovsky when he tried to bring the gun up again, and, well, it was just one of those times.

  He side-kicked the Russian about three inches below the back of his knee, that third burst whooping almost straight up as Orlovsky went down.

  Freddie tried to grab Chevette Washington, seemed to see the screwdriver for the first time, and just managed to bring his laptop up with both hands. That screwdriver went right through it. Freddie yelped and dropped it.

  Rydell grabbed the loose cuff, the one that had been around his wrist, and just pulled.

  Opened the passenger-side door of the Patriot and hauled her right in after him. Getting into the driver’s seat, he had a grandstand view of the longhair pounding Svobodov’s bloody face into the hood, all these pieces of rusty junk jumping each time he did it.

  Key. Ignition.

  Rydell saw Chevette Washington’s phone and the case with the VL glasses fall out of Svobodov’s flak vest. Powered down the window and reached around. Somebody shot the longhair off Svobodov, pop, pop, pop, and Rydell, stomping it in reverse, saw the man from the cop car swinging a little gun around, two-handed. Just like they taught you in FATSS. The back of the Patriot slammed into something and Svobodov flew off the hood in a cloud of rusty chain and odd lengths of pipe. Chevette Washington was trying to get out the passenger door, so he had to hang on to the cuff and spin the wheel one-handed, let go of her long enough to shove it into forward and tromp on it, then grab her again.

  The passenger door slammed shut as he took it straight for the man with the big smile, who maybe got off one more before he had to get out of the way, fast.

  The Patriot was fishtailing in about an inch of water, and he barely missed clipping the back of a big orange waste-hauler pulled up beside a building there.

  He caught this one crazy glimpse in the dash-mirror, out the back window: the bridge towering up like something wrapped in seaweed, sky graying now behind it, and Warbaby taking one stiff-legged step, another, raising the cane straight out from his shoulder, pointing it at the Patriot like it was a magic wand or something.

  Then whatever came out of the end of Warbaby’s cane took out the Patriot’s back window, and Rydell hung a right so tight it almost tipped them over.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Chevette Washington, like somebody talking in their sleep, ‘what are you doing?’

  He didn’t know, but hadn’t he just gone and done it?

  24 Song of the central pier

  When the lights went out, Yamazaki fumbled in the dark for his bag. Finding it, he felt through it for his flashlight.

  In the white beam, Skinner slept slack-jawed beneath the blankets and a ragged sleeping-bag.

  Yamazaki searched the several shelves above the table-ledge: small glass jars of spices, identical jars containing steel screws, an ancient Bakelite telephone reminding him of the origin of the verb ‘to dial,’ rolls of many different kinds and colors of adhesive tape, twists of heavy copper wire, pieces of what he took to be salt-water tackle, and, finally, a bundle of dusty candle-stubs secured with a rotting rubber band. Selecting the longest of these, he found a lighter beside the green camp-stove. Standing the candle upright on a white saucer, he lit it. The flame fluttered and went out.

  Flashlight in hand, he moved to the window and tugged it more tightly into its deep circular frame.

  Now the candle stayed lit, though the flame pulsed and swelled in drafts he could never hope to locate. Returning to the window, he looked out. The darkened bridge was invisible. Rain was driving almost horizontally against the window, tiny droplets reaching his face through cracks in the glass and corroded segments of the supporting lead.

  It occurred to him that Skinner’s room might be made to function as a camera obscura. If the church window’s tiny central bull’s-eye pane were removed, and the other panes covered, an inverted image would be cast on the opposite wall.

  Yamazaki knew that the central pier, the bridge’s center anchorage, had once qualified as one of the world’s largest pinhole cameras. In the structure’s pitch-black interior, light shining in through a single tiny hole had projected a huge image of the underside of the lower deck, the nearest tower, and the surrounding bay. Now the heart of the anchorage housed some uncounted number of the bridge’s more secretive inhabitants, and Skinner had advised him against attempting to go there. ‘Nothin’ like those Mansons out in the bushes on Treasure, Scooter, but you don’t want to bother ’em anyway. Okay people but they just aren’t looking for anybody to dro
p in, know what I mean?’

  Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande.

  Godzilla. Yamazaki shivered, recalling television images of Tokyo’s fall. He had been in Paris, with his parents. Now a new city rose there, its buildings grown, literally, floor by floor.

  The candlelight showed him Skinner’s little television, forgotten on the floor. Taking it to the table, he sat on the stool and examined it. There was no visible damage to the screen. It had simply come away from its frame, on a short length of multicolored ribbon. He folded the ribbon into the frame and pressed with his thumbs on either side of the screen. It popped back into place, but would it still function? He bent to examine the tiny controls. ON.

  Lime-and-purple diagonals chased themselves across the screen, then faded, revealing some steadycam fragment, the NHK logo displayed in the lower left corner. ‘—heir-apparent to the Harwood Levine public relations and advertising fortune, departed San Francisco this afternoon after a rumored stay of several days, declining comment on the purpose of his visit.’ A long face, horselike yet handsome, above a raincoat’s upturned collar. A large white smile. ‘Accompanying him,’ mid-distance shot down an airport corridor, the slender, dark-haired woman wrapped in something luxurious and black, silver gleaming at the heels of her shining boots, ‘was Maria Paz, the Padanian media personality, daughter of film director Carlo Paz—.’ The woman, who looked unhappy, vanished, to be replaced by infrared footage from New Zealand, as Japanese peace-keeping forces in armored vehicles advanced on a rural airport. ‘—losses attributed to the outlawed South Island Liberation Front, while in Wellington—’ Yamazaki attempted to change the channel, but the screen only strobed its lime-and-purple, then framed a portrait of Shapely. A BBC docu-drama. Calm, serious, mildly hypnotic. After two more unsuccessful attempts at locating another channel, Yamazaki let the British voiceover blot out the wind, the groaning of the cables, the creaking of the plywood walls. He focused his attention on the familiar story, its outcome fixed, comforting—if only in its certainty.

  James Delmore Shapely had come to the attention of the AIDS industry in the early months of the new century. He was thirty-one years old, a prostitute, and had been HIV-positive for twelve years. At the time of his ‘discovery,’ by Dr. Kim Kutnik of Atlanta, Georgia, Shapely was serving a two hundred and fifty day prison term for soliciting. (His status as HIV-positive, which would automatically have warranted more serious charges, had apparently been ‘glitched.’) Kutnik, a researcher with the Sharman Group, an American subsidiary of Shibata Pharmaceuticals, was sifting prison medical data in search of individuals who had been HIV-positive for a decade or more, were asymptomatic, and had entirely normal (or, as in Shapely’s case, above the norm) T-cell counts.

  One of the Sharman Group’s research initiatives centered around the possibility of isolating mutant strains of HIV. Arguing that viruses obey the laws of natural selection, several Sharman biologists had proposed that the HIV virus, in its then-current genetic format, was excessively lethal. Allowed to range unchecked, argued the Sharman team, a virus demonstrating 100 percent lethality must eventually bring about the extinction of the host organism. (Other Sharman researchers countered by citing the long incubation period as contributing to the survival of the host population.) As the BBC writers were careful to make clear, the idea of locating nonpathogenic strains of HIV, with a view of overpowering and neutralizing lethal strains, had been put forward almost a decade earlier, though the ‘ethical’ implications of experimentation with human subjects had impeded research. The core observation of the Sharman researchers dated from this earlier work: The virus wishes to survive, and cannot if it kills its host. The Sharman team, of which Dr. Kutnik was a part, intended to inject HIV-positive patients with blood extracted from individuals they believed to be infected with nonpathogenic strains of the virus. It was possible, they believed, that the nonpathogenic strain would overpower the lethal strain. Kim Kutnik was one of seven researchers given the task of locating HIV-positive individuals who might be harboring a nonpathogenic strain. She elected to begin her search through a sector of data concerned with current inmates of state prisons who were (a) in apparent good health, and (b) had tested HIV-positive at least a decade before. Her initial search turned up sixty-six possibles—among them, J. D. Shapely.

  Yamazaki watched as Kutnik, played by a young British actress, recalled, from a patio in Rio, her first meeting with Shapely. ‘I’d been struck by the fact that his T-cell count that day was over 1,200, and that his responses to the questionnaire seemed to indicated that ‘safe sex,’ as we thought of it then, was, well, not exactly a priority. He was a very open, very outgoing, really a very innocent character, and when I asked him, there in the prison visiting room, about oral sex, he actually blushed. Then he laughed, and said, well, he said he ‘sucked cock like it was going out of style’…’ The actress-Kutnik looked as though she were about to blush herself. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘in those days we didn’t really understand the disease’s exact vectors of infection, because, grotesque as it now seems, there had been no real research into the precise modes of transmission…’

  Yamazaki cut the set off. Dr. Kutnik would arrange Shapely’s release from prison as an AIDS research volunteer under Federal law. The Sharman Group’s project would be hindered by fundamentalist Christians objecting to the injection of ‘HIV-tainted’ blood into the systems of terminally ill AIDS patients. As the project foundered, Kutnik would uncover clinical data suggesting that unprotected sex with Shapely had apparently reversed the symptoms of several of her patients. There would be Kutnik’s impassioned resignation, the flight to Brazil with the baffled Shapely, lavish funding against a backdrop of impending civil war, and what could only be described as an extremely pragmatic climate for research.

  But it was such a sad story.

  Better to sit here by candlelight, elbows on the edge of Skinner’s table, listening for the song of the central pier.

  25 Without a paddle

  He kept saying he was from Tennessee and he didn’t need this shit. She kept thinking she was going to die, the way he was driving, or anyway those cops would be after them, or the one who shot Sammy. She still didn’t know what had happened, and wasn’t that Nigel who’d plowed into that tight-faced one?

  But he’d hung this right off Bryant, so she told him left on Folsom, because if the assholes were coming, she figured she wanted the Haight, best place she knew to get lost, and that was definitely what she intended to do, earliest opportunity. And this Ford was just like the one Mr. Matthews drove, ran the holding facility up in Beaverton. And she’d tried to stab somebody with a screwdriver. She’d never done anything like that in her life before. And she’d wrecked that black guy’s computer, the one with the haircut. And this bracelet on her left wrist, the other half flipping around, open, on three links of chain—

  He reached over and grabbed the loose cuff. Did something to it without taking his eyes off the street. He let go. Now it was locked shut.

  ‘Why’d you do that?’

  ‘So you don’t snag it on something, wind up cuffed to the door-handle or a street sign—’

  ‘Take it off.’

  ‘No key.’

  She rattled it at him. ‘Take it off.’

  ‘Stick it up the sleeve of your j
acket. Those are Beretta cuffs. Real good cuffs.’ He sounded like he was sort of happy to have something to talk about, and his driving had evened out. Brown eyes. Not old; twenties, maybe. Cheap clothes like K-Mart stuff, all wet. Light brown hair cut too short but not short enough. She watched a muscle in his jaw work, like he was chewing gum, but he wasn’t.

  ‘Where we going?’ she asked him.

  ‘Fuck if I know,’ he said, gunning the engine a little. ‘You the one said “left”…’

  ‘Who are you?’

  He glanced over at her. ‘Rydell. Berry Rydell.’

  ‘Barry?’

  ‘Berry. Like straw. Like dingle. Hey, this a big fucking street, lights and everything—’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So where should I—’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and hung it. ‘Why?’

  ‘The Haight. Lots of people up late, cops don’t like to go there…’

  ‘Ditch this car there?’

  ‘Turn your back on it two seconds, it’s history.’

  ‘They got ATM’s there?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Well, here’s one…’ Up over a curb, hunks of crazed safety-glass falling out of the frame where the back window had been. She hadn’t even noticed that.

  He dug a soggy-looking wallet out of his back pocket and started pulling cards out of it. Three of them. ‘I have to try to get some cash,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘You wanna jump out of this car and run,’ he shrugged, ‘then you just go for it.’ Then he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the glasses and Codes’s phone that she’d scooped when the lights went out in Dissidents. Because she knew from Lowell that people in trouble need a phone, most times worse than anything. He dropped them in her lap, the asshole’s glasses and the phone. ‘Yours.’