William Gibson - Zero history

“Why should he believe you?”

“Context. If he’s any good, he’ll be able to find out who I am, and see where I’m coming from. But what he won’t get, from that, is that I’ve got a hard-on for Gracie. That’s up to you. You’ve got to convey that. That it’s just personal that way.” She smiled, in a way that Milgrim didn’t like. “Maybe it’s my midlife adventure.”

“Okay,” said Milgrim, not feeling in any way that it was.

“Tell me something, though.”

“What?”

“If you’re what they want in exchange for Bigend’s guy, why are you being driven around by a girl, on the back of a bike? Why aren’t you locked down, watched over, massively surveilled?”

“Because Bigend has almost nobody he can trust right now.”

“Shit’s deep ,” she said, with what he took to be a kind of satisfaction. “Out now. You’ve got your orders. Go.”

Milgrim got out. Seeing the man in the raincoat approaching, he left the door open. He turned and walked back, past the two cider cans, lonely sentinels of Smithfield, as Fiona started her engine.

In the dark, Garreth asleep beside her, the round and looming bottom of the birdcage barely visible in the faint glow of the power telltales on his laptop and various phones; tiny bright points in red and green, a constellation of potential trouble.

She’d finally and truly met Frank, which had taken less getting used to than she would have imagined, though at first she’d cried a little.

Frank had been stabilized in Singapore, then variously reconstructed, in a surgical odyssey funded by the old man. Frank had seen arcane facilities in the United States, ghost wings of otherwise workaday military hospitals. In one of these, shattered bone had been replaced with custom segments of calcified rattan, fastened in place with ceramic screws whose main ingredient was the primary constituent of natural bone. The result, so far, was Frank, a patchwork thing, more stitches than skin. A taut and shining mosaic, reminding her of expensively mended china.

He’d initially voted to have it off, he’d told her, knowing quite a bit about the current state of prosthetics, a field being rapidly driven by America’s wars, with their massive improvements in rates of wound survival. But the surgeons the old man had gotten him to were chancers, he said, and he’d found himself infected by their eagerness to see what they could do, out at the very edge of the possible. This had caused her to weep again, and he’d held her, and made jokes, until it passed. And he’d been curious, too, about the officially nonexistent levels of expertise and technology he’d correctly assumed to be involved. Something demanding the temporary severing of certain nerves had been the least pleasant part of it, he’d said, and the recent procedures in Germany had been to reconnect those, so that he could now feel, increasingly, what Frank was feeling. Which, while not pleasant by any means, was far superior to previous disconnection, and absolutely essential in terms of getting back to walking.

He made the dressings progressively smaller, each time he changed them. The rest of Frank was that aerial Kansas patchwork of found-object dermis, reassuringly leg-shaped if a bit withered from the nonuse.

Most animals, he’d told her, apparently seriously, preferred bilaterally symmetrical mates, to the extent that it formed a sort of biota-wide bottom line, and that he’d understand if she felt that way. She’d told him that the bottom line as far as she was concerned was men who didn’t sound like utter fucking idiots, and had kissed him. After which, more kissing, much else, laughter, some tears, more laughter.

Now she lay in the minute glow of LEDs, and willed silence, absence of messaging, an empty in-box, this peace, here in the Piblokto Madness bed, which now no longer seemed that, to her, the arch of the right whale’s jawbone even bespeaking something matrimonial, if she thought about it, which she was still unwilling generally to do.

But okay right now. Okay so far. His breathing beside her.

Beneath her pillow, the iPhone began to vibrate. She slid her hand under, cupped it, considered the option of skipping the call. But these were not times for skipped calls.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“What’s wrong?” It was Milgrim.

“Garreth’s sleeping.”

“Sorry,” whispered Milgrim.

“What is it?’

“It’s complicated. Someone needs to speak with Garreth.”

“Who?”

“Please don’t get the wrong idea,” whispered Milgrim, “but she’s a U.S. federal agent.”

“That’s as wrong an idea as I’ve heard in a while,” said Hollis, forgetting to whisper.

“What is?” asked Garreth.

“It’s Milgrim.”

“Give him to me.”

She covered the phone, realizing she had no idea where its microphone might be, or if covering it would help. “He wants you talk to a U.S. agent.”

“Ah,” he said, “the odd bits emerge now. The localized high-pressure zone of weird begins to manifest. Always does. Give me the phone.”

“I’m scared.”

“Makes perfect sense.” He reached over, squeezed her arm reassuringly. “Phone, please.”

She handed him the phone.

“Milgrim,” he said. “Been networking, have we? Slow down. Does she have a name?”

And she heard a pen on paper as he wrote in the dark, something he was very good at.

“Does she? Really? She put it that way herself?” She felt him prop himself on the pillows. When he opened the laptop, its light was light of some weird and other moon. A lucky one, she hoped. She heard him begin to type, with one hand, while he asked Milgrim questions, brief ones, and listened to longer answers.

The heels of Milgrim’s Tanky amp; Tojo brogues, as he sat astride the high, raked pillion of Benny’s Yamaha, didn’t quite touch the cobbles of this tiny square. Something about the angle of his feet recalled some childhood line-drawing from Don Quixote , though whether those feet had been the knight’s or Sancho Panza’s, he didn’t know. Fiona sat, saddled lower, in front of him, boots firm on the pavement, holding them upright. He held her iPhone behind her back, seeing exactly where they were now, on the bright little window, via the application she’d shown him earlier: amid these narrow lanes, his eye backtracking to Farringdon, the straight run to the bridge, river, Southwark, Vegas cube. Comprehending the route for the first time.

He’d phoned Winnie from this courtyard, reading off the number Garreth had given him. He’d written it on the back of her card, which was becoming a softer object, its sharp corners blunted. She’d repeated it back to him, made him check it. “Good work,” she’d said. “Stand by in case I can’t reach him.”

But that had been eight minutes ago, so he assumed she was on the phone with Garreth.

Fiona’s yellow helmet turned. “Finished?” she asked, muffled by the visor.

He looked down at the screen, the glowing map. Saw it as a window into the city’s underlying fabric, as though he held something from which a rectangular chip of London’s surface had been pried, revealing a substrate of bright code. But really, wasn’t the opposite true, the city the code that underlay the map? There was an expression about that, but he’d never understood it, and now couldn’t remember how it went. The territory wasn’t the map?

“Done,” he said passing her the bright chip. She turned it off, pocketed it, while he put on Mrs. Benny’s helmet and fastened the chinstrap, scarcely noticing the hairspray.

He put his feet on the pegs as she rolled forward, and curled in closer to her armored back, watching day-bright vignettes of headlit wall-texture as she wheeled them around, the Yahama’s engine sounding as though it were anxious for the bridge.