William Gibson - Count Zero

“The bright ones.” Another silence. “Not people…”

“You spend much time in cyberspace, Angie? I mean jacked in, with a deck?”

“No. Just school stuff. My father said it wasn’t good for me.”

“He say anything about those dreams?”

“Only that they were getting realer. But I never told him about the others.

“You want to tell me? Maybe it’ll help me understand, figure out what we need to do…”

“Some of them tell me things Stories. Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around Then something happened, and it it knew itself. There’s a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the whole thing know itself… And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others, the bright ones. But it’s hard to tell, because they don’t tell it with words, exactly…”

Turner felt the skin on his neck prickle. Something coming back to him, up out of the drowned undertow of Mitchell’s dossier Hot burning shame in a hallway, dirty cream paint peeling, Cambridge, the graduate dorms… “Where were you born, Angie?”

“England. Then my father got into Maas, we moved. To Geneva.”

Somewhere in Virginia he eased the hovercraft over onto the gravel shoulder and out into an overgrown pasture, dust from the dry summer swirling out behind them as he swung them left and into a stand of pine. The turbine died as they settled into the apron bag.

“We might as well eat now.” he said, reaching back for Sally’s canvas carryall.

Angie undid her harness and unzipped the black sweatshirt Under it, she wore something tight and white, a child’s smooth tanned flesh showing in the scoop neck above young breasts. She took the bag from him and began unwrapping the sandwiches Sally had made for him. “What’s wrong with your brother?” she asked, handing him half a sandwich.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, there’s something… He drinks all the time, Sally said. Is he unhappy?”

“I don’t know,” Turner said, hunching and twisting the aches out of his neck and shoulders. “I mean, he must be, but I don’t know exactly why. People get stuck, sometimes.”

“You mean when they don’t have companies to take care of them?” She bit into her sandwich.

He looked at her. “Are you putting me on?”

She nodded, her mouth full Swallowed “A little bit I know that a lot of people don’t work for Maas. Never have and never will You’re one, your brother’s another. But it was a real question. I kind of liked Rudy, you know? But he just seemed so—”

“Screwed up,” he finished for her, still holding his sandwich. “Stuck. What it is, I think there’s a jump some people have to make, sometimes, and if they don’t do it, then they’re stuck good. And Rudy never did it.”

“Like my father wanting to get me out of Mans? Is that a jump?”

“No. Some jumps you have to decide on for yourself.

Just figure there’s something better waiting for you somewhere…” He paused, feeling suddenly ridiculous, and bit into the sandwich.

“Is that what you thought?”

He nodded, wondering if it were true.

“So you left, and Rudy stayed—”

“He was smart Still is, and he’d rolled up a bunch of degrees, did it all on the line. Got a doctorate in biotechnology from Tulane when he was twenty, a bunch of other stuff. Never sent out any resumes, nothing. We’d have recruiters turn up from all over, and he’d bullshit them, pick fights… I think he thought he could make something on his own. Like those hoods on the dogs I think he’s got a couple of original patents there, but… Anyway, he stayed there. Got into dealing and doing hardware for people, and he was hot stuff in the county. And our mother got sick, she was sick for a long time, and I was away.

“Where were you?” She opened the thermos and the smell of coffee filled the cabin.

“As far away as I could get,” he said, startled by the anger in his voice.

She passed him the plastic mug, filled to the brim with hot black coffee.

“How about you? You said you never knew your mother.”

“I didn’t. They split when I was little. She wouldn’t come back in on the contract unless he agreed to cut her in on some kind of stock plan. That’s what he said anyway.”

“So what’s he like?” He sipped coffee, then passed it back.

She looked at him over the rim of the red plastic mug, her eyes ringed with Sally’s makeup. “You tell me,” she said. “Or else ask me in twenty years. I’m seventeen, how the hell am I supposed to know?”

He laughed. “You’re starting to feel a little better now?”

“I guess so. Considering the circumstances.”

And suddenly he was aware of her, in a way he hadn’t been before, and his hands went anxiously to the controls.

“Good. We still have a long way to go.”

They slept in the hovercraft that night, parked behind the rusting steel lattice that had once supported a drive-in theater screen in southern Pennsylvania, Turner’s parka spread on the armor-plate floorboards below the turbine’s long bulge. She’d sipped the last of the coffee, cold now, as she sat in the square hatch opening above the passenger seat, watching the lightning bugs pulse across a field of yellowed grass.

Somewhere in his dreams — still colored with random flashes from her father’s dossier — she rolled against him, her breasts soft and warm against his bare back through the thin fabric of her T-shirt, and then her arm came over him to stroke the flat muscles of his stomach, but he lay still, pretending to a deeper sleep, and soon found his way down into the darker passages of Mitchell’s biosoft, where strange things came to mingle with his own oldest fears and hurts. And woke at dawn to hear her singing softly to herself from her perch in the roof hatch.

JAMMER’S WAS UP twelve more flights of dead escalator and occupied the rear third of the top floor. Aside from Leon’s place, Bobby had never seen a nightclub, and he found Jammer’s both impressive and scary. Impressive because of its scale and what he took to be the exceptional quality of the fittings, and scary because a nightclub, by day, is somehow inately unreal. Witchy. He peered around, thumbs snagged in the back pockets of his new jeans, while Jackie conducted a whispered conversation with a long-faced white man in rum-pled blue coveralls. The place was fitted out with dark ultrasuede banquettes, round black tables, and dozens of or-nate screens of pierced wood. The ceiling was painted black, each table faintly illuminated by its own little recessed flood aimed straight down out of the dark There was a central stage, brightly lit now with work lights strung on yellow flex, and, in the middle of the stage, a set of cherry-red acoustic drums. He wasn’t sure why, but it gave him the creeps; some sidelong sense of a half-life, as though something was about to shift, just at the edge of his vision…

“Bobby,” Jackie said, “come over here and meet Jammer.”

He crossed the stretch of plain dark carpet with all the cool he could muster and faced the long-faced man, who had dark, thinning hair and wore a white evening shirt under his coveralls. The man’s eyes were narrow, the hollows of his cheeks shadowed with a day’s growth of beard.

“Well,” the man said, “you want to be a cowboy?” He was looking at Bobby’s T-shirt and Bobby had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be about to laugh.