William Gibson - All Tomorrow's Parties

Now she climbs wooden rungs, a cruder ladder of two-by-fours, until her head clears the ply and she winces in wind and silvery light. Sees a gull hang almost stationary in the air, not twenty feet away, the towers of the city as backdrop.

The wind tugs at her hair, longer now than when she lived here, and a feeling that she can't name comes while something she has always known, and she has no interest in climbing farther, because she knows now that the home she remembers is no longer there. Only its shell, humming in the wind, where once she lay wrapped in blankets, smelling machinist's grease and coffee and fresh-cat wood.

Where, it comes to her, she was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring.

And knows she is no longer that, but that while she was, she scarcely knew it.

She hunches her shoulders, drawing her neck down into the carapace of Skinner's jacket, and imagines herself crying, though she knows she won't, and climbs back down.

BOOMZILLA sitting on the curb, beside the truck these two bitches say they pay him to watch. They don't come back, he'll get some help and strip it. Wants that robot balloon the blonde bitch had. That's fine. Fly that shit around.

Other bitch kind of biker-looking, big old coat looked like she got it off a dumpster. That one kick your ass, looked like.

Where they gone? Hungry now, wind blowing grit in his face, splashes of rain.

'Have you seen this girl? Movie-looking white man, face painted dark like they do down the coast. How they dress when they had time to think about coming here, everything worn out just right. Leather jacket like he's left his old airplane around the corner. Blue jeans. Black T.

Boomzilla, he'd puke, anybody try to put him in that shit. Boomzilla know how he going to dress, time he get his shit together.

Boomzilla looking at the printout the man holds out. Sees the biker-looking bitch, but dressed better.

Boomzilla looks up at the tinted face. See how pale the blue eyes look against it. Something say: cold. Something say: don't fuck with me.

Boomzilla thinks: he don't know it's they truck.

'She's lost, the man says.

You ass is, Boomzilla thinks. 'Never seen her.

Eyes lean in a little closer. 'Missing, understand? Trying to help her. A lost child.

Thinks: child my ass; bitch my momma's age.

Boomzilla shakes his head. How he does it serious, just a little, side to side. Means: no.

The blue eyes swing away, looking for somebody else to show the picture to; swing right past the truck. No click.

Man moving off, toward a clutch of people by a coffee stand, holding the picture.

Boomzilla watches him go.

A lost child himself, he has every intention of staying that way.

SAN Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities. It wasn't the NoCal-SoCal thing, but something that went down to the roots. Rydell remembered sitting with a beer somewhere, years ago, watching the partition ceremonies on CNN, and it hadn't impressed him much even then. But the difference, that was something.

A stiff gust of wind threw rain into his face, as he was coming down Stockton toward Market. Office girls held their skirts down and laughed, and Rydell felt like laughing too, though that had passed before he'd crossed Market and started down 4th.

This was where he'd met Chevette, where she'd lived.

She and Rydell had had their adventure up here, had met in the course of it, and the end of it had taken them to LA.

She hadn't liked LA, he always told himself, but he knew that really wasn't why it had gone the way it had.

They had moved down there, the two of them, while Rydell pursued the mediation of what they'd just gone through together. Cops in Trouble was interested, and Cops in Trouble had been interested in Rydell once before, back in Knoxville.

Fresh out of the academy, back then, he'd used deadly force on a stimulant abuser who was trying to kill his, the abuser's, girlfriend's children. The girlfriend had subsequently been looking to sue the department, the city, and Rydell, so Cops in Trouble had decided Rydell might warrant a segment. So they'd flown him out to SoCal, where they were based. He'd gotten an agent and everything, but the deal had fallen apart, so he'd taken a job driving armed response for IntenSecure. When he'd managed to get himself fired from that, he wound up going up to NoCal to do temp work, off the record, for the local IntenSecure operation there. That was what had gotten him into the trouble that introduced him to Chevette Washington.

So when Rydell turned up back in LA with a story to tell, and Chevette on his arm, Cops in Trouble had perked right up. They were moving into a phase where they tried to spin individual segments off into series for niche markets, and the demographics people liked it that Rydell was male, not too young, not too educated, and from the South. They also liked it that he wasn't racist, and they really liked it that he was with this really cute alt-dot kind of girl, one who looked like she could crush walnuts between her thighs.

Cops in Trouble had installed them in a small stealth hotel below Sunset, and they had been so happy, the first few weeks, that Rydell could barely stand to remember it.

Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history than love. The suite was like a little apartment, with its own kitchen and a gas fire, and they'd roll around at night on a blanket on the floor, in front of the fire, with the windows open and the lights out, blue flame flickering low and LAPD gunships drumming overhead, and every time he'd crawl into her arms, or she'd put her face down next to his, he'd known it was good history, the best, and that everything was going to be just fine.

But it hadn't been.

Rydell had never thought about his looks much. He looked, he'd thought, okay. Women had seemed to like him well enough, and it had been pointed out to him that he resembled the younger Tommy Lee Jones, Tommy Lee Jones being a twentieth-century movie star. And because they'd told him that, he'd watched a few of the guy's movies and liked them, though the resemblance people saw puzzled him.

He guessed he'd started to worry though, when Cops in Trouble had assigned a skinny blonde intern named Tara-May Ahlenby to follow him around, grabbing footage with a shoulder-mounted steadicam.

Tara-May had chewed gum and fiddled with filters and had generally put Rydell's teeth on edge. He'd known she was feeding live to Cops in Trouble, and he'd started to get the idea they weren't too happy with what was coming through. Tara-May hadn't helped, explaining to Rydell that the camera added an apparent twenty pounds to anybody's looks, but that, hey, she liked him just the way he was, beefy and solid. But she'd kept suggesting he try working out more. Why not go with that girlfriend of yours, she'd say, she's so buff, it hurts.

But Chevette had never seen the inside of a gym in her life; she owed her buffness to her genes and a few years she'd spent pounding up and down San Francisco hills on a competition-grade mountain bike, its frame rolled from epoxy and Japanese constriction paper.

So now Rydell sighed, coming up on the corner of 4th and Bryant, and on Bryant turning toward the bridge. The bag on his shoulder was starting to demonstrate its weight, its collusion with gravity. Rydell stopped, sighted again, readjusted the bag. Put thoughts of the past out of his mind.

Just walk

NO trouble at all finding that branch of Lucky Dragon.

Couldn't miss it, smack in what had been the middle of Bryant, dead center as you approached the entrance to the bridge. He hadn't been able to see it, coming along Bryant, because it was behind the jumble of old concrete tank traps they'd dropped those after the quake, but once you got past those, there it was.