William Gibson - All Tomorrow's Parties

'I'm not going anywhere, son, Fontaine said.

'It's on fire, Mr. Fontaine.

'It's where I live.

'Come on, Rydell, Chevette said, grabbing him by his waistband.

Tessa had climbed back on, behind her meshbacked driver, and was putting her input glasses on. 'Jesus, Tessa said, 'I don't believe the angles I'm getting.

Chevette tugged Rydell through the door and climbed on the back of the ATV, sort of sidesaddle, leaving room for Rydell. 'Wait, Rydell said, 'we can't just leave them here.

'We'? Hey, boy, I'm not carrying you- But the moon-faced boy saw the chain gun then and stopped.

'Go on, said Fontaine, who stood now with his arm around the shoulder of the boy who'd worn the helmet, whose eyes regarded Rydell with a sort of animal calm. 'Go on. We'll be okay here.

'I'm sorry, Rydell said. 'I'm sorry about your shop.

'Your ass be sorry, you don't get out of here.

Chevette heard a woman start screaming, toward San Francisco. She yanked his waistband, hard. The fly button popped off his khakis. He climbed on the back of the ATV opposite her, hanging on with one hand, the chain gun in the other.

The last she saw of the glowing girl, she was saying something to the man she'd called Konrad. Then Tessa's meshback popped it and they took off toward the city. 'Good-bye, Fontaine, Chevette shouted, but she doubted he ever heard her.

Remembering the night of a hill fire above the sharehouse, the birds in the brush all around the house waking in the dark, sensing it. All their voices.

And now through the plywood patchwork overhead she hears it too: the drumming of conflagration.

FONTAINE knows the bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridge's host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing. These bridge slingshots are lethal not only to rats, their users favoring balls of dense damp clay, a trick held over from the Middle Ages and not to be underestimated.

Fontaine watches the rats flash past and sighs. He has a fire ax here, somewhere, salvage from a tug sank in China Basin in 2003, and an extinguisher too, but he can't imagine these will be of much use, although chopping a hole in the back wall and falling into the bay is a possibility. He wonders if there actually are sharks there, as the bridge children like to believe. He knows for a fact there are mutant fish, warped, it is said, by oxides leaching off the piers of the cable towers.

But Fontaine has survived many disasters, both municipal and marital, and there is in him that which believes, against all odds or hope, that all will simply, somehow, be well. Or that in any case there is usually not much to be done about certain things, or in any case not by him.

So, now, rather than digging through the closet, where he remembers, possibly, putting that fire ax, he picks up his push broom and begins tidying the front of the shop, sweeping as much of the glass as possible into a single drift beside the door. Glass, he reflects, sweeping, is one of those substances that takes up relatively little space until you break it. But it is also, he recalls being told, if considered over truly cosmic stretches of time, a liquid. All the glass in every pane in every window, everywhere, is in the infinitely slow process of melting, sagging, sliding down, except it would be unlikely that any one pane survive the millennia required to be reduced to a solid puddle.

While outside the rats are being joined by fleeing humans, as diverse a company of them as only the bridge can offer. He hopes that Clarisse and the children are safe; he's tried to phone, but no answer, and there seemed little point in leaving a message, under the circumstances.

He looks back and sees Rydell's hologram girlfriend kneeling beside the bunk, talking to the boy. Beside the boy sits the professor who had borrowed the Kit Gun, and they strike Fontaine just then as a family group, unlikely perhaps but not without warmth. Fontaine has lived long enough with technological change that he really doesn't question the why or what of the girl: she is like a game program that comes out and sits in your room, he thinks, and some people would like that just fine.

Now he comes to an obstacle in his sweeping: the butchered Another One dolls in their puddle of consensual silicone. At least none of them are talking now. It looks terrible, cruel, when he pushes the broom up against them, amid shards of glass, so he leans the broom against the counter, fishes one from the glass by its limp arms. He carries the faux Japanese baby outside and stretches it on its back in front of the shop. The others follow, and he is laying out the last when a fat woman, fleeing heavily toward Treasure Island, clutching what appears to be a bedsheet-load of wet laundry, notices what he is doing and starts to scream. And screams all the way out of sight, and can still be heard as he turns back into the shop, thinking of Tourmaline, his first wife.

There is smoke in the air now, and maybe it is time to find that ax.

THAT shape that Laney sees when he looks at Harwood, at the idoru, at Rydell, and these others, has never before been a place for him, an inhabitable space. Now, driven by a new urgency (and augmented by virtually the entire population of the Walled City, working in a mode of simultaneity that very nearly approximates unison) he succeeds in actually being there, within a space defined by the emerging factors of the nodal point. It is a place where metaphor collapses, a descriptive black hole. He is no more able to describe it to himself, experiencing it, than he would be able to describe it to another.

Yet what it most nearly resembles, that place where history turns, is the Hole he has posited at the core of his being: an emptiness, as devoid of darkness as it is of light.

And Harwood, he knows immediately, though without knowing how he knows, is there.

— Harwood?

— Cohn Laney. An evening for miracles. The unexpected.

— You told them to burn the bridge.

— Is there no privacy?

— You're trying to stop her, aren't you?

— I suppose I am, yes, although without knowing exactly what it is I'm attempting to stop her from doing. She's an emergent system. She doesn't know herself.

— Do you? Do you know what you want?

— I want the advent of a degree of functional nanotechnology in a world that will remain recognizably descended from the one I woke in this morning. I want my world transfigured, yet I want my place in that world to be equivalent to the one I now occupy. I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want a free lunch. And I've found the way to have it, it seems. Though you have too. And what, we have to ask ourselves, went wrong there?

— You chose it. You chose to take 5-SB. In the orphanage, we volunteered to be test subjects, but we had no idea what we were taking.

— And I chose to take 5-SB based on results collected from you, Laney. You and a girl named Jennifer Mo, who subsequently became the homicidally obsessed stalker of an astonishingly boring actor named Kevin Burke. She committed suicide while holding him hostage at a meditation retreat in Idaho.

Laney knows the story of Jennifer Mo; it has haunted him since he first read it, several years ago, as a classified government document.

— Why hasn't it gotten you, Harwood? Why hasn't it kicked in?

— Perhaps because I'm too perfectly self-obsessed to become interested in anyone else. It's been all gravy for me. The next best thing to knowing the future. Better, actually: just that little degree of free will and we're so much more happy, aren't we? And looking backward is very nearly as much fun as looking forward, though our digital soup does thin out rather rapidly, that way down the time-line. Amazing, though: that business around Curie's husband… Changed everything, and who knows? I ask you, Laney, who knows?