William Gibson - Virtual Light

Sammy Sal gave her the look he’d given her the night she’d asked him to get her on at Allied. Then he grinned. Mean and funny. All those sharp white teeth. “Keep it between your legs, then. Come on, you try to keep up.”

He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-Rimz flaring neonwhite when he came down pumping. He must have thumbed Play then, because she caught the bass throbbing as she came after him through the traffic.

You want another beer, honey?”

The woman behind the bar had an intricate black tracery along either side of her shaven skull, down to what Yamazaki took to be her natural hairline. The tattoo’s style combined Celtic knots and cartoon lightning-bolts. Her hair, above it, was like the pelt of some nocturnal animal that had fed on peroxide and Vaseline. Her left ear had been randomly pierced, perhaps a dozen times, by a single length of fine steel wire. Ordinarily Yamazaki found this sort of display quite interesting, but now he was lost in composition, his notebook open before him.

“No” he said, “thank you.”

“Don’t wanna get fucked up, or what?” Her tone perfectly cheerful. He looked up from the notebook. She was waiting.

“Yes?”

“You wanna sit here, you gotta buy something.”

“Beer, please.”

“Same?”

“Yes, please.”

She opened a bottle of Mexican beer, fragments of ice sliding down the side as she put it down on the bar in front of him, and moved on to the customer to his left. Yamazaki returned to his notebook.

Skinner has tried repeatedly to convey that there is no agenda here whatever, no underlying structure. Only the bones, the bridge, the Thomasson itself. When the Little Grande came, it was not Godzilla. Indeed, there is no precisely equivalent myth in this place and culture (though this is perhaps not equally true of Los Angeles). The Bomb, so long awaited, is gone. In its place came these plagues, the slowest of cataclysms. But when Godzilla came at last to Tokyo, we were foundering in denial and profound despair. In all truth, we welcomed the most appalling destruction. Sensing, even as we mourned our dead, that we were again presented with the most astonishing of opportunities.

“That’s real nice” the man to his left said, placing his left hand on Yamazaki’s notebook. “That’s gotta be Japanese, it’s so nice.” Yamazaki looked up, smiling uncertainly, into eyes of a most peculiar emptiness. Bright, focused, yet somehow flat.

“From Japan, yes” Yamazaki said. The hand withdrew slowly, caressingly, from his notebook.

“Loveless” the man said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Loveless. My name.”

“Yamazaki.”

The eyes, very pale and wide-set, were the eyes of something watching from beneath still water. “Yeah. Figured it was something like that.” An easy smile, pointed with archaic gold.

“Yes? Like?”

“Something Japanese. Something ’zaki, something ’zuki. Some shit like that.” The smile growing somehow sharper. “Drink up your Corona there, Mr. Yamazuki.” The stranger’s hand, closing hard around his wrist. “Gettin’ warm, huh?”

There was a product called Kil’Z that Rydell had gotten to know at the Academy. It smelled, but faintly, of some ancient hair-tonic, flowery and cool, and you used it in situations where considerable bodily fluids had been spilled. It was an anti-viral agent, capable of nuking HIV’s throughout Crimean-Congo, Mokola fever, Tarzana Dengue, and the Kansas City flu.

He smelled it now, as the IntenSecure man used a blackanodyzed passkey to open the door into 1015.

“We’ll be sure to lock it up when we go” Warbaby said, touching the brim of his hat with his index finger. The IntenSecure man hesitated, then said, “Yessir. Anything else you want?”

“No” Warbaby said, and went into the room, Freddie on his heels. Rydell decided the thing for him to do was follow them in. He did, closing the door in the IntenSecure man’s face. Dark. The curtains drawn. Smell of Kil’Z. The lights came on. Freddie’s hand on the switch. Warbaby staring at a lighter patch of the brick-colored carpet, the place where the bed must’ve been.

Rydell glanced around. Old-fashioned, expensive-looking. Clubby, sort of. The walls covered in some kind of shiny, white-and-green striped stuff like silk. Polished wooden furniture. Chairs upholstered mossy green. A big brass lamp with a dark green shade. A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse. Then he saw a round, brownish-purple splotch of dried blood on the glass. It had crackled up, the way mud does in a summer creek bed, but tiny. Hadn’t had any of that Kil’Z on it, either, by the look of it. He stepped back.

Freddie, in his big shorts and the shirt with the pictures of pistols, had settled into one of the green chairs and was opening his laptop. Rydell watched him reel out a little black cable and pop it into the jack beside the telephone. He wondered if Freddie’s legs got cold, wearing shorts up here in November. He’d noticed that some black people were so far into fashion, they’d wear clothes like there wasn’t any such thing as weather.

Warbaby just stared at the place where the bed had been, looking sad as ever. “Well?” he said.

“I’m gettin‘ it, I’m gettin’ it” Freddie said, twiddling a little ball on his laptop.

Warbaby grunted. Watching him, it looked to Rydell as though the lenses of his black-framed glasses winked black for a second. Trick of the light. Then Rydell got this funny feeling, because Warbaby just looked right through him, his traveling gaze fixed on some moving something so keenly that Rydell himself was turning to look—at nothing.

He looked back at Warbaby. Warbaby’s cane came up, pointing at the space where the bed would have been, then swung back down to the carpet. Warbaby sighed.

“Want the site-data from SFPD now?” Freddie asked.

Warbaby grunted. His eyes were darting from side to side. Rydell thought of tv documentaries about voodoo, the priests’ eyes rolling when the gods got into them.

Freddie twirled the trackball under his finger. “Prints, hair, skin-flakes… You know what a hotel room is.”

Rydell couldn’t stand it. He stepped in front of Warbaby and looked him in the eye. “What the hell you doing?”

Warbaby saw him. Gave him a slow sad smile and removed his glasses. Took a big, navy blue silk handkerchief from the side pocket of his long coat and polished the glasses. He handed them to Rydell. “Put them on.”

Rydell looked down at the glasses and saw that the lenses were black now.

“Go on” Warbaby said.

Rydell noticed the weight as he slid them on. Pitch black. Then there was a stutter of soft fuzzy ball-lightning, like what you saw when you rubbed your eyes in the dark, and he was looking at Warbaby. Just behind Warbaby, hung on some invisible wall, were words, numbers, bright yellow. They came into focus as he looked at them, somehow losing Warbaby, and he saw that they were forensic stats.

“Or” Freddie said, “you can just be here now—”

And the bed was back, sodden with blood, the man’s soft, heavy corpse splayed out like a frog. That thing beneath his chin, blue-black, bulbous.

Rydell’s stomach heaved, bile rose in his throat, and then a naked woman rolled up from another bed, in a different room, her hair like silver in some impossible moonlight– Rydell yanked the glasses off. Freddie lay back in the chair, shaking with silent laughter, his laptop across his knees. “Man” he managed, “you oughta seen the look you had! Put parta the guy’s porno on there from Arkady’s evidence report…”