William Gibson - Virtual Light

“Take care of myself” Skinner said.

“I know that, boss” Fontaine assured, “but we got a couple of fried servos in your lift down there. Take a few days get that going for you, the kind of backlog we’re looking at. Need you somebody go up and down the rungs. Bring you food and all.”

“Scooter can do it” Skinner said.

Yamazaki blinked.

“That right?” Fontaine raised his eyebrows at Yamazaki. “You stay up here and take care of Mr. Skinner?”

Yamazaki thought of his borrowed flat in the tall Victorian house, its black marble bathroom larger than his bachelor apartment in Osaka. He looked from Fontaine to Skinner, then back. “I would be honored, to stay with Skinner-san, if he wishes.”

“Do what you like” Skinner said, and began laboriously stripping the sheets from his mattress.

“Chevette told me you might be up here” Fontaine said. “Some kind of university guy…” He put his cup down on the table, bent to swing his tool-bag up beside it. “Said maybe you people worried about uninvited guests.” He undid the bag’s two buckles and opened it. Tools gleamed there, rolls of insulated wire. He took out something wrapped in an oily rag, looked to see that Skinner wasn’t observing him, and tucked the thing behind the glass jars on the shelf above the table.

“We can pretty much make sure nobody you don’t know will get up here for the next couple days” he said to Yamazaki, lowering his voice. “But that’s a.38 Special, six rounds of hollow-point. You use it, do me a big favor and toss it off the side, okay? It’s of, uh” Fontaine grinned, “dubious provenance.”

Yamazaki thought of Loveless. Swallowed. “You gonna be okay up here?” Fontaine asked. “Yes” Yamazaki said, “yes, thank you.”

It was ten-thirty before they finally had to hit the street, and then only because Laurie, who Chevette knew from that first day she’d ever come in here, said that the manager, Benny Singh, was going to be showing up and they couldn’t stay in there anymore, particularly not with her friend asleep like that, like he was passed out or something. Chevette said she understood, and thanked her.

“You see Sammy Sal” Laurie said, “you say hi for me.”

Chevette nodded, sad, and started shaking the guy’s shoulder. He grunted and tried to brush her hand away. “Wake up. We gotta go.”

She couldn’t believe she’d told him all that stuff, but she’d just had to tell somebody or she’d go crazy. Not that telling it had made it make any more sense than it did before, and with this Rydell’s side of it added on, it sort of made even less. The news that somebody had gone and murdered the asshole just didn’t seem real, but if it was, she supposed, she was in deeper shit than ever.

“Wake up!”

“Jesus…” He sat up, knuckling his eyes.

“We gotta go. Manager’ll be in soon. My friend let you sleep a while.”

“Go where?”

Chevette had been thinking about that. “Cole, over by the Panhandle, there’s places rent rooms by the hour.”

“Hotels?”

“Not exactly” she said. “For people just need the bed for a little while.”

He dug behind the couch for his jacket. “Look at that” he said, sticking his fingers into the rip in the shoulder. “Brand new last night.”

Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning. Even the beggars looked worse off this time of day, like that guy there with those sores, the one trying to sell half a can of spaghetti sauce. She stepped around him. Another block or two and they’d start to hit the early crowd of day-trippers headed for Skywalker Park; more cover in the crowd but more cops, too. She tried to remember if Skywalker’s rentacops were IntenSecure, that company Rydell talked about.

She wondered if Fontaine had gone to Skinner’s like he’d said he would. She hadn’t wanted to say too much over the phone, so at first she’d just said she was going away for a while, and would Fontaine go over and see how Skinner was doing, and maybe this Japanese student guy who’d been hanging around lately. But Fontaine could tell she sounded worried, so he’d sort of pushed her about it, and she’d told him she was worried about Skinner, how maybe there were some people gonna go up there and hassle him.

“You don’t mean bridge people” he’d said, and she’d said no, she didn’t, but that was all she could say about it. The line went quiet for a few seconds and she could hear one of Fontaine’s kids singing in the background, one of those African songs with the weird throat-clicks. “Okay” Fontaine finally said, “I’ll look into that for you.” And Chevette said thanks, fast, and clicked off. Fontaine did a lot of favors for Skinner. He’d never talked to Chevette about it, but he seemed to have known Skinner all his life, or anyway as long as he’d been on the bridge. There were a lot of people like that, and Chevette knew Fontaine could fix it so people would watch the tower there, and the lift. Watch for strangers. People did that for each other, on the bridge, and Fontaine was always owed a lot of favors, because he was one of the main electricity men.

Now they were walking past this bagel place had a sort of iron cage outside, welded out of junk, where you could sit in there at little tables and have coffee and eat bagels, and the smell of the morning’s baking about made her faint from hunger. She was thinking maybe they’d better go in there and get a dozen in a bag, maybe some cream cheese, take it with them, when Rydell put his hand on her shoulder.

She turned her head and saw this big shiny white RV had just turned onto Haight in front of them, headed their way. Like you’d see rich old people driving back in Oregon, whole convoys of them, pulling boats on trailers, little jeeps, motorcycles hanging off the backs like lifeboats. They’d stop for the night in these special camps had razor-wire around them, dogs, NO TRESSPASSINGsigns that really meant it.

Rydell was staring at this RV like he couldn’t believe it, and now it was pulling up right beside them, this gray-haired old lady powering down the window and leaning out the driver’s side, saying “Young man! Excuse me, but I’m Danica Elliott and I believe we met yesterday on the plane from Burbank.”

Danica Elliott was this retired lady from Altadena, that was down in SoCal, and she’d flown up to San Francisco, she said on the same plane as Rydell, to get her husband moved to a different cryogenic facility. Well, not her husband, exactly, but his brain, which he’d had frozen when he died.

Chevette had heard about people doing that, but she hadn’t ever understood why they did it, and evidently Danica Elliott didn’t understand it either. But she’d come up here to throw good money after bad, she said, and get her husband David’s brain moved to this more expensive place that would keep it on ice in its own private little tank, and not just tumbling around in a big tank with a bunch of other people’s frozen brains, which was where it had been before. She seemed like a really nice lady to Chevette, but she sure could go on about this stuff, so that after a while Rydell was just driving and nodding his head like he was listening, and Chevette, who was navigating, was mostly paying attention to the map-display on the RV’s dash, plus keeping a lookout for police cars.

Mrs. Elliott had taken care of getting her husband’s brain relocated the night before, and she said it had made her kind of emotional, so she’d decided to rent this RV and drive it back to Altadena, just take her time and enjoy the trip. Trouble was, she didn’t know San Francisco, and she’d picked it up that morning at this rental place on sixth and gotten lost looking for a freeway. Wound up driving around in the Haight, which she said did not look at all like a safe neighborhood but was certainly very interesting.