William Gibson: Virtual Light

He turned to Sublett. “Man, you still haven’t got your ass vaccinated yet, you got nothin’ but stone white-trash ignorance to thank for it.”

Sublett cringed. “That’s worse than a live vaccine, man; that’s a whole ’nother disease right there!”

“Sure is” Rydell said, “but it doesn’t do anything to you. And there’s still plenty of the old kind walking around here. They oughta make it compulsory, you ask me.”

Sublett shuddered. “Reverend Fallon always said—”

“Screw Reverend Fallon” Rydell said, hitting the ignition. “Son of a bitch just makes money selling prayer-hankies to people like your momma. You knew that was all bullshit anyway, didn’t you, otherwise why’d you come out here?” He put Gunhead into gear and eased over into the Sunset traffic. One thing about driving a Hotspur Hussar, people almost always let you cut in.

Sublett’s head seemed to draw down between his high shoulders, giving him the look of a worried, steel-eyed buzzard. “Ain’t all that simple” he said. “It’s everything I been brought up to be. Can’t all be bullshit, can it?”

Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. “Naw” he said, “I guess it wouldn’t have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it’s just—”

“What they bring you all up to be, Berry?”

Rydell had to think about it. “Republican” he said, finally.

Karen Mendelsohn had seemed like the best of a whole string of things Rydell felt he could get used to just fine. Like flying business-class or having a SoCal MexAmeriBank card from Cops in Trouble.

That first time with her, in the Executive Suites in Knoxville, not having anything with him, he’d tried to show her his certificates of vaccination (required by the Department, else they couldn’t get you insured). She’d just laughed and said German nanotech would take care of all of that. Then she showed Rydell this thing through the transparent top of a gadget like a little battery-powered pressure-cooker. Rydell had heard about them, but he hadn’t ever seen one; he’d also heard they cost about as much as a small car. He’d read somewhere how they always had to be kept at body temperature.

It looked like it might be moving a little in there. Pale, sort of jellyfish thing. He asked her if it was true they were alive. She told him it wasn’t, exactly, but it was almost, and the rest of it was Bucky balls and subcellular automata. And he wouldn’t even know it was there, but no way was she going to put it in in front of him.

She’d gone into the bathroom to do that. When she came back out in that underwear, he got to learn where Milan was. And while it was true he wouldn’t have known the thing was there, he did know it was there, but pretty soon he forgot about it, almost.

They chartered a tilt-rotor to Memphis the next morning and got on Air Magellan to LAX. Business-class mostly meant better gizmos in the seatback in front of you, and Rydell’s immediate favorite was a telepresence set you could tune to servo-mounted mollies on the outside of the plane. Karen hated to use the little VirtuFax she carried around in her purse, so she’d gotten on to her office in L.A. and had them download her morning’s mail into her seatback display. She got down to that fast, talking on the phone, sending faxes, and leaving Rydell to ooh and ah at the views from the mollies.

The seats were bigger than when he used to fly down to Florida to see his father, the food was better, and the drinks were free. Rydell had three or four of those, fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until somewhere over Arizona.

The air was funny, at LAX, and the light was different. California was a lot more crowded than he’d expected, and louder. There was a man there from Cops in Trouble, holding up a piece of wrinkled white cardboard that said MENDELSOHNin red marker, only the S was backward. Rydell smiled, introduced himself, and shook hands with him. He seemed to like that; said his name was Sergei. When Karen asked him where the fucking car was, he turned bright red and said it would just take him a minute to get it. Karen said no thanks, they’d walk to the lot with him as soon as their bags turned up, no way was she waiting around in a zoo like this. Sergei nodded. He kept trying to fold up the sign and put it into his jacket pocket, but it was too big. Rydell wondered why she’d suddenly gotten bitchy like that. Tired from the trip, maybe. He winked at Sergei, but that just seemed to make the guy more nervous.

After their bags came, Karen’s two black leather ones and the softside blue Samsonite Rydell had bought with his new debit-card, he and Sergei carried them out and across a kind of trafficloop. The air outside was about the same, but hotter. This recording kept saying that the white spaces were for loading and unloading only. There were all kinds of cars jockeying around, babies crying, people leaning on piles of luggage, but Sergei knew where they were going—over to this garage across the way.

Sergei’s car was long, black, German, and looked like somebody had just cleaned it all over with warm spit and Q-Tips. When Rydell offered to ride shotgun, Sergei got rattled again and hustled him into the back seat with Karen. Which made her laugh, so Rydell felt better.

As they were pulling out of the garage, Rydell spotted two cops over by these big stainless-steel letters that said METRO. They wore air-conditioned helmets with clear plastic visors. They were poking at an old man with their sticks, though it didn’t look like they had them turned on. The old man’s jeans were out at the knees and he had big patches of tape on both cheekbones, which almost always means cancer. He was so burned, it was hard to tell if he was white or what. A crowd of people was streaming up the stairs behind the old man and the cops, under the METROsign, and stepping around them.

“Welcome to Los Angeles” she said. “Be glad you aren’t taking the subway.”

They had dinner that night in what Karen said was Hollywood, with Aaron Pursley himself, in a Tex-Mex restaurant on North Flores Street. It was the best Tex-Mex food Rydell had ever had. About a month later, he tried to take Sublett there for his birthday, maybe cheer him up with a down-home meal, but the man out front just wouldn’t let them in.

“Full up” he said.

Rydell could see plenty of empty tables through the window. It was early and there was hardly anybody in there. “How ’bout those” Rydell said, pointing at all the empty tables.

“Reserved” the man said.

Sublett said spicy foods weren’t really such a good idea for him anyway.

What he’d come to like best, cruising with Gunhead, was getting back up in the hills and canyons, particularly on a night with a good moon.

Sometimes you saw things up there and couldn’t quite be sure you’d seen them or not. One full-moon night Rydell had slung Gunhead around a curve and frozen a naked woman in the headlights, the way a deer’ll stop, trembling, on a country road. Just a second she was there, long enough for Rydell to think he’d seen that she either wore silver horns or some kind of hat with an upturned crescent, and that she might’ve been Japanese, which struck him right then as the weirdest thing about any of it. Then she saw him—he saw her see him—and smiled. Then she was gone.

Sublett had seen her, too, but it only kicked him into some kind of motormouthed ecstasy of religious dread, every horrormovie he’d ever seen tumbling over into Reverend Fallon’s rants about witches, devil-worshippers, and the living power of Satan. He’d gone through his week’s supply of gum, talking nonstop, until Rydell had finally told him to shut the fuck up.

Because now she was gone, he wanted to think about her. How she’d looked, what she might have been doing there, and how it was she’d vanished. With Sublett sulking in the shotgun seat, Rydell had tried to remember just exactly how it was she’d managed to so perfectly and suddenly not be there. And the funny thing was, he sort of remembered it two ways, which was nothing at all like the way he still didn’t really remember shooting Kenneth Turvey, even though he’d heard production assistants and network lawyers go over it so many times he felt like he’d seen it, or at least the Cops in Trouble version (which never aired). One way he remembered it, she’d just sort of gone down the slope beside the road, though whether she was running or floating, he couldn’t say. The other way he remembered, she’d jumped—though that was such a poor word for it—up the slope above the other side of the road, somehow clearing all that dust-silvered moonlit vegetation, and just flat-out impossible gone, forty feet if it was five.