William gibson - Count Zero

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COUNT ZERO

William Gibson

1986

Count Zero

THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted

it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up

with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-

bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs

and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized

hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the

pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract.

Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour

after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon

liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of

Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first

flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support

vat

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put

Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for

him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-

charides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market

The eyes were green.

He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated

simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of

the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn

dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his

secondfloor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs,

late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt

bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He

masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought

about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back

brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the

morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and

bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.

And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman

standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-

light that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner

We're done with you You're good as new

He was good as new. How good was that? He didn't know.

He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of

Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.

And the next. And ever was.

He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black

mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when

they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels

left ferroconcrete, dnnks arrived, dinner was served.

[n Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a

blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a

blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he amved

at the counter at the end of the comdor, he changed his

ticket.

He flew to Mexico.

And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of

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brooms, a woman's body warm against his own

The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected

sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of

the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf.

The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse cham-

bray, softened by countless washings.

He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted

window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. He'd had to walk

twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the

sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on

runway concrete.

He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek

of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plas-

tered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. He'd

ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink lucite

and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned

the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger

than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider

blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver.

Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus

through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-

aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was

there to welcome him back to Mexico.

Among the dozen~odd microsofts the Dutchman had given

him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish,

but in Vallarta he'd fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a

dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square

of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus

had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy

pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures,

the

day's winning numbers in the national lottery.

The woman beside him stirred in her sleep.

He raised himself on one elbow to look at her A stranger's

face, but not the one his life in hotels had taught him to

expect. He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of

cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fash-

ion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of

the previous five years.

Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and

Amencan. The blue sheets were nicked across her hips, the

sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her

long thighs with diagonals of gold. The faces he woke with in

the world's hotels were like God's own hood ornaments.

Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed

straight out to the void. But this one was different. Already.

somehow, there was meaning attached to it. Meaning and a

name.

He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His soles regis-

tered the grit of beach-sand on cool tile. There was a faint,

pervasive smell of insecticide. Naked, head throbbing, he

stood. He made his legs move. Walked, tried the first of two

doors, finding white tile, more white plaster, a bulbous chrome

shower head hung from rust-spotted iron pipe The sink's taps

offered identical trickles of blood-warm water. An antique

wristwatch lay beside a plastic tumbler, a mechanical Rolex

on a pale leather strap.

The bathroom's shuttered windows weie unglazed, strung

with a fine green mesh of plastic. He peered out between

hardwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and saw a dry

fountain of flower-painted tiles and the rusted carcass of a

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VW Rabbit

Allison. That was her name.

She wore frayed khaki shorts and one of his white T-shirts.

Her legs were very brown. The clockwork Rolex, with its

dull stainless case, went around her left wrist on its pigskin

strap. They went walking, down the curve of beach, toward

Barre de Navidad. They kept to the narrow strip of firm wet

sand above the line of surf.

Already they had a history together; he remembered her at

a stall that morning in the little town's iron-roofed mercado,

how she'd held the huge clay mug of boiled coffee in both

hands. Mopping eggs and salsa from the cracked white plate

with a tortilla, he'd watched flies circling fingers of sunlight

that found their way through a patchwork of palm frond and

corrugated siding. Some talk about her job with some legal

firm in L.A., how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle

pontoon towns tethered off Redondo. He'd told her he was in

personnel. Or had been, anyway. "Maybe I'm looking for a

new line of work

But talk seemed secondary to what there was between

them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against

the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both

shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the

thing. She squeezed his hand.

A blue figure came marching up the beach toward them, a

military policeman headed for town, spitshined black boots

unreal against the soft bright beach. As the man passed,

his face dark and immobile beneath mirrored glasses, Turner

noted the carbine-format Steiner-Optic laser with Fabrique

Nationale sights. The blue fatigues were spotless, creased like

knives.

Turner had been a soldier in his own nght for most of his

adult life, although he'd never worn a uniform. A mercenary,

his employers vast corporations warring covertly for the con-

trol of entire economies. He was a specialist in the extraction

of top executives and research people. The multinationals he

worked for would never admit that men like Turner existed.

You worked your way through most of a bottle of Her-

radura last night," she said.

He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was

watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails

painted with chipped pink gloss.

The breakers rolled in, their edges transparent as green

glass.

The spray beaded on her tan.

After their first day together, life fell into a simple pattern

They had breakfast in the mercado. at a stall with a concrete

counter worn smooth as polished marble. They spent the

morning swimming, until the sun drove them back into the

shuttered coolness of the hotel, where they made love under

the slow wooden blades of the ceiling fan, then slept. In the

afternoons they explored the maze of narrow streets behind

the Avenida, or went hiking in the hills. They dined in

beachfront restaurants and drank on the patios of the white

hotels. Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf

And gradually, without words, she taught him a new style

of passion. He was accustomed to being served, serviced

anonymously by skilled professionals. Now, in the white

cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt

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Pacific mixed with her own wet, her inner thighs cool against

his cheeks. Palms cradling her hips, he held her, raised her

like a chalice, lips pressing tight, while his tongue sought the

locus, the point, the frequency that would bring her home

Then, grinning, he'd mount, enter, and find his own way

there.

Sometimes, then, he'd talk, long spirals of unfocused nar-

rative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very

little, but he'd learned to value what little she did say, and,

always, she held him. And listened.

A week passed, then another. He woke to their final day

together in that same cool room, finding her beside him. Over

breakfast he imagined he felt a change in her, a tension.

They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot

the faint edge of anxiety.

In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach,

toward Barre, the way they'd gone that first morning.

Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his

ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Span-

ish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates

hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect.

Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered

the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer,

sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair

of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida.

His tan was dark and even The angular patchwork left by

the Dutchman's grafts was gone, and she had taught him the

unity of his body Mornings, when he met the green eyes in

the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman

no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry

cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a

country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the

smell of dust and fried breads

The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way

down the bay's arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a

detonation.

Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the

corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came

hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty

doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure's

fa~ade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three

levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of

finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and

pattern of tile

HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capi-

tals above one concrete arch. "Mar," he said, completing it,

though he'd removed the microsoft.

"It's over," she said, stepping beneath the arch, into

shadow.

"What's over?" He followed, the straw basket rubbing

against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between

his toes.

"Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future."

He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed-

springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls.

"It smells like piss," he said. ``Let's swim.

The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between

them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner's room and ate,

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silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved

her sun-streaked hair.

"You make me think about horses," he said finally

"Well," she said, as though she spoke from the depths of

exhaustion, "they've only been extinct for thirty years."

"No," he said, "their hair. The hair on their necks, when

they ran."

"Manes," she said, and there were tears in her eyes.

"Fuck it." Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep

breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the

beach. "It, me, what's it matter?" Her arms around him

again. "Oh, come on, Turner Come on"

And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed

something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen,

where the water met the sky.

When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the

yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white

riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall

away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the

surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did,

back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn't survived. The

waves had licked away its foundation.

"Give me the basket

She was buttoning her blouse. He'd bought it for her in one

of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue

Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the

shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. "I said give me

the basket."

She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon,

finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple

slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled

them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He

snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad-

ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the

Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung

toward the beach.

``Turner, I''

"Get up." Bundling the blanket and her towel into the

basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the

basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her

quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands.

"Maybe I'm wrong," he said. "If I am, get out of here. Cut

for that second stand of palms." He pointed. "Don't go back

to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home~~

He could hear the purr of the outboard now

He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she

turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stum-

bling in a drift of sand. She didn't look back.

He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflat-

able was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named

Tsushima, and he'd last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He'd

seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck.

He didn't need the glasses to know that the inflatable's

passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka's ninjas.

He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his

last can of Mexican beer.

He looked back at the line of white hotels, his hands inert

on one of Tsushima's teak railings Behind the hotels, the

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file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Count%20Zero.txtCOUNTZEROWilliamGibson1986CountZeroTHEYsentASLAMHOUNDonTurner'strailinNewDelhi,slottedittohispheromonesandthecolorofhishair.ItcaughtupwithhimonastreetcalledChandniChaukandcamescram-blingforhisrentedBMWthroughaforestofbarebrownlegsandpedicabtires.Itscorewas...

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William gibson - Count Zero

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