William Gibson - Virtual Light

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Virtual Light
1 The luminous flesh of giants
The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a
gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in
a smooth black pod.
Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet
unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down Lázaro Cárdenas flow with the luminous flesh of
giants, shunting out the night's barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual,
world without end.
The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of
jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing
in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.
Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines
himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets
of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.
He opens his eyes.
Mexico City is still there.
The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee
table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.
On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a creamy frieze. When he takes up
the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space behind his eyes. Their young men,
invariably entering from behind, wear black leather gloves. Slavic faces, calling up unwanted
fragments of a childhood: the reek of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying
train, the high old ceilings of an apartment overlooking a frozen park.
Twenty-eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest coupling; he glimpses figures
carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.
He opens another of the little bottles.
Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well-oiled machines, swallow their arrogant, self-
absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor of Soviet industrial cinema.
His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily
calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.
He drinks the vodka.
He watches television.
After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he stares out at the Zona Rosa
from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator chafing his freshly shaven chin.
And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the
Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they
take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.
He's thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing interest, but
here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.
An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of
carbon puising from
beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind of cola-colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every
surface; only the windshield is exposed, and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink,
reminding him of the gunship's lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly,
senselessly, with absolute conviction, around this carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning
relic in its spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the
already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?
Trembling, he watches the thing pass.
'That car ...' He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively addressing the broad brown neck of
the driver, whose massive ear lobes somehow recall reproduction pottery offered on the hotel's
shopping channel.
'El coche,' says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now seems to notice the courier for
the first time. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac flare, once, and briefly, with the
reflected ruby of a nightclub's laser, then gone.
The driver is staring at him.
He tells the driver to return to the hotel.
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He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted concourses of some European airport,
distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of departure.
Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.
The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds of traffic, muted by the gas-
filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.
He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all he knows of peace.
And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He draws them out, opening the ear
pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured since Prague.
Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn't
think of it in those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black
plastic frames have started to lose their sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now,
sueded white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like this one.
He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer inserts the yellowing audio beads.
He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as he fast-forwards through the clumsy titles
and up the moonlit ragged hiliscape of a place that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-
focus digital approximation of both.
She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon road. The candles. The wine. The
jet-beaded dress against the matte perfection of her skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn
smooth and cool as a snake's belly up her tensed thigh.
Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.
Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone beneath his pillow chimes softly
and only once.
'Yes?'
'Confirming your reservation to San Francisco,' someone says, either a woman or a machine. He
touches a key, recording the flight number, says goodnight, and closes his eyes on the tenuous
light sifting from the dark borders of the drapes.
Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal.
He sleeps.
IntenSecure had their wagons detailed every three shifts. They used this big specialty car wash
off Colby; twenty coats of hand-rubbed Wet Honey Sienna and you didn't let it get too shabby.
That one November evening the Republic of Desire put an end to his career in armed response, Berry
Rydell had arrived there a little early.
He liked the way it smelled inside. They had this pink stuff they put through the power-washers to
get the road film off, and the smell reminded him of a summer job he'd had in Knoxville, his last
year in school. They'd been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson
Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way, mostly
gray showing through but some old pink Safeway paint left in the little dips and crannies. They
were from Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts. The shirts had obviously cost
more than the suits, or at least as much, and they never wore ties or undid the top button. Rydell
had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was
true. He'd overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing
the integrity of the material's passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but
he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television.
But what it really amounted to was getting most of this
5
2 Cruising with gunhead
shitty old paint off thousands and thousands of square feet of equally shitty cinder block, and
you did it with an oscillating spray-head on the end of a long stainless handle. If you thought
the foreman wasn't looking, you could aim it at another kid, twist out a thirty-foot rooster tail
of stinging rainbow, and wash all his sunbiock off. Rydell and his friends all wore this
Australian stuff that came in serious colors, so you could see where you had and hadn't put it.
Had to get your right distance on it, though, 'cause up close those heads could take the chrome
off a bumper. Rydell and Buddy Crigger both got fired for doing that, finally, and then they
walked across Jeff Davis to a beer joint and Rydell wound up spending the night with this girl
from Key West, the first time he'd ever slept beside a woman.
Now here he was in Los Angeles, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur Hussar with twenty coats of hand-
rubbed lacquer. The Hussar was an armored Land Rover that could do a hundred and forty on a
straightaway, assuming you could find one open and had the time to accelerate. Hernandez, his
shift super, said you couldn't trust an Englishman to build anything much bigger than a hat, not
if you wanted it to work when you needed it; he said IntenSecure should've bought Israeli or at
least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph Lauren to design a tank anyway?
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Rydell didn't know about that, but that paint job was definitely trying too hard. He thought they
probably wanted people to think of those big brown United Parcel trucks, and at the same time they
maybe hoped it would look sort of like something you'd see in an Episcopal church. Not too much
gilt on the logo. Sort of restrained.
The people who worked in the car wash were mostly Mongolian immigrants, recent ones who had
trouble getting better jobs. They did this crazy throat-singing thing while they worked, and he
liked to hear that. He couldn't figure out how they did it; sounded like tree-frogs, but like it
was two sounds at once.
6
Now they were buffing the rows of chromed nubs down the sides. Those had been meant to support
electric crowd-control grids and were just chromed for looks. The riot-wagons in Knoxville had
been electrified, but with this drip-system that kept them wet, which was a lot nastier.
'Sign here,' said the crew boss, this quiet black kid named Anderson. He was a medical student,
days, and he always looked like he was about two nights short of sleep.
Rydell took the pad and the light-pen and signed the signature-plate. Anderson handed Rydell the
keys.
'You ought to get you some rest,' Rydell said. Anderson grinned, wanly. Rydell walked over to
Gunhead, deactivating the door alarm.
Somebody had written that inside, 'GUNHEAD,' in green marker on the panel above the windshield.
The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked it. Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird
trailer-camp video-sect. He said his mother had been getting ready to deed his ass to the church,
whatever that meant.
Sublett wasn't too anxious to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten the idea that these people
figured video was the Lord's preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of
perpetually burning bush. 'He's in the de-tails,' Sublett had said once. 'You gotta watch for Him
close.' Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more
television than anyone Rydell had ever met, mostly old movies on channels that never ran anything
but. Sublett said Gunhead was the name of a robot tank in a Japanese monster movie. Hernandez
thought Sublett had written the name on there himself. Sublett denied it. Hernandez said take it
off. Sublett ignored him. It was still there, but Rydell knew Sublett was too law-abiding to
commit any vandalism, and anyway the ink in the marker might've killed him.
Sublett had had allergies. He went into shock from various
7
kinds of cleaners and solvents, so you couldn't get him to come into the car wash at all, ever.
The allergies made him light sensitive, too, so he had to wear these mirrored contacts. What with
the black IntenSecure uniform and his dry blond hair, the contacts made him look like some kind of
Kian-assed Nazi robot. Which could get kind of complicated in the wrong store on Sunset, say three
in the morning and all you really wanted was some mineral water and a Coke. But Rydell was always
glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely
to find. And he probably wasn't even crazy. Both of which were definite pluses for Rydell. As
Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldn't be a
hairdresser.
Like Rydell, a lot of IntenSecure's response people were former police officers of some kind, some
were even ex-LAPD, and if the company's rules about not carrying personal weapons on duty were any
indication, his co-workers were expected to turn up packing all manner of hardware. There were
metal detectors on the staff-room doors and Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push-daggers,
nunchuks, stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and whatever else the detectors had picked up. Like
Friday morning at a South Miami high school. Hernandez gave it all back after the shift, but when
they went calling, they were supposed to make do with their Glocks and the chunkers.
The Glocks were standard police issue, at least twenty years old, that IntenSecure bought by the
truckload from PDs that could afford to upgrade to caseless ammunition. If you did it by the book,
you kept the Glocks in their plastic holsters, and kept the holsters Velcroed to the wagon's
central console. When you answered a call, you pulled a holstered pistol off the console and stuck
it on the patch provided on your uniform. That was the only time you were supposed to be out of
the wagon with a gun on, when you were actually responding.
The chunkers weren't even guns, not legally anyway, but a ten-second burst at close range would
chew somebody's face off. They were Israeli riot-control devices, air-powered, that fired one-inch
cubes of recycled rubber. They looked like the result of a forced union between a bulipup assault
rifle and an industrial staple gun, except they were made out of this bright yellow plastic. When
you pulled the trigger, those chunks came out in a solid stream. If you got really good with one,
you could shoot around corners; just kind of bounce them off a convenient surface. Up close,
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they'd eventually cut a sheet of plywood in half, if you kept on shooting, and they left major
bruises out to about thirty yards. The theory was, you didn't always encounter that many armed
intruders, and a chunker was a lot less likely to injure the client or the client's property. If
you did encounter an armed intruder, you had the Glock. Although the intruder was probably running
caseless through a floating breech-not part of the theory. Nor was it part of the theory that
seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and were thereby both inhumanly
fast and clinically psychotic.
There had been a lot of dancer in Knoxville, and some of it had gotten Rydell suspended. He'd
crawled into an apartment where a machinist named Kenneth Turvey was holding his girlfriend, two
little kids, and demanding to speak to the president. Turvey was white, skinny, hadn't bathed in a
month, and had the Last Supper tattooed on his chest. It was a very fresh tattoo; it hadn't even
scabbed over. Through a film of drying blood, Rydell could see that Jesus didn't have any face.
Neither did any of the Apostles.
'Damn it,' Turvey said, when he saw Rydell. 'I just wanna speak to the president.' He was sitting
cross-legged, naked, on his girlfriend's couch. He had something like a piece of pipe across his
lap, all wrapped with tape.
'We're trying to get her for you,' Rydell said. 'We're sorry it's taking so long, hut we have to
go through channels.'
9
'God damn it,' Turvey said wearily, 'doesn't nobody understand I'm on a mission from God?' He
didn't sound particularly angry, just tired and put out. Rydell could see the girlfriend through
the open door of the apartment's single bedroom. She was on her back, on the floor, and one of her
legs looked broken. He couldn't see her face. She wasn't moving at all. Where were the kids?
'What is that thing you got there?' Rydell asked, indicating the object across Turvey's lap.
'It's a gun,' Turvey said, 'and it's why I gotta talk to the president.'
'Never seen a gun like that,' Rydell allowed. 'What's it shoot?'
'Grapefruit cans,' Turvey said. 'Fulla concrete.'
'No shit?'
'Watch,' Turvey said, and brought the thing to his shoulder. It had a sort of breech, very
intricately machined, a trigger-thing like part of a pair of vise-grip pliers, and a couple of
flexible tubes. These latter ran down, Rydell saw, to a great big canister of gas, the kind you'd
need a hand truck to move, which lay on the floor beside the couch.
There on his knees, on the girlfriend's dusty polyester carpet, he'd watched that muzzle swing
past. It was big enough to put your fist down. He watched as Turvey took aim, back through the
open bedroom door, at the closet.
'Turvey,' he heard himself say, 'where's the goddamn kids?'
Turvey moved the vise-grip handle and punched a hole the size of a fruit-juice can through the
closet door. The kids were in there. They must've screamed, though Rydell couldn't remember
hearing it. Rydell's lawyer later argued that he was not only deaf at this point, hut in a state
of sonically induced catalepsy. Turvey's invention was only a few decihels short of what you got
with a SWAT stun-grenade. But Rydell couldn't remember. He couldn't rememher shooting Kenneth
Turvey in
the head, either, or anything else at all until he woke up in the hospital. There was a woman
there from Cops in Trouble, which had been Rydell's father's favorite show, but she said she
couldn't actually talk to him until she'd spoken with his agent. Rydell said he didn't have one.
She said she knew that, but one was going to call him.
Rydell lay there thinking about all the times he and his father had watched Cops in Trouble. 'What
kind of trouble we talking here?' he finally asked.
The woman just smiled. 'Whatever, Berry, it'll probably be adequate.'
He squinted up at her. She was sort of good-looking. 'What's your name?'
'Karen Mendelsohn.' She didn't look like she was from Knoxville, or even Memphis.
'You from Cops in Trouble?'
'Yes.'
'What you do for 'em?'
'I'm a lawyer,' she said. Rydell couldn't recall ever actually having met one before, but after
that he wound up meeting lots more.
Gunhead's displays were featureless slabs of liquid crystal; they woke when Rydell inserted the
key, typed the security code, and ran a basic systems check. The cameras under the rear bumper
were his favorites; they made parking really easy; you could see exactly where you were backing
up. The downlink from the Death Star wouldn't work while he was still in the car wash, too much
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steel in the building, but it was Sublett's job to keep track of all that with an ear-bead.
There was a notice posted in the staff room at IntenSecure, telling you it was company policy not
to call it that, the Death Star, but everybody did anyway. The LAPD called it that themselves.
Officially it was the Southern California (icosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite.
II
Watching the dashboard screens, Rydell backed carefully out of the building. Gunhead's twin
ceramic engines were new enough to still be relatively quiet; Rydell could hear the tires squish
over the wet concrete floor.
Sublett was waiting outside, his silver eyes reflecting the red of passing taillights. Behind him,
the sun was setting, the sky's colors bespeaking more than the usual cocktail of additives. He
stepped back as Rydell reversed past him, anxious to avoid the least droplet of spray from the
tires. Rydell was anxious too; he didn't want to have to haul the Texan to Cedars again if his
allergies kicked up.
Rydell waited as Sublett pulled on a pair of disposable surgical gloves.
'Howdy,' Sublett said, climbing into his seat. He closed his door and began to remove the gloves,
gingerly peeling them into a Ziploc Baggie.
'Don't get any on you,' Rydell said, watching the care with which Sublett treated the gloves.
'Go ahead, laugh,' Sublett said mildly. He took out a pack of hypo-allergenic gum and popped a
piece from its bubble. 'How's ol' Gunhead?'
Rydell scanned the displays, satisfied. 'Not too shabby.'
'Hope we don't have to respond to any damn' stealth houses tonight,' Sublett said, chewing.
Stealth houses, so-called, were on Sublett's personal list of bad calls. He said the air in them
was toxic. Rydell didn't think it made any sense, but he was tired of arguing about it. Stealth
houses were bigger than most regular houses, cost more, and Rydell figured the owners would pay
plenty to keep the air clean. Sublett maintained that anybody who built a stealth house was
paranoid to begin with, would always keep the place locked up too tight, no air circulation, and
you'd get that had toxic buildup.
If there'd been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn't known about them. He thought it was
an L.A. thing.
Ii
Sublett, who'd worked for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly on day patrol in Venice, had
been the first person to even mention them to Rydell. When Rydell finally got to answer a call to
one, he couldn't believe the place; it just went down and down, dug in beneath something that
looked almost, but not quite, like a bombed-out drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs
inside, white plaster, Turkish carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like he'd never
seen before. But it was some kind of tricky call; domestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the
husband hit the wife, the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just a glitch.
But it couldn't really be a glitch, because someone had had to hit the button, and there hadn't
been any response to the password call that came back to them three-point-eight seconds later. She
must've messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then hit the button. He'd been been riding with
'Big George' Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) hadn't liked it
either. 'You see these people, they're subscribers, man; nobody bleeding, you get your ass out,
okay?' Big George had said, after. But Rydell kept remembering a tension around the woman's eyes,
how she held the collar of the big white robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a matching
robe but with thick hairy legs and expensive glasses. There'd been something wrong there but he'd
never know what. Not any more than he'd ever understand how their lives really worked, lives that
looked like what you saw on tv but weren't.
L.A. was full of mysteries, when you looked at it that way. No bottom to it.
He'd come to like driving through it, though. Not when he had to get anywhere in particular, but
just cruising with Gunhead was okay. Now he was turning onto La Cienega and the little green
cursor on the clash was doing the same.
'Forbidden Zone,' Suhlett said. 'Herve Villechaize, Susan I yrell, Marie-Pascal Elfman, Viva.'
'3
'Viva?' Rydell asked. 'Viva what?' 'Viva. Actress.'
'When'd they make that?'
'1980.'
'I wasn't born yet.'
'Time on tv's all the same time, Rydell.'
'Man, I thought you were trying to get over your upbringing and all.' Rydell de-mirrored the door-
window to better watch a redheaded girl pass him in a pink Daihatsu Sneaker with the top off.
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'Anyway, I never saw that one.' It was just that hour of evening when women in cars looked about
as good, in Los Angeles, as anything ever did. The surgeon general was trying to outlaw
convertibles; said they contributed to the skin-cancer rate.
'End game. Al Cliver, Moira Chen, George Eastman, Gordon Mitchell. 1985.'
'Well, I was two,' Rydell said, 'but I didn't see that one either.'
Sublett fell silent. Rydell felt sorry for him; the Texan really didn't know any other way to
start a conversation, and his folks back home in the trailer-camp would've seen all those films
and more.
'Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'
Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'
'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay
phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows
they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or
something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears
these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'
Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'
'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep.'
Sublett opened his eyes. 'Who was in it?'
'Got me.'
Sublett's blank silver eyes widened in disbelief. 'Jesus, Berry, you shouldn't oughta watch tv,
not unless you're gonna pay it attention.'
He wasn't in the hospital very long, after he shot Kenneth Turvey; barely two days. His lawyer,
Aaron Pursley himself, made the case that they should've kept him in there longer, the better to
assess the extent of his post-traumatic shock. But Rydell hated hospitals and anyway he didn't
feel too bad; he just couldn't recall exactly what had happened. And he had Karen Mendelsohn to
help him out with things, and his new agent, Wellington Ma, to deal with the other people from
Cops in Trouble, not one of them as nice as Karen, who had long brown hair. Wellington Ma was
Chinese, lived in Los Angeles, and Karen said his father had been in the Big Circle gang-though
she advised Rydell not to bring it up.
Wellington Ma's business card was a rectangular slice of pink synthetic quartz, laser-engraved
with his name, 'The Ma-Mariano Agency,' an address on Beverly Boulevard, and all kinds of numbers
and e-mail addresses. It arrived by GlobEx in its own little gray suede envelope while Rydell was
still in the hospital.
'Looks like you could cut yourself on it,' Rydell said.
'You could, many no doubt have,' said Karen Mendelsohn, 'and if you put it in your wallet and sit
down, it shatters.'
'Then what's the point of it?'
'You're supposed to take very good care of it. You won't get another.'
Rydell never actually did meet Wellington Ma, at least not 'til quite a while later, but Karen
would bring in a little briefcase with a pair of eyephones on a wire and Rydell could talk with
him iii his office in LA. It was the sharpest tele
Is
presence rig Rydell had ever used, and it really did look just like he was right there. He could
see out the window to where there was this lopsided pyramid the color of a Noxzema jar. He asked
Wellington Ma what that was and Ma said it was the old Design Center, but currently it was a
discount mall, and Rydell could go there when he came to L.A., which was going to be soon.
Turvey's girlfriend, Jenni-Rae Cline, was bringing an intricately interlocking set of separate
actions against Rydell, the Department, the City of Knoxville, and the company in Singapore that
owned her apartment building. About twenty million in total.
Rydell, having become a cop in trouble, was glad to find that Cops in Trouble was right there for
him. They'd hired Aaron Pursley, for starters, and of course Rydell knew who he was from the show.
He had that gray hair, those blue eyes, that nose you could split kindling with, and wore jeans,
Tony Lama boots, and plain white oxford-cloth pima cotton cowboy business shirts with Navajo-
silver bob-ties. He was famous and he defended cops like Rydell from people like Turvey's
girlfriend and her lawyer.
Jenni-Rae Cline's lawyer maintained that Rydell shouldn't have been in her apartment at all, that
he'd endangered her life and her children's by so doing, and that he'd killed Kenneth Turvey in
the process, Mr. Turvey being described as a skilled craftsman, a steady worker, a loving father-
figure for little Rambo and Kelly, a born-again Christian, a recovering addict to 4-Thiobuscaline,
and the family's sole means of support.
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'Recovering?' Rydell asked Karen Mendelsohn in his room in the airport Executive Suites. She'd
just shown him the fax from Jenni-Rae's lawyer.
'Apparently he'd been to a meeting that very day,' Karen said.
'What did he do there?' Rydell asked, remembering the Last Supper in drying blood.
16
'According to our witnesses, he openly horned a tablespoon of his substance of choice, took the
podium by force, and delivered a thirty-minute rant on President Milibank's pantyhose and the
assumed current state of her genitalia. He then exposed himself, masturbated but did not
ejaculate, and left the basement of the First Baptist Church.'
'Jesus,' Rydell said. 'And this was at one of those drug meetings, like A.A.?'
'It was,' Karen Mendelsohn said, 'though apparently Turvey's performance has triggered an
unfortunate sequence of relapses. We'll send in a team of counselors, of course, to work with
those who were at the meeting.'
'That's nice,' Rydell said.
'Look good in court,' she said, 'in the unlikely event we ever get there.'
'He wasn't "recovering",' Rydell said. 'Hadn't even recovered from the last bunch he jammed up his
nose.'
'Apparently true,' she said. 'But he was also a member of Adult Survivors of Satanism, and they
are starting to take an interest in this case. Therefore, both Mr. Pursley and Mr. Ma feel it best
we coast it but soon, Berry. You and me.'
'But what about the court stuff?'
'You're on suspension from the Department, you haven't been charged with anything yet, and your
lawyer's name is Aaron-with-two-a's Pursley. You're out of here, Berry.'
'To L.A.?'
'None other.'
Rydell looked at her. He thought about Los Angeles on television. 'Will I like it?'
'At first,' she said. 'At first, it'll probably like you. I know Ido.'
Which was how he wound up going to bed with a lawyer- one who smelled like a million dollars,
talked dirty, slid all around, and wore underwear from Milan, which was in Italy.
'7
'The Kill-Fix. Cyrinda Burdette, Gudrun Weaver, Dean Mitchell, Shinobu Sakamaki. 1997.'
'Never saw it,' Rydebb said, sucking the last of his grande decaf cold capp-with-an-extra-shot
from the milky ice at the bottom of his plastic thermos cup.
'Mama saw Cyrinda Burdette. In this mall over by Waco. Got her autograph, too. Kept it up on the
set with the prayer-hankies and her hologram of the Reverend Wayne Falbon. She had a prayer-hanky
for every damn thing. One for the rent, one to keep the AIDS off, the TB...'
'Yeah? How'd she use 'em?'
'Kept 'em on top of the set,' Sublett explained, and finished the inch of quadruple-distilled
water left in the skinny translucent bottle. There was only one place along this part of Sunset
sold the stuff, but Rydell didn't mind; it was next to a take-out coffee-bar, and they could park
in the lot on the corner. Fellow who ran the lot always seemed kind of glad to see them.
'Prayer-hanky won't keep any AIDS off,' Rydell said. 'Get yourself vaccinated, like anybody else.
Get your momma vaccinated, too.' Through the de-mirrored window, Rydell could see a street-shrine
to J. D. Shapely, up against the concrete wall that was all that was left of the building that had
stood there once. You saw a lot of them in West Hollywood. Somebody had sprayed SHAPELY WAS A COCK-
SUCKING FAGGOT in bright pink paint, the letters three feet high, and then a big pink heart. Below
that, stuck to the wall, were postcards of Shapely and photographs of people who must've died. God
only knew how many millions had. On the pavement at the base of the wall were dead flowers, stubs
of candles, other stuff. Something about the postcards gave Rydell the creeps; they made the guy
look like a cross between Elvis and some kind of Catholic saint, skinny and with his eyes too big.
He turned to Suhlett. 'Man, you still haven't got your ass
i8
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 bulishit anyway, didn't
you, otherwise why'd you come out here?' He put Gunhead into gear and eased over into the Sunset
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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
'9
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
2.0
MENDELSOHN in 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 trafficioop.
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 QTips. 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
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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 METRO sign, and
stepping around them.
21
'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 Rydelb
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, talk ing 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.
And did Japanese women ever have that kind of long curly hair? And hadn't it looked like the
shadowed darkness of her bush had been shaved into something like an exclamation point?
He'd wound up buying Sublett four packs of the special gum at an all-night Russian pharmacy on
Wilshire, amazed at what the stuff cost him.
He'd seen other things, too, up the canyons, particularly when he'd drawn a shift on deep
graveyard. Mostly fires, small ones, where fires couldn't be. And lights in the sky, sometimes,
but Sublett was so full of trailer-camp contactee shit that if Rydell saw a light now, driving, he
knew better than to mention it.
But sometimes, when he was up there, he'd think about her. He knew he didn't know what she was,
and in some funny way he didn't even care if she'd been human or not. But he hadn't ever felt like
she was bad, just different.
2.3
So now he just drove, shooting the shit with Sublett, on the night that would turn out to be his
very last night on patrol with IntenSecure. No moon, but a rare clear sky with a few stars
showing. Five minutes to their first house check, then they'd be swinging back toward Beverly
Hills.
They were talking about this chain of Japanese gyms called Body Hammer. Body Hammer didn't offer
much in the way of traditional gym culture; in fact they went as far as possible in the opposite
direction, catering mostly to kids who liked the idea of being injected with Brazilian fetal
tissue and having their skeletons reinforced with what the ads called 'performance materials.'
Sublett said it was the Devil's work.
Rydell said it was a Tokyo franchise operation.
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Gunhead said: 'Multiple homicide, hostage-taking in progress, may involve subscriber's minor
children. Benedict Canyon. You have IntenSecure authorization to employ deadly, repeat, deadly
force.'
And the dash lit up like an old-time video arcade.
The way it had worked out, Rydell hadn't actually had time to get used to Karen Mendelsohn,
business-class seats, or any of that stuff.
Karen lived, umpteen floors up, in Century City II, aka the Blob, which looked sort of like a
streamlined, semi-transparent green tit and was the third-tallest structure in the L.A. Basin.
When the light was right, you could see almost clear through it, and make out the three giant
struts that held it up, each one so big around you could stuff an ordinary skyscraper up it with
room to spare. There were elevators up through these tripod-things, and they ran at an angle;
Rydell hadn't had time to get used to that either.
The tit had a carefully corroded copper nipple, like one of those Chinese hats, that could've
covered a couple of football fields. That was where Karen's apartment was, under there,
along with an equally pricey hundred others, a tennis club, bars and restaurants, and a mall you
had to pay to join before you could shop there. She was right out on the edge, with big curved
windows set into the green wall.
Everything in there was different shades of white, except for her clothes, which were always
black, her suitcases, which were black, too, and the big terry robes she liked to wear, which were
the color of dry oatmeal.
Karen said it was Aggressive Retro Seventies and she was getting a little tired of it. Rydell saw
how she could be, but figured it might not be polite to say so.
The network had gotten him a room in a West Hollywood hotel that looked more like a regular condo-
building, but he never did spend much time there. Until the Pooky Bear thing broke in Ohio, he'd
mostly been up at Karen's.
The discovery of the first thirty-five Pooky Bear victims pretty much put paid to Rydell's career
as a cop in trouble. It hadn't helped that the officers who'd first reached the scene, Sgt. China
Valdez and Cpl. Norma Pierce, were easily the two best-looking women on the whole Cincinnati force
('balls-out telegenic,' one of the production assistants had said, though Rydell thought it
sounded weird under the circumstances). Then the count began to rise, ultimately going right off
any known or established serial-killing scale. Then it was revealed that all the victims were
children. Then Sgt. Valdez went post-traumatic in stone bugfuck fashion, walking into a downtown
tavern and clipping both kneecaps off a known pedophile- this amazingly repulsive character,
nickname of Jellybeans, who had absolutely no connection with the Pooky Bear murders.
Aaron Pursley was already Learing it back to Cincinnati in a plane that had no metal in it
whatsoever, Karen had locked the goggles across her eyes and was talking nonstop to at least six
people at once, and Rydell was sitting on the edge of her big white bed, starting to get the idea
that something had changed.
2.5
When she finally took the goggles off, she just sat there, staring at a white painting on a white
wall.
'They got suspects?' Rydell asked.
Karen looked over at him like she'd never seen him before.
'Suspects? They've got confessions already . . .' It struck Rydell how old she looked right then,
and he wondered how old she actually was. She got up and walked out of the room.
She came back five minutes later in a fresh black outfit. 'Pack. I can't have you here now.' Then
she was gone, no kiss, no goodbye, and that was that.
He got up, put a television on, and saw the Pooky Bear killers for the first time. All three of
them. They looked, he thought, pretty much like everybody else, which is how people who do that
kind of shit usually do look on television.
He was sitting there in one of her oatmeal robes when a pair of rentacops let themselves in
without knocking. Their uniforms were black and they were wearing the same kind of black high-top
SWAT-trainers that Rydell had worn on patrol in Knoxville, the ones with the Kevlar insoles in
case somebody snuck up and tried to shoot you in the bottom of the foot.
One of them was eating an apple. The other one had a stun-stick in his hand.
'Hey, pal,' the first one said, around a mouthful of apple, 'we gotta show you out.'
'I had a pair of shoes like that,' Rydell said. 'Made in Portland, Oregon. Two hundred ninety-nine
dollars out at CostCo.'
The one with the stick grinned. 'You gonna get packing now?'
So Rydell did, picking up anything that wasn't black, white, or oatmeal and tossing it into his
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file:///F|/rah/William%20Gibson/Virtual%20Light.txtVirtualLight1TheluminousfleshofgiantsThecourierpresseshisforeheadagainstlayersofglass,argon,high-im\pactplastic.Hewatchesagunshiptraversethecity'smiddledistancelikeahuntingwasp,deaths\lungbeneathitsthoraxinasmoothblackpod.Hoursearlier,missileshavefa...

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