Zero History Read online

  TITLES BY WILLIAM GIBSON

  Neuromancer

  Count Zero

  Burning Chrome

  Mona Lisa Overdrive

  Virtual Light

  Idoru

  All Tomorrow’s Parties

  Pattern Recognition

  Spook Country

  WILLIAM

  GIBSON

  zero

  history

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons 2010

  First published in Great Britain by Viking 2010

  Copyright © William Gibson Ent. Ltd., 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196570-3

  Contents

  1. CABINET

  2. EDGE CITY

  3. SLUT’S WOOL

  4. PARADOXICAL ANTAGONIST

  5. THIN ON THE GROUND

  6. AFTER THE GYRATORY

  7. A HERF GUN IN FRITH STREET

  8. CURETTAGE

  9. FUCKSTICK

  10. EIGENBLICH

  11. UNPACKING

  12. COMPLIANCE TOOL

  13. MUSKRAT

  14. YELLOW HELMET

  15. THE DROP

  16. HONOR BAR

  17. HOMUNCULI

  18. 140

  19. PRESENCES

  20. AUGMENTED

  21. MINUS ONE

  22. FOLEY

  23. MEREDITH

  24. HUNCH

  25. TINFOIL

  26. MOTHER RUSSIA

  27. JAPANESE BASEBALL

  28. WHITE PEAR TEA

  29. SHIVER

  30. SIGHTING

  31. SECRET MACHINERIES

  32. POST-ACUTE

  33. BURJ

  34. THE ORDER FLOW

  35. DONGLE

  36. VINEGAR AND BROWN PAPER

  37. AJAY

  38. GETTING HOTTER

  39. THE NUMBER

  40. ENIGMA ROTORS

  41. GEAR-QUEER

  42. ELVIS, GRACELAND

  43. ICHINOMIYA

  44. THE VERBALS

  45. SHRAPNEL, SUPERSONIC

  46. TORTOISESHELL AND PINSTRIPES

  47. IN THE CUISINART ATRIUM

  48. SHOTGUN

  49. GREAT MARLBOROUGH

  50. BANK-MONUMENT

  51. SOMEONE

  52. THE MATTER IN GREATER DETAIL

  53. CRICKET

  54. AIR GLOW

  55. MR. WILSON

  56. ALWAYS IS GENIUS

  57. SOMETHING OFF THE SHELF

  58. DOUCHE BAGGAGE

  59. THE ART OF THE THING

  60. RAY

  61. FACIAL RECOGNITION

  62. WAKING

  63. CURLY STAYS, SLOW FOOD

  64. THREAT MANAGEMENT

  65. LEOPARD SKIN IN MINIATURE

  66. ZIP

  67. A CRUSHED MOUSE

  68. HAND-EYE

  69. THE GIFTING SUITE

  70. DAZZLE

  71. THE UGLY T-SHIRT

  72. SMITHFIELD

  73. THE PATCHWORK BOYFRIEND

  74. MAP, TERRITORY

  75. DOWN THE DARKNETS

  76. GONE-AWAY GIRL

  77. GREEN SCREEN

  78. EL LISSITZKY

  79. DUNGEON MASTER

  80. FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE

  81. ON SITE

  82. LONDON EYE

  83. PLEASE GO

  84. NEW ONE

  85. TO GET A HANDLE ON IT

  86. DOILIES

  87. THE OTHER SIDE

  THANKS:

  To Susan Allison,

  my editor

  1. CABINET

  Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city.

  Pearlescent silver, this one. Glyphed in Prussian blue, advertising something German, banking services or business software; a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic fawn.

  “Their money’s heavy,” he said, dropping a loose warm mass of pound coins into her hand. “Buys many whores.” The coins still retained the body heat of the fruit machine from which he’d deftly wrung them, almost in passing, on their way out of the King’s Something.

  “Whose money?”

  “My countrymen’s. Freely given.”

  “I don’t need this.” Trying to hand it back.

  “For the cab.” Giving the driver the address in Portman Square.

  “Oh Reg,” she said, “it wasn’t that bad. I had it in money markets, most of it.”

  “Bad as anything else. Call him.”

  “No.”

  “Call him,” he repeated, wrapped in Japanese herringbone Gore-Tex, multiply flapped and counterintuitively buckled.

  He closed the cab’s door.

  She watched him through the rear window as the cab pulled away. Stout and bearded, he turned now in Greek Street, a few minutes past midnight, to rejoin his stubborn protégé, Clammy of the Bollards. Back to the studio, to take up their lucrative creative struggle.

  She sat back, noticing nothing at all until they passed Selfridges, the driver taking a right.

  The club, only a few years old, was on the north side of Portman Square. Getting out, she paid and generously tipped the driver, anxious to be rid of Inchmale’s winnings.

  Cabinet, so called; of Curiosities, unspoken. Inchmale had become a member shortly after they, the three surviving members of the Curfew, had licensed the rights to “Hard to Be One” to a Chinese automobile manufacturer. Having already produced one Bollards album in Los Angeles, and with Clammy wanting to record the next in London, Inchmale had argued that joining Cabinet would ultimately prove cheaper than a hotel. And it had, she supposed, but only if you were talking about a very expensive hotel.

  She was staying there now as a paying guest. Given the state of money markets, whatever thos
e were, and the conversations she’d been having with her accountant in New York, she knew that she should be looking for more modestly priced accommodations.

  A peculiarly narrow place, however expensive, Cabinet occupied half the vertical mass of an eighteenth-century townhouse, one whose façade reminded her of the face of someone starting to fall asleep on the subway. It shared a richly but soberly paneled foyer with whatever occupied the other, westernmost, half of the building, and she’d formed a vague conviction that this must be a foundation of some kind, perhaps philanthropic in nature, or dedicated to the advancement of peace in the Middle East, however eventual. Something hushed, in any case, as it appeared to have no visitors at all.

  There was nothing, on façade or door, to indicate what that might be, no more than there was anything to indicate that Cabinet was Cabinet.

  She’d seen those famously identical, silver-pelted Icelandic twins in the lounge, the first time she’d gone there, both of them drinking red wine from pint glasses, something Inchmale dubbed an Irish affectation. They weren’t members, he’d made a point of noting. Cabinet’s members, in the performing arts, were somewhat less than stellar, and she assumed that that suited Inchmale just about as well as it suited her.

  It was the decor that had sold Inchmale, he said, and very likely it had been. Both he and it were arguably mad.

  Pushing open the door, through which one might have ridden a horse without having to duck to clear the lintel, she was greeted by Robert, a large and comfortingly chalk-striped young man whose primary task was to mind the entrance without particularly seeming to.

  “Good evening, Miss Henry.”

  “Good evening, Robert.”

  The decorators had kept it down, here, which was to say that they hadn’t really gone publicly, ragingly, batshit insane. There was a huge, ornately carved desk, with something vaguely pornographic going on amid mahogany vines and grape clusters, at which sat one or another of the club’s employees, young men for the most part, often wearing tortoiseshell spectacles of the sort she suspected of having been carved from actual turtles.

  Beyond the desk’s agreeably archaic mulch of paperwork twined a symmetrically opposed pair of marble stairways, leading to the floor above; that floor being bisected, as was everything above this foyer, into twin realms of presumed philanthropic mystery and Cabinet. From the Cabinet side, now, down the stairs with the widdershins twist, cascaded the sound of earnest communal drinking, laughter and loud conversation bouncing sharply off unevenly translucent stone, marbled in shades of aged honey, petroleum jelly, and nicotine. The damaged edges of individual steps had been repaired with tidy rectangular inserts of less inspired stuff, pallid and mundane, which she was careful never to step on.

  A tortoise-framed young man, seated at the desk, passed her the room key without being asked.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Miss Henry.”

  Beyond the archway separating the stairways, the floor plan gave evidence of hesitation. Indicating, she guessed, some awkwardness inherent in the halving of the building’s original purpose. She pressed a worn but regularly polished brass button, to call down the oldest elevator she’d ever seen, even in London. The size of a small, shallow closet, wider than it was deep, it took its time, descending its elongated cage of black-enameled steel.

  To her right, in shadow, illuminated from within by an Edwardian museum fixture, stood a vitrine displaying taxidermy. Game birds, mostly; a pheasant, several quail, others she couldn’t put a name to, all mounted as though caught in motion, crossing a sward of faded billiard-felt. All somewhat the worse for wear, though no more than might be expected for their probable age. Behind them, anthropomorphically upright, forelimbs outstretched in the manner of a cartoon somnambulist, came a moth-eaten ferret. Its teeth, which struck her as unrealistically large, she suspected of being wooden, and painted. Certainly its lips were painted, if not actually rouged, lending it a sinisterly festive air, like someone you’d dread running into at a Christmas party. Inchmale, on first pointing it out to her, had suggested she adopt it as a totem, her spirit beast. He claimed that he already had, subsequently discovering he could magically herniate the disks of unsuspecting music executives at will, causing them to suffer excruciating pain and a profound sense of helplessness.

  The lift arrived. She’d been a guest here long enough to have mastered the intricacies of the articulated steel gate. Resisting an urge to nod to the ferret, she entered and ascended, slowly, to the third floor.

  Here the narrow hallways, walls painted a very dark green, twisted confusingly. The route to her room involved opening several of what she assumed were fire doors, as they were very thick, heavy, and self-closing. The short sections of corridor, between, were hung with small watercolors, landscapes, unpeopled, each one featuring a distant folly. The very same distant folly, she’d noticed, regardless of the scene or region depicted. She refused to give Inchmale the satisfaction he’d derive from her asking about these, so hadn’t. Something too thoroughly liminal about them. Best not addressed. Life sufficiently complicated as it was.

  The key, attached to a weighty brass ferrule sprouting thick soft tassels of braided maroon silk, turned smoothly in the lock’s brick-sized mass. Admitting her to Number Four, and the concentrated impact of Cabinet’s designers’ peculiarity, theatrically revealed when she prodded the mother-of-pearl dot set into an otherwise homely gutta-percha button.

  Too tall, somehow, though she imagined that to be the result of a larger room having been divided, however cunningly. The bathroom, she suspected, might actually be larger than the bedroom, if that weren’t some illusion.

  They’d run with that tallness, employing a white, custom-printed wallpaper, decorated with ornate cartouches in glossy black. These were comprised, if you looked more closely, of enlarged bits of anatomical drawings of bugs. Scimitar mandibles, spiky elongated limbs, the delicate wings (she imagined) of mayflies. The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling. The cage was stacked with books, and fitted, inside, with minimalist Swiss halogen fixtures, each tiny bulb focused on one or another of Number Four’s resident artifacts. And not just prop books, Inchmale had proudly pointed out. Fiction or non-, they all seemed to be about England, and so far she’d read parts of Dame Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and most of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male.

  She took off her coat, putting it on a stuffed, satin-covered hanger in the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed to untie her shoes. The Piblokto Madness bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,” she added. Cabin fever, this culture-bound, arctic condition. Possibly dietary in origin. Linked to vitamin A toxicity. Inchmale was full of this sort of information, never more so than when he was in the studio. Give Clammy a whole hod of vitamin A, she’d suggested, he looks like he could use it.

  Her gaze fell on three unopened brown cartons, stacked to the left of the wardrobe. These contained shrink-wrapped copies of the British edition of a book she’d written in hotel rooms, though none as peculiarly memorable as this one. She’d begun just after the Chinese car commercial money had come in. She’d gone to Staples, West Hollywood, and bought three flimsy Chinese-made folding tables, to lay the manuscript and its many illustrations out on, in her corner suite at the Marmont. That seemed a long time ago, and she didn’t know what she’d do with these copies. The cartons of her copies of the American edition, she now remembered, were still in the luggage room of the Tribeca Grand.