Virtual light b-1 Page 11

  She looked at him. 'That's right.'

  'Well,' he said, digging his fingers into the black foam, 'what you scared of?'

  'Scared they'll come up to Skinner's and find 'em.'

  'Find what?'

  'These glasses.'

  'Spy, baby? Shot? Looking, like Alice 'n' all?' He drummed his fingers on the black foam.

  'These black glasses. Like sunglasses, but you can't see through 'em.'

  Sammy Sal tilted his beautiful head to one side. 'What's that mean?'

  'They're just black.'

  'Sunglasses?'

  'Yeah. But just black.'

  'Huh,' he said, 'you had been fucking the clients, but only just the cute ones, like me, you'd know what those are. Tell you don't have that many upscale boyfriends, pardon me. You date you some architects, some brain-surgeons, you'd know what those are.' His hand came up, forefinger flicking the corroded ball-chain that dangled from the zip.tab at the neck of Skinner's jacket. 'Those VL glasses. Virtual light.'

  She'd heard of it, but she wasn't sure what it was. 'They expensive, Sammy Sal?'

  'Shit, yes. 'Bout as much as a Japanese car. Not all that much more, though. Got these little EMP-drivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct. Friend of mine, he'd bring a pair home from the office where he worked. Landscape architects.

  Put 'em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that. . .'

  'But they're solid black.'

  'Not if you turn 'em on, they aren't. Turn 'em on, they don't even look like sunglasses. Just make you look, I dunno, serious.' He grinned at her. 'You look too damn' serious anyway. That your problem.'

  She shivered. 'Come back up to Skinner's with me, Sammy. Okay?' 'I don't like heights, much,' he said. 'That little box blow right off the top of that hridge, one night.'

  'Please, Sammy? This thing's got me tweaking. Be okay, riding with you, but I stop and I start thinking about it, I'm scared I'm gonna freeze up. What'll I do? Maybe I get there and it's the cops? What'll Skinner say, the cops come up there? Maybe I go in to work tomorrow and Bunny cans me. What'll Ido?'

  Sammy Sal gave her the look he'd given her the night she'd asked him to get her on at Allied. Then he grinned. Mean and funny. All those sharp white teeth. 'Keep it between your legs, then. Come on, you try to keep up.'

  He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-Rimz flaring neonwhite when he came down pumping. He must have thumbed Play then, because she caught the bass throbbing as she came after him through the traffic.

  14 Loveless

  'You want another beer, honey?'

  The woman behind the bar had an intricate black tracery along either side of her shaven skull, down to what Yamazaki took to be her natural hairline. The tattoo's style combined Celtic knots and cartoon lightning-bolts. Her hair, above it, was like the pelt of some nocturnal animal that had fed on peroxide and Vaseline. Her left ear had been randomly pierced, perhaps a dozen times, by a single length of fine steel wire. Ordinarily Yamazaki found this sort of display quite interesting, but now he was lost in composition, his notebook open before him.

  'No,' he said, 'thank you.'

  'Don't wanna get fucked up, or what?' Her tone perfectly cheerful. He looked up from the notebook. She was waiting.

  'Yes?' 'You wanna sit here, you gotta buy something.'

  'Beer, please.'

  'Same?'

  'Yes, please.'

  She opened a bottle of Mexican beer, fragments of ice sliding down the side as she put it down on the bar in front of him, and moved on to the customer to his left. Yamazaki returned to his notebook.

  Skinner has tried repeatedly to convey that there is no agenda here whatever, no underlying structure. Only the bones, the bridge, the Thomasson itself. When the Little Grande came, it was not Godzilla. Indeed, there is no precisely equivalent myth in this place and culture (though this is perhaps not equally true of Los Angeles). The Bomb, so long awaited, is gone. In its place came these plagues, the slowest of cataclysms. But when Godzilla came at last to Tokyo, we were foundering in denial and profound despair. In all truth, we welcomed the most appalling destruction. Sensing, even as we mourned our dead, that we were again presented with the most astonishing of opportunities.

  'That's real nice,' the man to his left said, placing his left hand on Yamazaki's notebook. 'That's gotta be Japanese, it's so nice.' Yamazaki looked up, smiling uncertainly, into eyes of a most peculiar emptiness. Bright, focused, yet somehow flat.

  'From Japan, yes,' Yamazaki said. The hand withdrew slowly, caressingly, from his notebook.

  'Loveless,' the man said.

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Loveless. My name.'

  'Yamazaki.'

  The eyes, very pale and wide-set, were the eyes of something watching from beneath still water. 'Yeah. Figured it was something like that.' An easy smile, pointed with archaic gold.

  'Yes? Like?'

  'Something Japanese. Something 'zaki, something 'zuki. Some shit like that.' The smile growing somehow sharper. 'Drink up your Corona there, Mr. Yamazuki.' The stranger's hand, closing hard around his wrist. 'Gettin' warm, huh?'

  15 In 1015

  There was a product called Kil'Z that Rydell had gotten to know at the Academy. It smelled, but faintly, of some ancient hair-tonic, flowery and cool, and you used it in situations where considerable bodily fluids had been spilled. It was an anti-viral agent, capable of nuking HIV's i through ~, Crimean-Congo, Mokola fever, Tarzana Dengue, and the Kansas City flu.

  He smelled it now, as the IntenSecure man used a blackanodyzed passkey to open the door into 1015.

  'We'll be sure to lock it up when we go,' Warbaby said, touching the brim of his hat with his index finger. The IntenSecure man hesitated, then said, 'Yessir. Anything else you want?'

  'No,' Warbaby said, and went into the room, Freddie on his heels. Rydell decided the thing for him to do was follow them in. He did, closing the door in the IntenSecure man's face. Dark. The curtains drawn. Smell of Kil'Z. The lights came on.

  Freddie's hand on the switch. Warbaby staring at a lighter patch of the brick-colored carpet, the place where the bed must've been.

  Rydell glanced around. Old-fashioned, expensive-looking. Clubby, sort of. The walls covered in some kind of shiny, white-and-green striped stuff like silk. Polished wooden furniture. Chairs upholstered mossy green. A big brass lamp with a dark green shade. A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. 'Currier & Ives,' it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse. Then he saw a round, brownish-purple splotch of dried blood on the glass. It had crackled up, the way mud does in a summer creek bed, but tiny. Hadn't had any of that Kil'Z on it, either, by the look of it. He stepped back.

  Freddie, in his big shorts and the shirt with the pictures of pistols, had settled into one of the green chairs and was opening his laptop. Rydell watched him reel out a little black cable and pop it into the jack beside the telephone. He wondered if

  Freddie's legs got cold, wearing shorts up here in November. He'd noticed that some black people were so far into fashion, they'd wear clothes like there wasn't any such thing as weather.

  Warbaby just stared at the place where the bed had been, looking sad as ever. 'Well?' he said.

  'I'm gettin' it, I'm gettin' it,' Freddie said, twiddling a little ball on his laptop.

  Warbaby grunted. Watching him, it looked to Rydell as though the lenses of his black-framed glasses winked black for a second. Trick of the light. Then Rydell got this funny feeling, because Warbaby just looked right through him, his traveling gaze fixed on some moving something so keenly that Rydell himself was turning to look-at nothing.

  He looked back at Warbaby. Warbaby's cane came up, pointing at the space where the bed would have been, then swung back down
to the carpet. Warbaby sighed.

  'Want the site-data from SFPD now?' Freddie asked.

  Warbaby grunted. His eyes were darting from side to side. Rydell thought of tv documentaries about voodoo, the priests' eyes rolling when the gods got into them.

  Freddie twirled the trackball under his finger. 'Prints, hair, skin-flakes . . . You know what a hotel room is.'

  Rydell couldn't stand it. He stepped in front of Warbaby and looked him in the eye. 'What the hell you doing?'

  Warbaby saw him. Gave him a slow sad smile and removed his glasses. Took a big, navy blue silk handkerchief from the side pocket of his long coat and polished the glasses. He handed them to Rydell. 'Put them on.'

  Rydell looked down at the glasses and saw that the lenses were black now.

  'Go on,' Warbaby said.

  Rydell noticed the weight as he slid them on. Pitch black. Then there was a stutter of soft fuzzy ball-lightning, like what you saw when you rubbed your eyes in the dark, and he was looking at Warbaby. Just behind Warbaby, hung on some invisible wall, were words, numbers, bright yellow. They came into focus as he looked at them, somehow losing Warbaby, and he saw that they were forensic stats.

  'Or,' Freddie said, 'you can just be here now-'

  And the bed was back, sodden with blood, the man's soft, heavy corpse splayed out like a frog. That thing beneath his chin, blue-black, bulbous.

  Rydell's stomach heaved, bile rose in his throat, and then a naked woman rolled up from another bed, in a different room, her hair like silver in some impossible moonlight— Rydell yanked the glasses off. Freddie lay back in the chair, shaking with silent laughter, his laptop across his knees. 'Man,' he managed, 'you oughta seen the look you had! Put parta the guy's porno on there from Arkady's evidence report…'

  'Freddie,' Warbaby said, 'are you all that anxious to be looking for work?'

  'Nossir, Mr. Warbaby.'

  'I can be hard, Freddie. You know that.'

  'Yessir.' Freddie sounded worried now.

  'A man died in this room. Someone bent over him on this bed,' he gestured at the bed that wasn't there, 'cut him a new smile, and pulled his tongue out through it. That isn't a casual homicide. You don't learn those kinds of tricks with anatomy from watching television, Freddie.' He held out his hand to Rydell. Rydell gave him the glasses. Their lenses were black again.

  Freddie swallowed. 'Yessir, Mr. Warbaby. Sorry.'

  'How'd you do that?' Rydell asked.

  Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on. They were clear now. 'There are drivers in the frames and lenses. They affect the nerves directly.'

  'It's a virtual light display,' Freddie said, eager to change the subject. 'Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.'

  'Telepresence,' Rydell said.

  'Naw,' Freddie said, 'that's light. That's photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn't work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn't have eyes, optic nerve's okay, he can see the input. That's why they built the first ones. For blind people.'

  Rydell went to the drapes, pulled them apart, looked down into some night street in this other city. People walking there, a few.

  'Freddie,' Warbaby said, 'flip me that Washington girl off the decrypted IntenSecure feed. The one works for Allied Messenger Service.'

  Freddie nodded, did something with his computer.

  'Yes,' Warbaby said, gazing at something only he could see, 'it's possible. Entirely possible. Rydell,' and he removed the glasses, 'you have a look.' Rydell let the drapes fall back, went to Warbaby, took the glasses, put them on. Somehow he felt it would be a mistake to hesitate, even if it meant having to look at the dead guy again.

  Black into color into full face and profile of this girl. Fingerprints. Image of her right retina blown up to the size of her head. Stats. WASHINGTON, CIIEVETTE-MARII.. Big gray eyes, long straight nose, a little grin for the camera. I)ark hair cut short and spikey, except for this crazy ponytail stuck up from the crown of her head.

  'Well,' Warbaby asked, 'what do you think?'

  Rydell couldn't figure what he was being asked. Finally he just said 'Cute.'

  He heard Freddie snort, like that was a dumb thing to say.

  But Warbaby said 'Good. That way you remember.'

  Sammy Sal lost her, where Bryant stuttered out in that jackstraw tumble of concrete tank-traps. Big as he was, he had no equal when it came to riding tight; he could take turns that just weren't possible; he could bongo and pull a three-sixty if he had to, and Chevette had seen him do it on a bet. But she had a good idea where she'd find him.

  She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She'd seen pictures of what it had looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she'd never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams.

  She skidded past a fish-wagon, losing traction in shaved ice, in gray guts the gulls would fight over in the morning. The fish man yelled something after her, but she didn't catch it.

  She rode on, between stalls and stands and the evening's commerce, looking for Sammy Sal.

  Found him where she thought she would, leaning on his bars beside an espresso wagon, not even breathing hard. A Mongolian girl with cheekbones like honey-coated chisels was running him a cup. Chevette bopped the particle-brakes and slid in beside him. 'Thought I'd have time for a short one,' he said, reaching for the tiny cup.

  Her legs ached with trying to keep up with him. 'You

  16 Sunflower

  better,' she said, with a glance toward the bridge, then she gestured to the girl to run her one. She watched the steaming puck of brown grounds thumped out, the fresh scoop, the quick short tamp. The girl swui~g the handle up and twisted the basket back into the machine.

  'You know,' Sammy Sal said, ausing before a first shallow sip, 'you shouldn't have this kind of problem. You don't need to. There's only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they're one kind We're the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore. How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try nt to drip rain on the carpet. And we get by, okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?'

  Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.

  'Crime,' Sammy Sal said, 'sex. Maybe drugs.' He put his cup down on the wagon's plywood counter. 'About covers it.

  'You fuck them,' Chevette said 'You said.'

  Sammy Sal shrugged. 'I like to. Trouble comes down from that, I'm up for it. But you just went and did something, no reason. Reached through the membrane. Let your fingers do the walking. Bad idea.'

  Chevette blew on her coffee. 'I know.'

  'So how you going to deal witi whatever's coming down?'

  'I'm going up to Skinner's room, get those glasses, take 'em up on the roof, and throw 'em over.'

  'Then what?'

  'Then I go on the way I do, 'til somebody turns up.'

  'Then what?'

  'Didn't do it. Don't know shit Never happened.'

  He nodded, slow, hut he was studying her. 'Uh-huh. Maybe. Maybe not. Somebody wants those glasses back, they can lean on you real hard. Anther way to go: we get 'em, ride back over to Allied, tell 'em ~ow it happened.'

  'We?'

  'Uh-huh. I'll go with you.' 'I'll lose my job.'

  'You can get you another job.'

  She drank the little cup off in a gulp. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. 'Job's all I got, Sammy. You know that. You got it for me.'

  'You got a place to sleep, up there. You got that crazy old motherfucker took you in-' 'I feed him, Sammy Sal'

  'You got your ass intact, honey. Some rich man decide to screw you over, 'cause you took his data-
glasses, maybe that ceases to be the case.'

  Chevette put her empty cup down on the counter, dug in the pockets of her jacket. Gave the girl fifteen for the two coffees and a two-dollar tip. Squared her shoulders under Skinner's jacket, the ball-chains rattling. 'No. Once that shit's in the Bay, nobody can prove I did anything.'

  Sammy Sal sighed. 'You're an innocent.'

  It sounded funny, like she didn't know you could use the word that way. 'You coming, Sammy Sal?'

  'What for?'

  'Talk to Skinner. Get between him and his magazines. That's where I left them. Behind his magazines. Then he won't see me get them out. I'll go up on the roof and off them.'

  'Okay,' he said, 'but I say you'll just be fucking up worse.'

  'I'll take the chance, okay?' She dismounted and started wheeling her bike toward the bridge.

  'I guess you will,' Sammy Sal said, but then he was off his bike, too, and pushing it, behind her.

  There'd only ever been three really good, that was to say seriously magic, times in Chevette's life. Oue was the night Sammy Sal had told her he'd tr~ to get her on at Allied, and he had. One was the day she'd paid cash money for her bike at City Wheels, and rode right on out of there. And there'd been the night she first met Lowell at Cognitive Dissidents-if you could count that now as lucky.

  Which was not to say that these were the times she'd been luckiest, because those were all :imes that had been uniformly and life-threateningly shitty, except for the part where the luck cut in.

  She'd been lucky the night she'd gone over the razor-wire and out of the Juvenile Center outside Beaverton, but that had been one deeply shitty night. She had scars on both palms to prove it.

  And she'd been very lucky the time she'd first wandered out onto the bridge, the lower deck, her knees wobbling with a fever she'd picked up on her way down the coast. Everything hurt her: the lights, every color, every sound, her mind pressing out into the world like a swollen ghost. She remembered the loose, flapping sole of her sneaker dragging over the littered deck, how that hurt her, too, and how she had to sit down, finally, everything up and turning, around her, the Korean man running out of his little store to yell at her, get up, get up, not here, not here. And Not Here had seemed like such a totally good idea, she'd gor~e straight there, right over backward, and hadn't even felt her skull slam the pavement.