Virtual light b-1 Read online

Remembering the security grunts in the lobby.

  The thing stuck down her pants.

  Down a corridor that opens off this one, she sees the doors of a service elevator spread wide now and welcoming. A Central Asian kid with a paint-splattered steel cart stacked up with flat rectangles that are television screens. He gives her a careful look as she edges in beside him. His face is all cheekbones, bright hooded eyes, his hair shaved up high in one of those near-vertical dos all these guys favor. He has a security badge clipped to the front of his clean gray workshirt and a

  VirtuFax slung around his neck on a red nylon cord.

  'Basement,' Chevette says.

  His fax buzzes. He raises it, pushes the button, peers into the eyepiece. The thing in her bike-pants starts to feel huge. Then he drops the fax back to his chest, blinks at her, and pushes a button marked B-6. The doors rumble shut and Chevette closes her eyes.

  She leans hack against the big quilted pads hung on the walls and wishes she were up in Skinner's room, listening to the cables creak. The floor there's a layer of two-by-fours laid on edge; the very top of the hump of the cable, riding its steel saddle, sticks up through the middle, and Skinner says there are 17,464 strands of wire in that cable. Each one is about as thick as a pencil. You can press your ear against it and hear the whole bridge sing, when the wind's just right.

  The elevator stops at four for no reason at all. Nobody there when the door opens. Chevette wants to press B-6 again but she makes herself wait for the kid with the fax to do it. He does.

  And B-6 is not the garage she so thoroughly wants now, but this maze of hundred-year-old concrete tunnels, floored in cracked asphalt tile, with big old pipes slung in iron brackets along the ceiling. She slips out while he's fiddling with one of the wheels on his cart.

  A century's-worth of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls of broadloom stacked like logs. More people in work clothes, some in kitchen whites, but she's trying for tag-pulling attitude and looks, she hopes, like she's making a delivery.

  She finds a narrow stairway and climbs. ,The air is hot and dead. Motion-sensors click the lights for her at the start of each flight. She feels the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.

  But her bike is there, on B-i, behind a column of nicked concrete.

  'Back off,' it says when she's five feet away. Not loud, like a car, but it sounds like it means it.

  Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging of silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbonwrapped frame makes Chevette's thighs tremble. She slips her left hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat. There's a little double zik as the particle-brakes let go, then she's up and Ofl it.

  It's never felt better, as she pumps up the oil-stained ramp and out of there.

  4 Career opportunities

  Rydell's roommate, Kevin Tarkovsky, wore a bone through his nose and worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.

  Monday morning, when Rydell told him he'd quit his job with IntenSecure, Kevin offered to try to find him something in sales, in the beach-culture line.

  'You got an okay build, basically,' Kevin said, looking at Rydell's bare chest and shoulders. Rydell was still wearing the orange trunks he'd worn when he'd gone to see Hernandez. He'd borrowed them from Kevin. He'd just taken his cast off, deflating it and crumpling it into the five-gallon plastic paint bucket that served as a wastebasket. The bucket had a big self-adhesive daisy on the side. 'You could work out a little more regularly. Arid maybe get some tats. Tribal black-work.'

  'Kevin, I don't know how to surf, wind-surf, anything. Hardly been in the ocean in my life. Couple of times down Tampa Bay.' It was about ten in the morning. Kevin had the day off work.

  'Sales is about providing an experience, Berry. The customer needs information, you provide it. But you give 'em an experience, too,' Kevin tapped his two-inch spindle of smooth white beef-bone by way of illustration. 'Then you sell them a new outfit.'

  'But I don't have a tan.'

  Kevin was the a)proxlmate color and sheen of a pair of mid-brown Cole-Haan loafers that Rydell's aunt had given him for his fifteenth birthday. This had nothing to do with either genetics or exposure to unfiltered sunlight, but was the result of regular injections and a complicated regimen of pills and lotions.

  'Well,' Kevin admitted, 'you would need a tan.'

  Rydell knew that Kevin didn't wind-surf, and never had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved, and Rydell had no doubt that Kevin could provide every bit of information a prospective buyer might desire. And that all-important experience; with his cordovan tan, gym-tuned physique, and that bone through his nose, he got a lot of attention. Mainly from women, though it didn't actually seem to do that much for him.

  What Kevin sold, primarily, was clothing. Expensive kind that supposedly kept the UV and the pollutants in the water off you. He had two whole cartons full of the stuff, stacked in their room's one closet. Rydell, who currently didn't have much in the way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw through there and borrow whatever took his fancy. Which wasn't a lot, as it turned out, because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Gb, black nanopore, or mirrorflex. A few of the jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW ME logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly shabby shape, as Rydell had discovered the last time he'd gone to the farmers market.

  He and Kevin were sharing one of two bedrooms in a sixties house in Mar Vista, which meant Sea View but there wasn't any. Someone had rigged up a couple of sheets of drywall down the middle of the room. On Rydell's side, the drywall was covered with those same big self-adhesive daisies and a collection of souvenir bumper-stickers from places like Magic Mountain, Nissan County, I)isneyland, and Skywalker Park. 1'here were two other people sharing the house, three if you counted the Chinese girl out in the garage (but she had her own bathroom in there).

  Rydell had bought a futon with most of his first month's pay from IntenSecure. He'd bought it at this stall in the market; they were cheaper there, and the stall was called Futon Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty funny. The Futon Mouth girl had explained how you could slip the Metro guy on the platform a twenty, then he'd let you get on the train with the rolled-up futon, which came in a big green plastic sack that reminded Rydebl of a bodybag.

  Lately, waiting to take the cast off, he'd spent a lot of time on that futon, staring up at those bumper-stickers. He wondered if whoever had put them there had actually bothered to go to all those places. Hernandez had once offered him work at Nissan County. IntenSecure had the rentacop franchise there. His parents had honeymooned at Disneyland. Skywalker Park was up in San Francisco; it had been called Golden Gate, before, and he remembered a couple of fairly low-key riots on television when they'd privatized it.

  'You on line to any of the job-search nets, Berry?'

  Rydell shook his head.

  'This one's on me,' Kevin said, passing Rydell the helmet. It wasn't anything like Karen's slick little goggles; just a white plastic rig like kids used for games. 'Put it on. I'll dial for you.'

  'Well,' Rydell said, 'this is nice, Kevin, but you don't have to go to all this trouble.'

  Kevin touched the bone in his nose. 'Well, there's the rent.'

  There was that. Rydell put the helmet on.

  'Now,' Sonya said, just as perky as could be, 'we're showing that you did graduate from this post-secondary training program-'

  'Academy,' Rydell corrected. 'Police.'

  'Yes, Berry, but we're showing that you were then employed for a total of eighteen days, before being placed on suspension.' Sonya looked like a cartoon of a pretty girl. No pores. No texture anywhere. Her teeth were very white and looked like a single unit, something that could be snapped out intact for closer inspection. But not for cleaning, because there was no need; cartoons didn't eat. She had wonderful tits, tho
ugh; she had the tits Rydell would have drawn for her if he'd been a talented cartoonist.

  'Well,' Rydell said, thinking of Turvey, 'I got into some trouble after they assigned me to Patrol.'

  Sonya nodded brightly. 'I see, Berry.' Rydell wondered what she did see. Or what the expert system that used her as a hand-puppet could see. Or how it saw. What did someone like Rydell look bike to an employment agency's computer system? Not like much, he decided.

  'Then you moved to Los Angeles, Berry, and we show ten weeks of employment with the IntenSecure Corporation's residential armed-response branch. Driver with experience of weapons.'

  Rydell thought of the rocket-pods slung under the LAPD chopper. Probably they'd had one of those CHAIN guns in there, too. 'Yep,' he agreed.

  'And you've resigned your position with IntenSecure.'

  'Guess so.'

  Sonya beamed at Rydell as though he'd just admitted, shyly, to a congressional appointment or a post-doctoral degree. 'Well, Berry,' she said, 'let me put my thinking cap on for just a second!' She winked, then closed her big cartoon eyes.

  Jesus, Rydebl thought. He tried to glance sideways, but Kevin's helmet didn't have any peripherals, so there was nothing there. Just Sonya, the empty rectangle of her desk, sketchy details suggesting an office, and the employment agency's logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her look bike the anchorwoman on a channel that only reported very good news.

  Sonya opened her eyes. Her smile became incandescent. 'You're from the South,' she said.

  'Uh-huh.'

  'Plantations, Berry. Magnolias. Tradition. But a certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality. Faulkner.' Fawk? 'Huh?'

  'Nightmare Folk Art, Berry. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.'

  Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last week's People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family.

  'Something for you, Berry?' Kevin looked hopeful.

  'Maybe,' Rydell said. 'This place in Sherman Oaks. I'll call 'em up, check it out.'

  Kevin fiddled with his nose-bone. 'I can give you a lift,' he said.

  There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody car-wrecks and disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an old lady.

  Kevin had let him off at the corner of Sepulveda and he'd walked back two blocks, looking for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had had real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular now, people wanted them put in everywhere.

  Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he must've driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he could count, but these streets looked completely different when you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty spaces behind dirty glass, with a yellowing pile of junk-mail on the floor inside and maybe a puddle of what couldn't be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. You'd pass a couple of those, then a place selling sunglasses for six times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista. The sunglasses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.

  Nightmare Folk Art was like that, sandwiched between a dead hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART-SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters hand-painted all lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But with a couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and one of those little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to

  Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a wide berth; cars like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not to mention hyper-aggressive.

  There was a rentacop looking at him through the armored glass of the door; not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed a pair of pressed chinos from Kevin. They were a little tight in the waist, hut they beat hell out of the orange trunks. He had on a black IntenSecure uniform-shirt with the patches ripped off, his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasn't sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the button. The rentacop buzzed him in.

  'Got an appointment with Justine Cooper,' he said, taking his sunglasses off.

  'With a client,' the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he should've been out on a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and saw a skinny woman with black hair. She was talking to a fat man who had no hair at all. Trying to sell him something, it looked like.

  'I'll wait,' Rydell said.

  The farmer didn't answer. State law said he couldn't have a gun, just the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic holster, but he probably did anyway. One of those little Russian hold-outs that chambered some godawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had the market in Saturday-night specials.

  Rydell looked around. That ol' Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Reverend Fallon-at least that had some kind of spin on it.

  He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasn't good. So he worked his way deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise. There was a whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things, behind glass in faded gilt frames. The wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what Rydell supposed were tombstones, old ones, the lettering worn down so faint you couldn't read it. He paused beside a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickaninny jockey-boys it had been against the law to have on your lawn in Knoxville. The jockey-boys had all been freshly-painted with big, red-lipped, watermelon-eating grins. The bed was spread with a hand-stitched quilt patterned like a Confederate flag. When he looked for a price tag, all he found was a yellow SOLD sticker.

  'Mr. Rydell? May I call you Berry?' Justine Cooper's jaw was so narrow that it looked like she wouldn't have room for the ordinary complement of teeth in there. Her hair was cut short, a polished brown helmet. She wore a couple of dark, flowing things that Rydell supposed were meant to conceal the fact that she was built more or less like a stick-insect. She didn't sound like she was from anywhere south of anywhere, much, and there was a visible tension strung through her, like wires.

  Rydell saw the fat man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deactivate the Range Rover's defenses.

  'Sure.'

  'You're from Knoxville?' He noticed she was breathing deliberately, like she was trying not to hyperventilate.

  'That's right.'

  'You don't have much of an accent.'

  'Well, I wish everybody felt that way.' He smiled, but she didn't smile back.

  'Is your family from Knoxville, Mr. Rydell?'

  Shit, he thought, go ahead, call me Berry. 'My father was, I guess. My mother's peo
ple are from up around Bristol, mostly.'

  Justine Cooper's dark eyes, not showing much white, were looking right at him, hut they didn't seem to be registering anything. He guessed she was somewhere in her forties.

  'Ms. Cooper?'

  She gave a violent start, as though he'd goosed her.

  'Ms. Cooper, what are those wreath-sort-of-things in those old frames there?' Pointing at them.

  'Memorial wreaths. Southwestern Virginia, late nineteenth, early twentieth century.'

  Good, Rydell thought, get her talking about the stock. He walked over to the framed wreaths for a closer look. 'Looks like hair,' he said.

  'It is,' she said. 'What else would it be?'

  'Human hair?'

  'Of course.'

  'You mean like dead people's hair?' He saw now the minute braiding, the hair twisted up into tiny flowerlike knots. It was lusterless and no particular color.

  'Mr. Rydell, I'm afraid that I may have wasted your time.' She moved tentatively in his direction. 'When I spoke with you on the phone, I was under the impression that you might be, well, much more of the South…'

  'How do you mean, Ms. Cooper?'

  'What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.'

  Damn. That talking head in the agency display had been playing this shit back word for word.

  'I don't suppose you've read Faulkner?' She raised one hand to brush at something invisible, something hanging in front of her face.

  There it was again. 'Nope.'

  'No, I didn't think so. I'm hoping to find someone who can help to convey that very darkness, Mr. Rydell. The mind of the South. A fever dream of sensuality.'

  Rydell blinked.

  'But you don't convey that to me. I'm sorry.' It looked like the invisible cobweb had come hack.

  Rydell looked at the rentacop, hut he didn't seem to he listening to any of this. Hell, he seemed to he asleep.

  'Lady,' Rydell said carefully, 'I think you're crazier than a sack full of assholes.'