“‘Us.’”
“Huh,” said Creedmore, absorbing this. “You in an ugly place.”
“Maybe not,” said Rydell. “Matter of witnesses.”
“I hear you,” said Randy Shoats, “but I'd have to talk to my label, see what the lawyers say.”
“Your label,” said Rydell.
“That's right.”
Their beer arrived, brown long necks. Rydell took a sip of his. “Is Creedmore on your label?”
“No,” said Randy Shoats.
Creedmore looked from Shoats to Rydell, back to Shoats. “All I did was poke him one, Randy. I didn't know it had anything to do with our deal.”
“It doesn't,” said Shoats, “long as you're able to go into the studio and record.”
“Goddamn, Rydell,” said Creedmore, “I don't need you comin' in here and fucking things up this way.”
Rydell, who was fumbling under the table with his duffel, getting the fanny pack out and opening it, looked at Creedmore but didn't say anything. He felt the Kraton grips of the ceramic switchblade. “You boys excuse me,” Rydell said, “I've gotta find the can.” He stood up, with the GlobEx box under his arm and the knife in his pocket and went to ask the waitress where the Men's was.
For the second time that day, he found himself seated in but not using a toilet stall, this one considerably more odorous than the last. The plumbing out here was as makeshift as any he'd seen, with bundles of scummy-looking transparent tubing snaking everywhere, and NoCal NOT POTABLE stickers peeling off above the sink taps.
He took the knife out of his pocket and pressed the button, watching the black blade swing out and lock. Then he pressed it again, unlocking the blade, closed it, and opened it again. What was it about switchblades, he wondered, that made you do that? He figured that that was a big part of what made people want them in the first place, something psychological but dumb, monkey-brained. Actually they were kind of pointless, he thought, except in terms of simple convenience. Kids liked them because they looked dramatic, but if somebody saw you open one, then they knew you had a knife, and they'd either run or kick your ass or shoot you, depending on how they felt about it and how they happened to be armed. He supposed there could be very specific situations in which you could just click one open and stick somebody with it, but he didn't think they'd be too frequent.
He had the GlobEx box across his lap. Gingerly, remembering how he'd cut himself back in LA, he used the tip of the blade to slit the gray tape. It went through the stuff like a wire through butter. When he got it to the point where he thought he'd be able to open it, he cautiously folded the knife and put it away. Then he lifted the lid.
At first he thought he was looking at a thermos bottle, one of those expensive brushed-stainless numbers, but as he lifted it out, the heft of it and the general fineness of manufacture told him it was something else.
He turned the thing over, finding an inset rectangular section with a cluster of micro-sockets, but nothing else except a slightly scuffed blue sticker that said FAMOUS ASPECT. He shook it. It neither sloshed nor rattled. Felt solid, and there was no visible lid or other way to open it. He wondered about something like that going through customs, how the GlobEx brokers could explain what it was, whatever that was, and not something full of some kind of contraband. He could think of a dozen kinds of contraband you could stick in something this size and do pretty well if you got it here from Tokyo.
Maybe it did contain drugs, he thought, or something else, and he was being set up. Maybe they'd kick the stall's door in any second and handcuff him for trafficking in proscribed fetal tissue or something.
He sat there. Nothing happened.
He lay the thing across his lap and searched through the fitted foam packing for any message, any clue, something that might explain what this was. But there was nothing, so he put the thing back in its box, exited the stall, washed his hands in non-potable bridge water, and left, intending to leave the bar, and Creedmore and Shoats in it, when he'd picked up his bag, which he'd left them minding.
Now he saw that the woman, that Maryalice, the one from breakfast, had joined them, and that Shoats had found a guitar somewhere, a scuffed old thing with what looked like masking tape patching a long crack down the front. Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.
Creedmore was hunched forward, watching, his wet-look streaked-blonde hair gleaming in the bar gloom, and Rydell saw a look there, an exposed hunger, that made him feel funny, like he was seeing Creedmore want something through the wall of shit he kept up around himself. It made Creedmore seem suddenly very human, and that somehow made him even less attractive.
Now Shoats, absently, produced what looked like the top of an old-fashioned tube of lipstick from his shirt pocket and began to play, using the gold metal tube as a slide. The sounds he coaxed from the guitar caught Rydell in the pit of his stomach, as surely as Creedmore had sucker-punched that security man: they sounded the way rosin feels on your fingers in a poolroom and made Rydell think of tricks with glass rods and the skins of cats. Somewhere inside the fat looping slack of that sound, something gorgeously, nastily tight was being figured out.
The bar, not crowded at this time of day but far from empty, had gone absolutely silent under the scraping, looping expressions of Shoats' guitar, and then Creedmore began to sing, something high and quavering and dirge-like.
And Creedmore sang about a train pulling out of a station, about the two lights on the back of it: how the blue light was his baby.
How the red light was his mind.
25. SUIT
HAVING abandoned sleep, Laney, neither a smoker nor a drinker, has taken to tossing back the contents of very small brown glass bottles of a patent specific for hangover, an archaic but still-popular Japanese remedy that consists of alcohol, caffeine, aspirin, and liquid nicotine. He knows somehow (somehow now he knows those things he needs to know) that this, along with periodic belts of a blue hypnotic cough syrup, is the combination he needs to continue.
Heart pounding, eyes wide to incoming data, hands cold and distant, he plunges resolutely on.
He no longer leaves the carton, relying both on Yamazaki (who brings medicines he refuses) and on a neighbor in the cardboard city, a meticulously groomed madman whom he takes to be an acquaintance of the old man, the builder of models, from whom Laney has leased, or otherwise obtained, this space.
Laney doesn't remember the advent of this mad one, whom he thinks of as the Suit, but that is not something he needs to know.
The Suit is, evidently, a former salaryman. The Suit wears a suit, the one suit, always. It is black, this suit, and was once a very good suit indeed, and it is evident from its condition that the Suit, in whichever carton he dwells, has a steam iron, lint rollers, surely a needle and thread, and the skill to use them. It is unthinkable, for instance, that this suit's buttons would be anything less than firmly and symmetrically attached, or that the Suit's white shirt, luminous in the halogen of the master model-builder's carton, would be anything less than perfectly white.
But it is also obvious that the Suit has seen better days, as indeed must be true of any inhabitant of this place. It is obvious, for instance, that the Suit's shirt is white because he paints it daily, Laney surmises (though he doesn't need to know) with a white product intended for the renovation of athletic shoes. The heavy black frames of his glasses are held together with worryingly precise ligatures of black electrical tape, tape cut to narrow custom widths with one of the old man's X-Acto knives and a miniature steel T-square and then applied with lapidary skill.
The Suit is as tidy, as perfectly squared away, as a man can be. But it has been a very long time, months or perhaps years, since the Suit has bathed. Every inch of visible flesh, of course, is scrubbed and spotless, but when the Suit moves, he exudes an odor quite indescribable, a hig
h thin reek, it seems, of madness and despair. He carries, always, three identical, plastic-wrapped copies of a book about himself. Laney, who cannot read Japanese, has seen that the three copies bear the same smiling photograph of the Suit himself, no doubt in better days, and holding, for some reason, a hockey stick. Laney knows (without knowing how he knows) that this was one of those self-advertising, smugly inspirational autobiographies that certain executives pay to have ghostwritten. But the rest of the Suit's story is occluded, to Laney, and very probably to the Suit as well.
Laney has other things on his mind, but it does occur to him that if it is the Suit he sends out to the drugstore as his more presentable representative, then he, Laney, is in bad shape indeed.
And he is, of course, but that seems, against the flood of data flowing Nile-wide and constantly through him, from inner horizon to inner horizon, scarcely a concern.
Laney is aware now of gifts without name. Of modes of perception that may never have previously existed.
He has, for instance, a directly spatial sense of something very near the totality of the infosphere.
He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet's phrase, like the world hurts God. Within this, he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet. He is very near, he thinks, to a vision in which past and future are one and the same; his present, when he is forced to reinhabit it, seems increasingly arbitrary, its placement upon the time line that is Colin Laney more a matter of convenience than of any absolute now.
All his life Laney has heard talk of the death of history, but confronted with the literal shape of all human knowledge, all human memory, he begins to see the way in which there never really has been any such thing.
No history. Only the shape, and it comprised of lesser shapes, in squirming fractal descent, on down into the infinitely finest of resolutions.
But there is will. “Future” is inherently plural.
And thus he chooses not to sleep and sends the Suit for more Regain, and he notices, as the Suit crawls out beneath the melon-tinted blanket, that the man's ankles are painted, in imitation of black socks, with something resembling asphalt.
26. BAD SECTOR
CHEVETTE bought two chicken sandwiches off a cart on the upper level and went back to find Tessa.
The wind had shifted, then died down, and with it that pre-storm tension, that weird elation.
Storms were serious business on the bridge, and even a gusty day would up the probability of someone getting hurt. In a rising wind the bridge could feel like a ship, anchored rock solid to the bottom of the bay, but straining. The bridge itself never really moved, no matter what (although she supposed it must have, in the quake, which was why it was no longer used for what it had been built for), but everything that had been added subsequently, all of that, with the wrong kind of luck, could move, and did sometimes with disastrous results. So that was what sent people running, when a wind got up, to check turnbuckles, lengths of aircraft cable, dubious webworks of two-by-four fir…
Skinner had taught her all that, more in passing than as formal lessons, though he'd had his way of giving formal lessons. One of those had been about how it had felt to be out here the night the bridge was first occupied by the homeless. What it had felt like to climb and topple the chainlink barriers, erected after the quake caused enough structural damage to suspend traffic.
Not that long ago, as years were measured, but some kind of life-time in terms of concept of place. Skinner had shown her pictures, what the bridge looked like before, but she simply can't imagine that people wouldn't have lived here. He'd also shown her drawings of older bridges too, bridges with shops and houses on them, and it just made sense to her. How could you have a bridge and not live on it?
She loves it here, admits it now in her heart, but there is also something in her, watching, that feels not a part of. A self-consciousness, as though she herself is making the sort of docu Tessa wanted to make, some inner version of all the product Carson coordinated for Real One. Like she's back, but she isn't. Like she's become something else in the meantime, without noticing, and now she's watching herself being here.
She found Tessa squatting in front of a narrow shopfront, BAD SECTOR spray-bombed across a plywood facade that looks as though it's been painted silver with a broom.
Tessa had God's Little Toy, semi-deflated, on her lap and is fiddling with something near the part that holds the camera. “Ballast,” Tessa said, looking up, “always goes first.”
“Here,” Chevette said, holding out a sandwich, “while it's still warm.”
Tessa tucked the Mylar balloon between her knees and accepts the greasy paper packet.
“Got any idea where you want to sleep tonight?” Chevette asked, unwrapping her own sandwich.
“In the van,” Tessa said, around a mouthful. “Got bags, foam.”
“Not where it is,” Chevette told her. “Kinda cannibal, around there.”.
“Where then?”
“If it's still got wheels, there's a place over by one of the piers, foot of Folsom, where people park and sleep. Cops know about it, but they go easy; easier for them if people all park in one place, to camp. But it can be hard to get a place.”
“This is good,” Tessa said to her sandwich, wiping grease from her lips with the back of her hand.
“Bridge chickens. Raise 'em over by Oakland, feed 'em scraps and stuff.” She bit into her sandwich. The bread was a square bun of sourdough white, dusted with flour. She chewed, staring into the window of this Bad Sector place.
Flat square tabs or sheets of plastic, different sizes and colors, baffled her, but then she got it: these were data disks, old magnetic media. And those big, round, flat black plastic things were analogue audio media, a mechanical system. You stuck a needle in a spiral scratch and spun the thing. Biting off more sandwich, she stepped past Tessa for a better look. There were reels of fine steel wire, ragged pink cylinders of wax with faded paper labels, yellowing transparent plastic reels of quarter-inch brown tape…
Looking past the display, she could see a lot of old hardware side by side on shelves, most of it in that grubby beige plastic. Why had people, for the first twenty years of computing, cased everything in that? Anything digital, from that century, it was pretty much guaranteed to be that sad-ass institutional beige, unless they'd wanted it to look more dramatic, more cutting edge, in which case they'd opted for black. But mostly this old stuff was molded in nameless shades of next-to-nothing, nondescript sort-of-tan.
“This is buggered,” sighed Tessa, who'd finished her sandwich and gone back to poking at God's Little Toy with the driver. She stuck out her hand, offering Chevette the driver. “Give it back to him, okay?”
“Who?”
“The sumo guy inside.”
Chevette took the little micro-torque tool and went into Bad Sector.
There was a Chinese kid behind the counter who looked like he might weigh in somewhere over two hundred pounds. He had that big pumpkin head the sumo guys had too, but his was recently shaven and he had a soul patch. He had a short-sleeve print shirt on, big tropical flowers, and a conical spike of blue Lucite through the lobe of his left ear. He was standing, behind a counter, in front of a wall covered with dog-eared posters advertising extinct game platforms.
“This your driver, right?”
“She have any luck with it?” He made no move to take it.
“I don't think so,” Chevette said, “but I think she pinpointed the problem.” She heard a faint, rapid clicking. Looked down to see a six-inch robot marching briskly across the countertop on big cartoony feet. It had that man-in-armor look, segmented glossy white shells over shiny steel armatures. She'd seen these before: it was a fully remote peripheral, controlled by a program that would take up most of a standard notebook. It came to a halt, put its hands together, executed
a perfect miniature bow, straightened, held up its little clip hands for the driver. She let it take the driver, the pull of the little arms somehow scary. It straightened up, putting the driver over its shoulder like a miniature rifle, and gave her a military salute.
Sumo boy was waiting for a reaction, but Chevette wasn't having any. She pointed at the beige hardware. “How come this old shit is always that same color?”
His forehead creased. “There are two theories. One is that it was to help people in the workplace be more comfortable with radically new technologies that would eventually result in the mutation or extinction of the workplace. Hence the almost universal choice, by the manufacturers, of a shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms.” He smirked at Chevette.
“Yeah? What's two?”
“That the people who were designing the stuff were unconsciously terrified of their own product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it looking as unexciting as possible. Literally ‘plain vanilla,’ you follow me?”
Chevette brought her finger close to the microbot; it did a funny little fall-back-and-shuffle to avoid being touched. “So who's into this old stuff? Collectors?”
“You'd think so, wouldn't you?”
“Well?”
“Programmers.”
“I don't get it,” Chevette said.
“Consider,” he said, holding out his hand to let the little ‘bot offer him the driver, “that when this stuff was new, when they were writing multi-million-line software, the unspoken assumption was that in twenty years that software would have been completely replaced by some better, more evolved version.” He took the driver and gestured with it toward the hardware on the shelves. “But the manufacturers were surprised to discover that there was this perverse but powerful resistance to spending tens of millions of dollars to replace existing software, let alone hardware, plus retraining possibly thousands of employees. Follow me?” He raised the driver, sighting down its shaft at her.