The Bridge Trilogy Part 36

294.

This book owes a very special debt to Paolo Polledri, founding Curator of Architecture and Design, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Polledri commissioned, for the 1990 exhibition Visionary San Francisco, a work of fiction which became the short story 'Skinner's Room,' and also arranged for me to collaborate with the architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts, whose redrawn map of the city (though I redrew it once again) provided me with Skywalker Park, the Trap, and the Sunflower towers. (From another work commissioned for this exhibition, Richard Rodriguez's powerful 'Sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype,' I appropriated Yamazaki's borrowed Victorian and the sense of its melancholy.)

The term Virtual Light was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe a form of instrumentation that produces 'optical sensations directly in the eye without the use of photons' (Mondo 2000).

Rydell's Los Angeles owes much to my reading of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observations regarding the privatization of public s.p.a.ce.

I am indebted to Markus, aka Fur, one of the editors of Mercury Rising, published by and for the San Francis...o...b..ke Messenger a.s.sociation, who kindly provided a complete file of hack issues and then didn't hear from me for a year or SO (sorry). Mercury Rising exists 'to inform, amuse, p.i.s.s off, and otherwise reinforce' the messenger community. It provided

me with Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton's workplace and a good deal of her character. Proj on!

Thanks, too, to the following, all of whom provided crucial a.s.sistance, the right fragment at the right time, or artistic support: Laurie Anderson, Cotty Chubb, Samuel Delany, Richard Dorsett, Brian Eno, Deborah Harry, Richard Kadrey, Mark Laidlaw, Tom Maddox, Pat Murphy, Richard Piellisch, John s.h.i.+rley, Chris Stein, Bruce Sterling, Roger Trilling, Bruce Wagner, Jack Womack.

Special thanks to Martha Millard, my literary agent, ever understanding of the long haul.

And to Deb, Graeme, and Claire, with love, for putting up with the time I spent in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Vancouver, B.C.

January 1993

Thanks Sogho Is.h.i.+, the j.a.panese director, introduced me to Kowloon Walled City via the photographs of Ryuji Miyamoto. It was Is.h.i.+san's idea that we should make a science fiction movie there. We never did, but the Walled City continued to haunt me, though I knew no more about it than I could gather from Miyamoto's stunning images, which eventually provided most of the texture for the Bridge in my novel Virtual Light.

Architect Ken Vineberg drew my attention to an article about the Walled City in Architectural Revieu~, where I first learned of City of Darkness, the splendid record a.s.sembled by Greg Girard

and Ian Lambrot (Watermark, London, 1993). From London, John Jarrold very kindly arranged for me to receive a copy.

Anything I know of the toecutting business, I owe to the criminal memoirs of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (Chopper from the inside, Sly Ink, Australia, 1991). Mr. Read is a great deal scarier than Blackwell, and has even fewer ears.

Karl Taro Greenfeld's Speed Tribes (HarperCollins, New York,

1994) richly fed my dreams of Laney's jet lag.

Stephen P. ("Plausibility") Brown rode shotgun on the work in progress for many months, commenting daily, sometimes more often, and always with a fine forbearance, as I faxed him a bewildering flurry of disconnected fragments he was somehow expected to interpret as "progress." His constant encouragement and seemingly endless patience were absolutely essential to this book's completion.

My publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic, also demonstrated

great patience, and I thank them.

idoru

1. Death Cube K After Slitscan, Laney heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau.

Rydell was a big quiet Tennessean with a sad shy grin, cheap sungla.s.ses, and a walkie-talkie screwed permanently into one ear.

"Paragon-Asia Datafiow," Rydell said, around four in the morning, the two of them seated in a pair of huge old armchairs. Concrete beams overhead had been hand-painted to vaguely resemble blond oak. The chairs, like the rest of the furniture in the Chateau's lobby, were oversized to the extent that whoever sat in them seemed built

to a smaller scale. - "Really?" Laney asked, keeping up the pretense that someone like Rydell would know where he could still find work.

"Tokyo, j.a.pan," Rydell said, and sucked iced latte through a plastic straw. "Guy I met in San Francisco last year. Yamazaki. He's working for 'em. Says they need a serious netrunner,"

Netrunner. Laney, who liked to think of himself as a researcher, suppressed a sigh. "Contract job?"

"Guess so. Didn't say."

"I don't think I'd want to live in Tokyo."

Rydell used his straw to stir the foam and ice remaining at the bottom of his tall plastic cup, as

though he were hoping to find a secret prize. "He didn't say you'd have to." He looked up. "You ever been to Tokyo?"

"No."

"Must be an interesting place, after that quake and all." The walkie-talkie ticked and whispered.

"I gotta go on out and check the gate by the bungalows now. Feel like coming?"

"No," Laney said. "Thanks."

Rydell stood, automatically straightening the creases in his khaki uniform trousers. He wore a black nylon web-belt hung with various holstered devices, all of them black, a short-sleeved white s.h.i.+rt, and a peculiarly immobile black tie. "I'll leave the number in your box," he said.

Laney watched the security man cross the terra cotta and the various rugs, to vanish past the darkly polished panels of the registration desk. He'd had something going on cable once, Laney had gathered. Nice guy. Loser.

Laney sat there until dawn came edging in through the tall, arched windows, and Taiwanese stainless could be heard to rattle, but gently, from the darkened cave of the breakfast room.

Immigrant voices, in some High Steppe dialect the Great Khans might well have understood. Echoes woke from the tiled floor, from the high beams surviving from an age that must once have seen the advent of Laney's kind or predecessors, their ecology of celebrity and the terrible and inviolable order of that food chain.

Rydell left a folded sheet of Chateau notepaper in Laney's box. A Tokyo number. Laney found it there the next afternoon, along with an updated estimate of his final bill from the lawyers.

He took them both up to the room he could no longer even pretend to afford.

A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator's goldveined mirror for this three- floor ascent of the aggressively nondescript 0 My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube K, apparently a Franz Kafka theme bar.

Stepping from the.elevator into a long s.p.a.ce announced in acid-etched metal as The Metamorphosis.

Where salarimen in white s.h.i.+rts had removed their suit jackets and loosened their dark ties, and sat at a bar of artfully corroded steel, drinking, the high backs of their chairs molded from some brown and chitinous resin. Insectoid mandibles curved above the drinkers' heads like scythes.

He moved forward into brown light, a low murmur of conversation. He understood no j.a.panese. The walls, unevenly transparent, repeated a motif of wing cases and bulbous abdomens, spikey brown limbs folded in at regular intervals. He increased his pace, aiming for a curving stairway molded to resemble glossy brown carapaces.

The eyes of Russian prost.i.tutes followed him from tables opposite the bar, flat and doll-like in this roach-light. The Natashas were everywhere, working girls s.h.i.+pped in from Vladivostok by the Kombinat. Routine plastic surgery lent them a hard a.s.sembly-line beauty. Slavic Barbies. A simpler operation implanted a tracking device for the benefit of their handlers.

The stairway opened into The Penal Colony, a disco, deserted at this hour, pulses of silent red lightning marking Laney's steps across the dance floor. A machine of some kind was suspended from the ceiling. Each of its articulated arms, suggestive of antique dental equipment, was tipped with sharp steel. Pens, he thought, vaguely remembering Kafka's story. Sentence of guilt, graven in the flesh of the condemned man's back. Wincing at a memory of upturned eyes unseeing. Pushed it down.

Moved on.

A second stairway, narrow, more steep, and he entered The Trial, low-ceilinged and dark. Walls the color of anthracite. Small flames s.h.i.+vered behind blue gla.s.s. He hesitated, nightblind and jet- lagged.

"Cohn Laney, is it?"

Australian. Enormous. Who stood behind a little table, shoulders sloping bearlike. Something strange about the shape of his shaven head. And another, much smaller figure, seated there.

j.a.panese, in a long-sleeved plaid s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned up to its oversized collar. Blinking up at Laney through circular lenses.

"Have a seat, Mr. Laney," the big man said.

And Laney saw that this man's left ear was missing, sheared away, leaving only a convoluted stump.

When Laney had worked for Slitscan, his supervisor was named Kathy Torrance. Palest of pale blonds. A pallor bordering on translucence, certain angles of light suggesting not blood but some fluid the shade of summer straw. On her left thigh the absolute indigo imprint of something twisted and multibarbed, an expensively savage pictoglyph. Visible each Friday, when she made it her habit to wear shorts to work.

She complained, always, that the nature of celebrity was much the worse for wear. Strip-mined, Laney gathered, by generations of her colleagues.

She propped her feet on the ledge of a hotdesk. She wore meticulous little reproductions of lineman's boots, buckled across the instep and stoutly laced to the ankle. He looked at her legs, their taut sweep from wooly sock tops to the sandpapered fringe of cut-off jeans. The tattoo looked like something from another planet, a sign or message burned in from the depths of s.p.a.ce, left there for mankind to interpret.

He asked her what she meant. She peeled a mint-flavored toothpick from its wrapper. Eyes he suspected were gray regarded him through mint-tinted contacts.

"n.o.body's really famous anymore, Laney. Have you noticed that?"

"No."