All Tomorrow's Parties (Bridge, #3)

by William Gibson

Silencio sits watching Raton and Playboy use, here behind this empty stall with its smell of apples. Raton has a little flashlight in his mouth so he can see what he is doing. It is the black tonight, and Raton is cutting the little plastic tube with the special knife, its handle longer than its short curved blade. The three of them are sitting on plastic crates. Raton and Playboy use the black two, maybe three times in a day and a night. Three times with the black, then they must use the white as well. The white is more expensive, but too much black and they start to talk fast and maybe see people who are not there. “Speaking with Jesus,” Playboy calls that, but the white he calls “walking with the king.” But it is not walking: white brings stillness, silence, sleep. Silencio prefers the white nights. Silencio knows that they buy the white from a black man, but the black from a white man, and he assumes this is the mystery depicted in the picture Raton wears on the chain around his neck: the black and the white teardrops swirling together to make roundness; in the white teardrop a small round of black, in the black a small round of white.

Silencio hears someone say pinche madre and this is Raton. When Raton uses the black and fights, he is very fast and you do not know what he will do; he hurts people and then shakes, laughing, sucking air through his mouth. Now he comes over the rolls of plastic like he is flying, with his knife shining in his hand, and Silencio sees the picture of a man with dog teeth and wings, and Raton’s teeth are like that, his snake eyes wide. And the black thing, like a long wet thumb, goes through Raton’s neck. And everything stops again. Then Raton tries to speak, and blood comes on his lips. He swings his knife at the man, but the knife cuts only air, and Raton’s fingers can no longer hold it. The man pulls the black thing from Raton’s throat. Raton sways on loose knees, and Silencio thinks of how it is when Raton uses too much white, then tries to walk. Raton puts his hands up to cover his throat on both sides. His mouth moves, but no words come out. One of Raton’s snake eyes falls out. The eye behind it is round and brown. Raton falls down on his knees, with his hands still on his throat. His snake eye and his brown eye look up at the man, and Silencio feels they look from different distances, seeing different things. Then Raton makes a small, soft sound in his throat and falls over backward, still on his knees, so that he lies on his back with his knees spread wide and his legs twisted back, and Silencio watches Raton’s gray pants go dark between his legs. Silencio looks at th...

The point moves again. Silencio understands. Closer.

LEAVE A HOUSE empty in Malibu, Tessa told Chevette, and you get the kind of people come down from the hills and barbecue dogs in your fireplace.

Just pump, she told herself, cresting the illusion of a rise. Shift again. Pump harder. The road surface started to look glassy in places, because she was overtaking the simulator’s refresh rate. “Zoom in.” Tessa’s voice, in miniature. “Shit,” Chevette said. Flipping up the visor. The camera platform, like a helium-filled cushion of silver Mylar, at eye level in the open doorway. Kid’s toy with little caged propellers, controlled from Tessa’s bedroom. Ring of light reflected in the lens housing as it extruded, zooming.

DRIFT. Laney is in drift. That is how he does it. It is a matter, he knows, of letting go. He admits the random. The danger of admitting the random is that the random may admit the Hole. The Hole is that which Laney’s being is constructed around. The Hole is absence at the fundamental core. The Hole is that into which he has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information. Mainly—lately—information. Information. This flow. This . . . corrosion. Drift. ONCE, BEFORE HE’D come to Tokyo, Laney woke in the bedroom of his suite in the Chateau. It was dark, only a shush of tires up from Sunset; muffled drumming of a helicopter, hunting the hills behind. And the Hole right there, beside him in the lonely queen-size expanse of his bed. The Hole, up close and personal.

BRIGHT PYRAMIDS OF fruit, beneath buzzing neon.

The boy reaches out. Two fingers touch the watch the man wears on his left wrist. He opens his mouth as if to speak. “The time?” Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy’s eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely.

“What is it?” Rydell asked. “Chain gun,” Fontaine said. “Disposable. Can’t reload it. Caseless: this long square thing’s the cartridges and the barrel in one. No moving parts to it: ignition’s electrical. Two buttons here, where the trigger would be, you just point it, press ’em both the same time. It’ll do that four times. Four charges.” “Why do they call it a chain gun?” “What this is, Martial says, it’s more like a directional grenade, you understand? Or sort of like a portable fragmentation mine. Main thing he told me is you don’t use it in any kind of confined space, and you only use it when there’s nobody in front of you you don’t mind seeing get really fucked up.” “So what’s the chain part?” Fontaine reached over and tapped the fat square barrel lightly, once, with his forefinger. “In here. Thing’s packed with four hundred two-foot lengths of super-fine steel chain, sharp as razor wire.” Rydell hefted the thing by its two grips, keeping his fingers away from those buttons. “And that—” “Makes hamburger,” Fontaine said.

Someone in the shadows opposite cut loose with something automatic, something silenced so efficiently that there was only the machinelike burr of a slide working, and the stitching sounds of bullets. Both Fontaine’s windows vanished instantly, and the glass front of the counter as well. Rydell found himself on the floor, unable to recall getting there. The gun across the street stopped abruptly, having chewed its way through a full clip. He saw himself down in the basement range at the academy in Knoxville, ejecting a half-moon clip from the stock of a bull-pup assault rifle, pulling out another, and slapping it into place. How long it took. The number of movements, exactly, that it took. There was a high, thin, very regular sound in his ears, and he realized that it was Chevette, crying. And then he was up, shoving the milk-carton nose of Fontaine’s lawyer’s Kombinat gun over the bottom of the square hole in the door where the glass had been. One of the two buttons, he thought, must be a safety. And the other filled the air outside with flame, recoil close to breaking his wrist, but nobody, really nobody, was going to be reloading anything. Not over there.

FONTAINE KNOWS THE bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridge’s host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing. These bridge slingshots are lethal not only to rats, their users favoring balls of dense damp clay, a trick held over from the Middle Ages and not to be underestimated.

Glass, he reflects, sweeping, is one of those substances that takes up relatively little space until you break it. But it is also, he recalls being told, if considered over truly cosmic stretches of time, a liquid. All the glass in every pane in every window, everywhere, is in the infinitely slow process of melting, sagging, sliding down, except it would be unlikely that any one pane survive the millennia required to be reduced to a solid puddle.

CHEVETTE CLIMBS THROUGH the hatch in the roof of Skinner’s room to find Rydell kneeling there in his Lucky Dragon security bib, but the critical factor here is the man from the bar, the one who shot Carson, who’s got a gun pressed into Rydell’s ear and is watching her, and smiling. He’s not much older than she is, she thinks, with his black buzz cut and his black leather coat, his scarf wrapped just so, casual but you know he takes time with it, and she wonders how it is people get this way, that they’ll stick a gun in someone’s ear and you know they’ll use it. And why does it seem that Rydell finds people like that, or do they find him?

God, it’s strange up here, now, with the night sky all smoke, the flames, lights of the city swimming and dimmed as the smoke rolls. Little glowing red worms are falling, winking out, all around her, and the smell of burning.

Light over the hatch turns green, and the hatch slides up and out crawls, unfolds sort of, this butt-naked girl, black hair, maybe Chinese, Japanese, something, she’s long and thin, not much titties on her the way Boomzilla likes but she’s smiling, and everybody, the manager, checker, securities, they jaw-hang, eyes popped: girl straightening up, still smiling, and walks fast to the front of the store, past the security counter, and Boomzilla sees her reach up and open the door, just right on out, and it’ll take more than a naked Japanese girl get anybody’s attention out there, in the middle of this disaster shit. But the crazy thing is, and he really doesn’t get this, standing looking out through the doors at the video pylon, so that he has to go outside and fire up his last Russian Marlboro to think about it, after, is that when he sees her walk past the screens there, he sees her on every last screen, walking out of every Lucky Dragon in the world, wearing that same smile. Boomzilla still thinking about this when his Marlboro’s done, but thinks it’s time for a Lucky Dragon Muff-Lette microwave, he thinks of that as his businessman’s breakfast, and he’s got the money but when he gets back in they got no Muff-Lette, fucking firemen ate them all. “Fuck that,” he tells them. “Why don’t you fax me one from fucking Paris?” So security throws his ass out.