Virtual Light

Ski

His jacket, the one she always wore, that had come from D. Lewis, Great Portland Street. That was in London. Ski

Ski

She looked past three cable-towers to Treasure Island. Smoke rose, there, from a fire on the shore, where the low cantilever, cottoned down in fog, shot off to Oakland. There was a dome-thing, up on the farthest suspension tower, honeycombed into sections like new copper, but Ski

A gray gull slid by, level with her eyes.

The city looked the same as ever, the hills like sleeping animals behind the office towers she knew by their numbers. She ought to be able to see that hotel.

The night before grabbed her by the back of the neck.

She couldn’t believe she’d done that, been that stupid. The case she’d pulled out of that dickhead’s pocket was hanging up in Ski

Ski

Chevette shoved off the edge of the hole, swung down and in, catching the top rung.

“Want any, you’re go

“Save me coffee.” She pulled on a pair of black cotton leggings and got into her trainers without bothering to lace them. She opened the hatch in the floor and climbed through, still worrying about the asshole, his glasses, her job. Down ten steel rungs off the side of an old crane. The cherry-picker basket waiting where she’d left it when she’d gotten back. Her bike cabled to an upright with a couple of Radio Shack screamers for good measure. She climbed into the waist-high yellow plastic basket and hit the switch.

The motor whined and the big-toothed cog on the bottom let her down the slope. Ski

It shook when it hit the bottom. She climbed out onto the wooden walkway and went along the wall of taut milky plastic, halogen-shadows of plants behind it and the gurgle of hydroponics. Turned the corner and down the stairs to the noise and morning hustle of the bridge. Nigel coming toward her with one of his carts, a new one. Making a delivery.

“Vette” with his big goofy grin. He called her that.

“Seen the egg lady?”

“City side” he said, meaning S.F. always, Oakland being always only ‘Land. “Good one, huh?” with a gesture of builder’s pride for his cart. Chevette saw the hraised aluminum frame, the Taiwanese hubs and rims beefed up with fat new spokes. Nigel did work for some of the other riders at Allied, ones who still rode metal. He hadn’t liked it when Chevette had gone for a paper frame. Now she bent to run her thumb along a specially smooth braise. “Good one” she agreed.

“That Jap shit delaminate on you yet?”

“No way.”

“’S go

“Come see you when it does.”

Nigel shook his hair at her. The faded wooden fishing-plug that hung from his left ear rattled and spun. “Too late then.” He shoved his cart toward Oakland.

Chevette found the egg lady and bought three, twisted up that way in two big dry blades of grass. Magic. You hated to take it apart, it was so perfect, and you could never get it back together or figure out how she did it. The egg lady took the five-piece and dropped it into the little bag around her scrawny lizard neck. She had no teeth at all, her face a nest of wrinkles that centered into that wet slit of a mouth.

Ski

She undid the eggs, the egg lady’s magic, and put them in a plastic bowl. Ski

You couldn’t tell what it was made of, and that meant expensive. Something dark gray, like the lead in a pencil, thin as the shell of one of those eggs, but you could probably drive a truck over it. Like her bike. She’d figured out how you opened it the night before; finger here, thumb there, it opened. No catch or anything, no spring. No trademark, either; no patent numbers. Inside was like black suede, but it gave like foam under your finger.

Those glasses, nested there. Big and black. Like that Orbison in the poster stuck to Ski

She pulled them from the black suede, the stuff springing instantly back to a smooth flat surface.

They bothered her. Not just that she’d stolen them, but they weighed too much. Way too heavy for what they were, even with the big earpieces. The frames looked as though they’d been carved from slabs of graphite. Maybe they had, she thought; there was graphite around the paper cores in her bike’s frame, and it was Asahi Engineering.