Virtual Light

“What?”

“You don’t know shit about shit. As much as I tell you, you’ll never understand the situation. It’s just too big for someone like you to understand. You don’t know how to think in those terms. IntenSecure belongs to the company that owns the information in those glasses.”

“Singapore” Rydell said. “Singapore own DatAmerica, too?”

“You can’t prove it, Rydell. Neither could Congress.”

“Look at those rats over there…”

“Fucking with my head…”

Rydell watched the last of the three rats vanish into the place that had been called The Gap. In through a loose vent or something. A gap. “Nope. Saw ’em.”

“Has it occurred to you that you wouldn’t be here right now if Lucius fucking Warbaby hadn’t taken up rollerblading last month?”

“How’s that?”

“He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, can’t drive, you wind up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage capitalism?”

“Tell me about what?”

“Don’t they teach you anything in that police academy?”

“Sure” Rydell said, “lots of stuff.” Thinking: how to talk to crazy fuckers when you’re being held hostage, except he was having a hard time remembering what they’d said. Keep ’em talking and don’t argue too much, something like that. “How come the stuff in those glasses has everybody’s tail in a twist, anyway?”

“They’re going to rebuild San Francisco. From the ground up, basically. Like they’re doing to Tokyo. They’ll start by layering a grid of seventeen complexes into the existing infrastructure. Eighty-story office/residential, retail/residence in the base. Completely self-sufficient. Variable-pitch parabolic reflectors, steam-generators. New buildings, man; they’ll eat their own sewage.”

“Who’ll eat sewage?”

“The buildings. They’re going to grow them, Rydell. Like they’re doing now in Tokyo. Like the maglev tu

“Sunflower” Chevette Washington said, then looked like she regretted it.

“Somebody’s been look-ing…” Gold teeth flashing.

“Uh, hey…” Go for that talking-to-the-armed-insane mode.

“Yes?”

“So what’s the problem? They wa

“The problem” this Loveless said, starting to unbutton his shirt, “is that a city like San Francisco has about as much sense of where it wants to go, of where it should go, as you do. Which is to say, very little. There are people, millions of them, who would object to the fact that this sort of plan even exists. Then there’s the business of real estate…”

“Real estate?”

“Know the three most important considerations in any purchase of real estate, Rydell?” Loveless’s chest, hairless and artificially pigmented, was gleaming with sweat.

“Three?”

“Location” Loveless said, “location, and location.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You never will. But the people who know where to buy, the people who’ve seen where the footprints of the towers fall, they will, Rydell. They’ll get it all.”

Rydell thought about it. “You looked, huh?”

Loveless nodded. “In Mexico City. He left them in his room. He was never, ever supposed to do that.”

“But you weren’t supposed to look either?” It just slipped out.

Loveless’s skin was ru

Dumped that whole bag of dancer into the Coke she’d brought him. She hadn’t been able to pour it all in, so she’d sloshed the Coke out onto the top of the can to wash it down, mix it around.

He had his shirt undone all the way now, the dark fabric darker with sweat, and his face was turning red.

“Loveless—” Rydell started, no idea what he was about to say, but Loveless screamed then, a high thin inhuman sound like a rabbit with its leg caught in a wire, and started pounding the butt of his pistol into the tight crotch of his jeans like there was something terrible fastened on him there, something he had to kill. Each time the gun came down, it fired, blowing holes in the carpeted floorboard the size of five-dollar pieces.

Chevette Washington came off that console like she was on rubber bands, right over the top of the center bucket and into the cabin in back.

Loveless froze, quivering, like every atom in him had locked down all at once, spi

And Chevette Washington, she was going just about that crazy herself, by the sound of it, trying to beat her way out the back of the RV.

“Hundred years old, those fuckers” Loveless said, and sort of sobbed, ejecting the empty magazine and snapping a fresh one in, “and they’re still getting it…”

“Out there” Rydell said. “By The Gap—”

“Who?”

“Svobodov” Rydell said, guessing that might do it.

The bullets came out of the little gun like the rubber cubes out of a chunker. By the third one, Rydell had reached over, deactivated the door-lock, and just sort of fallen out. Landed on his back on some cans and what felt like foam cups. Rolled. Kept rolling ’til he hit something.

Those little bullets blowing big holes in the whitewashed glass of the dead stores. A whole section fell away with a crash.

He could hear Chevette Washington pounding on the back door of the RV and he wished he could get her to stop.

“Hey! Loveless!”

The shooting stopped.

“Svobodov’s down, man!”

Chevette still pounding. Jesus.

“He needs an ambulance!”

On his hands and knees, up against some low tiled fountain smelled of chlorine and dust, he saw Loveless scramble down from the driver’s side, his face and chest slick and shining. The man had been trained so deeply, it occurred to Rydell, that it even cut through whatever the dancer was doing to him. Because he still moved the way they taught you to move in FATSS, the pistol out in both hands, the half-crouch, the smooth swings through potential arcs of fire.

And Chevette, she was still trying to kick her way out through the hexcel or whatever the back of the RV was made of. Then Loveless put a couple of bullets into it and she all of a sudden stopped.

At four o’clock Yamazaki descended the rungs he’d climbed with Loveless, in the dark, the night before.

Fontaine had gone, twenty minutes before the power returned, taking with him, against Ski

Yamazaki had watched the old man’s hands as they touched each tool in turn, imagining he saw some momentary strength or purpose flow into them there, or perhaps only memories of tasks undertaken, abandoned, completed. “You can always sell tools” Ski