Neuromancer (25 page)

Bill Gibson remembered that world, however often or for whatever reasons he might
try to forget it. He remembered the raw-boned old men with faces lined like dry riverbeds,
sun-bleached fedoras on their heads and white shirts beneath their overalls as they
hoed the fields; remembered the five-and-dime store with wooden floors worn glass-smooth,
and countertops lined with trays top-full with marvels, notions, and jimcrackery.
He recalled the sound of a fired gun echoing off the hill on the far side of an autumnal
field, and the mysterious way a shard of grandparental history excavated during some
slow summer afternoon, whether in the basement’s icebox or the attic’s bake-oven,
could possess such limitless fascination. He still understood the nature of the private
commentary of men, cognizant of the sort of words and kind of phrasing barber shop
regulars stopped using the moment a stranger, or mother, stepped through the door.
He still saw the stare in the eyes of old women who might have been recalling the
day their husbands headed east to the Western front, or the look on their fathers’
faces when they heard that a friend wouldn’t be coming back from the hole. He still
tapped a foot to radio ballads as they poured ethereally from a barn dance or fiddle
festival two states away, marking the rhythm in the
same manner as did the community elders, although unlike him the ancients remembered
a day when everything they heard would be heard solely in the instant it was produced,
never again, and leaving no more lasting trace than snowflakes falling onto the tongue.
And he could still listen to the far-off plaint of a train horn as the express rolled
through the night, wailing through a darkness lit solely by moon and fireflies; a
sound that planted in his mind the awareness that one day he too would travel far
away from that country of heart and home; would necessarily flee, as if pursued by
hounds, a world that essentialed abrogation as it demanded honorific, a sound endlessly
entrancing yet infinitely sad, the unignorable siren call of the wider world without.
The wider world waited, and he would go there.

I remember these things too, and this is how I know where cyberspace was born.

T
HE PROXIMITY OF
our beginnings has proven to be one of our deepest bonds. Only in the past couple
of years have we realized to what degree we remember the country that gave form to
our souls, and how that remembrance informs every thought we think, every word we
write. It is starting to sink in that with the passing of each hour now, as we leave
one century and step into another, that place, that past, becomes ever more lost inside
the shadows with which time enshrouds its mummy. (Gibson has called it the World Before
Television. A talent for the perfect phrase, as said.)

The past lingers in unexpected and unavoidable ways long after we believe it gone.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as they say. Our cultural and historical past
is readily accessible to everyone today, so long as you choose to turn it on, or download
it. Today, as never before—the information media having become to enlightenment as
the cereal aisle is to the supermarket—if you choose not to access the past, you are
de facto free to rule it out of existence, at least so far as you might be concerned.
But the personal past, while deniable if need be for a while, is far more difficult
to tune out; as in a Soviet hotel room, the radio is impossible to turn all the way
off. Gibson’s characters (I call them us) know this to be the case as often as you
do.

Read his books and reread them, and see anew how many references you find therein
to events or incidents that occurred at some unspecified time before the narrative
begins, and to nostalgic reveries of That Which Is No Longer the Way It Was; how often
his characters grow dimly aware of vague regrets for which they have no name, as if
they are haunted unto their deathbeds with not only their own memories, but with someone
else’s memories as well. Realize as you read to what degree, and to what effect, Gibson
employs the images of evocative clutter and disarray to create a setting against which
(as in an individual life) stray pieces of past days linger long enough to meld through
coeval existence into an aspect—the major aspect, in many ways—of the contemporary
world in which they remain.

I’m not referring to the overwhelming postapocalyptic damage and decay so often used
in the set design of contemporary films when their directors attempt to depict a futuristic
environment (these visuals usually being variants of those created for
Bladerunner
and
The Road Warrior,
and Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
first of all), although such images have been omnipresent in near-future fiction
as well. No, I speak instead of the scattered objects glimpsed within Chiba City bars
and market-stalls or most especially in Skinner’s room, in
Virtual Light
; each token of mundane temporality made rare by the passage of time, each described
by Gibson with watchmakers’ precision and unconditional love—the black-and-white family
photographs in their crumbling albums, the outmoded toaster ovens, the mildewed paperbacks,
the scratched LPs, which today go unsold at yard sales or gather dust in thrift stores,
but which tomorrow will prove to be pearls beyond price. The box of stuff in the back
of the closet, detritus that accumulates in the desk’s bottom drawers; the lint in
the navel of a private civilization, hinting at an apocalypse that (if apocalypse
at all) could have been nothing other than personal. When the past is always with
you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

Surely it is the constant awareness of that faraway past, in which he lived intensely
if not always happily, that so crystallizes Bill Gibson’s sense of what the future
will hold, and what will be most sorely missed there.

A
COUPLE OF
years ago I was sealed up for a month in one of the hospitals here in New York with
multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (the cyberpunk variety, it would be fair if painful
to say). Although Bill, like me, had always been pretty iffy about the general atmosphere
that clings to hospitals, he nonetheless came to visit me (I suspect I piqued his
interest by alerting him to the fact that my isolation unit rather resembled the ultimate
Phillipe Starck hotel room). He passed through the double doors and strapped on a
mask and there sat at my bedside while we spoke of the evasive ways of doctors, admired
the perfect dread inherent to the design of the biohazard symbol, watched the sun
setting over New Jersey and I tried not to cough. His visit meant a lot to me.

The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out to be your
friends, but once you have met them you can’t imagine that you could have gone through
life without ever knowing them. Bill and I have been through our own difficult moments
in our respective lives, and while I hope I’ve always been there for him, there’s
no question that he’s always been there for me. Doubtless I am not the only person
who can say this. I think anyone who knows him knows that there is no better nor more
generous person, both as a writer and as a friend, than Bill Gibson. His creative
intelligence is wicked, but his soul is pure.

A few months after I was released, Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music
was re-released in our present-day country, on CD. Every young person needs one,
Luc Sante said at the time, and I agree; especially everyone who comes from that part
of the country where so much of the music was originally recorded, up in the hills
and down in the hollers. As soon as I was able I bought Bill a set and sent it off
to him, where he tells me he has spent considerable time driving through Vancouver
nights, often with his son, listening repeatedly to a soundtrack that might seem (but
isn’t) utterly at odds with his or anyone’s landscape today, seventy-odd years after
the fact. After he had the opportunity to listen to the discs at length we talked,
among much else, about the particular songs that made the deepest impression on us,
and the particular artists who contained in their electronically
preserved voices those sounds most evocative of what has been lost, and how it is
possible to take from them all that can be recovered in order to be—partially, truly—reborn.

I think every writer would wish to evoke in a thousand words what can be evoked in
a single line of music. There were a number of textual variants of the song “East
Virginia Blues” recorded during the great period of 1927 to 1932. The version on the
Anthology
is Buell Kazee’s, and it is a good one (although my personal favorite is Clarence
Ashley’s). One line of the song, which is often found interpolated into other songs,
by other artists, sears into my heart each time I hear it, no matter who the singer
might be. Bill has quoted it himself, I believe. It is one of the lines I’d give a
million words to have written.

I’d rather be in some dark holler where the sun don’t never shine.

The sensibility that underlay American science fiction for many years was one of purest
optimism: an unquestioning faith that no matter how dire things were at any one moment,
or how impossible seemed the troubles remaining to be made right, as long as a heaping
helping of reason and loads of gung-ho inventiveness were put to good use everything
that was not as it should be would be sorted out, and life unimaginably improved.
(This sensibility, as we all know, makes up as well the largest part of what still
passes as the archetypal American spirit, for better or worse.) Although such blind
optimism lingers in that species of science fiction that today enjoys the largest
sales, reason has nothing to do with it and gung-ho inventiveness is most often employed
to market-test the potential salability of collectible tie-in merchandise. Their critical
success notwithstanding, the fact that Bill’s books have enjoyed such commercial success
in the face of
Star Wars, Star Trek
, triple-decker fantasy, and any number of shoot-’em-up video and computer games testifies
to their undeniable power. (In the parallel world there may be a Molly action figure,
complete with spring-out fingernails, but don’t wait for one to turn up on eBay here.)
Plainly his readers recognize, if but subcutaneously, that there’s quite a lot more
in a William Gibson book than great characters and a good story.

To be truly ready to confront the future—actual or imagined,
societal or personal—and to live reasonably within it once you are ready, an
entente cordiale
must first be made with the past, and the past is always the more frightening of
the two. Traveling from past to future means looking and leaping, stepping blindly
into the void, passing through the darkest of hollers. Sometimes the leap needed seems
too far, the void too empty, the holler too oddly reassuring in its darkness. But
there is no avoiding it: Hope that you’ll emerge on the far side with minimal trauma;
have faith, pray, wish as you will, but as science fiction writers know so well, there’s
no predicting what will be. Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually
hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You
can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. That goes for readers
as well as writers.

In transversing the passage through his own dark holler, William Gibson learned, as
all writers who matter learn, to emit one of quite a different nature—a warning shout,
yes, but an exclamation of wonder as well, one that will echo across more landscapes
than we can imagine for many years. It seems to me that in these interesting times
of ours, in the maelstrom of pomo distractions, not only have attention spans shortened,
but so as well have memories. I have no way of knowing what today’s young people will
recall, years hence, when they remember the World Before Cyberspace. I am positive,
however, that they’ll not forget Bill Gibson.

My colleague, my friend, my brother: In the middle of your great career, I salute
you.

Keep reading for an exciting preview of

William Gibson's new novel

THE PERIPHERAL

THE HAPTICS

T
hey didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched
him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war,
put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance,
which direction and what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and
he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they
were little, veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother. She and Burton
and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there,
later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except
for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their
property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like
blunt rifle slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped
this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking
and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked
like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.

Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of that foam, packed down hard in the dark
earth. He had the trailer’s lights turned up, and closer, through a window, she partly
saw him stand, turn, and on his spine and side the marks where they took the haptics
off, like the skin was dusted with something dead-fish silver. They said they could
get that off too, but he didn’t want to keep going back.

“Hey, Burton,” she called.

“Easy Ice,” he answered, her gamer tag, one hand bumping the
door open, the other tugging a new white t-shirt down, over that chest the Corps gave
him, covering the silvered patch above his navel, size and shape of a playing card.

Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Hefty
Mart amber. She’d helped him sweep it out, before he moved in. He hadn’t bothered
to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick
with this Chinese polymer, dried glassy and flexible. You could see stubs of burnt
matches down inside that, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a
legally sold cigarette, older than she was. She knew where to find a rusty jeweler’s
screwdriver, and somewhere else a 2009 quarter.

Now he just got his stuff out before he hosed the inside, every week or two, like
washing out Tupperware. Leon said the polymer was curatorial, how you could peel it
all out before you put your American classic up on eBay. Let it take the dirt with
it.

Burton took her hand, squeezed, pulling her up and in.

“You going to Davisville?” she asked.

“Leon’s picking me up.”

“Luke 4:5’s protesting there. Shaylene said.”

He shrugged, moving a lot of muscle but not by much.

“That was you, Burton. Last month. On the news. That funeral, in Carolina.”

He didn’t quite smile.

“You might’ve killed that boy.”

He shook his head, just a fraction, eyes narrowed.

“Scares me, you do that shit.”

“You still walking point, for that lawyer in Tulsa?”

“He isn’t playing. Busy lawyering, I guess.”

“You’re the best he had. Showed him that.”

“Just a game.” Telling herself, more than him.

“Might as well been getting himself a Marine.”

She thought she saw that thing the haptics did, then, that shiver, then gone.

“Need you to sub for me,” he said, like nothing had happened. “Five-hour shift. Fly
a quadcopter.”

She looked past him to his display. Some Danish supermodel’s legs, retracting into
some brand of car nobody she knew would ever drive, or likely even see on the road.
“You’re on disability,” she said. “Aren’t supposed to work.”

He looked at her.

“Where’s the job?” she asked.

“No idea.”

“Outsourced? VA’ll catch you.”

“Game,” he said. “Beta of some game.”

“Shooter?”

“Nothing to shoot. Work a perimeter around three floors of this tower, fifty-fifth
to fifty-seventh. See what turns up.”

“What does?”

“Paparazzi.” He showed her the length of his index finger. “Little things. You get
in their way. Edge ’em back. That’s all you do.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Get you set up before Leon comes.”

“Supposed to help Shaylene, later.”

“Give you two fives.” He took his wallet from his jeans, edged out a pair of new bills,
the little windows unscratched, holograms bright.

Folded, they went into the right front pocket of her cutoffs. “Turn the lights down,”
she said, “hurts my eyes.”

He did, swinging his hand through the display, but then the place looked like a seventeen-year-old
boy’s bedroom. She reached over, flicked it up a little.

She sat in his chair. It was Chinese, reconfiguring to her height and weight as he
pulled himself up an old metal stool, almost no paint left on it, waving a screen
into view.

MILAGROS COLDIRON SA

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Who we’re working for.”

“How do they pay you?”

“Hefty Pal.”

“You’ll get caught for sure.”

“Goes to an account of Leon’s,” he said. Leon’s Army service had been about the same
time as Burton’s in the Marines, but Leon wasn’t due any disability. Wasn’t, their
mother said, like he could claim to have caught the dumbfuck there. Not that Flynne
had ever thought Leon was anything but sly, under it all, and lazy. “Need my log-in
and the password. Hat trick.” How they both pronounced his tag, HaptRec, to keep it
private. He took an envelope from his back pocket, unfolded and opened it. The paper
looked thick, creamy.

“That from Fab?”

He drew out a long slip of the same paper, printed with what looked to be a full paragraph
of characters and symbols. “You scan it, or type it outside that window, we’re out
a job.”

She picked up the envelope, from where it lay on what she guessed had been a fold-down
dining table. It was one of Shaylene’s top-shelf stationery items, kept literally
on a top shelf. When letter orders came in from big companies, or lawyers, you went
up there. She ran her thumb across the logo in the upper left corner. “Medellín?”

“Security firm.”

“You said it’s a game.”

“That’s ten thousand dollars, in your pocket.”

“How long you been doing this?”

“Two weeks now. Sundays off.”

“How much you get?”

“Twenty-five thousand per.”

“Make it twenty, then. Short notice and I’m stiffing Shaylene.”

He gave her another two fives.