Bridge Trilogy Part three
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.
Hard to get rid of, those kind of people, and locks wouldn’t keep them out. That was why the people who used to live here, before the Spill, were willing to rent them out to students.
Tessa was Australian, a media sciences student at USC and the reason Chevette was out here now, couching it.
Well, that and the fact that she, Chevette, didn’t have a job or any money, now she’d split with Carson.
Tessa said Carson was a piece of work.
And look where it had all gotten her, Chevette thought, pumping her way up the trainer’s illusion of a Swiss mountain road and trying to ignore the reek of moldy laundry from the other side of the drywall partition. Someone had left a wet load in the machine, probably last Tuesday, before the fire, and now it was rotting in there.
Which was too bad, because that made it hard to get into riding the trainer. You could configure it for a dozen different bikes, and as many terrains, and Chevette liked this one, an old-fashioned steel-frame ten-speed you could take up this mountain road, wildflowers blurring in your peripheral vision. Her other favorite was a balloon-tired cruiser you rode along a beach, which was good for Malibu because you couldn’t ride along the beach, not unless you wanted to climb over rusty razor wire and ignore the biohazard warnings every hundred feet.
But that gym-sock mildew reek kept catching in the back of her sinuses, nothing alpine meadow about it at all, telling her she was broke and out of work and staying in a sharehouse in Malibu.
The house was right on the beach, with the wire about thirty feet out from the deck. Nobody knew exactly what it was that had spilled, because the government wasn’t telling. Something off a freighter, some people said, and some said it was a bulklifter that had come down in a 32 storm. The government was using nanobots to clean it up though; everybody agreed on that, and that was why they said you shouldn’t walk out there.
Chevette had found the trainer her second day here, and she’d ride two or three times a day or, like now, late at night. Nobody else seemed to be interested in it or ever to come into this little room off the garage, next to the laundry room, and that was fine with her. Living on the bridge, she’d been used to people being around, but everybody had always had something to do up there. The sharehouse was full of USC media sciences students, and they got on her nerves. They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.
She felt sweat run between the headband of the interface visor and her forehead, then down the side of her nose. She was getting a good bum on now; she could feel groups of muscles working in her back, ones that didn’t usually get it.
The trainer did a better job on the bike’s chartreuse lacquer than on the shift levers, she noticed. They were sort of cartoony, with road surface blurring past beneath them in generic texture map. The clouds would be generic too, if she looked up; just basic fractal stuff.
She was definitely not too happy with being here, or with her life in general at this point. She’d been talking with Tessa about that after dinner. Well, arguing about it.
Tessa wanted to make this documentary. Chevette knew what a documentary was because Carson had worked for a channel, Real One, that only just ran those, and Chevette had had to watch about a thousand of them. As a result, she thought, she now knew a whole lot about nothing in particular, and nothing in particular about whatever it was she was actually supposed to know. Like what to do now that her life had gotten her to this place.
Tessa wanted to take her back up to San Francisco, but Chevette had mixed feelings. The documentary Tessa wanted to make was about interstitial communities, and Tessa said Chevette had lived in one, because Chevette had lived on the bridge. Interstitial meant in between things, and Chevette figured that that made a kind of sense, anyway. 33 And she did miss it up there, miss the people, but she didn’t like thinking about it. Because of how things had gone since she’d come down here, and because she hadn’t kept in touch.