They gave him a pad to punch in the reservation number on Creedmore’s paper, and it came up paid. Had him sign on the pad, there. Told him to put it in slot twenty-three, level six. He left the office, got back into the Hawker, swung up the ramp, wet tires squealing on concrete.
Creedmore was conducting a grooming operation in the illuminated mirror behind the passenger-side sun visor. This consisted of running his fingers repeatedly back through his hair, wiping them on his jeans, then rubbing his eyes. He considered the results. “Time for a drink,” he said to the reflection of his bloodshot eyes. ~& “Seven in the morning,” Rydell said.
“What I said,” Creedmore said, flipping the visor back up. Rydell found the number twenty-three painted on the concrete,
between two vehicles shrouded in white dustcovers. He edged the Hawker carefully in and started shutting it down. He was able to do this without having to go to the help menu. Creedmore got out and went over to urinate on somebody’s tire.
Rydell checked the interior to see they hadn’t left anything, undid
~- the harness, leaned over to pull the passenger-side door shut, popped the trunk, opened the driver-side door, checked that he had the keys,
~ got out, closed the door.
“Hey, Buell. Your friend’s gonna pick this up, right?” Rydell was pulling his duffel out of the Hawker-Aichi’s weirdly narrow trunk, a space suggestive of the interior of a child’s coffin. There was nothing else in there, so he assumed Creedmore was traveling without luggage.
“No,” Creedmore said, “they gonna leave it up here get all dusty.”
He was buttoning his fly.
“So I give the keys to those Universal boys dowstairs?”
“No,” Creedmore said, “you give ’em to me.”
“I signed,” Rydell said.
“Give ’em to me.”
“Buell, this vehicle is my responsibility now. I’ve signed it in here.”
He closed the trunk, activated the security systems.
“Please step back,” said the I-Iawker-Aichi. “Respect my boundaries as I respect yours.” It had a beautiful, strangely genderless voice, gentle but firm.
Rydell took a step back, another.
‘°]That’s my friend’s car and my friend’s keys, and I’m supposed to
– Шve ’em to him.” Creedmore rested his hand on the big roper’s buckle like it was the wheel of his personal ship of state, but he looked uncertam, as though his hangover were leaning on him.
“Just tell him the keys’ll be here. That’s how you do it. Safer all ’round, that way.” Rydell shouldered his bag and started down the ramp,
~ glad to be stretching his legs. He looked back at Creedmore. “See you ~ ’round, Buell.”
45 “Son of a bitch,” Creedmore said, though Rydell took it to be more a reference to the universe that had created Rydell than to Rydell himself. Creedmore looked lost and disconnected, squinting under the greenish-white strip lighting. Rydell kept walking, down the battered concrete spiral of the parking garage, five more levels, till he came abreast of the office at the entrance. The Universal guards were drinking coffee, watching the end of their nature show. Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit’s dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky. They made a lot of nature shows there. He went out into the street, looking for a cab or a place that made breakfast. Smelling how San Francisco was a different place than Los Angeles, and feeling that was fine by him. He’d get something to eat, use the Brazilian glasses to phone Tokyo. Find out about that money. 48 WILLtAM GIBSON 11. OTHER GUY
CHEVETTE had never driven a standard, so it fell to Tessa to drive them up to San Francisco. Tessa didn’t seem to mind. She had her head full of the docu they were going to make, and she could work it out as she drove, telling Chevette about the different communities she wanted to cover and how she was going to cut it all together. All Chevette had to do was listen, or look like she was listening, and finally just fall asleep. She fell asleep as Tessa was telling her about a place called the Walled City, how there’d actually been this place, by Hong Kong, but it had been torn down before Hong Kong went back to being part of China. And then these crazy net people had built their own version of it, like a big communal website, and they’d turned it inside out, vanished in there. It wasn’t making much sense when Chevette nodded out, but it left pictures in her head. Dreams. • “What about the other guy?” Tessa was asking, when Chevette woke from those dreams. Chevette blinked out at the Five, the white line that seemed to reel up beneath the van. “What other guy?” ‘The cop. The one you went to Los Angeles with.” “Rydell,” Chevette said. “So why didn’t that work?” Tessa asked. Chevette didn’t really have an answer. “It just didn’t.” “So you had to hook up with Carson?” “No,” Chevette said, “I didn’t have to.” What were those white things, so many of them, off in a field there? Wind things: they made electricity. “It just seemed like the thing to do.”