Count Zero by William Gibson
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COUNT ZERO
William Gibson
1986
Count Zero
THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted
it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up
with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-
bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs
and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized
hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the
pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract.
Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour
after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon
liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of
Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first
flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support
vat
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put
Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for
him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-
charides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market
The eyes were green.
He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated
simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of
the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn
dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his
secondfloor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs,
late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt
bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He
masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought
about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back
brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the
morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and
bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman
standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-
light that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner
We're done with you You're good as new
He was good as new. How good was that? He didn't know.
He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of
Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.
And the next. And ever was.
He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black
mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when
they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels
left ferroconcrete, dnnks arrived, dinner was served.
[n Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a
blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a
blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he amved
at the counter at the end of the comdor, he changed his
ticket.
He flew to Mexico.
And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of
brooms, a woman's body warm against his own
The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected
sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of
the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf.
The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse cham-
bray, softened by countless washings.
He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted
window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. He'd had to walk
twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the
sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on
runway concrete.
He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek
of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plas-
tered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. He'd
ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink lucite
and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned
the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger
than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider
blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver.
Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus
through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-
aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was
there to welcome him back to Mexico.
Among the dozen~odd microsofts the Dutchman had given
him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish,
but in Vallarta he'd fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a
dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square
of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus
had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy
pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures,
the
day's winning numbers in the national lottery.
The woman beside him stirred in her sleep.
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her A stranger's
face, but not the one his life in hotels had taught him to
expect. He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of
cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fash-
ion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of
the previous five years.
Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and
Amencan. The blue sheets were nicked across her hips, the
sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her
long thighs with diagonals of gold. The faces he woke with in
the world's hotels were like God's own hood ornaments.
Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed
straight out to the void. But this one was different. Already.
somehow, there was meaning attached to it. Meaning and a
name.
He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His soles regis-
tered the grit of beach-sand on cool tile. There was a faint,
pervasive smell of insecticide. Naked, head throbbing, he
stood. He made his legs move. Walked, tried the first of two
doors, finding white tile, more white plaster, a bulbous chrome
shower head hung from rust-spotted iron pipe The sink's taps
offered identical trickles of blood-warm water. An antique
wristwatch lay beside a plastic tumbler, a mechanical Rolex
on a pale leather strap.
The bathroom's shuttered windows weie unglazed, strung
with a fine green mesh of plastic. He peered out between
hardwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and saw a dry
fountain of flower-painted tiles and the rusted carcass of a
VW Rabbit
Allison. That was her name.
She wore frayed khaki shorts and one of his white T-shirts.
Her legs were very brown. The clockwork Rolex, with its
dull stainless case, went around her left wrist on its pigskin
strap. They went walking, down the curve of beach, toward
Barre de Navidad. They kept to the narrow strip of firm wet
sand above the line of surf.
Already they had a history together; he remembered her at
a stall that morning in the little town's iron-roofed mercado,
how she'd held the huge clay mug of boiled coffee in both
hands. Mopping eggs and salsa from the cracked white plate
with a tortilla, he'd watched flies circling fingers of sunlight
that found their way through a patchwork of palm frond and
corrugated siding. Some talk about her job with some legal
firm in L.A., how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle
pontoon towns tethered off Redondo. He'd told her he was in
personnel. Or had been, anyway. "Maybe I'm looking for a
new line of work
But talk seemed secondary to what there was between
them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against
the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both
shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the
thing. She squeezed his hand.
A blue figure came marching up the beach toward them, a
military policeman headed for town, spitshined black boots
unreal against the soft bright beach. As the man passed,
his face dark and immobile beneath mirrored glasses, Turner
noted the carbine-format Steiner-Optic laser with Fabrique
Nationale sights. The blue fatigues were spotless, creased like
knives.
Turner had been a soldier in his own nght for most of his
adult life, although he'd never worn a uniform. A mercenary,
his employers vast corporations warring covertly for the con-
trol of entire economies. He was a specialist in the extraction
of top executives and research people. The multinationals he
worked for would never admit that men like Turner existed.
You worked your way through most of a bottle of Her-
radura last night," she said.
He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was
watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails
painted with chipped pink gloss.
The breakers rolled in, their edges transparent as green
glass.
The spray beaded on her tan.
After their first day together, life fell into a simple pattern
They had breakfast in the mercado. at a stall with a concrete
counter worn smooth as polished marble. They spent the
morning swimming, until the sun drove them back into the
shuttered coolness of the hotel, where they made love under
the slow wooden blades of the ceiling fan, then slept. In the
afternoons they explored the maze of narrow streets behind
the Avenida, or went hiking in the hills. They dined in
beachfront restaurants and drank on the patios of the white
hotels. Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf
And gradually, without words, she taught him a new style
of passion. He was accustomed to being served, serviced
anonymously by skilled professionals. Now, in the white
cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt
Pacific mixed with her own wet, her inner thighs cool against
his cheeks. Palms cradling her hips, he held her, raised her
like a chalice, lips pressing tight, while his tongue sought the
locus, the point, the frequency that would bring her home
Then, grinning, he'd mount, enter, and find his own way
there.
Sometimes, then, he'd talk, long spirals of unfocused nar-
rative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very
little, but he'd learned to value what little she did say, and,
always, she held him. And listened.
A week passed, then another. He woke to their final day
together in that same cool room, finding her beside him. Over
breakfast he imagined he felt a change in her, a tension.
They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot
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