Free Spook Country by William Gibson Page A

changing, though, because there are an increasing number of sites to post this sort of work on. If you’re logged into one of those, have an interface device”—he pointed to the helmet—“a laptop and wifi, you’re cruising.”
    She thought about it. “But each one of those sites, or servers, or…portals…?”
    He nodded. “Each one shows you a different world. Alberto’s shows me River Phoenix dead on a sidewalk. Somebody else’s shows me, I don’t know, only good things. Only kittens, say. The world we walk around in would be channels.”
    She cocked her head at him. “Channels?”
    “Yes. And given what broadcast television wound up being, that doesn’t sound so good. But think about blogs, how each one is actually trying to describe reality.”
    “They are?”
    “In theory.”
    “Okay.”
    “But when you look at blogs, where you’re most likely to find the real info is in the links. It’s contextual, and not only who the blog’s linked to, but who’s linked to the blog.”
    She looked at him. “Thanks.” She put the piece of white Lego down on the table, beside the origami-beautiful packaging from someone’s new iPod. There were the instructions and warranty papers, still heat-sealed in their vinyl bag. A thin white cable, factory-coiled, in another, smaller bag. A bright-yellow rectangle, larger than the Lego. She picked this up, letting her fingers do the thinking. “Then why aren’t more people doing it? How’s it different from virtual reality? Remember when we were all going to be doing that?” The yellow rectangle was made of die-cast hollow metal, covered with glossy paint. Part of a toy.
    “We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it. But you can’t just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We’ll have internalized the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you’ll just walk down the street…” He spread his arms, and grinned at her.
    “In Bobbyland,” she said.
    “You got it.”
    She turned the yellow thing over, saw MADE IN CHINA in tiny bas-relief capitals. Part of a toy truck. The box on the trailer. Container. It was a toy shipping container.
    And that was what the rectangular volume of wireframe had represented, full scale. A shipping container.
    She put the miniature down beside the white Lego, without looking at either.

14. JUANA
    H e remembered her apartment in San Isidro, near the big train station. Exposed wires crossed the high walls like vines, bare bulbs suspended, pots and pans on sturdy hooks. Her altar there was a maze of objects, charged with meaning. Vials of foul water, the half-assembled plastic kit of a Soviet bomber, a soldier’s felt shoulder patch in purple and yellow, old bottles with bubbles trapped within their glass, air from days gone a hundred years or more. These things comprised a mesh, Juana said, about which the deities were more easily manifest. Our Lady of Guadalupe had looked down upon it all, from her painting on the wall.
    That altar, like the one here in her Spanish Harlem apartment, had been dedicated primarily to He Who Opens The Way, and to Ochun, their paired energies never quite in balance, never entirely resting.
    The slaves had been forbidden the worship of their home gods, so they had joined the Catholic Church and celebrated them as saints. Each deity had a second, a Catholic face, like the god Babalaye, who was Lazarus, raised by Christ from the dead. Babalaye’s dance was the Dance of the Walking Dead. In San Isidro, deep in the long evenings, he had seen Juana smoke cigars, and dance, possessed.
    Now he was here with her, these years later, early in the morning, seated before her New