Free Count Zero by William Gibson Page B

in a stained green smock was spraying something yellow into a shallow gash that ran diagonally from just above the doll’s pelvic bone to just below its left nipple. He knew the man was black because his head was bare, bare and shaven, slick with sweat; his hands were covered in tight green gloves and all that Bobby could see of him was the gleaming crown of his head. There were pink and blue dermadisks stuck to the skin on either side of the doll’s neck. The edges of the wound seemed to have been painted with something that looked like chocolate syrup, and the yellow spray made a hissing sound as it escaped from its little silver tube.
    Then Bobby got the picture, and the universe reversed itself sickeningly. The lamp was suspended from the ceiling, the ceiling was mirrored, and he was the doll. He seemed to snap back on a long elastic cord, back through the red honeycombs, to the dream room where the black girl sliced pizza for her children. The waterknife made no sound at all, microscopic grit suspended in a needle-stream of high-speed water. The thing was intended to cut glass and alloy, Bobby knew, not to slice microwaved pizza, and he wanted to scream at her because he was terrified she’d take off her thumb without even feeling it.
    But he couldn’t scream, couldn’t move or make a sound at all. She lovingly sliced the last piece, toed the kickplate that shut the knife down, transferred the sliced pizza to a plain white ceramic platter, then turned toward the rectangle of blue beyond the balcony, where her children were—no, Bobby said, way down in himself, no way. Because the things that wheeled and plunged for her weren’t hang-gliding kids, but babies, the monstrous babies of Marsha’s dream, and the tattered wings a confusion of pink bone, metal, patched taut membranes of scrap plastic . . . He saw their teeth . . .
    “Whoa,” said the black man, “lost you for a second. Not for long, you understand, just maybe a New York minute . . .” His hand, in the mirrors overhead, took a flat spool of blue transparent plastic from the bloody cloth beside Bobby’s ribs. Delicately, with thumb and forefinger, he drew out a length of some sort of brown, beaded plastic. Minute points of light flashed along its edges and seemed to quiver and shift. “Claw,” he said, and with his other hand thumbed some sort of integral cutter in the sealed blue spool. Now the length ofbeaded stuff swung free and began to writhe. “Good shit,” he said, bringing the thing into Bobby’s line of sight. “New. What they use in Chiba now.” It was brown, headless, each bead a body segment, each segment edged with pale shining legs. Then, with a conjurer’s flick of his green-gloved wrists, he lay the centipede down the length of the open wound and pinched delicately at the final segment, the one nearest Bobby’s face. As the segment came away, it withdrew a glittering black thread that had served the thing as a nervous system, and as that went, each set of claws locked shut in turn, zipping the slash tight as a new leather jacket.
    “Now, you see,” said the black man, mopping the last of the brown syrup away with a wet white pad, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
     
    His entrance to Two-a-Day’s apartment wasn’t anything like the way he’d so often imagined it. To begin with, he’d never imagined being wheeled in in a wheelchair that someone had appropriated from St. Mary’s Maternity—the name and a serial number neatly laser-etched on the dull chrome of the left armrest. The woman who was wheeling him would have fitted neatly enough into one of his fantasies; her name was Jackie, one of the two Project girls he’d seen at Leon’s, and, he’d come to understand, one of his two angels. The wheelchair was silent as it glided across the scabrous gray wall-to-wall of the apartment’s narrow entranceway, but the gold bangles on Jackie’s fedora tinkled cheerfully as she pushed him along.
    And he’d never