Free Burning Chrome by William Gibson Page A

clothes,biker’s leather by brushed Harris tweed. With sleep, all spurious humanity had vanished.
    They were roosting.
    His couple seated themselves on the edge of the Formica countertop in the kitchenette, and Coretti hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years of that carpet seemed to separate him from the others, but something called to him across the distance, promising rest and peace and belonging. And still he hesitated, shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the genetic core of his body’s every cell.
    Until they opened their eyes, all of them simultaneously, the membranes sliding sideways to reveal the alien calm of dwellers in the ocean’s darkest trench.
    Coretti screamed, and ran away, and fled along corridors and down echoing concrete stairwells to cool rain and the nearly empty streets.
    Coretti never returned to his room on the third floor of that hotel. A bored house detective collected the linguistics texts, the single suitcase of clothing, and they were eventually sold at auction. Coretti took a room in a boardinghouse run by a grim Baptist teetotaler who led her roomers in prayer at the start of every overcooked evening meal. She didn’t mind that Coretti never joined them for those meals; he explained that he was given free meals at work. He lied freely and skillfully. He never drank at the boardinghouse, and he never came home drunk. Mr Coretti was a little odd, but always paid his rent on time. And he was very quiet.
    Coretti stopped looking for her. He stopped going to bars. He drank out of a paper bag while going to and from his job at a publisher’s warehouse, in an area whose industral zoning permitted few bars.
    He worked nights.
    Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep – he never slept lying down, now – he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily…Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.
    A kind of animal that lives only on alcoholic beverages. With peculiar metabolisms they convert the alcohol and the various proteins from mixed drinks and wine and beers into everything they need. And they can change outwardly, like a chameleon or a rockfish, for protection. So they can live among us. And maybe, Coretti thought, they grow in stages. In the early stages seeming like humans, eating the food humans eat, sensing their difference only in a vague disquiet of being an outsider.
    A kind of animal with its own cunning, its own special set or urban instincts. And the ability to know its own kind when they’re near. Maybe.
    And maybe not.
    Coretti drifted into sleep.
    On a Wednesday three weeks into his new job, his landlady opened his door – she never knocked – and told him that he was wanted on the phone. Her voice was tight with habitual suspicion, and Coretti followed her along the dark hallway to the second-floor sitting room and the telephone.
    Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was ‘You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.’
    And then the dial tone, when the caller hung up.
    Later, alone in his room, listening to the landlady’s firm tread in the room below, Coretti realized that there was no need to remain where he was. The summons had come. But the landlady demanded three weeks’ notice if anyone wanted to leave. That meant that Coretti owed her money. Instinct told him to leave it for her.
    A Christian workingman in the next room coughed in his sleep as Coretti got up and went down the hall to the telephone. Coretti told the evening-shift foreman that he was quitting his job. He hung up and went back to his room, locked the door