Spook Country by William Gibson Read Free Book Online

for the Newton’s in a flower bed. The Fitzgerald’s really complicated, not always there.”
    “He wouldn’t want to talk to me?”
    “I don’t think he’d like it that you’ve even heard of him.” He frowned. “How did you?”
    “My editor at Node, in London, the one supervising the piece? His name is Philip Rausch. He said he thought you’d know him, but probably Odile wouldn’t.”
    “She doesn’t.”
    “Can you get Bobby to talk with me, Alberto?”
    “It’s not…”
    “He’s not a Curfew fan?” Something inside her cringed at playing the card.
    Alberto giggled. It came bubbling out of his big frame like carbon dioxide. He grinned at her, happily starstruck again. He took another drink. “Actually,” he said, “he does listen to you. The Curfew’s music is something we were able to bond around.”
    “Alberto, I like your work. I like what I’ve seen. I look forward to seeing more. Your River Phoenix piece was my first experience of the medium, a powerful one.” His face went very still, expectant. “I need your help, Alberto. I haven’t done a piece like this before. I’m trying to get a feel for how things work at Node, and Node is asking me to talk with Bobby. There’s no reason I should expect you to trust me—”
    “I do,” he said, with a remarkably groomly cadence. Then: “I do trust you, Hollis, it’s just…” He winced. “You don’t know Bobby.”
    “Tell me. About Bobby.”
    He put a forefinger on the white cloth, tracing a line. Crossed it with another, at a right angle. “The GPS grid,” he said.
    She felt minute hairs shift, on the small of her back, just above the waistband.
    Alberto leaned forward. “Bobby divides his place up into smaller squares, within the grid. He sees everything in terms of GPS gridlines, the world divided up that way. It is, of course, but…” He frowned. “He won’t sleep in the same square twice. He crosses them off, never goes back to one where he’s slept before.”
    “You find that strange?” She did, certainly, but had no idea what passed for eccentric, for Alberto.
    “Bobby is, well, Bobby. Strange? Definitely. Difficult.”
    This wasn’t going where she wanted it to. “I also need to know more about how you make your pieces.” That should do it, she thought. He brightened immediately.
    Their burgers arrived. He looked as though he wanted to brush his aside, now.
    “I start with a sense of place,” he began. “With event, place. Then I research. I compile photographs. For the Fitzgerald, of course, there were no images of the event, precious little in the way of accounts. But there were pictures of him taken in roughly the same period. Wardrobe notes, haircut. Other photographs. And everything I could find on Schwab’s. And there was a lot on Schwab’s, because it was the most famous drugstore in America. Partly because Leon Schwab, the owner, kept claiming that Lana Turner was discovered there, sitting on a stool at his soda fountain. She used to deny that there was any truth to the story, and it seems like Schwab made it up to get customers into the store. But it got the place photographed for magazines. Lots of detail.”
    “And you make the photographs…3-D?” She wasn’t sure how to put it.
    “Are you kidding? I model everything.”
    “How?”
    “I build virtual models, then cover them with skins, textures I’ve sampled, or created myself, usually for that specific piece. Each model has a virtual skeleton, so I can pose and position the figure in its environment. I use digital lights to add shadows and reflections.” He squinted at her, as if trying to decide whether she was really listening. “The modeling is like pushing and pulling clay. I do that over an inner structure of joints—the skeleton, with a spine, shoulders, elbows, fingers. It’s not that different from designing figures for a game. Then I model multiple heads, with slightly different expressions, and combine