Spook Country by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

them.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s more subtle. The expressions don’t look made-up, if you do that. I color them, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture. I collect textures. Some of my textures are real skin, scanned in. The River piece, I couldn’t get the skin right. Finally I sampled a very young Vietnamese girl. It worked. People who knew him, they said so.”
    She put her burger down, swallowed. “I didn’t imagine you doing all that. Somehow I thought it would all just…happen? With…technology?”
    He nodded. “Yeah. I get that a lot. All the work I have to do, it seems sort of old-fashioned, archaic. I have to position virtual lights, so shadows will be cast correctly. Then there’s a certain amount of ‘fill,’ atmosphere, for the environment.” He shrugged. “The original only exists on the server, when I’m done, in virtual dimensions of depth, width, height. Sometimes I think that even if the server went down, and took my model with it, that that space would still exist, at least as a mathematical possibility, and that the space we live in…” He frowned.
    “Yes?”
    “Might work the same way.” He shrugged again, and picked up his burger.
    You, she thought, are seriously creeping me out.
    But she only nodded gravely and picked up her own burger.

9. A COLD CIVIL WAR
    T he message tone woke him. He reached for his phone in the dark, watched Volapuk scroll briefly past. Alejandro was outside, wanting in. It was ten after two in the morning. He sat up, pulled on his jeans, socks, sweater. Then his boots, whose laces he tied carefully: this was protocol.
    It was cold in the hallway, as he locked his door behind him, less cold in the elevator. In the narrow, fluorescent-lit foyer below, he rapped once on the street door, heard his cousin’s three raps in reply, then one. When he opened the door, Alejandro stepped in, surrounded by a nimbus of colder air and the smell of whiskey. Tito closed and locked the door behind him.
    “You were sleeping?”
    “Yes,” Tito said, starting for the elevator.
    “I went to Carlito,” Alejandro said, following Tito into the elevator. Tito pushed the button; the door closed. “Carlito and I have our own business.” Meaning separate from family business. “I asked him about your old man.” The door opened.
    “Why did you do that?” Tito unlocked his door.
    “Because I didn’t think you had taken me seriously.”
    They entered the darkness of Tito’s room. He turned on the small shaded lamp attached to his MIDI keyboard. “Shall I make coffee? Tea?”
    “Zavarka?”
    “Bags.” Tito no longer made tea in the Russian way, though he did steep his tea bags in a cheap Chinese tchainik.
    Alejandro seated himself on the foot of Tito’s mattress, knees drawn up before his face. “Carlito brews the zavarka. He takes it with a spoon of jam.” His teeth shone in the light from the MIDI lamp.
    “What did he tell you?”
    “Our grandfather was the understudy of Semenov,” Alejandro said. Tito turned on his hotplate and filled the kettle.
    “Who was that?”
    “Semenov was Castro’s first KGB advisor.”
    Tito looked back at his cousin. This was something like hearing a fairy tale, though not an entirely unfamiliar one. And then the children met a flying horse, his mother would tell him. And then grandfather met Castro’s KGB advisor. He turned back to the hotplate.
    “Grandfather was one of the less obvious participants in the formation of the Dirección General de Inteligencia.”
    “Carlito told you that?”
    “I knew it already. From Juana.”
    Tito thought about this as he put the kettle to boil on the element. Their grandfather’s secrets could not have gone with him entirely. Legends grew like vines, through a family like theirs, and the midden of their shared history, however deep, was narrow, constrained by the need for secrecy. Juana, so long in charge of the production of required documents, would have enjoyed a certain