Zero History by William Gibson Read Free Book Online

rain.
    “There’s a place there,” she said. “One of his secrets. Do it. If he wants to go back later for the overdubs, do it.”
    “So why’s he breaking my balls now, remixing?”
    “It’s his process,” she said.
    Clammy rolled his eyes, to heaven or his black cap, then back to her. “You ask your friend where they got the Hounds?”
    “Not yet,” she said.
    He turned on his stool, swung his leg out from beneath the counter. “Hounds,” he said. The jeans he wore were black, very narrow. “Twenty-ounce,” he said. “Brutal heavy.”
    “Slubby?”
    “You blind?”
    “Where did you find them?”
    “Melbourne. Girl I met, knew where and when.”
    “A store?”
    “Never in shops,” he said. “Except secondhand, and that’s not likely.”
    “I tried Google,” she said. “A Mary Stewart book, a band, CD by someone else …”
    “Go further, on Google, and there’s eBay,” he said.
    “Hounds on eBay?”
    “All fake. Almost all. Chinese fakes.”
    “The Chinese are faking it?”
    “Chinese are faking everything,” Clammy said. “You get a real Hounds piece on eBay, someone makes an offer high enough to stop it. Never seen an auction for real Hounds run off.”
    “It’s an Australian brand?”
    He looked disgusted, which was how he’d looked in whatever few previous brief conversations they’d had. “Fuck no,” he said, “it’s
Hounds
.”
    “Tell me about it, Clammy,” she said. “I need to know.”

6. AFTER THE GYRATORY

    T he Neo’s plastic case reminded Milgrim of one of those electronic stud-finders they sold in hardware stores, its shape simultaneously simple and clumsy, awkward against his ear.
    “Gussets?” demanded Rausch, on the Neo.
    “He said they needed them. One in each inner thigh.”
    “What are they?”
    “An extra piece of material, between two seams. Usually triangular.”
    “How do you know that?”
    Milgrim considered. “I like details,” he said.
    “What did he look like?”
    “Football player,” Milgrim said. “With a sort of mullet.”
    “A what?”
    “I have to go,” Milgrim said. “We’re at the Hanger Lane Gyratory System.”
    “Wha—”
    Milgrim clicked off.
    Pocketing the Neo, he brought himself more upright, feeling the Jankel-armored, four-doored, short-bedded Toyota Hilux’s ferocious engine-transplant gather itself for their plunge into England’s most famously intimidating roundabout, seven lanes of fiercely determined traffic.
    According to Aldous, the Hilux’s other driver, this route from Heathrow, decidedly nonoptimal, was part of his job requirement, meant to maintain certain skills one was otherwise unable to practice in London traffic.
    Braced for the discomfort of rapid acceleration on run-flat tires, from a standing stop, Milgrim glanced down, to his right, glimpsing the pinstriped thigh of the driver in the adjacent lane, and missed seeing the light change.
    Then they were in it, fully gyratory, the driver expertly and repeatedly inserting the Hilux’s secretly massive but oddly skittish bulk sideways, it seemed, into absurdly tiny lane-change gaps.
    Milgrim had no idea why he’d come to enjoy this so much. Prior to his stay in Basel, he’d have kept his eyes shut for the whole thing; if he’d been expecting it, he’d have upped his medication. But now, grinning, he sat with the red cardboard tube upright between his legs, holding it with the fingertips of both hands, as though it were a joystick.
    Then they were out of it. He sighed, deeply if mysteriously satisfied, and felt the driver’s glance.
    This driver wasn’t as talkative as Aldous, but that might have something to do with the urine test. Aldous had never had to administer the urine test, or drive back to London with a vial cooling in his overcoat pocket.
    Aldous had told Milgrim all about the Toyota Hilux, about the Jankel armor and the bulletproof glass and the run-flats. “Cartel grade,” Aldous had assured him, and unusual for London, at least