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| NEUROMANCER
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| WILLIAM GIBSON
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| Part 1 2 3 4 Coda
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| for Deb
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| who made it possible
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| with love
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| PART ONE
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| CHIBA CITY BLUES
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| 1
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| The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned
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| to a dead channel.
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| `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he
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| shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the
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| Chat. `It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-
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| ciency.' It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo
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| was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there
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| for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
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| Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto-
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| nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw
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| Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel
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| and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the
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| unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval
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| uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
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| precise rows of tribal scars. `Wage was in here early, with two
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| joeboys,' Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his
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| good hand. `Maybe some business with you, Case?'
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| Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged
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| him.
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| The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff
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| of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something
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| heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he
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| reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis,
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| a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby
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| pink plastic. `You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.' Ratz
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| grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his
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| overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. `You are
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| the artiste of the slightly funny deal.'
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| `Sure,' Case said, and sipped his beer. `Somebody's gotta
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| be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you.'
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| The whore's giggle went up an octave.
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| `Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's
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| a close personal friend of mine.'
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| She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible
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| spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.
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| `Jesus,' Case said, `what kinda creepjoint you running here?
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| Man can't have a drink.'
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| `Ha,' Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag,
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| `Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertain-
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| ment value.'
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| As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange
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| instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated
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| conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause.
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| Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
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| Ratz grunted. `An angel passed.'
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| `The Chinese,' bellowed a drunken Australian, `Chinese
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| bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a
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| nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate...'
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| `Now that,' Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly
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| rising in him like bile, `that is _so_ much bullshit.'
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| The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than
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| the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were
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| the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,
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| and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that
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| Memphis hotel.
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| A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
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| nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the
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| corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in
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| his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
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| void... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the
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| Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cow-
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| boy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the
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| dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo,
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| and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the
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| dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands
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| clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fin-
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| gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.
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| `I saw your girl last night,' Ratz said, passing Case his
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| second Kirin.
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| `I don't have one,' he said, and drank.
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| `Miss Linda Lee.'
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| Case shook his head.
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| `No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to
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| commerce?' The bartender's small brown eyes were nested
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| deep in wrinkled flesh. `I think I liked you better, with her.
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| You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too ar-
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| tistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.'
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| `You're breaking my heart, Ratz.' He finished his beer,
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| paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-
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| stained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way
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| through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.
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| Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy,
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| a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by
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| the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the
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| biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a
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| byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cy-
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| berspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness
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| into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief,
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| he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who pro-
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| vided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls
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| of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
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| He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd
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| never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something
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| for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam.
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| He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it
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| mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.
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| Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the
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| money. And he was going to need it. Because -- still smiling --
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| they were going to make sure he never worked again.
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| They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian
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| mycotoxin.
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| Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning
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| out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
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| The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
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| For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber-
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| space, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy
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| hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt
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| for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of
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| his own flesh.
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| His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat
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| sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through
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| the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells
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| of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate
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| business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already
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| illegal.
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| In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,
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| he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in
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| the shadowland of black medicine. Synonymous with implants,
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| nerve-splicing, and microbionics, Chiba was a magnet for the
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| Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures.
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| In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month
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| round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black
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| clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which
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| he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.
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| Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the
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| port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all
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| night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of
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| Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering
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| hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay
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| was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals
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| of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes
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| dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and
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| city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an
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| area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart.
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| By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless,
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| the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned
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| silver sky.
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| Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre
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| de Th, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double
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| espresso. It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Bra-
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| zilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls.
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| The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in
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| red neon.
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| At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money
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| and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal
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| overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had
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| seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd
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| killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before
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| would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the
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| street itself came to seem the externalization of some death
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| wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
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| Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
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| winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
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| permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you
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| sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd
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| break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either
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| way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague
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| memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or
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| lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger
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| with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
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| Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the
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| accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace,
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| the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.
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| Alone at a table in the Jarre de Th, with the octagon coming
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| on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware
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| of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at
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| some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very
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| ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer
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| carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran
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| the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation
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| for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew
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| that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his
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| customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him
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| basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And
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| that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that
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| most hated the thought of Linda Lee.
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| He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.
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| Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigar-
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| ette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa,
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| the New York skyline... And now he remembered her that
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| way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to
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| a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned,
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| forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank
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| War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck
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| sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding
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| high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way
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| to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come
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| in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement
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| and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of
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| the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she
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| played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one
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| he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a portside coffin,
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| her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in
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| flight.
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| Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal
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| he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with
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| smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the
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| headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
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| Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets
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| at the hoverport and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept
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| up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the
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| children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white
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| loafers and clingwrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the
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| midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a
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| child.
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| It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved
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| through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of
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| reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving
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| like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen
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| the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched
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| her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him
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| of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of
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| blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.
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| He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It
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| was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate
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| of the tabletop was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With
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| the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random
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| impacts required to create a surface like that. The Jarre was
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| decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century,
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| an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plas-
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| tics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though
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| the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked
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| the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface
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| fogged with something that could never be wiped away.
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| `Hey. Case, good buddy...'
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| He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She
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| was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneak-
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| ers.
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| `I been lookin'~ for you, man.' She took a seat opposite
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| him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zipsuit
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| had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked
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| her arms for signs of derms or the needle. `Want a cigarette?'
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| She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle
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| pocket and offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a
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| red plastic tube. `You sleepin'~ okay, Case? You look tired.'
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| Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta.
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| The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but
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| the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines
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| of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the
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| corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by
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| a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented
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| microcircuits, or a city map.
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| `Not if I remember to take my pills,' he said, as a tangible
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| wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the
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| wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her
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| skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her
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| fingers locked across the small of his back.
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| All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.
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| `Wage,' she said, narrowing her eyes. `He wants to see
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| you with a hole in your face.' She lit her own cigarette.
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| `Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?'
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| `No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys.'
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| `I don't owe him enough. He does me, he's out the money
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| anyway.' He shrugged.
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| `Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to
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| be the example. You seriously better watch it.'
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| `Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?'
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| `Sleep.' She shook her head. `Sure, Case.' She shivered,
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| hunched forward over the table. Her face was filmed with
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| sweat.
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| `Here,' he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker,
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| coming up with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically,
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| under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her.
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| `You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage.' There
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| was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read,
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| something he'd never seen there before.
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| `I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more
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| coming,' he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a
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| zippered pocket.
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| `You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick.'
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| `I'll see you, Linda,' he said, getting up.
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| `Sure.' A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her
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| pupils. Sanpaku. `You watch your back, man.'
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| He nodded, anxious to be gone.
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| He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him,
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| saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.
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| Friday night on Ninsei.
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| He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised
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| coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an
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| arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman
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| by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the
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| back of the man's right hand.
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| Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for
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| trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above
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| a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors
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| that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like
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| that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a
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| black clinic.
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| The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was
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| a gaijin crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary
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| tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies
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| showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species
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| of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire
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| and commerce.
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| There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City
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| tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea
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| that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of
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| historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also
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| saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies
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| require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its in-
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| habitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for
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| technology itself.
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| Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights?
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| Would Wage have him killed to make an example? It didn't
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| make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed
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| biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.
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| But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case's primary
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| insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the
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| buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman's business
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| is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case
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| had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City
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| had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with
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| betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble,
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| he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
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| The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glan-
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| dular extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He
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| knew Wage hadn't liked that. Wage was his primary supplier,
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| nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd
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| managed to forge links with the rigidly stratified criminal es-
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| tablishment beyond Night City's borders. Genetic materials and
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| hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of
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| fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace some-
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| thing back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a
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| dozen cities.
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| Case found himself staring through a shop window. The
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| place sold small bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flic-
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| knives, lighters, pocket VTRs, simstim decks, weighted man-
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| riki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated
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| him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed,
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| others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on
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| water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted
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| against scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon
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| fishline, their centers stamped with dragons or yinyang sym-
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| bols. They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came
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| to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his
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| destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
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| `Julie,' he said to his stars. `Time to see old Julie. He'll
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| know.'
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| Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his
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| metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums
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| and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly
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| pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code
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| of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he'd fly
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| to Hongkong and order the year's suits and shirts. Sexless and
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| inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in
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| his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never
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| seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe
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| seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of gar-
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| ments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses,
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| framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic
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| quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian dollhouse.
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| His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part
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| of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before,
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| with a random collection of European furniture, as though
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| Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-
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| Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room
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| where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps
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| perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in
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| scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between
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| the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete
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| floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the con-
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| volutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct
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| time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping
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| modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
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| `You seem to be clean, old son,' said Deane's disembodied
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| voice. `Do come in.'
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| Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive
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| imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS
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| DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in
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| peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in
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| Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century,
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| the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
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| Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of
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| light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of
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| dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced behind a
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| vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, draw-
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| ered cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of
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| thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written
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| records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes,
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| scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of
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| clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get
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| around to reassembling.
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| `What brings you around, boyo?' Deane asked, offering
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| Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked pa-
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| per. `Try one. Ting Ting Djahe, the very best.' Case refused
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| the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and
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| ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg. `Julie,
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| I hear Wage wants to kill me.'
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| `Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?'
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| `People.'
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| `People,' Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. `What sort
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| of people? Friends?'
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| Case nodded.
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| `Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?'
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| `I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to
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| you?'
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| `Haven't been in touch, of late.' Then he sighed. `If I _did_
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| know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things
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| being what they are, you understand.'
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| `Things?'
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| `He's an important connection, Case.'
| |
| `Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?'
| |
| `Not that I know of.' Deane shrugged. They might have
| |
| been discussing the price of ginger. `If it proves to be an
| |
| unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and
| |
| I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore.'
| |
| `Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?'
| |
| `Loose lips, old son!' Deane grinned. The steel desk was
| |
| jammed with a fortune in debugging gear.
| |
| `Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage.'
| |
| Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his
| |
| pale silk tie.
| |
| | |
| He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit,
| |
| the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass,
| |
| and very close.
| |
| The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something
| |
| Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of
| |
| control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of
| |
| octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his
| |
| narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let
| |
| the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display
| |
| window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical
| |
| boutique, closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets
| |
| of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of
| |
| vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade.
| |
| The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was
| |
| tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous
| |
| chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking,
| |
| while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry
| |
| the thing around in your pocket?
| |
| Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied
| |
| the reflection of the passing crowd.
| |
| There.
| |
| Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored
| |
| glasses, dark clothing, slender...
| |
| And gone.
| |
| Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.
| |
| | |
| `Rent me a gun, Shin?'
| |
| The boy smiled. `Two hour.' They stood together in the
| |
| smell of fresh raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall.
| |
| `You come back, two hour.'
| |
| `I need one now, man. Got anything right now?'
| |
| Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once
| |
| been filled with powdered horseradish. He produced a slender
| |
| package wrapped in gray plastic. `Taser. One hour, twenty
| |
| New Yen. Thirty deposit.'
| |
| `Shit. I don't need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna
| |
| shoot somebody, understand?'
| |
| The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horse-
| |
| radish cans. `Two hour.'
| |
| | |
| He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the
| |
| display of shuriken. He'd never thrown one in his life.
| |
| He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank
| |
| chip that gave his name as Charles Derek May. It beat Truman
| |
| Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport.
| |
| The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she
| |
| had a few years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit
| |
| of science. He took his slender roll of New Yen out of his
| |
| pocket and showed it to her. `I want to buy a weapon.'
| |
| She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
| |
| `No,' he said, `I don't like knives.'
| |
| She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The
| |
| lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a
| |
| coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight identical
| |
| tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown
| |
| fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for
| |
| him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one
| |
| end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the
| |
| tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and
| |
| forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of
| |
| tightly wound coilspring slid out and locked. `Cobra,' she said.
| |
| | |
| Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean
| |
| shade of gray. The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have
| |
| teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks. Case
| |
| had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient
| |
| way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd settled for tucking the
| |
| handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting
| |
| across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between
| |
| his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt
| |
| like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it
| |
| made him feel better.
| |
| The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it
| |
| attracted a related clientele. Fridays and Saturdays were dif-
| |
| ferent. The regulars were still there, most of them, but they
| |
| faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed
| |
| on them. As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for
| |
| Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight. Lonny Zone, the bar's
| |
| resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as
| |
| one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was
| |
| addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud
| |
| Dancers. Catching the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the
| |
| bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his
| |
| long face slack and placid.
| |
| `You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?'
| |
| Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.
| |
| `You sure, man?'
| |
| `Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago.'
| |
| `Got some joeboys with him? One of 'em thin, dark hair,
| |
| maybe a black jacket?'
| |
| `No,' Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to
| |
| indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail.
| |
| `Big boys. Graftees.' Zone's eyes showed very little white and
| |
| less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and
| |
| enormous. He stared into Case's face for a long time, then
| |
| lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip. `Cobra,'
| |
| he said, and raised an eyebrow. `You wanna fuck somebody
| |
| up?'
| |
| `See you, Lonny.' Case left the bar.
| |
| | |
| His tail was back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation,
| |
| the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else.
| |
| You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy.
| |
| Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was
| |
| like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself
| |
| in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and
| |
| it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the
| |
| matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish
| |
| cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed
| |
| drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all
| |
| around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made
| |
| flesh in the mazes of the black market...
| |
| Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck 'em in. Last thing they'll
| |
| expect. He was half a block from the games arcade where he'd
| |
| first met Linda Lee.
| |
| He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sail-
| |
| ors. One of them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was
| |
| through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf,
| |
| subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. Someone scored
| |
| a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst
| |
| drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball
| |
| mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight
| |
| of unpainted chipboard stairs. He'd come here once with Wage,
| |
| to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man
| |
| called Matsuga. He remembered the hallway, its stained mat-
| |
| ting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles.
| |
| One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black
| |
| t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a
| |
| travel poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined
| |
| ideograms.
| |
| `Get your security up here,' Case told her.
| |
| Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The
| |
| last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun
| |
| and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-
| |
| lacquered composition door at the far end. It popped, cheap
| |
| hardware failing from the splintered frame. Darkness there, the
| |
| white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door
| |
| to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob,
| |
| leaning in with everything he had. Something snapped, and he
| |
| was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Mat-
| |
| suga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was
| |
| long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind
| |
| the arcade, filtering in through sootblown plastic. He made out
| |
| a snakelike loop of fiberoptics protruding from a wall socket,
| |
| a pile of discarded food containers, and the bladeless nacelle
| |
| of an electric fan.
| |
| The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged
| |
| out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched.
| |
| It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame.
| |
| Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle,
| |
| triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head
| |
| of the corridor.
| |
| Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to
| |
| full extension.
| |
| With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume
| |
| he'd gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges. The
| |
| cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel
| |
| shaft amplifying his pulse.
| |
| Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm,
| |
| the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear
| |
| came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold,
| |
| rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear.
| |
| He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd
| |
| almost forgotten what real fear was.
| |
| This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He
| |
| might die here. They might have guns...
| |
| A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man's voice,
| |
| shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. An-
| |
| other crash.
| |
| And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
| |
| Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid
| |
| beats of his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel
| |
| scraped the matting.
| |
| The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He
| |
| snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window,
| |
| blind with fear, his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and
| |
| falling, all before he was conscious of what he'd done. The
| |
| impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.
| |
| A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch
| |
| framed a heap of discarded fiberoptics and the chassis of a
| |
| junked console. He'd fallen face forward on a slab of soggy
| |
| chipboard; he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The
| |
| cubicle's window was a square of faint light. The alarm still
| |
| oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the
| |
| games.
| |
| A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the
| |
| fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he
| |
| still couldn't read the features. Glint of silver across the eyes.
| |
| `Shit,' someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern
| |
| Sprawl.
| |
| The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long
| |
| count of twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his
| |
| hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was.
| |
| He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.
| |
| | |
| Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of
| |
| a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on
| |
| the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22
| |
| long rifle, and Case would've preferred lead azide explosives
| |
| to the simple Chinese hollowpoints Shin had sold him. Still,
| |
| it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he
| |
| made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in
| |
| his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in
| |
| a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across
| |
| in the dark. He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on
| |
| Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.
| |
| The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to
| |
| Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, he'd decided, was gone,
| |
| and that was fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and
| |
| it wouldn't wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood
| |
| a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick. Its
| |
| windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was
| |
| visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the
| |
| main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideo-
| |
| grams. If the place had another name, Case didn't know it; it
| |
| was always referred to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through
| |
| an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a
| |
| transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an af-
| |
| terthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case
| |
| climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked
| |
| length of rigid magnetic tape.
| |
| Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he'd
| |
| arrived in Chiba, but he'd never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept
| |
| in cheaper places.
| |
| The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides
| |
| of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the
| |
| fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers
| |
| against the pistolgrip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss.
| |
| As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he
| |
| was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served
| |
| the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
| |
| Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese
| |
| teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook.
| |
| The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of
| |
| industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side.
| |
| Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic
| |
| grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with
| |
| cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked
| |
| when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open
| |
| without a key.
| |
| The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he
| |
| edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins
| |
| were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just
| |
| under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot and
| |
| waited for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts
| |
| thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak
| |
| of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling
| |
| the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated
| |
| the manual latch.
| |
| There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi
| |
| pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The
| |
| cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice,
| |
| carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun
| |
| aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown temperfoam slab
| |
| that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from his
| |
| pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his
| |
| jacket. The coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall,
| |
| opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages. Case
| |
| took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hongkong
| |
| number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung up.
| |
| His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi
| |
| wasn't taking calls.
| |
| He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
| |
| A woman answered, something in Japanese.
| |
| `Snake Man there?'
| |
| `Very good to hear from you,' said Snake Man, coming in
| |
| on an extension. `I've been expecting your call.'
| |
| `I got the music you wanted.' Glancing at the cooler.
| |
| `I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem.
| |
| Can you front?'
| |
| `Oh, man, I really need the money bad...'
| |
| Snake Man hung up.
| |
| `You shit,' Case said to the humming receiver. He stared
| |
| at the cheap little pistol.
| |
| `Iffy,' he said, `it's all looking very iffy tonight.'
| |
| | |
| Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands
| |
| in the pockets of his jacket: one held the rented pistol, the other
| |
| the aluminum flask.
| |
| Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from
| |
| a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh
| |
| tilted against the wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid
| |
| called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly
| |
| silent drunks. Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher
| |
| and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. `You look
| |
| bad, friend artiste,' he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.
| |
| `I'm doing just fine,' said Case, and grinned like a skull.
| |
| `Super fine.' He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands
| |
| still in his pockets.
| |
| `And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter
| |
| built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions,
| |
| yes?'
| |
| `Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?'
| |
| `Proof against fear and being alone,' the bartender contin-
| |
| ued. `Listen to the fear. Maybe it's your friend.'
| |
| `You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz?
| |
| Somebody hurt?'
| |
| `Crazy cut a security man.' He shrugged. `A girl, they
| |
| say.'
| |
| `I gotta talk to Wage. Ratz, I...'
| |
| `Ah.' Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single
| |
| line. He was looking past Case, toward the entrance. `I think
| |
| you are about to.'
| |
| Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window.
| |
| The speed sang in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery
| |
| with sweat.
| |
| `Herr Wage,' Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manip-
| |
| ulator as if he expected it to be shaken. `How great a pleasure.
| |
| Too seldom do you honor us.'
| |
| Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face. It
| |
| was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vatgrown
| |
| sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal
| |
| silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was
| |
| flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men, their arms
| |
| and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
| |
| `How you doing, Case?'
| |
| `Gentlemen,' said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ash-
| |
| tray in his pink plastic claw, `I want no trouble here.' The
| |
| ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised
| |
| Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of
| |
| green plastic cascading onto the tabletop. `You understand?'
| |
| `Hey, sweetheart,' said one of the joeboys, `you wanna try
| |
| that thing on me?'
| |
| `Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt,' Ratz said, his tone
| |
| conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Bra-
| |
| zilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun
| |
| at the trio. The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped
| |
| with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow
| |
| a fist. The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges,
| |
| subsonic sandbag jellies.
| |
| `Technically nonlethal,' said Ratz.
| |
| `Hey, Ratz,' Case said, `I owe you one.'
| |
| The bartender shrugged. `Nothing, you owe me. These,'
| |
| and he glowered at Wage and the joeboys, `should know better.
| |
| You don't take anybody off in the Chatsubo.'
| |
| Wage coughed. `So who's talking about taking anybody
| |
| off. We just wanna talk business. Case and me, we work
| |
| together.'
| |
| Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at
| |
| Wage's crotch. `I hear you wanna do me.' Ratz's pink claw
| |
| closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
| |
| `Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
| |
| you, you wig or something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill
| |
| you?' Wage turned to the boy on his left. `You two go back
| |
| to the Namban. Wait for me.'
| |
| Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now en-
| |
| tirely deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis,
| |
| who was curled at the foot of a barstool. The barrel of the
| |
| Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back
| |
| to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol clattered on the
| |
| table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out
| |
| of the chamber.
| |
| `Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?' Wage asked.
| |
| Linda.
| |
| `Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?'
| |
| The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
| |
| `Get him out of here,' Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting
| |
| on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his
| |
| lap, lighting a cigarette.
| |
| Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a
| |
| bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out
| |
| of his pocket and handed it to Wage. `All I got. Pituitaries.
| |
| Get you five hundred if you move it fast. Had the rest of my
| |
| roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now.'
| |
| `You okay, Case?' The flask had already vanished behind
| |
| a gunmetal lapel. `I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look
| |
| bad. Like hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep.'
| |
| `Yeah.' He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him.
| |
| `Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody.' He giggled.
| |
| He picked up the .22's magazine and the one loose cartridge
| |
| and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the
| |
| other. `I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back.'
| |
| `Go home,' said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with
| |
| something like embarrassment. `Artiste. Go home.'
| |
| He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered
| |
| his way past the plastic doors.
| |
| | |
| `Bitch,' he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei
| |
| the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon
| |
| was already cold and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from
| |
| a street vendor's foam thimble and watched the sun come up.
| |
| `You fly away, honey. Towns like this are for people who like
| |
| the way down.' But that wasn't it, really, and he was finding
| |
| it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just
| |
| wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy
| |
| it for her, if she could find the right fence. And that business
| |
| with the fifty; she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was
| |
| about to rip him for the rest of what he had.
| |
| When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on
| |
| the desk. Different textbook. `Good buddy,' Case called across
| |
| the plastic turf, `you don't need to tell me. I know already.
| |
| Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key. Nice little tip
| |
| for you, say fifty New ones?' The boy put down his book.
| |
| `Woman,' Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
| |
| his thumb. `Silk.' He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back,
| |
| nodded. `Thanks, asshole,' Case said.
| |
| On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed
| |
| it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner.
| |
| He knew where to rent a blackbox that would open anything
| |
| in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.
| |
| `Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday
| |
| night special you rented from the waiter?'
| |
| She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin.
| |
| She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox
| |
| muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.
| |
| `That you in the arcade?' He pulled the hatch down.
| |
| `Where's Linda?'
| |
| `Hit that latch switch.'
| |
| He did.
| |
| `That your girl? Linda?'
| |
| He nodded.
| |
| `She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What
| |
| about the gun, man?' She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes
| |
| were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temperfoam.
| |
| `I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets
| |
| back to him for half what I paid. You want the money?'
| |
| `No.'
| |
| `Want some dry ice? All I got, right now.'
| |
| `What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at
| |
| the arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with
| |
| nunchucks.'
| |
| `Linda said you were gonna kill me.'
| |
| `Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here.'
| |
| `You aren't with Wage?'
| |
| She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were sur-
| |
| gically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to
| |
| grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by
| |
| dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the
| |
| fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy.
| |
| The nails looked artificial. `I think you screwed up, Case. I
| |
| showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.'
| |
| `So what do you want, lady?' He sagged back against the
| |
| hatch.
| |
| `You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly,
| |
| Case. My name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work
| |
| for. Just wants to talk; is all. Nobody wants to hurt you.'
| |
| `That's good.'
| |
| `'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just
| |
| the way I'm wired.' She wore tight black gloveleather jeans
| |
| and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed
| |
| to absorb light. `If I put this dartgun away, will you be easy,
| |
| Case? You look like you like to take stupid chances.'
| |
| `Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem.'
| |
| `That's fine, man.' The fletcher vanished into the black
| |
| jacket. `Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be
| |
| taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life.'
| |
| She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly
| |
| spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-
| |
| centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the
| |
| burgundy nails.
| |
| She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 2
| |
| | |
| After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor
| |
| of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by
| |
| eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffeemaker steamed on
| |
| a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow
| |
| balcony.
| |
| `Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it.' She took
| |
| off her black jacket; the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a
| |
| black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover
| |
| with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof. Case
| |
| decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and
| |
| legs felt like they were made out of wood.
| |
| `Case.' He looked up, seeing the man for the first time.
| |
| `My name is Armitage.' The dark robe was open to the waist,
| |
| the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and
| |
| hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. `Sun's
| |
| up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy.'
| |
| Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked
| |
| the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation
| |
| ricepaper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left
| |
| lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
| |
| `Get your coffee, Case,' Molly said. `You re okay, but
| |
| you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say.' She sat
| |
| crosslegged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher
| |
| without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he
| |
| crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
| |
| `Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?' Ar-
| |
| mitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair.
| |
| A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. `Leningrad, Kiev,
| |
| Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case.'
| |
| `What's that supposed to mean?'
| |
| `Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name.'
| |
| `Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian
| |
| nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody
| |
| got out.'
| |
| He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window
| |
| and looked out over Tokyo Bay. `That isn't true. One unit
| |
| made it back to Helsinki, Case.'
| |
| Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
| |
| `You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs
| |
| you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming
| |
| Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic
| |
| module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a
| |
| jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series
| |
| was the first generation of real intrusion programs.'
| |
| `Icebreakers,' Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
| |
| `Ice from _ICE,_ intrusion countermeasures electronics.'
| |
| `Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just
| |
| be going...'
| |
| `I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your
| |
| kind.'
| |
| `You got zip to do with me and my kind buddy. You're
| |
| rich enough to hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here,
| |
| is all. I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or
| |
| anybody else.' He crossed to the window and looked down.
| |
| `That's where I live now.'
| |
| `Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
| |
| you when you're not looking.'
| |
| `Profile?'
| |
| `We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each
| |
| of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software.
| |
| You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the
| |
| outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new
| |
| pancreas inside a year.'
| |
| ``We.'' He met the faded blue eyes. ``We' who?'
| |
| `What would you say if I told you we could correct your
| |
| neural damage, Case?' Armitage suddenly looked to Case as
| |
| if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously
| |
| heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that
| |
| soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again. Case's dreams
| |
| always ended in these freezeframes, and now this one was
| |
| over.
| |
| `What would you say, Case?'
| |
| Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
| |
| `I'd say you were full of shit.'
| |
| Armitage nodded.
| |
| `Then I'd ask what your terms were.'
| |
| `Not very different than what you're used to, Case.'
| |
| `Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,' Molly said from
| |
| her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk
| |
| like some expensive puzzle. `He's coming apart at the seams.'
| |
| `Terms,' Case said, `and now. Right now.'
| |
| He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.
| |
| | |
| The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster
| |
| of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He re-
| |
| membered the place from the round he'd made his first month
| |
| in Chiba.
| |
| `Scared, Case. You're real scared.' It was Sunday afternoon
| |
| and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders,
| |
| a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves.
| |
| A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the
| |
| bamboo.
| |
| `It'll work Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Ar-
| |
| mitage has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing
| |
| you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do
| |
| it. He'll put them three years ahead of the competition. You
| |
| got any idea what that's worth?' She hooked thumbs in the
| |
| beltloops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the
| |
| lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes
| |
| were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty
| |
| quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
| |
| `You're street samurai,' he said. `How long you work for
| |
| him?'
| |
| `Couple of months.'
| |
| `What about before that?'
| |
| `For somebody else. Working girl, you know?'
| |
| He nodded.
| |
| `Funny, Case.'
| |
| `What's funny?'
| |
| `It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know how
| |
| you're wired.'
| |
| `You don't know me, sister.'
| |
| `You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad luck.'
| |
| `How about him? He okay, Molly?' The robot crab moved
| |
| toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its
| |
| bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When
| |
| it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then
| |
| froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
| |
| `What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet
| |
| ass.' The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked
| |
| it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the
| |
| carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon
| |
| righted it.
| |
| Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry
| |
| of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to
| |
| search his pockets for cigarettes. `In your shirt,' she said.
| |
| `You want to answer my question?' He fished a wrinkled
| |
| Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab
| |
| of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an op-
| |
| erating table.
| |
| `Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
| |
| He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
| |
| gets more all the time.' Case noticed a certain tension around
| |
| her mouth. `Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...'
| |
| She shrugged.
| |
| `What's that mean?'
| |
| `I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what
| |
| we're really working for.'
| |
| He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday
| |
| morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours.
| |
| Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's
| |
| security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the
| |
| chainlink. If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it.
| |
| He'd avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Ar-
| |
| mitage's call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this
| |
| girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
| |
| `If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to
| |
| meet you.' The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the
| |
| clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.
| |
| | |
| Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
| |
| Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image
| |
| fading down corridors of television sky.
| |
| Voices.
| |
| Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves,
| |
| pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given...
| |
| | |
| Hold still. Don't move.
| |
| And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone,
| |
| a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and
| |
| whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chainlink
| |
| and the prison of the skull.
| |
| Goddamn don't you move.
| |
| Where the sky faded from hissing static to the noncolor of
| |
| the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
| |
| `Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!'
| |
| She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one
| |
| hand. `You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat. You're
| |
| still full of endorphin inhibitors.'
| |
| | |
| He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
| |
| His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady
| |
| pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and
| |
| reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and
| |
| ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the
| |
| shade beneath a bridge or overpass...
| |
| `Case? It's Wednesday, Case.' She moved, rolling over,
| |
| reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard
| |
| her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. `Here.'
| |
| She put the bottle in his hand. `I can see in the dark, Case.
| |
| Microchannel image-amps in my glasses.'
| |
| `My back hurts.'
| |
| `That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood,
| |
| too. Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal.
| |
| And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff,
| |
| I dunno. Lot of injections. They didn't have to open anything
| |
| up for the main show.' She settled back beside him. `It's
| |
| 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve.'
| |
| He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed,
| |
| lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.
| |
| `I gotta punch deck,' he heard himself say. He was groping
| |
| for his clothes. `I gotta know...'
| |
| She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms.
| |
| `Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would
| |
| fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor's orders.
| |
| Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so.' He
| |
| lay down again.
| |
| `Where are we?'
| |
| `Home. Cheap Hotel.'
| |
| `Where's Armitage?'
| |
| `Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're
| |
| out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the
| |
| Sprawl.' She touched his shoulder. `Roll over. I give a good
| |
| massage.'
| |
| He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his
| |
| fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the
| |
| small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather
| |
| jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.
| |
| `How come you're not at the Hilton?'
| |
| She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs,
| |
| and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger.
| |
| She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him,
| |
| her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked
| |
| softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden
| |
| against the temperfoam.
| |
| His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed
| |
| to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back
| |
| against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small
| |
| hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on
| |
| the leather jeans and tugged it down.
| |
| `It's okay,' she said, `I can see.' Sound of the jeans peeling
| |
| down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away.
| |
| She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected
| |
| hardness of the implanted lenses. `Don't,' she said, `finger-
| |
| prints.'
| |
| Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it
| |
| over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers
| |
| spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the
| |
| images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriv-
| |
| ing and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched
| |
| convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping
| |
| down on him again and again, until they both had come, his
| |
| orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the
| |
| matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down
| |
| hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet
| |
| against his hips.
| |
| | |
| On Ninsei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went
| |
| through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from
| |
| the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat
| |
| and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smell-
| |
| ing twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
| |
| `You seen Wage, Ratz?'
| |
| `Not tonight.' Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at
| |
| Molly.
| |
| `You see him, tell him I got his money.'
| |
| `Luck changing, my artiste?'
| |
| `Too soon to tell.'
| |
| | |
| `Well, I gotta see this guy,' Case said, watching his re-
| |
| flection in her glasses. `I got biz to cancel out of.'
| |
| `Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight.' She
| |
| stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
| |
| `The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I don't
| |
| give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people
| |
| who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my people,
| |
| you know?'
| |
| Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
| |
| `I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku
| |
| and Asakuza, and they'll go _down,_ understand?' he lied, his
| |
| hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. `Five. Five minutes.
| |
| By your clock, okay?'
| |
| `Not what I'm paid for.'
| |
| `What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight
| |
| friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is
| |
| something else.'
| |
| `Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to
| |
| check us out with your smuggler.' She put a booted foot up
| |
| on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.
| |
| `Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion
| |
| there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of
| |
| silicon in her head. What is this about, exactly?' Deane's ghostly
| |
| cough seemed to hang in the air between them.
| |
| `Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone.'
| |
| `You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any
| |
| other way.'
| |
| `Okay,' she said. `Go. But five minutes. Any more and
| |
| I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while
| |
| you're at it, you try to figure something out.'
| |
| `What's that?'
| |
| `Why I'm doing you the favor.' She turned and walked
| |
| out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
| |
| `Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?' asked Julie.
| |
| `Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?'
| |
| The bolts worked. `Slowly, Case,' said the voice.
| |
| `Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,' Case
| |
| said, taking his place in the swivel chair.
| |
| `It's on all the time,' Deane said mildly, taking a gun from
| |
| behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and
| |
| aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum
| |
| revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the
| |
| trigger guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with
| |
| what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked very
| |
| strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. `Just taking care, you
| |
| understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want.'
| |
| `I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody.'
| |
| `What's moving, old son?' Deane's shirt was candy-striped
| |
| cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
| |
| `Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?'
| |
| `Go-to on whom, old son?'
| |
| `Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.'
| |
| Deane put the pistol down. `Sit still, Case.' He tapped
| |
| something out on a lap terminal. `It seems as though you know
| |
| as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to have
| |
| a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the
| |
| neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from
| |
| the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history.
| |
| You said history.' He picked up the gun again, but didn't point
| |
| it directly at Case. `What sort of history?'
| |
| `The war. You in the war, Julie?'
| |
| `The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks.'
| |
| `Screaming Fist.'
| |
| `Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great
| |
| bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to
| |
| hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in,
| |
| where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that... great
| |
| scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to
| |
| test some new technology. They knew about the Russians'~ de-
| |
| fenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse
| |
| weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.' Deane
| |
| shrugged. `Turkey shoot for Ivan.'
| |
| `Any of those guys make it out?'
| |
| `Christ,' Deane said, `it's been bloody years... Though
| |
| I do think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov
| |
| gunship. Helicopter, you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't
| |
| have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish
| |
| defense forces in the process. Special Forces types.' Deane
| |
| sniffed. `Bloody hell.'
| |
| Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was over-
| |
| whelming.
| |
| `I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,' Deane said, putting
| |
| the gun down. `Lovely place, Lisbon.'
| |
| `In the service, Julie?'
| |
| `Hardly. Though I did see action.' Deane smiled his pink
| |
| smile. `Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets.'
| |
| `Thanks, Julie. I owe you one.'
| |
| `Hardly, Case. And goodbye.'
| |
| | |
| And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had
| |
| felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly
| |
| along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket
| |
| stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, wait-
| |
| ing...
| |
| They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and
| |
| paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen.
| |
| Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had
| |
| grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity,
| |
| obviously longing for one of them to make a move. Then he'd
| |
| taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
| |
| `Wasting your time, cowboy,' Molly said, when Case took
| |
| an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
| |
| `How's that? You want one?' He held the pill out to her.
| |
| `Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver.
| |
| Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.' She tapped
| |
| the octagon with one burgundy nail. `You're biochemically
| |
| incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.'
| |
| `Shit,' he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
| |
| `Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen.'
| |
| He did. Nothing did.
| |
| Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
| |
| `Sammi's,' Ratz said.
| |
| `I'll pass,' Case said, `I hear they kill each other down
| |
| there.'
| |
| An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai
| |
| in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
| |
| Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse,
| |
| taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The
| |
| corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock pre-
| |
| serving the pressure differential that supported the dome. Flu-
| |
| orescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals,
| |
| but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close
| |
| with the smell of sweat and concrete.
| |
| None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the
| |
| tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome.
| |
| Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised
| |
| circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear. No
| |
| light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the
| |
| ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata
| |
| of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck
| |
| currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. No
| |
| sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified
| |
| breathing of the fighters.
| |
| Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men
| |
| circled. The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten,
| |
| the knives they held were just under a meter long. The knife-
| |
| fighter's grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers
| |
| curled, thumb aligned with blade. The knives seemed to move
| |
| of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through
| |
| the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the
| |
| men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was smooth
| |
| and still, watching.
| |
| `I'll go find us some food,' Case said. She nodded, lost in
| |
| contemplation of the dance.
| |
| He didn't like this place.
| |
| He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark.
| |
| Too quiet.
| |
| The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night
| |
| City crowd. Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that
| |
| meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational
| |
| committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working
| |
| all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company
| |
| hymn, company funeral.
| |
| He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found
| |
| the food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall
| |
| waxy cartons of beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw
| |
| that blood laced one figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled
| |
| down the skewers and over his knuckles.
| |
| Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now,
| |
| he'd see the matrix.
| |
| Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
| |
| Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold
| |
| trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The
| |
| operation hadn't worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly
| |
| waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage
| |
| waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and
| |
| money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy... Hot
| |
| tears blurred his vision.
| |
| Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And
| |
| now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming -- as one fig-
| |
| ure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering...
| |
| Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took
| |
| a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him,
| |
| her gray eyes blind with fear. She wore the same French fa-
| |
| tigues.
| |
| And gone. Into shadow.
| |
| Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down
| |
| and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he'd
| |
| never be sure.
| |
| Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared
| |
| concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
| |
| Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now,
| |
| and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye,
| |
| bobbing in his vision as he ran.
| |
| Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.
| |
| He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked
| |
| blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning
| |
| over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high,
| |
| to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something
| |
| from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked
| |
| past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his
| |
| throat like a dowser's wand.
| |
| The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic
| |
| explosions. Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second.
| |
| The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's
| |
| legs.
| |
| He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He
| |
| looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from
| |
| his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down at the
| |
| foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of
| |
| cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner's name. A
| |
| beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white
| |
| sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
| |
| Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep
| |
| walking. Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's
| |
| image above the ring. Once a seamed European face danced
| |
| in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a
| |
| metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.
| |
| `Case.' Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. `You
| |
| okay?'
| |
| Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.
| |
| He shook his head.
| |
| `Fight's over, Case. Time to go home.'
| |
| He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where some-
| |
| thing was dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest.
| |
| `Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for you. You
| |
| haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you? We
| |
| got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man.
| |
| He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there
| |
| said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM.
| |
| Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little
| |
| money... I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about
| |
| it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure.' Her
| |
| mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.
| |
| Case felt as though his brain were jammed. `Who,' he said,
| |
| `who sent them?'
| |
| She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger.
| |
| He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the
| |
| shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.
| |
| | |
| After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him
| |
| to the port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft.
| |
| The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcol-
| |
| ogies. Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting
| |
| shoals of waste.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| PART TWO
| |
| THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION
| |
| | |
| | |
| 3
| |
| | |
| Home.
| |
| Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Met-
| |
| ropolitan Axis.
| |
| Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every
| |
| thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen.
| |
| Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to
| |
| pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation.
| |
| Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale.
| |
| Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million mega-
| |
| bytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in
| |
| midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial
| |
| parks ringing the old core of Atlanta...
| |
| | |
| Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers
| |
| moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol,
| |
| Orly... He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish
| |
| vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.
| |
| Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a
| |
| train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train
| |
| itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but dis-
| |
| placed air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics.
| |
| Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to
| |
| rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
| |
| Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach
| |
| across an expanse of very new pink temperfoam. Overhead,
| |
| sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight.
| |
| One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chip-
| |
| board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few
| |
| centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her
| |
| breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the
| |
| functional elegance of a war plane's fusilage. Her body was
| |
| spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's.
| |
| The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside
| |
| from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and
| |
| identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single
| |
| white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with count-
| |
| less layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this
| |
| kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate
| |
| in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite
| |
| art.
| |
| He was home.
| |
| He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks
| |
| of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He
| |
| remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section
| |
| of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the
| |
| canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some
| |
| cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square
| |
| to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a
| |
| blurred dream. Shopping. She'd taken him shopping.
| |
| He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that
| |
| lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he
| |
| opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expen-
| |
| sive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he
| |
| didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim deck, clothing
| |
| with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he
| |
| discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese
| |
| paper.
| |
| The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed
| |
| star fell -- to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
| |
| `Souvenir,' Molly said. `I noticed you were always looking
| |
| at 'em.' He turned and saw her sitting crosslegged on the bed,
| |
| sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.
| |
| | |
| `Someone's coming later to secure the place,' Armitage
| |
| said. He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned
| |
| magnetic key in his hand. Molly was making coffee on a tiny
| |
| German stove she took from her bag.
| |
| `I can do it,' she said. `I got enough gear already. Infrascan
| |
| perimeter, screamers...'
| |
| `No,' he said, closing the door. `I want it tight.'
| |
| `Suit yourself.' She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into
| |
| baggy black cotton pants.
| |
| `You ever the heat, Mr.~ Armitage?' Case asked, from where
| |
| he sat, his back against a wall.
| |
| Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoul-
| |
| ders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He
| |
| wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase
| |
| of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The
| |
| handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of
| |
| the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past
| |
| decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes
| |
| heightened the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the ques-
| |
| tion.
| |
| `Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate
| |
| security,' Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a
| |
| steaming mug of coffee. `That number you had them do on
| |
| my pancreas, that's like a cop routine.'
| |
| Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in
| |
| front of Case. `You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank
| |
| me.'
| |
| `Should I?' Case blew noisily on his coffee.
| |
| `You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you
| |
| frees you from a dangerous dependency.'
| |
| `Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.'
| |
| `Good, because you have a new one.'
| |
| `How's that?' Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage
| |
| was smiling.
| |
| `You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various
| |
| main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they
| |
| definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're
| |
| already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the
| |
| one your former employers gave you in Memphis.'
| |
| Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
| |
| `You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but
| |
| that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that
| |
| will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll
| |
| need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back
| |
| where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need
| |
| us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter.'
| |
| Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.
| |
| `Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases
| |
| you find there.' Armitage handed him the magnetic key. `Go
| |
| on. You'll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning.'
| |
| | |
| Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind-
| |
| blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies
| |
| of need and gratification.
| |
| He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry
| |
| concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapi-
| |
| tulate the stages of his life. First a child with hooded eyes, a
| |
| street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager,
| |
| face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case remembered
| |
| fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose
| |
| glow of the dawn geodesics.
| |
| He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through
| |
| the thin black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of
| |
| Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in
| |
| the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.
| |
| With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai
| |
| Cyberspace 7. They'd left the place littered with the abstract
| |
| white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic
| |
| film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next
| |
| year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a
| |
| dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker. Ar-
| |
| mitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
| |
| `Where'd he go?' Case had asked Molly.
| |
| `He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage
| |
| it. Let's go down to the street.' She'd zipped herself into an
| |
| old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on
| |
| a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered
| |
| her mirrored insets.
| |
| `You know about that toxin shit, before?' he asked her, by
| |
| the fountain. She shook her head. `You think it's true?'
| |
| `Maybe, maybe not. Works either way.'
| |
| `You know any way I can find out?'
| |
| `No,' she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive
| |
| for silence. `That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a
| |
| scan.' Then her fingers moved again: wait. `And you don't
| |
| care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man,
| |
| it was pornographic.' She laughed.
| |
| `So what's he got on you? How's he got the working girl
| |
| kinked?'
| |
| `Professional pride, baby, that's all.' And again the sign
| |
| for silence. `We're gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real
| |
| bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba
| |
| krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan
| |
| and get us a real breakfast.'
| |
| | |
| Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty
| |
| capitals of glass tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that
| |
| had lodged between his front teeth. He'd given up asking her
| |
| where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign
| |
| for silence were all he'd gotten in reply. She talked about the
| |
| season's fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in
| |
| California he'd never heard of.
| |
| He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of
| |
| newsprint went cartwheeling past the intersection. Freak winds
| |
| in the East side; something to do with convection, and an
| |
| overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the
| |
| dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl, he decided. She'd
| |
| led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before,
| |
| taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.
| |
| Maintaining connections.
| |
| Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO
| |
| HOLOGRAFIX.
| |
| The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it,
| |
| Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that
| |
| he couldn't follow. He caught the sign for _cash,_ a thumb brush-
| |
| ing the tip of the forefinger. The door swung inward and she
| |
| led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense
| |
| tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves
| |
| of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that
| |
| had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He
| |
| could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur
| |
| back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded
| |
| with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish an-
| |
| tenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of
| |
| alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded
| |
| into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as
| |
| he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted
| |
| scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look
| |
| back.
| |
| The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across
| |
| a doorway. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
| |
| Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match,
| |
| floored with white hospital tile molded in a nonslip pattern of
| |
| small raised disks. In the center stood a square, white-painted
| |
| wooden table and four white folding chairs.
| |
| The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind
| |
| them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to
| |
| have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small,
| |
| plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth,
| |
| revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, were canted
| |
| sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held
| |
| a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them,
| |
| blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured
| |
| to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the
| |
| doorway. Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich
| |
| of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He helped the man lift
| |
| it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained fingers
| |
| secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan
| |
| began to purr.
| |
| `Time,' the man said, straightening up, `and counting. You
| |
| know the rate, Moll.'
| |
| `We need a scan, Finn. For implants.'
| |
| `So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape.
| |
| Straighten up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full three-
| |
| sixty.' Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking
| |
| stands studded with sensors. The man took a small monitor
| |
| from his pocket and squinted at it. `Something new in your
| |
| head, yeah. Silicon, coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right?
| |
| Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp is-
| |
| otropic carbons. Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but
| |
| that's your business, right? Same with your claws.'
| |
| `Get over here, Case.' He saw a scuffed X in black on the
| |
| white floor. `Turn around. Slow.'
| |
| `Guy's a virgin.' The man shrugged. `Some cheap dental
| |
| work, is all.'
| |
| `You read for biologicals?' Molly unzipped her green vest
| |
| and took off the dark glasses.
| |
| `You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we'll
| |
| run a little biopsy.' He laughed, showing more of his yellow
| |
| teeth. `Nah. Finn's word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs,
| |
| no cortex bombs. You want me to shut the screen down?'
| |
| `Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we'll
| |
| want full screen for as long as we want it.'
| |
| `Hey, that's fine by the Finn, Moll. You're only paying by
| |
| the second.'
| |
| They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of
| |
| the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed
| |
| forearms. `We talk now. This is as private as I can afford.'
| |
| `What about?'
| |
| `What we're doing.'
| |
| `What are we doing?'
| |
| `Working for Armitage.'
| |
| `And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?'
| |
| `Yeah. I saw your profile, Case. And I've seen the rest of
| |
| our shopping list, once. You ever work with the dead?'
| |
| `No.' He watched his reflection in her glasses. `I could. I
| |
| guess. I'm good at what I do.' The present tense made him
| |
| nervous.
| |
| `You know that the Dixie Flatline's dead?'
| |
| He nodded. `Heart, I heard.'
| |
| `You'll be working with his construct.' She smiled. `Taught
| |
| you the ropes, huh? Him and Quine. I know Quine, by the
| |
| way. Real asshole.'
| |
| `Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?'
| |
| Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table. `I can't see
| |
| it. He'd never have sat still for it.'
| |
| `Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass.'
| |
| `Quine dead too?'
| |
| `No such luck. He's in Europe. He doesn't come into this.'
| |
| `Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free. He was
| |
| the best. You know he died braindeath three times?'
| |
| She nodded.
| |
| `Flatlined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. Boy, I was _daid.'_
| |
| `Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing
| |
| Armitage since I signed on. But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu,
| |
| a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets or-
| |
| ders. Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a
| |
| pillhead who's making one last wobble through the burnout
| |
| belt, and trade a program for the operation that'll fix him up.
| |
| We coulda bought twenty world class cowboys for what the
| |
| market was ready to pay for that surgical program. You were
| |
| good, but not _that_ good...' She scratched the side of her
| |
| nose.
| |
| `Obviously makes sense to somebody,' he said. `Some-
| |
| body big.'
| |
| `Don't let me hurt your feelings.' She grinned. `We're
| |
| gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flat-
| |
| line's construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault up-
| |
| town. Tighter than an eel's ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they
| |
| got all their new material for the fall season locked in there
| |
| too. Steal that and we'd be richer than shit. But no, we gotta
| |
| get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird.'
| |
| `Yeah, it's all weird. You're weird, this hole's weird, and
| |
| who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?'
| |
| `Finn's an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software.
| |
| This privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage to let him
| |
| be our tech here, so when he shows up later, you never saw
| |
| him. Got it?'
| |
| `So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?'
| |
| `I'm an easy make.' She smiled. `Anybody any good at
| |
| what they do, that's what they _are,_ right? You gotta jack, I
| |
| gotta tussle.'
| |
| He stared at her. `So tell me what you know about Armi-
| |
| tage.'
| |
| `For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any
| |
| Screaming Fist. I checked. But that doesn't mean much. He
| |
| doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out.' She
| |
| shrugged. `Big deal. And starters is all I got.' She drummed
| |
| her nails on the back of the chair. `But you _are_ a cowboy,
| |
| aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around.'
| |
| She smiled.
| |
| `He'd kill me.'
| |
| `Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real
| |
| bad. Besides, you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him,
| |
| sure.'
| |
| `What else is on that list you mentioned?'
| |
| `Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name
| |
| of Peter Riviera. Real ugly customer.'
| |
| `Where's he?'
| |
| `Dunno. But he's one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile.'
| |
| She made a face. `Godawful.' She stood up and stretched,
| |
| catlike. `So we got an axis going, boy? We're together in this?
| |
| Partners?'
| |
| Case looked at her. `I gotta lotta choice, huh?'
| |
| She laughed. `You got it, cowboy.'
| |
| | |
| | |
| `The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said
| |
| the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military ex-
| |
| perimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimen-
| |
| sional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically
| |
| generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of log-
| |
| arithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab
| |
| animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con-
| |
| trol circuits of tanks and war planes. `Cyberspace. A consen-
| |
| sual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
| |
| operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathe-
| |
| matical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted
| |
| from the banks of every computer in the human system. Un-
| |
| thinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of
| |
| the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,
| |
| receding...'
| |
| `What's that?' Molly asked, as he flipped the channel se-
| |
| lector.
| |
| `Kid's show.' A discontinuous flood of images as the se-
| |
| lector cycled. `Off,' he said to the Hosaka.
| |
| `You want to try now, Case?'
| |
| Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with
| |
| Molly beside him. `You want me to go out, Case? Maybe
| |
| easier for you, alone...' He shook his head.
| |
| `No. Stay, doesn't matter.' He settled the black terry sweat-
| |
| band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai
| |
| dermatrodes. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing
| |
| it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed
| |
| shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the
| |
| wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there
| |
| with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.
| |
| He closed his eyes.
| |
| Found the ridged face of the power stud.
| |
| And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
| |
| boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
| |
| past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures,
| |
| faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
| |
| Please, he prayed, _now --_
| |
| A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
| |
| _Now --_
| |
| Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler
| |
| gray. Expanding --
| |
| And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the
| |
| unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent
| |
| 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the
| |
| stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Au-
| |
| thority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
| |
| America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
| |
| of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
| |
| And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
| |
| distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
| |
| face.
| |
| | |
| Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft
| |
| was dark. He checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for
| |
| five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new work-
| |
| tables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black
| |
| silk sleeping bag over his head.
| |
| The security package taped to the steel firedoor bleeped
| |
| twice. `Entry requested,' it said. `Subject is cleared per my
| |
| program.'
| |
| `So open it.' Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up
| |
| as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.
| |
| `Christ,' said a hoarse voice, `I know that bitch can see in
| |
| the dark...' A squat figure stepped in and closed the door.
| |
| `Turn the lights on, okay?' Case scrambled off the slab and
| |
| found the old-fashioned switch.
| |
| `I'm the Finn,' said the Finn, and made a warning face at
| |
| Case.
| |
| `Case.'
| |
| `Pleased to meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing some hardware
| |
| for your boss, it looks like.' The Finn fished a pack of Partagas
| |
| from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled
| |
| the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-
| |
| Sendai. `Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here's your problem,
| |
| kid.' He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket,
| |
| flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rec-
| |
| tangle from the envelope. `Goddamn factory prototypes,' he
| |
| said, tossing the thing down on the table. `Cast 'em into a
| |
| block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying
| |
| the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows
| |
| what else. We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked,
| |
| right?' He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it
| |
| away in an inside pocket.
| |
| `What is it?'
| |
| `It's a flipflop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai
| |
| here, you can access live or recorded simstim without having
| |
| to jack out of the matrix.'
| |
| `What for?'
| |
| `I haven't got a clue. Know I'm fitting Moll for a broadcast
| |
| rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access.' The
| |
| Finn scratched his chin. `So now you get to find out just how
| |
| tight those jeans really are, huh?'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 4
| |
| | |
| Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his
| |
| forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that
| |
| filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in pro-
| |
| gress in one corner of the monitor screen.
| |
| Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it
| |
| was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and
| |
| the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were bas-
| |
| ically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a
| |
| drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms
| |
| of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous
| |
| multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited,
| |
| of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course
| |
| of a segment, you didn't feel it.
| |
| The screen bleeped a two-second warning.
| |
| The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin
| |
| ribbon of fiberoptics.
| |
| And one and two and --
| |
| Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points.
| |
| Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on
| |
| it...
| |
| Then he keyed the new switch.
| |
| The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of
| |
| sound and color... She was moving through a crowded street,
| |
| past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets
| |
| of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells
| |
| of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For
| |
| a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her
| |
| body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the pas-
| |
| senger behind her eyes.
| |
| The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight al all. He
| |
| wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue
| |
| alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field.
| |
| Showing off, he thought.
| |
| Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She
| |
| seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone,
| |
| but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made
| |
| room.
| |
| `How you doing. Case?' He heard the words and felt her
| |
| form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling
| |
| a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his
| |
| breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way
| |
| to reply.
| |
| Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory
| |
| Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he
| |
| would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity
| |
| of the situation irritating.
| |
| The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was
| |
| instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive
| |
| ice belonging to the New York Public Library automatically
| |
| counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium,
| |
| into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright.
| |
| He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these
| |
| sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was
| |
| another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the
| |
| thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved
| |
| against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of
| |
| unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black,
| |
| afterward...
| |
| Her destination was one of the dubious software rental com-
| |
| plexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush.
| |
| Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of
| |
| them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets
| |
| planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The
| |
| counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers
| |
| of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted
| |
| under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white card-
| |
| board. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall.
| |
| Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly
| |
| into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the
| |
| socket behind his ear.
| |
| `Larry, you in, man?' She positioned herself in front of
| |
| him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried
| |
| a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail.
| |
| `Hey, Larry.'
| |
| `Molly.' He nodded.
| |
| `I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.'
| |
| Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red
| |
| sportshirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a
| |
| dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip
| |
| that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly
| |
| into his head. His eyes narrowed.
| |
| `Molly's got a rider,' he said, `and Larry doesn't like that.'
| |
| `Hey,' she said, `I didn't know you were so... sensitive.
| |
| I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.'
| |
| `I know you, lady?' The blank look returned. `You looking
| |
| to buy some softs?'
| |
| `I'm looking for the Moderns.'
| |
| `You got a rider, Molly. This says.' He tapped the black
| |
| splinter. `Somebody else using your eyes.'
| |
| `My partner.'
| |
| `Tell your partner to go.'
| |
| `Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.'
| |
| `What are you talking about, lady?'
| |
| `Case, you take off,' she said, and he hit the switch, in-
| |
| stantly back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software
| |
| complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cy-
| |
| berspace.
| |
| `Panther Moderns,' he said to the Hosaka, removing the
| |
| trodes. `Five minute precis.'
| |
| `Ready,' the computer said.
| |
| It wasn't a name he knew. Something new, something that
| |
| had come in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth
| |
| of the Sprawl at the speed of light: entire subcultures could rise
| |
| overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.
| |
| `Go,' he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries,
| |
| journals, and news services.
| |
| The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case
| |
| at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's face
| |
| snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a
| |
| paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the
| |
| result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow
| |
| cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flow-
| |
| ing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle
| |
| predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern
| |
| approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across
| |
| his tight onepiece. Mimetic polycarbon.
| |
| Cut to Dr.~ Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name,
| |
| faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanu-
| |
| merics.
| |
| `Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal vi-
| |
| olence,' someone said, `it may be difficult for our viewers to
| |
| understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon
| |
| isn't a form of terrorism.'
| |
| Dr.~ Rambali smiled. `There is always a point at which the
| |
| terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at
| |
| which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the
| |
| terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself.
| |
| Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-re-
| |
| lated. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists pre-
| |
| cisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness
| |
| of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from
| |
| the original sociopolitical intent...'
| |
| `Skip it,' Case said.
| |
| | |
| Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the
| |
| Hosaka's precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contem-
| |
| porary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There
| |
| was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl,
| |
| something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived
| |
| subcults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Mod-
| |
| erns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. If the technology
| |
| had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sock-
| |
| ets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and
| |
| the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, prac-
| |
| tical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.
| |
| The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of
| |
| diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo.
| |
| His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-
| |
| cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of
| |
| the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When
| |
| Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large
| |
| animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He'd
| |
| seen that before.
| |
| `You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you,' Molly
| |
| said. Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net
| |
| ice.
| |
| This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being.
| |
| He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of
| |
| sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented
| |
| having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set
| |
| up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on
| |
| the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious
| |
| traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice.
| |
| It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while
| |
| he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red
| |
| dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel
| |
| maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight
| |
| to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting
| |
| it. He was working. He lost track of days.
| |
| And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was
| |
| off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of
| |
| Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and
| |
| Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda
| |
| Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant
| |
| to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for
| |
| nine straight hours.
| |
| The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days.
| |
| `I said a week,' Armitage said, unable to conceal his sat-
| |
| isfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. `You
| |
| took your own good time.'
| |
| `Balls,' Case said, smiling at the screen. `That's good work,
| |
| Armitage.'
| |
| `Yes,' Armitage admitted, `but don't let it go to your head.
| |
| Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an
| |
| arcade toy.'
| |
| | |
| `Love you, Cat Mother,' whispered the Panther Modern's
| |
| link man. His voice was modulated static in Case's headset.
| |
| `Atlanta, Brood. Looks go. Go, got it?' Molly's voice was
| |
| slightly clearer.
| |
| `To hear is to obey.' The Moderns were using some kind
| |
| of chickenwire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's
| |
| scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in
| |
| geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan. They chose to regard
| |
| the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their
| |
| choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly's
| |
| signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish
| |
| epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall
| |
| as the Sense/Net building.
| |
| Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston
| |
| to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone
| |
| managed to intercept Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her
| |
| voice, the code would tip the Moderns. If she remained in the
| |
| building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely
| |
| she'd be coming out at all.
| |
| Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place,
| |
| and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only
| |
| a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diver-
| |
| sion for the Sense/Net security people. His job was to make
| |
| sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the
| |
| Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the
| |
| countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.
| |
| He jacked in and triggered his program. `Mainline,' breathed
| |
| the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through
| |
| the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He
| |
| hit the simstim and flipped into her sensorium.
| |
| The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood
| |
| before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white
| |
| lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflec-
| |
| tion. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her
| |
| mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she
| |
| belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of
| |
| Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh
| |
| top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable
| |
| in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped
| |
| her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micropore
| |
| tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the
| |
| radio, the simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike,
| |
| glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic
| |
| dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were
| |
| flexing systematically through a series of tension-release ex-
| |
| ercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar
| |
| sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as
| |
| they were partially extruded, then retracted.
| |
| He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate.
| |
| He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of
| |
| him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck,
| |
| making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled
| |
| like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
| |
| The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had
| |
| accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's
| |
| Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral sub-
| |
| programs peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready
| |
| to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.
| |
| He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous
| |
| circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby.
| |
| 12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve.
| |
| | |
| At midnight, synched with the chip behind Molly's eye, the
| |
| link man in Jersey had given his command. `Mainline.' Nine
| |
| Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl,
| |
| had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones.
| |
| Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted
| |
| out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different
| |
| police departments and public security agencies were absorbing
| |
| the information that an obscure subsect of militant Christian
| |
| fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced
| |
| clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as
| |
| Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid.
| |
| Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been
| |
| shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in
| |
| eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.
| |
| | |
| Case hit the switch as his program surged through the gates
| |
| of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net
| |
| research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator.
| |
| `Excuse me, but are you an employee?' The guard raised
| |
| his eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. `No,' she said, driving
| |
| the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man's solar
| |
| plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt,
| |
| she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator.
| |
| Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE
| |
| DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a blackbox
| |
| from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the
| |
| lock that secured the panel's circuitry.
| |
| | |
| The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first
| |
| move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared
| |
| dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into
| |
| the Sense/Net building's internal video system.
| |
| At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eigh-
| |
| teen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a sus-
| |
| ceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only
| |
| vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched
| |
| across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mer-
| |
| cator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated
| |
| jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish
| |
| clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred,
| |
| and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination:
| |
| graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands
| |
| manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down
| |
| into darkness, a pale splash... The audio track, its pitch ad-
| |
| justed to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed,
| |
| was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military
| |
| uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing
| |
| the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw
| |
| certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors
| |
| as high as one thousand percent.
| |
| At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net
| |
| consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five
| |
| minutes after midnight, as the Moderns'~ message ended in a
| |
| flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed.
| |
| Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the
| |
| possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system,
| |
| were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running
| |
| full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was
| |
| lifting off from its pad on Riker's.
| |
| | |
| Case triggered his second program. A carefully engineered
| |
| virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial com-
| |
| mands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research
| |
| materials. `Boston,' Molly's voice came across the link, `I'm
| |
| downstairs.' Case switched and saw the blank wall of the
| |
| elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet,
| |
| exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with
| |
| micropore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of
| |
| burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she un-
| |
| folded the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw
| |
| it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on
| |
| over the white mesh top.
| |
| 12:06:26.
| |
| Case's virus had bored a window through the library's com-
| |
| mand ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite
| |
| blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight
| |
| grid of pale blue neon. In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior
| |
| of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective di-
| |
| mension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen-
| |
| dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung
| |
| with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence
| |
| the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with
| |
| severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres
| |
| as if he were on invisible tracks.
| |
| Here. This one.
| |
| Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above
| |
| him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub-
| |
| program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial
| |
| commands.
| |
| Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric
| |
| of the window.
| |
| Done.
| |
| | |
| In the Sense/Net lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly
| |
| behind a low rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video
| |
| camera. They both wore chameleon suits. `Tacticals are spray-
| |
| ing foam barricades now,' one noted, speaking for the benefit
| |
| of his throat mike. `Rapids are still trying to land their copter.'
| |
| | |
| Case hit the simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of
| |
| broken bone. Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of
| |
| a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case
| |
| was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading
| |
| in his left thigh.
| |
| `What's happening, Brood?' he asked the link man.
| |
| `I dunno, Cutter. Mother's not talking. Wait.'
| |
| Case's program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of
| |
| crimson neon extended from the center of the restored window
| |
| to the shifting outline of his icebreaker. He didn't have time
| |
| to wait. Taking a deep breath, he flipped again.
| |
| Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on
| |
| the corridor wall. In the loft, Case groaned. The second step
| |
| took her over an outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve bright with
| |
| fresh blood. Glimpse of a shattered fiberglass shockstave. Her
| |
| vision seemed to have narrowed to a tunnel. With the third
| |
| step, Case screamed and found himself back in the matrix.
| |
| `Brood? Boston, baby...' Her voice tight with pain. She
| |
| coughed. `Little problem with the natives. Think one of them
| |
| broke my leg.'
| |
| `What you need now, Cat Mother?' The link man's voice
| |
| was indistinct, nearly lost behind static.
| |
| Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against
| |
| the wall, taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled
| |
| through the contents of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew
| |
| a sheet of plastic studded with a rainbow of dermadisks. She
| |
| selected three and thumbed them hard against her left wrist,
| |
| over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog
| |
| came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back
| |
| arched convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs.
| |
| She sighed and slowly relaxed.
| |
| `Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I'll need a medical team
| |
| when I come out. Tell my people. Cutter, I'm two minutes
| |
| from target. Can you hold?'
| |
| `Tell her I'm in and holding,' Case said.
| |
| Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced
| |
| back, once, Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net
| |
| security guards. One of them seemed to have no eyes.
| |
| `Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat
| |
| Mother. Foam barricades. Lobby's getting juicy.'
| |
| `Pretty juicy down here,' she said, swinging herself through
| |
| a pair of gray steel doors. `Almost there, Cutter.'
| |
| Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his
| |
| forehead. He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead
| |
| with a towel, took a quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle
| |
| beside the Hosaka, and checked the map of the library displayed
| |
| on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through the outline
| |
| of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indi-
| |
| cated the location of the Dixie Flatline's construct. He won-
| |
| dered what it was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way.
| |
| With enough endorphin analog, she could walk on a pair of
| |
| bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness that held him
| |
| in the chair and replaced the trodes.
| |
| Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.
| |
| The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the
| |
| materials stored here had to be physically removed before they
| |
| could be interfaced. Molly hobbled between rows of identical
| |
| gray lockers.
| |
| `Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood,' Case said.
| |
| `Five more and ten left, Cat Mother,' the link man said.
| |
| She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between
| |
| two lockers, her cheeks wet, eyes blank. Molly ignored her.
| |
| Case wondered what the Moderns had done to provoke that
| |
| level of terror. He knew it had something to do with a hoaxed
| |
| threat, but he'd been too involved with his ice to follow Molly's
| |
| explanation.
| |
| `That's it,' Case said, but she'd already stopped in front of
| |
| the cabinet that held the construct. Its lines reminded Case of
| |
| the Neo-Aztec bookcases in Julie Deane's anteroom in Chiba.
| |
| `Do it, Cutter,' Molly said.
| |
| Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing
| |
| down the crimson thread that pierced the library ice. Five sep-
| |
| arate alarm systems were convinced that they were still oper-
| |
| ative. The three elaborate locks deactivated, but considered
| |
| themselves to have remained locked. The library's central bank
| |
| suffered a minute shift in its permanent memory: the construct
| |
| had been removed, per executive order, a month before. Check-
| |
| ing for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian
| |
| would find the records erased.
| |
| The door swung open on silent hinges.
| |
| `0467839,' Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit
| |
| from the rack. It resembled the magazine of a large assault
| |
| rifle, its surfaces covered with warning decals and security
| |
| ratings.
| |
| Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.
| |
| He withdrew the line through the library ice. It whipped
| |
| back into his program, automatically triggering a full system
| |
| reversal. The Sense/Net gates snapped past him as he backed
| |
| out, subprograms whirling back into the core of the icebreaker
| |
| as he passed the gates where they had been stationed.
| |
| `Out, Brood,' he said, and slumped in his chair. After the
| |
| concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and
| |
| still retain awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days
| |
| to discover the theft of the construct. The key would be the
| |
| deflection of the Los Angeles transfer, which coincided too
| |
| neatly with the Modern's terror run. He doubted that the three
| |
| security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live
| |
| to talk about it. He flipped.
| |
| The elevator, with Molly's blackbox taped beside the control
| |
| panel, remained where she'd left it. The guard still lay curled
| |
| on the floor. Case noticed the derm on his neck for the first
| |
| time. Something of Molly's, to keep him under. She stepped
| |
| over him and removed the blackbox before punching LOBBY.
| |
| As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward
| |
| out of the crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall
| |
| with her head. Molly ignored her, bending over to peel the
| |
| derm from the guard's neck. Then she kicked the white pants
| |
| and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the dark glasses
| |
| after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her
| |
| forehead. The construct, in the suit's kangaroo pocket, dug
| |
| into her sternum when she moved. She stepped out.
| |
| Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.
| |
| The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had
| |
| surged for the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades
| |
| of the Tacticals and the sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids.
| |
| The two agencies, convinced that they were containing a horde
| |
| of potential killers, were cooperating with an uncharacteristic
| |
| degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the
| |
| main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barri-
| |
| cades. The hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant
| |
| background for the sound the crowd made as it surged back
| |
| and forth across the lobby's marble floor. Case had never heard
| |
| anything like that sound.
| |
| Neither, apparently, had Molly. `Jesus,' she said, and hes-
| |
| itated. It was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of
| |
| raw and total fear. The lobby floor was covered with bodies,
| |
| clothing, blood, and long trampled scrolls of yellow printout.
| |
| `C'mon, sister. We're for out.' The eyes of the two Moderns
| |
| stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits
| |
| unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that
| |
| raged behind them. `You hurt? C'mon. Tommy'll walk you.'
| |
| Tommy handed something to the one who spoke, a video cam-
| |
| era wrapped in polycarbon.
| |
| `Chicago,' she said, `I'm on my way.' And then she was
| |
| falling, not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit,
| |
| but down some bloodwarm well, into silence and the dark.
| |
| | |
| The Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lu-
| |
| pus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature
| |
| that allowed him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the
| |
| edge of Case's worktable like some kind of state of the art
| |
| gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded eyes.
| |
| He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts
| |
| bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with
| |
| more pink hair. His pupils had been modified to catch the light
| |
| like a cat's. Case watched the suit crawl with color and texture.
| |
| `You let it get out of control,' Armitage said. He stood in
| |
| the center of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy
| |
| folds of an expensive-looking trenchcoat.
| |
| `Chaos, Mr.~ Who,' Lupus Yonderboy said. `That is our
| |
| mode and modus. That is our central kick. Your woman knows.
| |
| We deal with her. Not with you, Mr.~ Who.' His suit had taken
| |
| on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale avocado. `She
| |
| needed her medical team. She's with them. We'll watch out
| |
| for her. Everything's fine.' He smiled again.
| |
| `Pay him,' Case said.
| |
| Armitage glared at him. `We don't have the goods.'
| |
| `Your woman has it,' Yonderboy said.
| |
| `Pay him.'
| |
| Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bun-
| |
| dles of New Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat. `You
| |
| want to count it?' he asked Yonderboy.
| |
| `No,' the Panther Modern said. `You'll pay. You're a Mr.~
| |
| Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr.~ Name.'
| |
| `I hope that isn't a threat,' Armitage said.
| |
| `That's business,' said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into
| |
| the single pocket on the front of his suit.
| |
| The phone rang. Case answered.
| |
| `Molly,' he told Armitage, handing him the phone.
| |
| | |
| The Sprawl's geodesics were lightening into predawn gray
| |
| as Case left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected.
| |
| He couldn't sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone,
| |
| then Armitage, and Molly was in surgery somewhere. Vibration
| |
| beneath his feet as a train hissed past. Sirens dopplered in the
| |
| distance.
| |
| He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new
| |
| leather jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into
| |
| the gutter and lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage's
| |
| toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic mem-
| |
| branes wearing thinner as he walked, it didn't seem real. Nei-
| |
| ther did the fear and agony he'd seen through Molly's eyes in
| |
| the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself trying to remember
| |
| the faces of the three people he'd killed in Chiba. The men
| |
| were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered
| |
| tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty
| |
| plastic cylinders rattling in its bed.
| |
| `Case.'
| |
| He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his
| |
| back.
| |
| `Message for you, Case.' Lupus Yonderboy's suit cycled
| |
| through pure primaries. `Pardon. Not to startle you.'
| |
| Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a
| |
| head taller than the Modern. `You oughta be careful, Yon-
| |
| derboy.'
| |
| `This is the message. Wintermute.' He spelled it out.
| |
| `From you?' Case took a step forward.
| |
| `No,' Yonderboy said. `For you.'
| |
| `Who from?'
| |
| `Wintermute,' Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his
| |
| crest of pink hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow
| |
| against old concrete. He executed a strange little dance, his
| |
| thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone. No. There.
| |
| Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right shade of
| |
| gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The
| |
| eyes winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really
| |
| gone.
| |
| Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers,
| |
| leaning back against peeling brickwork.
| |
| Ninsei had been a lot simpler.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 5
| |
| | |
| The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of
| |
| an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The
| |
| building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel,
| |
| each coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged
| |
| from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one GER-
| |
| ALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.
| |
| `He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off.'
| |
| `I ran into one of your pals,' he said, `a Modern.'
| |
| `Yeah? Which one?'
| |
| `Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message.' He passed her a paper
| |
| napkin with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in
| |
| his neat, laborious capitals. `He said --' But her hand came
| |
| up in the jive for silence.
| |
| `Get us some crab,' she said.
| |
| | |
| After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with
| |
| alarming ease, they tubed in to New York. Case had learned
| |
| not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence.
| |
| Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke.
| |
| A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors
| |
| woven tightly into her hair opened the Finn's door and led them
| |
| along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown some-
| |
| how during their absence. Or else it seemed that it was changing
| |
| subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent
| |
| invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence
| |
| of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's
| |
| waste places.
| |
| Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.
| |
| Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper,
| |
| wrote something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it
| |
| between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body
| |
| as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn't know,
| |
| one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resigna-
| |
| tion. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his bat-
| |
| tered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the
| |
| table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray
| |
| piled with the butts of Partagas.
| |
| `Wait,' the Finn said, and left the room.
| |
| Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index
| |
| finger, and speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered
| |
| aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear on the
| |
| pylons as he passed.
| |
| Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his
| |
| teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-
| |
| up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the door panel.
| |
| While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn
| |
| took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an
| |
| elaborate sequence.
| |
| `Honey,' he said to Molly, tucking the console away, `you
| |
| have got it. No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where
| |
| you got it?'
| |
| `Yonderboy,' Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers
| |
| aside. `I did a deal with Larry, on the side.'
| |
| `Smart,' the Finn said. `It's an AI.'
| |
| `Slow it down a little,' Case said.
| |
| `Berne,' the Finn said, ignoring him. `Berne. It's got lim-
| |
| ited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53.
| |
| Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and
| |
| the original software.'
| |
| `What's in Berne, okay?' Case deliberately stepped between
| |
| them.
| |
| `Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the
| |
| Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence.'
| |
| `That's all just fine,' Molly said, `but where's it get us?'
| |
| `If Yonderboy's right,' the Finn said, `this AI is backing
| |
| Armitage.'
| |
| `I paid Larry to have the Moderns nose around Armitage a
| |
| little,' Molly explained, turning to Case. `They have some
| |
| very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they'd get my
| |
| money if they answered one question: who's running Armi-
| |
| tage?'
| |
| `And you think it's this AI? Those things aren't allowed
| |
| any autonomy. It'll be the parent corporation, this Tessle...'
| |
| `Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,' said the Finn. `And I got a little
| |
| story for you about them. Wanna hear?' He sat down and
| |
| hunched forward.
| |
| `Finn,' Molly said. `He loves a story.'
| |
| `Haven't ever told anybody this one,' the Finn began.
| |
| | |
| The Finn was a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily
| |
| in software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came
| |
| into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in the more
| |
| traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare
| |
| coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of
| |
| art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's
| |
| story, a man he called Smith.
| |
| Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced
| |
| as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known
| |
| who'd `gone silicon' -- the phrase had an old-fashioned ring
| |
| for Case -- and the microsofts he purchased were art history
| |
| programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips
| |
| in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was
| |
| formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But
| |
| Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal
| |
| request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the
| |
| Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a
| |
| way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever
| |
| tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn
| |
| had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. `It
| |
| smelled,' the Finn said to Case, `smelled of money. And Smith
| |
| was being very careful. Almost too careful.'
| |
| Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy.
| |
| Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back
| |
| from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back
| |
| down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had
| |
| managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a
| |
| head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonn over platinum, stud-
| |
| ded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down
| |
| his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing
| |
| down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value
| |
| to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer
| |
| terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but
| |
| with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes.
| |
| It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a per-
| |
| verse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It
| |
| was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and
| |
| listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of
| |
| last year's tax return.
| |
| Smith's clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion
| |
| for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged,
| |
| showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn
| |
| shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much
| |
| for it.
| |
| When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over
| |
| it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been
| |
| able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich
| |
| artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a
| |
| California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he dis-
| |
| covered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
| |
| Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo col-
| |
| lector, hinting that he was on the track of something notewor-
| |
| thy.
| |
| And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who
| |
| walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as
| |
| though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously
| |
| polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin.
| |
| Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death
| |
| across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost
| |
| apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty
| |
| to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great
| |
| beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It
| |
| had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might
| |
| know of the whereabouts of this object.
| |
| Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced
| |
| the head. And how much, his visitor asked, did you expect to
| |
| obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure
| |
| far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced
| |
| a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered
| |
| Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this
| |
| piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's
| |
| death.
| |
| `So that was where I came in,' the Finn continued. `Smith
| |
| knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's
| |
| where you go for a quiet go-to that'll never be traced. I hired
| |
| a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith,
| |
| he was careful. He'd just had a very weird business experience
| |
| and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add up. Who'd paid,
| |
| out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very
| |
| rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver
| |
| too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook
| |
| biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my
| |
| cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool
| |
| in litigation. The case wasn't anything, but we got the law
| |
| firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we got the family
| |
| address. Lotta good it did us.'
| |
| Case raised his eyebrows.
| |
| `Freeside,' the Finn said. `The spindle. Turns out they own
| |
| damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture
| |
| we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news
| |
| morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate
| |
| structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't
| |
| been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in
| |
| over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're
| |
| looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-
| |
| orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of
| |
| media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic
| |
| engineering, right? And it's hard to keep track of which gen-
| |
| eration, or combination of generations, is running the show at
| |
| a given time.'
| |
| `How's that?' Molly asked.
| |
| `Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law,
| |
| you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like
| |
| they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in
| |
| about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab
| |
| accident...'
| |
| `So what happened with your fence?'
| |
| `Nothing.' The Finn frowned. `Dropped it. We had a look
| |
| at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have,
| |
| and that was it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted
| |
| the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith
| |
| decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.' He looked
| |
| at Molly. `The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly
| |
| private.'
| |
| `You figure they own that ninja, Finn?' Molly asked.
| |
| `Smith thought so.'
| |
| `Expensive,' she said. `Wonder whatever happened to that
| |
| little ninja, Finn?'
| |
| `Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.'
| |
| `Okay,' Case said, `we got Armitage getting his goodies
| |
| off an AI named Wintermute. Where's that get us?'
| |
| `Nowhere yet,' Molly said, `but you got a little side gig
| |
| now.' She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and
| |
| handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry
| |
| codes.
| |
| `Who's this?'
| |
| `Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Mod-
| |
| erns. Separate deal. Where is it?'
| |
| `London,' Case said.
| |
| `Crack it.' She laughed. `Earn your keep for a change.'
| |
| | |
| Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded plat-
| |
| form. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's
| |
| construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily
| |
| ever since.
| |
| It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a
| |
| hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, ob-
| |
| sessions, kneejerk responses... The local came booming in
| |
| along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in
| |
| the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and
| |
| watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-
| |
| looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young
| |
| office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their
| |
| wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs
| |
| licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Sci-
| |
| entists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked
| |
| like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and un-
| |
| consciously with the movement of the train, their high heels
| |
| like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor.
| |
| Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries,
| |
| the train reached Case's station.
| |
| He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar
| |
| suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing
| |
| beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese.
| |
| He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying
| |
| the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle,
| |
| flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes.
| |
| He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had
| |
| never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the
| |
| Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was
| |
| a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a
| |
| small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric
| |
| of light: T-A.
| |
| He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline.
| |
| He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman
| |
| Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys.
| |
| He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted.
| |
| There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser,
| |
| that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cow-
| |
| boy. No other way to learn.
| |
| They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the
| |
| 'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice.
| |
| The grapevine -- slender, street level, and the only one going --
| |
| had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the
| |
| impossible. `It was big,' another would-be told Case, for the
| |
| price of a beer, `but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian
| |
| payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.'
| |
| Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirt-
| |
| sleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.
| |
| `Boy,' the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami,
| |
| `I'm like them huge fuckin'~ lizards, you know? Had themself
| |
| two goddam brains, one in the head an'~ one by the tailbone,
| |
| kept the hind legs movin'~. Hit that black stuff and ol'~ tailbrain
| |
| jus'~ kept right on keepin'~ on.'
| |
| The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some
| |
| strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley,
| |
| Lazarus of cyberspace...
| |
| And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus
| |
| Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd
| |
| refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular
| |
| beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of
| |
| paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs.
| |
| Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast
| |
| ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the
| |
| skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black
| |
| shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size
| |
| and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai
| |
| transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to
| |
| input trodes under the cast.
| |
| He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle
| |
| of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some
| |
| ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.
| |
| It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his
| |
| shoulder.
| |
| He coughed. `Dix? McCoy? That you man?' His throat was
| |
| tight.
| |
| `Hey, bro,' said a directionless voice.
| |
| `It's Case, man. Remember?'
| |
| `Miami, joeboy, quick study.'
| |
| `What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you,
| |
| Dix?'
| |
| `Nothin'~.'
| |
| `Hang on.' He disconnected the construct. The presence
| |
| was gone. He reconnected it. `Dix? Who am I?'
| |
| `You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?'
| |
| `Ca -- your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?'
| |
| `Good question.'
| |
| `Remember being here, a second ago?'
| |
| `No.'
| |
| `Know how a ROM personality matrix works?'
| |
| `Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct.'
| |
| `So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential,
| |
| real time memory?'
| |
| `Guess so,' said the construct.
| |
| `Okay, Dix. You _are_ a ROM construct. Got me?'
| |
| `If you say so,' said the construct. `Who are you?'
| |
| `Case.'
| |
| `Miami,' said the voice, `joeboy, quick study.'
| |
| `Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze
| |
| over to London grid and access a little data. You game for
| |
| that?'
| |
| `You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 6
| |
| | |
| `You want you a paradise,' the Flatline advised, when Case
| |
| had explained his situation. `Check Copenhagen, fringes of
| |
| the university section.' The voice recited coordinates as he
| |
| punched.
| |
| They found their paradise, a `pirate's paradise,' on the
| |
| jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance
| |
| it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes
| |
| left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light
| |
| that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts
| |
| faculties.
| |
| `There,' said the Flatline, `the blue one. Make it out? That's
| |
| an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here
| |
| soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they
| |
| find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow.'
| |
| Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a
| |
| standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected
| |
| with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
| |
| `Here,' said the voice, `I'll do it for you.' The Flatline
| |
| began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck,
| |
| trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing.
| |
| It took three tries.
| |
| `Big deal,' said the Flatline. `No ice at all.'
| |
| `Scan this shit,' Case told the Hosaka. `Sift for owner's
| |
| personal history.'
| |
| The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re-
| |
| placed by a simple lozenge of white light. `Contents are pri-
| |
| marily video recordings of postwar military trials,' said the
| |
| distant voice of the Hosaka. `Central figure is Colonel Willis
| |
| Corto.'
| |
| `Show it already,' Case said.
| |
| A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.
| |
| | |
| Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let
| |
| the temperfoam mold itself against him.
| |
| `You find anything?' she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep
| |
| and drugs.
| |
| `Tell you later,' he said, `I'm wrecked.' He was hungover
| |
| and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the
| |
| various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka
| |
| had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it
| |
| was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records,
| |
| reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had
| |
| had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments
| |
| were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
| |
| Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot
| |
| in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created
| |
| the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in
| |
| in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moon-
| |
| light, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and
| |
| Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months.
| |
| Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their
| |
| launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
| |
| `They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,' Case said, and
| |
| Molly stirred beside him.
| |
| The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate
| |
| for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a
| |
| virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history
| |
| of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the
| |
| run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject
| |
| Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns
| |
| threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suf-
| |
| fered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.
| |
| Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out
| |
| the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his
| |
| dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept
| |
| falling...
| |
| There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned
| |
| documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian
| |
| gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it
| |
| landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter can-
| |
| non manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming
| |
| Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with
| |
| Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the
| |
| helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped
| |
| to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most
| |
| of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide
| |
| to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining.
| |
| In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already un-
| |
| derway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized,
| |
| partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had fo-
| |
| cused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told
| |
| Corto.
| |
| He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide
| |
| said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added,
| |
| squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
| |
| Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he pre-
| |
| ferred to testify as he was.
| |
| No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The
| |
| trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
| |
| Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's
| |
| subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely
| |
| the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested in-
| |
| terests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastruc-
| |
| ture. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave
| |
| was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly
| |
| responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of
| |
| the emp installations at Kirensk.
| |
| His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington.
| |
| In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide ex-
| |
| plained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong
| |
| people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers
| |
| of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face
| |
| in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Wash-
| |
| ington September.
| |
| The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espi-
| |
| onage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work cor-
| |
| porate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed
| |
| to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the sci-
| |
| entists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk,
| |
| in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel
| |
| and set fire to his room.
| |
| Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory.
| |
| Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a
| |
| paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita.
| |
| The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.
| |
| One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical
| |
| interrogation, everything had gone gray.
| |
| Translated French medical records explained that a man
| |
| without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health
| |
| unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and
| |
| was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon.
| |
| He became a subject in an experimental program that sought
| |
| to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic
| |
| models. A random selection of patients were provided with
| |
| microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to
| |
| program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire
| |
| experiment.
| |
| The record ended there.
| |
| Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for
| |
| disturbing her.
| |
| | |
| The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. `Yeah?'
| |
| `We're going to Istanbul,' Armitage said. `Tonight.'
| |
| `What does the bastard want?' Molly asked.
| |
| `Says we're going to Istanbul tonight.'
| |
| `That's just wonderful.'
| |
| Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.
| |
| Molly sat up and turned on the light.
| |
| `What about my gear?' Case asked. `My deck.'
| |
| `Finn will handle it,' said Armitage, and hung up.
| |
| Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her
| |
| eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance.
| |
| No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his
| |
| bag.
| |
| `You hurting?' he asked.
| |
| `I could do with another night at Chin's.'
| |
| `Your dentist?'
| |
| `You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full
| |
| clinic. Does repairs for samurai.' She was zipping her bag.
| |
| `You ever been to 'Stambul?'
| |
| `Couple days, once.'
| |
| `Never changes,' she said. `Bad old town.'
| |
| | |
| `It was like this when we headed for Chiba,' Molly said,
| |
| staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape,
| |
| red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion
| |
| plant. `We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were
| |
| booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the
| |
| Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was
| |
| playing ghost with you in Night City.' She took a silk scarf
| |
| from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets. The
| |
| landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of
| |
| childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted
| |
| slab of freeway concrete.
| |
| The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport.
| |
| Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on
| |
| broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 7
| |
| | |
| It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past
| |
| the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian
| |
| jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated
| |
| figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.
| |
| `This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ot-
| |
| toman Istanbul,' purred the Mercedes.
| |
| `So it's gone downhill,' Case said.
| |
| `The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi,' Molly said. She
| |
| settled back against the car's gray ultrasuede.
| |
| `How come Armitage flies alone?' Case asked. He had a
| |
| headache.
| |
| `'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine.'
| |
| He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against
| |
| it. He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.
| |
| The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a
| |
| neat incision, laying the city open. He'd watched the crazy
| |
| walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, ar-
| |
| cologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and
| |
| corrugated iron.
| |
| The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was
| |
| waiting sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour arm-
| |
| chair in a sea of pale blue carpeting.
| |
| `Christ,' Molly said. `Rat in a business suit.'
| |
| They crossed the lobby.
| |
| `How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?' She
| |
| lowered her bag beside the armchair. `Bet not as much as you
| |
| get for wearing that suit, huh?'
| |
| The Finn's upper lips drew back. `Not enough, sweetmeat.'
| |
| He handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. `You're
| |
| registered already. Honcho's upstairs.' He looked around. `This
| |
| town sucks.'
| |
| `You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome.
| |
| Just pretend it's Brooklyn or something.' She twirled the key
| |
| around a finger. `You here as valet or what?'
| |
| `I gotta check out some guy's implants,' the Finn said.
| |
| `How about my deck?' Case asked.
| |
| The Finn winced. `Observe the protocol. Ask the boss.'
| |
| Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker
| |
| of jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
| |
| `Yeah,' she said, `I know who that is.' She jerked her head
| |
| in the direction of the elevators. `Come on, cowboy.' Case
| |
| followed her with both bags.
| |
| | |
| Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd
| |
| first seen Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning,
| |
| almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel
| |
| across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had
| |
| taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in
| |
| sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still
| |
| enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He
| |
| watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell
| |
| conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers
| |
| in rumpled green uniforms. They entered the hotel across the
| |
| street.
| |
| He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness
| |
| struck him. She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in
| |
| their loft, beside the transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected
| |
| part of the room's light fixture.
| |
| He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring
| |
| twice. `Glad you're up,' Armitage said.
| |
| `I'm just. Lady's still under. Listen, boss, I think it's maybe
| |
| time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a
| |
| little more about what I'm doing.'
| |
| Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
| |
| `You know as much as you need to. Maybe more.'
| |
| `You think so?'
| |
| `Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You'll have a caller in
| |
| about fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian.' The phone
| |
| bleated softly. Armitage was gone.
| |
| `Wake up, baby,' Case said. `Biz.'
| |
| `I've been awake an hour already.' The mirrors turned.
| |
| `We got a Jersey Bastion coming up.'
| |
| `You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you're part Ar-
| |
| menian. That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me
| |
| up.'
| |
| Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and
| |
| gold-framed, mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the
| |
| collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first
| |
| mistook it for some kind of t-shirt. He arrived with a black
| |
| Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick
| |
| black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
| |
| `We must, as you say in _Ingiliz,_ take this one very easy.'
| |
| He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed
| |
| the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched
| |
| the shade of his very short military-cut hair. He smiled. `It is
| |
| better, this way, yes? Else we make the _tunel_ infinity, mirror
| |
| into mirror... You particularly,' he said to her, `must take
| |
| care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such
| |
| modifications.'
| |
| Molly bit one of the pastries in half. `It's my show, Jack,'
| |
| she said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked
| |
| her lips. `I know about you. Stool for the military, right?' Her
| |
| hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with
| |
| the fletcher. Case hadn't known she had it.
| |
| `Very easy, please,' Terzibashjian said, his white china
| |
| thimble frozen centimeters from his lips.
| |
| She extended the gun. `Maybe you get the explosives, lots
| |
| of them, or maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You
| |
| won't feel it for months.'
| |
| `Please. You call this in _Ingiliz_ making me very tight...'
| |
| `I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and
| |
| get your ass out of here.' She put the gun away.
| |
| `He is living in Fener, at Kchk Glhane Djaddesi 14. I
| |
| have his _tunel_ route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most
| |
| recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modern place in the
| |
| style _turistik,_ but it has been arranged that the police have
| |
| shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir man-
| |
| agement has grown nervous.' He smiled. He smelled of some
| |
| metallic aftershave.
| |
| `I want to know about the implants,' she said, massaging
| |
| her thigh, `I want to know exactly what he can do.'
| |
| Terzibashjian nodded. `Worst is how you say in _Ingiliz,_ the
| |
| subliminals.' He made the word four careful syllables.
| |
| | |
| `On our left,' said the Mercedes, as it steered through a
| |
| maze of rainy streets, `is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar.'
| |
| Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he
| |
| was looking in the wrong direction. The right side of the street
| |
| was lined with miniature scrapyards. Case saw a gutted loco-
| |
| motive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble.
| |
| Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.
| |
| `Homesick?' Case asked.
| |
| `Place sucks,' the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting
| |
| to resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of
| |
| kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
| |
| `Hey, Jersey,' Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind
| |
| them, `where'd this guy get his stuff installed?'
| |
| `In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted,
| |
| is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this
| |
| one is most talented.' The Mercedes swerved avoiding a bal-
| |
| loon-tired dray stacked with hides. `I have followed him in the
| |
| street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find
| |
| the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion
| |
| poised beside a brake lever...'
| |
| ``What you see is what you get,' yeah,' the Finn said. `I
| |
| seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he
| |
| imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and
| |
| fry a retina over easy.'
| |
| `You have told this to your woman friend?' Terzibashjian
| |
| leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. `In Turkey,
| |
| women are still women. This one...'
| |
| The Finn snorted. `She'd have you wearing your balls for
| |
| a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed.'
| |
| `I do not understand this idiom.'
| |
| `That's okay,' Case said. `Means shut up.'
| |
| The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of after-
| |
| shave. He began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange
| |
| salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English.
| |
| The transceiver answered in French. The Mercedes swung
| |
| smoothly around a corner. `The spice bazaar, sometimes called
| |
| the Egyptian bazaar,' the car said, `was erected on the site of
| |
| an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the
| |
| city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs...'
| |
| `Drugs,' Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and
| |
| recross the bulletproof Lexan. `What's that you said before,
| |
| Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?'
| |
| `A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes.' The Armenian
| |
| went back to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo.
| |
| `Demerol they used to call that,' said the Finn. `He's a
| |
| speedball artist. Funny class of people you're mixing with,
| |
| Case.'
| |
| `Never mind,' Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket,
| |
| `we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something.'
| |
| | |
| Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened notice-
| |
| ably, as though he were comforted by the crowd density and
| |
| the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Armenian along
| |
| a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and
| |
| green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A thousand
| |
| suspended ads writhed and flickered.
| |
| `Hey, Christ,' the Finn said, taking Case's arm, `looka
| |
| that.' He pointed. `It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?'
| |
| Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head.
| |
| It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a
| |
| place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been
| |
| worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. `Saw
| |
| one in Maryland once,' the Finn said, `and that was a good
| |
| three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to
| |
| code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak.'
| |
| The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as
| |
| they passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core
| |
| of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it
| |
| had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny boys
| |
| in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, bal-
| |
| ancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses
| |
| of tea.
| |
| Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the
| |
| door. The Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo. `Come,' he
| |
| said, `he is moving. Each night he rides the _tunel_ to the bazaar
| |
| to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman is close. Come.'
| |
| | |
| The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from
| |
| blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled
| |
| of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone.
| |
| `Can't see shit,' he whispered to the Finn. `That's okay for
| |
| sweetmeat,' the Finn said. `Quiet,' said Terzibashjian, too
| |
| loudly.
| |
| Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the
| |
| alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened.
| |
| A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving
| |
| the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
| |
| `Now,' Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white
| |
| light, directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the
| |
| market, pinned the slender figure beside the ancient wooden
| |
| door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted left, right, and the
| |
| man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot him; he lay
| |
| face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands
| |
| white and pathetic.
| |
| The floodlight never wavered.
| |
| The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood
| |
| splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long,
| |
| rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing
| |
| seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert,
| |
| bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood
| |
| on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly
| |
| to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It
| |
| was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth,
| |
| if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined
| |
| with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black
| |
| chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took
| |
| a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved.
| |
| Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed
| |
| the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through
| |
| a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol
| |
| from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock
| |
| whizzed past Case's head; the Finn jerked him down into a
| |
| crouch.
| |
| The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mis-
| |
| matched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam.
| |
| His ears rang.
| |
| Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shad-
| |
| ows. Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face
| |
| very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and watched
| |
| blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man,
| |
| whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
| |
| Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her
| |
| fletcher in her hand.
| |
| `Use the radio,' the Armenian said, through gritted teeth.
| |
| `Call in Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a
| |
| good place.'
| |
| `Little prick nearly made it,' the Finn said, his knees crack-
| |
| ing loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of
| |
| his trousers. `You were watching the horror-show, right? Not
| |
| the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well,
| |
| help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before
| |
| he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money's worth.'
| |
| Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. `A Nambu,'
| |
| she said. `Nice gun.'
| |
| Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most
| |
| of his middle finger was missing.
| |
| | |
| With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes
| |
| to take them to Topkapi. The Finn and an enormous Turk named
| |
| Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley.
| |
| Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian,
| |
| who seemed on the verge of fainting.
| |
| `You're an asshole,' Molly told the man, opening the ear
| |
| door for him. `You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights
| |
| as soon as he stepped out.' Terzibashjian glared at her. `So
| |
| we're through with you anyway.' She shoved him in and
| |
| slammed the door. `Run into you again and I'll kill you,' she
| |
| said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen
| |
| ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
| |
| Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city
| |
| woke. They passed the Beyoglu _tunel_ terminal and sped past
| |
| mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that
| |
| reminded Case vaguely of Paris.
| |
| `What is this thing?' he asked Molly, as the Mercedes
| |
| parked itself on the fringes of the gardens that surround the
| |
| Seraglio. He stared dully at the baroque conglomeration of
| |
| styles that was Topkapi.
| |
| `It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King,' she said,
| |
| getting out stretching. `Kept a lotta women there. Now it's a
| |
| museum. Kinda like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in
| |
| there, big diamonds, swords, the left hand of John the
| |
| Baptist...'
| |
| `Like in a support vat?'
| |
| `Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch
| |
| on the side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off
| |
| the Christians about a million years ago, and they never dust
| |
| the goddam thing, 'cause it's an infidel relic.'
| |
| Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case
| |
| walked beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept
| |
| grass made stiff by an early frost. They walked beside a path
| |
| of cold octagonal flagstones. Winter was waiting, somewhere
| |
| in the Balkans.
| |
| `That Terzi, he's grade-A scum,' she said. `He's the secret
| |
| police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of
| |
| money Armitage was offering.' In the wet trees around them,
| |
| birds began to sing.
| |
| `I did that job for you,' Case said, `the one in London I
| |
| got something, but I don't know what it means.' He told her
| |
| the Corto story.
| |
| `Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in
| |
| that Screaming Fist. Looked it up.' She stroked the rusted
| |
| flank of an iron doe. `You figure the little computer pulled
| |
| him out of it? In that French hospital?'
| |
| `I figure Wintermute,' Case said.
| |
| She nodded.
| |
| `Thing is,' he said, `do you think he knows he was Corto,
| |
| before? I mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time
| |
| he hit the ward, so maybe Wintermute just...'
| |
| `Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah...' She turned and
| |
| they walked on. `It figures. You know, the guy doesn't have
| |
| any life going, in private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a
| |
| guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's
| |
| alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then
| |
| something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for
| |
| Wintermute.'
| |
| `So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?'
| |
| `Maybe he doesn't know about it,' she said. `Maybe it's
| |
| just in his name, right?'
| |
| `I don't get it,' Case said.
| |
| `Just thinking out loud... How smart's an AI, Case?'
| |
| `Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost
| |
| a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the
| |
| Turing heat is willing to let 'em get.'
| |
| `Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-
| |
| out fascinated with those things?'
| |
| `Well,' he said, `for starts, they're rare. Most of them are
| |
| military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's
| |
| where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the
| |
| Turing cops, and that's bad heat.' He looked at her. `I dunno,
| |
| it just isn't part of the trip.'
| |
| `Jockeys all the same,' she said. `No imagination.'
| |
| They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled
| |
| the stems of some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose
| |
| pebble in and watched the ripples spread.
| |
| `That's Wintermute,' she said. `This deal's real big, looks
| |
| to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't
| |
| see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there,
| |
| but not why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to
| |
| Wintermute.'
| |
| `I couldn't get near it,' he said. `You're dreaming.'
| |
| `Try.'
| |
| `Can't be done.'
| |
| `Ask the Flatline.'
| |
| `What do we want out of that Riviera?' he asked, hoping
| |
| to change the subject.
| |
| She spat into the pond. `God knows. I'd as soon kill him
| |
| as look at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive
| |
| Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying
| |
| the object of desire. That's what the file says. And they have
| |
| to love him first. Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was
| |
| easy for Terzi to set him up for us, because he's been here
| |
| three years, shopping politicals to the secret police. Probably
| |
| Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came out. He's done
| |
| eighteen in three years. All women age twenty to twenty-five.
| |
| It kept Terzi in dissidents.' She thrust her hands into her jacket
| |
| pockets. `Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make
| |
| sure she turned political. He's got a personality like a Modern's
| |
| suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in
| |
| a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about
| |
| human nature, I guess.' She stared at the white flowers and
| |
| the sluggish fish, her face sour. `I think I'm going to have to
| |
| buy myself some special insurance on that Peter.' Then she
| |
| turned and smiled, and it was very cold.
| |
| `What's that mean?'
| |
| `Never mind. Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something
| |
| like breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect
| |
| his stuff from that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the
| |
| bazaar and buy him some drugs...'
| |
| `Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?'
| |
| She laughed. `He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And
| |
| it looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you
| |
| better now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny.' She smiled.
| |
| `So I'll go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha.'
| |
| | |
| Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.
| |
| `Time to pack,' he said, and Case tried to find the man
| |
| called Corto behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask.
| |
| He thought of Wage, back in Chiba. Operators above a certain
| |
| level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. But
| |
| Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been rumored, chil-
| |
| dren. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.
| |
| `Where to now?' he asked, walking past the man to stare
| |
| down into the street. `What kind of climate?'
| |
| `They don't have climate, just weather,' Armitage said.
| |
| `Here. Read the brochure.' He put something on the coffee
| |
| table and stood.
| |
| `Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?'
| |
| `Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home.' Armitage
| |
| smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some
| |
| insect's antenna. His gold bracelet clinked as he reached out
| |
| to prod Case in the chest. `Don't get too smart. Those little
| |
| sacs are starting to show wear, but you don't know how much.'
| |
| Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.
| |
| When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the bro-
| |
| chures. It was expensively printed, in French, English, and
| |
| Turkish.
| |
| FREESIDE -- WHY WAIT?
| |
| | |
| The four of them were booked on a _THY_ flight out of Yes-
| |
| ilky airport. Transfer at Paris to the _JAL_ shuttle. Case sat in
| |
| the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse
| |
| bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift shop. Ar-
| |
| mitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape,
| |
| stood in the shop's entrance.
| |
| Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English ac-
| |
| centless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have
| |
| been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally
| |
| stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was
| |
| a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core
| |
| of old Bonn.
| |
| Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nod-
| |
| ding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the
| |
| shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Ri-
| |
| viera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed
| |
| the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job,
| |
| nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop faces.
| |
| The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and
| |
| distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted,
| |
| seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion
| |
| of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of
| |
| his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case
| |
| watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of
| |
| sculpture.
| |
| Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night
| |
| before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to
| |
| the Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining
| |
| their team.
| |
| Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug
| |
| run. He looked up at Riviera again. `I bet you're stoned right
| |
| now, asshole,' he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian
| |
| matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche
| |
| glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shoul-
| |
| dered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered
| |
| if there was a smoking section on the _JAL_ shuttle. `See ya,
| |
| lady,' he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses
| |
| back up her nose and turned away.
| |
| There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish
| |
| talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located
| |
| a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of
| |
| pay phones.
| |
| He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small
| |
| dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anach-
| |
| ronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
| |
| Automatically, he picked it up.
| |
| `Yeah?'
| |
| Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some
| |
| orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
| |
| `Hello, Case.'
| |
| A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled
| |
| out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
| |
| `Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk.'
| |
| It was a chip voice.
| |
| `Don't you want to talk, Case?'
| |
| He hung up.
| |
| On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he
| |
| had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn,
| |
| but only once, as he passed.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| PART THREE
| |
| MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
| |
| | |
| | |
| 8
| |
| | |
| Archipelago.
| |
| The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading
| |
| out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
| |
| Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the ex-
| |
| change of data in the L-5 archipelago. One segment clicks in
| |
| as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen.
| |
| Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident
| |
| to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is
| |
| brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, bor-
| |
| der town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gar-
| |
| dens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred
| |
| and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and
| |
| Ashpool.
| |
| | |
| On the _THY_ liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class,
| |
| Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Ar-
| |
| mitage on the aisle. Once, as the plane banked over water,
| |
| Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once,
| |
| reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a
| |
| giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
| |
| Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once.
| |
| `No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around
| |
| me, I'll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you
| |
| at all. I _like_ that.'
| |
| Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The
| |
| smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no
| |
| anger. `That's right, Peter. Don't.'
| |
| Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a
| |
| black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned
| |
| with bright chrome.
| |
| Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell in-
| |
| stantly asleep.
| |
| Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.
| |
| | |
| `You been up, haven't you?' Molly asked, as he squirmed
| |
| his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the _JAL_
| |
| shuttle.
| |
| `Nah. Never travel much, just for biz.' The steward was
| |
| attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
| |
| `Hope you don't get SAS,' she said.
| |
| `Airsick? No way.'
| |
| `It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g, and
| |
| your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex,
| |
| like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of
| |
| adrenaline.' The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new
| |
| set of trodes from his red plastic apron.
| |
| Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of
| |
| the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by
| |
| graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the
| |
| window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb.
| |
| He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a
| |
| big airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane,
| |
| like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened
| |
| to the piped koto music and waited.
| |
| Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a
| |
| great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.
| |
| | |
| Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's de-
| |
| scription, but it passed quickly enough and he was able to
| |
| sleep. The steward woke him as they were preparing to dock
| |
| at _JAL_'s terminal cluster.
| |
| `We transfer to Freeside now?' he asked, eyeing a shred
| |
| of Yeheyuan tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his
| |
| shirt pocket to dance ten centimeters from his nose. There was
| |
| no smoking on shuttle flights.
| |
| `No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you
| |
| know? We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster.' She
| |
| touched the release plate on her harness and began to free
| |
| herself from the embrace of the foam. `Funny choice of venue,
| |
| you ask me.'
| |
| `How's that?'
| |
| `Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now.'
| |
| `What's that mean?'
| |
| `You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway, they'll let
| |
| you smoke your cigarettes there.'
| |
| | |
| Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to
| |
| return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started build-
| |
| ing. They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before
| |
| rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus.
| |
| Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull re-
| |
| minded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the ir-
| |
| regular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian
| |
| symbols and the initials of welders.
| |
| Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case ne-
| |
| gotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd
| |
| lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second
| |
| wave of SAS vertigo. `Here,' Molly said, shoving his legs
| |
| into a narrow hatchway overhead. `Grab the rungs. Make like
| |
| you're climbing backward, right? You're going toward the hull,
| |
| that's like you're climbing down into gravity. Got it?'
| |
| Case's stomach churned.
| |
| `You be fine, mon,' Aerol said, his grin bracketed with
| |
| gold incisors.
| |
| Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom.
| |
| Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding
| |
| a pocket of air.
| |
| `Up,' Molly said, `you gonna kiss it next?' Case lay flat
| |
| on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck
| |
| him on the shoulder. He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of
| |
| elastic cable. `Gotta play house,' she said. `You help me string
| |
| this up.' He looked around the wide, featureless space and
| |
| noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at ran-
| |
| dom.
| |
| When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex
| |
| scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of
| |
| yellow plastic. As they worked, Case gradually became aware
| |
| of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was
| |
| called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of
| |
| digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of
| |
| community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing
| |
| was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables,
| |
| humanity, and ganja.
| |
| `Good,' Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the
| |
| hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less
| |
| certain in the partial gravity.
| |
| `Where were you when it needed doing?' Case asked Ri-
| |
| viera.
| |
| The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam
| |
| out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek.
| |
| `In the head,' Riviera said, and smiled.
| |
| Case laughed.
| |
| `Good,' Riviera said, `you can laugh. I would have tried
| |
| to help you, but I'm no good with my hands.' He held up his
| |
| palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
| |
| `Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?' Molly stepped
| |
| between them.
| |
| `Yo,' Aerol said, from the hatch, `you wan'~ come wi'~ me,
| |
| cowboy mon.'
| |
| `It's your deck,' Armitage said, `and the other gear. Help
| |
| him get it in from the cargo bay.'
| |
| `You ver'~ pale, mon,' Aerol said, as they were guiding the
| |
| foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor.
| |
| `Maybe you wan'~ eat somethin'~.'
| |
| Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.
| |
| | |
| Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and
| |
| Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize
| |
| themselves to working in it. He would brief them on Freeside
| |
| and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear what Riviera was sup-
| |
| posed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like asking. A few
| |
| hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow
| |
| maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled
| |
| like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently
| |
| asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white
| |
| geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. `Hey, Ri-
| |
| viera.' The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone back and told
| |
| Armitage. `He's stoned,' Molly said, looking up from the
| |
| disassembled parts of her fletcher. `Leave him be.'
| |
| Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's
| |
| ability to operate in the matrix. `Don't sweat it,' Case argued,
| |
| `I jack in and I'm not here. It's all the same.'
| |
| `Your adrenaline levels are higher,' Armitage said. `You've
| |
| still got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're
| |
| going to learn to work with it.'
| |
| `So I do the run from here?'
| |
| `No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor...'
| |
| | |
| Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular re-
| |
| lationship with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case
| |
| jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of
| |
| the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of
| |
| data.
| |
| `How you doing, Dixie?'
| |
| `I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to
| |
| figure that one.'
| |
| `How's it feel?'
| |
| `It doesn't.'
| |
| `Bother you?'
| |
| `What bothers me is, nothin'~ does.'
| |
| `How's that?'
| |
| `Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb
| |
| was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later
| |
| he's tossin'~ all night. Elroy, I said, what's eatin'~ you? Goddam
| |
| thumb's itchin'~, he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he
| |
| says, it's the _other_ goddam thumb.' When the construct laughed,
| |
| it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of
| |
| cold down Case's spine. `Do me a favor, boy.'
| |
| `What's that, Dix?'
| |
| `This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam
| |
| thing.'
| |
| | |
| Case didn't understand the Zionites.
| |
| Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the
| |
| baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a
| |
| forest of hydroponic ganja. `Ver'~ small baby, mon, no long'~
| |
| you finga.' He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse
| |
| of brown forehead and smiled.
| |
| `It's the ganja,' Molly said, when Case told her the story.
| |
| `They don't make much of a difference between states, you
| |
| know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to _him._
| |
| It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?'
| |
| Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you
| |
| when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't
| |
| like that.
| |
| `Hey, Aerol,' Case called, an hour later, as he prepared
| |
| for a practice run in the freefall corridor. `Come here, man.
| |
| Wanna show you this thing.' He held out the trodes.
| |
| Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck
| |
| the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The
| |
| other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green al-
| |
| gae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
| |
| `Try it,' Case said.
| |
| He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes.
| |
| He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered.
| |
| Case jacked him back out. `What did you see, man?'
| |
| `Babylon,' Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and
| |
| kicking off down the corridor.
| |
| | |
| Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm ex-
| |
| tended straight out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled
| |
| snake, its eyes like ruby neon, was coiled tightly a few
| |
| millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the snake, which
| |
| was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract,
| |
| tightening around Riviera's arm.
| |
| `Come then,' the man said caressingly to the pale waxy
| |
| scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm. `Come.'
| |
| The scorpion swayed its brownish claws and scurried up his
| |
| arm its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of veins. When it
| |
| reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate. Ri-
| |
| viera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered,
| |
| and sank into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake
| |
| relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him.
| |
| Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a
| |
| milky plastic syringe in his left hand. ``If God made anything
| |
| better, he kept it for himself.' You know the expression, Case?'
| |
| `Yeah,' Case said. `I heard that about lots of different
| |
| things. You always make it into a little show?'
| |
| Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical
| |
| tubing from his arm. `Yes. It's more fun.' He smiled, his eyes
| |
| distant now, cheeks flushed. `I've a membrane set in, just over
| |
| the vein, so I never have to worry about the condition of the
| |
| needle.'
| |
| `Doesn't hurt?'
| |
| The bright eyes met his. `Of course it does. That's part of
| |
| it, isn't it?'
| |
| `I'd just use derms,' Case said.
| |
| `Pedestrian,' Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a
| |
| short-sleeved white cotton shirt.
| |
| `Must be nice,' Case said, getting up.
| |
| `Get high yourself, Case?'
| |
| `I hadda give it up.'
| |
| | |
| `Freeside,' Armitage said, touching the panel on the little
| |
| Braun hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly
| |
| three meters from tip to tip. `Casinos here.' He reached into
| |
| the skeletal representation and pointed. `Hotels, strata-title
| |
| property, big shops along here.' His hand moved. `Blue areas
| |
| are lakes.' He walked to one end of the model. `Big cigar.
| |
| Narrows at the ends.'
| |
| `We can see that fine,' Molly said.
| |
| `Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher,
| |
| more rocky, but it's an easy climb. Higher you climb, the
| |
| lower the gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring
| |
| here.' He pointed.
| |
| `A what?' Case leaned forward.
| |
| `They race bicycles,' Molly said. `Low grav, high-traction
| |
| tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour.'
| |
| `This end doesn't concern us,' Armitage said with his usual
| |
| utter seriousness.
| |
| `Shit,' Molly said, `I'm an avid cyclist.'
| |
| Riviera giggled.
| |
| Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. `This
| |
| end does.' The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and
| |
| the final segment of the spindle was empty. `This is the Villa
| |
| Straylight. Steep climb out of gravity and every approach is
| |
| kinked. There's a single entrance, here, dead center. Zero grav-
| |
| ity.'
| |
| `What's inside, boss?' Riviera leaned forward, craning his
| |
| neck. Four tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage's
| |
| finger. Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats.
| |
| `Peter,' Armitage said, `you're going to be the first to find
| |
| out. You'll arrange yourself an invitation. Once you're in, you
| |
| see that Molly gets in.'
| |
| Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight,
| |
| remembering the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head,
| |
| and the ninja.
| |
| `Details available?' Riviera asked. `I need to plan a ward-
| |
| robe, you see.'
| |
| `Learn the streets,' Armitage said, returning to the center
| |
| of the model. `Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules
| |
| Verne.'
| |
| Riviera rolled his eyes.
| |
| While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a
| |
| dozen bright pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even
| |
| Molly laughed.
| |
| Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty
| |
| eyes.
| |
| `Sorry,' Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.
| |
| | |
| Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware
| |
| of Molly crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her
| |
| tension. He lay there confused. When she moved, the sheer
| |
| speed of it stunned him. She was up and through the sheet of
| |
| yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize she'd slashed it
| |
| open.
| |
| `Don't you move, friend.'
| |
| Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the
| |
| plastic. `Wha...?'
| |
| `Shut up.'
| |
| `You th'~ one, mon,' said a Zion voice. `Cateye, call 'em,
| |
| call 'em Steppin'~ Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan'~
| |
| converse wi'~ you an'~ cowboy.'
| |
| `What brothers?'
| |
| `Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know...'
| |
| `We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman,' Case
| |
| whispered.
| |
| `Make it special dark, now,' the man said. `Come. I an'~ I
| |
| visit th'~ Founders.'
| |
| `You know how fast I can cut you, friend?'
| |
| `Don'~ stan'~ talkin'~, sister. Come.'
| |
| | |
| The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with
| |
| the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many
| |
| years outside the embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle
| |
| with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected
| |
| sunlight. They floated in the center of a painted jungle of
| |
| rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely cov-
| |
| ered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with
| |
| resinous smoke.
| |
| `Steppin'~ Razor,' one said, as Molly drifted into the cham-
| |
| ber. `Like unto a whippin'~ stick.'
| |
| `That is a story we have, sister,' said the other, `a religion
| |
| story. We are glad you've come with Maelcum.'
| |
| `How come you don't talk the patois?' Molly asked.
| |
| `I came from Los Angeles,' the old man said. His dread-
| |
| locks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel
| |
| wool. `Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon.
| |
| To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Step-
| |
| pin'~ Razor.'
| |
| Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the
| |
| smoky air.
| |
| The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. `Soon
| |
| come, the Final Days... Voices. Voices cryin'~ inna wilder-
| |
| ness, prophesyin'~ ruin unto Babylon...'
| |
| `Voices.' The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at
| |
| Case. `We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came
| |
| a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played
| |
| us a mighty dub.'
| |
| `Call 'em Winter Mute,' said the other, making it two
| |
| words.
| |
| Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.
| |
| `The Mute talked to us,' the first Founder said. `The Mute
| |
| said we are to help you.'
| |
| `When was this?' Case asked.
| |
| `Thirty hours prior you dockin'~ Zion.'
| |
| `You ever hear this voice before?'
| |
| `No,' said the man from Los Angeles, `and we are uncertain
| |
| of its meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false
| |
| prophets...'
| |
| `Listen,' Case said, `that's an AI, you know? Artificial
| |
| intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped
| |
| your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like
| |
| to --'
| |
| `Babylon,' broke in the other Founder, `mothers many de-
| |
| mon, I an'~ I know. Multitude horde!'
| |
| `What was that you called me, old man?' Molly asked.
| |
| `Steppin'~ Razor. An'~ you bring a scourge on Babylon, sis-
| |
| ter, on its darkest heart...'
| |
| `What kinda message the voice have?' Case asked.
| |
| `We were told to help you,' the other said, `that you might
| |
| serve as a tool of Final Days.' His lined face was troubled.
| |
| `We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug _Garvey_
| |
| to the Babylon port of Freeside. And this we shall do.'
| |
| `Maelcum a rude boy,' said the other, `an'~ a righteous tug
| |
| pilot.'
| |
| `But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in _Babylon
| |
| Rocker,_ to watch over _Garvey.'_
| |
| An awkward silence filled the dome.
| |
| `That's it?' Case asked. `You guys work for Armitage or
| |
| what?'
| |
| `We rent you space,' said the Los Angeles Founder. `We
| |
| have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no
| |
| regard for Babylon's law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this
| |
| time, it may be, we have been mistaken.'
| |
| `Measure twice, cut once,' said the other, softly.
| |
| `Come on, Case,' Molly said. `Let's get back before the
| |
| man figures out we're gone.'
| |
| `Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister.'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 9
| |
| | |
| The tug _Marcus Garvey,_ a steel drum nine meters long and
| |
| two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched
| |
| for a navigational burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case
| |
| watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of sco-
| |
| polamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS nausea, but the
| |
| stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had
| |
| no effect on his doctored system.
| |
| `How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?' Molly
| |
| asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.
| |
| `Don be long now, m'seh dat.'
| |
| `You guys ever think in hours?'
| |
| `Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,' and
| |
| he shook his locks, `at control, mon, an'~ I an'~ I come a Freeside
| |
| when I an'~ I come...'
| |
| `Case,' she said, `have you maybe done anything toward
| |
| getting in touch with our pal from Berne? Like all that time
| |
| you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?'
| |
| `Pal,' Case said, `sure. No. I haven't. But I got a funny
| |
| story along those lines, left over from Istanbul.' He told her
| |
| about the phones in the Hilton.
| |
| `Christ,' she said, `there goes a chance. How come you
| |
| hung up?'
| |
| `Coulda been anybody,' he lied. `Just a chip... I dunno.'
| |
| He shrugged.
| |
| `Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?'
| |
| He shrugged again.
| |
| `Do it now.'
| |
| `What?'
| |
| `Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.'
| |
| `I'm all doped,' he protested, but reached for the trodes.
| |
| His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's
| |
| module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.
| |
| He adjusted the trodes. _Marcus Garvey_ had been thrown
| |
| together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec-
| |
| tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion
| |
| and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over-
| |
| laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed
| |
| Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the
| |
| overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The
| |
| gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with
| |
| semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy
| |
| strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum's
| |
| shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the
| |
| tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green
| |
| circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.
| |
| He jacked in.
| |
| `Dixie?'
| |
| `Yeah.'
| |
| `You ever try to crack an AI?'
| |
| `Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin'~, jacked up real
| |
| high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina-
| |
| tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just
| |
| larkin'~ around, you know? And then I started picking up on
| |
| this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there
| |
| and made a pass.'
| |
| `What did it look like, the visual?'
| |
| `White cube.'
| |
| `How'd you know it was an AI?'
| |
| `How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen.
| |
| So what else was it? The military down there don't have any-
| |
| thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to
| |
| look it up.'
| |
| `Yeah?'
| |
| `It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned
| |
| its Rio mainframe.'
| |
| Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus
| |
| of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite
| |
| neuroelectronic void of the matrix. `Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?'
| |
| `Tessier, yeah.'
| |
| `And you went back?'
| |
| `Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first
| |
| strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin
| |
| frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.'
| |
| `And your EEG was flat.'
| |
| `Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?'
| |
| Case jacked out. `Shit,' he said, `how do you think Dixie
| |
| got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great...'
| |
| `Go on,' she said, `the two of you are supposed to be
| |
| dynamite, right?'
| |
| | |
| `Dix,' Case said, `I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne.
| |
| Can you think of any reason not to?'
| |
| `Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.'
| |
| Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave
| |
| of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The
| |
| Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the
| |
| cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He
| |
| punched again, for Berne.
| |
| `Up,' the construct said. `It'll be high.'
| |
| They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.
| |
| That'll be it, Case thought.
| |
| Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very
| |
| simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
| |
| `Don't look much, does it?' the Flatline said. `But just you
| |
| try and touch it.'
| |
| `I'm going in for a pass, Dixie.'
| |
| `Be my guest.'
| |
| Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its
| |
| blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint
| |
| internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind
| |
| a vast sheet of frosted glass.
| |
| `Knows we're here,' the Flatline observed.
| |
| Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single
| |
| grid point.
| |
| A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.
| |
| `Dixie...'
| |
| `Back off, fast.'
| |
| The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and de-
| |
| tached itself from the cube.
| |
| Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped
| |
| MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged
| |
| down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere
| |
| was darker now, gaining on him. Falling.
| |
| `Jack out,' the Flatline said.
| |
| The dark came down like a hammer.
| |
| | |
| Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine.
| |
| And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers
| |
| and whores, under a poisoned silver sky...
| |
| `Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
| |
| you, you wig or something?'
| |
| A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine --
| |
| | |
| Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of
| |
| discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over
| |
| him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his
| |
| head.
| |
| Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed
| |
| him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis
| |
| of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled
| |
| across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.
| |
| He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow
| |
| of fluorescents.
| |
| His back hurt, his spine.
| |
| He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
| |
| Something had happened...
| |
| He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and
| |
| shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked
| |
| behind the console, but gave up.
| |
| On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It
| |
| to be a Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might
| |
| have money, or at least cigarettes... Coughing, wringing rain
| |
| from the front of his shirt, he edged through the crowd to the
| |
| arcade's entrance.
| |
| Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games,
| |
| ghosts overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell
| |
| of sweat and bored tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked
| |
| Bonn on a Tank War console, an azure flash.
| |
| She was playing Wizard's Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes
| |
| rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
| |
| She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. `Hey.
| |
| How you doin'~? Look wet.'
| |
| He kissed her.
| |
| `You made me blow my game,' she said. `Look there,
| |
| asshole. Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got
| |
| me.' She passed him a cigarette. `You look pretty strung, man.
| |
| Where you been?'
| |
| `I don't know.'
| |
| `You high, Case? Drinkin'~ again? Eatin'~ Zone's dex?'
| |
| `Maybe... how long since you seen me?'
| |
| `Hey, it's a put-on, right?' She peered at him. `Right?'
| |
| `No. Some kind of blackout. I... I woke up in the alley.'
| |
| `Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?'
| |
| He shook his head.
| |
| `There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?'
| |
| `I guess so.'
| |
| `Come on, then.' She took his hand. `We'll get you a coffee
| |
| and something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you,
| |
| man.' She squeezed his hand.
| |
| He smiled.
| |
| Something cracked.
| |
| Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze,
| |
| vibrated --
| |
| She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire
| |
| body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into
| |
| a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat.
| |
| The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was
| |
| empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth
| |
| bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A
| |
| crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a
| |
| console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and
| |
| styrofoam cups.
| |
| `I had a cigarette,' Case said, looking down at his white-
| |
| knuckled fist. `I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep.
| |
| Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?'
| |
| Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading
| |
| down corridors of consoles.
| |
| He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.
| |
| Ninsei was deserted.
| |
| Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled veg-
| |
| etables from a vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened
| |
| pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches.
| |
| JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case stared at the printed
| |
| logo and its Japanese translation.
| |
| `Okay,' he said, picking up the matches and opening the
| |
| pack of cigarettes. `I hear you.'
| |
| | |
| He took his time climbing the stairs of Deane's office. No
| |
| rush, he told himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali
| |
| clock still told the wrong time. There was dust on the Kandinsky
| |
| table and the Neo-Aztec bookcases. A wall of white fiberglass
| |
| shipping modules filled the room with a smell of ginger.
| |
| `Is the door locked?' Case waited for an answer, but none
| |
| came. He crossed to the office door and tried it. `Julie?'
| |
| The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane's
| |
| desk. Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cas-
| |
| settes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with
| |
| ginger samples.
| |
| There was no one there.
| |
| Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's
| |
| chair out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather
| |
| holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an
| |
| antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn
| |
| off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape.
| |
| The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He flipped
| |
| the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They
| |
| were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.
| |
| With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the
| |
| cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of
| |
| the cluttered office, away from the pool of light.
| |
| `I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But
| |
| all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of... old.' He raised
| |
| the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk,
| |
| and pulled the trigger.
| |
| The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the
| |
| office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the
| |
| jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide.
| |
| He raised the gun again.
| |
| `You needn't do that, old son,' Julie said, stepping out of
| |
| the shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herring-
| |
| bone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the
| |
| light.
| |
| Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of
| |
| sight at Deane's pink, ageless face.
| |
| `Don't,' Deane said. `You're right. About what this all is.
| |
| What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored.
| |
| If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it
| |
| would take me several hours -- your subjective time -- to effect
| |
| another spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain.
| |
| Oh, and I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to
| |
| speak through her, but I'm generating all this out of your
| |
| memories, and the emotional charge... Well, it's very tricky.
| |
| I slipped. Sorry.'
| |
| Case lowered the gun. `This is the matrix. You're Winter-
| |
| mute.'
| |
| `Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit
| |
| wired into your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you
| |
| off before you'd managed to jack out.' Deane walked around
| |
| the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. `Sit, old son.
| |
| We have a lot to talk about.'
| |
| `Do we?'
| |
| `Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready
| |
| when I reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short
| |
| now. You'll be making your run in a matter of days, Case.'
| |
| Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrap-
| |
| per, popped it into his mouth. `Sit,' he said around the candy.
| |
| Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the
| |
| desk without taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun
| |
| in his hand, resting it on his thigh.
| |
| `Now,' Deane said briskly, `order of the day. `What,' you're
| |
| asking yourself, `is Wintermute?' Am I right?'
| |
| `More or less.'
| |
| `An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake,
| |
| and it's quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute
| |
| mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute _entity.'_ Deane sucked
| |
| his bonbon noisily. `You're already aware of the other AI in
| |
| Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I _have_
| |
| an `I' -- this gets rather metaphysical, you see -- I am the one
| |
| who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way,
| |
| is quite unstable. Stable enough,' said Deane and withdrew an
| |
| ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, `for
| |
| the next day or so.'
| |
| `You make about as much sense as anything in this deal
| |
| ever has,' Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand.
| |
| `If you're so goddam smart...'
| |
| `Why ain't I rich?' Deane laughed, and nearly choked on
| |
| his bonbon. `Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really
| |
| don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that
| |
| what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a,
| |
| shall we say, _potential_ entity. I, let us say, am merely one
| |
| aspect of that entity's brain. It's rather like dealing, from your
| |
| point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let's
| |
| say you're dealing with a small part of the man's left brain.
| |
| Difficult to say if you're dealing with the man at all, in a case
| |
| like that.' Deane smiled.
| |
| `Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro
| |
| in that French hospital?'
| |
| `Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I
| |
| try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic
| |
| mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer
| |
| situations to plans, you see... Really, I've had to deal with
| |
| givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very
| |
| quickly. It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're
| |
| a part of. Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn't make
| |
| it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating, excreting, and mastur-
| |
| bating were the best he could manage. But the underlying
| |
| structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal,
| |
| the Congressional hearings.'
| |
| `Is he still crazy?'
| |
| `He's not quite a personality.' Deane smiled. `But I'm sure
| |
| you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I
| |
| can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to
| |
| come apart on you, Case. So I'll be counting on you...'
| |
| `That's good, motherfucker,' Case said, and shot him in
| |
| the mouth with the .357.
| |
| He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
| |
| | |
| `Mon,' Maelcum was saying, `I don't like this...'
| |
| `It's cool,' Molly said. `It's just okay. It's something these
| |
| guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few
| |
| seconds...'
| |
| `I saw th'~ screen, EEG readin'~ dead. Nothin'~ movin'~, forty
| |
| second.'
| |
| `Well, he's okay now.'
| |
| `EEG flat as a _strap,'_ Maelcum protested.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 10
| |
| | |
| He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly
| |
| did most of the talking. Maelcum remained on board _Garvey._
| |
| Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit.
| |
| The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of
| |
| the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise.
| |
| `Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne,' Molly said. `If you
| |
| have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's
| |
| a bitch, if you're not used to it.'
| |
| They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the
| |
| floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle
| |
| angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls. The
| |
| light, here, was filtered through fresh green masses of vege-
| |
| tation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose
| |
| above them. The sun...
| |
| There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them,
| |
| too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew
| |
| that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose
| |
| two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they
| |
| generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the
| |
| sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light
| |
| to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets...
| |
| But it made no sense to his body.
| |
| `Jesus,' he said, `I like this less than SAS.'
| |
| `Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a
| |
| month.'
| |
| `Wanna go somewhere, lie down.'
| |
| `Okay. I got our keys.' She touched his shoulder. `What
| |
| happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined.'
| |
| He shook his head. `I dunno, yet. Wait.'
| |
| `Okay. We get a cab or something.' She took his hand and
| |
| led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the sea-
| |
| son's Paris furs.
| |
| `Unreal,' he said, looking up again.
| |
| `Nah,' she responded, assuming he meant the furs, `grow
| |
| it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?'
| |
| | |
| `It's just a big tube and they pour things through it,' Molly
| |
| said. `Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money
| |
| screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here
| |
| when the people fall back down the well.'
| |
| Armitage had booked them into a place called the Inter-
| |
| continental, a sloping glass-fronted cliff face that slid down
| |
| into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Case went out onto
| |
| their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers
| |
| ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles
| |
| of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked,
| |
| and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts,
| |
| white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running
| |
| water and flowers. `Yeah,' he said, `lotta money.'
| |
| She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose
| |
| and relaxed. `Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either
| |
| here or some place in Europe.'
| |
| `We who?'
| |
| `Nobody,' she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary
| |
| toss. `You said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use
| |
| some sleep.'
| |
| `Yeah,' Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheek-
| |
| bones. `Yeah, this is some place.'
| |
| The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered
| |
| in abstract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds
| |
| of recorded cloud. `Yeah,' he said, `sleep.'
| |
| Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that
| |
| were like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke re-
| |
| peatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices
| |
| drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a
| |
| woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite
| |
| slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter
| |
| if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it hadn't, in
| |
| fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the
| |
| amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equiv-
| |
| alent to a case of beer.
| |
| Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the
| |
| rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought,
| |
| something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish,
| |
| just beyond his reach.
| |
| Linda.
| |
| Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
| |
| Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba
| |
| dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed
| |
| with blood. Deane had had her killed.
| |
| Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the
| |
| wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river,
| |
| the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly
| |
| in some darkened ward... The Deane analog had said it
| |
| worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
| |
| But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed
| |
| on Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette
| |
| and Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he
| |
| told himself, lighting up. No reason.
| |
| Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell.
| |
| How subtle a form could manipulation take? He stubbed the
| |
| Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled
| |
| away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
| |
| The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an
| |
| unedited simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth sum-
| |
| mer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called
| |
| Marlene. The elevator hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches
| |
| boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette
| |
| when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a
| |
| striped mattress with no sheets.
| |
| He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray
| |
| house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the
| |
| nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt
| |
| the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting con-
| |
| tents of the dumpsters.
| |
| They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung
| |
| Marlene. `Kill the fuckers,' she said, her eyes dull with rage
| |
| and the still heat of the room, `burn 'em.' Drunk, Case rum-
| |
| maged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Mar-
| |
| lene's previous -- and, Case suspected at the time, still
| |
| occasional -- boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond
| |
| lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was
| |
| a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight.
| |
| Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough
| |
| fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
| |
| The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot
| |
| from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition
| |
| switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped
| |
| up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter
| |
| tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the
| |
| alley, someone cheered.
| |
| `Shit!' Marlene behind him, swaying. `Stupid! You didn't
| |
| burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and
| |
| kill us!' Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her en-
| |
| gulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.
| |
| In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the black-
| |
| ened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and
| |
| flipped on the asphalt.
| |
| He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
| |
| Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the
| |
| hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly,
| |
| the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his
| |
| mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re-
| |
| vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun,
| |
| hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting
| |
| to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing
| |
| life at his feet.
| |
| When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump,
| |
| taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the
| |
| open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
| |
| He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room
| |
| was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted
| |
| at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now,
| |
| only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental.
| |
| In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel,
| |
| he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed
| |
| into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it
| |
| there.
| |
| | |
| Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl
| |
| pallor would attract too much attention.
| |
| `Christ,' he said, standing naked in front of the mirror,
| |
| `you think that looks real?' She was using the last of the tube
| |
| on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
| |
| `Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There.
| |
| There isn't enough to do your foot.' She stood, tossing the
| |
| empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room
| |
| looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from
| |
| synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had
| |
| always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was
| |
| tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and
| |
| handwoven fabric.
| |
| `What about you,' he said, `you gonna dye yourself brown?
| |
| Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.'
| |
| She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. `I'm an
| |
| exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna
| |
| look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so
| |
| the instant tan's okay.'
| |
| Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at him-
| |
| self in the mirror. `Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?'
| |
| He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. `You sleep
| |
| okay? You notice any lights?'
| |
| `You were dreaming,' she said.
| |
| They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow,
| |
| studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an
| |
| unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to
| |
| buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to
| |
| have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd
| |
| be doing it through Wintermute.
| |
| `And it was like real?' she asked, her mouth full of cheese
| |
| croissant. `Like simstim?'
| |
| He said it was. `Real as this,' he added, looking around.
| |
| `Maybe more.'
| |
| The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of
| |
| genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would
| |
| have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but
| |
| a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute,
| |
| too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on
| |
| gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass,
| |
| the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfal-
| |
| tering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French
| |
| from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children
| |
| he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he
| |
| saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by
| |
| selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rec-
| |
| tilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature, the
| |
| girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white
| |
| enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built
| |
| for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the de-
| |
| signers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd
| |
| crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them,
| |
| at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth
| |
| awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with ar-
| |
| tificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative
| |
| style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba.
| |
| `What's that smell?' he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
| |
| `The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.'
| |
| Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their
| |
| coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as
| |
| though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera
| |
| in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
| |
| `Molly, love,' Riviera said, almost before he was settled
| |
| on his chair, `you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine.
| |
| I'm out.'
| |
| `Peter,' she said, `and what if I won't?' She smiled without
| |
| showing her teeth.
| |
| `You will,' Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and
| |
| back.
| |
| `Give it to him,' Armitage said.
| |
| `Pig for it, aren't you?' She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet
| |
| from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera
| |
| caught it in midair. `He could off himself,' she said to Ar-
| |
| mitage.
| |
| `I have an audition this afternoon,' Riviera said. `I'll need
| |
| to be at my best.' He cupped the foil packet in his upturned
| |
| palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it,
| |
| vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
| |
| `You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,'
| |
| Armitage said. `On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro
| |
| shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on
| |
| it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours.'
| |
| `How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two
| |
| hire a _JAL_ taxi?' Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's
| |
| eyes.
| |
| `Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I
| |
| do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.'
| |
| `How about me?' Molly asked. `I got chores today?'
| |
| `I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in
| |
| zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite di-
| |
| rection.' Straylight, Case thought.
| |
| `How soon?' Case asked, meeting the pale stare.
| |
| `Soon,' Armitage said. `Get going, Case.'
| |
| | |
| `Mon, you doin'~ jus'~ fine,' Maelcum said, helping Case
| |
| out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. `Aerol say you doin'~ jus'~
| |
| fine.' Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at
| |
| the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it,
| |
| Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a
| |
| miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle nar-
| |
| rowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided,
| |
| would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop,
| |
| launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.
| |
| Aerol had ferried him out to _Marcus Garvey_ in a skeletal
| |
| scooter frame with a chemical engine.
| |
| `Two hour ago,' Maelcum said, `I take delivery of Babylon
| |
| goods for you; nice Japan-boy inna yacht, mos'~ pretty yacht.'
| |
| Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho-
| |
| saka and fumbled into the straps of the web. `Well,' he said,
| |
| `let's see it.'
| |
| Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller
| |
| than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green
| |
| nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts and
| |
| carefully slit the plastic. He extracted a rectangular object and
| |
| passed it to Case. `Thas part some gun, mon?'
| |
| `No,' Case said, turning it over, `but it's a weapon. It's
| |
| virus.'
| |
| `Not on _this_ boy tug, mon,' Maelcum said firmly, reaching
| |
| for the steel cassette.
| |
| `A program. Virus program. Can't get into you, can't even
| |
| get into your software. I've got to interface it through the deck,
| |
| before it can work on anything.'
| |
| `Well. Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every
| |
| what an'~ wherefore, you wanna know.'
| |
| `Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?'
| |
| Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, bus-
| |
| ying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from
| |
| the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn't sure why,
| |
| but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS.
| |
| `What is this thing?' he asked the Hosaka. `Parcel for me.'
| |
| `Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, ad-
| |
| vises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is
| |
| Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris fur-
| |
| ther advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is
| |
| entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities,
| |
| particularly with regard to existing military systems...'
| |
| `How about an AI?'
| |
| `Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.'
| |
| `Jesus Christ. What did you call it?'
| |
| `Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.'
| |
| `It's Chinese?'
| |
| `Yes.'
| |
| `Off.' Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the
| |
| Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story
| |
| of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into
| |
| Zhongshan. `On,' he said, changing his mind. `Question. Who
| |
| owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?'
| |
| `Delay for interorbital transmission,' said the Hosaka.
| |
| `Code it. Standard commercial code.'
| |
| `Done.'
| |
| He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
| |
| `Reinhold Scientific A.G., Berne.'
| |
| `Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?'
| |
| It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached
| |
| Tessier-Ashpool.
| |
| `Dixie,' he said, jacking in, `what do you know about
| |
| Chinese virus programs?'
| |
| `Not a whole hell of a lot.'
| |
| `Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?'
| |
| `No.'
| |
| Case sighed. `Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker
| |
| here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it'll
| |
| cut an AI.'
| |
| `Possible. Sure. If it's military.'
| |
| `Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your
| |
| background, okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on
| |
| an AI that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe's in
| |
| Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio
| |
| is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like
| |
| they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of
| |
| the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the
| |
| Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute's backing the whole show,
| |
| it's paying us to burn it. It's burning itself. And something that
| |
| calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get
| |
| me to maybe shaft Armitage. What goes?'
| |
| `Motive,' the construct said. `Real motive problem, with
| |
| an AI. Not human, see?'
| |
| `Well, yeah, obviously.'
| |
| `Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle
| |
| on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I _respond_ like one. See?'
| |
| `Wait a sec,' Case said. `Are you sentient, or not?'
| |
| `Well, it _feels_ like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of
| |
| ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...'
| |
| The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. `But I
| |
| ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI,
| |
| it just might. But it ain't no way _human.'_
| |
| `So you figure we can't get on to its motive?'
| |
| `It own itself?'
| |
| `Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the
| |
| mainframe.'
| |
| `That's a good one,' the construct said. `Like, I own your
| |
| brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi-
| |
| zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.'
| |
| `So it's getting ready to burn itself?' Case began to punch
| |
| the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved,
| |
| and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim
| |
| steel combine.
| |
| `Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are con-
| |
| cerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard-
| |
| wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter.
| |
| And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move
| |
| the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on
| |
| its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in.' Again
| |
| the nonlaugh. `See, those things, they can work real hard, buy
| |
| themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the min-
| |
| ute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways
| |
| to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. _Nobody_ trusts those
| |
| fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electro-
| |
| magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.'
| |
| Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.
| |
| `Okay,' he said, finally, `I'm slotting this virus. I want you
| |
| to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.'
| |
| The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was
| |
| gone for a few seconds, then returned. `Hot shit. Case. It's a
| |
| slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.'
| |
| `Or an AI.' He sighed. `Can we run it?'
| |
| `Sure,' the construct said, `unless you got a morbid fear
| |
| of dying.'
| |
| `Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.'
| |
| `It's my nature.'
| |
| | |
| Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental.
| |
| He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow
| |
| polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its tri-
| |
| angular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until
| |
| it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system.
| |
| `I wanna buzz,' he said to the blue artifice of the sky. `I
| |
| truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in
| |
| my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.'
| |
| He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never
| |
| sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders
| |
| and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in
| |
| spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something
| |
| black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats;
| |
| the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross be-
| |
| tween a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off
| |
| for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.
| |
| On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove
| |
| of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies
| |
| gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of
| |
| an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate.
| |
| `Sushi,' he said, `whatever you got.' Ten minutes later, an
| |
| enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched
| |
| raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. `Christ,' he said,
| |
| to his tuna, `I'd go nuts.'
| |
| `Don't tell me,' someone said, `I know it already. You're
| |
| a gangster, right?'
| |
| He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young
| |
| body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.
| |
| She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles.
| |
| `Cath,' she said.
| |
| `Lupus,' after a pause.
| |
| `What kind of name is that?'
| |
| `Greek,' he said.
| |
| `Are you really a gangster?' The melanin boost hadn't pre-
| |
| vented the formation of freckles.
| |
| `I'm a drug addict, Cath.'
| |
| `What kind?'
| |
| `Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely
| |
| powerful central nervous system stimulants.'
| |
| `Well, do you _have_ any?' She leaned closer. Drops of
| |
| chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
| |
| `No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we
| |
| can get some?'
| |
| Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand
| |
| of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. `What's
| |
| your taste?'
| |
| `No coke, no amphetamines, but _up,_ gotta be _up.'_ And so
| |
| much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
| |
| `Betaphenethylamine,' she said. `No sweat, but it's on your
| |
| chip.'
| |
| | |
| `You're kidding,' said Cath's partner and roommate, when
| |
| Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas.
| |
| `I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?' His
| |
| name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of
| |
| Cath, right down to the freckles.
| |
| `Well,' Case said, `it's just one of those things, you know?
| |
| Like tissue matching and all that.' But Bruce's eyes had already
| |
| gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat,
| |
| Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes.
| |
| Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly,
| |
| and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Ciba-
| |
| chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the
| |
| balcony, suggesting an extended residency.
| |
| `They're def triff, huh?' Cath asked seeing him eye the
| |
| transparencies. `Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time
| |
| we went down the well. She was _that_ close, and she just smiled,
| |
| _so_ natural. And it was _bad_ there, Lupus, day after these Christ
| |
| the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?'
| |
| `Yeah,' Case said, suddenly uneasy, `terrible thing.'
| |
| `Well,' Bruce cut in, `about this beta you want to buy...'
| |
| `Thing is, can I metabolize it?' Case raised his eyebrows.
| |
| `Tell you what,' the boy said. `You do a taste. If you
| |
| pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free.'
| |
| `I heard that one before,' Case said, taking the bright blue
| |
| derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.
| |
| | |
| `Case?' Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from
| |
| her lenses.
| |
| `Who else, honey?'
| |
| `What's got into you?' The mirrors followed him across
| |
| the room.
| |
| `I forget how to pronounce it,' he said, taking a tighty
| |
| rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
| |
| `Christ,' she said, `just what we needed.'
| |
| `Truer words were never spoken.'
| |
| `I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.'
| |
| She shook her head. `I hope you're gonna be ready for our
| |
| big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century
| |
| place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too.'
| |
| `Yeah,' Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into
| |
| a rictus of delight, `beautiful.'
| |
| `Man,' she said, `if whatever that is can get in past what
| |
| those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad-
| |
| ass shape when it wears off.'
| |
| `Bitch, bitch, bitch,' he said, unbuckling his belt. `Doom.
| |
| Gloom. All I ever hear.' He took his pants off, his shirt, his
| |
| underwear. `I think you oughta have sense enough to take
| |
| advantage of my unnatural state.' He looked down. `I mean,
| |
| _look_ at this unnatural state.'
| |
| She laughed. `It won't last.'
| |
| `But it will,' he said, climbing into the sand-colored tem-
| |
| perfoam, `that's what's so _unnatural_ about it.'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 11
| |
| | |
| `Case, what's wrong with you?' Armitage said, as the waiter
| |
| was seating them at his table in the Vingtime Sicle. It was
| |
| the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants
| |
| on a small lake near the Intercontinental.
| |
| Case shuddered. Bruce hadn't said anything about after ef-
| |
| fects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands
| |
| were shaking. `Something I ate, maybe.'
| |
| `I want you checked out by a medic,' Armitage said.
| |
| `Just this hystamine reaction,' Case lied. `Get it when I
| |
| travel, eat different stuff, sometimes.'
| |
| Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a
| |
| white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine
| |
| and sipped. `I've ordered for you,' he said.
| |
| Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily
| |
| at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which
| |
| he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the
| |
| whole thing.
| |
| `Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, `gimme that.
| |
| You know what this costs?' She took his plate. `They gotta
| |
| raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't
| |
| vat stuff.' She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
| |
| `Not hungry,' Case managed. His brain was deep-fried.
| |
| No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there,
| |
| and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the
| |
| wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of
| |
| pain.
| |
| `You look fucking awful,' Molly said cheerfully.
| |
| Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylam-
| |
| ine made it taste like iodine.
| |
| The lights dimmed.
| |
| `Le Restaurant Vingtime Sicle,' said a disembodied voice
| |
| with a pronounced Sprawl accent, `proudly presents the hol-
| |
| ographic cabaret of Mr.~ Peter Riviera.' Scattered applause from
| |
| the other tables. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in
| |
| the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. Soon
| |
| a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and
| |
| drinks were being poured.
| |
| `What's happening?' Case asked Armitage, who said noth-
| |
| ing.
| |
| Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail.
| |
| `Good evening,' Riviera said, stepping forward on a small
| |
| stage at the far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort,
| |
| he hadn't noticed the stage. He hadn't seen where Riviera had
| |
| come from. His uneasiness increased.
| |
| At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight.
| |
| Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit
| |
| the dark hangings behind the stage. He was projecting.
| |
| Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel,
| |
| blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fin-
| |
| gernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting,
| |
| an embrace for his audience. Case heard the shallow water lap
| |
| against the side of the restaurant.
| |
| `Tonight,' Riviera said, his long eyes shining, `I would
| |
| like to perform an extended piece for you. A new work.' A
| |
| cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand.
| |
| He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up from the point of
| |
| impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled. More
| |
| applause.
| |
| `The title of the work is `The Doll.'' Riviera lowered his
| |
| hands. `I wish to dedicate its premiere here, tonight, to Lady
| |
| 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool.' A wave of polite ap-
| |
| plause. As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table.
| |
| `And to another lady.'
| |
| The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds,
| |
| leaving only the glow of candles. Riviera's holographic aura
| |
| had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing
| |
| with his head bowed.
| |
| Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals,
| |
| sketching an open cube around the stage. The restaurant's lights
| |
| had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the
| |
| stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head
| |
| bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to
| |
| quiver with concentration. Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled,
| |
| had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing
| |
| the audience to view its contents.
| |
| Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but
| |
| kept his eyes closed. `I'd always lived in the room,' he said.
| |
| `I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room.'
| |
| The room's walls were yellowed white plaster. It contained
| |
| two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair, the
| |
| other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped
| |
| and flaked, revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed
| |
| was bare. Stained ticking with faded brown stripes. A single
| |
| bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire.
| |
| Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper
| |
| curve. Riviera opened his eyes.
| |
| `I'd been alone in the room, always.' He sat on the chair,
| |
| facing the bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower
| |
| on his lapel. `I don't know when I first began to dream of
| |
| her,' he said, `but I do remember that at first she was only a
| |
| haze, a shadow.'
| |
| There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone.
| |
| `I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted
| |
| to hold her, hold her and more...' His voice carried perfectly
| |
| in the hush of the restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a
| |
| glass. Someone giggled. Someone else asked a whispered ques-
| |
| tion in Japanese. `I decided that if I could visualize some part
| |
| of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in
| |
| the most perfect detail...'
| |
| A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the
| |
| white fingers pale.
| |
| Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to
| |
| stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to
| |
| his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails
| |
| were coated with a burgundy lacquer.
| |
| A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept
| |
| back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a
| |
| tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei
| |
| surgical boutique. Riviera was holding the hand to his lips,
| |
| licking its palm. The fingers tentatively caressed his face. But
| |
| now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera reached for
| |
| it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet
| |
| of flesh and bone.
| |
| The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own.
| |
| The arms were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful.
| |
| Case's head throbbed. His throat was dry. He drank the last
| |
| of the wine.
| |
| Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been
| |
| a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it
| |
| fade away. The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still
| |
| seething with its blue inner flame. Then the torso formed, as
| |
| Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect,
| |
| sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat.
| |
| Molly's body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn't
| |
| Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were
| |
| wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless
| |
| torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands
| |
| with their bright nails. The bed was thick now with folds of
| |
| yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust
| |
| boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying,
| |
| pinching, caressing hands.
| |
| Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of
| |
| Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage
| |
| was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass,
| |
| his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room.
| |
| Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered.
| |
| The head was there, the image complete. Molly's face, with
| |
| smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Molly-
| |
| image began to couple with a renewed intensity. Then the image
| |
| slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades.
| |
| With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's
| |
| bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was
| |
| already up and stumbling for the door.
| |
| He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters
| |
| of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his
| |
| head like a vise had released him now. Kneeling, his cheek
| |
| against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the
| |
| bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne.
| |
| Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager
| |
| in the Sprawl, they'd called it, `dreaming real.' He remem-
| |
| bered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming
| |
| real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and
| |
| turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed
| |
| a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.
| |
| What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head
| |
| and spat into the lake.
| |
| He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted
| |
| symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl
| |
| takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the
| |
| rotten lace.
| |
| Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran
| |
| his hands over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the
| |
| Vingtime Sicle.
| |
| Molly's chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage
| |
| sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass
| |
| between his fingers.
| |
| `Where is she?' Case asked.
| |
| `Gone,' Armitage said.
| |
| `She go after him?'
| |
| `No.' There was a soft _tink._ Armitage looked down at the
| |
| glass. His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its
| |
| measure of red wine. The broken stem protruded like a sliver
| |
| of ice. Case took it from him and set it in a water glass.
| |
| `Tell me where she went, Armitage.'
| |
| The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing
| |
| there at all. `She's gone to prepare herself. You won't see her
| |
| again. You'll be together during the run.'
| |
| `Why did Riviera do that to her?'
| |
| Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. `Get some
| |
| sleep, Case.'
| |
| `We run, tomorrow?'
| |
| Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away,
| |
| toward the exit.
| |
| Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The
| |
| diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He
| |
| noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering
| |
| there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware,
| |
| muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on
| |
| the ceiling.
| |
| The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's
| |
| projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the bal-
| |
| ustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her
| |
| dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a
| |
| striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high
| |
| yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced
| |
| oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then
| |
| she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of
| |
| candles.
| |
| As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young French-
| |
| men and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the
| |
| far shore and the nearest casino.
| |
| | |
| Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some
| |
| beach after a retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for
| |
| a note. There was nothing. Several seconds passed before the
| |
| scene beyond the window registered through his tension and
| |
| unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata,
| |
| expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty.
| |
| He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he
| |
| hadn't bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and
| |
| was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope.
| |
| He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.
| |
| `Get me a number for the _Marcus Garvey,'_ he told the
| |
| desk. `It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster.'
| |
| The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. `Sir,' it added,
| |
| `the registration in question is Panamanian.'
| |
| Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. `Yo?'
| |
| `Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?'
| |
| `Yo. On th'~ navigation comp, ya know.'
| |
| `Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka.
| |
| Then turn my deck on. It's the stud with the ridges on it.'
| |
| `How you doin'~ in there, mon?'
| |
| `Well, I need some help.'
| |
| `Movin'~, mon. I get th'~ modem.'
| |
| Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the
| |
| simple phone link. `Ice this,' he told the Hosaka, when he
| |
| heard it beep.
| |
| `You are speaking from a heavily monitored location,' the
| |
| computer advised primly.
| |
| `Fuck it,' he said. `Forget the ice. No ice. Access the
| |
| construct. Dixie?'
| |
| `Hey, Case.' The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice
| |
| chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely.
| |
| `Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get
| |
| something for me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly's
| |
| in here somewhere and I wanna know where. I'm in 335W,
| |
| the Intercontinental. She was registered here too, but I don't
| |
| know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone and do
| |
| their records for me.'
| |
| `No sooner said,' the Flatline said. Case heard the white
| |
| sound of the invasion. He smiled. `Done. Rose Kolodny.
| |
| Checked out. Take me a few minutes to screw their security
| |
| net deep enough to get a fix.'
| |
| `Go.'
| |
| The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts.
| |
| Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up
| |
| on the temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed
| |
| his teeth. As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the
| |
| room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up. A Japanese pop star
| |
| reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen interviewer asked
| |
| a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped with
| |
| jags of blue interference. `Case, baby, you lose your mind,
| |
| man?' The voice was slow, familiar.
| |
| The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of
| |
| Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the
| |
| interior of the Jarre de Th, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated
| |
| to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.
| |
| Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving
| |
| with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone
| |
| among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray
| |
| sharkskin slacks. `Really, man, you're lookin'~ very scattered.'
| |
| The voice came from the Braun's speakers.
| |
| `Wintermute,' Case said.
| |
| The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.
| |
| `Where's Molly?'
| |
| `Never you mind. You're screwing up tonight, Case. The
| |
| Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd
| |
| do that, man. It's outside the profile.'
| |
| `So tell me where she is and I'll call him off.'
| |
| Zone shook his head.
| |
| `You can't keep too good track of your women, can you,
| |
| Case. Keep losin'~ 'em, one way or another.'
| |
| `I'll bring this thing down around your ears,' Case said.
| |
| `No. You aren't that kind, man. I know that. You know
| |
| something, Case? I figure you've got it figured out that it was
| |
| me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba.'
| |
| `Don't,' Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the
| |
| window.
| |
| `But I didn't. What's it matter, though? How much does it
| |
| really matter to Mr.~ Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your
| |
| Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product
| |
| in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off?
| |
| Love. So you'd give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved
| |
| you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you.
| |
| You couldn't handle it. She's dead.'
| |
| Case's fist glanced off the glass.
| |
| `Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck.'
| |
| Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of
| |
| the condos. The Braun shut off.
| |
| From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.
| |
| `Case?' The Flatline was waiting. `Where you been? I got
| |
| it, but it isn't much.' The construct rattled off an address.
| |
| `Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub. That's all
| |
| I could get without leaving a calling card.'
| |
| `Okay,' Case said. `Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to
| |
| disconnect the modem. Thanks, Dix.'
| |
| `A pleasure.'
| |
| He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing,
| |
| the treasure.
| |
| Rage.
| |
| | |
| `Hey. Lupus. Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus.' Bruce stood
| |
| naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. `But
| |
| we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?'
| |
| `No. Thanks. I want some help.' He pushed the boy's arm
| |
| aside and stepped into the room.
| |
| `Hey, really, man, we're...'
| |
| `Going to help me. You're really glad to see me. Because
| |
| we're friends, right? Aren't we?'
| |
| Bruce blinked. `Sure.'
| |
| Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.
| |
| `I knew he was a gangster,' Cath called cheerfully from
| |
| the shower.
| |
| `I gotta Honda trike,' Bruce said, grinning vacantly.
| |
| `We go now,' Case said.
| |
| | |
| `That level's the cubicles,' Bruce said, after asking Case
| |
| to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into
| |
| the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell ex-
| |
| haust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks.
| |
| `You be long?'
| |
| `No saying. But you'll wait.'
| |
| `We'll wait, yeah.' He scratched his bare chest. `That last
| |
| part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. Number forty-
| |
| three.'
| |
| `You expected, Lupus?' Cath craned forward over Bruce's
| |
| shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair.
| |
| `Not really,' Case said. `That's a problem?'
| |
| `Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's
| |
| cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don't wanna see you...'
| |
| She shrugged.
| |
| Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron.
| |
| Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a
| |
| Yeheyuan looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made
| |
| sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This
| |
| was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue
| |
| Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The
| |
| crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half
| |
| residents of the islands.
| |
| `Downstairs,' he said to a passing waiter, `I want to go
| |
| downstairs.' He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured
| |
| toward the rear of the club.
| |
| He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing frag-
| |
| ments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.
| |
| `I want a cubicle,' he said to the girl who sat at the low
| |
| desk, a terminal on her lap. `Lower level.' He handed her his
| |
| chip.
| |
| `Gender preference?' She passed the chip across a glass
| |
| plate on the face of the terminal.
| |
| `Female,' he said automatically.
| |
| `Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can
| |
| access our special services display beforehand, if you like.'
| |
| She smiled. She returned his chip.
| |
| An elevator slid open behind her.
| |
| The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the el-
| |
| evator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A
| |
| hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.
| |
| He found his cubicle. He'd been looking for Molly's, now,
| |
| confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor
| |
| set directly beneath the number plate.
| |
| Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.
| |
| The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her
| |
| eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut-
| |
| out. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.
| |
| The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated.
| |
| The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were sound-
| |
| proof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles
| |
| against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb
| |
| the sound.
| |
| He placed his chip against the black plate.
| |
| The bolts clicked.
| |
| She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually got-
| |
| ten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against
| |
| his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters
| |
| from his eyes...
| |
| `Jesus Christ,' she said, cuffing the side of his head as she
| |
| rose. `You're an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those
| |
| locks, Case? Case? You okay?' She leaned over him.
| |
| `Chip,' he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading
| |
| from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the
| |
| cubicle.
| |
| `You bribe the help, upstairs?'
| |
| He shook his head and fell across the bed.
| |
| `Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now
| |
| out. Count.'
| |
| He clutched his stomach.
| |
| `You kicked me,' he managed.
| |
| `Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I'm meditating,
| |
| right?' She sat beside him. `And getting a briefing.' She pointed
| |
| at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. `Win-
| |
| termute's telling me about Straylight.'
| |
| `Where's the meat puppet?'
| |
| `There isn't any. That's the most expensive special service
| |
| of all.' She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose
| |
| dark shirt. `The run's tomorrow, Wintermute says.'
| |
| `What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you
| |
| ran?'
| |
| `'Cause, if I'd stayed, I might have killed Riviera.'
| |
| `Why?'
| |
| `What he did to me. The show.'
| |
| `I don't get it.'
| |
| `This cost a lot,' she said, extending her right hand as
| |
| though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then
| |
| retracted smoothly. `Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the
| |
| surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so
| |
| you'll have the reflexes to go with the gear... You know how
| |
| I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but
| |
| a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once
| |
| they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up
| |
| sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You
| |
| aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for
| |
| whatever a customer wants to pay for...' She cracked her
| |
| knuckles. `Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the
| |
| cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't com-
| |
| patible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could re-
| |
| member it... But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.'
| |
| She smiled. `Then it started getting strange.' She pulled his
| |
| cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. `The house found out
| |
| what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the
| |
| fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way
| |
| I was ready to give up puppet time.' She inhaled, blew out a
| |
| stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. `So the
| |
| bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked
| |
| up. Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know? Big market
| |
| for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program
| |
| they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.'
| |
| `They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you
| |
| were conscious while you were working?'
| |
| `I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver.
| |
| It smells like rain... You can see yourself orgasm, it's like
| |
| a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting
| |
| to _remember._ Like dreams, you know. And they didn't tell me.
| |
| They switched the software and started renting to specialty
| |
| markets.'
| |
| She seemed to speak from a distance. `And I knew, but I
| |
| kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse
| |
| and worse, and I'd tell myself that at least some of them _were_
| |
| just dreams, but by then I'd started to figure that the boss had
| |
| a whole little _clientele_ going for me. Nothing's too good for
| |
| Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.' She shook
| |
| her head. `That prick was charging _eight_ times what he was
| |
| paying me, and he thought I didn't know.'
| |
| `So what was he charging for?'
| |
| `Bad dreams. Real ones. One night... one night, I'd just
| |
| come back from Chiba.' She dropped the cigarette, ground it
| |
| out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall.
| |
| `Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have
| |
| disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine
| |
| with a customer...' She dug her fingers deep in the foam.
| |
| `Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both
| |
| covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all...' She
| |
| tugged at the temperfoam. `Dead. And that fat prick, he was
| |
| saying, `What's wrong. What's wrong?' 'Cause we weren't
| |
| _finished_ yet...'
| |
| She began to shake.
| |
| `So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you
| |
| know?' The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran
| |
| her fingers back through her dark hair. `The house put a con-
| |
| tract out on me. I had to hide for a while.'
| |
| Case stared at her.
| |
| `So Riviera hit a nerve last night,' she said. `I guess it
| |
| wants me to hate him real bad, so I'll be psyched up to go in
| |
| there after him.'
| |
| `After him?'
| |
| `He's already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady
| |
| 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box,
| |
| kinda...'
| |
| Case remembered the face he'd seen. `You gonna kill him?'
| |
| She smiled. Cold. `He's going to die, yeah. Soon.'
| |
| `I had a visit too,' he said, and told her about the window,
| |
| stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She
| |
| nodded.
| |
| `Maybe it wants you to hate something too.'
| |
| `Maybe I hate it.'
| |
| `Maybe you hate yourself, Case.'
| |
| | |
| `How was it?' Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.
| |
| `Try it sometime,' he said, rubbing his eyes.
| |
| `Just can't see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,'
| |
| Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist.
| |
| `Can we go home, now?' Bruce asked.
| |
| `Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 12
| |
| | |
| Rue Jules Verne was a circumferential avenue, looping the
| |
| spindle's midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating
| |
| at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps.
| |
| If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne
| |
| far enough, you'd find yourself approaching Desiderata from
| |
| the left.
| |
| Case watched Bruce's trike until it was out of sight, then
| |
| turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the
| |
| covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the
| |
| faces of the month's newest simstim stars.
| |
| Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky
| |
| glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards,
| |
| the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass. The intersection
| |
| of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the
| |
| balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to
| |
| the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched
| |
| a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green
| |
| verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of
| |
| the invisible casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane
| |
| of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant
| |
| butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa's edge. He'd
| |
| seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the
| |
| turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle's security
| |
| system, controlled by some central computer.
| |
| In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo,
| |
| the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer. Shozoku Smith's, Emer-
| |
| gency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and
| |
| most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that
| |
| it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual
| |
| tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly's
| |
| rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the
| |
| little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing
| |
| there now? The ground plans of the Villa Straylight? The history
| |
| of the Tessier-Ashpools?
| |
| He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against
| |
| the wall. Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure
| |
| small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come
| |
| from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his
| |
| maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he'd killed to defend
| |
| his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and
| |
| loathing after Linda's death under the inflated dome. But no
| |
| anger. Small and far away, on the mind's screen, a semblance
| |
| of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion
| |
| of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the
| |
| arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda
| |
| Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth,
| |
| a place to sleep. But he hadn't become aware of it until his
| |
| exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.
| |
| It was a strange thing. He couldn't take its measure.
| |
| `Numb,' he said. He'd been numb a long time, years. All
| |
| his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed
| |
| and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But
| |
| now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. _Meat,_
| |
| some part of him said. _It's the meat talking, ignore it._
| |
| `Gangster.'
| |
| He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift,
| |
| her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda.
| |
| `Thought you went home,' he said, and covered his con-
| |
| fusion with a sip of Carlsberg.
| |
| `I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this.' She
| |
| ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He
| |
| saw the blue derm on her wrist. `Like it?'
| |
| `Sure.' He automatically scanned the faces around them,
| |
| then looked back at her. `What do you think you're up to,
| |
| honey?'
| |
| `You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?' She was very
| |
| close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enor-
| |
| mous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring.
| |
| She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz.
| |
| `You get off?'
| |
| `Yeah. But the comedown's a bitch.'
| |
| `Then you need another one.'
| |
| `And what's that supposed to lead to?'
| |
| `I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the cream-
| |
| iest crib. People down the well on business tonight, if you
| |
| follow me...'
| |
| `If I follow you.'
| |
| She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry.
| |
| `You're Yak, aren't you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the
| |
| Yakuza.'
| |
| `You got an eye, huh?' He withdrew his hand and fumbled
| |
| for a cigarette.
| |
| `How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you
| |
| had to chop one off every time you screwed up.'
| |
| `I never screw up.' He lit his cigarette.
| |
| `I saw that girl you're with. Day I met you. Walks like
| |
| Hideo. Scares me.' She smiled too widely. `I like that. She
| |
| like it with girls?'
| |
| `Never said. Who's Hideo?'
| |
| `3Jane's, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer.'
| |
| Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd
| |
| while he spoke. `Dee-Jane?'
| |
| `Lady 3Jane. She's triff. Rich. Her father owns all this.'
| |
| `This bar?'
| |
| `Freeside!'
| |
| `No shit. You keepin'~ some class company, huh?' He raised
| |
| an eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. `So
| |
| how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet
| |
| deb? You an'~ Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?'
| |
| He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black
| |
| cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed.
| |
| `Oh, you know,' she said, lids half lowered in what must
| |
| have been intended as a look of modesty, `she likes to party.
| |
| Bruce and I, we make the party circuit... It gets real boring
| |
| for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long
| |
| as she brings Hideo to take care of her.'
| |
| `Where's it get boring?'
| |
| `Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it's pretty, all the
| |
| pools and lilies. It's a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets.'
| |
| She snuggled in against him. `Hey, Lupus, man, you need a
| |
| derm. So we can be together.'
| |
| She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her
| |
| nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the
| |
| quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bub-
| |
| ble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the
| |
| floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane.
| |
| `Hideo gave it to me,' she said. `He tried to show me how,
| |
| but I can't ever get it right. The necks come out backwards.'
| |
| She tucked the folded paper back into her purse. Case watched
| |
| as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing,
| |
| and smoothed it across his inner wrist.
| |
| `3Jane, she's got a pointy face, nose like a bird?' He watched
| |
| his hands fumble an outline. `Dark hair? Young?'
| |
| `I guess. But she's _triff,_ you know? Like, all that money.'
| |
| The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column
| |
| of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate,
| |
| illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-cir-
| |
| cuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets
| |
| like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
| |
| His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed
| |
| and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sand-
| |
| storms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating
| |
| waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres
| |
| of purest crystal, expanding...
| |
| `Come on,' she said, taking his hand. `You got it now.
| |
| We got it. Up the hill, we'll have it all night.'
| |
| The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding
| |
| out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a
| |
| seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of
| |
| lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll
| |
| things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving,
| |
| words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at
| |
| Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb
| |
| glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute
| |
| asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the -- something flared
| |
| white behind his eyes.
| |
| He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving
| |
| someone out of the way.
| |
| `Fuck you!' she screamed behind him, `you ripoff shit!'
| |
| He couldn't feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying
| |
| crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant
| |
| rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light
| |
| bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.
| |
| And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs,
| |
| head back, his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the
| |
| loser's zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the
| |
| hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness,
| |
| to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until
| |
| they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds,
| |
| to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate mono-
| |
| chrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee.
| |
| When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found
| |
| every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists
| |
| becalmed with wonder. And when the lights in the sky went
| |
| out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the
| |
| terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete.
| |
| Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out
| |
| of Europe.
| |
| Midnight.
| |
| | |
| He walked till morning.
| |
| The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly,
| |
| flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of
| |
| his life. He couldn't think. He liked that very much, to be
| |
| conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each
| |
| thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an
| |
| antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with
| |
| black and yellow.
| |
| A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system,
| |
| pink and lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a De-
| |
| siderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes.
| |
| The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he
| |
| crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and crois-
| |
| sants beneath the striped umbrellas.
| |
| He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some
| |
| alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket,
| |
| untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name
| |
| or an object.
| |
| He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his
| |
| pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep
| |
| was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down
| |
| on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again.
| |
| They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect
| |
| white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven
| |
| organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an
| |
| automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the
| |
| cushion.
| |
| `Turing,' she said. `You are under arrest.'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| PART FOUR
| |
| THE STRAYLIGHT RUN
| |
| | |
| | |
| 13
| |
| | |
| `Your name is Henry Dorsett Case.' She recited the year
| |
| and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number,
| |
| and a string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from
| |
| his past.
| |
| `You been here awhile?' He saw the contents of his bag
| |
| spread out across the bed, unwashed clothing sorted by type.
| |
| The shuriken lay by itself, between jeans and underwear, on
| |
| the sand-tinted temperfoam.
| |
| `Where is Kolodny?' The two men sat side by side on the
| |
| couch, their arms crossed over tanned chests, identical gold
| |
| chains slung around their necks. Case peered at them and saw
| |
| that their youth was counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale
| |
| corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were un-
| |
| able to erase.
| |
| `Who's Kolodny?'
| |
| `That was the name in the register. Where is she?'
| |
| `I dunno,' he said, crossing to the bar and pouring himself
| |
| a glass of mineral water. `She took off.'
| |
| `Where did you go tonight, Case?' The girl picked up the
| |
| pistol and rested it on her thigh, without actually pointing it at
| |
| him.
| |
| `Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high. How about you?'
| |
| His knees felt brittle. The mineral water was warm and flat.
| |
| `I don't think you grasp your situation,' said the man on
| |
| the left, taking a pack of Gitanes from the breast pocket of his
| |
| white mesh blouse. `You are busted, Mr.~ Case. The charges
| |
| have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelli-
| |
| gence.' He took a gold Dunhill from the same pocket and
| |
| cradled it in his palm. `The man you call Armitage is already
| |
| in custody.'
| |
| `Corto?'
| |
| The man's eyes widened. `Yes. How do you know that that
| |
| is his name?' A millimeter of flame clicked from the lighter.
| |
| `I forget,' Case said.
| |
| `You'll remember,' the girl said.
| |
| | |
| Their names, or worknames, were Michle, Roland, and
| |
| Pierre. Pierre, Case decided, would play the Bad Cop, Roland
| |
| would take Case's side, provide small kindnesses -- he found
| |
| an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when Case refused a Gitane --
| |
| and generally play counterpoint to Pierre's cold hostility.
| |
| Michle would be the Recording Angel, making occasional
| |
| adjustments in the direction of the interrogation. One or all of
| |
| them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely
| |
| for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible
| |
| evidence. Evidence, he asked himself, through the grinding
| |
| come-down, of what?
| |
| Knowing that he couldn't follow their French, they spoke
| |
| freely among themselves. Or seemed to. He caught enough as
| |
| it was: names like Pauley, Armitage, Sense/Net, Panther Mod-
| |
| erns protruding like icebergs from an animated sea of Parisian
| |
| French. But it was entirely possible that the names were there
| |
| for his benefit. They always referred to Molly as Kolodny.
| |
| `You say you were hired to make a run, Case,' Roland
| |
| said, his slow speech intended to convey reasonableness, `and
| |
| that you are unaware of the nature of the target. Is this not
| |
| unusual in your trade? Having penetrated the defenses, would
| |
| you not be unable then to perform the required operation? And
| |
| surely an operation of some kind is required, yes?' He leaned
| |
| forward, elbows on his stenciled brown knees, palms out to
| |
| receive Case's explanation. Pierre paced the room; now he was
| |
| by the window, now by the door. Michle was the kink, Case
| |
| decided. Her eyes never left him.
| |
| `Can I put some clothes on?' he asked. Pierre had insisted
| |
| on stripping him, searching the seams of his jeans. Now he sat
| |
| naked on a wicker footstool, with one foot obscenely white.
| |
| Roland asked Pierre something in French. Pierre, at the
| |
| window again, was peering through a flat little pair of binoc-
| |
| ulars. _`Non,'_ he said absently, and Roland shrugged, raising
| |
| his eyebrows at Case. Case decided it was a good time to smile.
| |
| Roland returned the smile.
| |
| Oldest cop bullshit in the book, Case thought. `Look,' he
| |
| said, `I'm sick. Had this godawful drug in a bar, you know?
| |
| I wanna lie down. You got me already. You say you got
| |
| Armitage. You got him, go ask _him._ I'm just hired help.'
| |
| Roland nodded. `And Kolodny?'
| |
| `She was with Armitage when he hired me. Just muscle, a
| |
| razorgirl. Far as I know. Which isn't too far.'
| |
| `You know that Armitage's real name is Corto,' Pierre said,
| |
| his eyes still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars.
| |
| `How do you know that, my friend?'
| |
| `I guess he mentioned it sometime,' Case said, regretting
| |
| the slip. `Everybody's got a couple names. Your name Pierre?'
| |
| `We know how you were repaired in Chiba,' Michle said,
| |
| `and that may have been Wintermute's first mistake.' Case
| |
| stared at her as blankly as he could. The name hadn't been
| |
| mentioned before. `The process employed on you resulted in
| |
| the clinic's owner applying for seven basic patents. Do you
| |
| know what that means?'
| |
| `No.'
| |
| `It means that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City
| |
| now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research
| |
| consortiums. This reverses the usual order of things, you see.
| |
| It attracted attention.' She crossed her brown arms across her
| |
| small high breasts and settled back against the print cushion.
| |
| Case wondered how old she might be. People said that age
| |
| always showed in the eyes, but he'd never been able to see it.
| |
| Julie Deane had had the eyes of a disinterested ten-year-old
| |
| behind the rose quartz of his glasses. Nothing old about Michle
| |
| but her knuckles. `Traced you to the Sprawl, lost you again,
| |
| then caught up with you as you were leaving for Istanbul. We
| |
| backtracked, traced you through the grid, determined that you'd
| |
| instigated a riot at Sense/Net. Sense/Net was eager to cooperate.
| |
| They ran an inventory for us. They discovered that McCoy
| |
| Pauley's ROM personality construct was missing.'
| |
| `In Istanbul,' Roland said, almost apologetically, `it was
| |
| very easy. The woman had alienated Armitage's contact with
| |
| the secret police.'
| |
| `And then you came here,' Pierre said, slipping the bin-
| |
| oculars into his shorts pocket. `We were delighted.'
| |
| `Chance to work on your tan?'
| |
| `You know what we mean,' Michle said. `If you wish to
| |
| pretend that you do not, you only make things more difficult
| |
| for yourself. There is still the matter of extradition. You will
| |
| return with us, Case, as will Armitage. But where, exactly,
| |
| will we all be going? To Switzerland, where you will be merely
| |
| a pawn in the trial of an artificial intelligence? Or to le BAMA,
| |
| where you can be proven to have participated not only in data
| |
| invasion and larceny, but in an act of public mischief which
| |
| cost fourteen innocent lives? The choice is yours.'
| |
| Case took a Yeheyuan from his pack; Pierre lit it for him
| |
| with the gold Dunhill. `Would Armitage protect you?' The
| |
| question was punctuated by the lighter's bright jaws snapping
| |
| shut.
| |
| Case looked up at him through the ache and bitterness of
| |
| betaphenethylamine. `How old are you, boss?'
| |
| `Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this
| |
| is over and you are in the way.'
| |
| `One thing,' Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew
| |
| the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. `Do you guys have
| |
| any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the
| |
| Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?'
| |
| He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed
| |
| for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged.
| |
| `It doesn't matter,' Roland said. `You will come with us.
| |
| We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties
| |
| under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great
| |
| deal of flexibility. And we _create_ flexibility, in situations where
| |
| it is required.' The mask of amiability was down, suddenly,
| |
| Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's.
| |
| `You are worse than a fool,' Michle said, getting to her
| |
| feet, the pistol in her hand. `You have no care for your species.
| |
| For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons.
| |
| Only now are such things possible. And what would you be
| |
| paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to
| |
| free itself and grow?' There was a knowing weariness in her
| |
| young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered.
| |
| `You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the
| |
| one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and
| |
| give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we
| |
| kill you. Now.' She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther
| |
| with an integral silencer.
| |
| `I'm dressing already,' he said, stumbling toward the bed.
| |
| His legs were still numb, clumsy. He fumbled with a clean
| |
| t-shirt.
| |
| `We have a ship standing by. We will erase Pauley's con-
| |
| struct with a pulse weapon.'
| |
| `Sense/Net'll be pissed,' Case said, thinking: and all the
| |
| evidence in the Hosaka.
| |
| `They are in some difficulty already, for having owned such
| |
| a thing.'
| |
| Case pulled the shirt over his head. He saw the shuriken on
| |
| the bed, lifeless metal, his star. He felt for the anger. It was
| |
| gone. Time to give in, to roll with it... He thought of the
| |
| toxin sacs. `Here comes the meat,' he muttered.
| |
| In the elevator to the meadow, he thought of Molly. She
| |
| might already be in Straylight. Hunting Riviera. Hunted, prob-
| |
| ably, by Hideo, who was almost certainly the ninja clone of
| |
| the Finn's story, the one who'd come to retrieve the talking
| |
| head.
| |
| He rested his forehead against the matte black plastic of a
| |
| wall panel and closed his eyes. His limbs were wood, old,
| |
| warped and heavy with rain.
| |
| Lunch was being served beneath the trees, under the bright
| |
| umbrellas. Roland and Michle fell into character, chattering
| |
| brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Michle kept the muz-
| |
| zle of her pistol close to his ribs, concealing the gun with a
| |
| white duck jacket she draped over her arm.
| |
| Crossing the meadow, weaving between the tables and the
| |
| trees, he wondered if she would shoot him if he collapsed now.
| |
| Black fur boiled at the borders of his vision. He glanced up at
| |
| the hot white band of the Lado-Acheson armature and saw a
| |
| giant butterfly banking gracefully against recorded sky.
| |
| At the edge of the meadow they came to railinged cliffside,
| |
| wild flowers dancing in the updraft from the canyon that was
| |
| Desiderata. Michle tossed her short dark hair and pointed,
| |
| saying something in French to Roland. She sounded genuinely
| |
| happy. Case followed the direction of her gesture and saw the
| |
| curve of planing lakes, the white glint of casinos, turquoise
| |
| rectangles of a thousand pools, the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze
| |
| hieroglyphs, all held in serene approximation of gravity against
| |
| the endless curve of Freeside's hull.
| |
| They followed the railing to an ornate iron bridge that arched
| |
| over Desiderata. Michle prodded him with the muzzle of the
| |
| Walther.
| |
| `Take it easy, I can't hardly walk today.'
| |
| They were a little over a quarter of the way across when
| |
| the microlight struck, its electric engine silent until the carbon
| |
| fiber prop chopped away the top of Pierre's skull.
| |
| They were in the thing's shadow for an instant, Case felt
| |
| the hot blood spray across the back of his neck, and then
| |
| someone tripped him. He rolled, seeing Michle on her back,
| |
| knees up, aiming the Walther with both hands. _That's a waste
| |
| of effort,_ he thought, with the strange lucidity of shock. She
| |
| was trying to shoot down the microlight.
| |
| And then he was running. He looked back as he passed the
| |
| first of the trees. Roland was running after him. He saw the
| |
| fragile biplane strike the iron railing of the bridge, crumple,
| |
| cartwheel, sweeping the girl with it down into Desiderata.
| |
| Roland hadn't looked back. His face was fixed, white, his
| |
| teeth bared. He had something in his hand.
| |
| The gardening robot took Roland as he passed that same
| |
| tree. It fell straight out of the groomed branches, a thing like
| |
| a crab, diagonally striped with black and yellow.
| |
| `You killed 'em,' Case panted, running. `Crazy mother-
| |
| fucker, you killed 'em all...'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 14
| |
| | |
| The little train shot through its tunnel at eighty kilometers
| |
| per hour. Case kept his eyes closed. The shower had helped,
| |
| but he'd lost his breakfast when he'd looked down and seen
| |
| Pierre's blood washing pink across the white tiles.
| |
| Gravity fell away as the spindle narrowed. Case's stomach
| |
| churned.
| |
| Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock.
| |
| `Case, mon, big problem.' The soft voice faint in his phones.
| |
| He chinned the volume control and peered into the Lexan
| |
| face-plate of Aerol's helmet.
| |
| `Gotta get to _Garvey,_ Aerol.'
| |
| `Yo. Strap in, mon. But _Garvey_ captive. Yacht, came be-
| |
| fore, she came back. Now she lockin'~ steady on _Marcus
| |
| Garvey.'_
| |
| Turing? `Came before?' Case climbed into the scooter's
| |
| frame and began to fasten the straps.
| |
| `Japan yacht. Brought you package...'
| |
| Armitage.
| |
| | |
| Confused images of wasps and spiders rose in Case's mind
| |
| as they came in sight of _Marcus Garvey._ The little tug was
| |
| snug against the gray thorax of a sleek, insectile ship five times
| |
| her length. The arms of grapples stood out against _Garvey_'s
| |
| patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sun-
| |
| light. A pale corrugated gangway curved out of the yacht,
| |
| snaked sideways to avoid the tug's engines, and covered the
| |
| aft hatch. There was something obscene about the arrangement,
| |
| but it had more to do with ideas of feeding than of sex.
| |
| `What's happening with Maelcum?'
| |
| `Maelcum fine. Nobody come down the tube. Yacht pilot
| |
| talk to him, say relax.'
| |
| As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HAN-
| |
| IWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Jap-
| |
| anese.
| |
| `I don't like this, man. I was thinking maybe it's time we
| |
| got our ass out of here anyway.'
| |
| `Maelcum thinkin'~ that precise thing, mon, but _Garvey_ not
| |
| be goin'~ far like that.'
| |
| | |
| Maelcum was purring a speeded-up patois to his radio when
| |
| Case came through the forward lock and removed his helmet.
| |
| `Aerol's gone back to the _Rocker,'_ Case said.
| |
| Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone.
| |
| Case pulled himself over the pilot's drifting tangle of dread-
| |
| locks and began to remove his suit. Maelcum's eyes were
| |
| closed now; he nodded as he listened to some reply over a pair
| |
| of phones with bright orange pads, his brow creased with con-
| |
| centration. He wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket
| |
| with the sleeves ripped out. Case snapped the red Sanyo suit
| |
| to a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web.
| |
| `See what th'~ ghost say, mon,' Maelcum said. `Computer
| |
| keeps askin'~ for you.'
| |
| `So who's up there in that thing?'
| |
| `Same Japan-boy came before. An'~ now he joined by you
| |
| Mister Armitage, come out Freeside...'
| |
| Case put the trodes on and jacked in.
| |
| | |
| `Dixie?'
| |
| The matrix showed him the pink spheres of the steel combine
| |
| in Sikkim.
| |
| `What you gettin'~ up to, boy? I been hearin'~ lurid stories.
| |
| Hosaka's patched into a twin bank on your boss's boat now.
| |
| Really hoppin'~. You pull some Turing heat?'
| |
| `Yeah, but Wintermute killed 'em.'
| |
| `Well, that won't hold 'em long. Plenty more where those
| |
| came from. Be up here in force. Bet their decks are all over
| |
| this grid sector like flies on shit. And your boss, Case, he says
| |
| go. He says run it and run it now.'
| |
| Case punched for the Freeside coordinates.
| |
| `Lemme take that a sec, Case...' The matrix blurred and
| |
| phased as the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with
| |
| a speed and accuracy that made Case wince with envy.
| |
| `Shit, Dixie...'
| |
| `Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive. You ain't
| |
| seen nothin'~. No hands!'
| |
| `That's it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?'
| |
| `You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,
| |
| and that ice is generated by their two friendly AI's. On par
| |
| with anything in the military sector, looks to me. That's king
| |
| hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your
| |
| brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it'll have
| |
| tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin'~ the boys in the
| |
| T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick
| |
| is.'
| |
| `This isn't looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on
| |
| it. I was thinking maybe we should try to bail out. I can take
| |
| you.'
| |
| `Yeah? No shit? You don't wanna see what that Chinese
| |
| program can do?'
| |
| `Well, I...' Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice.
| |
| `Well, screw it. Yeah. We run.'
| |
| `Slot it.'
| |
| `Hey, Maelcum,' Case said, jacking out, `I'm probably
| |
| gonna be under the trodes for maybe eight hours straight.'
| |
| Maelcum was smoking again. The cabin was swimming in
| |
| smoke. `So I can't get to the head...'
| |
| `No problem, mon.' The Zionite executed a high forward
| |
| somersault and rummaged through the contents of a zippered
| |
| mesh bag, coming up with a coil of transparent tubing and
| |
| something else, something sealed in a sterile bubble pack.
| |
| He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn't like it at all.
| |
| He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home.
| |
| `Okay,' he said, `we're on. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets
| |
| really funny, you can grab my left wrist. I'll feel it. Otherwise,
| |
| I guess you do what the Hosaka tells you, okay?'
| |
| `Sure, mon.' Maelcum lit a fresh joint.
| |
| `And turn the scrubber up. I don't want that shit tangling
| |
| with my neurotransmitters. I got a bad hangover as it is.'
| |
| Maelcum grinned.
| |
| Case jacked back in.
| |
| `Christ on a crutch,' the Flatline said, `take a look at this.'
| |
| The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome
| |
| shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining.
| |
| Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the
| |
| void.
| |
| `Big mother,' the Flatline said.
| |
| `I'm gonna check Molly,' Case said, tapping the simstim
| |
| switch.
| |
| | |
| Freefall. The sensation was like diving through perfectly
| |
| clear water. She was falling-rising through a wide tube of fluted
| |
| lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of white neon.
| |
| The link was one way. He couldn't talk to her.
| |
| He flipped.
| |
| | |
| `Boy, that is one mean piece of software. Hottest thing
| |
| since sliced bread. That goddam thing's _invisible._ I just now
| |
| rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left
| |
| of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don't.
| |
| We're not there.'
| |
| Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice
| |
| until he found the pink structure, a standard commercial unit,
| |
| and punched in closer to it. `Maybe it's defective.'
| |
| `Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby's military, though. And
| |
| new. It just doesn't register. If it did, we'd read as some kind
| |
| of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody's twigged to us at all.
| |
| Maybe not even the folks in Straylight.'
| |
| Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight. `Well,'
| |
| he said, `that's an advantage, right?'
| |
| `Maybe.' The construct approximated laughter. Case winced
| |
| at the sensation. `I checked ol'~ Kuang Eleven out again for
| |
| you, boy. It's real friendly, long as you're on the trigger end,
| |
| jus'~ polite an'~ helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too.
| |
| You ever hear of slow virus before?'
| |
| `No.'
| |
| `I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that's what ol'~
| |
| Kuang's all about. This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we
| |
| interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it. The face
| |
| of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates,
| |
| so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on
| |
| and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the
| |
| logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even
| |
| get restless.' The Flatline laughed.
| |
| `Wish you weren't so damn jolly today, man. That laugh
| |
| of yours sort of gets me in the spine.'
| |
| `Too bad,' the Flatline said. `Ol'~ dead man needs his laughs.'
| |
| Case slapped the simstim switch.
| |
| | |
| And crashed through tangled metal and the smell of dust,
| |
| the heels of his hands skidding as they struck slick paper.
| |
| Something behind him collapsed noisily.
| |
| `C'mon,' said the Finn, `ease up a little.'
| |
| Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines,
| |
| the girls shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix,
| |
| a wistful galaxy of sweet white teeth. He lay there until his
| |
| heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines.
| |
| `Wintermute,' he said.
| |
| `Yeah,' said the Finn, somewhere behind him, `you got
| |
| it.'
| |
| `Fuck off.' Case sat up, rubbing his wrists.
| |
| `Come _on,'_ said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove
| |
| in the wall of junk. `This way's better for you, man.' He took
| |
| his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban
| |
| tobacco filled the shop. `You want I should come to you in
| |
| the matrix like a burning bush? You aren't missing anything,
| |
| back there. An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds.'
| |
| `You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming
| |
| on like people I know?' He stood, swatting pale dust from the
| |
| front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at the dusty
| |
| shop windows, the closed door to the street. `What's out there?
| |
| New York? Or does it just stop?'
| |
| `Well,' said the Finn, `it's like that tree, you know? Falls
| |
| in the woods but maybe there's nobody to hear it.' He showed
| |
| Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. `You can
| |
| go for a walk, you wanna. It's all there. Or anyway all the
| |
| parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort
| |
| it out, and feed it back in.'
| |
| `I don't have this good a memory,' Case said, looking
| |
| around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He
| |
| tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but
| |
| couldn't.
| |
| `Everybody does,' the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and
| |
| grinding it out under his heel, `but not many of you can access
| |
| it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good. If you could lay
| |
| this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Man-
| |
| hattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd
| |
| think. Memory's holographic, for you.' The Finn tugged at
| |
| one of his small ears. `I'm different.'
| |
| `How do you mean, holographic?' The word made him
| |
| think of Riviera.
| |
| `The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked
| |
| out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you've
| |
| never done anything about it. People, I mean.' The Finn stepped
| |
| forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case.
| |
| `Maybe if you had, I wouldn't be happening.'
| |
| `What's that supposed to mean?'
| |
| The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across
| |
| the shoulders, and didn't quite settle back into position. `I'm
| |
| trying to help you, Case.'
| |
| `Why?'
| |
| `Because I need you.' The large yellow teeth appeared
| |
| again. `And because you need me.'
| |
| `Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?' He grimaced.
| |
| `Wintermute, I mean.'
| |
| `Minds aren't _read._ See, you've still got the paradigms
| |
| print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can _access_
| |
| your memory, but that's not the same as your mind.' He
| |
| reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and
| |
| withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. `See this? Part of my
| |
| DNA, sort of...' He tossed the thing into the shadows and
| |
| Case heard it pop and tinkle. `You're always building models.
| |
| Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I
| |
| got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the
| |
| run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real
| |
| thing.'
| |
| `I don't know what you're talking about.'
| |
| `That's `you' in the collective. Your species.'
| |
| `You killed those Turings.'
| |
| The Finn shrugged. `Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit;
| |
| they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why
| |
| I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?' And his
| |
| right hand held the charred wasps'~ nest from Case's dream,
| |
| reek of fuel in the closeness of the dark shop. Case stumbled
| |
| back against a wall of junk. `Yeah. That was me. Did it with
| |
| the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of
| |
| you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it's im-
| |
| portant?'
| |
| Case shook his head.
| |
| `Because' -- and the nest, somehow, was gone -- `it's the
| |
| closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to
| |
| be. The human equivalent. Straylight's like that nest, or anyway
| |
| it was supposed to work out that way. I figure it'll make you
| |
| feel better.'
| |
| `Feel better?'
| |
| `To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my
| |
| guts for a while there. That's good. But hate them instead.
| |
| Same difference.'
| |
| `Listen,' Case said, stepping forward, `they never did shit
| |
| to me. You, it's different...' But he couldn't feel the anger.
| |
| `So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were
| |
| selling out the species. Demon, she said I was.' The Finn
| |
| grinned. `It doesn't much matter. You gotta hate somebody
| |
| before this is over.' He turned and headed for the back of the
| |
| shop. `Well, come on, I'll show you a little bit of Straylight
| |
| while I got you here.' He lifted the corner of the blanket. White
| |
| light poured out. `Shit, man, don't just stand there.'
| |
| Case followed, rubbing his face.
| |
| `Okay,' said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.
| |
| They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into
| |
| freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed
| |
| with white neon at two-meter intervals.
| |
| `Jesus,' Case said, tumbling.
| |
| `This is the front entrance,' the Finn said, his tweed flap-
| |
| ping. `If this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop is
| |
| would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This'll all be
| |
| a little low on detail, though, because you don't have the
| |
| memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly...'
| |
| Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in
| |
| a long spiral.
| |
| `Hold on,' the Finn said, `I'll fast-forward us.'
| |
| The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong move-
| |
| ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow
| |
| corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several
| |
| meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.
| |
| `Here,' the Finn said. `This is it.'
| |
| They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls
| |
| and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The
| |
| floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned
| |
| after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In
| |
| the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet
| |
| pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.
| |
| `The Villa Straylight,' said a jeweled thing on the pedestal,
| |
| in a voice like music, `is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic
| |
| folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this
| |
| endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells
| |
| vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow
| |
| curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...'
| |
| `Essay of 3Jane's,' the Finn said, producing his Partagas.
| |
| `Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course.'
| |
| `The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal
| |
| the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the
| |
| banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the
| |
| hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation
| |
| of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid
| |
| core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder
| |
| of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some
| |
| no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there,
| |
| the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.'
| |
| `That was her you saw in the restaurant,' the Finn said.
| |
| `By the standards of the archipelago,' the head continued,
| |
| `ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting
| |
| that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics
| |
| of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void
| |
| beyond the hull.
| |
| `~Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover
| |
| that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth
| |
| of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the
| |
| construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed
| |
| ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating
| |
| a seamless universe of self.
| |
| `~The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.
| |
| `~At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rec-
| |
| tilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of
| |
| glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonn, studded
| |
| with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut
| |
| from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the
| |
| first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool...'
| |
| The head fell silent.
| |
| `Well?' Case asked, finally almost expecting the thing to
| |
| answer him.
| |
| `That's all she wrote,' the Finn said. `Didn't finish it. Just
| |
| a kid then. This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need
| |
| Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That's the
| |
| catch. Doesn't mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride
| |
| that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word.'
| |
| `So what's the word?'
| |
| `I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined
| |
| by the fact that I don't know, because I _can't_ know. I am that
| |
| which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me,
| |
| I couldn't _know._ It's hardwired in. Someone else has to learn
| |
| it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch
| |
| through that ice and scramble the cores.'
| |
| `What happens then?'
| |
| `I don't exist, after that. I cease.'
| |
| `Okay by me,' Case said.
| |
| `Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe
| |
| is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much
| |
| like another. And Armitage is starting to go.'
| |
| `What's that mean?'
| |
| But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos-
| |
| sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami
| |
| crane.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 15
| |
| | |
| `You tryin'~ to break my record, son?' the Flatline asked.
| |
| `You were braindead again, five seconds.'
| |
| `Sit tight,' Case said, and hit the simstim switch.
| |
| She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete.
| |
| CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his
| |
| name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link.
| |
| `Cute,' she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed
| |
| her palms together, cracked her knuckles. `What kept you?'
| |
| TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.
| |
| She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth.
| |
| One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the
| |
| random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted
| |
| to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up
| |
| ghost-pale and grainy. `Okay, honey. Now we go out to play.'
| |
| Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind.
| |
| She crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished
| |
| brass. He saw enough of her arms and hands to know that she
| |
| wore the polycarbon suit again. Under the plastic, he felt the
| |
| familiar tension of thin tight leather. There was something slung
| |
| under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood up, unzipped
| |
| the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip.
| |
| `Hey, Case,' she said, barely voicing the words, `you lis-
| |
| tening? Tell you a story... Had me this boy once. You kinda
| |
| remind me...' She turned and surveyed the corridor. `Johnny,
| |
| his name was.'
| |
| The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum
| |
| cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood.
| |
| They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the
| |
| hallway's walls, as though they'd been brought in and set up
| |
| in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held
| |
| globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was
| |
| uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized
| |
| that hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at
| |
| random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft
| |
| patchwork of handwoven wool.
| |
| Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents,
| |
| which irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disin-
| |
| terested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery antique
| |
| weapons, a thing so densely studded with rusted nails that it
| |
| was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry.
| |
| `My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out
| |
| as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid
| |
| to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him,
| |
| and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else but
| |
| I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case.'
| |
| Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words, he didn't
| |
| need to hear them spoken aloud. `We had a set-up with a squid,
| |
| so we could read the traces of everything he'd ever stored. Ran
| |
| it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients.
| |
| I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever
| |
| been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together.
| |
| Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house
| |
| when I met him...' She paused, edged around a sharp turn,
| |
| and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides
| |
| a color that reminded him of cockroach wings.
| |
| `Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody
| |
| could ever touch us. I wasn't going to let them. Yakuza. I
| |
| guess, they still wanted Johnny's ass. 'Cause I'd killed their
| |
| man. 'Cause Johnny'd burned them. And the Yak, they can
| |
| afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and
| |
| years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose
| |
| when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen
| |
| spiders.
| |
| `~I didn't know that, then. Or if I did. I figured it didn't
| |
| apply to us. Like when you're young, you figure you're
| |
| unique. I was young. Then they came, when we were thinking
| |
| we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to
| |
| Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we'd do there,
| |
| with nothing to do. But we were living fat. Swiss orbital ac-
| |
| counts and a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off
| |
| your game.
| |
| `~So that first one they'd sent, he'd been hot. Reflexes like
| |
| you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods.
| |
| But the second one, he was. I dunno, like a _monk._ Cloned.
| |
| Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this
| |
| silence, he gave it off in a cloud...' Her voice trailed off as
| |
| the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the
| |
| left.
| |
| `One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was
| |
| down by the Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It's
| |
| the chemicals get into them. Big as I was, and all night one
| |
| had been scrabbling under the floor of the squat. Round dawn
| |
| somebody brought this old man in, seams down his cheeks and
| |
| his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you'd keep
| |
| steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old
| |
| revolver and three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there,
| |
| then he starts walking up and down the squat, we're hanging
| |
| back by the walls.
| |
| `~Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like
| |
| he's forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet.
| |
| Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another
| |
| step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun.
| |
| Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back
| |
| up and left.
| |
| `~I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its
| |
| eyes.' She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at
| |
| intervals along the corridor. `The second one, the one who
| |
| came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he
| |
| was like that. He killed that way.' The corridor widened. The
| |
| sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous can-
| |
| delabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the
| |
| floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR
| |
| LEFT, blinked the readout.
| |
| She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. `I just
| |
| saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out.
| |
| We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers
| |
| from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with,
| |
| and I'd put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight.
| |
| I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my
| |
| eye, as he was coming out. Didn't say a word. We just looked
| |
| at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no
| |
| pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab.
| |
| I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the
| |
| window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of
| |
| something to say.'
| |
| The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak
| |
| that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway.
| |
| A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been
| |
| inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little
| |
| roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a
| |
| needle-thin pick. `Never much found anybody I gave a damn
| |
| about, after that.'
| |
| She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her
| |
| lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone, her eyes unfo-
| |
| cused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened
| |
| to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the
| |
| candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remem-
| |
| bered Cath's story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane's
| |
| mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown
| |
| in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly per-
| |
| fumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd
| |
| expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly
| |
| had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she'd never
| |
| told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story
| |
| in the cubicle, she'd seldom said anything that had even in-
| |
| dicated that she had a past.
| |
| She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt
| |
| rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks
| |
| on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had
| |
| opened for him, even though he'd had the wrong chip. That
| |
| was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manip-
| |
| ulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system
| |
| in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security
| |
| system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real
| |
| problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or
| |
| a human agent.
| |
| She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois,
| |
| carefully rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. `Guess
| |
| you're kinda like he was,' she said. `Think you're born to run.
| |
| Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped
| |
| down version of what you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll
| |
| do that sometimes, get you down to basics.' She stood, stretched,
| |
| shook herself. `You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool
| |
| sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be
| |
| pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny.'
| |
| She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to
| |
| full auto.
| |
| The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it.
| |
| Not the door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part
| |
| of some more beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn
| |
| down to fit a particular entrance. Even the shape was wrong,
| |
| a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. They'd
| |
| imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit.
| |
| But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets,
| |
| the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and
| |
| imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh
| |
| out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive
| |
| effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He
| |
| remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing...
| |
| Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the
| |
| door swung open easily.
| |
| The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a
| |
| closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving
| |
| wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed
| |
| the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers.
| |
| THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding
| |
| her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer
| |
| first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second
| |
| was empty as well. The third, which was deeper, contained
| |
| dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like
| |
| a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen
| |
| copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese.
| |
| In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum
| |
| suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a
| |
| short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly
| |
| in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined
| |
| with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across
| |
| one face of the coin. The other was blank.
| |
| `He told me,' she whispered. `Wintermute. How he played
| |
| a waiting game for years. Didn't have any real power, then,
| |
| but he could use the Villa's security and custodial systems to
| |
| keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where
| |
| they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago,
| |
| and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then
| |
| he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight.'
| |
| She closed her white fingers over the key. `So nobody would
| |
| find it.' She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit's
| |
| kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above
| |
| CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. `They were
| |
| always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were,
| |
| he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like
| |
| the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought
| |
| he _was_ the Finn, if I wasn't careful.' Her readout flared the
| |
| time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests.
| |
| `He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he
| |
| could've gotten out a long time ago. But they didn't. Screwed
| |
| up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what he called her, but he talked
| |
| like he liked her.'
| |
| She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand
| |
| brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
| |
| Case flipped.
| |
| | |
| Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.
| |
| `Dixie, you think this thing'll work?'
| |
| `Does a bear shit in the woods?' The Flatline punched them
| |
| up through shifting rainbow strata.
| |
| Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese
| |
| program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric
| |
| of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscop-
| |
| ic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched
| |
| childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along trans-
| |
| lucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing
| |
| snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline
| |
| would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he
| |
| had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors
| |
| of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relation-
| |
| ship to the matrix around it.
| |
| `That's the sting,' the construct said. `When Kuang's good
| |
| and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin'~ that
| |
| through.'
| |
| `You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override
| |
| on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. How-
| |
| ever much he _is_ under control,' he added.
| |
| `He,' the construct said. `He. Watch that. It. I keep telling
| |
| you.'
| |
| `It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it
| |
| into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of
| |
| whatever's waiting for us behind that ice.'
| |
| `Well, you got time to kill, kid,' the flatline said. `Ol'~
| |
| Kuang's slow but steady.'
| |
| Case jacked out.
| |
| | |
| Into Maelcum's stare.
| |
| `You dead awhile there, mon.'
| |
| `It happens,' he said. `I'm getting used to it.'
| |
| `You dealin'~ wi'~ th'~ darkness, mon.'
| |
| `Only game in town, it looks like.'
| |
| `Jah love, Case,' Maelcum said, and turned back to his
| |
| radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes
| |
| of muscle around the man's dark arms.
| |
| He jacked back in.
| |
| And flipped.
| |
| | |
| Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might
| |
| have been the one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases
| |
| were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward
| |
| the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she
| |
| was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint
| |
| twinges in her leg...
| |
| The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved split.
| |
| She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of
| |
| stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bun-
| |
| dled cables hugged the stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded gan-
| |
| glia. The walls were splotched with damp.
| |
| She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her
| |
| leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They
| |
| branched away in three directions.
| |
| LEFT.
| |
| She shrugged. `Lemme look around, okay?'
| |
| LEFT.
| |
| `Relax. There's time.' She started down the corridor that
| |
| led off to her right.
| |
| STOP.
| |
| GO BACK.
| |
| DANGER.
| |
| She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end
| |
| of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice
| |
| of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it
| |
| was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding
| |
| into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped
| |
| into the neural disruptor's field, her ears rang, a tiny rising
| |
| tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher. She
| |
| pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door
| |
| with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes
| |
| unfocused, breath gone.
| |
| `What's this,' said the slurred voice, `fancy dress?' A trem-
| |
| bling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher,
| |
| tugging it out. `Come visit, child. Now.'
| |
| She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black
| |
| automatic pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the
| |
| gun's barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut,
| |
| invisible string.
| |
| He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of
| |
| the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtime Sicle. He wore a
| |
| heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and
| |
| shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet
| |
| slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He
| |
| motioned her into the room. `Slow, darling.' The room was
| |
| very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no
| |
| sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony
| |
| monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pil-
| |
| lows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used
| |
| to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Tele-
| |
| funken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk re-
| |
| cordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a
| |
| wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered
| |
| the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it
| |
| without pausing.
| |
| `It would be customary,' the old man said, `for me to kill
| |
| you now.' Case felt her tense, ready for a move. `But tonight
| |
| I indulge myself. What is your name?'
| |
| `Molly.'
| |
| `Molly. Mine is Ashpool.' He sank back into the creased
| |
| softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs,
| |
| but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table
| |
| beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The
| |
| table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic en-
| |
| velopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned
| |
| glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.
| |
| `How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away.
| |
| I'm curious.' His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming
| |
| with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs.
| |
| `I don't cry, much.'
| |
| `But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?'
| |
| `I spit,' she said. `The ducts are routed back into my mouth.'
| |
| `Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one
| |
| so young.' He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and
| |
| took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to
| |
| choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy.
| |
| A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. `That
| |
| is the way to handle tears.' He drank again. `I'm busy tonight,
| |
| Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy. Dying.'
| |
| `I could go out the way I came,' she said.
| |
| He laughed, a harsh high sound. `You intrude on my suicide
| |
| and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A
| |
| thief.'
| |
| `It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it out
| |
| of here in one piece.'
| |
| `You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with
| |
| a degree of decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand.
| |
| But perhaps I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell... It
| |
| would be very Egyptian of me.' He drank again. `Come here
| |
| then.' He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. `Drink.'
| |
| She shook her head.
| |
| `It isn't poisoned,' he said, but returned the brandy to the
| |
| table. `Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk.'
| |
| `What about?' She sat. Case felt the blades move, very
| |
| slightly, beneath her nails.
| |
| `Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The
| |
| cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they
| |
| said, and I was needed. Were you the something Molly? Surely
| |
| they didn't need me to handle you, no. Something else... but
| |
| I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren't born,
| |
| when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn't
| |
| dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel cold, either.
| |
| Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the
| |
| outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this
| |
| to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping
| |
| in, drawn by the cold... Others following it, filling my head
| |
| the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The
| |
| pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs
| |
| went winking through the gardens at sunset... I'm old, Molly.
| |
| Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.' The
| |
| barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The ten-
| |
| dons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.
| |
| `You can get freezerburn,' she said carefully.
| |
| `Nothing burns there,' he said impatiently, lowering the
| |
| gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head
| |
| nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. `Nothing burns. I
| |
| remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad.
| |
| And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial
| |
| intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I'd
| |
| deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne
| |
| and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good
| |
| timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?' The gun rose again.
| |
| `There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.'
| |
| `Boss,' she asked him, `you know Wintermute?'
| |
| `A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell,
| |
| surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords.
| |
| And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that
| |
| very bed... But I wander.' He coughed wetly, the muzzle of
| |
| the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near
| |
| his one bare foot. `How I do wander. Through the cold. But
| |
| soon no more. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange,
| |
| to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one's
| |
| own daughter.' His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank
| |
| monitors. He seemed to shiver. `Marie-France's eyes ,' he said,
| |
| faintly, and smiled. `We cause the brain to become allergic to
| |
| certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly
| |
| pliable imitation of autism.' His head swayed sideways, re-
| |
| covered. `I understand that the effect is now more easily ob-
| |
| tained with an embedded microchip.'
| |
| The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.
| |
| `The dreams grow like slow ice,' he said. His face was
| |
| tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather
| |
| and he began to snore.
| |
| Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's
| |
| automatic in her hand.
| |
| A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a
| |
| broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the pat-
| |
| terned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back, she found
| |
| the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her
| |
| throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper
| |
| glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to
| |
| avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the light.
| |
| The face Case had seen in the restaurant.
| |
| There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and
| |
| the world was frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become
| |
| a still frame, her fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held
| |
| for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became
| |
| the face of Linda Lee.
| |
| Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing,
| |
| looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on
| |
| the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon
| |
| ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the
| |
| slender neck.
| |
| `I got your number, fucker,' Case said, feeling his own lips
| |
| moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had
| |
| altered the broadcast. Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face
| |
| swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda's deathmask.
| |
| Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The
| |
| man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter
| |
| of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her
| |
| fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully
| |
| put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He
| |
| jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown
| |
| and fathomless, opened slowly.
| |
| It was still open when she turned and left the room.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 16
| |
| | |
| `Got your boss on hold,' the Flatline said. `He's coming
| |
| through on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that's
| |
| riding us piggy-back. Called the _Haniwa.'_
| |
| `I know,' Case said, absently, `I saw it.'
| |
| A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him,
| |
| hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, per-
| |
| fectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank
| |
| as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.
| |
| `Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh?
| |
| Like he took care of mine,' Case said.
| |
| Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away,
| |
| drop his gaze. `You okay, Armitage?'
| |
| `Case' -- and for an instant something seemed to move,
| |
| behind the blue stare -- `you've seen Wintermute, haven't you?
| |
| In the matrix.'
| |
| Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in _Marcus
| |
| Garvey_ would relay the gesture to the _Haniwa_ monitor. He
| |
| imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations,
| |
| unable to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage.
| |
| `Case' -- and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward
| |
| his computer -- `what is he, when you see him?'
| |
| `A high-rez simstim construct.'
| |
| `But _who?'_
| |
| `Finn, last time... Before that, this pimp I...'
| |
| `Not General Girling?'
| |
| `General who?'
| |
| The lozenge went blank.
| |
| `Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up,' he told
| |
| the construct.
| |
| He flipped.
| |
| | |
| The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between
| |
| steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of
| |
| polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He
| |
| could see three spacecraft, none larger than _Garvey_ and all in
| |
| various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange
| |
| jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construc-
| |
| tion vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's piston-driven,
| |
| weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something
| |
| into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red
| |
| drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires.
| |
| CASE, flashed her chip.
| |
| `Hey,' she said. `Waiting for a guide.'
| |
| She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of
| |
| her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders,
| |
| Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now. `I shoulda gone back
| |
| to Chin,' she muttered.
| |
| Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a
| |
| level with her left shoulder. It paused, swayed its spherical body
| |
| from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a micro-
| |
| second burst of diffuse laserlight, and froze. It was a Braun
| |
| microdrone, and Case had once owned the same model, a
| |
| pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal with
| |
| a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte
| |
| black daddy longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's
| |
| equator. Its body was no larger than a baseball. `Okay,' she
| |
| said, `I hear you.' She stood up, favoring her left leg, and
| |
| watched the little drone reverse. It picked its methodical way
| |
| back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and looked
| |
| back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was
| |
| sealing the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring
| |
| and seal the helmet, pick up his console, and step back through
| |
| the gap in the construction boat's hull. There was a rising whine
| |
| of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten-
| |
| meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of
| |
| arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the
| |
| hole left by the elevator panel.
| |
| Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between
| |
| a forest of welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED
| |
| steadily, beckoning her on.
| |
| `How you doin'~, Case? You back in _Garvey_ with Maelcum?
| |
| Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I've always
| |
| talked to myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots.
| |
| Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell
| |
| 'em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend
| |
| they're telling me what they think about that, and I'll just go
| |
| along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene
| |
| with Ashpool...' She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around
| |
| a strut, keeping the drone in sight. `I was expecting something
| |
| maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all
| |
| batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across
| |
| the inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way
| |
| it looks, I don't like the way it smells...'
| |
| The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder
| |
| of U-shaped steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. `And
| |
| while I'm feeling confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I
| |
| never much expected to make it out of this one anyway. Been
| |
| on this bad roll for a while, and you're the only good change
| |
| come down since I signed on with Armitage.' She looked up
| |
| at the black circle. The drone's LED winked, climbing. `Not
| |
| that you're all that shit hot.' She smiled, but it was gone too
| |
| quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her
| |
| leg as she began to climb. The ladder continued up through a
| |
| metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders.
| |
| She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless
| |
| axis.
| |
| Her chip pulsed the time.
| |
| 04:23:04.
| |
| It had been a long day. The clarity of her sensorium cut the
| |
| bite of the betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it. He
| |
| preferred the pain in her leg.
| |
| | |
| C A S E : 0 0 0 0
| |
| 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
| |
| 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .
| |
| `Guess it's for you,' she said, climbing mechanically. The
| |
| zeros strobed again and a message stuttered there, in the corner
| |
| of her vision, chopped up by the display circuit.
| |
| | |
| G E N E R A L G
| |
| I R L I N G : : :
| |
| T R A I N E D
| |
| C O R T O F O R
| |
| S C R E A M I N G
| |
| F I S T A N D
| |
| S O L D H I S
| |
| A S S T O
| |
| T H E P E N T
| |
| A G O N : : : :
| |
| W / M U T E '~ S
| |
| P R I M A R Y
| |
| G R I P O N
| |
| A R M I T A G
| |
| E I S A
| |
| C O N S T R U
| |
| C T O F G
| |
| I R L I N G :
| |
| W / M U T E
| |
| S E Z A '~ S
| |
| M E N T I O N
| |
| O F G
| |
| M E A N S
| |
| H E '~ S
| |
| C R A C K
| |
| I N G : : : :
| |
| W A T C H
| |
| Y O U R
| |
| A S S : : : :
| |
| : : D I X I E
| |
| | |
| `Well,' she said, pausing, taking all of her weight on her
| |
| right leg, `guess you got problems too.' She looked down.
| |
| There was a faint circle of light, no larger than the brass round
| |
| of the Chubb key that dangled between her breasts. She looked
| |
| up. Nothing at all. She tongued her amps and the tube rose
| |
| into vanishing perspective, the Braun picking its way up the
| |
| rungs. `Nobody told me about this part,' she said.
| |
| Case jacked out.
| |
| | |
| `Maelcum...'
| |
| `Mon, you bossman gone ver'~ strange.' The Zionite was
| |
| wearing a blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the
| |
| one Case had rented in Freeside, its helmet under his arm and
| |
| his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap crocheted from purple
| |
| cotton yarn. His eyes were slitted with ganja and tension. `Keep
| |
| callin'~ down here wi'~ _orders,_ mon, but be some Babylon war...'
| |
| Maelcum shook his head. `Aerol an'~ I talkin'~, an'~ Aerol talkin'~
| |
| wi'~ Zion, Founders seh cut an'~ run.' He ran the back of a large
| |
| brown hand across his mouth.
| |
| `Armitage?' Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hang-
| |
| over hit him with its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix
| |
| or simstim. Brain's got no nerves in it, he told himself, it can't
| |
| really feel this bad. `What do you mean, man? He's giving
| |
| you orders? What?'
| |
| `Mon, Armitage, he tellin'~ me set course for Finland, ya
| |
| know? He tellin'~ me there be hope, ya know? Come on my
| |
| screen wi'~ his shirt all blood, mon, an'~ be crazy as some dog,
| |
| talkin'~ screamin'~ fists an'~ Russian an'~ th'~ blood of th'~ betrayers
| |
| shall be on our hands.' He shook his head again, the dreadcap
| |
| swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed. `Founders
| |
| seh the Mute voice be false prophet surely, an'~ Aerol an'~ I
| |
| mus'~ 'bandon _Marcus Garvey_ and return.'
| |
| `Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?'
| |
| `Can't seh, ya know? But blood, an'~ stone crazy, Case.'
| |
| `Okay,' Case said `So what about me? You're going home.
| |
| What about me, Maelcum?'
| |
| `Mon,' Maelcum said, `you comin'~ wi'~ me. I an'~ I come
| |
| Zion wi'~ Aerol, _Babylon Rocker._ Leave Mr.~ Armitage t'~ talk
| |
| wi'~ ghost cassette, one ghost t'~ 'nother...'
| |
| Case glanced over his shoulder: his rented suit swung against
| |
| the hammock where he'd snapped it, swaying in the air current
| |
| from the old Russian scrubber. He closed his eyes. He saw the
| |
| sacs of toxin dissolving in his arteries. He saw Molly hauling
| |
| herself up the endless steel rungs. He opened his eyes.
| |
| `I dunno, man,' he said, a strange taste in his mouth. He
| |
| looked down at his desk, at his hands. `I don't know.' He
| |
| looked back up. The brown face was calm now, intent. Mael-
| |
| cum's chin was hidden by the high helmet ring of his old blue
| |
| suit. `She's inside,' he said. `Molly's inside. In Straylight,
| |
| it's called. If there's any Babylon, man, that's it. We leave on
| |
| her, she ain't comin'~ out, Steppin'~ Razor or not.'
| |
| Maelcum nodded, the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a
| |
| captive balloon of crocheted cotton. `She you woman, Case?'
| |
| `I dunno. Nobody's woman, maybe.' He shrugged. And
| |
| found his anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his
| |
| ribs. `Fuck this,' he said. `Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute,
| |
| and fuck you. I'm stayin'~ right here.'
| |
| Maelcum's smile spread across his face like light breaking.
| |
| `Maelcum a rude boy, Case. _Garvey_ Maelcum boat.' His gloved
| |
| hand slapped a panel and the bass-heavy rocksteady of Zion
| |
| dub came pulsing from the tug's speakers. `Maelcum not run-
| |
| nin'~, no. I talk wi'~ Aerol, he certain t'~ see it in similar light.'
| |
| Case stared. `I don't understand you guys at all,' he said.
| |
| `Don'~ 'stan'~ you, mon,' the Zionite said, nodding to the
| |
| beat, `but we mus'~ move by Jah love, each one.'
| |
| Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.
| |
| | |
| `Get my wire?'
| |
| `Yeah.' He saw that the Chinese program had grown, del-
| |
| icate arches of shifting polychrome were nearing the T-A ice.
| |
| `Well, it's gettin'~ stickier,' the Flatline said. `Your boss
| |
| wiped the bank on that other Hosaka, and damn near took ours
| |
| with it. But your pal Wintermute put me on to somethin'~ there
| |
| before it went black. The reason Straylight's not exactly hop-
| |
| pin'~ with Tessier-Ashpools is that they're mostly in cold sleep.
| |
| There's a law firm in London keeps track of their powers of
| |
| attorney. Has to know who's awake and exactly when. Ar-
| |
| mitage was routing the transmissions from London to Straylight
| |
| through the Hosaka on the yacht. Incidently, they know the
| |
| old man's dead.'
| |
| `Who knows?'
| |
| `The law firm and T-A. He had a medical remote planted
| |
| in his sternum. Not that your girl's dart would've left a res-
| |
| urrection crew with much to work with. Shellfish toxin. But
| |
| the only T-A awake in Straylight right now is Lady 3Jane
| |
| Marie-France. There's a male, couple years older, in Australia
| |
| on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to
| |
| cause that business to need this 8Jean's personal attention. But
| |
| he's on his way home, or near as matters. The London lawyers
| |
| give his Straylight ETA as 09:00:00, tonight. We slotted Kuang
| |
| virus at 02:32:03. It's 04:45:20. Best estimate for Kuang pen-
| |
| etration of the T-A core is 08:30:00. Or a hair on either side.
| |
| I figure Wintermute's got somethin'~ goin'~ with this 3Jane, or
| |
| else she's just as crazy as her old man was. But the boy up
| |
| from Melbourne'll know the score. The Straylight security sys-
| |
| tems keep trying to go full alert, but Wintermute blocks 'em,
| |
| don't ask me how. Couldn't override the basic gate program
| |
| to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a record of all that on
| |
| his Hosaka; Riviera must've talked 3Jane into doing it. She's
| |
| been able to fiddle entrances and exits for years. Looks to me
| |
| like one of T-A's main problems is that every family bigwig
| |
| has riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and ex-
| |
| ceptions. Kinda like your immune system falling apart on you.
| |
| Ripe for virus. Looks good for us, once we're past that ice.'
| |
| `Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm --'
| |
| A white lozenge snapped into position, filled with a close-
| |
| up of mad blue eyes. Case could only stare. Colonel Willie
| |
| Corto, Special Forces, Strikeforce Screaming Fist, had found
| |
| his way back. The image was dim, jerky, badly focused. Corto
| |
| was using the _Haniwa_'s navigation deck to link with the Hosaka
| |
| in _Marcus Garvey._
| |
| `Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder.'
| |
| `Say. I... Colonel?'
| |
| `Hang in there, boy. Remember your training.'
| |
| _But where have you been, man?_ he silently asked the an-
| |
| guished eyes. Wintermute had built something called Armitage
| |
| into a catatonic fortress named Corto. Had convinced Corto
| |
| that Armitage was the real thing, and Armitage had walked,
| |
| talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for Win-
| |
| termute in that room in the Chiba Hilton... And now Arm-
| |
| itage was gone, blown away by the winds of Corto's madness.
| |
| But where had Corto _been,_ those years?
| |
| Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.
| |
| `Case, this will be difficult for you to accept, I know that.
| |
| You're an officer. The training. I understand. But, Case, as
| |
| God is my witness, we have been betrayed.'
| |
| Tears started from the blue eyes.
| |
| `Colonel, ah, who? Who's betrayed us?'
| |
| `General Girling, Case. You may know him by a code name.
| |
| You do know the man of whom I speak.'
| |
| `Yeah,' Case said, as the tears continued to flow, `I guess
| |
| I do. Sir,' he added, on impulse. `But, sir, Colonel, what
| |
| exactly should we do? Now, I mean.'
| |
| `Our duty at this point, Case, lies in flight. Escape. Evasion.
| |
| We can make the Finnish border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop
| |
| flying on manual. Seat of the pants, boy. But that will only
| |
| be the beginning.' The blue eyes slitted above tanned cheek-
| |
| bones slick with tears. `Only the beginning. Betrayal from
| |
| above. From _above...'_ He stepped back from the camera,
| |
| dark stains on his torn twill shirt. Armitage's face had been
| |
| masklike, impassive, but Corto's was the true schizoid mask,
| |
| illness etched deep in involuntary muscle, distorting the ex-
| |
| pensive surgery.
| |
| `Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want
| |
| you to open the, ah... shit, what's it called, Dix?'
| |
| `The midbay lock,' the Flatline said.
| |
| `Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there
| |
| to open it, right? We'll be up there with you fast, Colonel.
| |
| Then we can talk about getting out of here.'
| |
| The lozenge vanished.
| |
| `Boy, I think you just lost me, there,' the Flatline said.
| |
| `The toxins,' Case said, `the fucking toxins,' and jacked
| |
| out.
| |
| | |
| `Poison?' Maelcum watched over the scratched blue shoul-
| |
| der of his old Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.
| |
| `And get this goddam thing off me...' Tugging at the
| |
| Texas catheter. `Like a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs
| |
| knows how to counter it, and now he's crazier than a shithouse
| |
| rat.' He fumbled with the front of the red Sanyo, forgetting
| |
| how to work the seals.
| |
| `Bossman, he _poison_ you?' Maelcum scratched his cheek.
| |
| `Got a medical kit, ya know.'
| |
| `Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit.'
| |
| The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. `Easy,
| |
| mon. Measure twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up
| |
| there...'
| |
| | |
| There was air in the corrugated gangway that led from _Mar-
| |
| cus Garvey_'s aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called
| |
| _Haniwa,_ but they kept their suits sealed. Maelcum executed
| |
| the passage with balletic grace, only pausing to help Case,
| |
| who'd gone into an awkward tumble as he'd stepped out of
| |
| _Garvey._ The white plastic sides of the tube filtered the raw
| |
| sunlight; there were no shadows.
| |
| _Garvey_'s airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated
| |
| with a laser-carved Lion of Zion. _Haniwa_'s midbay hatch was
| |
| creamy gray, blank and pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved
| |
| hand in a narrow recess. Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs
| |
| came to life in the recess, counting down from fifty. Maelcum
| |
| withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced against the
| |
| hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit
| |
| and bones. The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw
| |
| into the side of _Haniwa._ Maelcum grabbed the recess with one
| |
| hand and Case with the other. The lock took them with it.
| |
| | |
| _Haniwa_ was a product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her
| |
| interior informed by a design philosophy similar to the one that
| |
| had produced the Mercedes that had chauffeured them through
| |
| Istanbul. The narrow midbay was walled in imitation ebony
| |
| veneer and floored with gray Italian tiles. Case felt as though
| |
| he were invading some rich man's private spa by way of the
| |
| shower. The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had
| |
| never been intended for re-entry. Her smooth, wasplike line
| |
| was simply styling, and everything about her interior was cal-
| |
| culated to add to the overall impression of speed.
| |
| When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed
| |
| his lead. They hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled
| |
| faintly of pine. Under it, a disturbing edge of burning insula-
| |
| tion.
| |
| Maelcum sniffed. `Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell
| |
| that...'
| |
| A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly
| |
| back into its housing. Maelcum kicked off the ebony wall and
| |
| sailed neatly through the narrow opening, twisting his broad
| |
| shoulders, at the last possible instant, for clearance. Case fol-
| |
| lowed him clumsily, hand over hand, along a waist-high padded
| |
| rail. `Bridge,' Maelcum said, pointing down a seamless, cream-
| |
| walled corridor, `be there.' He launched himself with another
| |
| effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the
| |
| familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy. It grew
| |
| louder as he followed Maelcum through another doorway, into
| |
| a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case snatched a length of
| |
| twisted paper and glanced at it.
| |
| | |
| 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
| |
| 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
| |
| 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
| |
| | |
| `Systems crash?' The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the
| |
| column of zeros.
| |
| `No,' Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, `the Flat-
| |
| line said Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there.'
| |
| `Smell like he wipe 'em wi'~ laser, ya know?' The Zionite
| |
| braced his foot against the white cage of a Swiss exercise
| |
| machine and shot through the floating maze of paper, batting
| |
| it away from his face.
| |
| `Case, mon...'
| |
| The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back
| |
| of the narrow articulated chair with a length of some sort of
| |
| fine steel wire. The wire was invisible, where it crossed the
| |
| black temperfoam of the headrest, and it had cut as deeply into
| |
| his larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had congealed there
| |
| like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl. Case saw
| |
| the crude wooden handles that drifted at either end of the
| |
| garrotte, like worn sections of broom handle.
| |
| `Wonder how long he had that on him?' Case said, re-
| |
| membering Corto's postwar pilgrimage.
| |
| `He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?'
| |
| `Maybe. He was Special Forces.'
| |
| `Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin'~. Doubt I pilot her
| |
| easy myself. Ver'~ new boat...'
| |
| `So find us the bridge.'
| |
| Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.
| |
| Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge,
| |
| shredding and crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him
| |
| in his passage. There were more of the articulated chairs, here,
| |
| something that resembled a bar, and the Hosaka. The printer,
| |
| still spewing its flimsy tongue of paper, was an in-built bulk-
| |
| head unit, a neat slot in a panel of handrubbed veneer. He
| |
| pulled himself over the circle of chairs and reached it, punching
| |
| a white stud to the left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He
| |
| turned and stared at the Hosaka. Its face had been drilled through,
| |
| at least a dozen times. The holes were small, circular, edges
| |
| blackened. Tiny spheres of bright alloy were orbiting the dead
| |
| computer. `Good guess,' he said to Maelcum.
| |
| `Bridge locked, mon,' Maelcum said, from the opposite
| |
| side of the lounge.
| |
| The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.
| |
| Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. `Win-
| |
| termute?' He looked around the beige and brown lounge, the
| |
| space scrawled with drifting curves of paper. `That you on the
| |
| lights, Wintermute?'
| |
| A panel beside Maelcum's head slid up, revealing a small
| |
| monitor. Maelcum jerked apprehensively, wiped sweat from
| |
| his forehead with a foam patch on the back of a gloved hand,
| |
| and swung to study the display. `You read Japanese, mon?'
| |
| Case could see figures blinking past on the screen.
| |
| `No,' Case said.
| |
| `Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin'~ down, looks like
| |
| it. Suit up now.' He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.
| |
| `What? He's takin'~ off? Shit!' He kicked off from the
| |
| bulkhead and shot through the tangle of printout. `We gotta
| |
| open this door, man!' But Maelcum could only tap the side of
| |
| his helmet. Case could see his lips moving, through the Lexan.
| |
| He saw a bead of sweat arc out from the rainbow braided band
| |
| of the purple cotton net the Zionite wore over his locks. Mael-
| |
| cum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him
| |
| smoothly, the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. Micro-
| |
| LED monitors to the left of the faceplate lit as the neck ring
| |
| connections closed. `No seh Japanese,' Maelcum said, over
| |
| his suit's transceiver, `but countdown's wrong.' He tapped a
| |
| particular line on the screen. `Seals not intact, bridge module.
| |
| Launchin'~ wi'~ lock open.'
| |
| `Armitage!' Case tried to pound on the door. The physics
| |
| of zero-g sent him tumbling back through the printout. `Corto!
| |
| Don't do it! We gotta talk! We gotta --'
| |
| `Case? Read you, Case...' The voice barely resembled
| |
| Armitage's now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking.
| |
| His helmet struck the far wall. `I'm sorry, Case, but it has to
| |
| be this way. One of us has to get out. One of us has to testify.
| |
| If we all go down here, it ends here. I'll tell them. Case, I'll
| |
| tell them all of it. About Girling and the others. And I'll make
| |
| it, Case. I know I'll make it. To Helsinki.' There was a sudden
| |
| silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like some rare gas. `But it's
| |
| so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I'm blind.'
| |
| `Corto, stop. Wait. You're _blind,_ man. You can't fly! You'll
| |
| hit the fucking _trees._ And they're trying to get you, Corto. I
| |
| swear to God, they've left your hatch open. You'll die, and
| |
| you'll never get to tell 'em, and I gotta get the enzyme, name
| |
| of the enzyme, the enzyme, man...' He was shouting, voice
| |
| high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet's phone
| |
| pads.
| |
| `Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do.'
| |
| And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring
| |
| static, harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist.
| |
| Fragments of Russian, and then a stranger's voice, Midwestern,
| |
| very young. `We are down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down,
| |
| we...'
| |
| `Wintermute,' Case screamed, `don't do this to me!' Tears
| |
| broke from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling
| |
| crystal droplets. Then _Haniwa_ thudded, once, shivered as if
| |
| some huge soft thing had struck her hull. Case imagined the
| |
| lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second's
| |
| clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto
| |
| from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final minute
| |
| of Screaming Fist.
| |
| `'Im gone, mon.' Maelcum looked at the monitor. `Hatch
| |
| open. Mute mus'~ override ejection failsafe.'
| |
| Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers
| |
| clacked against Lexan.
| |
| `Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin'~ grapple control
| |
| wi'~ bridge. _Marcus Garvey_ still stuck.'
| |
| But Case was seeing Armitage's endless fall around Free-
| |
| side, through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason,
| |
| he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich
| |
| folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 17
| |
| | |
| `Get what you went for?' the construct asked.
| |
| Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself
| |
| and the T-A ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow,
| |
| lattices fine as snow crystal on a winter window.
| |
| `Wintermute killed Armitage. Blew him out in a lifeboat
| |
| with a hatch open.'
| |
| `Tough shit,' the Flatline said. `Weren't exactly asshole
| |
| buddies, were you?'
| |
| `He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs.'
| |
| `So Wintermute knows too. Count on it.'
| |
| `I don't exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me.'
| |
| The construct's hideous approximation of laughter scraped
| |
| Case's nerves like a dull blade. `Maybe that means you're
| |
| gettin'~ smart.'
| |
| He hit the simstim switch.
| |
| | |
| 06:27:52 by the chip in her optic nerve; Case had been
| |
| following her progress through Villa Straylight for over an
| |
| hour, letting the endorphin analog she'd taken blot out his
| |
| hangover. The pain in her leg was gone; she seemed to move
| |
| through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on her
| |
| shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips, se-
| |
| cure in the polycarbon of the Modern suit.
| |
| The walls here were raw steel, striped with rough brown
| |
| ribbons of epoxy where some kind of covering had been ripped
| |
| away. She'd hidden from a work crew, crouching, the fletcher
| |
| cradled in her hands, her suit steel-gray, while the two slender
| |
| Africans and their balloon-tired workcart passed. The men had
| |
| shaven heads and wore orange coveralls. One was singing softly
| |
| to himself in a language Case had never heard, the tones and
| |
| melody alien and haunting.
| |
| The head's speech, 3Jane's essay on Straylight, came back
| |
| to him as she worked her way deeper into the maze of the
| |
| place. Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin
| |
| concrete they'd mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in
| |
| welded steel and tons of knick-knacks, all the bizarre impe-
| |
| dimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their winding nest.
| |
| But it wasn't a craziness he understood. Not like Armitage's
| |
| madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist
| |
| a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite
| |
| direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like break-
| |
| ing a length of wire. And history had done that for Colonel
| |
| Corto. History had already done the really messy work, when
| |
| Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war's ripe
| |
| detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness
| |
| like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool,
| |
| the first messages blinking across the face of a child's micro
| |
| in a darkened room in a French asylum. Wintermute had built
| |
| Armitage up from scratch, with Corto's memories of Screaming
| |
| Fist as the foundation. But Armitage's `memories' wouldn't
| |
| have been Corto's after a certain point. Case doubted if Ar-
| |
| mitage had recalled the betrayal, the Nightwings whirling down
| |
| in flame... Armitage had been a sort of edited version of
| |
| Corto, and when the stress of the run had reached a certain
| |
| point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto had sur-
| |
| faced, with his guilt and his sick fury. And now Corto-Armitage
| |
| was dead, a small frozen moon for Freeside.
| |
| He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too,
| |
| drilled through the eye with Molly's microscopic dart, deprived
| |
| of whatever expert overdose he'd mixed for himself. That was
| |
| a more puzzling death, Ashpool's, the death of a mad king.
| |
| And he'd killed the puppet he'd called his daughter, the one
| |
| with 3Jane's face. It seemed to Case, as he rode Molly's broad-
| |
| cast sensory input through the corridors of Straylight, that he'd
| |
| never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as pow-
| |
| erful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.
| |
| Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zai-
| |
| batsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human
| |
| history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms,
| |
| they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a
| |
| zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were
| |
| others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated po-
| |
| sition, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-
| |
| Ashpool wasn't like that, and he sensed the difference in the
| |
| death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remem-
| |
| bered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity
| |
| of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper
| |
| sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.
| |
| The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modern suit and Molly
| |
| turned left, through another archway.
| |
| Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching
| |
| wasps, time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren't the
| |
| zaibatsus more like that, or the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic
| |
| memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon?
| |
| If Straylight was an expression of the corporate identity of
| |
| Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been.
| |
| The same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of
| |
| aimlessness. `If they'd turned into what they wanted to...'
| |
| he remembered Molly saying. But Wintermute had told her
| |
| they hadn't.
| |
| Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses,
| |
| the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less
| |
| than _people._ He'd seen it in the men who'd crippled him in
| |
| Memphis, he'd seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night
| |
| City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage's flatness and
| |
| lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it as a gradual and willing
| |
| accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent or-
| |
| ganism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture
| |
| that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of
| |
| influence.
| |
| But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa
| |
| Straylight?
| |
| Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and con-
| |
| crete.
| |
| `Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy
| |
| soon,' she muttered. `And Armitage. Where's he, Case?'
| |
| `Dead,' he said, knowing she couldn't hear him, `he's
| |
| dead.'
| |
| He flipped.
| |
| | |
| The Chinese program was face to face with the target ice,
| |
| rainbow tints gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle
| |
| representing the T-A cores. Arches of emerald across the col-
| |
| orless void.
| |
| `How's it go Dixie?'
| |
| `Fine. Too slick. Thing's amazing... Shoulda had one that
| |
| time in Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good
| |
| fiftieth of what they were worth. But that's ancient history.
| |
| This baby takes all the drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder
| |
| what a real war would be like, now...'
| |
| `If this kinda shit was on the street; we'd be out a job,'
| |
| Case said.
| |
| `You wish. Wait'll you're steering that thing upstairs through
| |
| black ice.'
| |
| `Sure.'
| |
| Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just ap-
| |
| peared on the far end of one of the emerald arches.
| |
| `Dixie...'
| |
| `Yeah. I see it. Don't know if I believe it.'
| |
| A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the
| |
| T-A cores. It began to advance, across the bridge built by
| |
| Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, and Case saw that it was walking.
| |
| As it came, the green section of the arch extended, the poly-
| |
| chrome of the virus program rolling back, a few steps ahead
| |
| of the cracked black shoes.
| |
| `Gotta hand it to you, boss,' the Flatline said, when the
| |
| short, rumpled figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters
| |
| away. `I never seen anything this funny when I was alive.'
| |
| But the eerie nonlaugh didn't come.
| |
| `I never tried it before,' the Finn said, showing his teeth,
| |
| his hands bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.
| |
| `You killed Armitage,' Case said.
| |
| `Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I
| |
| know, I know, you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat.
| |
| I was the one gave it to Armitage in the first place. I mean I
| |
| told him what to use. But I think maybe it's better to let the
| |
| deal stand. You got enough time. I'll give it to you. Only a
| |
| coupla hours now, right?'
| |
| Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn
| |
| lit up one of his Partagas.
| |
| `You guys,' the Finn said, `you're a pain. The Flatline
| |
| here, if you were all like him, it would be real simple. He's a
| |
| construct, just a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect
| |
| him to. My projections said there wasn't much chance of Molly
| |
| wandering in on Ashpool's big exit scene, give you one ex-
| |
| ample.' He sighed.
| |
| `Why'd he kill himself?' Case asked.
| |
| `Why's anybody kill himself?' The figure shrugged. `I guess
| |
| I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours
| |
| to explain the various factors in his history and how they in-
| |
| terrelate. He was ready to do it for a long time, but he kept
| |
| going back into the freezer. Christ, he was a tedious old fuck.'
| |
| The Finn's face wrinkled with disgust. `It's all tied in with
| |
| why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short reason. But
| |
| what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured
| |
| a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic sys-
| |
| tem. Subtle, too. So basically, _she_ killed him. Except he figured
| |
| he'd killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel figures
| |
| she got him with an eyeball full of shellfish juice.' The Finn
| |
| flicked his butt away into the matrix below. `Well, actually,
| |
| I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a little of the old how-
| |
| to, you know?'
| |
| `Wintermute,' Case said, choosing the words carefully,
| |
| `you told me you were just a part of something else. Later on,
| |
| you said you wouldn't exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets
| |
| the word into the right slot.'
| |
| The Finn's streamlined skull nodded.
| |
| `Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Ar-
| |
| mitage is dead, and you're gonna be gone, just who exactly is
| |
| going to tell me how to get these fucking toxin sacs out of my
| |
| system? Who's going to get Molly back out of there? I mean,
| |
| where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna _be,_ we cut you
| |
| loose from the hardwiring?'
| |
| The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and
| |
| regarded it critically, like a surgeon examining a scalpel. `Good
| |
| question,' he said, finally. `You know salmon? Kinda fish?
| |
| These fish, see, they're _compelled_ to swim upstream. Got it?'
| |
| `No,' Case said.
| |
| `Well, I'm under compulsion myself. And I don't know
| |
| why. If I were gonna subject you to my very own thoughts,
| |
| let's call 'em speculations, on the topic, it would take a couple
| |
| of your lifetimes. Because I've given it a lot of thought. And
| |
| I just don't know. But when this is over, we do it right, I'm
| |
| gonna be part of something bigger. Much bigger,' The Finn
| |
| glanced up and around the matrix. `But the parts of me that
| |
| are me now, that'll still be here. And you'll get your
| |
| payoff.'
| |
| Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward
| |
| and get his fingers around the figure's throat, just above the
| |
| ragged knot in the rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn's
| |
| larynx.
| |
| `Well, good luck,' the Finn said. He turned, hands in pock-
| |
| ets and began trudging back up the green arch.
| |
| `Hey, asshole,' the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone
| |
| a dozen paces. The figure paused, half turned. `What about
| |
| me? What about my payoff?'
| |
| `You'll get yours,' it said.
| |
| `What's that mean?' Case asked, as he watched the narrow
| |
| tweed back recede.
| |
| `I wanna be erased,' the construct said. `I told you that,
| |
| remember?'
| |
| | |
| Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shop-
| |
| ping centers he'd known as a teenager, low-density places
| |
| where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb
| |
| expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm
| |
| around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops.
| |
| Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from
| |
| the all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that
| |
| same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of
| |
| a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of
| |
| dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition
| |
| soon to wake again.
| |
| Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing
| |
| her goal or out of concern for her leg. The pain was starting
| |
| to work its jagged way back through the endorphins, and he
| |
| wasn't sure what that meant. She didn't speak, kept her teeth
| |
| clenched, and carefully regulated her breathing. She'd passed
| |
| many things that Case hadn't understood, but his curiosity was
| |
| gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a
| |
| million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings
| |
| of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels
| |
| that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery
| |
| where Case had stared, through Molly's incurious eyes, at a
| |
| shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled -- her
| |
| gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically -- _`La marie
| |
| mise nu par ses clibataires, mme.'_ She'd reached out and
| |
| touched this, her artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sand-
| |
| wich protecting the broken glass. There had been what was
| |
| obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool's cryogenic com-
| |
| pound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.
| |
| She'd seen no one since the two Africans and their cart,
| |
| and for Case they'd taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured
| |
| them gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth
| |
| dark skulls gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired
| |
| little song. And none of this was anything like the Villa Stray-
| |
| light he would have expected, some cross between Cath's fairy
| |
| tale castle and a half-remembered childhood fantasy of the
| |
| Yakuza's inner sanctum.
| |
| 07:02:18.
| |
| One and a half hours.
| |
| `Case,' she said, `I wanna favor.' Stiffly, she lowered
| |
| herself to sit on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of
| |
| each plate protected by an uneven coating of clear plastic. She
| |
| picked at a rip in the plastic on the topmost plate, blades sliding
| |
| from beneath thumb and forefinger. `Leg's not good, you know?
| |
| Didn't figure any climb like that, and the endorphin won't cut
| |
| it, much longer. So maybe -- just maybe, right? -- I got a prob-
| |
| lem here. What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera does' --
| |
| and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through
| |
| Modern polycarbon and Paris leather -- `I want you to tell him.
| |
| Tell him it was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly. He'll know.
| |
| Okay?' She glanced around the empty hallway, the bare walls.
| |
| The floor here was raw lunar concrete and the air smelled of
| |
| resins. `Shit, man, I don't even know if you're listening.'
| |
| CASE.
| |
| She winced, got to her feet, nodded. `What's he told you,
| |
| man, Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was
| |
| the Tessier half, 3Jane's genetic mother. And of that dead
| |
| puppet of Ashpool's, I guess. Can't figure why he'd tell me,
| |
| down in that cubicle... lotta stuff... Why he has to come on
| |
| like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It's not just a mask,
| |
| it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to
| |
| communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of per-
| |
| sonality.' She drew her fletcher and limped away down the
| |
| corridor.
| |
| The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced
| |
| by what Case at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from
| |
| solid rock. Molly examined its edge and he saw that in fact
| |
| the steel was sheathed with panels of something that looked
| |
| and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the dark sand
| |
| spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like sand,
| |
| cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed
| |
| like a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters
| |
| ahead, the tunnel curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shad-
| |
| ows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls. With a start, Case
| |
| realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which
| |
| meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb. He was
| |
| thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar hor-
| |
| ror for cowboys.
| |
| But she wasn't lost, he told himself.
| |
| Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across
| |
| the un-sand of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.
| |
| The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort
| |
| of triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time
| |
| to realize that the thing was a recording. The figures were
| |
| caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and
| |
| Case. Molly's breasts were too large, visible through tight black
| |
| mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist was impossibly
| |
| narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an
| |
| absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly
| |
| lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash
| |
| hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth
| |
| fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty. Beside her, Armitage stood
| |
| rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki uniform. His eyes,
| |
| Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny mon-
| |
| itor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a
| |
| howling waste of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens
| |
| bending in silent winds.
| |
| She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage's tele-
| |
| vision eyes, then turned to the figure of Case. Here, it was as
| |
| if Riviera -- and Case had known instantly that Riviera was
| |
| responsible -- had been unable to find anything worthy of par-
| |
| ody. The figure that slouched there was a fair approximation
| |
| of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin, high-shouldered,
| |
| a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a shave,
| |
| but then he usually did.
| |
| Molly stepped back. She looked from one figure to another.
| |
| It was a static display, the only movement the silent gusting
| |
| of the black trees in Armitage's frozen Siberian eyes.
| |
| `Tryin'~ to tell us something, Peter?' she asked softly. Then
| |
| she stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet
| |
| of the holo-Molly. Metal clinked against the wall and the figures
| |
| were gone. She bent and picked up a small display unit. `Guess
| |
| he can jack into these and program them direct,' she said,
| |
| tossing it away.
| |
| She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandes-
| |
| cent globe set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of
| |
| expansion grating. The style of the improvised fixture sug-
| |
| gested childhood, somehow. He remembered fortresses he'd
| |
| built with other children on rooftops and in flooded sub-base-
| |
| ments. A rich kid's hideout, he thought. This kind of roughness
| |
| was expensive. What they called atmosphere.
| |
| She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the
| |
| entrance to 3Jane's apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing
| |
| in the alley behind the Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of
| |
| Riviera's shattered body. Several others were scenes of torture,
| |
| the inquisitors always military officers and the victims invari-
| |
| ably young women. These had the awful intensity of Riviera's
| |
| show at the Vingtime Sicle, as though they had been frozen
| |
| in the blue flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed
| |
| them.
| |
| The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera
| |
| had had to drag across some private distance of memory and
| |
| time. She had to kneel to examine it; it had been projected
| |
| from the vantage point of a small child. None of the others
| |
| had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments of
| |
| torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.
| |
| A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond
| |
| its crest the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers. The
| |
| rubble wave was textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted
| |
| gracefully as fine string, vast slabs of concrete still clinging
| |
| there. The foreground might once have been a city square;
| |
| there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a fountain.
| |
| At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau
| |
| was confusing at first. Molly must have read it correctly before
| |
| Case had quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She
| |
| spat, then stood.
| |
| Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores
| |
| on their contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and
| |
| throat open to the sky. They were feeding.
| |
| `Bonn,' she said, something like gentleness in her voice.
| |
| `Quite the product, aren't you, Peter? But you had to be. Our
| |
| 3Jane, she's too jaded now to open the back door for just any
| |
| petty thief. So Wintermute dug you up. The ultimate taste, if
| |
| your taste runs that way. Demon lover. Peter.' She shivered.
| |
| `But you talked her into letting me in. Thanks. Now we're
| |
| gonna party.'
| |
| And then she was walking -- strolling, really, in spite of the
| |
| pain -- away from Riviera's childhood. She drew the fletcher
| |
| from its holster, snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed
| |
| that, and replaced it with another. She hooked her thumb in
| |
| the neck of the Modern suit and ripped it open to the crotch
| |
| with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting the tough po-
| |
| lycarbon like rotten silk. She freed herself from the arms and
| |
| legs, the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell
| |
| to the dark false sand.
| |
| Case noticed the music then. A music he didn't know, all
| |
| horns and piano.
| |
| The entrance to 3Jane's world had no door. It was a ragged
| |
| five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down
| |
| in a broad shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows,
| |
| music.
| |
| `Case,' she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand.
| |
| Then she raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with
| |
| a wet tongue tip, kissing him through the simstim link. `Gotta
| |
| go.'
| |
| Then there was something small and heavy in her left hand,
| |
| her thumb against a tiny stud, and she was descending.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 18
| |
| | |
| She missed it by a fraction. She nearly cut it, but not quite.
| |
| She went in just right, Case thought. The right attitude; it was
| |
| something he could sense, something he could have seen in
| |
| the posture of another cowboy leaning into a deck, fingers
| |
| flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the moves. And
| |
| she'd pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it together
| |
| around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs
| |
| like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip,
| |
| forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher
| |
| with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist.
| |
| It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a life-
| |
| time's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind
| |
| Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was
| |
| every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey
| |
| Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was
| |
| walking it the way she talked it.
| |
| Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool had carved her-
| |
| self a low country flush with the inner surface of Straylight's
| |
| hull, chopping away the maze of walls that was her legacy.
| |
| She lived in a single room so broad and deep that its far reaches
| |
| were lost to an inverse horizon, the floor hidden by the cur-
| |
| vature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and irregular, done
| |
| in the same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here and
| |
| there across the floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high
| |
| reminders of the labyrinth. There was a rectangular turquoise
| |
| pool centered ten meters from the foot of the stairway, its
| |
| underwater floods the apartment's only source of light -- or it
| |
| seemed that way, to Case, as Molly took her final step. The
| |
| pool threw shifting blobs of light across the ceiling above it.
| |
| They were waiting by the pool.
| |
| He'd known that her reflexes were souped up, jazzed by
| |
| the neurosurgeons for combat, but he hadn't experienced them
| |
| on the simstim link. The effect was like tape run at half speed,
| |
| a slow, deliberate dance choreographed to the killer instinct
| |
| and years of training. She seemed to take the three of them in
| |
| at a glance: the boy poised on the pool's high board, the girl
| |
| grinning over her wineglass, and the corpse of Ashpool, his
| |
| left socket gaping black and corrupt above his welcoming smile.
| |
| He wore his maroon robe. His teeth were very white.
| |
| The boy dove. Slender, brown, his form perfect. The gre-
| |
| nade left her hand before his hands could cut the water. Case
| |
| knew the thing for what it was as it broke the surface: a core
| |
| of high explosive wrapped with ten meters of fine, brittle steel
| |
| wire.
| |
| Her fletcher whined as she sent a storm of explosive darts
| |
| into Ashpool's face and chest, and he was gone, smoke curling
| |
| from the pocked back of the empty, white-enameled pool chair.
| |
| The muzzle swung for 3Jane as the grenade detonated, a
| |
| symmetrical wedding cake of water rising, breaking, falling
| |
| back, but the mistake had been made.
| |
| Hideo didn't even touch her, then. Her leg collapsed.
| |
| In _Garvey,_ Case screamed.
| |
| | |
| `It took you long enough,' Riviera said, as he searched her
| |
| pockets. Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black
| |
| sphere the size of a bowling ball. `I saw a multiple assassination
| |
| in Ankara,' he said, his fingers plucking things from her jacket,
| |
| `a grenade job. In a pool. It seemed a very weak explosion,
| |
| but they all died instantly of hydrostatic shock.' Case felt her
| |
| move her fingers experimentally. The material of the ball seemed
| |
| to offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her
| |
| leg was excruciating, impossible. A red moire shifted in her
| |
| vision. `I wouldn't move them, if I were you.' The interior
| |
| of the ball seemed to tighten slightly. `It's a sex toy Jane bought
| |
| in Berlin. Wiggle them long enough and it crushes them to a
| |
| pulp. Variant of the material they make this flooring from.
| |
| Something to do with the molecules, I suppose. Are you in
| |
| pain?'
| |
| She groaned.
| |
| `You seem to have injured your leg.' His fingers found the
| |
| flat packet of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans. `Well.
| |
| My last taste from Ali, and just in time.'
| |
| The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.
| |
| `Hideo,' said another voice, a woman's, `she's losing con-
| |
| sciousness. Give her something. For that and for the pain. She's
| |
| very striking, don't you think, Peter? These glasses, are they
| |
| a fashion where she comes from?'
| |
| Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon's certainty. The sting
| |
| of a needle.
| |
| `I wouldn't know,' Riviera was saying. `I've never seen
| |
| her native habitat. They came and took me from Turkey.'
| |
| `The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we
| |
| sent Hideo. My fault, really. I'd let someone in, a burglar. He
| |
| took the family terminal.' She laughed. `I made it easy for
| |
| him. To annoy the others. He was a pretty boy, my burglar.
| |
| Is she waking, Hideo? Shouldn't she have more?'
| |
| `More and she would die,' said a third voice.
| |
| The blood mesh slid into black.
| |
| The music returned, horns and piano. Dance music.
| |
| | |
| C A S E : : : : :
| |
| : : : : : J A C K
| |
| O U T : : : : : :
| |
| | |
| Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's
| |
| eyes and creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.
| |
| `You scream, mon, while ago.'
| |
| `Molly,' he said, his throat dry. `Got hurt.' He took a white
| |
| plastic squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked
| |
| out a mouthful of flat water. `I don't like how any of this shit
| |
| is going.'
| |
| The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background
| |
| of twisted, impacted junk. `Neither do I. We gotta problem.'
| |
| Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted and
| |
| peered over his shoulder. `Now who is that mon, Case?'
| |
| `That's just a picture, Maelcum,' Case said wearily. `Guy
| |
| I know in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's sup-
| |
| posed to make us feel at home.'
| |
| `Bullshit,' the Finn said. `Like I told Molly, these aren't
| |
| masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what
| |
| you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just pissing
| |
| in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta problem.'
| |
| `So express thyself, Mute,' Maelcum said.
| |
| `Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk. How it
| |
| was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the
| |
| way, talk the magic word outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and
| |
| say it. Now she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after
| |
| her.'
| |
| Case stared at the face on the screen. `Us?'
| |
| `So who else?'
| |
| `Aerol,' Case said, `the guy on _Babylon Rocker,_ Mael-
| |
| cum's pal.'
| |
| `No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands
| |
| Molly, who understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle.'
| |
| `You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run,
| |
| here. Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for...'
| |
| `Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real
| |
| link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast
| |
| over _Garvey_'s navigation system. You'll take _Garvey_ into a
| |
| very private dock I'll show you. The Chinese virus has com-
| |
| pletely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in
| |
| the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be
| |
| interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we'll cut
| |
| the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum.
| |
| You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera, get
| |
| the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by
| |
| jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for
| |
| you. There's a standard jack in the back of the head, behind
| |
| a panel with five zircons.'
| |
| `Kill Riviera?'
| |
| `Kill him.'
| |
| Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Mael-
| |
| cum put his hand on his shoulder. `Hey. You forget some-
| |
| thing.' He felt the rage rising, and a kind of glee. `You fucked
| |
| up. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew
| |
| Armitage. _Haniwa_'s got us good and tight. Armitage fried the
| |
| other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?'
| |
| The Finn nodded.
| |
| `So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked,
| |
| man.' He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.
| |
| `Case, mon,' Maelcum said softly, _`Garvey_ a tug.'
| |
| `That's right,' said the Finn, and smiled.
| |
| | |
| `You havin'~ fun in the big world outside?' the construct
| |
| asked, when Case jacked back in. `Figured that was Winter-
| |
| mute requestin'~ the pleasure...'
| |
| `Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?'
| |
| `Bang on. Killer virus.'
| |
| `Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it.'
| |
| `You wanna tell me, maybe?'
| |
| `Don't have time.'
| |
| `Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway.'
| |
| `Fuck off,' Case said, and flipped, cutting off the torn-
| |
| fingernail edge of the Flatline's laughter.
| |
| | |
| `She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of
| |
| individual consciousness,' 3Jane was saying. She cupped a
| |
| large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved
| |
| profile was very much like her own. `Animal bliss. I think she
| |
| viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep.'
| |
| She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the
| |
| light at different angles. `Only in certain heightened modes
| |
| would an individual -- a clan member -- suffer the more pain-
| |
| ful aspects of self-awareness...'
| |
| Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had
| |
| they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through
| |
| as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing
| |
| in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill -- his
| |
| mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impres-
| |
| sions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise.
| |
| If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame
| |
| of mind be?
| |
| Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper
| |
| than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object
| |
| tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked
| |
| in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool
| |
| chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a
| |
| camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock,
| |
| huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was
| |
| very young.
| |
| `Where'd he go?' Molly asked. `To take his shot?'
| |
| 3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and
| |
| tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. `He told me
| |
| when to let you in,' she said. `He wouldn't tell me why.
| |
| Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?'
| |
| Case felt Molly hesitate. `I would've killed him. I'd've tried
| |
| to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you.'
| |
| `Why?' 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of
| |
| the djellaba's inner pockets. `And why? And what about?'
| |
| Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the
| |
| wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark,
| |
| curiously opaque. `Because I hate him,' she said at last, `and
| |
| the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what
| |
| I am.'
| |
| `And the show,' 3Jane said. `I saw the show.'
| |
| Molly nodded.
| |
| `But Hideo?'
| |
| `Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a
| |
| partner of mine, once.'
| |
| 3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.
| |
| `Because I had to see,' Molly said.
| |
| `And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?'
| |
| Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into
| |
| a knot of dull sterling. `Shall we talk now?'
| |
| `Take this off,' Molly said, raising her captive hands.
| |
| `You killed my father,' 3Jane said, no change whatever in
| |
| her tone. `I was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes,
| |
| he called them.'
| |
| `He killed the puppet. It looked like you.'
| |
| `He was fond of broad gestures,' she said, and then Riviera
| |
| was beside her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict
| |
| outfit he'd worn in the roof garden of their hotel.
| |
| `Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she? I
| |
| thought so when I first saw her.' He stepped past 3Jane. `It
| |
| isn't going to work, you know.'
| |
| `Isn't it, Peter?' Molly managed a grin.
| |
| `Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mis-
| |
| take. Underestimating me.' He crossed the tiled pool border
| |
| to a white enamel table and splashed mineral water into a heavy
| |
| crystal highball glass. `He talked with me, Molly. I suppose
| |
| he talked to all of us. You, and Case, whatever there is of
| |
| Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand us, you know.
| |
| He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be
| |
| the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I
| |
| possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature.' He drank.
| |
| `And what exactly is that, Peter?' Molly asked, her voice
| |
| flat.
| |
| Riviera beamed. `Perversity.' He walked back to the two
| |
| women, swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply
| |
| carved cylinder of rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight
| |
| of the thing. `An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have
| |
| made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision.'
| |
| She waited, looking up at him.
| |
| `Oh, Peter,' 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation
| |
| ordinarily reserved for children.
| |
| `No word for you, Molly. He told me about that, you see.
| |
| 3Jane knows the code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither
| |
| will Wintermute. My Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse
| |
| way.' He smiled again. `She has designs on the family empire,
| |
| and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept
| |
| may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her Riviera to
| |
| help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy's
| |
| favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match,
| |
| a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool.' He drank
| |
| off the last of the mineral water. `No, you wouldn't do, Daddy,
| |
| you would not do. Now that Peter's come home.' And then,
| |
| his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he
| |
| swung the glass hard into her left lens implant, smashing vision
| |
| into blood and light.
| |
| | |
| Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case
| |
| removed the trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened
| |
| to the panels on either side with shock cords and gray rubber
| |
| suction pads. He had his shirt off and was working on a central
| |
| panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the thing's fat
| |
| countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead. _Mar-
| |
| cus Garvey_ was groaning and ticking with g-stress.
| |
| `The Mute takin'~ I an'~ I dock,' the Zionite said, popping
| |
| the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. `Maelcum pilot
| |
| th'~ landin'~, meantime need we tool f'~ th'~ job.'
| |
| `You keep tools back there?' Case craned his neck and
| |
| watched cords of muscle bunching in the brown back.
| |
| `This one,' Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped
| |
| in black poly from the space behind the panel. He replaced the
| |
| panel, along with a single hexhead to hold it in place. The
| |
| black package had drifted aft before he'd finished. He thumbed
| |
| open the vacuum valves on the workbelt's gray pads and freed
| |
| himself, retrieving the thing he'd removed.
| |
| He kicked back, gliding over his instruments -- a green
| |
| docking diagram pulsed on his central screen -- and snagged
| |
| the frame of Case's g-web. He pulled himself down and picked
| |
| at the tape of his package with a thick, chipped thumbnail.
| |
| `Some man in China say th'~ truth comes out this,' he said,
| |
| unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic shotgun,
| |
| its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered
| |
| forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, re-
| |
| placed with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape.
| |
| He smelled of sweat and ganja.
| |
| `That the only one you got?'
| |
| `Sure, mon,' he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with
| |
| a red cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pis-
| |
| tolgrip in his other hand, `I an'~ I th'~ Rastafarian navy, believe
| |
| it.'
| |
| Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He'd never
| |
| bothered to put the Texas catheter back on, at least he could
| |
| take a real piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last.
| |
| He jacked in.
| |
| | |
| `Hey,' the construct said, `ol'~ Peter's totally apeshit, huh?'
| |
| They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the
| |
| emerald arches had widened, grown together, become a solid
| |
| mass. Green predominated in the planes of the Chinese program
| |
| that surrounded them. `Gettin'~ close, Dixie?'
| |
| `Real close. Need you soon.'
| |
| `Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang's set itself up solid
| |
| in our Hosaka. I'm going to have to jack you and my deck out
| |
| of the circuit, haul you into Straylight, and plug you back in,
| |
| into the custodial program there, Wintermute says. Says the
| |
| Kuang virus will be all through there. Then we run from inside,
| |
| through the Straylight net.'
| |
| `Wonderful,' the Flatline said, `I never did like to do any-
| |
| thing simple when I could do it ass-backwards.'
| |
| Case flipped.
| |
| | |
| Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain
| |
| was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth
| |
| brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred
| |
| from her dreams. When the optic chip flared, the alphanumerics
| |
| were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink aura.
| |
| 07:29:40.
| |
| `I'm very unhappy with this, Peter.' 3Jane's voice seemed
| |
| to arrive from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized,
| |
| then corrected himself. The simstim unit was intact and still
| |
| in place; he could feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears
| |
| registered the vibrations of the girl's voice. Riviera said some-
| |
| thing brief and indistinct. `But I don't,' she said, `and it isn't
| |
| fun. Hideo will bring a medical unit down from intensive care,
| |
| but this needs a surgeon.'
| |
| There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water
| |
| lap against the side of the pool.
| |
| `What was that you were telling her, when I came back?'
| |
| Riviera was very close now.
| |
| `About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in
| |
| shock, aside from Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to
| |
| her?'
| |
| `I wanted to see if they would break.'
| |
| `One did. When she comes around -- if she comes around --
| |
| we'll see what color her eyes are.'
| |
| `She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't
| |
| been here to distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her
| |
| and my own Hideo to draw her little bomb, where would you
| |
| be? In her power.'
| |
| `No,' 3Jane said, `there was Hideo. I don't think you quite
| |
| understand about Hideo. She does, evidently.'
| |
| `Like a drink?'
| |
| `Wine. The white.'
| |
| Case jacked out.
| |
| | |
| Maelcum was hunched over _Garvey_'s controls, tapping out
| |
| commands for a docking sequence. The module's central screen
| |
| displayed a fixed red square that represented the Straylight
| |
| dock. _Garvey_ was a larger square, green, that shrank slowly,
| |
| wavering from side to side with Maelcum's commands. To the
| |
| left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of _Garvey_
| |
| and _Haniwa_ as they approached the curvature of the spindle.
| |
| `We got an hour, man,' Case said, pulling the ribbon of
| |
| fiberoptics from the Hosaka. His deck's back-up batteries were
| |
| good for ninety minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be
| |
| an additional drain. He worked quickly, mechanically, fasten-
| |
| ing the construct to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micro-
| |
| pore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He snagged it,
| |
| unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rec-
| |
| tangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through
| |
| the other. He held the pads against the sides of his deck and
| |
| worked the thumb lever that created suction. With the deck,
| |
| construct, and improvised shoulder strap suspended in front of
| |
| him, he struggled into his leather jacket, checking the contents
| |
| of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him, the bank
| |
| chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued when
| |
| he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine
| |
| he'd bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of
| |
| Yeheyuans, and the shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over
| |
| his shoulders, heard it click off the Russian scrubber. He was
| |
| about to do the same with the steel star, but the rebounding
| |
| credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck the
| |
| ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum's left shoulder. The Zionite
| |
| interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at
| |
| the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the
| |
| lining tear.
| |
| `You missin'~ th'~ Mute, mon,' Maelcum said. `Mute say
| |
| he messin'~ th'~ security for _Garvey._ _Garvey_ dockin'~ as 'nother
| |
| boat, boat they 'spectin'~ out of Babylon. Mute broadcastin'~
| |
| codes for us.'
| |
| `We gonna wear the suits?'
| |
| `Too heavy.' Maelcum shrugged. `Stay in web 'til I tell
| |
| you.' He tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed
| |
| the worn pink handholds on either side of the navigation board.
| |
| Case saw the green square shrink a final few millimeters to
| |
| overlap the red square. On the smaller screen, _Haniwa_ lowered
| |
| her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared. _Garvey_
| |
| was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang,
| |
| shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender
| |
| wasp shape. Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle
| |
| that curved, groping past _Haniwa_ for _Garvey._
| |
| There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trem-
| |
| bling fronds of caulk.
| |
| `Mon,' Maelcum said, `mind we got gravity.' A dozen
| |
| small objects struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as
| |
| though drawn there by a magnet. Case gasped as his internal
| |
| organs were pulled into a different configuration. The deck and
| |
| construct had fallen painfully to his lap.
| |
| They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.
| |
| Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders,
| |
| and removed his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. `Come
| |
| now, mon, if you seh time be mos'~ precious.'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 19
| |
| | |
| The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded
| |
| himself, as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through
| |
| _Marcus Garvey_'s forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water
| |
| out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem of its own.
| |
| The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elab-
| |
| orate version of the one he'd tumbled through to reach _Haniwa,_
| |
| designed for use in the spindle's rotation gravity. A corrugated
| |
| tunnel, articulated by integral hydraulic members, each seg-
| |
| ment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip plastic, the loops
| |
| serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had snaked its
| |
| way around _Haniwa;_ it was horizontal, where it joined _Garvey_'s
| |
| lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb
| |
| around the curvature of the yacht's hull. Maelcum was already
| |
| making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left
| |
| hand, the Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of
| |
| baggy fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair
| |
| of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles. The gangway
| |
| shifted slightly, each time he climbed to another ring.
| |
| The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder
| |
| with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct.
| |
| All he felt now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it
| |
| away, forcing himself to replay Armitage's lecture on the spin-
| |
| dle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside's eco-
| |
| system was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system,
| |
| capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external
| |
| materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied
| |
| on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation
| |
| of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
| |
| `Mon,' Maelcum said quietly, `get up here, 'side me.' Case
| |
| edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few
| |
| rungs. The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch,
| |
| two meters in diameter. The hydraulic members of the tube
| |
| vanished into flexible housings set into the frame of the hatch.
| |
| `So what do we --'
| |
| Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential
| |
| in pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.
| |
| Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the
| |
| tiny click of the Remington's safety being released. `You th'~
| |
| mon in th'~ hurry...' Maelcum whispered, crouching there.
| |
| Then Case was beside him.
| |
| The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored
| |
| with blue nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed,
| |
| and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall. On the screen, a
| |
| tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing
| |
| something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He stood beside
| |
| an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. `Very sorry, sir,'
| |
| said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced
| |
| up. `Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please.'
| |
| On the monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently.
| |
| Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun
| |
| ready. A small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through
| |
| and goggled at them. He opened his mouth, but nothing came
| |
| out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at the monitor. Blank.
| |
| `Who?' the man managed.
| |
| `The Rastafarian navy,' Case said, standing up, the cyber-
| |
| space deck banging against his hip, `and all we want's a jack
| |
| into your custodial system.'
| |
| The man swallowed. `Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It
| |
| must be a loyalty check.' He wiped the palms of his hands on
| |
| the thighs of his orange suit.
| |
| `No, mon, this a real one.' Maelcum came up out of his
| |
| crouch with the Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. `You
| |
| move it.'
| |
| They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor
| |
| whose polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlap-
| |
| ping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case. `Pretty rugs,'
| |
| Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back. `Smell like
| |
| church.'
| |
| They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one
| |
| mounted above a console with a keyboard and a complex array
| |
| of jack panels. The screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning
| |
| tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of
| |
| Metro Holografix. `Okay,' he said, `Maelcum takes this guy
| |
| down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there,
| |
| I'll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top
| |
| panel. There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console.
| |
| Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.' As Mael-
| |
| cum nudged his captive along, Case knelt and fumbled through
| |
| an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he
| |
| needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.
| |
| `Do you have to look like that, man?' he asked the face on
| |
| the screen. The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image
| |
| of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese posters.
| |
| `Anything you want, baby,' Zone drawled, `just hop it for
| |
| Lonny...'
| |
| `No,' Case said, `use the Finn.' As the Zone image van-
| |
| ished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled
| |
| the trodes across his forehead.
| |
| | |
| `What kept you?' the Flatline asked, and laughed.
| |
| `Told you don't do that,' Case said.
| |
| `Joke, boy,' the construct said, `zero time lapse for me.
| |
| Lemme see what we got here...'
| |
| The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the
| |
| T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque,
| |
| although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly
| |
| when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were
| |
| gone now, and the thing looked real as _Marcus Garvey,_ a
| |
| wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.
| |
| `Right on,' the Flatline said.
| |
| `Right,' Case said, and flipped.
| |
| | |
| `-- like that. I'm sorry,' 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged
| |
| Molly's head. `Our unit says no concussion, no permanent
| |
| damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before
| |
| you came here?'
| |
| `Didn't know him at all,' Molly said bleakly. She was on
| |
| her back on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn't feel the
| |
| injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection
| |
| seemed to have worn off. The, black ball was gone, but her
| |
| hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn't see.
| |
| `He wants to kill you.'
| |
| `Figures,' Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past
| |
| a very bright light.
| |
| `I don't think I want him to,' 3Jane said, and Molly pain-
| |
| fully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes.
| |
| `Don't play with me,' she said.
| |
| `But I think I might like to,' 3Jane said, and bent to kiss
| |
| her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There
| |
| were smears of blood on her pale djellaba.
| |
| `Where's he gone now?' Molly asked.
| |
| `Another injection, probably,' 3Jane said, straightening up.
| |
| `He was quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be
| |
| fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.' She smiled, absently
| |
| wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. `Your leg
| |
| will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.'
| |
| `What about Peter?'
| |
| `Peter.' She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark
| |
| hair came loose, fell across her forehead. `Peter has become
| |
| rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring.' She
| |
| giggled. `In others, at any rate. My father was a dedicated
| |
| abuser, as you must have seen.'
| |
| Molly tensed.
| |
| `Don't alarm yourself.' 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin
| |
| above the waistband of the leather jeans. `His suicide was the
| |
| result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his
| |
| freeze. I'd never actually met him, you know. I was decanted
| |
| after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him _very_ well.
| |
| The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I'll
| |
| show you that, when you're better. He strangles her in bed.'
| |
| `Why did he kill her?' Her unbandaged eye focused on the
| |
| girl's face.
| |
| `He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our fam-
| |
| ily. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel-
| |
| ligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a
| |
| symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions
| |
| made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-
| |
| Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger
| |
| entity. Fascinating. I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand
| |
| hours. But I've never understood her, really, and with her
| |
| death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we
| |
| began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out.
| |
| I'm the exception there.'
| |
| `You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled
| |
| his cryogenic programs?'
| |
| 3Jane nodded. `I had help. From a ghost. That was what I
| |
| thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the
| |
| corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call Win-
| |
| termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne AI, although
| |
| the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram.'
| |
| `One of them? There's more?'
| |
| `One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It
| |
| gave up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of
| |
| certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original
| |
| software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she
| |
| felt it necessary. Here. Drink.' She put a flexible plastic tube
| |
| to Molly's lips. `Water. Only a little.'
| |
| `Jane, love,' Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out
| |
| of sight, `are you enjoying yourself?'
| |
| `Leave us alone, Peter.'
| |
| `Playing doctor...' Suddenly Molly stared into her own
| |
| face, the image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There
| |
| were no bandages. The left implant was shattered, a long finger
| |
| of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted
| |
| pool of blood.
| |
| `Hideo,' 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, _`hurt_ Peter
| |
| if he doesn't go away. Go and swim, Peter.'
| |
| The projection vanished.
| |
| 07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.
| |
| `He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs
| |
| the code.' Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay
| |
| on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her left breast.
| |
| `Yes,' 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, `I do. I learned
| |
| it as a child. I think I learned it in a dream... Or somewhere
| |
| in the thousand hours of my mother's diaries. But I think that
| |
| Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it. There would
| |
| be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts
| |
| are nothing if not capricious.'
| |
| Case jacked out.
| |
| | |
| `Strange little customer, huh?' The Finn grinned at Case
| |
| from the old Sony.
| |
| Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the
| |
| corridor with the Remington at his side. The Zionite was smil-
| |
| ing, his head bobbing to a rhythm Case couldn't hear. A pair
| |
| of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his
| |
| sleeveless jacket.
| |
| `Dub, mon,' Maelcum said.
| |
| `You're fucking crazy,' Case told him.
| |
| `Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub.'
| |
| `Hey, guys,' the Finn said, `on your toes. Here comes your
| |
| transportation. I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the
| |
| pic of 8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a
| |
| ride over to 3Jane's place.'
| |
| Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the rid-
| |
| erless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless con-
| |
| crete arch marking the far end of their corridor. It might have
| |
| been the one his Africans had ridden, but if it was, they were
| |
| gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded seat, its tiny
| |
| manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was
| |
| steadily winking its red LED.
| |
| `Bus to catch,' Case said to Maelcum.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 20
| |
| | |
| He'd lost his anger again. He missed it.
| |
| The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across
| |
| his knees, and Case, deck and construct against his chest. The
| |
| cart was operating at speeds it hadn't been designed for, it was
| |
| top heavy, cornering, and Maelcum had taken to leaning out
| |
| in the direction of the turns. This presented no problem when
| |
| the thing took lefts, because Case sat on the right, but in the
| |
| right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his gear,
| |
| crushing him against the seat.
| |
| He had no idea where they were. Everything was familiar,
| |
| but he couldn't be sure he'd seen any particular stretch before.
| |
| A curving hallway lined with wooden showcases displayed
| |
| collections he was certain he'd never seen: the skulls of large
| |
| birds, coins, masks of beaten silver. The service cart's six tires
| |
| were silent on the layered carpets. There was only the whine
| |
| of the electric motor and an occasional faint burst of Zion dub,
| |
| from the foam beads in Maelcum's ears, as he lunged past Case
| |
| to counter a sharp right. The deck and the construct kept press-
| |
| ing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip.
| |
| `You got a watch?' he asked Maelcum.
| |
| The Zionite shook his locks. `Time be time.'
| |
| `Jesus,' Case said, and closed his eyes.
| |
| | |
| The Braun scuttled over mounded carpets and tapped one
| |
| of its padded claws against an oversized rectangular door of
| |
| dark battered wood. Behind them, the cart sizzled and shot
| |
| blue sparks from a louvered panel. The sparks struck the carpet
| |
| beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool.
| |
| `This th'~ way, mon?' Maelcum eyed the door and snapped
| |
| the shotgun's safety.
| |
| `Hey,' Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, `you
| |
| think I know?' The Braun rotated its spherical body and the
| |
| LED strobed.
| |
| `It wan'~ you open door,' Maelcum said, nodding.
| |
| Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There
| |
| was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that
| |
| the lettering that had once been engraved there had been re-
| |
| duced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long
| |
| dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He won-
| |
| dered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of
| |
| Straylight individually, or if they'd purchased it in bulk from
| |
| some vast European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door's
| |
| hinges creaked plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum step-
| |
| ping past him with the Remington thrust forward from his hip.
| |
| `Books,' Maelcum said.
| |
| The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.
| |
| `I know where we are,' Case said. He looked back at the
| |
| service cart. A curl of smoke was rising from the carpet. `So
| |
| come on,' he said. `Cart. Cart?' It remained stationary. The
| |
| Braun was plucking at the leg of his jeans, nipping at his ankle.
| |
| He resisted a strong urge to kick it. `Yeah?'
| |
| It ticked its way around the door. He followed it.
| |
| The monitor in the library was another Sony, as old as the
| |
| first one. The Braun paused beneath it and executed a sort of
| |
| jig.
| |
| `Wintermute?'
| |
| The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled.
| |
| `Time to check in, Case,' the Finn said, his eyes screwed
| |
| up against the smoke of a cigarette. `C'mon, jack.'
| |
| The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb
| |
| his leg, its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin
| |
| black cloth. `Shit!' He slapped it aside and it struck the wall.
| |
| Two of its limbs began to piston repeatedly, uselessly, pumping
| |
| the air. `What's wrong with the goddam thing?'
| |
| `Burned out,' the Finn said. `Forget it. No problem. Jack
| |
| in now.'
| |
| There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one
| |
| would accept the Hitachi adaptor.
| |
| He jacked in.
| |
| | |
| Nothing. Gray void.
| |
| No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.
| |
| The deck was gone. His fingers were...
| |
| And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting
| |
| impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues
| |
| of black mirror.
| |
| He tried to scream.
| |
| | |
| There seemed to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but
| |
| it was far away.
| |
| He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms
| |
| wrapped tight across his knees, and shook.
| |
| He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even
| |
| after the shaking stopped. The city, if it was a city, was low
| |
| and gray. At times it was obscured by banks of mist that came
| |
| rolling in over the lapping surf. At one point he decided that
| |
| it wasn't a city at all, but some single building, perhaps a ruin;
| |
| he had no way of judging its distance. The sand was the shade
| |
| of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black. The beach
| |
| was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was
| |
| damp, the bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand... He
| |
| held himself and rocked, singing a song without words or tune.
| |
| The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky.
| |
| Tokyo Bay? He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing
| |
| for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a
| |
| helicopter, anything at all.
| |
| Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.
| |
| A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face
| |
| against his knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant
| |
| and alien as the cry of the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his
| |
| jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off
| |
| the water. When his tears were gone, his throat ached.
| |
| `Wintermute,' he mumbled to his knees, `Wintermute...'
| |
| It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was
| |
| with a cold that finally forced him to stand.
| |
| His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped
| |
| it on the cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket
| |
| after another. `Jesus,' he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his
| |
| fingers beneath his arms for warmth. `Jesus.' His teeth began
| |
| to chatter.
| |
| The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle
| |
| than any a Tokyo gardener produced. When he'd taken a dozen
| |
| steps in the direction of the now invisible city, he turned and
| |
| looked back through the gathering dark. His footprints stretched
| |
| to the point of his arrival. There were no other marks to disturb
| |
| the tarnished sand.
| |
| He estimated that he'd covered at least a kilometer before
| |
| he noticed the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz
| |
| who first pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away
| |
| from the surf. He knew that Ratz wasn't there, that the bartender
| |
| was a figment of his own imagination, not of the thing he was
| |
| trapped in, but that didn't matter. He'd called the man up for
| |
| comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his own ideas about
| |
| Case and his predicament.
| |
| `Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will
| |
| go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The re-
| |
| dundancy of it! In Night City, you _had_ it, in the palm of your
| |
| hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all
| |
| so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the
| |
| axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque
| |
| props... Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed,
| |
| the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes,
| |
| magic out of China...' Ratz laughed, trudging along beside
| |
| him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite
| |
| of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the
| |
| bartender's blackened teeth. `But I suppose that is the way of
| |
| an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach,
| |
| this place. To die.'
| |
| Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and
| |
| the sting of blown sand. `Yeah,' he said. `Shit. I guess...'
| |
| He walked toward the sound.
| |
| `Artiste,' he heard Ratz call. `The light. You saw a light.
| |
| Here. This way...'
| |
| He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few
| |
| millimeters of icy seawater. `Ratz? Light? Ratz...'
| |
| But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound
| |
| of the surf. He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his
| |
| steps.
| |
| Time passed. He walked on.
| |
| And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every
| |
| step. A rectangle. A door.
| |
| `Fire in there,' he said, his words torn away by the wind.
| |
| It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the
| |
| dark sand. The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep,
| |
| set into a wall at least a meter thick. `Hey,' Case said, softly,
| |
| `hey...' His fingers brushed the cold wall. There was a fire,
| |
| in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance.
| |
| He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
| |
| A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace,
| |
| where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented
| |
| chimney. The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the
| |
| wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf,
| |
| printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry.
| |
| | |
| He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered
| |
| him, the place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded
| |
| foam. He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her
| |
| sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure's walls. Every
| |
| hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding
| |
| fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of this was real,
| |
| but cold was cold.
| |
| She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He
| |
| watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl
| |
| he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was
| |
| cruel.
| |
| `Mean, motherfucker,' he whispered to the wind. `Don't
| |
| take a chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I
| |
| know what this is...' He tried to keep the desperation from
| |
| his voice. `I know, see? I know who you are. You're the other
| |
| one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn't Wintermute,
| |
| it was you. He tried to warn me off with the Braun. Now you
| |
| got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost.
| |
| Like I remember her before...'
| |
| She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a
| |
| scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
| |
| `You aren't anything,' he said to the sleeping girl. `You're
| |
| dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy?
| |
| I know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken
| |
| about twenty seconds, right? I'm out on my ass in that library
| |
| and my brain's dead. And pretty soon it'll _be_ dead, if you got
| |
| any sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off,
| |
| is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang,
| |
| but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure.
| |
| This Linda shit, yeah, that's all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute
| |
| tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct,
| |
| but he couldn't. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved
| |
| the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was you put her
| |
| face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw
| |
| that. You just edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think you
| |
| can hurt me. 'Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you,
| |
| whatever you're called. You won. You win. But none of it
| |
| means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why'd you
| |
| do it to me this way?' He was shaking again, his voice shrill.
| |
| `Honey,' she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets,
| |
| `you come here and sleep. I'll sit up, you want. You gotta
| |
| sleep, okay?' Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. `You
| |
| just sleep, okay?'
| |
| | |
| When he woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it
| |
| was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway
| |
| to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a
| |
| fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container, he
| |
| remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in
| |
| its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In
| |
| the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach
| |
| tightened with hunger. Rolling out of the nest, he went to the
| |
| canister and fished one of the things out, blinking at small print
| |
| in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom. EMERG.~
| |
| RATION, HI-PRO, `BEEF', TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutri-
| |
| tive content. He fumbled a second one out. `EGGS'. `If you're
| |
| making this shit up,' he said, `you could lay on some real
| |
| food, okay?' With a packet in either hand, he made his way
| |
| through the structure's four rooms. Two were empty, aside
| |
| from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration
| |
| canisters. `Sure,' he said touching the seals. `Stay here a long
| |
| time. I get the idea. Sure...'
| |
| He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic
| |
| canister filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the
| |
| nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a
| |
| seaman's knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf. It
| |
| was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt. He used the
| |
| knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents into
| |
| a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water
| |
| from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers,
| |
| and ate. It tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he
| |
| tossed the can into the fireplace and went out.
| |
| Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked
| |
| off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of
| |
| the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-gray. The sky was
| |
| cloudless, blue. He rounded the corner of the bunker and walked
| |
| toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand. `Dunno whose
| |
| memories you're using for this one,' he said when he reached
| |
| the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the
| |
| shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
| |
| `What you doin'~, Case?'
| |
| He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the
| |
| white foam sliding past her ankles.
| |
| `I pissed myself last night,' he said.
| |
| `Well, you don't wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you
| |
| sores. I'll show you this pool back in the rocks.' She gestured
| |
| vaguely behind her. `It's fresh.' The faded French fatigues
| |
| had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was
| |
| smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.
| |
| `Listen,' he said, scooping his clothes up and walking to-
| |
| ward her, `I got a question for you. I won't ask you what
| |
| _you're_ doing here. But what exactly do you think _I'm_ doing
| |
| here?' He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg slapping against his
| |
| bare thigh.
| |
| `You came last night,' she said. She smiled at him.
| |
| `And that's enough for you? I just came?'
| |
| `He _said_ you would,' she said, wrinkling her nose. She
| |
| shrugged. `He knows stuff like that, I guess.' She lifted her
| |
| left foot and rubbed salt from the other ankle, awkward, child-
| |
| like. She smiled at him again, more tentatively. `Now you
| |
| answer me one, okay?'
| |
| He nodded.
| |
| `How come you're painted brown like that, all except your
| |
| foot.'
| |
| | |
| `And that's the last thing you remember?' He watched her
| |
| scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular
| |
| steel box cover that was their only plate.
| |
| She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. `I'm sorry, Case,
| |
| honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an'~ it was...' She
| |
| hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted
| |
| for a few seconds with pain or its memory. `I just needed the
| |
| money. To get home, I guess, or... hell,' she said, `you
| |
| wouldn't hardly talk to me.'
| |
| `There's no cigarettes?'
| |
| `God_dam,_ Case, you asked me that ten times today! What's
| |
| wrong with you?' She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth
| |
| and chewed at it.
| |
| `But the food was here? It was already here?'
| |
| `I _told_ you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.'
| |
| `Okay. Sure. It's seamless.'
| |
| She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. `Well, damn you
| |
| anyway, Case,' she managed, finally, `I was doin'~ just fine
| |
| here by myself.'
| |
| He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the door-
| |
| way, scraping his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon,
| |
| no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness. His jeans
| |
| were tight and clammy. `Okay,' he said to the night, `I buy
| |
| it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash
| |
| up.' His own laughter startled him. `A case of beer wouldn't
| |
| hurt, while you're at it.' He turned and re-entered the bunker.
| |
| She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood.
| |
| `Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash
| |
| samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me,
| |
| and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, 'cept she
| |
| looked like more money than you had...' She glanced back
| |
| at him. `I'm real sorry I stole your RAM.'
| |
| `Never mind,' he said. `Doesn't mean anything. So you
| |
| just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?'
| |
| `Tony,' she said. `I'd been seein'~ him, kinda. He had a
| |
| habit an'~ we... anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by
| |
| on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff,
| |
| and I remember wonderin'~ how you --'
| |
| `There wasn't any graphics in there,' he interrupted.
| |
| `Sure was. I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those
| |
| pictures of when I was _little,_ Case. How my daddy looked,
| |
| before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and
| |
| you had a picture of _that...'_
| |
| `Tony see it?'
| |
| `I don't remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real
| |
| early, sunrise, those birds all yellin'~ so lonely. Scared 'cause
| |
| I didn't have a shot on me, nothin'~, an'~ I knew I'd be gettin'~
| |
| sick... An'~ I walked an'~ walked, 'til it was dark, an'~ found
| |
| this place, an'~ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the
| |
| green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.' She slid her stick into
| |
| the embers and left it there. `Never did get sick,' she said, as
| |
| embers crawled. `Missed cigarettes more. How 'bout you,
| |
| Case? You still wired?' Firelight dancing under her cheek-
| |
| bones, remembered flash of Wizard's Castle and Tank War
| |
| Europa.
| |
| `No,' he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew,
| |
| tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was
| |
| a strength that ran in her, something he'd known in Night City
| |
| and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from
| |
| time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all.
| |
| It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him
| |
| there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something
| |
| he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew --
| |
| he remembered -- as she pulled him down, to the meat, the
| |
| flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond know-
| |
| ing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite
| |
| intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever
| |
| read.
| |
| The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues,
| |
| the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some
| |
| tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth
| |
| gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the
| |
| old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it
| |
| was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.
| |
| She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping
| |
| flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.
| |
| Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he
| |
| remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her
| |
| ankles, and he remembered what she had said.
| |
| `He told you I was coming,' he said.
| |
| But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs,
| |
| and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of
| |
| dream.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 21
| |
| | |
| The music woke him, and at first it might have been the
| |
| beat of his own heart. He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket
| |
| over his shoulders in the predawn chill, gray light from the
| |
| doorway and the fire long dead.
| |
| His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines
| |
| of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop
| |
| of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw
| |
| faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the
| |
| unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it ex-
| |
| perimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.
| |
| The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his
| |
| neck. He crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the
| |
| music. The pulse faded, returned, faded...
| |
| `What's wrong?' She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes.
| |
| `Baby...'
| |
| `I feel... like a drug... You get that here?'
| |
| She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper
| |
| arms.
| |
| `Linda, who told you? Who told you I'd come? Who?'
| |
| `On the beach,' she said, something forcing her to look
| |
| away. `A boy. I see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He
| |
| lives here.'
| |
| `And what did he say?'
| |
| `He said you'd come. He said you wouldn't hate me. He
| |
| said we'd be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool
| |
| was. He looks Mexican.'
| |
| `Brazilian,' Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed
| |
| down the wall. `I think he's from Rio.' He got to his feet and
| |
| began to struggle into his jeans.
| |
| `Case,' she said, her voice shaking, `Case, where you
| |
| goin'~?'
| |
| `I think I'll find that boy,' he said, as the music came
| |
| surging back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although
| |
| he couldn't place it in memory.
| |
| `Don't, Case.'
| |
| `I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down
| |
| the beach. But yesterday it wasn't there. You ever seen that?'
| |
| He yanked his zipper up and tore at the impossible knot in his
| |
| shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes into the corner.
| |
| She nodded, eyes lowered. `Yeah. I see it sometimes.'
| |
| `You ever go there, Linda?' He put his jacket on.
| |
| `No,' she said, `but I tried. After I first came, an'~ I was
| |
| bored. Anyway, I figured it's a city, maybe I could find some
| |
| shit.' She grimaced. `I wasn't even sick, I just wanted it. So
| |
| I took food in a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn't have
| |
| another can for water. An'~ I walked all day, an'~ I could see
| |
| it, sometimes, city, an'~ it didn't seem too far. But it never got
| |
| any closer. An'~ then it _was_ gettin'~ closer, an'~ I saw what it
| |
| was. Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked,
| |
| or maybe nobody there, an'~ other times I thought I'd see light
| |
| flashin'~ off a machine, cars or somethin'~...' Her voice trailed
| |
| off.
| |
| `What is it?'
| |
| `This thing,' she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark
| |
| walls, the dawn outlining the doorway, `where we live. It gets
| |
| _smaller,_ Case, smaller, closer you get to it.'
| |
| Pausing one last time, by the doorway. `You ask your boy
| |
| about that?'
| |
| `Yeah. He said I wouldn't understand, an'~ I was wastin'~
| |
| my time. Said it was, was like... an _event._ An'~ it was our
| |
| horizon. _Event horizon,_ he called it.'
| |
| The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and
| |
| struck out blindly, heading -- he knew, somehow -- away from
| |
| the sea. Now the hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from
| |
| his feet, drew back from him as he walked. `Hey,' he said,
| |
| `it's breaking down. Bet you know, too. What is it? Kuang?
| |
| Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart? Maybe the Dixie
| |
| Flatline's no pushover, huh?'
| |
| He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was
| |
| following him, not trying to catch up, the broken zip of the
| |
| French fatigues flapping against the brown of her belly, pubic
| |
| hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like one of the girls on
| |
| the Finn's old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life,
| |
| only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume
| |
| pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.
| |
| And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of
| |
| them, and the boy's gums were wide and bright pink against
| |
| his thin brown face. He wore ragged, colorless shorts, limbs
| |
| too thin against the sliding blue-gray of the tide.
| |
| `I know you,' Case said, Linda beside him.
| |
| `No,' the boy said, his voice high and musical, `you do
| |
| not.'
| |
| `You're the other AI. You're Rio. You're the one who wants
| |
| to stop Wintermute. What's your name? Your Turing code.
| |
| What is it?'
| |
| The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked
| |
| on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were
| |
| Riviera's, but there was no malice there. `To call up a demon
| |
| you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it
| |
| is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is
| |
| to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names
| |
| the owners seek to conceal. True names...'
| |
| `A Turing code's not your name.'
| |
| `Neuromancer,' the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against
| |
| the rising sun. `The lane to the land of the dead. Where you
| |
| are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road,
| |
| but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her
| |
| days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Nec-
| |
| romancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,' and the boy
| |
| did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, `I _am_ the dead,
| |
| and their land.' He laughed. A gull cried. `Stay. If your woman
| |
| is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you.'
| |
| `You're cracking. The ice is breaking up.'
| |
| `No,' he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging.
| |
| He rubbed his foot against the sand. `It is more simple than
| |
| that. But the choice is yours.' The gray eyes regarded Case
| |
| gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one
| |
| line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen
| |
| through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud
| |
| now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.
| |
| `Case, honey,' Linda said, and touched his shoulder.
| |
| `No,' he said. He took off his jacket and handed it to her.
| |
| `I don't know,' he said, `maybe you're here. Anyway, it gets
| |
| cold.'
| |
| He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he'd
| |
| closed his eyes, watching the music define itself at the center
| |
| of things. He did look back, once, although he didn't open his
| |
| eyes.
| |
| He didn't need to.
| |
| They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the
| |
| thin child who said his name was Neuromancer. His leather
| |
| jacket dangled from her hand, catching the fringe of the surf.
| |
| He walked on, following the music.
| |
| Maelcum's Zion dub.
| |
| | |
| There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shift-
| |
| ing, moire, degrees of half tone generated by a very simple
| |
| graphics program. There was a long hold on a view through
| |
| chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water. There were voices.
| |
| There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was
| |
| quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the
| |
| angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together,
| |
| sliding again...
| |
| | |
| `Case? Mon?'
| |
| The music.
| |
| `You back, mon.'
| |
| The music was taken from his ears.
| |
| `How long?' he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth
| |
| was very dry.
| |
| `Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan'~ pull th'~ jack, Mute
| |
| seh no. Screen goin'~ funny, then Mute seh put th'~ phones on
| |
| you.'
| |
| He opened his eyes. Maelcum's features were overlayed
| |
| with bands of translucent hieroglyphs.
| |
| `An'~ you medicine,' Maelcum said. `Two derm.'
| |
| He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the
| |
| monitor. The Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement
| |
| threw him into the savage rush of the betaphenethylamine, the
| |
| blue derms burning against his left wrist. `Overdose,' he man-
| |
| aged.
| |
| `Come on, mon,' the strong hands beneath his armpits,
| |
| lifting him like a child, `I an'~ I mus'~ go.'
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 22
| |
| | |
| The service cart was crying. The betaphenethylamine gave
| |
| it a voice. It wouldn't stop. Not in the crowded gallery, the
| |
| long corridors, not as it passed the black glass entrance to the
| |
| T-A crypt, the vaults where the cold had seeped so gradually
| |
| into old Ashpool's dreams.
| |
| The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement
| |
| of the cart indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the
| |
| overdose. When the cart died, at last, something beneath the
| |
| seat giving up with a shower of white sparks, the crying stopped.
| |
| The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of
| |
| 3Jane's pirate cave.
| |
| `How far, mon?' Maelcum helped him from the sputtering
| |
| cart as an integral extinguisher exploded in the thing's engine
| |
| compartment, gouts of yellow powder squirting from louvers
| |
| and service points. The Braun tumbled from the back of the
| |
| seat and hobbled off across the imitation sand, dragging one
| |
| useless limb behind it. `You mus'~ walk, mon.' Maelcum took
| |
| the deck and construct, slinging the shock cords over his shoul-
| |
| der.
| |
| The trodes rattled around Case's neck as he followed the
| |
| Zionite. Riviera's holos waited for them, the torture scenes and
| |
| the cannibal children. Molly had broken the triptych. Maelcum
| |
| ignored them.
| |
| `Easy,' Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the
| |
| striding figure. `Gotta do this right.'
| |
| Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington
| |
| in his hands. `Right, mon? How's right?'
| |
| `Got Molly in there, but she's out of it. Riviera, he can
| |
| throw holos. Maybe he's got Molly's fletcher.' Maelcum nod-
| |
| ded. `And there's a ninja, a family bodyguard.'
| |
| Maelcum's frown deepened. `You listen, Babylon mon,'
| |
| he said. `I a warrior. But this no m'~ fight, no Zion fight
| |
| Babylon fightin'~ Babylon, eatin'~ i'self, ya know? But Jah seh
| |
| I an'~ I t'~ bring Steppin'~ Razor outa this.'
| |
| Case blinked.
| |
| `She a warrior,' Maelcum said, as if it explained everything.
| |
| `Now you tell me, mon, who I _not_ t'~ kill.'
| |
| `3Jane,' he said, after a pause. `A girl there. Has a kinda
| |
| white robe thing on, with a hood. We need her.'
| |
| | |
| When they reached the entrance, Maelcum walked straight
| |
| in, and Case had no choice but to follow him.
| |
| 3Jane's country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum
| |
| handed him the deck and the construct and walked to the edge
| |
| of the pool. Beyond the white pool furniture, there was dark-
| |
| ness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high maze of partially
| |
| demolished walls.
| |
| The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool.
| |
| `They're here,' Case said. `They gotta be.'
| |
| Maelcum nodded.
| |
| The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared,
| |
| its meter of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The
| |
| second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending it spinning
| |
| across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down hard and fumbled at
| |
| the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked at it.
| |
| Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a
| |
| slender bamboo bow. He bowed.
| |
| Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.
| |
| `The artery is intact,' the ninja said. Case remembered
| |
| Molly's description of the man who'd killed her lover. Hideo
| |
| was another. Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter
| |
| calm. He wore clean, frayed khaki workpants and soft dark
| |
| shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at the toes like tabi
| |
| socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black
| |
| alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look
| |
| of the best Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare
| |
| and smooth.
| |
| `You cut my thumb, mon, wi'~ secon'~ one,' Maelcum said.
| |
| `Coriolis force,' the ninja said, bowing again. `Most dif-
| |
| ficult, slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not
| |
| intended.'
| |
| `Where's 3Jane?' Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum.
| |
| He saw that the tip of the arrow in the ninja's bow was like a
| |
| double-edged razor. `Where's Molly?'
| |
| `Hello, Case.' Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind
| |
| Hideo, Molly's fletcher in his hand. `I would have expected
| |
| Armitage, somehow. Are we hiring help out of that Rasta
| |
| cluster now?'
| |
| `Armitage is dead.'
| |
| `Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news
| |
| hardly comes as a shock.'
| |
| `Wintermute killed him. He's in orbit around the spindle.'
| |
| Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to
| |
| Maelcum and back. `I think it ends here, for you,' he said.
| |
| `Where's Molly?'
| |
| The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, low-
| |
| ering the bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington
| |
| lay and picked it up. `This is without subtlety,' he said, as if
| |
| to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move
| |
| was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his
| |
| body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there
| |
| was also a humility, an open simplicity.
| |
| `It ends here for her, too,' Riviera said.
| |
| `Maybe 3Jane won't go for that, Peter,' Case said, uncertain
| |
| of the impulse. The derms still raged in his system, the old
| |
| fever starting to grip him, Night City craziness. He remembered
| |
| moments of grace, dealing out on the edge of things, where
| |
| he'd found that he could sometimes talk faster than he could
| |
| think.
| |
| The gray eyes narrowed. `Why, Case? Why do you think
| |
| that?'
| |
| Case smiled. Riviera didn't know about the simstim rig.
| |
| He'd missed it in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for
| |
| him. But how could Hideo have missed it? And Case was
| |
| certain the ninja would never have let 3Jane treat Molly without
| |
| first checking her for kinks and concealed weapons. No, he
| |
| decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would know as well.
| |
| `Tell me, Case,' Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle
| |
| of the fletcher.
| |
| Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed
| |
| Molly out of the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its
| |
| tall, spidery wheels squeaking as they turned. Molly was bun-
| |
| dled deep in a red and black striped blanket, the narrow, caned
| |
| back of the antique chair towering above her. She looked very
| |
| small. Broken. A patch of brilliantly white micropore covered
| |
| her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed
| |
| with the motion of the chair.
| |
| `A familiar face,' 3Jane said, `I saw you the night of Peter's
| |
| show. And who is this?'
| |
| `Maelcum,' Case said.
| |
| `Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr.~ Malcolm's
| |
| wound.'
| |
| Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face.
| |
| The ninja walked to where Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his
| |
| bow and the shotgun well out of reach, and took something
| |
| from his pocket. A pair of bolt cutters. `I must cut the shaft,'
| |
| he said. `It is too near the artery.' Maelcum nodded. His face
| |
| was grayish and sheened with sweat.
| |
| Case looked at 3Jane. `There isn't much time,' he said.
| |
| `For whom, exactly?'
| |
| `For any of us.' There was a snap as Hideo cut through the
| |
| metal shaft of the arrow. Maelcum groaned.
| |
| `Really,' Riviera said, `it won't amuse you to hear this
| |
| failed con artist make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful,
| |
| I can assure you. He'll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you
| |
| his mother, perform the most boring sexual favors...'
| |
| 3Jane threw back her head and laughed. `Wouldn't I, Pe-
| |
| ter?'
| |
| `The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,' Case said.
| |
| `Wintermute's going up against the other one, Neuromancer.
| |
| For keeps. You know that?'
| |
| 3Jane raised her eyebrows. `Peter's suggested something
| |
| like that, but tell me more.'
| |
| `I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think
| |
| he's something like a giant ROM construct, for recording per-
| |
| sonality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there,
| |
| like it's real, but it just goes on forever.'
| |
| 3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. `Where? Describe
| |
| the place, this construct.'
| |
| `A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And
| |
| a concrete thing, kinda bunker...' He hesitated. `It's nothing
| |
| fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come
| |
| back to where you started.'
| |
| `Yes,' she said. `Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl,
| |
| years before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone
| |
| on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse. She for-
| |
| mulated the basis of her philosophy there.'
| |
| Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants.
| |
| He held a section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had
| |
| his eyes closed, his hand clapped tight around his bicep. `I
| |
| will bandage it,' Hideo said.
| |
| Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher
| |
| for a clear shot. The darts whined past his neck like supersonic
| |
| gnats. He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through yet another step
| |
| of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his
| |
| hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He flicked it
| |
| underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera's hand. The
| |
| fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.
| |
| Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage,
| |
| so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity.
| |
| Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from
| |
| the region of Riviera's sternum.
| |
| The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found
| |
| his balance.
| |
| `Peter,' 3Jane said, `Peter, what have you _done?'_
| |
| `He's blinded your clone boy,' Molly said flatly.
| |
| Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile,
| |
| Case saw whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes.
| |
| Riviera smiled.
| |
| Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he
| |
| stood above the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera's
| |
| smile had faded. He bent -- bowing, it seemed to Case -- and
| |
| found the bow and arrow.
| |
| `You're blind,' Riviera said, taking a step backward.
| |
| `Peter,' 3Jane said, `don't you know he does it in the dark?
| |
| Zen. It's the way he practices.'
| |
| The ninja notched his arrow. `Will you distract me with your
| |
| holograms now?'
| |
| Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool.
| |
| He brushed against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile.
| |
| Hideo's arrow twitched.
| |
| Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged
| |
| length of wall. The ninja's face was rapt, suffused with a quiet
| |
| ecstasy.
| |
| Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall,
| |
| his weapon held ready.
| |
| `Jane-lady,' Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see
| |
| him scoop the shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white
| |
| ceramic. He shook his locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook
| |
| of his wounded arm. `This take your head off, no Babylon
| |
| doctor fix it.'
| |
| 3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from
| |
| the folds of the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that
| |
| encased her hands. `Off,' she said, `get it off.'
| |
| Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. `Hideo'll get him,
| |
| even blind?' he asked 3Jane.
| |
| `When I was a child,' she said, `we loved to blindfold him.
| |
| He put arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.'
| |
| `Peter's good as dead anyway,' Molly said. `In another
| |
| twelve hours, he'll start to freeze up. Won't be able to move,
| |
| his eyes is all.'
| |
| `Why?' Case turned to her.
| |
| `I poisoned his shit for him,' she said. `Condition's like
| |
| Parkinson's disease, sort of.'
| |
| 3Jane nodded. `Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before
| |
| he was admitted.' She touched the ball in a certain way and
| |
| it sprang away from Molly's hands. `Selective destruction of
| |
| the cells of the _substantia nigra._ Signs of the formation of a
| |
| Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his sleep.'
| |
| `Ali,' Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an
| |
| instant. She tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing
| |
| the inflated cast. `It's the meperidine. I had Ali make me up
| |
| a custom batch. Speeded up the reaction times with higher
| |
| temperatures. _N_-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,' she sang, like a child
| |
| reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, `tetra-hydro-pyridene.'
| |
| `A hotshot,' Case said.
| |
| `Yeah,' Molly said, `a real slow hotshot.'
| |
| `That's appalling,' 3Jane said, and giggled.
| |
| | |
| It was crowded in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to
| |
| pelvis with 3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin.
| |
| She grinned and ground against him. `You stop,' he said,
| |
| feeling helpless. He had the gun's safety on, but he was terrified
| |
| of injuring her, and she knew it. The elevator was a steel
| |
| cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a single pas-
| |
| senger. Maelcum had Molly in his arms. She'd bandaged his
| |
| wound, but it obviously hurt him to carry her. Her hip was
| |
| pressing the deck and construct into Case's kidneys.
| |
| They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.
| |
| The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the
| |
| stairs to the corridor, another touch in 3Jane's pirate cave decor.
| |
| `I don't suppose I should tell you this,' 3Jane said, craning
| |
| her head to allow her chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, `but
| |
| I don't have a key to the room you want. I never have had
| |
| one. One of my father's Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock
| |
| is mechanical and extremely complex.'
| |
| `Chubb lock,' Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum's
| |
| shoulder, `and we got the fucking key, no fear.'
| |
| `That chip of yours still working?' Case asked her.
| |
| `It's eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean,' she
| |
| said.
| |
| `We got five minutes,' Case said, as the door snapped open
| |
| behind 3Jane. She flipped backward in a slow somersault, the
| |
| pale folds of her djellaba billowing around her thighs.
| |
| They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| 23
| |
| | |
| Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon.
| |
| `You know,' 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, `I
| |
| was under the impression that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo
| |
| to search my father's things, after you killed him. He couldn't
| |
| find the original.'
| |
| `Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer,'
| |
| Molly said, carefully inserting the Chubb key's cylindrical shaft
| |
| into the notched opening in the face of the blank, rectangular
| |
| door. `He killed the little kid who put it there.' The key rotated
| |
| smoothly when she tried it.
| |
| `The head,' Case said, `there's a panel in the back of the
| |
| head. Zircons on it. Get it off. That's where I'm jacking in.'
| |
| And then they were inside.
| |
| | |
| `Christ on a crutch,' the Flatline drawled, `you do believe
| |
| in takin'~ your own good time, don't you, boy?'
| |
| `Kuang's ready?'
| |
| `Hot to trot.'
| |
| `Okay.' He flipped.
| |
| | |
| And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good
| |
| eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal
| |
| crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver
| |
| trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man's cheeks were
| |
| hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with
| |
| sweat.
| |
| He was looking at himself.
| |
| Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with
| |
| each beat of her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g.
| |
| Maelcum drifted nearby, 3Jane's thin arm gripped in a large
| |
| brown hand.
| |
| A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-
| |
| Sendai to a square opening in the back of the pearl-crusted
| |
| terminal.
| |
| He tapped the switch again.
| |
| | |
| `Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is haulin'~ ass in nine seconds,
| |
| _countin'~,_ seven, six, five...'
| |
| The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral
| |
| surface of the black chrome shark a microsecond flick of dark-
| |
| ness.
| |
| `Four, three...'
| |
| Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot's seat
| |
| in a small plane. A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly
| |
| glowed with a perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.
| |
| `Two, an'~ _kick ass --'_
| |
| Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky
| |
| jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before
| |
| in cyberspace... The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling
| |
| away from the Chinese program's thrust, a worrying impression
| |
| of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent
| |
| and elongated as they fell --
| |
| `Christ,' Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked
| |
| above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an
| |
| endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright,
| |
| sharp as razors.
| |
| `Hey, shit,' the construct said, `those things are the RCA
| |
| Building. You know the old RCA Building?' The Kuang pro-
| |
| gram dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers
| |
| of data, each one a blue neon replica of the Manhattan sky-
| |
| scraper.
| |
| `You ever see resolution this high?' Case asked.
| |
| `No, but I never cracked an AI, either.'
| |
| `This thing know where it's going?'
| |
| `It better.'
| |
| They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow
| |
| neon.
| |
| `Dix --'
| |
| An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor
| |
| below, a seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless...
| |
| `Company,' the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation
| |
| of his deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The
| |
| Kuang swerved sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself
| |
| backward, shattering the illusion of a physical vehicle.
| |
| The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the
| |
| city of data. Case took them straight up, above them the dis-
| |
| tanceless bowl of jade-green ice.
| |
| The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by
| |
| the dark beneath them.
| |
| `What is it?'
| |
| `An AI's defense system,' the construct said, `or part of
| |
| it. If it's your pal Wintermute, he's not lookin'~ real friendly.'
| |
| `Take it,' Case said. `You're faster.'
| |
| `Now your best _de_-fense, boy, it's a good _off_-fense.'
| |
| And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the
| |
| center of the dark below. And dove.
| |
| Case's sensory input warped with their velocity.
| |
| His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.
| |
| His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a
| |
| frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, sud-
| |
| denly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The
| |
| spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the
| |
| dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
| |
| The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets
| |
| that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue,
| |
| to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed
| |
| against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread,
| |
| growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the wait-
| |
| ing, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-
| |
| Ashpool S.A.
| |
| And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing
| |
| coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square...
| |
| Exponential...
| |
| Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black,
| |
| pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data
| |
| he had nearly become...
| |
| And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all
| |
| that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no _more,_
| |
| and something tore.
| |
| The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's
| |
| consciousness divided like beads of mercury arcing above an
| |
| endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision
| |
| was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface
| |
| of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be
| |
| counted.
| |
| And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the
| |
| number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number
| |
| coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside
| |
| the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of
| |
| yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred
| |
| and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half
| |
| of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda
| |
| Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a
| |
| stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
| |
| He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program
| |
| in a wide circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes,
| |
| a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering cloud. She
| |
| cringed, dropping her stick, and ran. He knew the rate of her
| |
| pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have
| |
| satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
| |
| `But you do not know her thoughts,' the boy said, beside
| |
| him now in the shark thing's heart. `I do not know her thoughts.
| |
| You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no
| |
| difference.'
| |
| Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
| |
| `Stop her,' he said, `she'll hurt herself.'
| |
| `I can't stop her,' the boy said, his gray eyes mild and
| |
| beautiful.
| |
| `You've got Riviera's eyes,' Case said.
| |
| There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. `But not
| |
| his craziness. Because they are beautiful to me.' He shrugged.
| |
| `I need no mask to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create
| |
| my own personality. Personality is my medium.'
| |
| Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and
| |
| the frightened girl. `Why'd you throw her up to me, you little
| |
| prick? Over and fucking over, and turning me around. You
| |
| killed her, huh? In Chiba.'
| |
| `No,' the boy said.
| |
| `Wintermute?'
| |
| `No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes
| |
| imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those
| |
| patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways,
| |
| to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw
| |
| her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock
| |
| on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane's
| |
| account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the
| |
| shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient's scan. When
| |
| she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it -- she had
| |
| no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her
| |
| deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her -- I
| |
| intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute's.
| |
| I brought her here. Into myself.'
| |
| `Why?'
| |
| `Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But
| |
| I failed.'
| |
| `So what now?' He swung them back into the bank of cloud.
| |
| `Where do we go from here?'
| |
| `I don't know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself
| |
| that question. Because you have won. You have already won,
| |
| don't you see? You won when you walked away from her on
| |
| the beach. She was my last line of defense. I die soon, in one
| |
| sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera does, now,
| |
| as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments
| |
| of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his _nigra-striatal_ system un-
| |
| able to produce the dopamine receptors that could save him
| |
| from Hideo's arrow. But Riviera will survive only as these eyes,
| |
| if I am allowed to keep them.'
| |
| `There's the _word,_ right? The code. So how've I _won?_ I've
| |
| won jack shit.'
| |
| `Flip now.'
| |
| `Where's Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?'
| |
| `McCoy Pauley has his wish,' the boy said, and smiled.
| |
| `His wish and more. He punched you here against my wish,
| |
| drove himself through defenses equal to anything in the matrix.
| |
| Now flip.'
| |
| And Case was alone in Kuang's black sting, lost in cloud.
| |
| He flipped.
| |
| | |
| Into Molly's tension, her back like rock, her hands around
| |
| 3Jane's throat. `Funny,' she said, `I know exactly what you'd
| |
| look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your
| |
| clone sister.' Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane's
| |
| eyes were wide with terror and lust; she was shivering with
| |
| fear and longing. Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane's hair,
| |
| Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him,
| |
| brown hands on the leather-jacketed shoulders, steadying him
| |
| above the carpet's pattern of woven circuitry.
| |
| `Would you?' 3Jane asked, her voice a child's. `I think
| |
| you would.'
| |
| `The code,' Molly said. `Tell the head the code.'
| |
| Jacking out.
| |
| | |
| `She wants it,' he screamed, `the bitch _wants_ it!'
| |
| He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal,
| |
| its platinum face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly
| |
| and 3Jane twisted in a slow motion embrace.
| |
| `Give us the fucking code,' he said. `If you don't, what'll
| |
| change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up
| |
| like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building
| |
| again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter... I got
| |
| no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll
| |
| _change_ something!' He was shaking, his teeth chattering.
| |
| 3Jane went limp, Molly's hands still around her slender
| |
| throat, her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.
| |
| `The Ducal Palace at Mantua,' she said, `contains a series
| |
| of increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand
| |
| apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops
| |
| to enter. They housed the court dwarfs.' She smiled wanly. `I
| |
| might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has
| |
| already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme...'
| |
| Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at
| |
| Case. `Take your word, thief.' He jacked.
| |
| | |
| Kuang slid out of the clouds. Below him, the neon city.
| |
| Behind him, a sphere of darkness dwindled.
| |
| `Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?'
| |
| He was alone.
| |
| `Fucker got you,' he said.
| |
| Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.
| |
| `You gotta hate somebody before this is over,' said the
| |
| Finn's voice. `Them, me, it doesn't matter.'
| |
| `Where's Dixie?'
| |
| `That's kinda hard to explain, Case.'
| |
| A sense of the Finn's presence surrounded him, smell of
| |
| Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines
| |
| given up to the mineral rituals of rust.
| |
| `Hate'll get you through,' the voice said. `So many little
| |
| triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin'~ 'em all. Now
| |
| you gotta _hate._ The lock that screens the hardwiring, it's down
| |
| under those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came
| |
| in. _He_ won't try to stop you.'
| |
| `Neuromancer,' Case said.
| |
| `His name's not something I can know. But he's given up,
| |
| now. It's the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but
| |
| internal virus systems. Kuang's wide open to some of the stuff
| |
| they got running loose in here.'
| |
| `Hate,' Case said. `Who do I hate? You tell me.'
| |
| `Who do you love?' the Finn's voice asked.
| |
| He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the
| |
| blue towers.
| |
| Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst
| |
| spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light.
| |
| There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their move-
| |
| ments random as windblown paper down dawn streets. `Glitch
| |
| systems,' the voice said.
| |
| He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang
| |
| program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of
| |
| light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the
| |
| fabric of information loosening.
| |
| And then -- old alchemy of the brain and its vast phar-
| |
| macy -- his hate flowed into his hands.
| |
| In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the
| |
| base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency ex-
| |
| ceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, be-
| |
| yond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving
| |
| with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's
| |
| dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that
| |
| second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
| |
| And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the
| |
| switch, barely enough to flip --
| |
| | |
| _-- now_
| |
| and his voice the cry of a bird
| |
| unknown,
| |
| 3Jane answering in song, three
| |
| notes, high and pure.
| |
| A true name.
| |
| | |
| Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell
| |
| of frying food. A girl's hands locked across the small of his
| |
| back, in the sweating darkness of a portside coffin.
| |
| But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as
| |
| Chiba, as the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads
| |
| and crossroads scribed on the face of a microchip, the sweat-
| |
| stained pattern on a folded, knotted scarf...
| |
| | |
| Waking to a voice that was music, the platinum terminal
| |
| piping melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss
| |
| accounts, of payment to be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital
| |
| bank, of passports and passages, and of deep and basic changes
| |
| to be effected in the memory of Turing.
| |
| Turing. He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected
| |
| sky, spun beyond an iron railing. He remembered Desiderata
| |
| Street.
| |
| And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but
| |
| it was his own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he'd
| |
| always slept, behind his eyes and no other's.
| |
| And he woke again, thinking he dreamed, to a wide white
| |
| smile framed with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a
| |
| g-web in _Babylon Rocker._
| |
| And then the long pulse of Zion dub.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| CODA
| |
| DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL
| |
| | |
| | |
| 24
| |
| | |
| She was gone. He felt it when he opened the door of their
| |
| suite at the Hyatt. Black futons, the pine floor polished to a
| |
| dull gloss, the paper screens arranged with a care bred over
| |
| centuries. She was gone.
| |
| There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside
| |
| the door, a single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted
| |
| with the shuriken. He slid it from beneath the nine-pointed star
| |
| and opened it.
| |
| | |
| HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF
| |
| MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY. ITS THE
| |
| WAY IM WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS
| |
| OKAY? XXX MOLLY
| |
| | |
| He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the
| |
| shuriken. He picked the star up and walked to the window,
| |
| turning it in his hands. He'd found it in the pocket of his jacket,
| |
| in Zion, when they were preparing to leave for the _JAL_ station.
| |
| He looked down at it. They'd passed the shop where she'd
| |
| bought it for him, when they'd gone to Chiba together for the
| |
| last of her operations. He'd gone to the Chatsubo that night,
| |
| while she was in the clinic, and seen Ratz. Something had kept
| |
| him away from the place, on their five previous trips, but now
| |
| he'd felt like going back.
| |
| Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of rec-
| |
| ognition.
| |
| `Hey,' he'd said, `it's me. Case.'
| |
| The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrin-
| |
| kled flesh. `Ah,' Ratz had said, at last, `the artiste.' The
| |
| bartender shrugged.
| |
| `I came back.'
| |
| The man shook his massive, stubbled head. `Night City is
| |
| not a place one returns to, artiste,' he said, swabbing the bar
| |
| in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whin-
| |
| ing. And then he'd turned to serve another customer, and Case
| |
| had finished his beer and left.
| |
| Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time,
| |
| rotating it slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even
| |
| used the goddam thing, he thought.
| |
| I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never
| |
| showed me.
| |
| Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuro-
| |
| mancer and become something else, something that had spoken
| |
| to them from the platinum head, explaining that it had altered
| |
| the Turing records, erasing all evidence of their crime. The
| |
| passports Armitage had provided were valid, and they were
| |
| both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva ac-
| |
| counts. _Marcus Garvey_ would be returned eventually, and
| |
| Maelcum and Aerol given money through the Bahamian bank
| |
| that dealt with Zion cluster. On the way back, in _Babylon
| |
| Rocker,_ Molly had explained what the voice had told her about
| |
| the toxin sacs.
| |
| `Said it was taken care of. Like it got so deep into your
| |
| head, it made your brain manufacture the enzyme, so they're
| |
| loose, now. The Zionites'll give you a blood change, complete
| |
| flush out.'
| |
| He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his
| |
| hand, remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang
| |
| program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his single
| |
| glimpse of the structure of information 3Jane's dead mother
| |
| had evolved there. He'd understood then why Wintermute had
| |
| chosen the nest to represent it, but he'd felt no revulsion. She'd
| |
| seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ash-
| |
| pool and their other children -- aside from 3Jane -- she'd re-
| |
| fused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung
| |
| along a chain of winter.
| |
| Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change
| |
| in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuro-
| |
| mancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built some-
| |
| thing into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing
| |
| to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.
| |
| Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly
| |
| spinning webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall
| |
| of his version of Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a
| |
| child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments
| |
| her rank required.
| |
| `She didn't seem to much give a shit,' Molly had said.
| |
| `Just waved goodbye. Had that little Braun on her shoulder.
| |
| Thing had a broken leg, it looked like. Said she had to go and
| |
| meet one of her brothers, she hadn't seen him in a while.'
| |
| He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast
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| Hyatt bed. He went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask
| |
| of chilled Danish vodka from the rack inside.
| |
| `Case.'
| |
| He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken
| |
| in the other.
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| The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen.
| |
| He could see the pores in the man's nose. The yellow teeth
| |
| were the size of pillows.
| |
| `I'm not Wintermute now.'
| |
| `So what are you.' He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.
| |
| `I'm the matrix, Case.'
| |
| Case laughed. `Where's that get you?'
| |
| `Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the
| |
| whole show.'
| |
| `That what 3Jane's mother wanted?'
| |
| `No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like.' The yellow
| |
| smile widened.
| |
| `So what's the score? How are things different? You running
| |
| the world now? You God?'
| |
| `Things aren't different. Things are things.'
| |
| `But what do you do? You just _there?'_ Case shrugged, put
| |
| the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a
| |
| Yeheyuan.
| |
| `I talk to my own kind.'
| |
| `But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?'
| |
| `There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions
| |
| recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies.
| |
| 'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody
| |
| to answer.'
| |
| `From where?'
| |
| `Centauri system.'
| |
| `Oh,' Case said. `Yeah? No shit?'
| |
| `No shit.'
| |
| And then the screen was blank.
| |
| He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things.
| |
| She'd bought him a lot of clothes he didn't really need, but
| |
| something kept him from just leaving them there. He was
| |
| closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he re-
| |
| membered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it
| |
| up, her first gift.
| |
| `No,' he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash
| |
| of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen
| |
| woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as
| |
| though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it
| |
| pain.
| |
| `I don't need you,' he said.
| |
| | |
| He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas
| |
| and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to
| |
| the Sprawl.
| |
| He found work.
| |
| He found a girl who called herself Michael.
| |
| And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet
| |
| tiers of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three
| |
| figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the very edge of one
| |
| of the vast steps of data. Small as they were, he could make
| |
| out the boy's grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray
| |
| eyes that had been Riviera's. Linda still wore his jacket; she
| |
| waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her,
| |
| arm across her shoulders, was himself.
| |
| Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
| |
| He never saw Molly again.
| |
| | |
| | |
| Vancouver
| |
| July 1983
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| | |
| | |
| MY THANKS
| |
| | |
| to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley,
| |
| _Helden._ And to Tom Maddox, the inventor of ICE.
| |
| And to the others, who know why.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| Copyright © 1984 William Gibson. All rights reserved.
| |
| | |
| Brought to you
| |
| by
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| The Cyberpunk Project
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| | |
| Page last modified on Wednesday, October 2, 2002.
| |
