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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
unfaltering 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 rectilinear 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 designers
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 artificial 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 Armitage.
"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 direction." 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 narrowed, 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 Hosaka 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, busying 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, advises, under
coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven
penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai
Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatable 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 commerical 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 Al. 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 citizenship. 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 Al's are
concerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hardwired
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 Al 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
minute, 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 Al ever built has an electromagnetic 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 Al." 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 triangular 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
between 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 prevented
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 Cibachromes 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 your 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 tightly 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 sadass 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 temperfoam,
"that's what's so unnatural about it."
"Case, what's wrong with you?" Armitage said, as the waiter was
seating them at his table in the Vingtieme Siecle. 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 effects.
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 betaphenethylamine made it
taste like iodine.
The lights dimmed.
"Le Restaurant Vingtieme Siecle," said a disembodied voice with a
pronounced Sprawl accent, "proudly presents the holographic 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 nothing.
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 fingernails 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 première here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane
Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool." A wave of polite applause. 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 question 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 Mollyimage 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 remembered 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 Vingtieme Siecle.
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 balustrade; 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 Frenchmen 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
The, 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 exhaust 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 fragments 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 elevator 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 cutout. 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 soundproof. 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 gotten 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. "Wintermute'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 compatible. So the worktime started bleeding
in, and I could remember 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 contract 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."
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, Emergency. 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 confusion 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,
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
unfaltering 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 rectilinear 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 designers
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 artificial 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 Armitage.
"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 direction." 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 narrowed, 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 Hosaka 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, busying 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, advises, under
coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven
penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai
Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatable 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 commerical 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 Al. 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 citizenship. 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 Al's are
concerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hardwired
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 Al 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
minute, 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 Al ever built has an electromagnetic 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 Al." 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 triangular 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
between 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 prevented
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 Cibachromes 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 your 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 tightly 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 sadass 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 temperfoam,
"that's what's so unnatural about it."
"Case, what's wrong with you?" Armitage said, as the waiter was
seating them at his table in the Vingtieme Siecle. 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 effects.
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 betaphenethylamine made it
taste like iodine.
The lights dimmed.
"Le Restaurant Vingtieme Siecle," said a disembodied voice with a
pronounced Sprawl accent, "proudly presents the holographic 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 nothing.
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 fingernails 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 première here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane
Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool." A wave of polite applause. 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 question 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 Mollyimage 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 remembered 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 Vingtieme Siecle.
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 balustrade; 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 Frenchmen 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
The, 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 exhaust 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 fragments 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 elevator 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 cutout. 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 soundproof. 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 gotten 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. "Wintermute'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 compatible. So the worktime started bleeding
in, and I could remember 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 contract 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."
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, Emergency. 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 confusion 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,