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radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enormous 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 creamiest 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 bubble 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-circuited 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. Sandstorms 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
monochrome, 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 Desiderata 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
croissants 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."
"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 unable 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 intelligence." 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 Michele, 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. Michele 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 Moderns 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. Michele 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 binoculars. "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," Michele 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 Michele 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 binoculars into his
shorts pocket. "We were delighted."
"Chance to work on your tan?"
"You know what we mean," Michele 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," Michele 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 construct
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, probably, 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 Michele fell into character, chattering brightly in French.
Pierre came behind. Michele kept the muzzle 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. Michele
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. Michele 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 Michele 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 motherfucker, you
killed 'em all. . ."
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 before, 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 sunlight. 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 HANIWA in crisp
white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Japanese.
"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
dreadlocks 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 concentration. 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 Al'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 Manhattan, 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 important?"
Case shook his head. "Because"-- and the nest, somehow, was gone--
&lddquo;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 flapping. "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 movement, 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
rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass,
rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, 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 impossible angles,
tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.
"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 listening? 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 disinterested 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 accounts 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 candelabrum 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 unfocused 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
remembered 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 perfumed, 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
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 creamiest 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 bubble 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-circuited 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. Sandstorms 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
monochrome, 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 Desiderata 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
croissants 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."
"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 unable 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 intelligence." 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 Michele, 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. Michele 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 Moderns 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. Michele 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 binoculars. "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," Michele 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 Michele 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 binoculars into his
shorts pocket. "We were delighted."
"Chance to work on your tan?"
"You know what we mean," Michele 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," Michele 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 construct
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, probably, 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 Michele fell into character, chattering brightly in French.
Pierre came behind. Michele kept the muzzle 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. Michele
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. Michele 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 Michele 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 motherfucker, you
killed 'em all. . ."
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 before, 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 sunlight. 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 HANIWA in crisp
white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Japanese.
"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
dreadlocks 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 concentration. 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 Al'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 Manhattan, 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 important?"
Case shook his head. "Because"-- and the nest, somehow, was gone--
&lddquo;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 flapping. "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 movement, 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
rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass,
rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, 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 impossible angles,
tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.
"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 listening? 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 disinterested 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 accounts 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 candelabrum 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 unfocused 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
remembered 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 perfumed, 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