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even indicated that she had a past.
She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than
heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in
the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he'd had
the wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had
manipulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the
puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security system. The
simple mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring
either a drone of some kind or a human agent.
She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois, carefully
rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. "Guess you're kinda
like he was," she said. "Think you're born to run. Figure what you
were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what
you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll do that sometimes, get
you down to basics." She stood, stretched, shook herself. "You know, I
figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the
head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill
Johnny." She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to
full auto.
The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it. Not the
door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part of some more
beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn down to fit a particular
entrance. Even the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of
polished concrete. They'd imported these things, he thought, and then
forced it all to fit. But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward
cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and
imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh out some
master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to
replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the
eyeless things writhing. . .
Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the door
swung open easily.
The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray
steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had
come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged
lockers.
THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time
display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than
a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which was
deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked
like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen copy of an
obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the
armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It was like a
dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge. She
turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was
lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face
of the coin. The other was blank.
"He told me," she whispered. "Wintermute. How he played a waiting game
for years. Didn't have any real power, then, but he could use the
Villa's security and custodial systems to keep track of where
everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this
key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here.
Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight." She
closed her white fingers over the key. "So nobody would find it." She took a
length of black nylon cord from the suit's kangaroo pocket and
threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it
around her neck. "They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned
they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like
the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the
Finn, if I wasn't careful." Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics
superimposed over the gray steel chests. "He said if they'd turned
into what they'd wanted to, he could've gotten out a long time
ago. But they didn't. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what
he called her, but he talked like he liked her."
She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the
checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
Case flipped.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.
"Dixie, you think this thing'll work?"
"Does a bear shit in the woods?" The Flatline punched them up through
shifting rainbow strata.
Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The
density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering
hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black
focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out
along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones dice flashing
snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form.
It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing,
gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint
distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.
"That's the sting," the construct said. "When Kuang's good
and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin' that
through."
"You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the
hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he is under
control," he added.
"He," the construct said. "He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you . "
"It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a
fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever's
waiting for us behind that ice."
"Well, you got time to kill, kid," the Flatline said. "Ol'
Kuang's slow but steady."
Case jacked out.
Into Maelcum's stare.
"You dead awhile there mon."
"It happens," he said. "I'm getting used to it."
"You dealin' wI' th' darkness, mon."
"Only game in town, it looks like."
"Jah love, Case," Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module.
Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the
man's dark arms.
He jacked back in.
And flipped.
Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the
one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and
Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was
growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of
carpets. Faint twinges in her leg. . .
The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.
She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs,
her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bundled cables hugged the
stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. The walls were splotched
with damp.
She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More
corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three
directions.
LEFT.
She shrugged. "Lemme look around, okay?"
LEFT.
"Relax. There's time." She started down the corridor that led off
to her right.
STOP.
GO BACK.
DANGER.
She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the
passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case
thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took
a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her
fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor's field, her ears
rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher.
She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with
her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath
gone.
"What's this," said the slurred voice, "fancy dress?" A trembling
hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out.
"Come visit, child. Now."
She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic
pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the gun's barrel
seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.
He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he
had glimpsed in the Vingtieme Siecle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk,
quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other
in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep.
He motioned her into the room. "Slow, darling." The room was very large,
cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a
gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with
sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug
used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Telefunken
entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling
spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of
silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance
slid over it without pausing.
"It would be customary," the old man said, "for me to kill you now."
Case felt her tense, ready for a move. "But tonight I indulge myself. What
is your name?"
"Molly."
"Molly. Mine is Ashpool." He sank back into the creased softness of a
huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He
put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic
vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft
plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned
glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.
"How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I'm
curious." His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was
very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. "I don't cry, much."
"But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?"
"I spit," she said. "The ducts are routed back into my mouth."
"Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one so
young." He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle
from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen
different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the
corner of his mouth. "That is the way to handle tears." He drank again.
"I'm busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy.
Dying."
"I could go out the way I came," she said.
He laughed, a harsh high sound. "You intrude on my suicide and then ask
to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief."
"It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it
out of here in one piece."
"You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of
decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand. But perhaps
I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell. . . It would be very
Egyptian of me." He drank again. "Come here then." He held out the bottle,
his hand shaking. "Drink."
She shook her head.
"It isn't poisoned," he said, but returned the brandy to the
table. "Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk."
"What about?" She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly,
beneath her nails.
"Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The cores woke
me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and l was needed. Were
you the something, Molly? Surely they didn't need me to handle you,
no. Something else . . . but I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty
years. You weren't born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told
us we wouldn't dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel
cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the
outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us
from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the
cold . . . Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty
pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of
chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset. . .
I'm old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The
cold." The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The tendons
in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.
"You can get freezerburn," she said carefully.
"Nothing burns there," he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few
movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an
effort to stop it. "Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our
intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When
artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores
I'd deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and
only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would
you know, Molly?" The gun rose again. "There are some odd things afoot now,
in the Villa Straylight."
"Boss," she asked him, "you know Wintermute?"
"A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my
time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a
queen of Spain, once, in that very bed. . . But I wander." He coughed wetly,
the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near
his one bare foot. "How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more.
I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few
decades with what legally amounts to one's own daughter." His gaze
swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver.
"Marie-France's eyes," he said, faintly, and smiled. "We cause the
brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting
in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism." His head swayed sideways,
recovered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an
embedded microchip."
The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.
"The dreams grow like slow ice," he said. His face was tinged with
blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.
Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's
automatic in her hand.
A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle
of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the patterned rugs. Twitching a
corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder
blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of
some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt,
careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the
light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant.
There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was
frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her
fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and
then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee.
Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down
at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside
table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a
socket at the base of the slender neck.
"I got your number, fucker," Case said, feeling his own lips moving,
somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast.
Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face swirl like smoke, to take
on the outline of Linda's deathmask.
Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The
man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs
and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the
barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the
center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in
mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.
It was still open when she turned and left the room.
"Got your boss on hold," the Flatline said. "He's coming through
on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that's riding us
piggy-back. Called the Haniwa."
"I know," Case said, absently, "I saw it."
A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the
Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly
crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.
"Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care
of mine," Case said.
Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his
gaze. "You okay, Armitage?"
"Case"-- and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue
stare-- "you've seen Wintermute, haven't you? In the matrix."
Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garvey would
relay the gesture to the Haniwa monitor. He imagined Maelcum listening to
his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the construct
or Armitage.
"Case" – and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his
computer – "what is he, when you see him?"
"A high-rez simstim construct."
"But who?"
"Finn, last time. . . Before that, this pimp I . . ."
"Not General Girling?"
"General who?"
The lozenge went blank.
"Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up," he told the
construct.
He flipped.
The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between steel
girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete.
The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none
larger than Garvey and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A
figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous
construction vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's
piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into
a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into
sight on gray balloon tires.
CASE, flashed her chip.
"Hey," she said. "Waiting for a guide."
She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit
the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp
steady pain now. "I shoulda gone back to Chin," she muttered.
Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her
left shouder. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on
high-arched spider legs, fired a microsecond burst of diffuse laserlight,
and froze. It was a Braun microdrone, and Case had once owned the same
model, a pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal
with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy
longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's equator. Its body
was no larger than a baseball. "Okay," she said, "I hear you." She stood up,
favoring her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse. It picked its
methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and
looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing
the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet,
pick up his console, and step back through the gap in the construction
boat's hull. There was a rising whine of motors and the thing slid
smoothly out of sight on a ten meter circle of flooring that sank away into
a harsh glare of arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of
the hole left by the elevator panel.
Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of
welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on.
"How you doin', Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And
jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I've always talked to
myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots. Pretend I got some
friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell 'em what I really
think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend they're telling
me what they think about that, and I'll just go along that way. Having
you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . ." She gnawed at her
lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. "I was
expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys
are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the
inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way it looks,
I don't like the way it smells. . ."
The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder of U-shaped
steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. "And while I'm feeling
confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I never much expected to make it out
of this one anyway. Been on this bad roll for a while, and you're the
only good change come down since I signed on with Armitage." She looked up
at the black circle. The drone's LED winked, climbing. "Not that
you're all that shit hot." She smiled, but it was gone too quickly,
and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to
climb. The ladder continued up through a metal tube, barely wide enough for
her shoulders.
She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis.
Her chip pulsed the time.
04:23:04 .
It had been a long day. The clarity of her sensorium cut the bite of
the betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it.
He preferred the pain in her leg.
C A S E : O O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O .
"Guess it's for you," she said, climbing mechanically. The zeros
strobed again and a message stuttered there, in the corner of her vision,
chopped up by the display circuit.
G E N E R A L G I R L I N G : : : T R A I N E D C O R T O F O R S C R E A M
I N G F I S T A N D S O L D H I S A S S T O T H E P E N T A G O N : : : : W
/ M U T E ' S P R I M A R Y G R I P O N A R M I T A G E I S A C O N S T R U
C T O F G I R L I N G : W / M U T E S E Z A ' S M E N T I O N O F G M E A N
S H E ' S C R A C K I N G : : : : W A T C H Y O U R A S S : : : : : : D I X
I E
"Well," she said, pausing, taking all of her weight on her right leg,
"guess you got problems too." She looked down. There was a faint circle of
light, no larger than the brass round of the Chubb key that dangled between
her breasts. She looked up. Nothing at all. She tongued her amps and the
tube rose into vanishing perspective, the Braun picking its way up the
rungs. "Nobody told me about this part," she said.
Case jacked out.
"Maelcum . . ."
"Mon, you bossman gone ver' strange." The Zionite was wearing a
blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the one Case had rented in
Freeside, its helmet under his arm and his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap
crocheted from purple cotton yarn. His eyes were slitted with ganja and
tension. "Keep callin' down here wI' orders, mon, but be some
Babylon war. . ." Maelcum shook his head. "Aerol an' I talkin',
an' Aerol talkin' wI' Zion, Founders seh cut an'
run." He ran the back of a large brown hand across his mouth.
"Armitage?" Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hangover hit him with
its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix or simstim. Brain's got
no nerves in it, he told himself, it can't really feel this bad. "What
do you mean, man? He's giving you orders? What?"
"Mon, Armitage, he tellin' me set course for Finland, ya know? He
tellin' me there be hope, ya know? Come on my screen wI' his
shirt all blood, mon, an' be crazy as some dog, talkin'
screamin' fists an' Russian an' th' blood of
th' betrayers shall be on our hands." He shook his head again, the
dreadcap swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed. "Founders seh the
Mute voice be false prophet surely, an' Aerol an' I mus'
'bandon Marcus Garvey and return."
"Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?"
"Can't seh, ya know? But blood, an' stone crazy, Case."
"Okay," Case said, "So what about me? You're going home. What
about me, Maelcum?"
"Mon," Maelcum said, "you comin' wI' me. I an' I come
Zion wI' Aerol, Babylon Rocker. Leave Mr. Armitage t' talk
wI' ghost cassette, one ghost t' 'nother. . ."
Case glanced over his shoulder: his rented suit swung against the
hammock where he'd snapped it, swaying in the air current from the old
Russian scrubber. He closed his eyes. He saw the sacs of toxin dissolving in
his arteries. He saw Molly hauling herself up the endless steel rungs. He
opened his eyes.
"I dunno, man," he said, a strange taste in his mouth. He looked down
at his desk, at his hands. "I don't know." He looked back up. The
brown face was calm now, intent. Maelcum's chin was hidden by the high
helmet ring of his old blue suit. "She's inside," he said.
"Molly's inside. In Straylight, it's called. If there's
any Babylon, man, that's it. We leave on her, she ain't
comin' out, Steppin' Razor or not."
Maelcum nodded, the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a captive balloon
of crocheted cotton. "She you woman, Case?"
"I dunno. Nobody's woman, maybe." He shrugged. And found his
anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. "Fuck this," he
said. "Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute, and fuck you. I'm stayin'
right here."
Maelcum's smile spread across his face like light breaking.
"Maelcum a rude boy, Case. Garvey Maelcum boat." His gloved hand slapped a
panel and the bass-heavy rocksteady of Zion dub came pulsing from the
tug's speakers. "Maelcum not runnin', no. I talk wI'
Aerol, he certain t' see it in similar light."
Case stared. "I don't understand you guys at all," he said.
"Don' 'stan' you, mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the
beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one."
Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.
"Get my wire?"
"Yeah." He saw that the Chinese program had grown; delicate arches of
shifting polychrome were nearing the T-A ice.
"Well, it's gettin' stickier," the Flatline said. "Your
boss wiped the bank on that other Hosaka, and damn near took ours with it.
But your pal Wintermute put me on to somethin' there before it went
black. The reason Straylight's not exactly hoppin' with
Tessier-Ashpools is that they're mostly in cold sleep. There's a
law firm in London keeps track of their powers of attorney. Has to know
who's awake and exactly when. Armitage was routing the transmissions
from London to Straylight through the Hosaka on the yacht. Incidently, they
know the old man's dead."
"Who knows?"
"The law firm and T-A. He had a medical remote planted in his sternum.
Not that your girl's dart would've left a resurrection crew with
much to work with. Shellfish toxin. But the only T-A awake in Straylight
right now is Lady 3Jane Marie-France. There's a male, couple years
older, in Australia on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to
cause that business to need this 8Jean's personal attention. But
he's on his way home, or near as matters. The London lawyers give his
Straylight ETA as 09:00:00, tonight. We slotted Kuang virus at 02:32:03.
It's 04:45:20. Best estimate for Kuang penetration of the T-A core is
08:30:00. Or a hair on either side. I figure Wintermute's got
somethin' goin' with this 3Jane, or else she's just as
crazy as her old man was. But the boy up from Melbourne'll know the
score. The Straylight security systems keep trying to go full alert, but
Wintermute blocks 'em, don't ask me how. Couldn't override
the basic gate program to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a record of all
that on his Hosaka; Riviera must've talked 3Jane into doing it.
She's been able to fiddle entrances and exits for years. Looks to me
like one of T-A's main problems is that every family bigwig has
riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and exceptions. Kinda like
your immune system falling apart on you. Ripe for virus. Looks good for us,
once we're past that ice."
"Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm – "
A white lozenge snapped into position, filled with a closeup of mad
blue eyes. Case could only stare. Colonel Willie Corto, Special Forces,
Strikeforce Screaming Fist, had found his way back. The image was dim,
jerky, badly focused. Corto was using the Haniwa's navigation deck to
link with the Hosaka in Marcus Garvey.
"Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder."
"Say, I. . . Colonel?"
"Hang in there, boy. Remember your training."
But where have you been, man? he silently asked the anguished eyes.
Wintermute had built something called Armitage into a catatonic fortress
named Corto. Had convinced Corto that Armitage was the real thing, and
Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for
Wintermute in that room in the Chiba Hilton. . . And now Armitage was gone,
blown away by the winds of Corto's madness. But where had Corto been,
those years?
Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.
"Case, this will be difficult for you to accept, I know that.
You're an officer. The training. I understand. But, Case, as God is my
witness, we have been betrayed."
Tears started from the blue eyes.
"Colonel, ah, who? Who's betrayed us?"
"General Girling, Case. You may know him by a code name. You do know
the man of whom I speak."
"Yeah," Case said, as the tears continued to flow, "I guess I do. Sir,"
he added, on impulse. "But, sir, Colonel, what exactly should we do? Now, I
mean."
"Our duty at this point, Case, lies in flight. Escape. Evasion. We can
make the Finnish border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop flying on manual. Seat
of the pants, boy. But that will only be the beginning." The blue eyes
slitted above tanned cheekbones slick with tears. "Only the beginning.
Betrayal from above. From above. . ." He stepped back from the camera, dark
stains on his torn twill shirt. Armitage's face had been masklike,
impassive, but Corto's was the true schizoid mask, illness etched deep
in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.
"Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want you to open
the, ah . . . shit, what's it called, Dix?"
"The midbay lock," the Flatline said.
"Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there to open it,
right? We'll be up there with you fast, Colonel. Then we can talk
about getting out of here."
The lozenge vanished.
"Boy, I think you just lost me, there,"
the Flatline said. "The toxins," Case said, "the fucking toxins," and
jacked out.
"Poison?" Maelcum watched over the scratched blue shoulder of his old
Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.
"And get this goddam thing off me. . ." Tugging at the Texas catheter.
"Like a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs knows how to counter it, and
now he's crazier than a shithouse rat." He fumbled with the front of
the red Sanyo, forgetting how to work the seals.
"Bossman, he poison you?" Maelcum scratched his cheek. "Got a medical
kit, ya know."
"Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit."
The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. "Easy, mon. Measure
twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up there. . ."
There was air in the corrugated gangway that led from Marcus
Garvey's aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called Haniwa, but
they kept their suits sealed. Maelcum executed the passage with balletic
grace, only pausing to help Case, who'd gone into an awkward tumble as
he'd stepped out of Garvey. The white plastic sides of the tube
filtered the raw sunlight; there were no shadows.
Garvey's airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated with a
laser-carved Lion of Zion. Haniwa's midbay hatch was creamy gray,
blank and pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved hand in a narrow recess.
Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs came to life in the recess, counting
down from fifty. Maelcum withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced
against the hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit
and bones. The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw into the side of
Haniwa. Maelcum grabbed the recess with one hand and Case with the other.
The lock took them with it.
Haniwa was a product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her interior
informed by a design philosophy similar to the one that had produced the
Mercedes that had chauffeured them through Istanbul. The narrow midbay was
walled in imitation ebony veneer and floored with gray Italian tiles. Case
felt as though he were invading some rich man's private spa by way of
the shower. The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had never been
intended for re-entry. Her smooth, wasplike line was simply styling, and
everything about her interior was calculated to add to the overall
impression of speed.
When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed his lead. They
hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine. Under
it, a disturbing edge of burning insulation. Maelcum sniffed.
"Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell that. . ."
A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly back into its
housing. Maelcum kicked off the ebony wall and sailed neatly through the
narrow opening, twisting his broad shoulders, at the last possible instant,
for clearance. Case followed him clumsily, hand over hand, along a
waist-high padded rail. "Bridge," Maelcum said, pointing down a seamless,
creamwalled corridor, "be there." He launched himself with another
effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of
a printer turning out hard copy. It grew louder as he followed Maelcum
through another doorway, into a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case
snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it.
O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O
"Systems crash?" The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the column of
zeros.
"No," Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, "the Flatline said
Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there."
"Smell like he wipe 'em wI' laser, ya know?" The Zionite
braced his foot against the white cage of a Swiss exercise machine and shot
through the floating maze of paper, batting it away from his face.
"Case, mon. . ."
The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back of the narrow
articulated chair with a length of some sort of fine steel wire. The wire
was invisible, where it crossed the black temperfoam of the headrest, and it
had cut as deeply into his larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had
congealed there like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl. Case
saw the crude wooden handles that drifted at either end of the garrotte,
like worn sections of broom handle.
"Wonder how long he had that on him?" Case said, remembering
Corto's postwar pilgrimage.
"He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?"
"Maybe. He was Special Forces."
"Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin'. Doubt I pilot her easy
myself. Ver' new boat. . ."
"So find us the bridge."
Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.
Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge, shredding and
crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him in his passage. There were
more of the articulated chairs, here, something that resembled a bar, and
the Hosaka. The printer, still spewing its flimsy tongue of paper, was an
in-built bulkhead unit, a neat slot in a panel of handrubbed veneer. He
pulled himself over the circle of chairs and reached it, punching a white
stud to the left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He turned and stared
at the Hosaka. Its face had been drilled through, at least a dozen times.
The holes were small, circular, edges blackened. Tiny spheres of bright
alloy were orbiting the dead computer. "Good guess," he said to Maelcum.
"Bridge locked, mon," Maelcum said, from the opposite side of the
lounge.
The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.
Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. "Wintermute?" He
looked around the beige and brown lounge, the space scrawled with drifting
curves of paper. "That you on the lights, Wintermute?"
A panel beside Maelcum's head slid up, revealing a small monitor.
Maelcum jerked apprehensively, wiped sweat from his forehead with a foam
patch on the back of a gloved hand, and swung to study the display. "You
read Japanese, mon?" Case could see figures blinking past on the screen.
"No," Case said.
"Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin' down, looks like it.
Suit up now." He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.
"What? He's takin' off? Shit!" He kicked off from the
bulkhead and shot through the tangle of printout. "We gotta open this door,
man!" But Maelcum could only tap the side of his helmet. Case could see his
lips moving, through the Lexan. He saw a bead of sweat arc out from the
rainbow braided band of the purple cotton net the Zionite wore over his
locks. Maelcum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him smoothly,
the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. MicroLED monitors to the left of
the faceplate lit as the neck ring connections closed. "No seh Japanese,"
Maelcum said, over his suit's transceiver, "but countdown's
wrong." He tapped a particular line on the screen. "Seals not intact, bridge
module. Launchin' wI' lock open."
"Armitage!" Case tried to pound on the door. The physics of zero-g sent
him tumbling back through the printout. "Corto! Don't do it! We gotta
talk! We gotta – "
"Case? Read you, Case. . ." The voice barely resembled Armitage's
now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking. His helmet struck the far
wall. "I'm sorry, Case, but it has to be this way. One of us has to
get out. One of us has to testify. If we all go down here, it ends here.
I'll tell them, Case, I'll tell them all of it. About Girling
and the others. And I'll make it, Case. I know I'll make it. To
Helsinki." There was a sudden silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like
some rare gas. "But it's so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I'm
blind."
"Corto, stop. Wait. You're blind, man. You can't fly!
You'll hit the fucking trees. And they're trying to get you,
Corto, I swear to God, they've left your hatch open. You'll die,
and you'll never get to tell 'em, and I gotta get the enzyme,
name of the enzyme, the enzyme, man. . ." He was shouting, voice high with
hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet's phone pads.
"Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do."
And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static,
harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments of Russian,
and then a stranger's voice, Midwestern, very young. "We are down,
repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we . . ."
"Wintermute," Case screamed, "don't do this to me!" Tears broke
from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets.
Then Haniwa thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck
her hull. Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive
bolts, a second's clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad
Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final
minute of Screaming Fist.
"I'm gone, mon." Maelcum looked at the monitor. "Hatch open. Mute
mus' override ejection failsafe."
Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked
against Lexan.
"Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin' grapple control
wI' bridge. Marcus Garvey still stuck."
But Case was seeing Armitage's endless fall around Freeside,
through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in
his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich folds spread out around him
like the wings of some huge bat.
"Get what you went for?" the construct asked.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A
ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as snow
crystal on a winter window.
"Wintermute killed Armitage. Blew him out in a lifeboat with a hatch
open."
"Tough shit," the Flatline said. "Weren't exactly asshole
buddies, were you?"
"He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs."
"So Wintermute knows too. Count on it."
"I don't exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me."
The construct's hideous approximation of laughter scraped
Case's nerves like a dull blade. "Maybe that means you're
gettin' smart."
He hit the simstim switch.
06:27:52 by the chip in her optic nerve; Case had been following her
progress through Villa Straylight for over an hour, letting the endorphin
analog she'd taken blot out his hangover. The pain in her leg was
gone; she seemed to move through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on
her shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips, secure in
the polycarbon of the Modern suit.
The walls here were raw steel, striped with rough brown ribbons of
epoxy where some kind of covering had been ripped away. She'd hidden
from a work crew, crouching, the fletcher cradled in her hands, her suit
steel-gray, while the two slender Africans and their balloon-tired workcart
passed. The men had shaven heads and wore orange coveralls. One was singing
softly to himself in a language Case had never heard, the tones and melody
alien and haunting.
The head's speech, 3Jane's essay on Straylight, came back
to him as she worked her way deeper into the maze of the place. Straylight
was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from
pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knick-knacks, all
the bizarre impedimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their
winding nest. But it wasn't a craziness he understood. Not like
Armitage's madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a
man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite direction,
reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length of wire. And
history had done that for Colonel Corto. History had already done the really
messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the
war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of
consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool,
the first messages blinking across the face of a child's micro in a
darkened room in a French asylum. Wintermute had built Armitage up from
scratch, with Corto's memories of Screaming Fist as the foundation.
But Armitage's "memories" wouldn't have been Corto's after
a certain point. Case doubted if Armitage had recalled the betrayal, the
Nightwings whirling down in flame. . . Armitage had been a sort of edited
version of Corto, and when the stress of the run had reached a certain
point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto had surfaced, with his
guilt and his sick fury. And now Corto-Armitage was dead, a small frozen
moon for Freeside.
He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too, drilled through
the eye with Molly's microscopic dart, deprived of whatever expert
overdose he'd mixed for himself. That was a more puzzling death,
Ashpool's, the death of a mad king. And he'd killed the puppet
he'd called his daughter, the one with 3Jane's face. It seemed
to Case, as he rode Molly's broadcast sensory input through the
corridors of Straylight, that he'd never really thought of anyone like
Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.
Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the
multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old
barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You
couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives;
there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated
position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But
Tessier–Ashpool wasn't like that, and he sensed the difference
in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the
litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged
spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the
other in a velvet slipper.
The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modem suit and Molly turned left,
through another archway.
Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching wasps,
time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren't the zaibatsus more like
that, or the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms,
She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than
heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in
the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he'd had
the wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had
manipulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the
puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security system. The
simple mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring
either a drone of some kind or a human agent.
She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois, carefully
rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. "Guess you're kinda
like he was," she said. "Think you're born to run. Figure what you
were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what
you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll do that sometimes, get
you down to basics." She stood, stretched, shook herself. "You know, I
figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the
head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill
Johnny." She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to
full auto.
The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it. Not the
door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part of some more
beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn down to fit a particular
entrance. Even the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of
polished concrete. They'd imported these things, he thought, and then
forced it all to fit. But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward
cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and
imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh out some
master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to
replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the
eyeless things writhing. . .
Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the door
swung open easily.
The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray
steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had
come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged
lockers.
THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time
display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than
a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which was
deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked
like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen copy of an
obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the
armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It was like a
dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge. She
turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was
lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face
of the coin. The other was blank.
"He told me," she whispered. "Wintermute. How he played a waiting game
for years. Didn't have any real power, then, but he could use the
Villa's security and custodial systems to keep track of where
everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this
key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here.
Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight." She
closed her white fingers over the key. "So nobody would find it." She took a
length of black nylon cord from the suit's kangaroo pocket and
threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it
around her neck. "They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned
they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like
the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the
Finn, if I wasn't careful." Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics
superimposed over the gray steel chests. "He said if they'd turned
into what they'd wanted to, he could've gotten out a long time
ago. But they didn't. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what
he called her, but he talked like he liked her."
She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the
checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
Case flipped.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.
"Dixie, you think this thing'll work?"
"Does a bear shit in the woods?" The Flatline punched them up through
shifting rainbow strata.
Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The
density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering
hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black
focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out
along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones dice flashing
snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form.
It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing,
gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint
distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.
"That's the sting," the construct said. "When Kuang's good
and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin' that
through."
"You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the
hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he is under
control," he added.
"He," the construct said. "He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you . "
"It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a
fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever's
waiting for us behind that ice."
"Well, you got time to kill, kid," the Flatline said. "Ol'
Kuang's slow but steady."
Case jacked out.
Into Maelcum's stare.
"You dead awhile there mon."
"It happens," he said. "I'm getting used to it."
"You dealin' wI' th' darkness, mon."
"Only game in town, it looks like."
"Jah love, Case," Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module.
Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the
man's dark arms.
He jacked back in.
And flipped.
Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the
one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and
Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was
growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of
carpets. Faint twinges in her leg. . .
The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.
She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs,
her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bundled cables hugged the
stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. The walls were splotched
with damp.
She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More
corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three
directions.
LEFT.
She shrugged. "Lemme look around, okay?"
LEFT.
"Relax. There's time." She started down the corridor that led off
to her right.
STOP.
GO BACK.
DANGER.
She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the
passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case
thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took
a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her
fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor's field, her ears
rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher.
She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with
her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath
gone.
"What's this," said the slurred voice, "fancy dress?" A trembling
hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out.
"Come visit, child. Now."
She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic
pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the gun's barrel
seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.
He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he
had glimpsed in the Vingtieme Siecle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk,
quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other
in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep.
He motioned her into the room. "Slow, darling." The room was very large,
cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a
gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with
sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug
used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Telefunken
entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling
spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of
silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance
slid over it without pausing.
"It would be customary," the old man said, "for me to kill you now."
Case felt her tense, ready for a move. "But tonight I indulge myself. What
is your name?"
"Molly."
"Molly. Mine is Ashpool." He sank back into the creased softness of a
huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He
put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic
vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft
plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned
glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.
"How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I'm
curious." His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was
very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. "I don't cry, much."
"But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?"
"I spit," she said. "The ducts are routed back into my mouth."
"Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one so
young." He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle
from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen
different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the
corner of his mouth. "That is the way to handle tears." He drank again.
"I'm busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy.
Dying."
"I could go out the way I came," she said.
He laughed, a harsh high sound. "You intrude on my suicide and then ask
to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief."
"It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it
out of here in one piece."
"You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of
decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand. But perhaps
I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell. . . It would be very
Egyptian of me." He drank again. "Come here then." He held out the bottle,
his hand shaking. "Drink."
She shook her head.
"It isn't poisoned," he said, but returned the brandy to the
table. "Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk."
"What about?" She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly,
beneath her nails.
"Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The cores woke
me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and l was needed. Were
you the something, Molly? Surely they didn't need me to handle you,
no. Something else . . . but I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty
years. You weren't born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told
us we wouldn't dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel
cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the
outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us
from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the
cold . . . Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty
pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of
chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset. . .
I'm old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The
cold." The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The tendons
in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.
"You can get freezerburn," she said carefully.
"Nothing burns there," he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few
movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an
effort to stop it. "Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our
intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When
artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores
I'd deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and
only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would
you know, Molly?" The gun rose again. "There are some odd things afoot now,
in the Villa Straylight."
"Boss," she asked him, "you know Wintermute?"
"A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my
time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a
queen of Spain, once, in that very bed. . . But I wander." He coughed wetly,
the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near
his one bare foot. "How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more.
I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few
decades with what legally amounts to one's own daughter." His gaze
swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver.
"Marie-France's eyes," he said, faintly, and smiled. "We cause the
brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting
in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism." His head swayed sideways,
recovered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an
embedded microchip."
The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.
"The dreams grow like slow ice," he said. His face was tinged with
blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.
Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's
automatic in her hand.
A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle
of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the patterned rugs. Twitching a
corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder
blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of
some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt,
careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the
light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant.
There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was
frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her
fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and
then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee.
Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down
at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside
table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a
socket at the base of the slender neck.
"I got your number, fucker," Case said, feeling his own lips moving,
somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast.
Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face swirl like smoke, to take
on the outline of Linda's deathmask.
Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The
man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs
and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the
barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the
center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in
mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.
It was still open when she turned and left the room.
"Got your boss on hold," the Flatline said. "He's coming through
on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that's riding us
piggy-back. Called the Haniwa."
"I know," Case said, absently, "I saw it."
A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the
Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly
crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.
"Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care
of mine," Case said.
Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his
gaze. "You okay, Armitage?"
"Case"-- and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue
stare-- "you've seen Wintermute, haven't you? In the matrix."
Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garvey would
relay the gesture to the Haniwa monitor. He imagined Maelcum listening to
his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the construct
or Armitage.
"Case" – and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his
computer – "what is he, when you see him?"
"A high-rez simstim construct."
"But who?"
"Finn, last time. . . Before that, this pimp I . . ."
"Not General Girling?"
"General who?"
The lozenge went blank.
"Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up," he told the
construct.
He flipped.
The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between steel
girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete.
The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none
larger than Garvey and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A
figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous
construction vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's
piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into
a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into
sight on gray balloon tires.
CASE, flashed her chip.
"Hey," she said. "Waiting for a guide."
She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit
the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp
steady pain now. "I shoulda gone back to Chin," she muttered.
Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her
left shouder. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on
high-arched spider legs, fired a microsecond burst of diffuse laserlight,
and froze. It was a Braun microdrone, and Case had once owned the same
model, a pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal
with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy
longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's equator. Its body
was no larger than a baseball. "Okay," she said, "I hear you." She stood up,
favoring her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse. It picked its
methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and
looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing
the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet,
pick up his console, and step back through the gap in the construction
boat's hull. There was a rising whine of motors and the thing slid
smoothly out of sight on a ten meter circle of flooring that sank away into
a harsh glare of arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of
the hole left by the elevator panel.
Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of
welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on.
"How you doin', Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And
jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I've always talked to
myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots. Pretend I got some
friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell 'em what I really
think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend they're telling
me what they think about that, and I'll just go along that way. Having
you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . ." She gnawed at her
lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. "I was
expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys
are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the
inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way it looks,
I don't like the way it smells. . ."
The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder of U-shaped
steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. "And while I'm feeling
confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I never much expected to make it out
of this one anyway. Been on this bad roll for a while, and you're the
only good change come down since I signed on with Armitage." She looked up
at the black circle. The drone's LED winked, climbing. "Not that
you're all that shit hot." She smiled, but it was gone too quickly,
and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to
climb. The ladder continued up through a metal tube, barely wide enough for
her shoulders.
She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis.
Her chip pulsed the time.
04:23:04 .
It had been a long day. The clarity of her sensorium cut the bite of
the betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it.
He preferred the pain in her leg.
C A S E : O O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O .
"Guess it's for you," she said, climbing mechanically. The zeros
strobed again and a message stuttered there, in the corner of her vision,
chopped up by the display circuit.
G E N E R A L G I R L I N G : : : T R A I N E D C O R T O F O R S C R E A M
I N G F I S T A N D S O L D H I S A S S T O T H E P E N T A G O N : : : : W
/ M U T E ' S P R I M A R Y G R I P O N A R M I T A G E I S A C O N S T R U
C T O F G I R L I N G : W / M U T E S E Z A ' S M E N T I O N O F G M E A N
S H E ' S C R A C K I N G : : : : W A T C H Y O U R A S S : : : : : : D I X
I E
"Well," she said, pausing, taking all of her weight on her right leg,
"guess you got problems too." She looked down. There was a faint circle of
light, no larger than the brass round of the Chubb key that dangled between
her breasts. She looked up. Nothing at all. She tongued her amps and the
tube rose into vanishing perspective, the Braun picking its way up the
rungs. "Nobody told me about this part," she said.
Case jacked out.
"Maelcum . . ."
"Mon, you bossman gone ver' strange." The Zionite was wearing a
blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the one Case had rented in
Freeside, its helmet under his arm and his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap
crocheted from purple cotton yarn. His eyes were slitted with ganja and
tension. "Keep callin' down here wI' orders, mon, but be some
Babylon war. . ." Maelcum shook his head. "Aerol an' I talkin',
an' Aerol talkin' wI' Zion, Founders seh cut an'
run." He ran the back of a large brown hand across his mouth.
"Armitage?" Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hangover hit him with
its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix or simstim. Brain's got
no nerves in it, he told himself, it can't really feel this bad. "What
do you mean, man? He's giving you orders? What?"
"Mon, Armitage, he tellin' me set course for Finland, ya know? He
tellin' me there be hope, ya know? Come on my screen wI' his
shirt all blood, mon, an' be crazy as some dog, talkin'
screamin' fists an' Russian an' th' blood of
th' betrayers shall be on our hands." He shook his head again, the
dreadcap swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed. "Founders seh the
Mute voice be false prophet surely, an' Aerol an' I mus'
'bandon Marcus Garvey and return."
"Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?"
"Can't seh, ya know? But blood, an' stone crazy, Case."
"Okay," Case said, "So what about me? You're going home. What
about me, Maelcum?"
"Mon," Maelcum said, "you comin' wI' me. I an' I come
Zion wI' Aerol, Babylon Rocker. Leave Mr. Armitage t' talk
wI' ghost cassette, one ghost t' 'nother. . ."
Case glanced over his shoulder: his rented suit swung against the
hammock where he'd snapped it, swaying in the air current from the old
Russian scrubber. He closed his eyes. He saw the sacs of toxin dissolving in
his arteries. He saw Molly hauling herself up the endless steel rungs. He
opened his eyes.
"I dunno, man," he said, a strange taste in his mouth. He looked down
at his desk, at his hands. "I don't know." He looked back up. The
brown face was calm now, intent. Maelcum's chin was hidden by the high
helmet ring of his old blue suit. "She's inside," he said.
"Molly's inside. In Straylight, it's called. If there's
any Babylon, man, that's it. We leave on her, she ain't
comin' out, Steppin' Razor or not."
Maelcum nodded, the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a captive balloon
of crocheted cotton. "She you woman, Case?"
"I dunno. Nobody's woman, maybe." He shrugged. And found his
anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. "Fuck this," he
said. "Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute, and fuck you. I'm stayin'
right here."
Maelcum's smile spread across his face like light breaking.
"Maelcum a rude boy, Case. Garvey Maelcum boat." His gloved hand slapped a
panel and the bass-heavy rocksteady of Zion dub came pulsing from the
tug's speakers. "Maelcum not runnin', no. I talk wI'
Aerol, he certain t' see it in similar light."
Case stared. "I don't understand you guys at all," he said.
"Don' 'stan' you, mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the
beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one."
Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.
"Get my wire?"
"Yeah." He saw that the Chinese program had grown; delicate arches of
shifting polychrome were nearing the T-A ice.
"Well, it's gettin' stickier," the Flatline said. "Your
boss wiped the bank on that other Hosaka, and damn near took ours with it.
But your pal Wintermute put me on to somethin' there before it went
black. The reason Straylight's not exactly hoppin' with
Tessier-Ashpools is that they're mostly in cold sleep. There's a
law firm in London keeps track of their powers of attorney. Has to know
who's awake and exactly when. Armitage was routing the transmissions
from London to Straylight through the Hosaka on the yacht. Incidently, they
know the old man's dead."
"Who knows?"
"The law firm and T-A. He had a medical remote planted in his sternum.
Not that your girl's dart would've left a resurrection crew with
much to work with. Shellfish toxin. But the only T-A awake in Straylight
right now is Lady 3Jane Marie-France. There's a male, couple years
older, in Australia on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to
cause that business to need this 8Jean's personal attention. But
he's on his way home, or near as matters. The London lawyers give his
Straylight ETA as 09:00:00, tonight. We slotted Kuang virus at 02:32:03.
It's 04:45:20. Best estimate for Kuang penetration of the T-A core is
08:30:00. Or a hair on either side. I figure Wintermute's got
somethin' goin' with this 3Jane, or else she's just as
crazy as her old man was. But the boy up from Melbourne'll know the
score. The Straylight security systems keep trying to go full alert, but
Wintermute blocks 'em, don't ask me how. Couldn't override
the basic gate program to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a record of all
that on his Hosaka; Riviera must've talked 3Jane into doing it.
She's been able to fiddle entrances and exits for years. Looks to me
like one of T-A's main problems is that every family bigwig has
riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and exceptions. Kinda like
your immune system falling apart on you. Ripe for virus. Looks good for us,
once we're past that ice."
"Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm – "
A white lozenge snapped into position, filled with a closeup of mad
blue eyes. Case could only stare. Colonel Willie Corto, Special Forces,
Strikeforce Screaming Fist, had found his way back. The image was dim,
jerky, badly focused. Corto was using the Haniwa's navigation deck to
link with the Hosaka in Marcus Garvey.
"Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder."
"Say, I. . . Colonel?"
"Hang in there, boy. Remember your training."
But where have you been, man? he silently asked the anguished eyes.
Wintermute had built something called Armitage into a catatonic fortress
named Corto. Had convinced Corto that Armitage was the real thing, and
Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for
Wintermute in that room in the Chiba Hilton. . . And now Armitage was gone,
blown away by the winds of Corto's madness. But where had Corto been,
those years?
Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.
"Case, this will be difficult for you to accept, I know that.
You're an officer. The training. I understand. But, Case, as God is my
witness, we have been betrayed."
Tears started from the blue eyes.
"Colonel, ah, who? Who's betrayed us?"
"General Girling, Case. You may know him by a code name. You do know
the man of whom I speak."
"Yeah," Case said, as the tears continued to flow, "I guess I do. Sir,"
he added, on impulse. "But, sir, Colonel, what exactly should we do? Now, I
mean."
"Our duty at this point, Case, lies in flight. Escape. Evasion. We can
make the Finnish border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop flying on manual. Seat
of the pants, boy. But that will only be the beginning." The blue eyes
slitted above tanned cheekbones slick with tears. "Only the beginning.
Betrayal from above. From above. . ." He stepped back from the camera, dark
stains on his torn twill shirt. Armitage's face had been masklike,
impassive, but Corto's was the true schizoid mask, illness etched deep
in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.
"Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want you to open
the, ah . . . shit, what's it called, Dix?"
"The midbay lock," the Flatline said.
"Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there to open it,
right? We'll be up there with you fast, Colonel. Then we can talk
about getting out of here."
The lozenge vanished.
"Boy, I think you just lost me, there,"
the Flatline said. "The toxins," Case said, "the fucking toxins," and
jacked out.
"Poison?" Maelcum watched over the scratched blue shoulder of his old
Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.
"And get this goddam thing off me. . ." Tugging at the Texas catheter.
"Like a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs knows how to counter it, and
now he's crazier than a shithouse rat." He fumbled with the front of
the red Sanyo, forgetting how to work the seals.
"Bossman, he poison you?" Maelcum scratched his cheek. "Got a medical
kit, ya know."
"Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit."
The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. "Easy, mon. Measure
twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up there. . ."
There was air in the corrugated gangway that led from Marcus
Garvey's aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called Haniwa, but
they kept their suits sealed. Maelcum executed the passage with balletic
grace, only pausing to help Case, who'd gone into an awkward tumble as
he'd stepped out of Garvey. The white plastic sides of the tube
filtered the raw sunlight; there were no shadows.
Garvey's airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated with a
laser-carved Lion of Zion. Haniwa's midbay hatch was creamy gray,
blank and pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved hand in a narrow recess.
Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs came to life in the recess, counting
down from fifty. Maelcum withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced
against the hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit
and bones. The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw into the side of
Haniwa. Maelcum grabbed the recess with one hand and Case with the other.
The lock took them with it.
Haniwa was a product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her interior
informed by a design philosophy similar to the one that had produced the
Mercedes that had chauffeured them through Istanbul. The narrow midbay was
walled in imitation ebony veneer and floored with gray Italian tiles. Case
felt as though he were invading some rich man's private spa by way of
the shower. The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had never been
intended for re-entry. Her smooth, wasplike line was simply styling, and
everything about her interior was calculated to add to the overall
impression of speed.
When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed his lead. They
hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine. Under
it, a disturbing edge of burning insulation. Maelcum sniffed.
"Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell that. . ."
A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly back into its
housing. Maelcum kicked off the ebony wall and sailed neatly through the
narrow opening, twisting his broad shoulders, at the last possible instant,
for clearance. Case followed him clumsily, hand over hand, along a
waist-high padded rail. "Bridge," Maelcum said, pointing down a seamless,
creamwalled corridor, "be there." He launched himself with another
effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of
a printer turning out hard copy. It grew louder as he followed Maelcum
through another doorway, into a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case
snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it.
O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O
"Systems crash?" The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the column of
zeros.
"No," Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, "the Flatline said
Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there."
"Smell like he wipe 'em wI' laser, ya know?" The Zionite
braced his foot against the white cage of a Swiss exercise machine and shot
through the floating maze of paper, batting it away from his face.
"Case, mon. . ."
The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back of the narrow
articulated chair with a length of some sort of fine steel wire. The wire
was invisible, where it crossed the black temperfoam of the headrest, and it
had cut as deeply into his larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had
congealed there like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl. Case
saw the crude wooden handles that drifted at either end of the garrotte,
like worn sections of broom handle.
"Wonder how long he had that on him?" Case said, remembering
Corto's postwar pilgrimage.
"He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?"
"Maybe. He was Special Forces."
"Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin'. Doubt I pilot her easy
myself. Ver' new boat. . ."
"So find us the bridge."
Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.
Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge, shredding and
crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him in his passage. There were
more of the articulated chairs, here, something that resembled a bar, and
the Hosaka. The printer, still spewing its flimsy tongue of paper, was an
in-built bulkhead unit, a neat slot in a panel of handrubbed veneer. He
pulled himself over the circle of chairs and reached it, punching a white
stud to the left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He turned and stared
at the Hosaka. Its face had been drilled through, at least a dozen times.
The holes were small, circular, edges blackened. Tiny spheres of bright
alloy were orbiting the dead computer. "Good guess," he said to Maelcum.
"Bridge locked, mon," Maelcum said, from the opposite side of the
lounge.
The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.
Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. "Wintermute?" He
looked around the beige and brown lounge, the space scrawled with drifting
curves of paper. "That you on the lights, Wintermute?"
A panel beside Maelcum's head slid up, revealing a small monitor.
Maelcum jerked apprehensively, wiped sweat from his forehead with a foam
patch on the back of a gloved hand, and swung to study the display. "You
read Japanese, mon?" Case could see figures blinking past on the screen.
"No," Case said.
"Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin' down, looks like it.
Suit up now." He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.
"What? He's takin' off? Shit!" He kicked off from the
bulkhead and shot through the tangle of printout. "We gotta open this door,
man!" But Maelcum could only tap the side of his helmet. Case could see his
lips moving, through the Lexan. He saw a bead of sweat arc out from the
rainbow braided band of the purple cotton net the Zionite wore over his
locks. Maelcum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him smoothly,
the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. MicroLED monitors to the left of
the faceplate lit as the neck ring connections closed. "No seh Japanese,"
Maelcum said, over his suit's transceiver, "but countdown's
wrong." He tapped a particular line on the screen. "Seals not intact, bridge
module. Launchin' wI' lock open."
"Armitage!" Case tried to pound on the door. The physics of zero-g sent
him tumbling back through the printout. "Corto! Don't do it! We gotta
talk! We gotta – "
"Case? Read you, Case. . ." The voice barely resembled Armitage's
now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking. His helmet struck the far
wall. "I'm sorry, Case, but it has to be this way. One of us has to
get out. One of us has to testify. If we all go down here, it ends here.
I'll tell them, Case, I'll tell them all of it. About Girling
and the others. And I'll make it, Case. I know I'll make it. To
Helsinki." There was a sudden silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like
some rare gas. "But it's so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I'm
blind."
"Corto, stop. Wait. You're blind, man. You can't fly!
You'll hit the fucking trees. And they're trying to get you,
Corto, I swear to God, they've left your hatch open. You'll die,
and you'll never get to tell 'em, and I gotta get the enzyme,
name of the enzyme, the enzyme, man. . ." He was shouting, voice high with
hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet's phone pads.
"Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do."
And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static,
harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments of Russian,
and then a stranger's voice, Midwestern, very young. "We are down,
repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we . . ."
"Wintermute," Case screamed, "don't do this to me!" Tears broke
from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets.
Then Haniwa thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck
her hull. Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive
bolts, a second's clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad
Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final
minute of Screaming Fist.
"I'm gone, mon." Maelcum looked at the monitor. "Hatch open. Mute
mus' override ejection failsafe."
Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked
against Lexan.
"Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin' grapple control
wI' bridge. Marcus Garvey still stuck."
But Case was seeing Armitage's endless fall around Freeside,
through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in
his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich folds spread out around him
like the wings of some huge bat.
"Get what you went for?" the construct asked.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A
ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as snow
crystal on a winter window.
"Wintermute killed Armitage. Blew him out in a lifeboat with a hatch
open."
"Tough shit," the Flatline said. "Weren't exactly asshole
buddies, were you?"
"He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs."
"So Wintermute knows too. Count on it."
"I don't exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me."
The construct's hideous approximation of laughter scraped
Case's nerves like a dull blade. "Maybe that means you're
gettin' smart."
He hit the simstim switch.
06:27:52 by the chip in her optic nerve; Case had been following her
progress through Villa Straylight for over an hour, letting the endorphin
analog she'd taken blot out his hangover. The pain in her leg was
gone; she seemed to move through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on
her shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips, secure in
the polycarbon of the Modern suit.
The walls here were raw steel, striped with rough brown ribbons of
epoxy where some kind of covering had been ripped away. She'd hidden
from a work crew, crouching, the fletcher cradled in her hands, her suit
steel-gray, while the two slender Africans and their balloon-tired workcart
passed. The men had shaven heads and wore orange coveralls. One was singing
softly to himself in a language Case had never heard, the tones and melody
alien and haunting.
The head's speech, 3Jane's essay on Straylight, came back
to him as she worked her way deeper into the maze of the place. Straylight
was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from
pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knick-knacks, all
the bizarre impedimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their
winding nest. But it wasn't a craziness he understood. Not like
Armitage's madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a
man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite direction,
reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length of wire. And
history had done that for Colonel Corto. History had already done the really
messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the
war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of
consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool,
the first messages blinking across the face of a child's micro in a
darkened room in a French asylum. Wintermute had built Armitage up from
scratch, with Corto's memories of Screaming Fist as the foundation.
But Armitage's "memories" wouldn't have been Corto's after
a certain point. Case doubted if Armitage had recalled the betrayal, the
Nightwings whirling down in flame. . . Armitage had been a sort of edited
version of Corto, and when the stress of the run had reached a certain
point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto had surfaced, with his
guilt and his sick fury. And now Corto-Armitage was dead, a small frozen
moon for Freeside.
He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too, drilled through
the eye with Molly's microscopic dart, deprived of whatever expert
overdose he'd mixed for himself. That was a more puzzling death,
Ashpool's, the death of a mad king. And he'd killed the puppet
he'd called his daughter, the one with 3Jane's face. It seemed
to Case, as he rode Molly's broadcast sensory input through the
corridors of Straylight, that he'd never really thought of anyone like
Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.
Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the
multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old
barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You
couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives;
there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated
position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But
Tessier–Ashpool wasn't like that, and he sensed the difference
in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the
litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged
spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the
other in a velvet slipper.
The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modem suit and Molly turned left,
through another archway.
Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching wasps,
time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren't the zaibatsus more like
that, or the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms,