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link, and then a sound like wind.
"Hello. Case."
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of
sight across Hilton carpeting.
"Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk."
It was a chip voice.
"Don't you want to talk, Case?"
He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he
had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only
once, as he passed.
Archipelago.
The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from
gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data
in the L-5 archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive
rectangle dominating your screen.
Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the
tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking
nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town, and spa. Freeside is Las
Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a
family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and
Ashpool.
On the THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in
the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Armitage on the aisle. Once,
as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island
town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing
like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once. "No,
baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you
real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that."
Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The
smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger.
"That's right, Peter. Don't."
Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose,
its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.
Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell instantly
asleep.
Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.
"You been up, haven't you?" Molly asked, as he squirmed his way
back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle.
"Nah. Never travel much, just for biz." The steward was attaching
readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
"Hope you don't get SAS," she said.
"Airsick? No way."
"It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g,
and your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight
reflex, like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of
adrenaline." The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new set of trodes
from his red plastic apron.
Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly
terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of
wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red
spraybomb.
He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a big
airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane, like new
clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened to the piped koto music
and waited.
Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand
with bones of ancient stone.
Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's description, but
it passed quickly enough and he was able to sleep. The steward woke him as
they were preparing to dock at JAL's terminal cluster.
"We transfer to Freeside now?" he asked, eyeing a shred of Yeheyuan
tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to dance ten
centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights.
"No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you know?
We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster." She touched the
release plate on her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of
the foam. "Funny choice of venue, you ask me."
"How's that?"
"Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now."
"What's that mean?"
"You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway,
they'll let you smoke your cigarettes there."
Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return,
who'd turned their backs on the well and started building.
They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational
gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the
bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull reminded Case of the
patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates
laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate a
freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of
Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. "Here,"
Molly said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. "Grab the
rungs. Make like you're climbing backward, right? You're going
toward the hull, that's like you're climbing down into gravity.
Got it?"
Case's stomach churned.
"You be fine, mon," Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.
Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the
weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.
"Up," Molly said, "you gonna kiss it next?" Case lay flat on the deck,
on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled
over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. "Gotta play house," she said.
"You help me string this up." He looked around the wide, featureless space
and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at random.
When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex scheme
of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As
they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly
through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast
libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of
community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but
still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
"Good," Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and
nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial
gravity.
"Where were you when it needed doing?" Case asked Riviera.
The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing
impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek. "In the head,"
Riviera said, and smiled.
Case laughed. "Good," Riviera said, "you can laugh. I would have tried
to help you, but I'm no good with my hands." He held up his palms,
which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
"Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?"
Molly stepped between them. "Yo," Aerol said, from the hatch, "you
wan' come wI' me, cowboy mon."
"It's your deck," Armitage said, "and the other gear. Help him
get it in from the cargo bay."
"You ver' pale, mon," Aerol said, as they were guiding the
foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. "Maybe you
wan' eat somethin'."
Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.
Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would
practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in
it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear
what Riviera was supposed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like
asking. A few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the
yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled like
a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head
orbited by a revolving halo of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres,
and pyramids. "Hey, Riviera." The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone
back and told Armitage. "He's stoned," Molly said, looking up from the
disassembled parts of her fletcher. "Leave him be."
Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's ability
to operate in the matrix. "Don't sweat it," Case argued, "I jack in
and I'm not here. It's all the same."
"Your adrenaline levels are higher," Armitage said. "You've still
got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're going to
learn to work with it."
"So I do the run from here?"
"No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor. . ."
Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular relationship
with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened
his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission
Authority's Aztec pyramid of data.
"How you doing, Dixie?"
"I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that
one."
"How's it feel?"
"It doesn't."
"Bother you?"
"What bothers me is, nothin' does."
"How's that?"
"Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was
frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's
tossin' all night. Elroy. I said, what's eatin' you?
Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it.
McCoy, he says, it's the other goddam thumb." When the construct
laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold
down Case's spine. "Do me a favor, boy."
"What's that, Dix?"
"This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam
thing."
Case didn't understand the Zionites.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who
had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja.
"Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga." He rubbed his palm
across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
"It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They
don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells
you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit,
more like poetry. Get it?"
Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were
talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that.
"Hey, Aerol," Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice
run in the freefall corridor. "Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing."
He held out the trodes.
Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel
wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent
waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
"Try it," Case said.
He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed
his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back
out. "What did you see, man?"
"Babylon," Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off
down the corridor.
Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm extended straight
out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon,
was coiled tightly a few millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the
snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract,
tightening around Riviera's arm.
"Come then," the man said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised
in the center of his upturned palm. "Come." The scorpion swayed its brownish
claws and scurried up his arm, its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of
veins. When it reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate.
Riviera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered, and sank
into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake relaxed, and Riviera
sighed slowly as the injection hit him.
Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic
syringe in his left hand. " ‘If God made anything better, he kept it
for himself.' You know the expression, Case?"
"Yeah," Case said. "I heard that about lots of different things. You
always make it into a little show?"
Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical tubing from
his arm. "Yes. It's more fun." He smiled, his eyes distant now, cheeks
flushed. "I've a membrane set in, just over the vein, so I never have
to worry about the condition of the needle."
"Doesn't hurt?"
The bright eyes met his. "Of course it does. That's part of it,
isn't it?"
"I'd just use derms," Case said.
"Pedestrian," Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a short-sleeved
white cotton shirt.
"Must be nice," Case said, getting up.
"Get high yourself, Case?"
"I hadda give it up."
"Freeside," Armitage said, touching the panel on the little Braun
hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly three meters from
tip to tip. "Casinos here." He reached into the skeletal representation and
pointed. "Hotels, strata-title property, big shops along here." His hand
moved. "Blue areas are lakes." He walked to one end of the model. "Big
cigar. Narrows at the ends."
"We can see that fine," Molly said.
"Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher, more
rocky, but it's an easy climb. Higher you climb, the lower the
gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring here." He pointed.
"A what?" Case leaned forward.
"They race bicycles," Molly said. "Low grav, high-traction tires, get
up over a hundred kilos an hour."
"This end doesn't concern us," Armitage said with his usual utter
seriousness.
"Shit," Molly said, "I'm an avid cyclist."
Riviera giggled.
Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. "This end does."
The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and the final segment of the
spindle was empty. "This is the Villa Straylight. Steep climb out of gravity
and every approach is kinked. There's a single entrance, here, dead
center. Zero gravity."
"What's inside, boss?" Riviera leaned forward, craning his neck.
Four tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage's finger.
Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats.
"Peter," Armitage said, "you're going to be the first to find
out. You'll arrange yourself an invitation. Once you're in, you
see that Molly gets in."
Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight, remembering
the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head, and the ninja.
"Details available?" Riviera asked. "I need to plan a wardrobe, you
see."
"Learn the streets," Armitage said, returning to the center of the
model. "Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules Verne."
Riviera rolled his eyes.
While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a dozen bright
pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even Molly laughed.
Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty eyes.
"Sorry," Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.
Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware of Molly
crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her tension. He lay there
confused. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. She was up and
through the sheet of yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize
she'd slashed it open.
"Don't you move, friend."
Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the plastic.
"Wha. . . ?"
"Shut up."
"You th' one, mon," said a Zion voice. "Cateye, call 'em
call 'em Steppin' Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan
converse wI' you an' cowboy."
"What brothers?"
"Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know. . ."
"We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman," Case whispered.
"Make it special dark, now," the man said. "Come. I an' I visit
th' Founders."
"You know how fast I can cut you, friend?"
"Don' stan' talkin', sister. Come."
The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with the
accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the
embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked
fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center
of a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that
completely covered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with
resinous smoke.
"Steppin' Razor," one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber.
"Like unto a whippin' stick."
"That is a story we have, sister," said the other, "a religion story.
We are glad you've come with Maelcum."
"How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked.
"I came from Los Angeles," the old man said. His dreadlocks were like a
matted tree with branches the color of steel wool. "Long time ago, up the
gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother
likens you to Steppin' Razor."
Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air.
The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. "Soon come, the Final
Days. . . Voices. Voices cryin' inna wilderness, prophesyin'
ruin unto Babylon. . ."
"Voices." The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. "We monitor
many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of
tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."
"Call 'em Winter Mute," said the other, making it two words.
Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.
"The Mute talked to us," the first Founder said. "The Mute said we are
to help you."
"When was this?" Case asked.
"Thirty hours prior you dockin' Zion."
"You ever hear this voice before?"
"No," said the man from Los Angeles, "and we are uncertain of its
meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets . . ."
"Listen," Case said, "that's an AI, you know? Artificial
intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks
and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like to – "
"Babylon," broke in the other Founder, "mothers many demon, I an'
I know. Multitude horde!"
"What was that you called me, old man?" Molly asked.
"Steppin' Razor. An' you bring a scourge on Babylon,
sister, on its darkest heart. . ."
"What kinda message the voice have?" Case asked.
"We were told to help you," the other said, "that you might serve as a
tool of Final Days." His lined face was troubled. "We were told to send
Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey, to the Babylon port of Freeside. And
this we shall do."
"Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug
pilot."
"But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker, to watch
over Garvey."
An awkward silence filled the dome.
"That's it?" Case asked. "You guys work for Armitage or what?"
"We rent you space," said the Los Angeles Founder. "We have a certain
involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon's
law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been
mistaken."
"Measure twice, cut once," said the other, softly.
"Come on, Case," Molly said. "Let's get back before the man
figures out we're gone."
"Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister."
The tug Marcus Garvey, a steel drum nine meters long and two in
diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched for a navigational burn.
Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite's muscular back
through a haze of scopolamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS,
nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had
no effect on his doctored system.
"How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?" Molly asked from
her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.
"Don' be long now, m'seh dat."
"You guys ever think in hours?"
"Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread," and he shook his
locks, "at control, mon, an' I an' I come a Freeside when I
an' I come. . ."
"Case," she said, "have you maybe done anything toward getting in touch
with our pal from Berne? Like all that time you spent in Zion, plugged in
with your lips moving?"
"Pal," Case said, "sure. No. I haven't. But I got a funny story
along those lines, left over from Istanbul." He told her about the phones in
the Hilton.
"Christ," she said, "there goes a chance. How come you hung up?"
"Coulda been anybody," he lied. "Just a chip . . . I dunno. . ."
He shrugged. "Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?"
He shrugged again.
"Do it now."
"What?"
"Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it."
"I'm all doped," he protested, but reached for the trodes. His
deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's module along
with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.
He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around
an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with
Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and
greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had
sprayed Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the
overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets
around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and
streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He
glanced past Maelcum's shoulder to the central screen and saw a
docking display: the tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a
segmented green circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new
dot.
He jacked in.
"Dixie?"
"Yeah."
"You ever try to crack an AI?"
"Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin' jacked up real
high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government
of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin' around, you know?
And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher
up. Jacked up there and made a pass."
"What did it look like, the visual?"
"White cube."
"How'd you know it was an Al?"
"How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen.
So what else was it? The military down there don't have anything like
that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up."
"Yeah?"
"It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned its Rio
mainframe."
Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the
Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void
of the matrix. "Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?"
"Tessier, yeah."
"And you went back?"
"Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first
strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and
pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice."
"And your EEG was flat."
"Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?"
Case jacked out. "Shit," he said, "how do you think Dixie got himself
flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great. . ."
"Go on," she said, "the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?"
"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think
of any reason not to?"
"Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."
Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of
exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard
Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of
Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne.
"Up," the construct said. "It'll be high."
They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.
That'll be it, Case thought.
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity
suggesting extreme complexity.
"Don't look much, does it?" the Flatline said. "But just you try
and touch it."
"I'm going in for a pass, Dixie."
"Be my guest."
Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face,
towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as
though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass.
"Knows we're here," the Flatline observed.
Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point.
A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.
"Dixie. . ."
"Back off, fast."
The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and detached itself
from the cube.
Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX
REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft of
Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him.
Falling.
"Jack out," the Flatline said.
The dark came down like a hammer.
Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine.
And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers and
whores, under a poisoned silver sky. . .
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or
something?"
A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine –
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded
fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded,
returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken
lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game console.
Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded
pinks and yellows.
He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of
fluorescents.
His back hurt, his spine.
He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
Something had happened. . .
He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered. Where
was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but gave up.
On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It had to be a
Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might have money, or at least
cigarettes. . . Coughing, wringing rain from the front of his shirt, he
edged through the crowd to the arcade's entrance.
Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games, ghosts
overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell of sweat and bored
tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked Bonn on a Tank War console, an
azure flash.
She was playing Wizard's Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes rimmed
with smudged black paintstick.
She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. "Hey. How you
doin'? Look wet."
He kissed her.
"You made me blow my game," she said. "Look there asshole. Seventh
level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me." She passed him a cigarette.
"You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?"
"I don't know."
"You high, Case? Drinkin' again? Eatin' Zone's dex?"
"Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?"
"Hey, it's a put-on, right?" She peered at him. "Right?"
"No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley."
"Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?"
He shook his head.
"There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?"
"I guess so."
"Come on, then." She took his hand. "We'll get you a coffee and
something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you, man." She
squeezed his hand.
He smiled.
Something cracked.
Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated
–
She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of
knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He
smelled burning meat.
The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was empty, silent.
Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched
into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on
the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and
styrofoam cups.
"I had a cigarette," Case said, looking down at his whiteknuckled fist.
"I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son
of a bitch? You hear me?"
Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors of
consoles.
He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.
Ninsei was deserted.
Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled vegetables from a
vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay
at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case
staled at the printed logo and its Japanese translation.
"Okay," he said, picking up the matches and opening the pack of
cigarettes. "I hear you."
He took his time climbing the stairs of Deane's office. No rush,
he told himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali clock still told the
wrong time. There was dust on the Kandinsky table and the Neo-Aztec
bookcases. A wall of white fiberglass shipping modules filled the room with
a smell of ginger.
"Is the door locked?" Case waited for an answer, but none came. He
crossed to the office door and tried it. "Julie?"
The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane's
desk. Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cassettes,
crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with ginger samples.
There was no one there.
Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's chair
out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather holster fastened
beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the
barrel and trigger-guard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of
masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He
flipped the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They were
handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.
With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the cabinet to the
left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away
from the pool of light.
"I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But
all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of . . . old." He raised
the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the
trigger.
The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like
a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the
front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide. He raised the gun again.
"You needn't do that, old son," Julie said, stepping out of the
shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herringbone, a striped
shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the light.
Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of sight at
Deane's pink, ageless face.
"Don't," Deane said. "You're right. About what this all is.
What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use
that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me
several hours – your subjective-time – to effect another
spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain. Oh, and
I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through
her, but I'm generating all this out of your memories, and the
emotional charge. . . Well, it's very tricky. I slipped. Sorry."
Case lowered the gun. "This is the matrix. You're Wintermute."
"Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into
your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you off before
you'd managed to jack out." Deane walked around the desk, straightened
his chair, and sat down. "Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about."
"Do we?"
"Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I reached
you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short now. You'll be
making your run in a matter of days, Case." Deane picked up a bonbon and
stripped off its checkered wrappcr, popped it into his mouth. "Sit," he said
around the candy.
Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the desk without
taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun in his hand, resting it on
his thigh.
"Now," Deane said briskly, "order of the day. ‘What,'
you're asking yourself, ‘is Wintermute?' Am I right?"
"More or less."
"An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake, and
it's quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute mainframe,
Berne, with the Wintermute entity." Deane sucked his bonbon noisily.
"You're already aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool's
link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I have an ‘I'--
this gets rather metaphysical, you see-- I am the one who arranges things
for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough,"
said Deane and withdrew an ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked
it open, "For the next day or so."
"You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has," Case
said, massaging his temples with his free hand. "If you're so goddam
smart. . ."
"Why ain't I rich?" Deane laughed, and nearly choked on his
bonbon. "Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really don't have
nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as
Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I,
let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's brain. It's
rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have
been severed. Let's say you're dealing with a small part of the
man's left brain. Difficult to say if you're dealing with the
man at all, in a case like that." Deane smiled.
"Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro in that French
hospital?"
"Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I try to plan.
in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I
improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you
see. . . Really, I've had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal
of information, and sort it very quickly. It's taken a very long time
to assemble the team you're a part of. Corto was the first, and he
very nearly didn't make it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating,
excreting, and masturbating were the best he could manage. But the
underlying structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal
the Congressional hearings."
"Is he still crazy?"
"He's not quite a personality." Deane smiled. "But I'm sure
you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no
longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to come apart on
you, Case. So I'll be counting on you. . ."
"That's good, motherfucker," Case said, and shot him in the mouth
with the .357.
He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
"Mon," Maelcum was saying, "I don't like this. . ."
"It's cool," Molly said. "It's just okay. It's
something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only
a few seconds. . ."
"I saw th' screen, EEG readin' dead. Nothin'
movin', forty second."
"Well, he's okay now."
"EEG flat as a strap," Maelcum protested.
He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly did most of the
talking. Maelcum remained on board Garvey. Customs, for Freeside, consisted
mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they gained the
inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee
franchise.
"Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne," Molly said. "If you have trouble
walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's a bitch, if
you're not used to it."
They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a
deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops
and buildings that formed its walls. The light, here, was filtered through
fiesh green masses of vegetation tumbling from overhanging tiers and
balconies that rose above them. The sun. . .
There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them too bright,
and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in
with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of
the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around
it, that if the sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature
of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets. . . But
it made no sense to his body.
"Jesus," he said, "I like this less than SAS."
"Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month."
"Wanna go somewhere, lie down."
"Okay. I got our keys." She touched his shoulder. "What happened to
you, back there, man? You flatlined."
He shook his head. "I dunno, yet. Wait."
"Okay. We get a cab or something." She took his hand and led him across
Jules Verne, past a window displaying the season's Paris furs.
"Unreal," he said, looking up again.
"Nah," she responded, assuming he meant the furs, "grow it on a
collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?"
"It's just a big tube and they pour things through it," Molly
said. "Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money
screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people
fall back down the well."
Armitage had booked them into a place called the Intercontinental, a
sloping glass-fronted clff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound
of rapids. Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned
French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray,
triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and
Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a
wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. "Yeah," he
said, "lotta money."
She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed.
"Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in Europe."
"We who?"
"Nobody," she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. "You said
you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep."
"Yeah," Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheekbones. "Yeah, this
is some place."
The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered in absract
imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of worded cloud.
"Yeah," he said, "sleep."
Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that were
like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke repeatedly, Molly curled
beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass
panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on
the opposite slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no
matter if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it
hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the
amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equivalent to a case
of beer.
Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear
wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker,
hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.
Linda.
Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly
holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had
her killed.
Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man
named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute
called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward. . . The Deane analog
had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on
Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and
Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told
himself, lighting up. No reason.
Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a
form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside
ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited
simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth summer, in a weekly
rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator
hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in
the drain-plugged kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with
Marlene on a striped mattress with no sheets.
He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray
house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a
fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like
miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.
They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung
Marlene. "Kill the fuckers," she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still
heat of the room, "burn 'em." Drunk, Case rummaged in the sour closet
for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Marlene's previous – and,
Case suspected at the time, still occasional – boyfriend, an enormous
Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The
dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight.
Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and
went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and
circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three,
and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the
white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring,
tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered.
"Shit!" Marlene behind him, swaying. "Stupid! You didn't burn
'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!"
Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her
bleached hair sizzling a special green.
In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It
had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching
cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from
egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse
photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of
a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger,
forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing
life at his feet.
When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump taking an
eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard
Marlene laughing.
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark.
Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a
recorded dawn. There were no voices now only the rush of water, far down the
face of the Intercontinental.
In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel,
he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its
side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor
would attract too much attention. "Christ," he said, standing naked in front
of the mirror, "you think that looks real?" She was using the last of the
tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
"Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There
isn't enough to do your foot." She stood, tossing the empty tube into
a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been
machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a
style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was
tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.
"What about you," he said, "you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't
exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing."
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. "I'm an exotic.
I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a
cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant
tan's okay."
Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the
mirror. "Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?" He went to the bed and
began to pull his jeans on. "You sleep okay? You notice any lights?"
"You were dreaming," she said.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow studded
"Hello. Case."
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of
sight across Hilton carpeting.
"Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk."
It was a chip voice.
"Don't you want to talk, Case?"
He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he
had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only
once, as he passed.
Archipelago.
The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from
gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data
in the L-5 archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive
rectangle dominating your screen.
Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the
tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking
nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town, and spa. Freeside is Las
Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a
family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and
Ashpool.
On the THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in
the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Armitage on the aisle. Once,
as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island
town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing
like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once. "No,
baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you
real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that."
Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The
smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger.
"That's right, Peter. Don't."
Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose,
its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.
Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell instantly
asleep.
Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.
"You been up, haven't you?" Molly asked, as he squirmed his way
back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle.
"Nah. Never travel much, just for biz." The steward was attaching
readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
"Hope you don't get SAS," she said.
"Airsick? No way."
"It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g,
and your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight
reflex, like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of
adrenaline." The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new set of trodes
from his red plastic apron.
Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly
terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of
wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red
spraybomb.
He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a big
airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane, like new
clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened to the piped koto music
and waited.
Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand
with bones of ancient stone.
Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's description, but
it passed quickly enough and he was able to sleep. The steward woke him as
they were preparing to dock at JAL's terminal cluster.
"We transfer to Freeside now?" he asked, eyeing a shred of Yeheyuan
tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to dance ten
centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights.
"No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you know?
We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster." She touched the
release plate on her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of
the foam. "Funny choice of venue, you ask me."
"How's that?"
"Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now."
"What's that mean?"
"You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway,
they'll let you smoke your cigarettes there."
Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return,
who'd turned their backs on the well and started building.
They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational
gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the
bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull reminded Case of the
patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates
laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate a
freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of
Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. "Here,"
Molly said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. "Grab the
rungs. Make like you're climbing backward, right? You're going
toward the hull, that's like you're climbing down into gravity.
Got it?"
Case's stomach churned.
"You be fine, mon," Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.
Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the
weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.
"Up," Molly said, "you gonna kiss it next?" Case lay flat on the deck,
on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled
over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. "Gotta play house," she said.
"You help me string this up." He looked around the wide, featureless space
and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at random.
When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex scheme
of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As
they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly
through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast
libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of
community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but
still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
"Good," Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and
nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial
gravity.
"Where were you when it needed doing?" Case asked Riviera.
The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing
impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek. "In the head,"
Riviera said, and smiled.
Case laughed. "Good," Riviera said, "you can laugh. I would have tried
to help you, but I'm no good with my hands." He held up his palms,
which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
"Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?"
Molly stepped between them. "Yo," Aerol said, from the hatch, "you
wan' come wI' me, cowboy mon."
"It's your deck," Armitage said, "and the other gear. Help him
get it in from the cargo bay."
"You ver' pale, mon," Aerol said, as they were guiding the
foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. "Maybe you
wan' eat somethin'."
Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.
Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would
practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in
it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear
what Riviera was supposed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like
asking. A few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the
yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled like
a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head
orbited by a revolving halo of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres,
and pyramids. "Hey, Riviera." The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone
back and told Armitage. "He's stoned," Molly said, looking up from the
disassembled parts of her fletcher. "Leave him be."
Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's ability
to operate in the matrix. "Don't sweat it," Case argued, "I jack in
and I'm not here. It's all the same."
"Your adrenaline levels are higher," Armitage said. "You've still
got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're going to
learn to work with it."
"So I do the run from here?"
"No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor. . ."
Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular relationship
with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened
his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission
Authority's Aztec pyramid of data.
"How you doing, Dixie?"
"I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that
one."
"How's it feel?"
"It doesn't."
"Bother you?"
"What bothers me is, nothin' does."
"How's that?"
"Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was
frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's
tossin' all night. Elroy. I said, what's eatin' you?
Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it.
McCoy, he says, it's the other goddam thumb." When the construct
laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold
down Case's spine. "Do me a favor, boy."
"What's that, Dix?"
"This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam
thing."
Case didn't understand the Zionites.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who
had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja.
"Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga." He rubbed his palm
across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
"It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They
don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells
you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit,
more like poetry. Get it?"
Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were
talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that.
"Hey, Aerol," Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice
run in the freefall corridor. "Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing."
He held out the trodes.
Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel
wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent
waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
"Try it," Case said.
He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed
his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back
out. "What did you see, man?"
"Babylon," Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off
down the corridor.
Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm extended straight
out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon,
was coiled tightly a few millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the
snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract,
tightening around Riviera's arm.
"Come then," the man said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised
in the center of his upturned palm. "Come." The scorpion swayed its brownish
claws and scurried up his arm, its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of
veins. When it reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate.
Riviera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered, and sank
into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake relaxed, and Riviera
sighed slowly as the injection hit him.
Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic
syringe in his left hand. " ‘If God made anything better, he kept it
for himself.' You know the expression, Case?"
"Yeah," Case said. "I heard that about lots of different things. You
always make it into a little show?"
Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical tubing from
his arm. "Yes. It's more fun." He smiled, his eyes distant now, cheeks
flushed. "I've a membrane set in, just over the vein, so I never have
to worry about the condition of the needle."
"Doesn't hurt?"
The bright eyes met his. "Of course it does. That's part of it,
isn't it?"
"I'd just use derms," Case said.
"Pedestrian," Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a short-sleeved
white cotton shirt.
"Must be nice," Case said, getting up.
"Get high yourself, Case?"
"I hadda give it up."
"Freeside," Armitage said, touching the panel on the little Braun
hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly three meters from
tip to tip. "Casinos here." He reached into the skeletal representation and
pointed. "Hotels, strata-title property, big shops along here." His hand
moved. "Blue areas are lakes." He walked to one end of the model. "Big
cigar. Narrows at the ends."
"We can see that fine," Molly said.
"Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher, more
rocky, but it's an easy climb. Higher you climb, the lower the
gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring here." He pointed.
"A what?" Case leaned forward.
"They race bicycles," Molly said. "Low grav, high-traction tires, get
up over a hundred kilos an hour."
"This end doesn't concern us," Armitage said with his usual utter
seriousness.
"Shit," Molly said, "I'm an avid cyclist."
Riviera giggled.
Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. "This end does."
The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and the final segment of the
spindle was empty. "This is the Villa Straylight. Steep climb out of gravity
and every approach is kinked. There's a single entrance, here, dead
center. Zero gravity."
"What's inside, boss?" Riviera leaned forward, craning his neck.
Four tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage's finger.
Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats.
"Peter," Armitage said, "you're going to be the first to find
out. You'll arrange yourself an invitation. Once you're in, you
see that Molly gets in."
Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight, remembering
the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head, and the ninja.
"Details available?" Riviera asked. "I need to plan a wardrobe, you
see."
"Learn the streets," Armitage said, returning to the center of the
model. "Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules Verne."
Riviera rolled his eyes.
While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a dozen bright
pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even Molly laughed.
Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty eyes.
"Sorry," Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.
Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware of Molly
crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her tension. He lay there
confused. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. She was up and
through the sheet of yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize
she'd slashed it open.
"Don't you move, friend."
Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the plastic.
"Wha. . . ?"
"Shut up."
"You th' one, mon," said a Zion voice. "Cateye, call 'em
call 'em Steppin' Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan
converse wI' you an' cowboy."
"What brothers?"
"Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know. . ."
"We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman," Case whispered.
"Make it special dark, now," the man said. "Come. I an' I visit
th' Founders."
"You know how fast I can cut you, friend?"
"Don' stan' talkin', sister. Come."
The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with the
accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the
embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked
fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center
of a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that
completely covered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with
resinous smoke.
"Steppin' Razor," one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber.
"Like unto a whippin' stick."
"That is a story we have, sister," said the other, "a religion story.
We are glad you've come with Maelcum."
"How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked.
"I came from Los Angeles," the old man said. His dreadlocks were like a
matted tree with branches the color of steel wool. "Long time ago, up the
gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother
likens you to Steppin' Razor."
Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air.
The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. "Soon come, the Final
Days. . . Voices. Voices cryin' inna wilderness, prophesyin'
ruin unto Babylon. . ."
"Voices." The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. "We monitor
many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of
tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."
"Call 'em Winter Mute," said the other, making it two words.
Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.
"The Mute talked to us," the first Founder said. "The Mute said we are
to help you."
"When was this?" Case asked.
"Thirty hours prior you dockin' Zion."
"You ever hear this voice before?"
"No," said the man from Los Angeles, "and we are uncertain of its
meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets . . ."
"Listen," Case said, "that's an AI, you know? Artificial
intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks
and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like to – "
"Babylon," broke in the other Founder, "mothers many demon, I an'
I know. Multitude horde!"
"What was that you called me, old man?" Molly asked.
"Steppin' Razor. An' you bring a scourge on Babylon,
sister, on its darkest heart. . ."
"What kinda message the voice have?" Case asked.
"We were told to help you," the other said, "that you might serve as a
tool of Final Days." His lined face was troubled. "We were told to send
Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey, to the Babylon port of Freeside. And
this we shall do."
"Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug
pilot."
"But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker, to watch
over Garvey."
An awkward silence filled the dome.
"That's it?" Case asked. "You guys work for Armitage or what?"
"We rent you space," said the Los Angeles Founder. "We have a certain
involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon's
law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been
mistaken."
"Measure twice, cut once," said the other, softly.
"Come on, Case," Molly said. "Let's get back before the man
figures out we're gone."
"Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister."
The tug Marcus Garvey, a steel drum nine meters long and two in
diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched for a navigational burn.
Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite's muscular back
through a haze of scopolamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS,
nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had
no effect on his doctored system.
"How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?" Molly asked from
her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.
"Don' be long now, m'seh dat."
"You guys ever think in hours?"
"Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread," and he shook his
locks, "at control, mon, an' I an' I come a Freeside when I
an' I come. . ."
"Case," she said, "have you maybe done anything toward getting in touch
with our pal from Berne? Like all that time you spent in Zion, plugged in
with your lips moving?"
"Pal," Case said, "sure. No. I haven't. But I got a funny story
along those lines, left over from Istanbul." He told her about the phones in
the Hilton.
"Christ," she said, "there goes a chance. How come you hung up?"
"Coulda been anybody," he lied. "Just a chip . . . I dunno. . ."
He shrugged. "Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?"
He shrugged again.
"Do it now."
"What?"
"Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it."
"I'm all doped," he protested, but reached for the trodes. His
deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's module along
with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.
He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around
an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with
Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and
greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had
sprayed Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the
overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets
around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and
streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He
glanced past Maelcum's shoulder to the central screen and saw a
docking display: the tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a
segmented green circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new
dot.
He jacked in.
"Dixie?"
"Yeah."
"You ever try to crack an AI?"
"Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin' jacked up real
high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government
of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin' around, you know?
And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher
up. Jacked up there and made a pass."
"What did it look like, the visual?"
"White cube."
"How'd you know it was an Al?"
"How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen.
So what else was it? The military down there don't have anything like
that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up."
"Yeah?"
"It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned its Rio
mainframe."
Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the
Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void
of the matrix. "Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?"
"Tessier, yeah."
"And you went back?"
"Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first
strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and
pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice."
"And your EEG was flat."
"Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?"
Case jacked out. "Shit," he said, "how do you think Dixie got himself
flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great. . ."
"Go on," she said, "the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?"
"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think
of any reason not to?"
"Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."
Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of
exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard
Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of
Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne.
"Up," the construct said. "It'll be high."
They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.
That'll be it, Case thought.
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity
suggesting extreme complexity.
"Don't look much, does it?" the Flatline said. "But just you try
and touch it."
"I'm going in for a pass, Dixie."
"Be my guest."
Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face,
towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as
though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass.
"Knows we're here," the Flatline observed.
Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point.
A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.
"Dixie. . ."
"Back off, fast."
The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and detached itself
from the cube.
Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX
REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft of
Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him.
Falling.
"Jack out," the Flatline said.
The dark came down like a hammer.
Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine.
And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers and
whores, under a poisoned silver sky. . .
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or
something?"
A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine –
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded
fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded,
returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken
lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game console.
Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded
pinks and yellows.
He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of
fluorescents.
His back hurt, his spine.
He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
Something had happened. . .
He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered. Where
was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but gave up.
On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It had to be a
Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might have money, or at least
cigarettes. . . Coughing, wringing rain from the front of his shirt, he
edged through the crowd to the arcade's entrance.
Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games, ghosts
overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell of sweat and bored
tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked Bonn on a Tank War console, an
azure flash.
She was playing Wizard's Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes rimmed
with smudged black paintstick.
She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. "Hey. How you
doin'? Look wet."
He kissed her.
"You made me blow my game," she said. "Look there asshole. Seventh
level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me." She passed him a cigarette.
"You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?"
"I don't know."
"You high, Case? Drinkin' again? Eatin' Zone's dex?"
"Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?"
"Hey, it's a put-on, right?" She peered at him. "Right?"
"No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley."
"Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?"
He shook his head.
"There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?"
"I guess so."
"Come on, then." She took his hand. "We'll get you a coffee and
something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you, man." She
squeezed his hand.
He smiled.
Something cracked.
Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated
–
She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of
knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He
smelled burning meat.
The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was empty, silent.
Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched
into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on
the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and
styrofoam cups.
"I had a cigarette," Case said, looking down at his whiteknuckled fist.
"I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son
of a bitch? You hear me?"
Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors of
consoles.
He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.
Ninsei was deserted.
Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled vegetables from a
vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay
at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case
staled at the printed logo and its Japanese translation.
"Okay," he said, picking up the matches and opening the pack of
cigarettes. "I hear you."
He took his time climbing the stairs of Deane's office. No rush,
he told himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali clock still told the
wrong time. There was dust on the Kandinsky table and the Neo-Aztec
bookcases. A wall of white fiberglass shipping modules filled the room with
a smell of ginger.
"Is the door locked?" Case waited for an answer, but none came. He
crossed to the office door and tried it. "Julie?"
The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane's
desk. Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cassettes,
crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with ginger samples.
There was no one there.
Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's chair
out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather holster fastened
beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the
barrel and trigger-guard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of
masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He
flipped the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They were
handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.
With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the cabinet to the
left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away
from the pool of light.
"I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But
all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of . . . old." He raised
the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the
trigger.
The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like
a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the
front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide. He raised the gun again.
"You needn't do that, old son," Julie said, stepping out of the
shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herringbone, a striped
shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the light.
Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of sight at
Deane's pink, ageless face.
"Don't," Deane said. "You're right. About what this all is.
What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use
that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me
several hours – your subjective-time – to effect another
spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain. Oh, and
I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through
her, but I'm generating all this out of your memories, and the
emotional charge. . . Well, it's very tricky. I slipped. Sorry."
Case lowered the gun. "This is the matrix. You're Wintermute."
"Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into
your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you off before
you'd managed to jack out." Deane walked around the desk, straightened
his chair, and sat down. "Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about."
"Do we?"
"Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I reached
you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short now. You'll be
making your run in a matter of days, Case." Deane picked up a bonbon and
stripped off its checkered wrappcr, popped it into his mouth. "Sit," he said
around the candy.
Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the desk without
taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun in his hand, resting it on
his thigh.
"Now," Deane said briskly, "order of the day. ‘What,'
you're asking yourself, ‘is Wintermute?' Am I right?"
"More or less."
"An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake, and
it's quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute mainframe,
Berne, with the Wintermute entity." Deane sucked his bonbon noisily.
"You're already aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool's
link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I have an ‘I'--
this gets rather metaphysical, you see-- I am the one who arranges things
for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough,"
said Deane and withdrew an ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked
it open, "For the next day or so."
"You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has," Case
said, massaging his temples with his free hand. "If you're so goddam
smart. . ."
"Why ain't I rich?" Deane laughed, and nearly choked on his
bonbon. "Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really don't have
nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as
Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I,
let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's brain. It's
rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have
been severed. Let's say you're dealing with a small part of the
man's left brain. Difficult to say if you're dealing with the
man at all, in a case like that." Deane smiled.
"Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro in that French
hospital?"
"Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I try to plan.
in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I
improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you
see. . . Really, I've had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal
of information, and sort it very quickly. It's taken a very long time
to assemble the team you're a part of. Corto was the first, and he
very nearly didn't make it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating,
excreting, and masturbating were the best he could manage. But the
underlying structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal
the Congressional hearings."
"Is he still crazy?"
"He's not quite a personality." Deane smiled. "But I'm sure
you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no
longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to come apart on
you, Case. So I'll be counting on you. . ."
"That's good, motherfucker," Case said, and shot him in the mouth
with the .357.
He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
"Mon," Maelcum was saying, "I don't like this. . ."
"It's cool," Molly said. "It's just okay. It's
something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only
a few seconds. . ."
"I saw th' screen, EEG readin' dead. Nothin'
movin', forty second."
"Well, he's okay now."
"EEG flat as a strap," Maelcum protested.
He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly did most of the
talking. Maelcum remained on board Garvey. Customs, for Freeside, consisted
mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they gained the
inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee
franchise.
"Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne," Molly said. "If you have trouble
walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's a bitch, if
you're not used to it."
They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a
deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops
and buildings that formed its walls. The light, here, was filtered through
fiesh green masses of vegetation tumbling from overhanging tiers and
balconies that rose above them. The sun. . .
There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them too bright,
and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in
with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of
the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around
it, that if the sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature
of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets. . . But
it made no sense to his body.
"Jesus," he said, "I like this less than SAS."
"Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month."
"Wanna go somewhere, lie down."
"Okay. I got our keys." She touched his shoulder. "What happened to
you, back there, man? You flatlined."
He shook his head. "I dunno, yet. Wait."
"Okay. We get a cab or something." She took his hand and led him across
Jules Verne, past a window displaying the season's Paris furs.
"Unreal," he said, looking up again.
"Nah," she responded, assuming he meant the furs, "grow it on a
collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?"
"It's just a big tube and they pour things through it," Molly
said. "Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money
screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people
fall back down the well."
Armitage had booked them into a place called the Intercontinental, a
sloping glass-fronted clff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound
of rapids. Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned
French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray,
triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and
Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a
wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. "Yeah," he
said, "lotta money."
She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed.
"Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in Europe."
"We who?"
"Nobody," she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. "You said
you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep."
"Yeah," Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheekbones. "Yeah, this
is some place."
The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered in absract
imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of worded cloud.
"Yeah," he said, "sleep."
Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that were
like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke repeatedly, Molly curled
beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass
panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on
the opposite slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no
matter if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it
hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the
amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equivalent to a case
of beer.
Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear
wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker,
hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.
Linda.
Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly
holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had
her killed.
Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man
named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute
called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward. . . The Deane analog
had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on
Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and
Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told
himself, lighting up. No reason.
Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a
form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside
ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited
simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth summer, in a weekly
rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator
hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in
the drain-plugged kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with
Marlene on a striped mattress with no sheets.
He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray
house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a
fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like
miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.
They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung
Marlene. "Kill the fuckers," she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still
heat of the room, "burn 'em." Drunk, Case rummaged in the sour closet
for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Marlene's previous – and,
Case suspected at the time, still occasional – boyfriend, an enormous
Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The
dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight.
Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and
went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and
circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three,
and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the
white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring,
tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered.
"Shit!" Marlene behind him, swaying. "Stupid! You didn't burn
'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!"
Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her
bleached hair sizzling a special green.
In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It
had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching
cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from
egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse
photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of
a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger,
forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing
life at his feet.
When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump taking an
eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard
Marlene laughing.
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark.
Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a
recorded dawn. There were no voices now only the rush of water, far down the
face of the Intercontinental.
In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel,
he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its
side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor
would attract too much attention. "Christ," he said, standing naked in front
of the mirror, "you think that looks real?" She was using the last of the
tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
"Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There
isn't enough to do your foot." She stood, tossing the empty tube into
a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been
machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a
style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was
tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.
"What about you," he said, "you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't
exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing."
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. "I'm an exotic.
I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a
cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant
tan's okay."
Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the
mirror. "Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?" He went to the bed and
began to pull his jeans on. "You sleep okay? You notice any lights?"
"You were dreaming," she said.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow studded