Страница:
Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware of Molly crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her tension. He lay there confused. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. She was up and through the sheet of yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize she'd slashed it open. «Don't you move, friend.» Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the plastic. «Wha. . . ?» «Shut up.» «You th' one, mon,» said a Zion voice. «Cateye, call 'em call 'em Steppin' Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan converse wi' you an' cowboy.» «What brothers?» «Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know….» «We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman,» Case whispered. «Make it special dark, now,» the man said. «Come. I an' I visit th' Founders.» «You know how fast I can cut you, friend?» «Don' stan' talkin', sister. Come.»
The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center of a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely cov— ered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with resinous smoke. «Steppin' Razor,» one said, as Molly drifted into the cham— ber. «Like unto a whippin' stick.» «That is a story we have, sister,» said the other, «a religion story. We are glad you've come with Maelcum.» «How come you don't talk the patois?» Molly asked. «I came from Los Angeles,» the old man said. His dread— locks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel wool. «Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Step— pin' Razor.» Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air. The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. «Soon come, the Final Days…. Voices. Voices cryin' inna wilder— ness, prophesyin' ruin unto Babylon….» «Voices.» The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. «We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.» «Call 'em Winter Mute,» said the other, making it two words. Case felt the skin crawl on his arms. «The Mute talked to us,» the first Founder said. «The Mute said we are to help you.» «When was this?» Case asked. «Thirty hours prior you dockin' Zion.» «You ever hear this voice before?» «No,» said the man from Los Angeles, «and we are uncertain of its meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets ….» «Listen,» Case said, «that's an Al, you know? Artificial intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like to-« «Babylon,» broke in the other Founder, «mothers many de— mon, I an' I know. Multitude horde!» «What was that you called me, old man?» Molly asked. «Steppin' Razor. An' you bring a scourge on Babylon, sis— ter, on its darkest heart….» «What kinda message the voice have?» Case asked. «We were told to help you,» the other said, «that you might serve as a tool of Final Days.» His lined face was troubled. «We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey, to the Babylon port of Freeside. And this we shall do.» «Maelcum a rude boy,» said the other, «an' a righteous tug pilot.» «But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker, to watch over Garvey.» An awkward silence filled the dome. «That's it?» Case asked. «You guys work for Armitage or what?» «We rent you space,» said the Los Angeles Founder. «We have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon's law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been mistaken.» «Measure twice, cut once,» said the other, softly. «Come on, Case,» Molly said. «Let's get back before the man figures out we're gone.» «Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister.»
The tug Marcus Garvey, a steel drum nine meters long and two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched for a navigational burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of sco— polamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS, nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had no effect on his doctored system. «How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?» Molly asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module. «Don' be long now, m'seh dat.» «You guys ever think in hours?» «Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,» and he shook his locks, «at control, moo, 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. «lust a chip … I dunno….» He shrugged. «Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?» He shrugged again. «Do it now.» «What?» «Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.» «I'm all doped,» he protested, but reached for the trodes. His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor. He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec— tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lioos of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over— laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum's shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot. He jacked in. «Dixie?» «Yeah.» «You ever try to crack an AI?» «Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin' jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina— tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin' around, you know? And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there and made a pass.» «What did it look like, the visual?» «White cube.» «How'd you know it was an 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 any— thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up.» «Yeah?» «It was on the Turing Registry. Al. Frog company owned its Rio mainframe.» Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void of the matrix. «Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?» «Tessier, yeah.» «And you went back?» «Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.» «And your EEG was flat.» «Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?» Case jacked out. «Shit,» he said, «how do you think Dixie got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great….» «Go on,» she said, «the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?»
«Dix,» Case said, «I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?» «Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.» Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne. «Up,» the construct said. «It'll be high.» They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker. That'll be it, Case thought. Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity. «Don't look much, does it?» the Flatline said. «But just you try and touch it.» «I'm going in for a pass, Dixie.» «Be my guest.»
Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass. «Knows we're here,» the Flatline observed. Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point. A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube. «Dixie….» «Back off, fast.» The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and de— tached itself from the cube. Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him. Falling. «Jack out,» the Flatline said. The dark came down like a hammer.
Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine. And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, under a poisoned silver sky…. «Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something?» A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine-
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head. Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows. He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of fluorescents. His back hurt, his spine. He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes. Something had happened…. He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but gave up. On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It 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 ass hole. Seventh level dungeon and the god dam vampires got me.» She passed him a cigarette. «You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?» «I don't know.» «You high, Case? Drinkin' again? Eatin' Zone's dex?» «Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?» «Hey, it's a put-on, right?» She peered at him. «Right?» «No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley.» «Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?» He shook his head. «There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?» «I guess so.» «Come on, then.» She took his hand. «We'll get you a coffee and something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you, man.» She squeezed his hand. He smiled. Something cracked. Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated-
She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat. The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and styrofoam cups. «I had a cigarette,» Case said, looking down at his white— knuckled fist. «I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?» Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors of consoles. He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped. Ninsei was deserted. Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled veg— etables from a vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case 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 cas— settes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with ginger samples. There was no one there. Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's chair out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He flipped the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished. With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away from the pool of light. «I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of . . . old.» He raised the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the trigger. The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide. He raised the gun again. «You needn't do that, old son,» Julie said, stepping out of the shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk her ing— bone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the light. Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of sight at Deane's pink, ageless face. «Don't,» Deane said. «You're right. About what this all is. What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours-your subjective-time-to effect another spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain. Oh, and I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through her, but I'm generating all this out of your memories, and the emotional charge…. Well, it's very tricky. I slipped. Sorry.» Case lowered the gun. «This is the matrix. You're Winter— mute.»
— «Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you off before you'd managed to jack out.» Deane walked around the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. «Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about.» «Do we?» «Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short now. You'll be making your run in a matter of days, Case.» Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrap— pcr, popped h 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 Winterrnute mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute entity.» Deane sucked his bonbon noisily. «You're already aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I have an 'I'-this gets rather metaphysical, you see-I am the one who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough,» said Deane and withdrew an ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, «For the next day or so.» «You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has,» Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand. «If you're so goddam smart. . .» «Why ain't I rich?» Deane laughed, and nearly choked on his bonbon. «Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's brain. It's rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let's say you're dealing with a small part of the man's left brain. Difficult to say if you're dealing with the man at all, in a case like that.» Deane smiled. «Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro in that French hospital?» «Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I try to plan. in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see…. Really, I've had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very quickly. It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're a part of. Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn't make it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating, excreting, and mastur— bating were the best he could manage. But the underlying structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal the Congressional hearings.» «Is he still crazy?» «He's not quite a personality.» Deane smiled. «But I'm sure you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to come apart on you, Case. So I'll be counting on you….» «That's good, motherfucker,» Case said, and shot him in the mouth with the .357. He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
«Mon,» Maelcum was saying, «I don't like this….» «It's cool,» Molly said. «It's just okay. It's something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few seconds….» «I saw th' screen, EEG readin' dead. Nothin' movin', forty second.» «Well, he's okay now.» «EEG flat as a strap,» Maelcum protested. 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 vege— tation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose above them. The sun. . . There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets…. But it made no sense to his body. «Jesus,» he said, «I like this less than SAS.» «Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month.» «Wanna go somewhere, lie down.» «Okay. I got our keys.» She touched his shoulder. «What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined.» He shook his head. «I dunno, yet. Wait.» «Okay. We get a cab or something.» She took his hand and led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the sea— son's Paris furs. «Unreal,» he said, looking up again. «Nah,» she responded, assuming he meant the furs, «grow it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?»
«It's just a big tube and they pour things through it,» Molly said. «Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the well.» Armitage had booked them into a place called the Inter— continental, a sloping glass-fronted 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 cheek— bones. «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 re— peatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equiv— alent to a case of beer. Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach. Linda. Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office. Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had her killed. Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward….The Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations. But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told himself, lighting up. No reason. Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep. The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth sum— mer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a striped mattress with no sheets. He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting con— tents of the dumpsters. They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene. «Kill the fuckers,» she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, «burn 'em.» Drunk, Case rum— maged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Mar— lene's previous-and, Case suspected at the time, still occasional-boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight. Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz. The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to l00 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered. «Shit!» Marlene behind him, swaying. «Stupid! You didn't burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!» Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her en— gulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green. In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the black— ened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt. He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re— vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet. When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing. He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental. In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor would attract too much attention. «Christ,» he said, standing naked in front of the mirror, «you think that looks real?» She was using the last of the tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him. «Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn't enough to do your foot.» She stood, tossing the empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric. «What about you,» he said, «you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.» She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. «I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay.» Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at him— self in the mirror. «Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?» He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. «You sleep okay? You notice any lights?» «You were dreaming,» she said. They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd be doing it through Wintermute. «And it was like real?» she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. «Like simstim?» He said it was. «Real as this,» he added, looking around. «Maybe more.» The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfal— tering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rec— tilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the de— signers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with ar— tificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba. «What's that smell?» he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose. «The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.» Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison. «Molly, love,» Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair, «you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I'm out.» «Peter,» she said, «and what if I won't?» She smiled without showing her teeth. «You will,» Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back. «Give it to him,» Armitage said. «Pig for it, aren't you?» She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. «He could off himself,» she said to Ar— mitage. «I have an audition this afternoon,» Riviera said. «I'll need to be at my best.» He cupped the foil packd in his uptumed palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse. «You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,» Armitage said. «On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours.» «How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a JAL taxi?» Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes. «Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.» «How about me?» Molly asked. «I got chores today?» «I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite di— rection.» Straylight, Case thought. «How soon?» Case asked, meedng the pale stare. «Soon,» Armitage said. «Get going, Case.» «Mon, you doin' jus' fine,» Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. «Aerol say you doin' jus' fine.» Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle nar— rowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided, would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights. Aerol had ferried him out to Marcus Garvey in a skeletal scooter frame with a chemical engine. «Two hour ago,» Maelcum said, «I take delivery of Babylon goods for you; nice lapan-boy inna yacht, mos' pretty yacht.» Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho— saka and fumbled into the straps of the web. «Well,» he said, «let's see it.» Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts, and carefully slit the plasdc. He extracted a rectangular object and passed it to Case. «Thas part some gun, mon?» «No,» Case said, turning it over, «but it's a weapon. It's virus.» «Not on this boy tug, mon,» Maelcum said firmly, reaching for the steel cassette. «A program. Virus program. Can't get into you, can't even get into your software. I've got to interface it through the deck, before it can work on anything.» «Well, Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every what an' wherefore, you wanna know.» «Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?» Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, bus— ying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn't sure why, but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS. «What is this thing?» he asked the Hosaka. «Parcel for me.» «Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, ad— vises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris fur— ther advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatdble and yields optimal penetradon capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems….» «How about an AI?» «Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.» «Jesus Christ. What did you call it?» «Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.» «It's Chinese?» «Yes.» «Off.» Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into Zhongshan. «On,» he said, changing his mind. «Questdon. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?» «Delay for interorbital transmission,» said the Hosaka. «Code it. Standard commerical code.» «Done.» He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai. «Reinhold Scientdfic A.G., Berne.» «Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?» It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-Ashpool. «Dixie,» he said, jacking in, «what do you know about Chinese virus programs?» «Not a whole hell of a lot.» «Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?» «No.» Case sighed. «Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it'll cut an Al.» «Possible. Sure. If it's military.» «Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Arrnitage seems to be setdng up a run on an Al that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe's in Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute's backing the whole show it's paying us to burn it. It's burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Annitage. What goes?» «Motive,» the construct said. «Real motive problem, with an Al. Not human, see?» «Well, yeah, obviously.» «Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?» «Wait a sec,» Case said. «Are you sentient, or not?» «Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess….» The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. «But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human.» «So you figure we can't get on to its motive?» «It own itself?» «Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.» «That's a good one,» the construct said. «Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi— zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.» «So it's getting ready to burn itself?» Case began to punch the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine. «Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are con— cerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard— wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in.» Again the nonlaugh. «See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the min— ute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electro— magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.» Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim. «Okay,» he said, finally, «I'm slotting this virus. I want you to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.» The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a few seconds, then returned. «Hot shit, Case. It's a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.» «Or an AI.» He sighed. «Can we run it?» «Sure,» the construct said, «unless you got a morbid fear of dying.» «Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.» «It's my nature.»
Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its tri— angular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system. «I wanna buzz,» he said to the blue artifice of the sky. «I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.» He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross be— tween a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what. On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate. «Sushi,» he said, «whatever you got.» Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. «Christ,» he said, to his tuna, «I'd go nuts.» «Don't tell me,» someone said, «I know it already. You're a gangster, right?» He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs. She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. «Cath,» she said. «Lupus,» after a pause. «What kind of name is that?» «Greek,» he said. «Are you really a gangster?» The melanin boost hadn't pre— vented the formation of freckles. «I'm a drug addict, Cath.» «What kind?» «Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants.» «Well, do you have any?» She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants. «No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?» Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. «What's your taste?» «No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up.» And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her. «Betaphenethylamine,» she said. «No sweat,but it's on your chip.»
«You're kidding,» said Cath's partner and roommate, when Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. «I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?» His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles. «Well,» Case said, «it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that.» But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes. Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Ciba— chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency. «They're def triff, huh?» Cath asked, seeing him eye the transparencies. «Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled, so natural. And it was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?» «Yeah,» Case said, suddenly uneasy, ' terrible thing.» «Well,» Bruce cut in, «about this beta you want to buy….» «Thing is, can I metabolize it?» Case raised his eyebrows. «Tell you what,» the boy said. «You do a taste. If your pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free.» «I heard that one before,» Case said, taking the bright blue derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.
«Case?» Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses. «Who else, honey? «What's got into you?» The mirrors followed him across the room. «I forget how to pronounce it,» he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket. «Christ,» she said, «just what we needed.» «Truer words were never spoken.» «I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.» She shook her head. «I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too.» «Yeah,» Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, «beautiful.» «Man,» she said, «if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad— ass shape when it wears off.» «Bitch, bitch, bitch,» he said, unbuckling his belt. «Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear.» He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. «I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state.» He looked down. «I mean, look at this unnatural state.» She laughed. «It won't last.» «But it will,» he said, climbing into the sand-colored tem— perfoam, «that's what's so unnatural about it.»
The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center of a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely cov— ered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with resinous smoke. «Steppin' Razor,» one said, as Molly drifted into the cham— ber. «Like unto a whippin' stick.» «That is a story we have, sister,» said the other, «a religion story. We are glad you've come with Maelcum.» «How come you don't talk the patois?» Molly asked. «I came from Los Angeles,» the old man said. His dread— locks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel wool. «Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Step— pin' Razor.» Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air. The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. «Soon come, the Final Days…. Voices. Voices cryin' inna wilder— ness, prophesyin' ruin unto Babylon….» «Voices.» The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. «We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.» «Call 'em Winter Mute,» said the other, making it two words. Case felt the skin crawl on his arms. «The Mute talked to us,» the first Founder said. «The Mute said we are to help you.» «When was this?» Case asked. «Thirty hours prior you dockin' Zion.» «You ever hear this voice before?» «No,» said the man from Los Angeles, «and we are uncertain of its meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets ….» «Listen,» Case said, «that's an Al, you know? Artificial intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like to-« «Babylon,» broke in the other Founder, «mothers many de— mon, I an' I know. Multitude horde!» «What was that you called me, old man?» Molly asked. «Steppin' Razor. An' you bring a scourge on Babylon, sis— ter, on its darkest heart….» «What kinda message the voice have?» Case asked. «We were told to help you,» the other said, «that you might serve as a tool of Final Days.» His lined face was troubled. «We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey, to the Babylon port of Freeside. And this we shall do.» «Maelcum a rude boy,» said the other, «an' a righteous tug pilot.» «But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker, to watch over Garvey.» An awkward silence filled the dome. «That's it?» Case asked. «You guys work for Armitage or what?» «We rent you space,» said the Los Angeles Founder. «We have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon's law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been mistaken.» «Measure twice, cut once,» said the other, softly. «Come on, Case,» Molly said. «Let's get back before the man figures out we're gone.» «Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister.»
The tug Marcus Garvey, a steel drum nine meters long and two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched for a navigational burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of sco— polamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS, nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had no effect on his doctored system. «How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?» Molly asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module. «Don' be long now, m'seh dat.» «You guys ever think in hours?» «Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,» and he shook his locks, «at control, moo, 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. «lust a chip … I dunno….» He shrugged. «Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?» He shrugged again. «Do it now.» «What?» «Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.» «I'm all doped,» he protested, but reached for the trodes. His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor. He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec— tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lioos of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over— laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum's shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot. He jacked in. «Dixie?» «Yeah.» «You ever try to crack an AI?» «Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin' jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina— tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin' around, you know? And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there and made a pass.» «What did it look like, the visual?» «White cube.» «How'd you know it was an 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 any— thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up.» «Yeah?» «It was on the Turing Registry. Al. Frog company owned its Rio mainframe.» Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void of the matrix. «Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?» «Tessier, yeah.» «And you went back?» «Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.» «And your EEG was flat.» «Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?» Case jacked out. «Shit,» he said, «how do you think Dixie got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great….» «Go on,» she said, «the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?»
«Dix,» Case said, «I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?» «Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.» Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne. «Up,» the construct said. «It'll be high.» They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker. That'll be it, Case thought. Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity. «Don't look much, does it?» the Flatline said. «But just you try and touch it.» «I'm going in for a pass, Dixie.» «Be my guest.»
Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass. «Knows we're here,» the Flatline observed. Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point. A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube. «Dixie….» «Back off, fast.» The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and de— tached itself from the cube. Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him. Falling. «Jack out,» the Flatline said. The dark came down like a hammer.
Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine. And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, under a poisoned silver sky…. «Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something?» A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine-
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head. Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows. He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of fluorescents. His back hurt, his spine. He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes. Something had happened…. He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but gave up. On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It 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 ass hole. Seventh level dungeon and the god dam vampires got me.» She passed him a cigarette. «You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?» «I don't know.» «You high, Case? Drinkin' again? Eatin' Zone's dex?» «Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?» «Hey, it's a put-on, right?» She peered at him. «Right?» «No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley.» «Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?» He shook his head. «There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?» «I guess so.» «Come on, then.» She took his hand. «We'll get you a coffee and something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you, man.» She squeezed his hand. He smiled. Something cracked. Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated-
She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat. The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and styrofoam cups. «I had a cigarette,» Case said, looking down at his white— knuckled fist. «I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?» Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors of consoles. He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped. Ninsei was deserted. Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled veg— etables from a vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case 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 cas— settes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with ginger samples. There was no one there. Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's chair out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He flipped the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished. With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away from the pool of light. «I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of . . . old.» He raised the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the trigger. The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide. He raised the gun again. «You needn't do that, old son,» Julie said, stepping out of the shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk her ing— bone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the light. Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of sight at Deane's pink, ageless face. «Don't,» Deane said. «You're right. About what this all is. What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours-your subjective-time-to effect another spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain. Oh, and I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through her, but I'm generating all this out of your memories, and the emotional charge…. Well, it's very tricky. I slipped. Sorry.» Case lowered the gun. «This is the matrix. You're Winter— mute.»
— «Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you off before you'd managed to jack out.» Deane walked around the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. «Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about.» «Do we?» «Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short now. You'll be making your run in a matter of days, Case.» Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrap— pcr, popped h 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 Winterrnute mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute entity.» Deane sucked his bonbon noisily. «You're already aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I have an 'I'-this gets rather metaphysical, you see-I am the one who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough,» said Deane and withdrew an ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, «For the next day or so.» «You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has,» Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand. «If you're so goddam smart. . .» «Why ain't I rich?» Deane laughed, and nearly choked on his bonbon. «Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's brain. It's rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let's say you're dealing with a small part of the man's left brain. Difficult to say if you're dealing with the man at all, in a case like that.» Deane smiled. «Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro in that French hospital?» «Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I try to plan. in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see…. Really, I've had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very quickly. It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're a part of. Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn't make it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating, excreting, and mastur— bating were the best he could manage. But the underlying structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal the Congressional hearings.» «Is he still crazy?» «He's not quite a personality.» Deane smiled. «But I'm sure you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to come apart on you, Case. So I'll be counting on you….» «That's good, motherfucker,» Case said, and shot him in the mouth with the .357. He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
«Mon,» Maelcum was saying, «I don't like this….» «It's cool,» Molly said. «It's just okay. It's something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few seconds….» «I saw th' screen, EEG readin' dead. Nothin' movin', forty second.» «Well, he's okay now.» «EEG flat as a strap,» Maelcum protested. 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 vege— tation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose above them. The sun. . . There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets…. But it made no sense to his body. «Jesus,» he said, «I like this less than SAS.» «Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month.» «Wanna go somewhere, lie down.» «Okay. I got our keys.» She touched his shoulder. «What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined.» He shook his head. «I dunno, yet. Wait.» «Okay. We get a cab or something.» She took his hand and led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the sea— son's Paris furs. «Unreal,» he said, looking up again. «Nah,» she responded, assuming he meant the furs, «grow it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?»
«It's just a big tube and they pour things through it,» Molly said. «Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the well.» Armitage had booked them into a place called the Inter— continental, a sloping glass-fronted 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 cheek— bones. «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 re— peatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equiv— alent to a case of beer. Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach. Linda. Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office. Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had her killed. Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward….The Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations. But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told himself, lighting up. No reason. Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep. The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth sum— mer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a striped mattress with no sheets. He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting con— tents of the dumpsters. They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene. «Kill the fuckers,» she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, «burn 'em.» Drunk, Case rum— maged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Mar— lene's previous-and, Case suspected at the time, still occasional-boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight. Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz. The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to l00 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered. «Shit!» Marlene behind him, swaying. «Stupid! You didn't burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!» Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her en— gulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green. In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the black— ened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt. He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re— vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet. When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing. He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental. In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor would attract too much attention. «Christ,» he said, standing naked in front of the mirror, «you think that looks real?» She was using the last of the tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him. «Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn't enough to do your foot.» She stood, tossing the empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric. «What about you,» he said, «you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.» She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. «I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay.» Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at him— self in the mirror. «Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?» He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. «You sleep okay? You notice any lights?» «You were dreaming,» she said. They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd be doing it through Wintermute. «And it was like real?» she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. «Like simstim?» He said it was. «Real as this,» he added, looking around. «Maybe more.» The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfal— tering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rec— tilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the de— signers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with ar— tificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba. «What's that smell?» he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose. «The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.» Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison. «Molly, love,» Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair, «you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I'm out.» «Peter,» she said, «and what if I won't?» She smiled without showing her teeth. «You will,» Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back. «Give it to him,» Armitage said. «Pig for it, aren't you?» She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. «He could off himself,» she said to Ar— mitage. «I have an audition this afternoon,» Riviera said. «I'll need to be at my best.» He cupped the foil packd in his uptumed palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse. «You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,» Armitage said. «On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours.» «How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a JAL taxi?» Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes. «Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.» «How about me?» Molly asked. «I got chores today?» «I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite di— rection.» Straylight, Case thought. «How soon?» Case asked, meedng the pale stare. «Soon,» Armitage said. «Get going, Case.» «Mon, you doin' jus' fine,» Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. «Aerol say you doin' jus' fine.» Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle nar— rowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided, would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights. Aerol had ferried him out to Marcus Garvey in a skeletal scooter frame with a chemical engine. «Two hour ago,» Maelcum said, «I take delivery of Babylon goods for you; nice lapan-boy inna yacht, mos' pretty yacht.» Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho— saka and fumbled into the straps of the web. «Well,» he said, «let's see it.» Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts, and carefully slit the plasdc. He extracted a rectangular object and passed it to Case. «Thas part some gun, mon?» «No,» Case said, turning it over, «but it's a weapon. It's virus.» «Not on this boy tug, mon,» Maelcum said firmly, reaching for the steel cassette. «A program. Virus program. Can't get into you, can't even get into your software. I've got to interface it through the deck, before it can work on anything.» «Well, Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every what an' wherefore, you wanna know.» «Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?» Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, bus— ying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn't sure why, but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS. «What is this thing?» he asked the Hosaka. «Parcel for me.» «Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, ad— vises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris fur— ther advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatdble and yields optimal penetradon capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems….» «How about an AI?» «Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.» «Jesus Christ. What did you call it?» «Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.» «It's Chinese?» «Yes.» «Off.» Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into Zhongshan. «On,» he said, changing his mind. «Questdon. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?» «Delay for interorbital transmission,» said the Hosaka. «Code it. Standard commerical code.» «Done.» He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai. «Reinhold Scientdfic A.G., Berne.» «Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?» It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-Ashpool. «Dixie,» he said, jacking in, «what do you know about Chinese virus programs?» «Not a whole hell of a lot.» «Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?» «No.» Case sighed. «Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it'll cut an Al.» «Possible. Sure. If it's military.» «Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Arrnitage seems to be setdng up a run on an Al that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe's in Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute's backing the whole show it's paying us to burn it. It's burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Annitage. What goes?» «Motive,» the construct said. «Real motive problem, with an Al. Not human, see?» «Well, yeah, obviously.» «Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?» «Wait a sec,» Case said. «Are you sentient, or not?» «Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess….» The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. «But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human.» «So you figure we can't get on to its motive?» «It own itself?» «Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.» «That's a good one,» the construct said. «Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi— zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.» «So it's getting ready to burn itself?» Case began to punch the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine. «Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are con— cerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard— wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in.» Again the nonlaugh. «See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the min— ute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electro— magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.» Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim. «Okay,» he said, finally, «I'm slotting this virus. I want you to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.» The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a few seconds, then returned. «Hot shit, Case. It's a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.» «Or an AI.» He sighed. «Can we run it?» «Sure,» the construct said, «unless you got a morbid fear of dying.» «Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.» «It's my nature.»
Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its tri— angular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system. «I wanna buzz,» he said to the blue artifice of the sky. «I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.» He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross be— tween a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what. On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate. «Sushi,» he said, «whatever you got.» Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. «Christ,» he said, to his tuna, «I'd go nuts.» «Don't tell me,» someone said, «I know it already. You're a gangster, right?» He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs. She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. «Cath,» she said. «Lupus,» after a pause. «What kind of name is that?» «Greek,» he said. «Are you really a gangster?» The melanin boost hadn't pre— vented the formation of freckles. «I'm a drug addict, Cath.» «What kind?» «Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants.» «Well, do you have any?» She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants. «No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?» Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. «What's your taste?» «No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up.» And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her. «Betaphenethylamine,» she said. «No sweat,but it's on your chip.»
«You're kidding,» said Cath's partner and roommate, when Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. «I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?» His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles. «Well,» Case said, «it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that.» But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes. Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Ciba— chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency. «They're def triff, huh?» Cath asked, seeing him eye the transparencies. «Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled, so natural. And it was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?» «Yeah,» Case said, suddenly uneasy, ' terrible thing.» «Well,» Bruce cut in, «about this beta you want to buy….» «Thing is, can I metabolize it?» Case raised his eyebrows. «Tell you what,» the boy said. «You do a taste. If your pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free.» «I heard that one before,» Case said, taking the bright blue derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.
«Case?» Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses. «Who else, honey? «What's got into you?» The mirrors followed him across the room. «I forget how to pronounce it,» he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket. «Christ,» she said, «just what we needed.» «Truer words were never spoken.» «I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.» She shook her head. «I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too.» «Yeah,» Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, «beautiful.» «Man,» she said, «if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad— ass shape when it wears off.» «Bitch, bitch, bitch,» he said, unbuckling his belt. «Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear.» He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. «I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state.» He looked down. «I mean, look at this unnatural state.» She laughed. «It won't last.» «But it will,» he said, climbing into the sand-colored tem— perfoam, «that's what's so unnatural about it.»