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The little train shot through its tunnel at eighty kilometers per hour. Case kept his eyes closed. The shower had helped, but he'd lost his breakfast when he'd looked down and seen Pierre's blood washing pink across the white tiles. Gravity fell away as the spindle narrowed. Case's stomach churned. Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock. «Case, mon, big problem.» The soft voice faint in his phones. He chinned the volume control and peered into the Lexan face-plate of Aerol's helmet. «Gotta get to Garvey, Aerol.» «Yo. Strap in, mon. But Garvey captive. Yacht, came be— fore, she came back. Now she lockin' steady on Marcus Garvey. « Turing? «Came before?» Case climbed into the scooter's frame and began to fasten the straps.
«Japan yacht. Brought you package….» Armitage.
Confused images of wasps and spiders rose in Case's mind as they came in sight of Marcus Garvey. The little tug was snug against the gray thorax of a sleek, insectile ship five times her length. The arms of grapples stood out against Garvey's patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sun— light. A pale corrugated gangway curved out of the yacht, snaked sideways to avoid the tug's engines, and covered the aft hatch. There was something obscene about the arrangement, but it had more to do with ideas of feeding than of sex. «What's happening with Maelcum?» «Maelcum fine. Nobody come down the tube. Yacht pilot talk to him, say relax.» As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HAN— IWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Jap— anese. «I don't like this, man. I was thinking maybe it's time we got our ass out of here anyway.» «Maelcum thinkin' that precise thing, mon, but Garvey not be goin' far like that.»
Maelcum was purring a speeded-up patois to his radio when Case came through the forward lock and removed his helmet. «Aerol's gone back to the Rocker,» Case said. Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone. Case pulled himself over the pilot's drifting tangle of dread— locks and began to remove his suit. Maelcum's eyes were closed now; he nodded as he listened to some reply over a pair of phones with bright orange pads, his brow creased with con— centration. He wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket with the sleeves ripped out. Case snapped the red Sanyo suit to a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web. «See what th' ghost say, mon,» Maelcum said. «Computer keeps askin' for you.» «So who's up there in that thing?» «Same Japan-boy came before. An' now he joined by you Mister Armitage, come out Freeside….» Case put the trodes on and jacked in.
«This isn't looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on it. I was thinking maybe we should try to bail out. I can take you.» «Yeah? No shit? You don't wanna see what that Chinese program can do?» «Well, I . . .» Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice. «Well, screw it. Yeah. We run.» «Slot it.» «Hey, Maelcum,» Case said, jacking out, «I'm probably gonna be under the trodes for maybe eight hours straight.» Maelcum was smoking again. The cabin was swimming in smoke. «So I can't get to the head….» «No problem, mon.» The Zionite executed a high forward somersault and rummaged through the contents of a zippered mesh bag, coming up with a coil of transparent tubing and something else, something sealed in a sterile bubble pack. He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn't like it at all. He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home. «Okay,» he said, «we're on. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets really funny, you can grab my left wrist. I'll feel it. Otherwise, I guess you do what the Hosaka tells you, okay?» «Sure, mon.» Maelcum lit a fresh joint. «And turn the scrubber up. I don't want that shit tangling with my neurotransmitters. I got a bad hangover as it is.» Maelcum grinned. Case jacked back in. «Christ on a crutch,» the Flatline said, «take a look at this.» The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void. «Big mother,» the Flatline said. «I'm gonna check Molly,» Case said, tapping the simstim switch.
Freefall. The sensation was like diving through perfectly clear water. She was falling-rising through a wide tube of fluted lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of white neon. The link was one way. He couldn't talk to her. He flipped.
«Boy, that is one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread. That goddam thing's invisible. I just now rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don't. We're not there.» Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice until he found the pink structure, a standard commercial unit, and punched in closer to it. «Maybe it's defective.» «Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby's military, though. And new. It just doesn't register. If it did, we'd read as some kind of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody's twigged to us at all. Maybe not even the folks in Straylight.»
Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight. «Well,» he said, «that's an advantage, right?» «Maybe.» The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the sensation. «I checked ol' Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It's real friendly, long as you're on the trigger end, jus' polite an' helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?» «No.» «I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that's what ol' Kuang's all about. This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even get restless.» The Flatline laughed. «Wish you weren't so damn jolly today, man. That laugh of yours sort of gets me in the spine.» «Too bad,» the Flatline said. «Ol' dead man needs his laughs.» Case slapped the simstim switch.
And crashed through tangled metal and the smell of dust, the heels of his hands skidding as they struck slick paper. Something behind him collapsed noisily. «C'mon,» said the Finn, «ease up a little.» Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines, the girls shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix, a wistful galaxy of sweet white teeth. He lay there until his heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines. «Wintermute,» he said. «Yeah,» said the Finn, somewhere behind him, «you got it.» «Fuck off.» Case sat up, rubbing his wrists. «Come on,» said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall of junk. «This way's better for you, man.» He took his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. «You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush? You aren't missing anything, back there. An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds.» «You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like people I know?» He stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at-the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. «What's out there? New York? Or does it just stop?» «Well,» said the Finn, «it's like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods but maybe there's nobody to hear it.» He showed Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. «You can go for a walk, you wanna. It's all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in.» «I don't have this good a memory,» Case said, looking around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but couldn't. «Everybody does,» the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, «but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Man— hattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Memory's holographic, for you.» The Finn tugged at one of his small ears. «I'm different.» «How do you mean, holographic?» The word made him think of Riviera. «The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you've never done anything about it. People, I mean.» The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. «Maybe if you had, I wouldn't be happening.» «What's that supposed to mean?» The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the shoulders, and didn't quite settle back into position. «I'm trying to help you, Case.» «Why?» «Because I need you.» The large yellow teeth appeared again. «And because you need me.» «Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?» He grimaced. «Wintermute, I mean.» «Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind.» He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. «See this? Part of my DNA, sort of….» He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. «You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing.» «I don't know what you're talking about.» «That's 'you' in the collective. Your species.» «You killed those Turings.» The Finn shrugged. «Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?» And his right hand held the charred wasps' nest from Case's dream, reek of fuel in the closeness of the darkshop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. «Yeah. That was me. Did it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it's im— portant?» Case shook his head. «Because»-and the nest, somehow, was gone-«it's the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be . The human equivalent . Straylight' s like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. l figure it'll make you feel better.» «Feel better?» «To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That's good. But hate them instead. Same difference.» «Listen,» Case said, stepping forward, «they never did shit to me. You, it's different….» But he couldn't feel the anger. «So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was.» The Finn grinned. «It doesn't much matter. You gotta hate somebody before this is over.» He turned and headed for the back of the shop. «Well, come on, I'll show you a little bit of Straylight while I got you here.» He lifted the corner of the blanket. White light poured out. «Shit, man, don't just stand there.» Case followed, rubbing his face.
«Okay,» said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow. They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals. «Jesus,» Case said, tumbling. «This is the front entrance,» the Finn said, his tweed flap— ping. «If this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This'll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don't have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly….» Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral. «Hold on,» the Finn said, «I'll fast-forward us.» The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong move— ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness. «Here,» the Finn said. «This is it.» They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass. «The Villa Straylight,» said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, «is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves….» «Essay of 3Jane's,» the Finn said, producing his Partagas. «Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course.» «The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.»
«That was her you saw in the restaurant,» the Finn said. «By the standards of the archipelago,» the head continued, «ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. «Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. «The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise. «At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rec— tilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool….» The head fell silent. «Well?» Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him. «That's all she wrote,» the Finn said. «Didn't finish it. Just a kid then. This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That's the catch. Doesn't mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word.» «So what's the word?» «I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I can't know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't know. It's hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.» «What happens then?» «I don't exist, after that. I cease.» «Okay by me,» Case said. «Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go.» «What's that mean?» But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos— sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.
«You tryin' to break my record, son?» the Flatline asked. «You were braindead again, five seconds.» «Sit tight,» Case said, and hit the simstim switch. She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete. CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link. «Cute,» she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed her palms together, cracked her knuckles. «What kept you?»
TIME MOLLY TIME NOW. She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth. One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up ghost-pale and grainy. «Okay, honey. Now we go out to play.» Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind. She crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished brass. He saw enough of her arms and hands to know that she wore the polycarbon suit again. Under the plastic, he felt the familiar tension of thin tight leather. There was something slung under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood up, unzipped the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip. «Hey, Case,» she said, barely voicing the words, «you lis— tening? Tell you a story…. Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . .» She turned and surveyed the corridor. «Johnny, his name was.» The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood. They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the hallway's walls, as though they'd been brought in and set up in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized that hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft patchwork of handwoven wool. Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents, which irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disin— terested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique weapons, a thing so densely studded with rusted nails that it was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry…. «My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case.» Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn't need to hear them spoken aloud. «We had a set-up with a squid, so we could read the traces of everything he'd ever stored. Ran it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house when I met him….» She paused, edged around a sharp turn and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides a color that reminded him of cockroach wings. «Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody could ever touch us. I wasn't going to let them. Yakuza, I guess, they still wanted Johnny's ass. 'Cause I'd killed their man. 'Cause Johnny'd burned them. And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders. «I didn't know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn't apply to us. Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I was young. Then they came, when we were thinking we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we'd do there, with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss orbital ac— counts and a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off your game. «So that first one they'd sent, he'd been hot. Reflexes like you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods. But the second one, he was, I dunno, like a monk. Cloned. Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud….» Her voice trailed off as the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the left. «One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was down by the Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It's the chemicals get into them. Big as I was, and all night one had been scrabbling under the floor of the squat. Round dawn somebody brought this old man in, seams down his cheeks and his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you'd keep steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old revolver and three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there, then he starts walking up and down the squat, we're hanging back by the walls. «Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like he's forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet. Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun. Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back up and left. «I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its eyes.» She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at intervals along the corridor. «The second one, the one who came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he was like that. He killed that way.» The corridor widened. The sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous can— delabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR LEFT, blinked the readout. She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. «I just saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out. We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with, and I'd put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight. I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my eye, as he was coming out. Didn't say a word. We just looked at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of something to say.» The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway. A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. «Never much found anybody I gave a damn about, after that.» She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfo— cused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remem— bered Cath's story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane's mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly per— fumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she'd never told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story in the cubicle, she'd seldom said anything that had even in— dicated that she had a past. She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he'd had the wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manip— ulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or a human agent. She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois, carefully rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. «Guess you're kinda like he was,» she said. «Think you're born to run. Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll do that sometimes, get you down to basics.» She stood, stretched, shook herself. «You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny.» She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to full auto. The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it. Not the door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part of some more beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn down to fit a particular entrance. Even the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. They'd imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit. But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing…. Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the door swung open easily. The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers. THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which was deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face of the coin. The other was blank. «He told me,» she whispered. «Wintermute. How he played a waiting game for years. Didn't have any real power, then, but he could use the Villa's security and custodial systems to keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight.» She closed her white fingers over the key. «So nobody would find it.» She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit's kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. «They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the Finn, if I wasn't careful.» Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests. «He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he could've gotten out a long time ago. But they didn't. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what he called her, but he talked like he liked her.» She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher. Case flipped.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing. «Dixie, you think this thing'll work?» «Does a bear shit in the woods?» The Flatline punched them up through shifting rainbow strata. Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscop— ic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along trans— lucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relation— ship to the matrix around it. «That's the sting,» the construct said. «When Kuang's good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin' that through.» «You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. How— ever much he is under control,» he added. «He,» the construct said. «He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you . « «It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever's waiting for us behind that ice.» «Well, you got time to kill, kid,» the Flatline said. «Ol' Kuang's slow but steady.» Case jacked out..
Into Maelcum's stare. «You dead awhile there mon.» «It happens,» he said. «i'm getting used to it.» «You dealin' wi' th' darkness, mon.» «Only game in town, it looks like.» «Jah love, Case,» Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the man's dark arms. He jacked back in. And flipped.
Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg…. The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split. She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bun— dled cables hugged the stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded gan— glia. The walls were splotched with damp. She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions.
LEFT. She shrugged. «Lemme look around, okay?»
LEFT. «Relax. There's time.» She started down the corridor that led off to her right.
STOP
GO BACK.
DANGER. She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor's field, her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher. She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone. «What's this,» said the slurred voice, «fancy dress?» A trem— bling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. «Come visit, child. Now.» She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the gun's barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string. He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtieme Siecle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. «Slow, darling.» The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pil— lows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Tele— funken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk re— cordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing. «It would be customary,» the old man said, «for me to kill you now.» Case felt her tense, ready for a move. «But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?» «Molly.» «Molly. Mine is Ashpool.» He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic en— velopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon. «How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I'm curious.» His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. «I don't cry, much.» «But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?» «I spit,» she said. «The ducts are routed back into my mouth.» «Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one so young.» He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. «That is the way to handle tears.» He drank again. «I'm busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy. Dying.» «I could go out the way I came,» she said. He laughed, a harsh high sound. «You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.» «It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece.» «You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand. But perhaps I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell…. It would be very Egyptian of me.» He drank again. «Come here then.» He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. «Drink.» She shook her head. «It isn't poisoned,» he said, but returned the brandy to the table. «Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk.» «What about?» She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails. «Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and l was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely they didn't need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren't born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn't dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold . . . Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset…. I'm old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.» The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The ten— dons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now. «You can get freezerburn,» she said carefully. «Nothing burns there,» he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. «Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I'd deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?» The gun rose again. «There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.» «Boss,» she asked him, «you know Wintermute?» «A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that very bed…. But I wander.» He coughed wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near his one bare foot. «How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one's own daughter.» His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. «Marie-France's eyes,» he said, faintly, and smiled. «We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.» His head swayed sideways, re— covered. «I understand that the effect is now more easily ob— tained with an embedded microchip.» The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet. «The dreams grow like slow ice,» he said. His face was tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore. Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's automatic in her hand. A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the pat— terned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant. There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee. Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck. «I got your number, fucker,» Case said, feeling his own lips moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast. Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda's deathmask. Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly. It was still open when she turned and left the room.
16
«Japan yacht. Brought you package….» Armitage.
Confused images of wasps and spiders rose in Case's mind as they came in sight of Marcus Garvey. The little tug was snug against the gray thorax of a sleek, insectile ship five times her length. The arms of grapples stood out against Garvey's patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sun— light. A pale corrugated gangway curved out of the yacht, snaked sideways to avoid the tug's engines, and covered the aft hatch. There was something obscene about the arrangement, but it had more to do with ideas of feeding than of sex. «What's happening with Maelcum?» «Maelcum fine. Nobody come down the tube. Yacht pilot talk to him, say relax.» As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HAN— IWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Jap— anese. «I don't like this, man. I was thinking maybe it's time we got our ass out of here anyway.» «Maelcum thinkin' that precise thing, mon, but Garvey not be goin' far like that.»
Maelcum was purring a speeded-up patois to his radio when Case came through the forward lock and removed his helmet. «Aerol's gone back to the Rocker,» Case said. Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone. Case pulled himself over the pilot's drifting tangle of dread— locks and began to remove his suit. Maelcum's eyes were closed now; he nodded as he listened to some reply over a pair of phones with bright orange pads, his brow creased with con— centration. He wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket with the sleeves ripped out. Case snapped the red Sanyo suit to a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web. «See what th' ghost say, mon,» Maelcum said. «Computer keeps askin' for you.» «So who's up there in that thing?» «Same Japan-boy came before. An' now he joined by you Mister Armitage, come out Freeside….» Case put the trodes on and jacked in.
* * *
«Dixie?» The matrix showed him the pink spheres of the steel combine in Sikkim. «What you gettin' up to, boy? I been hearin' lurid stories. Hosaka's patched into a twin bank on your boss's boat now. Really hoppin'. You pull some Turing heat?» «Yeah, but Wintermute killed 'em.» «Well, that won't hold 'em long. Plenty more where those came from. Be up here in force. Bet their decks are all over this grid sector like flies on shit. And your boss, Case, he says go. He says run it and run it now.» Case punched for the Freeside coordinates. «Lemme take that a sec, Case….» The matrix blurred and phased as the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with a speed and accuracy that made Case wince with envy. «Shit, Dixie….» «Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive. You ain't seen nothin'. No hands!» «That's it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?» «You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., and that ice is generated by their two friendly Al's. On par with anything in the military sector, looks to me. That's king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it'll have tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin' the boys in the T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick«This isn't looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on it. I was thinking maybe we should try to bail out. I can take you.» «Yeah? No shit? You don't wanna see what that Chinese program can do?» «Well, I . . .» Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice. «Well, screw it. Yeah. We run.» «Slot it.» «Hey, Maelcum,» Case said, jacking out, «I'm probably gonna be under the trodes for maybe eight hours straight.» Maelcum was smoking again. The cabin was swimming in smoke. «So I can't get to the head….» «No problem, mon.» The Zionite executed a high forward somersault and rummaged through the contents of a zippered mesh bag, coming up with a coil of transparent tubing and something else, something sealed in a sterile bubble pack. He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn't like it at all. He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home. «Okay,» he said, «we're on. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets really funny, you can grab my left wrist. I'll feel it. Otherwise, I guess you do what the Hosaka tells you, okay?» «Sure, mon.» Maelcum lit a fresh joint. «And turn the scrubber up. I don't want that shit tangling with my neurotransmitters. I got a bad hangover as it is.» Maelcum grinned. Case jacked back in. «Christ on a crutch,» the Flatline said, «take a look at this.» The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void. «Big mother,» the Flatline said. «I'm gonna check Molly,» Case said, tapping the simstim switch.
Freefall. The sensation was like diving through perfectly clear water. She was falling-rising through a wide tube of fluted lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of white neon. The link was one way. He couldn't talk to her. He flipped.
«Boy, that is one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread. That goddam thing's invisible. I just now rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don't. We're not there.» Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice until he found the pink structure, a standard commercial unit, and punched in closer to it. «Maybe it's defective.» «Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby's military, though. And new. It just doesn't register. If it did, we'd read as some kind of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody's twigged to us at all. Maybe not even the folks in Straylight.»
Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight. «Well,» he said, «that's an advantage, right?» «Maybe.» The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the sensation. «I checked ol' Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It's real friendly, long as you're on the trigger end, jus' polite an' helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?» «No.» «I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that's what ol' Kuang's all about. This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even get restless.» The Flatline laughed. «Wish you weren't so damn jolly today, man. That laugh of yours sort of gets me in the spine.» «Too bad,» the Flatline said. «Ol' dead man needs his laughs.» Case slapped the simstim switch.
And crashed through tangled metal and the smell of dust, the heels of his hands skidding as they struck slick paper. Something behind him collapsed noisily. «C'mon,» said the Finn, «ease up a little.» Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines, the girls shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix, a wistful galaxy of sweet white teeth. He lay there until his heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines. «Wintermute,» he said. «Yeah,» said the Finn, somewhere behind him, «you got it.» «Fuck off.» Case sat up, rubbing his wrists. «Come on,» said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall of junk. «This way's better for you, man.» He took his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. «You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush? You aren't missing anything, back there. An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds.» «You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like people I know?» He stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at-the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. «What's out there? New York? Or does it just stop?» «Well,» said the Finn, «it's like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods but maybe there's nobody to hear it.» He showed Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. «You can go for a walk, you wanna. It's all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in.» «I don't have this good a memory,» Case said, looking around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but couldn't. «Everybody does,» the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, «but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Man— hattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Memory's holographic, for you.» The Finn tugged at one of his small ears. «I'm different.» «How do you mean, holographic?» The word made him think of Riviera. «The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you've never done anything about it. People, I mean.» The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. «Maybe if you had, I wouldn't be happening.» «What's that supposed to mean?» The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the shoulders, and didn't quite settle back into position. «I'm trying to help you, Case.» «Why?» «Because I need you.» The large yellow teeth appeared again. «And because you need me.» «Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?» He grimaced. «Wintermute, I mean.» «Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind.» He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. «See this? Part of my DNA, sort of….» He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. «You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing.» «I don't know what you're talking about.» «That's 'you' in the collective. Your species.» «You killed those Turings.» The Finn shrugged. «Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?» And his right hand held the charred wasps' nest from Case's dream, reek of fuel in the closeness of the darkshop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. «Yeah. That was me. Did it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it's im— portant?» Case shook his head. «Because»-and the nest, somehow, was gone-«it's the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be . The human equivalent . Straylight' s like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. l figure it'll make you feel better.» «Feel better?» «To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That's good. But hate them instead. Same difference.» «Listen,» Case said, stepping forward, «they never did shit to me. You, it's different….» But he couldn't feel the anger. «So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was.» The Finn grinned. «It doesn't much matter. You gotta hate somebody before this is over.» He turned and headed for the back of the shop. «Well, come on, I'll show you a little bit of Straylight while I got you here.» He lifted the corner of the blanket. White light poured out. «Shit, man, don't just stand there.» Case followed, rubbing his face.
«Okay,» said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow. They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals. «Jesus,» Case said, tumbling. «This is the front entrance,» the Finn said, his tweed flap— ping. «If this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This'll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don't have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly….» Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral. «Hold on,» the Finn said, «I'll fast-forward us.» The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong move— ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness. «Here,» the Finn said. «This is it.» They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass. «The Villa Straylight,» said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, «is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves….» «Essay of 3Jane's,» the Finn said, producing his Partagas. «Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course.» «The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.»
«That was her you saw in the restaurant,» the Finn said. «By the standards of the archipelago,» the head continued, «ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. «Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. «The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise. «At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rec— tilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool….» The head fell silent. «Well?» Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him. «That's all she wrote,» the Finn said. «Didn't finish it. Just a kid then. This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That's the catch. Doesn't mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word.» «So what's the word?» «I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I can't know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't know. It's hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.» «What happens then?» «I don't exist, after that. I cease.» «Okay by me,» Case said. «Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go.» «What's that mean?» But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos— sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.
«You tryin' to break my record, son?» the Flatline asked. «You were braindead again, five seconds.» «Sit tight,» Case said, and hit the simstim switch. She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete. CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link. «Cute,» she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed her palms together, cracked her knuckles. «What kept you?»
TIME MOLLY TIME NOW. She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth. One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up ghost-pale and grainy. «Okay, honey. Now we go out to play.» Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind. She crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished brass. He saw enough of her arms and hands to know that she wore the polycarbon suit again. Under the plastic, he felt the familiar tension of thin tight leather. There was something slung under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood up, unzipped the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip. «Hey, Case,» she said, barely voicing the words, «you lis— tening? Tell you a story…. Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . .» She turned and surveyed the corridor. «Johnny, his name was.» The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood. They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the hallway's walls, as though they'd been brought in and set up in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized that hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft patchwork of handwoven wool. Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents, which irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disin— terested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique weapons, a thing so densely studded with rusted nails that it was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry…. «My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case.» Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn't need to hear them spoken aloud. «We had a set-up with a squid, so we could read the traces of everything he'd ever stored. Ran it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house when I met him….» She paused, edged around a sharp turn and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides a color that reminded him of cockroach wings. «Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody could ever touch us. I wasn't going to let them. Yakuza, I guess, they still wanted Johnny's ass. 'Cause I'd killed their man. 'Cause Johnny'd burned them. And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders. «I didn't know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn't apply to us. Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I was young. Then they came, when we were thinking we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we'd do there, with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss orbital ac— counts and a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off your game. «So that first one they'd sent, he'd been hot. Reflexes like you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods. But the second one, he was, I dunno, like a monk. Cloned. Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud….» Her voice trailed off as the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the left. «One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was down by the Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It's the chemicals get into them. Big as I was, and all night one had been scrabbling under the floor of the squat. Round dawn somebody brought this old man in, seams down his cheeks and his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you'd keep steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old revolver and three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there, then he starts walking up and down the squat, we're hanging back by the walls. «Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like he's forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet. Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun. Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back up and left. «I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its eyes.» She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at intervals along the corridor. «The second one, the one who came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he was like that. He killed that way.» The corridor widened. The sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous can— delabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR LEFT, blinked the readout. She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. «I just saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out. We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with, and I'd put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight. I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my eye, as he was coming out. Didn't say a word. We just looked at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of something to say.» The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway. A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. «Never much found anybody I gave a damn about, after that.» She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfo— cused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remem— bered Cath's story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane's mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly per— fumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she'd never told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story in the cubicle, she'd seldom said anything that had even in— dicated that she had a past. She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he'd had the wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manip— ulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or a human agent. She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois, carefully rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. «Guess you're kinda like he was,» she said. «Think you're born to run. Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll do that sometimes, get you down to basics.» She stood, stretched, shook herself. «You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny.» She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to full auto. The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it. Not the door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part of some more beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn down to fit a particular entrance. Even the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. They'd imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit. But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing…. Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the door swung open easily. The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers. THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which was deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face of the coin. The other was blank. «He told me,» she whispered. «Wintermute. How he played a waiting game for years. Didn't have any real power, then, but he could use the Villa's security and custodial systems to keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight.» She closed her white fingers over the key. «So nobody would find it.» She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit's kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. «They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the Finn, if I wasn't careful.» Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests. «He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he could've gotten out a long time ago. But they didn't. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what he called her, but he talked like he liked her.» She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher. Case flipped.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing. «Dixie, you think this thing'll work?» «Does a bear shit in the woods?» The Flatline punched them up through shifting rainbow strata. Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscop— ic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along trans— lucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relation— ship to the matrix around it. «That's the sting,» the construct said. «When Kuang's good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin' that through.» «You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. How— ever much he is under control,» he added. «He,» the construct said. «He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you . « «It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever's waiting for us behind that ice.» «Well, you got time to kill, kid,» the Flatline said. «Ol' Kuang's slow but steady.» Case jacked out..
Into Maelcum's stare. «You dead awhile there mon.» «It happens,» he said. «i'm getting used to it.» «You dealin' wi' th' darkness, mon.» «Only game in town, it looks like.» «Jah love, Case,» Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the man's dark arms. He jacked back in. And flipped.
Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg…. The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split. She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bun— dled cables hugged the stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded gan— glia. The walls were splotched with damp. She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions.
LEFT. She shrugged. «Lemme look around, okay?»
LEFT. «Relax. There's time.» She started down the corridor that led off to her right.
STOP
GO BACK.
DANGER. She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor's field, her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher. She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone. «What's this,» said the slurred voice, «fancy dress?» A trem— bling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. «Come visit, child. Now.» She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the gun's barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string. He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtieme Siecle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. «Slow, darling.» The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pil— lows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Tele— funken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk re— cordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing. «It would be customary,» the old man said, «for me to kill you now.» Case felt her tense, ready for a move. «But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?» «Molly.» «Molly. Mine is Ashpool.» He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic en— velopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon. «How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I'm curious.» His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. «I don't cry, much.» «But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?» «I spit,» she said. «The ducts are routed back into my mouth.» «Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one so young.» He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. «That is the way to handle tears.» He drank again. «I'm busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy. Dying.» «I could go out the way I came,» she said. He laughed, a harsh high sound. «You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.» «It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece.» «You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand. But perhaps I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell…. It would be very Egyptian of me.» He drank again. «Come here then.» He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. «Drink.» She shook her head. «It isn't poisoned,» he said, but returned the brandy to the table. «Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk.» «What about?» She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails. «Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and l was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely they didn't need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren't born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn't dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold . . . Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset…. I'm old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.» The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The ten— dons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now. «You can get freezerburn,» she said carefully. «Nothing burns there,» he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. «Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I'd deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?» The gun rose again. «There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.» «Boss,» she asked him, «you know Wintermute?» «A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that very bed…. But I wander.» He coughed wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near his one bare foot. «How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one's own daughter.» His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. «Marie-France's eyes,» he said, faintly, and smiled. «We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.» His head swayed sideways, re— covered. «I understand that the effect is now more easily ob— tained with an embedded microchip.» The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet. «The dreams grow like slow ice,» he said. His face was tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore. Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's automatic in her hand. A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the pat— terned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant. There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee. Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck. «I got your number, fucker,» Case said, feeling his own lips moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast. Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda's deathmask. Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly. It was still open when she turned and left the room.
16
«Got your boss on hold,» the Flatline said. «He's coming through on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that's riding us piggy-back. Called the Haniwa.» «I know,» Case said, absently, «I saw it.» A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, per— fectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared. «Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care of mine,» Case said. Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his gaze. «You okay, Armitage?» «Case»-and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue stare-«you've seen Wintermute, haven't you? In the matrix.» Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garvey would relay the gesture to the Naniwa monitor. He imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage. «Case»-and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his computer-«what is he, when you see him?» «A high-rez simstim construct.» «But who?» «Finn, last time…. Before that, this pimp I …» «Not General Girling?» «General who?» The lozenge went blank. «Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up,» he told the construct. He flipped.
The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none larger than Garvey and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construc— tion vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires. CASE, flashed her chip. «Hey,» she said. «Waiting for a guide.» She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now. «I shoulda gone back to Chin,» she muttered. Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her left shouder. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a micro— second burst of diffuse laserlight, and froze. It was a Braun microdrone, and Case had once owned the same model, a pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's equator. Its body was no larger than a baseball. «Okay,» she said, «I hear you.» She stood up, favoring her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse. It picked its methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet, pick up his console, and step back through the gap in the construction boat's hull. There was a rising whine of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten— meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the hole left by the elevator panel. Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on. «How you doin', Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I've always talked to myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell 'em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend they're telling me what they think about that, and I'll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . .» She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. «I was expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the way it smells….» The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder of U-shaped steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. «And while I'm feeling confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I never much expected to make it out of this one anyway. Been on this bad roll for a while, and you're the only good change come down since I signed on with Armitage.» She looked up at the black circle. The drone's LED winked, climbing. «Not that you're all that shit hot.» She smiled, but it was gone too quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to climb. The ladder continued up through a metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders. She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis. Her chip pulsed the time.
The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none larger than Garvey and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construc— tion vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires. CASE, flashed her chip. «Hey,» she said. «Waiting for a guide.» She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now. «I shoulda gone back to Chin,» she muttered. Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her left shouder. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a micro— second burst of diffuse laserlight, and froze. It was a Braun microdrone, and Case had once owned the same model, a pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's equator. Its body was no larger than a baseball. «Okay,» she said, «I hear you.» She stood up, favoring her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse. It picked its methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet, pick up his console, and step back through the gap in the construction boat's hull. There was a rising whine of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten— meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the hole left by the elevator panel. Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on. «How you doin', Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I've always talked to myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell 'em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend they're telling me what they think about that, and I'll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . .» She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. «I was expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the way it smells….» The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder of U-shaped steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. «And while I'm feeling confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I never much expected to make it out of this one anyway. Been on this bad roll for a while, and you're the only good change come down since I signed on with Armitage.» She looked up at the black circle. The drone's LED winked, climbing. «Not that you're all that shit hot.» She smiled, but it was gone too quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to climb. The ladder continued up through a metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders. She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis. Her chip pulsed the time.