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Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's eyes and creased forehead as Case removed the trodes. «You scream, mon, while ago.» «Molly,» he said, his throat dry. «Got hurt.» He took a white plastic squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat water. «I don't like how any of this shit is going.» The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted, impacted junk. «Neither do 1. We gotta problem.» Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted, and peered over his shoulder. «Now who is that mon, Case?» «That's just a picture, Maelcum,» Case said wearily. «Guy I know in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's sup— posed to make us feel at home.» «Bullshit,» the Finn said. «Like I told Molly, these aren't masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just pissing in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta problem.» «So express thyself, Mute,» Maelcum said. «Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk. How it was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the way, talk the magic word outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and say it. Now she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after her.» Case stared at the face on the screen. «Us?» «So who else?» «Aerol,» Case said, «the guy on Babylon Rocker, Mael— cum's pal.» «No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle.» «You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run, here. Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for….» «Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's navigation system. You'll take Garvey into a very private dock I'll show you. The Chinese virus has com— pletely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum . You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera, get the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons.» «Kill Riviera'!» «Kill him.» Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Mael— cum put his hand on his shoulder. «Hey. You forget some— thing.» He felt the rage rising, and a kind of glee. «You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?» The Finn nodded. «So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked man.» He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat. «Case, mon,» Maelcum said softly, «Garvey a tug.» «That's right,» said the Finn, and smiled.
«You havin' fun in the big world outside?» the construct asked, when Case jacked back in. «Figured that was Winter— mute requestin' the pleasure….» «Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?» «Bang on. Killer virus.» «Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it.» «You wanna tell me, maybe?» «Don't have time.» «Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway.» «Fuck off,» Case said, and flipped, cutting off the torn— fingernail edge of the Flatline's laughter.
«She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness,» 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own. «Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep.» She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the light at different angles. «Only in certain heightened modes would an individual-a clan member-suffer the more pain— ful aspects of self-awareness. . .» Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill-his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impres— sions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise. If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be? Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock, huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young. «Where'd he go?» Molly asked. «To take his shot?» 3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. «He told me when to let you in,» she said. «He wouldn't tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?» Case felt Molly hesitate. «I would've killed him. I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you.» «Why?» 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the djellaba's inner pockets. «And why? And what about?» Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark, curiously opaque. «Because I hate him,» she said at last, «and the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am.» «And the show,» 3Jane said. «I saw the show.» Molly nodded. «But Hideo?» «Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a partner of mine, once.» 3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows. «Because I had to see,» Molly said. «And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?» Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling. «Shall we talk now?» «Take this off,» Molly said, raising her captive hands. «You killed my father,» 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. «I was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes, he called them.» «He killed the puppet. It looked like you.» «He was fond of broad gestures,» she said, and then Riviera was beside her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he'd worn in the roof garden of their hotel. «Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she? I thought so when I first saw her.» He stepped past 3Jane. «It isn't going to work, you know.» «Isn't it, Peter?» Molly managed a grin. «Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mis— take. Underestimating me.» He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. «He talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case, whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature.» He drank. «And what exactly is that, Peter?» Molly asked, her voice flat. Riviera beamed. «Perversity.» He walked back to the two women, swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. «An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision.» She waited, looking up at him. «Oh, Peter,» 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation ordinarily reserved for children. «No word for you, Molly. He told me about that you see. 3Jane knows the code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither will Wintermute. My Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse way.» He smiled again. «She has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy's favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match, a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool.» He drank off the last of the mineral water. «No, you wouldn't do, Daddy, you would not do. Now that Peter's come home.» And then, his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.
Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened to the panels on either side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the thing's fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead. Mar— cus Garvey was groaning and ticking with g-stress. «The Mute takin' I an' I dock,» the Zionite said, popping the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. «Maelcum pilot th' landin', meantime need we tool f' th' job.» «You keep tools back there?» Case craned his neck and watched cords of muscle bunching in the brown back. «This one,» Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped in black poly from the space behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a single hexhead to hold it in place. The black package had drifted aft before he'd finished. He thumbed open the vacuum valves on the workbelt's gray pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing he'd removed. He kicked back, gliding over his instruments-a green docking diagram pulsed on his central screen-and snagged the frame of Case's g-web. He pulled himself down and picked at the tape of his package with a thick, chipped thumbnail. «Some man in China say th' truth comes out this,» he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, re— placed with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and ganja. «That the only one you got?» «Sure, mon,» he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pis— tolgrip in his other hand, «I an' I th' Rastafarian navy, believe it.» Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He'd never bothered to put the Texas catheter back on; at least he could take a real piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last. He jacked in.
Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. When the optic chip flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink aura. 07:29:40. «I'm very unhappy with this, Peter.» 3Jane's voice seemed to arrive from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized, then corrected himself. The simstim unit was intact and still in place; he could feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears registered the vibrations of the girl's voice. Riviera said some— thing brief and indistinct. «But I don't,» she said, «and it isn't fun. Hideo will bring a medical unit down from intensive care, but this needs a surgeon.» There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against the side of the pool. «What was that you were telling her, when I came back?» Riviera was very close now. «About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside from Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to her?» «I wanted to see if they would break.» «One did. When she comes around-if she comes around— we'll see what color her eyes are.» «She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't been here to distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo to draw her little bomb, where would you be? In her power.» «No,» 3Jane said, «there was Hideo. I don't think you quite understand about Hideo. She does, evidently.» «Like a drink?» «Wine. The white.» Case jacked out.
Maelcum was hunched over Garvey's controls, tapping out commands for a docking sequence. The module's central screen displayed a fixed red square that represented the Straylight dock. Garvey was a larger square, green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum's commands. To the left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of Garvey and Haniwa as they approached the curvature of the spindle. «We got an hour, man,» Case said, pulling the ribbon of fiberoptics from the Hosaka. His deck's back-up batteries were good for ninety minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be an additional drain. He worked quickly, mechanically, fasten— ing the construct to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micro— pore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rec— tangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other. He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever that created suction. With the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder strap suspended in front of him, he struggled into his leather jacket, checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him, the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued when he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he'd bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over his shoulders, heard it click off the Russian scrubber. He was about to do the same with the steel star, but the rebounding credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck the ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum's left shoulder. The Zionite interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear. «You missin' th' Mute, mon,» Maelcum said. «Mute say he messin' th' security for Garvey. Garvey dockin' as 'nother boat, boat they 'spectin' out of Babylon. Mute broadcastin' codes for us.» «We gonna wear the suits?» «Too heavy.» Maelcum shrugged. «Stay in web 'til I tell you.» He tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed the worn pink handholds on either side of the navigation board. Case saw the green square shrink a final few millimeters to overlap the red square. On the smaller screen, Haniwa lowered her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared. Garvey was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang, shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender wasp shape. Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle that curved, groping past Haniwa for Garvey. There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trem— bling fronds of caulk. «Mon,» Maelcum said, «mind we got gravity.» A dozen small objects struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a magnet. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration. The deck and construct had fallen painfully to his lap. They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it. Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and removed his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. «Come now, mon, if you seh time be mos' precious.»
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Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's eyes and creased forehead as Case removed the trodes. «You scream, mon, while ago.» «Molly,» he said, his throat dry. «Got hurt.» He took a white plastic squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat water. «I don't like how any of this shit is going.» The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted, impacted junk. «Neither do 1. We gotta problem.» Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted, and peered over his shoulder. «Now who is that mon, Case?» «That's just a picture, Maelcum,» Case said wearily. «Guy I know in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's sup— posed to make us feel at home.» «Bullshit,» the Finn said. «Like I told Molly, these aren't masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just pissing in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta problem.» «So express thyself, Mute,» Maelcum said. «Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk. How it was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the way, talk the magic word outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and say it. Now she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after her.» Case stared at the face on the screen. «Us?» «So who else?» «Aerol,» Case said, «the guy on Babylon Rocker, Mael— cum's pal.» «No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle.» «You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run, here. Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for….» «Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's navigation system. You'll take Garvey into a very private dock I'll show you. The Chinese virus has com— pletely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum . You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera, get the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons.» «Kill Riviera'!» «Kill him.» Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Mael— cum put his hand on his shoulder. «Hey. You forget some— thing.» He felt the rage rising, and a kind of glee. «You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?» The Finn nodded. «So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked man.» He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat. «Case, mon,» Maelcum said softly, «Garvey a tug.» «That's right,» said the Finn, and smiled.
«You havin' fun in the big world outside?» the construct asked, when Case jacked back in. «Figured that was Winter— mute requestin' the pleasure….» «Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?» «Bang on. Killer virus.» «Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it.» «You wanna tell me, maybe?» «Don't have time.» «Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway.» «Fuck off,» Case said, and flipped, cutting off the torn— fingernail edge of the Flatline's laughter.
«She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness,» 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own. «Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep.» She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the light at different angles. «Only in certain heightened modes would an individual-a clan member-suffer the more pain— ful aspects of self-awareness. . .» Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill-his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impres— sions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise. If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be? Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock, huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young. «Where'd he go?» Molly asked. «To take his shot?» 3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. «He told me when to let you in,» she said. «He wouldn't tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?» Case felt Molly hesitate. «I would've killed him. I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you.» «Why?» 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the djellaba's inner pockets. «And why? And what about?» Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark, curiously opaque. «Because I hate him,» she said at last, «and the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am.» «And the show,» 3Jane said. «I saw the show.» Molly nodded. «But Hideo?» «Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a partner of mine, once.» 3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows. «Because I had to see,» Molly said. «And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?» Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling. «Shall we talk now?» «Take this off,» Molly said, raising her captive hands. «You killed my father,» 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. «I was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes, he called them.» «He killed the puppet. It looked like you.» «He was fond of broad gestures,» she said, and then Riviera was beside her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he'd worn in the roof garden of their hotel. «Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she? I thought so when I first saw her.» He stepped past 3Jane. «It isn't going to work, you know.» «Isn't it, Peter?» Molly managed a grin. «Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mis— take. Underestimating me.» He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. «He talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case, whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature.» He drank. «And what exactly is that, Peter?» Molly asked, her voice flat. Riviera beamed. «Perversity.» He walked back to the two women, swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. «An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision.» She waited, looking up at him. «Oh, Peter,» 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation ordinarily reserved for children. «No word for you, Molly. He told me about that you see. 3Jane knows the code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither will Wintermute. My Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse way.» He smiled again. «She has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy's favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match, a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool.» He drank off the last of the mineral water. «No, you wouldn't do, Daddy, you would not do. Now that Peter's come home.» And then, his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.
Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened to the panels on either side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the thing's fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead. Mar— cus Garvey was groaning and ticking with g-stress. «The Mute takin' I an' I dock,» the Zionite said, popping the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. «Maelcum pilot th' landin', meantime need we tool f' th' job.» «You keep tools back there?» Case craned his neck and watched cords of muscle bunching in the brown back. «This one,» Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped in black poly from the space behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a single hexhead to hold it in place. The black package had drifted aft before he'd finished. He thumbed open the vacuum valves on the workbelt's gray pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing he'd removed. He kicked back, gliding over his instruments-a green docking diagram pulsed on his central screen-and snagged the frame of Case's g-web. He pulled himself down and picked at the tape of his package with a thick, chipped thumbnail. «Some man in China say th' truth comes out this,» he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, re— placed with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and ganja. «That the only one you got?» «Sure, mon,» he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pis— tolgrip in his other hand, «I an' I th' Rastafarian navy, believe it.» Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He'd never bothered to put the Texas catheter back on; at least he could take a real piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last. He jacked in.
* * *
«Hey,» the construct said, «ol' Peter's totally apeshit, huh?» They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the emerald arches had widened, grown together, become a solid mass. Green predominated in the planes of the Chinese program that surrounded them. «Gettin' close, Dixie?» «Real close. Need you soon.» «Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang's set itself up solid in our Hosaka. I'm going to have to jack you and my deck out of the Circuit, haul you into Straylight, and plug you back in, into the custodial program there, Wintermute says. Says the Kuang virus will be all through there. Then we run from inside through the Straylight net.» «Wonderful,» the Flatline said, «I never did like to do any— thing simple when I could do it ass-backwards.» Case flipped.Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. When the optic chip flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink aura. 07:29:40. «I'm very unhappy with this, Peter.» 3Jane's voice seemed to arrive from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized, then corrected himself. The simstim unit was intact and still in place; he could feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears registered the vibrations of the girl's voice. Riviera said some— thing brief and indistinct. «But I don't,» she said, «and it isn't fun. Hideo will bring a medical unit down from intensive care, but this needs a surgeon.» There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against the side of the pool. «What was that you were telling her, when I came back?» Riviera was very close now. «About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside from Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to her?» «I wanted to see if they would break.» «One did. When she comes around-if she comes around— we'll see what color her eyes are.» «She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't been here to distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo to draw her little bomb, where would you be? In her power.» «No,» 3Jane said, «there was Hideo. I don't think you quite understand about Hideo. She does, evidently.» «Like a drink?» «Wine. The white.» Case jacked out.
Maelcum was hunched over Garvey's controls, tapping out commands for a docking sequence. The module's central screen displayed a fixed red square that represented the Straylight dock. Garvey was a larger square, green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum's commands. To the left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of Garvey and Haniwa as they approached the curvature of the spindle. «We got an hour, man,» Case said, pulling the ribbon of fiberoptics from the Hosaka. His deck's back-up batteries were good for ninety minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be an additional drain. He worked quickly, mechanically, fasten— ing the construct to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micro— pore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rec— tangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other. He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever that created suction. With the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder strap suspended in front of him, he struggled into his leather jacket, checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him, the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued when he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he'd bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over his shoulders, heard it click off the Russian scrubber. He was about to do the same with the steel star, but the rebounding credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck the ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum's left shoulder. The Zionite interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear. «You missin' th' Mute, mon,» Maelcum said. «Mute say he messin' th' security for Garvey. Garvey dockin' as 'nother boat, boat they 'spectin' out of Babylon. Mute broadcastin' codes for us.» «We gonna wear the suits?» «Too heavy.» Maelcum shrugged. «Stay in web 'til I tell you.» He tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed the worn pink handholds on either side of the navigation board. Case saw the green square shrink a final few millimeters to overlap the red square. On the smaller screen, Haniwa lowered her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared. Garvey was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang, shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender wasp shape. Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle that curved, groping past Haniwa for Garvey. There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trem— bling fronds of caulk. «Mon,» Maelcum said, «mind we got gravity.» A dozen small objects struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a magnet. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration. The deck and construct had fallen painfully to his lap. They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it. Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and removed his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. «Come now, mon, if you seh time be mos' precious.»
19
The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself, as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through Marcus Garvey's forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem of its own. The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elab— orate version of the one he'd tumbled through to reach Haniwa, designed for use in the spindle's rotation gravity. A corrugated tunnel, articulated by integral hydraulic members, each seg— ment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip plastic, the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had snaked its way around Haniwa; it was horizontal , where it joined Garvey' s lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb around the curvature of the yacht's hull. Maelcum was already making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left hand, the Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of baggy fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles. The gangway shifted slightly, each time he climbed to another ring. The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. All he felt now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to replay Armitage's lecture on the spin— dle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside's eco— system was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all. «Mon,» Maelcum said quietly, «get up here, 'side me.» Case edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch, two meters in diameter. The hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible housings set into the frame of the hatch. «So what do we-« Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes. Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of the Remington's safety being released. «You th' mon in th' hurry….» Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Then Case was beside him. The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall. On the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. «Very sorry, sir,» said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced up. «Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please.» On the monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently. Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at the monitor. Blank. «Who?» the man managed. «The Rastafarian navy,» Case said, standing up, the cyber— space deck banging against his hip, «and all we want's a jack into your custodial system.» The man swallowed. «Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It must be a loyalty check.» He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his orange suit. «No, mon, this a real one.» Maelcum came up out of his crouch with the Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. «You move it.» They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlap— ping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case. «Pretty rugs,» Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back. «Smell like church.» They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted above a console with a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of Metro Holografix. «Okay,» he said, «Maelcum takes this guy down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there, I'll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel. There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.» As Mael— cum nudged his captive along, Case knelt and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused. «Do you have to look like that, man?» he asked the face on the screen. The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese posters. «Anything you want, baby,» Zone drawled, «just hop it for Lonny….» «No,» Case said, «use the Finn.» As the Zone image van— ished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his forehead.
«What kept you?» the Flatline asked, and laughed. «Told you don't do that,» Case said. «Joke, boy,» the construct said, «zero time lapse for me. Lemme see what we got here….» The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey, a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome. «Right on,» the Flatline said. «Right,» Case said, and flipped.
»-like that. I'm sorry,» 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged Molly's head. «Our unit says no concussion, no permanent damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before you came here?» «Didn't know him at all,» Molly said bleakly. She was on her back on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn't feel the injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn't see. «He wants to kill you.» «Figures,» Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright light. «I don't think I want him to,» 3Jane said, and Molly pain— fully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes. «Don't play with me,» she said. «But I think I might like to,» 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of blood on her pale djellaba. «Where's he gone now?» Molly asked. «Another injection, probably,» 3Jane said, straightening up. «He was quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.» She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. «Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.» «What about Peter?» «Peter.» She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came loose, fell across her forehead. «Peter has become rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring.» She giggled. «In others, at any rate. My father was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen.» Molly tensed. «Don't alarm yourself.» 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin above the waistband of the leather jeans. «His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I'd never actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him very well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I'll show you that, when you're better. He strangles her in bed.» «Why did he kill her?» Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl's face. «He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our fam— ily. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel— ligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the Al's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier— Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity . Fascinating . I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But I've never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I'm the exception there.» «You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his cryogenic programs?» 3Jane nodded. «I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call Win— termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne Al, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram.» «One of them? There's more?» «One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It gave up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink.» She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly's lips. «Water. Only a little.» «Jane, love,» Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight, «are you enjoying yourself?» «Leave us alone, Peter.» «Playing doctor….» Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages. The left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted pool of blood. «Hideo,» 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, «hurt Peter if he doesn't go away. Go and swim, Peter.» The projection vanished. 07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye. «He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code.» Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her left breast. «Yes,» 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, «I do. I learned it as a child. I think I learned it in a dream…. Or somewhere in the thousand hours of my mother's diaries. But I think that Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it. There would be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts are nothing if not capricious.» Case jacked out.
«Strange little customer, huh?» The Finn grinned at Case from the old Sony. Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the corridor with the Remington at his side. The Zionite was smil— ing, his head bobbing to a rhythm Case couldn't hear. A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his sleeveless jacket. «Dub, mon,» Maelcum said. «You're fucking crazy,» Case told him. «Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub.» «Hey, guys,» the Finn said, «on your toes. Here comes your transportation. I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the pic of 8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a ride over to 3Jane's place.» Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the rid— erless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless con— crete arch marking the far end of their corridor. It might have been the one his Africans had ridden, but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was steadily winking its red LED. «Bus to catch,» Case said to Maelcum.
«What kept you?» the Flatline asked, and laughed. «Told you don't do that,» Case said. «Joke, boy,» the construct said, «zero time lapse for me. Lemme see what we got here….» The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey, a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome. «Right on,» the Flatline said. «Right,» Case said, and flipped.
»-like that. I'm sorry,» 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged Molly's head. «Our unit says no concussion, no permanent damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before you came here?» «Didn't know him at all,» Molly said bleakly. She was on her back on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn't feel the injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn't see. «He wants to kill you.» «Figures,» Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright light. «I don't think I want him to,» 3Jane said, and Molly pain— fully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes. «Don't play with me,» she said. «But I think I might like to,» 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of blood on her pale djellaba. «Where's he gone now?» Molly asked. «Another injection, probably,» 3Jane said, straightening up. «He was quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.» She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. «Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.» «What about Peter?» «Peter.» She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came loose, fell across her forehead. «Peter has become rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring.» She giggled. «In others, at any rate. My father was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen.» Molly tensed. «Don't alarm yourself.» 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin above the waistband of the leather jeans. «His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I'd never actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him very well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I'll show you that, when you're better. He strangles her in bed.» «Why did he kill her?» Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl's face. «He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our fam— ily. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel— ligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the Al's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier— Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity . Fascinating . I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But I've never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I'm the exception there.» «You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his cryogenic programs?» 3Jane nodded. «I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call Win— termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne Al, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram.» «One of them? There's more?» «One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It gave up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink.» She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly's lips. «Water. Only a little.» «Jane, love,» Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight, «are you enjoying yourself?» «Leave us alone, Peter.» «Playing doctor….» Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages. The left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted pool of blood. «Hideo,» 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, «hurt Peter if he doesn't go away. Go and swim, Peter.» The projection vanished. 07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye. «He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code.» Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her left breast. «Yes,» 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, «I do. I learned it as a child. I think I learned it in a dream…. Or somewhere in the thousand hours of my mother's diaries. But I think that Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it. There would be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts are nothing if not capricious.» Case jacked out.
«Strange little customer, huh?» The Finn grinned at Case from the old Sony. Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the corridor with the Remington at his side. The Zionite was smil— ing, his head bobbing to a rhythm Case couldn't hear. A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his sleeveless jacket. «Dub, mon,» Maelcum said. «You're fucking crazy,» Case told him. «Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub.» «Hey, guys,» the Finn said, «on your toes. Here comes your transportation. I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the pic of 8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a ride over to 3Jane's place.» Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the rid— erless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless con— crete arch marking the far end of their corridor. It might have been the one his Africans had ridden, but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was steadily winking its red LED. «Bus to catch,» Case said to Maelcum.
20
He'd lost his anger again. He missed it. The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across his knees, and Case, deck and construct against his chest. The cart was operating at speeds it hadn't been designed for; it was top heavy, cornering, and Maelcum had taken to leaning out in the direction of the turns. This presented no problem when the thing took lefts, because Case sat on the right, but in the right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his gear, crushing him against the seat. He had no idea where they were. Everything was familiar, but he couldn't be sure he'd seen any particular stretch before. A curving hallway lined with wooden showcases displayed collections he was certain he'd never seen: the skulls of large birds, coins, masks of beaten silver. The service cart's six tires were silent on the layered carpets. There was only the whine of the electric motor and an occasional faint burst of Zion dub, from the foam beads in Maelcum's ears, as he lunged past Case to counter a sharp right. The deck and the construct kept press— ing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip. «You got a watch?» he asked Maelcum. The Zionite shook his locks. «Time be time.» «Jesus,» Case said, and closed his eyes.
The Braun scuttled over mounded carpets and tapped one of its padded claws against an oversized rectangular door of dark battered wood. Behind them, the cart sizzled and shot blue sparks from a louvered panel. The sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool. «This th' way, mon?» Maelcum eyed the door and snapped the shotgun's safety. «Hey,» Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, «you think I know?» The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed. «It wan' you open door,» Maelcum said, nodding. Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been re— duced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He won— dered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of Straylight individually, or if they'd purchased it in bulk from some vast European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door's hinges creaked plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum step— ping past him with the Remington thrust forward from his hip. «Books,» Maelcum said. The library, the white steel shelves with their labels. «I know where we are,» Case said. He looked back at the service cart. A curl of smoke was rising from the carpet. «So come on,» he said. «Cart. Cart?» It remained stationary. The Braun was plucking at the leg of his jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted a strong urge to kick it. «Yeah?» It ticked its way around the door. He followed it. The monitor in the library was another Sony, as old as the first one. The Braun paused beneath it and executed a sort of Jig. «Wintermute?» The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled. «Time to check in, Case,» the Finn said, his eyes screwed up against the smoke of a cigarette. «C'mon, jack.» The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb his leg, its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. «Shit!» He slapped it aside and it struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air. «What's wrong with the goddam thing?» «Burned out,» the Finn said. «Forget it. No problem. lack in now.» There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one would accept the Hitachi adaptor. He jacked in.
Nothing. Gray void. No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace. The deck was gone. His fingers were. . . And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror. He tried to scream.
There seemed to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far away. He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms wrapped tight across his knees, and shook. He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even after the shaking stopped. The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At one point he decided that it wasn't a city at all, but some single building, perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging its distance. The sand was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black. The beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand…. He held himself and rocked, singing a song without words or tune. The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo Bay? He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all. Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered. A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his throat ached. «Wintermute,» he mumbled to his knees, «Wintermute. . .» It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that finally forced him to stand. His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. «Jesus,» he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth. «Jesus.» His teeth began to chatter. The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a Tokyo gardener produced. When he'd taken a dozen steps in the direction of the now invisible city, he turned and looked back through the gathering dark. His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand. He estimated that he'd covered at least a kilometer before he noticed the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew that Ratz wasn't there, that the bartender was a figment of his own imagination, not of the thing he was trapped in, but that didn't matter. He'd called the man up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his own ideas about Case and his predicament. «Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The re— dundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque props…. Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes magic out of China….» Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender's blackened teeth. «But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.» Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of blown sand. «Yeah,» he said. «Shit. I guess. . .» He walked toward the sound. «Artiste,» he heard Ratz call. «The light. You saw a light. Here. This way. . .» He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of icy seawater. «Ratz? Light? Ratz. . .» But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf. He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps. Time passed. He walked on. And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A rectangle. A door. «Fire in there,» he said, his words torn away by the wind. It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand. The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a meter thick. «Hey,» Case said, softly, «hey. . .» His fingers brushed the cold wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance. He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps. A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry.
He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure's walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of this was real, but cold was cold. She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel. «Mean, motherfucker,» he whispered to the wind. «Don't take a chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is….» He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. «I know, see? I know who you are. You're the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like I remember her before….» She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek. «You aren't anything,» he said to the sleeping girl. «You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I'm out on my ass in that library and my brain's dead. And pretty soon it'll be dead, if you got any sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn't. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think you can hurt me. 'Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you're called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this way?» He was shaking again, his voice shrill. «Honey,» she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, «you come here and sleep. I'll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?» Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. «You just sleep, okay?»
When he woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things out, blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom. EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, «BEEF», TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutri-
tive content. He fumbled a second one out. «EGGS». «If you're making this shit up,» he said, «you could lay on some real food, okay?» With a packet in either hand, he made his way through the structure's four rooms. Two were empty, aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration canisters. «Sure,» he said touching the seals. «Stay here a long time. I get the idea. Sure. . .» He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman's knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the fireplace and went out. Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the comer of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand. «Dunno whose memories you're using for this one,» he said when he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear. «What you doin', Case?» He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam sliding past her ankles. «I pissed myself last night,» he said. «Well, you don't wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I'll show you this pool back in the rocks.» She gestured vaguely behind her. «It's fresh.» The faded French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair. «Listen,» he said, scooping his clothes up and walking to— ward her, «I got a question for you. I won't ask you what you're doing here. But what exactly do you think I'm doing here?» He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh. «You came last night,» she said. She smiled at him. «And that's enough for you? I just came?» «He said you would,» she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. «He knows stuff like that, I guess.» She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt from the other ankle, awkward, child— like. She smiled at him again, more tentatively. «Now you answer me one, okay?» He nodded. «How come you're painted brown like that, all except your foot?»
«And that's the last thing you remember?» He watched her scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that was their only plate. She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. «I'm sorry, Case, honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an' it was . . .» She hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or its memory. «I just needed the money. To get home, I guess, or…hell,» she said, «you wouldn't hardly talk to me.» «There's no cigarettes?» «Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What's wrong with you?» She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it. «But the food was here? It was already here?» «I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.» «Okay. Sure. It's seamless.» She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. «Well, damn you anyway, Case,» she managed, finally, «I was doin' just fine here by myself.» He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the door— way, scraping his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. «Okay,» he said to the night, «I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash up.» His own laughter startled him. «A case of beer wouldn't hurt, while you're at it.» He turned and re-entered the bunker. She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. «Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, 'cept she looked like more money than you had….» She glanced back at him. «I'm real sorry I stole your RAM.» «Never mind,» he said. «Doesn't mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?» «Tony,» she said. «I'd been seein' him, kinda. He had a habit an' we . . . anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin' how you-« «There wasn't any graphics in there,» he interrupted. «Sure was. I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those pictures of when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that….» «Tony see it?» «I don't remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds all yellin' so lonely. Scared 'cause I didn't have a shot on me, nothin', an' I knew I'd be gettin' sick…. An' I walked an' walked, 'til it was dark, an' found this place, an' next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.» She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. «Never did get sick,» she said, as embers crawled. «Missed cigarettes more. How 'bout you, Case? You still wired?» Firelight dancing under her cheek— bones, remembered flash of Wizard's Castle and Tank War Europa. «No,» he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew— he remembered-as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond know— ing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held. She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall. Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered what she had said. «He told you I was coming,» he said. But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.
The Braun scuttled over mounded carpets and tapped one of its padded claws against an oversized rectangular door of dark battered wood. Behind them, the cart sizzled and shot blue sparks from a louvered panel. The sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool. «This th' way, mon?» Maelcum eyed the door and snapped the shotgun's safety. «Hey,» Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, «you think I know?» The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed. «It wan' you open door,» Maelcum said, nodding. Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been re— duced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He won— dered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of Straylight individually, or if they'd purchased it in bulk from some vast European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door's hinges creaked plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum step— ping past him with the Remington thrust forward from his hip. «Books,» Maelcum said. The library, the white steel shelves with their labels. «I know where we are,» Case said. He looked back at the service cart. A curl of smoke was rising from the carpet. «So come on,» he said. «Cart. Cart?» It remained stationary. The Braun was plucking at the leg of his jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted a strong urge to kick it. «Yeah?» It ticked its way around the door. He followed it. The monitor in the library was another Sony, as old as the first one. The Braun paused beneath it and executed a sort of Jig. «Wintermute?» The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled. «Time to check in, Case,» the Finn said, his eyes screwed up against the smoke of a cigarette. «C'mon, jack.» The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb his leg, its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. «Shit!» He slapped it aside and it struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air. «What's wrong with the goddam thing?» «Burned out,» the Finn said. «Forget it. No problem. lack in now.» There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one would accept the Hitachi adaptor. He jacked in.
Nothing. Gray void. No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace. The deck was gone. His fingers were. . . And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror. He tried to scream.
There seemed to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far away. He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms wrapped tight across his knees, and shook. He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even after the shaking stopped. The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At one point he decided that it wasn't a city at all, but some single building, perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging its distance. The sand was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black. The beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand…. He held himself and rocked, singing a song without words or tune. The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo Bay? He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all. Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered. A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his throat ached. «Wintermute,» he mumbled to his knees, «Wintermute. . .» It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that finally forced him to stand. His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. «Jesus,» he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth. «Jesus.» His teeth began to chatter. The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a Tokyo gardener produced. When he'd taken a dozen steps in the direction of the now invisible city, he turned and looked back through the gathering dark. His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand. He estimated that he'd covered at least a kilometer before he noticed the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew that Ratz wasn't there, that the bartender was a figment of his own imagination, not of the thing he was trapped in, but that didn't matter. He'd called the man up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his own ideas about Case and his predicament. «Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The re— dundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque props…. Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes magic out of China….» Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender's blackened teeth. «But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.» Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of blown sand. «Yeah,» he said. «Shit. I guess. . .» He walked toward the sound. «Artiste,» he heard Ratz call. «The light. You saw a light. Here. This way. . .» He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of icy seawater. «Ratz? Light? Ratz. . .» But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf. He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps. Time passed. He walked on. And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A rectangle. A door. «Fire in there,» he said, his words torn away by the wind. It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand. The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a meter thick. «Hey,» Case said, softly, «hey. . .» His fingers brushed the cold wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance. He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps. A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry.
He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure's walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of this was real, but cold was cold. She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel. «Mean, motherfucker,» he whispered to the wind. «Don't take a chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is….» He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. «I know, see? I know who you are. You're the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like I remember her before….» She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek. «You aren't anything,» he said to the sleeping girl. «You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I'm out on my ass in that library and my brain's dead. And pretty soon it'll be dead, if you got any sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn't. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think you can hurt me. 'Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you're called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this way?» He was shaking again, his voice shrill. «Honey,» she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, «you come here and sleep. I'll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?» Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. «You just sleep, okay?»
When he woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things out, blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom. EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, «BEEF», TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutri-
tive content. He fumbled a second one out. «EGGS». «If you're making this shit up,» he said, «you could lay on some real food, okay?» With a packet in either hand, he made his way through the structure's four rooms. Two were empty, aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration canisters. «Sure,» he said touching the seals. «Stay here a long time. I get the idea. Sure. . .» He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman's knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the fireplace and went out. Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the comer of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand. «Dunno whose memories you're using for this one,» he said when he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear. «What you doin', Case?» He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam sliding past her ankles. «I pissed myself last night,» he said. «Well, you don't wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I'll show you this pool back in the rocks.» She gestured vaguely behind her. «It's fresh.» The faded French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair. «Listen,» he said, scooping his clothes up and walking to— ward her, «I got a question for you. I won't ask you what you're doing here. But what exactly do you think I'm doing here?» He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh. «You came last night,» she said. She smiled at him. «And that's enough for you? I just came?» «He said you would,» she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. «He knows stuff like that, I guess.» She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt from the other ankle, awkward, child— like. She smiled at him again, more tentatively. «Now you answer me one, okay?» He nodded. «How come you're painted brown like that, all except your foot?»
«And that's the last thing you remember?» He watched her scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that was their only plate. She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. «I'm sorry, Case, honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an' it was . . .» She hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or its memory. «I just needed the money. To get home, I guess, or…hell,» she said, «you wouldn't hardly talk to me.» «There's no cigarettes?» «Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What's wrong with you?» She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it. «But the food was here? It was already here?» «I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.» «Okay. Sure. It's seamless.» She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. «Well, damn you anyway, Case,» she managed, finally, «I was doin' just fine here by myself.» He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the door— way, scraping his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. «Okay,» he said to the night, «I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash up.» His own laughter startled him. «A case of beer wouldn't hurt, while you're at it.» He turned and re-entered the bunker. She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. «Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, 'cept she looked like more money than you had….» She glanced back at him. «I'm real sorry I stole your RAM.» «Never mind,» he said. «Doesn't mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?» «Tony,» she said. «I'd been seein' him, kinda. He had a habit an' we . . . anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin' how you-« «There wasn't any graphics in there,» he interrupted. «Sure was. I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those pictures of when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that….» «Tony see it?» «I don't remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds all yellin' so lonely. Scared 'cause I didn't have a shot on me, nothin', an' I knew I'd be gettin' sick…. An' I walked an' walked, 'til it was dark, an' found this place, an' next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.» She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. «Never did get sick,» she said, as embers crawled. «Missed cigarettes more. How 'bout you, Case? You still wired?» Firelight dancing under her cheek— bones, remembered flash of Wizard's Castle and Tank War Europa. «No,» he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew— he remembered-as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond know— ing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held. She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall. Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered what she had said. «He told you I was coming,» he said. But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.