13 WITH BOTH HANDS

   “MAYBE YOU CAN RUN that one by me again,” Bobby said, around a mouthful of rice and eggs “I thought you already said it’s not a religion.”
   Beauvoir removed his eyeglass frames and sighted down one of the earpieces. “That wasn’t what I said. I said you didn’t have to worry about it, is all, whether it’s a religion or not It’s Just a structure. Lets you an’ me discuss some things that are happening, otherwise we might not have words for it, concepts”
   “But you talk like these, whatchacallem, lows, are”
   “Loa,” Beauvoir corrected, tossing his glasses down on the table He sighed, dug one of the Chinese cigarettes from Two-a-Day’s pack, and lit it with the pewter skull. “Plural’s same as the singular.” He inhaled deeply, blew out twin streams of smoke through arched nostrils. “You think religion, what are you thinking about, exactly?”
   “Well, my mother’s sister, she’s a Scientologist, real orthodox, you know? And there’s this woman across the hall, she’s Catholic. My old lady” – he paused, the food gone tasteless in his mouth -” ‘she’d put these holograms up in my room sometimes, Jesus or Hubbard or some shit. I guess I think about that.”
   “Vodou isn’t like that,” Beauvoir said. “It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In our system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Vodou says, there’s God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?” Bobby nodded, chewing thoughtfully. Another derm and two glasses of the red wine had helped a lot, and the big man had taken Two-a-Day for a walk through the trees and the fluorescent jackstraws, leaving Bobby with Beauvoir. Then Jackie had shown up all cheerful, with a big bowl of this eggs-and-rice stuff, which wasn’t bad at all, and as she’d put it down on the table in front of him, she’d pressed one of her tits against his shoulder.
   “So,” Beauvoir said, “we are’ concerned with getting things done. If you want, we’re concerned with systems. And so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn’t be a cowboy and you wouldn’t have a handle, right?” He dunked what was left of the cigarette in a fingerprinted glass half full of red wine. “Looks like Two-a-Day was about to get down to serious partying, about the time the shit hit the fan.”
   “What shit’s that?” Bobby asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
   “You,” Beauvoir said, frowning. “Not that any of it is your fault. As much as Two-a-Day wants to make out that’s the case.”
   “He does? He seems pretty tense now Real bitchy, too.”
   “Exactly. You got it Tense Scared shitless is more like it.”
   “So how come?”
   “Well, you see, things aren’t exactly what they seem, with Two-a-Day. I mean, yeah, he actually does the kind of shit you’ve known him to; hustles hot software to the caspers, pardon me” – he grinned – “down in Barrytown, but his main shot, I mean the man’s real ambitions, you understand, lie elsewhere.” Beauvoir picked up a wilted canapé, regarded it with evident suspicion, and flicked it over the table, into the trees. “His thing, you understand, is dicking around for a couple of bigtime Sprawl oungans.”
   Bobby nodded blankly.
   “Dudes who serve with both hands”
   “You lost me there.”
   “We’re talking a professional priesthood here, you want to call it that. Otherwise, just imagine a couple of major dudes – console cowboys, among other things – who make it their business to get things done for people. ‘To serve with both hands’ is an expression we have, sort of means they work both ends. White and black, got me?”
   Bobby swallowed, then shook his head.
   “Sorcerers,” Beauvoir said “Never mind. Bad dudes, big money, that’s all you need to know Two-a-Day, he acts like an up-line joeboy for these people. Sometimes he finds some thing they might be interested in, he downloads it on ‘em, collects a few favors later. Maybe he collects a dozen too many favors, they download something on him. Not quite the same proposition, you follow me? Say they get something they think has potential, but it scares them. These characters tend to a certain conservatism, you see? No? Well, you’ll learn.”
   Bobby nodded.
   “The kind of software someone like you would rent from Two-a-Day, that’s nothin’. I mean, it’ll work, but it’s nothing anybody heavy would ever bother with. You’ve seen a lot of cowboy kinos, right? Well, the stuff they make up for those things isn’t much, compared with the kind of shit a real heavy operator can front. Particularly when it comes to icebreakers Heavy icebreakers are kind of funny to deal in, even for the big boys You know why? Because ice, all the really hard stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the matrix, is always the produce of an Al, an artificial intelligence. Nothing else is fast enough to weave good ice and constantly alter and upgrade it. So when a really powerful icebreaker shows up on the black market, there are already a couple of very dicey factors in play. Like, for starts, where did the product come from? Nine times out of ten, it came from an Al, and Al’s are constantly screened, mainly by the Turing people, to make sure they don’t get too smart. So maybe you’ll get the Turing machine after your ass, because maybe an Al somewhere wants to augment its private cash flow Some Al’s have citizenship, right? Another thing you have to watch out for, maybe it’s a military icebreaker, and that’s bad heat, too, or maybe it’s taken a walk out of some zaibatsu’s industrial espionage arm, and you don’t want that either You takin’ this shit in, Bobby?”
   Bobby nodded. He felt like he’d been waiting all his life to hear Beauvoir explain the workings of a world whose existence he’d only guessed at before.
   “Still, an icebreaker that’ll really cut is worth mega, I mean beaucoup. So maybe you’re Mr. Big in the market, someone offers you this thing, and you don’t want to just tell ‘em to take a walk So you buy it. You buy it, real quiet, but you don’t slot it, no. What do you do with it? You take it home, have your tech fix it up so that it looks real average. Like you have it set up in a format like this” – and he tapped a stack of software in front of him -”and you take it to your joeboy, who owes you some favors, as usual.
   “Wait a sec,” Bobby said. “I don’t think I like -”
   “Good. That means you’re getting smart, or anyway smarter. Because that’s what they did. They brought it out here to your friendly ‘wareman, Mr. Two-a-Day, and they told him their problem. ‘Ace,’ they say, ‘we want to check this shit out, test-drive it, but no way we gonna do it ourselves It’s down to you, boy.’ So, in the way of things, what’s Two-a-Day gonna do with it? Is he gonna slot it? No way at all. He just does the same damn thing the big boys did to him, ‘cept he isn’t even going to bother telling the guy he’s going to do it to. What he does, he picks a base out in the Midwest that’s full of tax-dodge programs and yen-laundry flowcharts for some whorehouse in Kansas City, and everybody who didn’t just fall off a tree knows that the motherfucker is eyeball-deep in ice, black ice, totally lethal feedback programs. There isn’t a cowboy in the Sprawl or out who’d mess with that base first, because it’s dripping with defenses; second, because the stuff inside isn’t worth anything to anybody but the IRS, and they’re probably already on the owner’s take
   “Hey,” Bobby said, “lemme get this straight”
   “I’m giving it to you straight, white boy! He picked out that base, then he ran down his list of hotdoggers, ambitious punks from over in Barrytown, wilsons dumb enough to run a program they’d never seen before against a base that some joker like Two-a-Day fingered for them and told them was an easy make. And who’s he pick? He picks somebody new to the game, natch, somebody who doesn’t even know where he lives, doesn’t even have his number, and he says, here, my man, you take this home and make yourself some money. You get anything good, Ill fence it for you!” Beauvoir’s eyes were wide, he wasn’t smiling. “Sound like anybody you know, man, or maybe you try not to hang out with losers?”
   “You mean he knew I was going to get killed if I plugged into that base?”
   “No, Bobby, but he knew it was a possibility if the package didn’t work. What he mainly wanted was to watch you try. Which he didn’t bother to do himself, just put a couple of cowboys on it. It could’ve gone a couple different ways. Say, if that icebreaker had done its number on the black ice, you’d have gotten in, found a bunch of figures that meant dick to you, you’d have gotten back out, maybe with-out leaving any trace at all. Well, you’d have come back to Leon’s and told Two-a-Day that he’d fingered the wrong data. Oh, he’d have been real apologetic, for sure, and you’d have gotten a new target and a new icebreaker, and he’d have taken the first one back to the Sprawl and said it looked okay. Meanwhile, he’d have an eye cocked in your direction, just to monitor your health, make sure nobody came looking for the icebreaker they might’ve heard you’d used. Another way it might have gone, the way it nearly did go, something could’ve been funny with the icebreaker, the ice could’ve fried you dead, and one of those cowboys would’ve had to break into your momma’s place and get that software back before any-body found your body.”
   “I dunno, Beauvoir, that’s pretty fucking hard to – “
   “Hard my ass. Life is hard. I mean, we’re talkin’ biz, you know?” Beauvoir regarded him with some severity, the plastic frames far down his slender nose. He was lighter than either Two-a-Day or the big man, the color of coffee with only a little whitener, his forehead high and smooth beneath close-cropped black fizz. He looked skinny, under his gray sharkskin robe, and Bobby didn’t really find him threatening at all. “But our problem, the reason we’re here, the reason you’re here, is to figure out what did happen. And that’s something else.”
   “But you mean he set me up, Two-a-Day set me up so I’d get my ass killed?” Bobby was still in the St Mary’s Maternity wheelchair, although he no longer felt like he needed it. “And he’s in deep shit with these guys, these heavies from the Sprawl?”
   “You got it now.”
   “And that’s why he was acting that way, like he doesn’t give a shit, or maybe hates my guts, right? And he’s real scared?”
   Beauvoir nodded.
   “And,” Bobby said, suddenly seeing what Two-a-Day was really pissed about, and why he was scared, “it’s because I got my ass jumped, down by Big Playground, and those Lobe fucks ripped me for my deck! And their software, it was still in my deck!” He leaned forward, excited at having put it together. “And these guys, it’s like they’ll kill him or some-thing, unless he gets it back for them, right?”
   “I can tell you watch a lot of kino,” Beauvoir said, “but that’s about the size of it, definitely.”
   “Right,” Bobby said, settling back in the wheelchair and putting his bare feet up on the edge of the table. “Well, Beauvoir, who are these guys? Whatchacallem, hoonguns? Sorcerers, you said? What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
   “Well, Bobby,” Beauvoir said “I’m one, and the big fella – you can call him Lucas – he’s the other.”

   “You’ve probably seen one of these before,” Beauvoir said, as the man he called Lucas put the projection tank down on the table, having methodically cleared a space for it.
   “In school,” Bobby said.
   “You go to school, man?” Two-a-Day snapped “Why the fuck didn’t you stay there?” He’d been chain-smoking since he came back with Lucas, and seemed in worse shape than he’d been in before.
   “Shut up, Two-a-Day,” Beauvoir said. “Little education might do you some good -”
   “They used one to teach us our way around in the matrix, how to access stuff from the print library, like that...”
   “Well, then,” Lucas said, straightening up and brushing nonexistent dust from his big pink palms, “did you ever use it for that, to access print books?” He’d removed his immaculate black suit coat, his spotless white shirt was traversed by a pair of slender maroon suspenders, and he’d loosened the knot of his plain black tie.
   “I don’t read too well,” Bobby said. “I mean, I can, but it’s work. But yeah, I did I looked at some real old books on the matrix and stuff”
   “I thought you had,” Lucas said, jacking some kind of small deck into the console that formed the base of the tank. “Count Zero. Count zero interrupt. Old programmer talk.” He passed the deck to Beauvoir, who began to tap commands into it.
   Complex geometric forms began to click into place in the tank, aligned with the nearly invisible planes of a three-dimensional grid. Beauvoir was sketching in the cyberspace coordinates for Barrytown, Bobby saw. “We’ll call you this blue pyramid, Bobby. There you are.” A blue pyramid began to pulse softly at the very center of the tank. “Now we’ll show you what Two-a-Day’s cowboys saw, the ones who were watching you. From now on, you’re seeing a recording “ An interrupted line of blue light extruded from the pyramid, following a grid line Bobby watched, seeing himself alone in his mother’s living room, the Ono-Sendai on his lap, the curtains drawn, his fingers moving across the deck
   “Icebreaker on its way,” Beauvoir said. The line of blue dots reached the wall of the tank. Beauvoir tapped the deck, and the coordinates changed. A new set of geometrics replaced the first arrangement Bobby recognized the cluster of orange rectangles centered in the grid. “That’s it,” he said.
   The blue line progressed from the edge of the tank, headed for the orange base. Faint planes of ghost-orange flickered around the rectangles, shifting and strobing, as the line grew closer.
   “You can see something’s wrong right there.” Lucas said. “That’s their ice, and it was already hip to you. Rumbled you before you even got a lock.”
   As the line of blue dots touched the shifting orange plane, it was surrounded by a translucent orange tube of slightly greater diameter The tube began to lengthen, traveling back, along the line, until it reached the wall of the tank...
   “Meanwhile,” Beauvoir said, “back home in Barrytown...” He tapped the deck again and now Bobby’s blue pyramid was in the center. Bobby watched as the orange tube emerged from the wall of the projection tank, still following the blue line, and smoothly approached the pyramid. “Now at this point, you were due to start doing some serious dying, cowboy.” The tube reached the pyramid; triangular orange planes snapped up, walling it in. Beauvoir froze the projection.
   “Now,” Lucas said, “when Two-a-Day’s hired help, who are all in all a pair of tough and experienced console jockeys, when they saw what you are about to see, my man, they decided that their deck was due for that big overhaul in the sky. Being pros, they had a backup deck. When they brought it on line, they saw the same thing. It was at that point that they decided to phone their employer, Mr. Two-a-Day, who, as we can see from this mess, was about to throw himself a party..
   “Man,” Two-a-Day said, his voice tight with hysteria, “I told you. I had some clients up here needed entertaining. I paid those boys to watch, they were watching, and they phoned me. I phoned you. What the hell you want, anyway?”
   “Our property,” Beauvoir said softly. “Now watch this, real close. This motherfucker is what we call an anomalous phenomenon, no shit...” He tapped the deck again, starting the recording.
   Liquid flowers of milky white blossomed from the floor of the tank; Bobby, craning forward, saw that they seemed to consist of thousands of tiny spheres or bubbles, and then they aligned perfectly with the cubical grid and coalesced, forming a top-heavy, asymmetrical structure,’ a thing like a rectilinear mushroom. The surfaces, facets, were white, perfectly blank. The image in the tank was no longer than Bobby’s open hand. but to anyone jacked into a deck it would have been enormous. The thing unfolded a pair of horns; these lengthened, curved, became pincers that arced out to grasp the pyramid. He saw the tips sink smoothly through the flickering orange planes of the enemy ice.
   “She said, ‘What are you doing?’ “ he heard himself say. “Then she asked me why they were doing that, doing it to me, killing me...”
   “Ah,” Beauvoir said, quietly, “now we are getting somewhere.”
   He didn’t know where they were going, but he was glad to be out of that chair. Beauvoir ducked to avoid a slanting gro-light that dangled from twin lengths of curly-cord: Bobby followed, almost slipping in a green-filmed puddle of water Away from Two-a-Day’s couch-clearing, the air seemed thicker. There was a greenhouse smell of damp and growing things.
   “So that’s how it was,” Beauvoir said, “Two-a-Day sent some friends round to Covina Concourse Courts, but you were gone. Your deck was gone, too.”
   “Well,” Bobby said, “I don’t see it’s exactly his fault, then. I mean, if I hadn’t split for Leon’s – and I was lookin’ for Two-a-Day. even lookin’ to try to get up here – then he’d have found me, right?” Beauvoir paused to admire a leafy stand of flowering hemp, extending a thin brown forefinger to lightly brush the pale, colorless flowers.
   “True,” he said, “but this is a business matter. He should have detailed someone to watch your place for the duration of the run, to ensure that neither you nor the software took any unscheduled walks.”
   “Well, he sent Rhea ‘n’ Jackie over to Leon’s, because I saw ‘em there.” Bobby reached into the neck of his black pajamas and scratched at the sealed wound that crossed his chest and stomach. Then he remembered the centipede thing Pye had used as a suture, and quickly withdrew his hand. It itched, a straight line of itch, but he didn’t want to touch it.
   “No, Jackie and Rhea are ours. Jackie is a mambo, a priestess, the horse of Danbala.” Beauvoir continued on his way, picking out what Bobby presumed was some existing track or path through the jumbled forest of hydroponics, although it seemed to progress in no particular direction. Some of the larger shrubs were rooted in bulbous green plastic trash bags filled with dark humus. Many of these had burst, and pale roots sought fresh nourishment in the shadows between the gro-lights, where time and the gradual fall of leaves conspired to produce a thin compost. Bobby wore a pair of black nylon thongs Jackie had found for him, but there was already damp earth between his toes. “A horse?” he asked Beauvoir, dodging past a prickly-looking thing that suggested an inside-out palm tree.
   “Danbala rides her, Danbala Wedo, the snake. Other times, she is the horse of Aida Wedo, his wife.”
   Bobby decided not to pursue it. He tried to change the subject: “How come Two-a-Day’s got such a motherhuge place? What are all these trees ‘n’ things for?” He knew that Jackie and Rhea had wheeled him through a doorway, in the St. Mary’s chair, but he hadn’t seen a wall since. He also knew that the arcology covered x number of hectares, so that it was possible that Two-a-Day’s place was very large indeed, but it hardly seemed likely that a ‘wareman, even a very sharp one, could afford this much space. Nobody could afford this much space, and why would anybody want to live in a leaky hydroponic forest?
   The last derm was wearing off, and his back and chest were beginning to burn and ache.
   “Ficus trees, mapou trees... This whole level of the Projects is a lieu saint, holy place.” Beauvoir tapped Bobby on the shoulder and pointed out twisted, bicolored strings dangling from the limbs of a nearby tree. “The trees are consecrated to different ba. That one is for Ougou, Ougou Feray, god of war. There’s a lot of other things grown up here, herbs the leaf-doctors need, and some just for fun. But this isn’t Two-a-Day’s place, this is communal.”
   “You mean the whole Project’s into this? All like voodoo and stuff?” It was worse than Marsha’s darkest fantasies.
   “No, man,” and Beauvoir laughed. “There’s a mosque up top, and a couple or ten thousand holyroller Baptists scattered around, some Church o’ Sci.... All the usual stuff. Still” – he grinned – “we are the ones with the tradition of getting shit done.... But how this got started, this level, that goes way back. The people who designed these places, maybe eighty, a hundred years ago, they had the idea they’d make ‘em as self-sufficient as possible. Make ‘em grow food Make ‘em heat themselves, generate power, whatever Now this one, you drill far enough down, is sitting on top of a lot of geothermal water. It’s real hot down there, but not hot enough to run an engine, so it wasn’t gonna give em any power. They made a stab at power, up on the roof, with about a hundred Darrieus rotors, what they call eggbeaters Had them-selves a wind farm, see? Today they get most of their watts off the Fission Authority, like anybody else. But that geothermal water, they pump that up to a heat exchanger. It’s too salty to drink, so in the exchanger it just heats up your standard Jersey tap water, which a lot of people figure isn’t worth drinking anyway...”
   Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby looked back. Shallow pools on the muddy concrete floor caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf trees, the bare pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic fluid.
   “Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of shrimp. Shrimp grow real fast in warm water. Then they pump it through pipes in the concrete, up here, to keep this place warm. That’s what this level was for, to grow ‘ponic amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into the catfish tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat the algae, and it all goes around again. Or anyway, that was the idea. Chances are they didn’t figure anybody’d go up on the roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room for a mosque, and they didn’t figure a lot of other changes either So we wound up with this space. But you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the Projects... Catfish, too”
   They had arrived at the wall. It was made of glass, beaded heavily with condensation. A few centimeters beyond it was another wall, that one made of what looked like rusty sheet steel. Beauvoir fished a key of some kind from a pocket in his sharkskin robe and slid it into an opening in a bare alloy beam dividing two expanses of window. Somewhere nearby, an engine whined into life; the broad steel shutter rotated up and out, moving jerkily, to reveal a view that Bobby had often imagined.
   They must be near the top, high up in the Projects, because Big Playground was something he could cover with two hands. The condos of Barrytown looked like some gray-white fungus, spreading to the horizon. It was nearly dark, and he could make out a pink glow, beyond the last range of condo racks.
   “That’s the Sprawl, over there, isn’t it? That pink.”
   “That’s right, but the closer you get, the less pretty it looks. How’d you like to go there, Bobby? Count Zero ready to make the Sprawl?”
   “Oh, yeah,” Bobby said, his palms against the sweating glass, “you got no idea....” The derm had worn off entirely now, and his back and chest hurt like hell.

14 NIGHT FLIGHT

   AS THE NIGHT came on, Turner found the edge again.
   It seemed like a long time since he’d been there, but when it clicked in, it was like he’d never left. It was that super-human synchromesh flow that stimulants only approximated. He could only score for it on the site of a major defection, one where he was in command, and then only in the final hours before the actual move.
   But it had been a long time; in New Delhi, he’d only been checking out possible escape routes for an executive who wasn’t entirely certain that relocation was what he wanted. If he had been working the edge, that night in Chandni Chauk, maybe he’d have been able to dodge the thing. Probably not, but the edge would’ve told him to try.
   Now the edge let him collate the factors he had to deal with at the site, balancing clusters of small problems against sin-gle, larger ones. So far there were a lot of little ones, but no real ballbreakers. Lynch and Webber were starting to get in each other’s hair, so he arranged to keep them apart. His conviction that Lynch was Conroy’s plant, instinctive from the beginning, was stronger now. Instincts sharpened, on the edge; things got witchy. Nathan was having trouble with the lowtech Swedish hand warmers; anything short of an electronic circuit baffled him. Turner put Lynch to work on the hand warmers, fueling and priming them, and let Nathan carry them out, two at a time, and bury them shallowly, at meter intervals, along the two long lines of orange tape.
   The microsoft Conroy had sent filled his head with its own universe of constantly shifting factors: airspeed, altitude, attitude, angle of attack, g-forces, headings. The plane’s weapon delivery information was a constant subliminal litany of target designators, bomb fall lines, search circles, range and release cues, weapons counts. Conroy had tagged the microsoft with a simple message outlining the plane’s time of arrival and confirming the arrangement for space for a single passenger
   He wondered what Mitchell was doing, feeling. The Maas Biolabs North America facility was carved into the heart of a sheer mesa, a table of rock thrusting from the desert floor. The biosoft dossier had shown Turner the mesa’s face, cut with bright evening windows; it rode about the uplifted arms of a sea of saguaros like the wheelhouse of a giant ship. To Mitchell, it had been prison and fortress, his home for nine years. Somewhere near its core he had perfected the hybridoma techniques that had eluded other researchers for almost a century; working with human cancer cells and a neglected, nearly forgotten model of DNA synthesis, he had produced the immortal hybrid cells that were the basic production tools of the new technology, minute biochemical factories endlessly reproducing the engineered molecules that were linked and built up into biochips. Somewhere in the Maas arcology, Mitchell would be moving through his last hours as their star researcher.
   Turner tried to imagine Mitchell leading a very different sort of life following his defection to Hosaka, but found it difficult. Was a research arcology in Arizona very different from one on Honshu?

   There had been times, during that long day, when Mitch-ell’s coded memories had risen in him, filling him with a strange dread that seemed to have nothing to do with the operation at hand.
   It was the intimacy of the thing that still disturbed him, and perhaps the feeling of fear sprang from that. Certain fragments seemed to have an emotional power entirely out of proportion to their content. Why should a memory of a plain hallway in some dingy Cambridge graduate dormitory fill him with a sense of guilt and self-loathing? Other images, which logically should have carried a degree of feeling, were strangely lacking in affect: Mitchell playing with his baby daughter on an expanse of pale woolen broadloom in a rented house in Geneva, the child laughing, tugging at his hand. Nothing. The man’s life, from Turner’s vantage, seemed marked out by a certain inevitability; he was brilliant, a brilliance that had been detected early on, highly motivated, gifted at the kind of blandly ruthless in-company manipulation required by some-one who aspired to become a top research scientist. If anyone was destined to rise through laboratory-corporate hierarchies, Turner decided, it would be Mitchell.
   Turner himself was incapable of meshing with the intensely tribal world of the zaibatsumen, the lifers. He was a perpetual outsider, a rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of inter-corporate politics. No company man would have been capable of taking the initiatives Turner was required to take in the course of an extraction. No company man was capable of Turner’s professionally casual ability to realign his loyalties to fit a change in employers. Or, perhaps, of his unyielding commitment once a contract had been agreed upon. He had drifted into security work in his late teens, ‘when the grim doldrums of the postwar economy were giving way to the impetus of new technologies. He had done well in security, considering his general lack of ambition. He had a ropy, muscular poise that impressed his employer’s clients, and he was bright, very bright. He wore clothes well. He had a way with technology.
   Conroy had found him in Mexico, where Turner’s employer had contracted to provide security for a Sense/Net simstim team who were recording a series of thirty-minute segments in an ongoing jungle adventure series When Conroy arrived, Turner was finishing his arrangements. He’d set up a liaison between Sense/Net and the local government, bribed the town’s top police official, analyzed the hotel’s security system, met the local guides and drivers and had their histories double-checked, arranged for digital voice protection on the simstim team’s transceivers, established a crisis-management team, and planted seismic sensors around the Sense/Net suite-cluster.
   He entered the hotel’s bar, a jungle-garden extension of the lobby, and found a seat by himself at one of the glass-topped tables. A pale man with a shock of white, bleached hair crossed the bar with a drink in each hand. The pale skin was drawn tight across angular features and a high forehead; he wore a neatly pressed military shirt over jeans, and leather sandals.
   “You’re the security for those simstim kids,” the pale man said, putting one of the drinks down on Turner’s table. “Alfredo told me.” Alfredo was one of the hotel bartenders.
   Turner looked up at the man, who was evidently sober and seemed to have all the confidence in the world. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” Turner said, making no move to accept the proffered drink.
   “It doesn’t matter,” Conroy said, seating himself, “we’re in the same ball game.” He seated himself.
   Turner stared. He had a bodyguard’s presence, something restless and watchful written in the lines of his body, and few strangers would so casually violate his private space.
   “You know,” the man said, the way someone might comment on a team that wasn’t doing particularly well in a given season, “those seismics you’re using really don’t make it. I’ve met people who could walk in there, eat your kids for breakfast, stack the bones in the shower, and stroll out whistling. Those seismics would say it never happened.” He took a sip of his drink. “You get A for effort, though. You know how to do a job.”
   The phrase “stack the bones in the shower” was enough.
   Turner decided to take the pale man out.
   “Look, Turner, here’s your leading lady.” The man smiled up at Jane Hamilton, who smiled back, her wide blue eyes clear and perfect, each iris ringed with the minute gold lettering of the Zeiss Ikon logo. Turner froze, caught in a split-second lock of indecision. The star was close, too close, and the pale man was rising – “Nice meeting you, Turner,” he said. “We’ll get together sooner or later. Take my advice about those seismics; back em up with a perimeter of screamers.” And then he turned and walked away, muscles rolling easily beneath the crisp fabric of his tan shirt.
   “That’s nice, Turner,” Hamilton said, taking the stranger’s place.
   “Yeah?” Turner watched as the man was lost in the confusion of the crowded lobby, amid pink-fleshed tourists.
   “You don’t ever seem to talk to people. You always look like you’re running a make on them, filing a report. It’s nice to see you making friends for a change”
   Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a given week She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illuminated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhumanly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated.
   He sat with her. in the bar, until she’d finished two drinks, then walked her back to the suite-cluster.
   “You wouldn’t feel like coming in for another, would you, Turner?”
   “No.” he said. This was the second evening she’d made the offer, and he sensed that it would be the last. “I have to check the seismics.”
   Later that night, he phoned New York for the number of a firm in Mexico City that could supply him with screamers for the perimeter of the suite-cluster.
   But a week later. Jane and three others, half the series cast, were dead.
   “We’re ready to roll the medics,” Webber said. Turner saw that she was wearing fingerless brown leather gloves She’d replaced her sunglasses with clear-glass shooting glasses, and there was a pistol on her hip. “Sutcliffe’s monitoring the perimeter with the remotes. We’ll need everybody else to get the fucker through the brush.”
   “Need me?”
   “Ramirez says he can’t do anything too strenuous this close to jacking in. You ask me, he’s just a lazy little L.A. shit.”
   “No,” Turner said, getting up from his seat on the ledge, “he’s right. If he sprained his wrist, we’d be screwed. Even something so minor that he couldn’t feel it could affect his speed...”
   Webber shrugged. “Yeah. Well, he’s back in the bunker, bathing his hands in the last of our water and humming to himself, so we should be just fine.”
   When they reached the surgery, Turner automatically counted heads. Seven. Ramirez was in the bunker; Sutcliffe was somewhere in the cinderblock maze, monitoring the sentry-remotes. Lynch had a Steiner-Optic laser slung over his right shoulder, a compact model with a folding alloy skeleton stock, integral batteries forming a fat handgrip below the gray titanium housing that served the thing as a barrel. Nathan was wearing a black jumpsuit, black paratrooper boots filmed with pale dust, and had the bulbous ant-eye goggles of an image-amplification rig dangling below his chin on a head strap.
   Turner removed his Mexican sunglasses, tucked them into a breast pocket in the blue work shirt, and buttoned the flap.
   “How’s it going, Teddy?” he asked a beefy six-footer with close-cropped brown hair.
   “Jus’ fine,” Teddy said, with a toothy smile.
   Turner surveyed the other three members of the site team, nodding to each man in turn: Compton, Costa, Davis.
   “Getting down to the wire, huh?” Costa asked. He had a round, moist face and a thin, carefully trimmed beard. Like Nathan and the others, he wore black.
   “Pretty close,” Turner said “All smooth so far.”
   Costa nodded.
   “We’re an estimated thirty minutes from arrival,” Turner said.
   Nathan, Davis,” Webber said, “disconnect the sewage line “ She handed Turner one of the Telefunken ear-bead sets. She’d already removed it from its bubble pack. She put one on herself, peeling the plastic backing from the self-adhesive throat microphone and smoothing it into place on her sunburnt neck.
   Nathan and Davis were moving in the shadows behind the module. Turner heard Davis curse softly.
   “Shit,” Nathan said, “there’s no cap for the end of the tube.” The others laughed.
   “Leave it,” Webber said. “Get to work on the wheels.
   Lynch and Compton unlimber the jacks.”
   Lynch drew a pistol-shaped power driver from his belt and ducked beneath surgery. It was swaying now, the suspension creaking softly; the medics were moving inside. Turner heard a brief, high-pitched whine from some piece of internal machinery, and then the chatter of Lynch’s driver as he readied the jacks.
   He put his ear-bead in and stuck the throat mike beside his larynx. “Sutcliffe? Check?”
   “Fine,” the Australian said, a tiny voice that seemed to come from the base of his skull.
   “Ramirez?”
   “Loud and clear...”

   Eight minutes. They were rolling the module out on its ten fat tires. Turner and Nathan were on the front pair, steering;
   Nathan had his goggles on. Mitchell was coming out in the dark of the moon. The module was heavy, absurdly heavy, and very nearly impossible to steer. “Like balancing a truck on a couple of shopping carts,” Nathan said to himself. Turner’s lower back was giving him trouble. It hadn’t been quite right since New Delhi.
   “Hold it,” Webber said, from the third wheel on the left. “I’m stuck on a fucking rock...”
   Turner released his wheel and straightened up. The bats were out in force tonight, flickering things against the bowl of desert starlight. There were bats in Mexico, in the jungle, fruit bats that slept in the trees that overhung the suite-cluster where the Sense/Net crew slept. Turner had climbed those trees, had strung the overhanging limbs with taut lengths of molecular monofilament, meters of invisible razor waiting for an unwary intruder. But Jane and the others had died anyway, blown away on a hillside in the mountains near Acapulco. Trouble with a labor union, someone said later, but nothing was ever determined, really, other than the fact of the primitive claymore charge, its placement and the position from which it had been detonated. Turner had climbed the hill himself, his clothes filmed with blood, and seen the nest of crushed undergrowth where the killers had waited, the knife switch and the corroded automobile battery. He found the butts of hand-rolled cigarettes and the cap from a bottle of Bohemia beer, bright and new.
   The series had to be canceled, and the crisis-management team did yeoman duty, arranging the removal of bodies and the repatriation of the surviving members of the cast and crew. Turner was on the last plane out, and after eight Scotches in the lounge of the Acapulco airport, he’d wandered blindly out into the central ticketing area and encountered a man named Buschel, an executive tech from Sense/Net’s Los Angeles complex. Buschel was pale beneath an L.A. tan, his seersucker suit limp with sweat. He was carrying a plain aluminum case, like a camera case, its sides dull with condensation. Turner stared at the man, stared at the sweating case, with its red and white warning decals and lengthy labels explaining the precautions required in the transportation of materials in cryogenic storage.
   “Christ,” Buschel said, noticing him “Turner. I’m sorry, man. Came down this morning. Ugly fucking business “ He took a sodden handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his face. “Ugly job. I’ve never had to do one of these, be-fore...”
   “What’s in the case, Buschel?” He was much closer now, although he didn’t remember stepping forward. He could see the pores in Buschel’s tanned face.
   “You okay, man?” Buschel taking a step back. “You look bad.”
   “What’s in the case, Buschel?” Seersucker bunched in his fist, knuckles white and shaking.
   “Damn it, Turner,” the man jerking free, the handle of the case clutched in both hands now. “They weren’t damaged. Only some minor abrasion on one of the corneas. They belong to the Net. It was in her contract, Turner.”
   And he’d turned away, his guts knotted tight around eight glasses of straight Scotch, and fought the nausea. And he’d continued to fight it, held it off for nine years, until, in his flight from the Dutchman, all the memory of it had come down on him, had fallen on him in London, in Heathrow, and he’d leaned forward, without pausing in his progress down yet another corridor, and vomited into a blue plastic waste canister.
   “Come on. Turner,” Webber said, “put some back in it. Show us how it’s done.” The module began to strain forward again, through the tarry smell of the desert plants.
   “Ready here,” Ramirez said, his voice remote and calm.
   Turner touched the throat mike’ “I’m sending you some company.” He removed his finger from the mike. “Nathan, it’s time. You and Davis, hack to the bunker.”
   Davis was in charge of the squirt gear, their sole nonmatrix link with Hosaka. Nathan was Mr. Fix-it. Lynch was rolling the last of the bicycle wheels away into the brush beyond the parking lot. Webber and Compton were kneeling beside the module, attaching the line that linked the Hosaka surgeons with the Sony biomonitor in the command post. With the wheels removed, lowered and leveled on four jacks, the portable neurosurgery reminded Turner once again of the French vacation module. That had been a much later trip, four years after Conroy had recruited him in Los Angeles.
   “How’s it going?” Sutcliffe asked, over the link.
   “Fine,” Turner said, touching the mike.
   “Lonely out here,” Sutcliffe said.
   “Compton,” Turner said, “Sutcliffe needs you to help him cover the perimeter. You, too, Lynch.”
   “Too bad,” Lynch said, from the dark. “I was hoping I’d get to see the action.”
   Turner’s hand was on the grip of the holstered Smith & Wesson, under the open flap of the parka. “Now, Lynch.” If Lynch was Connie’s plant. he’d want to be here. Or in the bunker.
   “Fuck it,” Lynch said. “There’s nobody out there and you know it. You don’t want me here, I’ll go in there and watch Ramirez.
   “Right,” Turner said, and drew the gun, depressing the stud that activated the xenon projector. The first tight-beam flash of noon-bright xenon light found a twisted saguaro, its needles like tufts of gray fur in the pitiless illumination. The second lit up the spiked skull on Lynch’s belt, framed it in a sharp-edged circle The sound of the shot and the sound of he bullet detonating on impact were indistinguishable, waves of concussion rolling out in invisible, ever-widening rings, out into the flat dark land like thunder.
   In the first few seconds after, there was no sound at all, even the bats and bugs silenced, waiting. Webber had thrown herself flat in the scrub, and somehow he sensed her there, now, knew that her gun would be out, held dead steady in those brown, capable hands. He had no idea where Compton was. Then Sutcliffe’s voice, over the ear-bead, scratching at him from his brainpan: “Turner. What was that?”
   There was enough starlight now to make out Webber. She was sitting up, gun in her hands, ready, her elbows braced on her knees.
   “He was Conroy’s plant,” Turner said, lowering the Smith & Wesson.
   “Jesus Christ,” she said. “I’m Conroy’s plant.”
   “He had a line out. I’ve seen it before.”
   She had to say it twice.
   Sutcliffe’s voice in his head, and then Ramirez: “We got your transportation. Eighty klicks and closing... Every-thing else looks clear. There’s a blimp twenty klicks south-southwest, Jaylene says, unmanned cargo and it’s right on schedule. Nothing else. What the fuck’s Sut yelling about? Nathan says he heard a shot” Ramirez was jacked in. most of his sensorium taken up with the input from the Maas-Neotek deck. “Nathan’s ready with the first squirt...”
   Turner could hear the jet banking now, braking for the landing on the highway. Webber was up and walking toward him, her gun in her hand. Sutcliffe was asking the same question, over and over.
   He reached up and touched the throat mike. “Lynch. He’s dead. The jet’s here. This is it.”
   And then the Jet was on them, black shadow, incredibly low, coming in without lights. There was a flare of blow-back jets as the thing executed a landing that would have killed a human pilot, and then a weird creaking as it readjusted its articulated carbon-fiber airframe. Turner could make out the green reflected glow of instrumentation in the curve of the plastic canopy.
   “You fucked up,” Webber said.
   Behind her, the hatch in the side of the surgery module popped open, framing a masked figure in a green paper contamination suit. The light from inside was blue-white, brilliant, it threw a distorted shadow of the suited medic out through the thin cloud of dust that hung above the lot in the wake of the Jet’s landing. “Close it!” Webber shouted. “Not yet!”
   As the door swung down, shutting out the light, they both heard the ultralight’s engine. After the roar of the jet, it seemed no more than the hum of a dragonfly, a drone that stuttered and faded as they listened. “He’s out of fuel,” Webber said. “But he’s close.”
   “He’s here,” Turner said, pressing the throat mike. “First squirt.”
   The tiny plane whispered past them, a dark delta against the stars They could hear something flapping in the wind of its silent passage, perhaps one of Mitchell’s pants legs. You’re up there, Turner thought, all alone, in the warmest clothes you own, wearing a pair of infrared goggles you built for yourself, and you’re looking for a pair of dotted lines picked out for you in hand warmers. “You crazy fucker,” he said, his heart filling with a strange admiration, “you really wanted out bad.”
   Then the first flare went up, with a festive little pop. and the magnesium glare began its slow white parachute ride to the desert floor. Almost immediately, there were two more, and the long rattle of automatic fire from the west end of the mall. He was peripherally aware of Webber stumbling through the brush, in the direction of the bunker, but his eyes were fixed on the wheeling ultralight, on its gay orange and blue fabric wings, and the goggled figure hunched there in the open metal framework above the fragile tripod landing gear Mitchell.
   The lot was bright as a football field, under the drifting flares. The ultralight banked and turned with a lazy grace that made Turner want to scream. A line of tracers hosed out in a white arc from beyond the site perimeter. Missed.
   Get it down. Get it down. He was running, jumping clumps of brush that caught at his ankles, at the hem of his parka.
   The flares. The light. Mitchell couldn’t use the goggles now, couldn’t see the infrared glow of the hand warmers. He was bringing it in wide of the strip. The nose wheel caught in something and the ultralight cartwheeled, crumpling, torn butterfly, and then lay down in its own white cloud of dust.
   The flash of the explosion seemed to reach him an instant before the sound, throwing his shadow before him across the pale brush. The concussion picked him up and threw him down, and as he fell, he saw the broken surgery module in a ball of yellow flame and knew that Webber had used her antitank rocket Then he was up again, moving, running, the gun in his hand.
   He reached the wreckage of Mitchell’s ultralight as the first flare died. Another one arced out of nowhere and blossomed overhead. The sound of firing was continuous now. He scram-bled over a twisted sheet of rusted tin and found the sprawled figure of the pilot, head and face concealed hy a makeshift helmet and a clumsy-looking goggle rig. The goggles were fastened to the helmet with dull silver strips of gaffer tape The twisted limbs were padded in layers of dark clothing.
   Turner watched his hands claw at the tape, tear at the infrared goggles; his hands were distant creatures, pale undersea things that lived a life of their own far down at the bottom of some unthinkable Pacific trench, and he watched as they tore frantically at tape, goggles, helmet. Until it all came away, and the long brown hair, limp with sweat, fell across the girl’s white face, smearing the thin trickle of dark blood that ran from one nostril, and her eyes opened, revealing empty whites, and he was tugging her up, somehow, into a fireman’s carry, and reeling in what he hoped was the direction of the jet.
   He felt the second explosion through the soles of his deck shoes, and saw the idiot grin on the lump of plastique that sat on Ramirez’s cyberspace deck. There was no flash, only sound and the sting of concussion through the concrete of the lot.
   And then he was in the cockpit, breathing the new-car smell of long-chain monomers, the familiar scent of newly minted technology, and the girl was behind him, an awkward doll sprawled in the embrace of the g-web that Conroy had paid a San Diego arms dealer to install behind the pilot’s web. The plane was quivering, a live thing, and as he squirmed deeper into his own web, he fumbled for the interface cable, found it, ripped the microsoft from his socket, and slid the cable-jack home.
   Knowledge lit him like an arcade game, and he surged forward with the plane-ness of the jet, feeling the flexible airframe reshape itself for jump-off as the canopy whined smoothly down on its servos. The g-web ballooned around him, locking his limbs rigid, the gun still in his hand. “Go, motherfucker.” But the jet already knew, and g-force crushed him down into the dark.

   “You lost consciousness,” the plane said Its chip-voice sounded vaguely like Conroy.
   “How long?”
   “Thirty-eight seconds.”
   “Where are we?”
   “Over Nagos.” The head-up display lit, a dozen constantly altered figures beneath a simplified map of the Arizona-Sonora line.
   The sky went white.
   “What was that?”
   Silence.
   “What was that?”
   “Sensors indicate an explosion,” the plane said. “The magnitude suggests a tactical nuclear warhead, but there was no electromagnetic pulse. The locus of destruction was our point of departure.”
   The white glow faded and was gone.
   “Cancel course,” he said.
   “Canceled. New headings, please.”
   “That’s a good question,” Turner said. He couldn’t turn his head to look at the girl behind him. He wondered if she were dead yet

15 BOX

   MARLY DREAMED OF ALAN, dusk in a wildflower field, and he cradled her head, then caressed and broke her neck. Lay there unmoving but she knew what he was doing. He kissed her all over. He took her money and the keys to her room. The stars were huge now, fixed above the bright fields, and she could still feel his hands on her neck. .
   She woke in the coffee-scented morning and saw the squares of sunlight spread across the books on Andrea’s table, heard Andrea’s comfortingly familiar morning cough as she lit a first cigarette from the stove’s front burner. She shook off the dark colors of the dream and sat up on Andrea’s couch, hugging the dark red quilt around her knees. After Gnass, after the police and the reporters, she’d never dreamed of him. Or if she did, she’d guessed, she somehow censored the dreams, erased them before she woke. She shivered, although it was already a warm morning, and went into the bathroom. She wanted no more dreams of Alain.
   “Paco told me that Alain was armed when we met,” she said when Andrea handed her the blue enamel mug of coffee.
   “Alain armed?” Andrea divided the omelet and slid half onto Marly’s plate. “What a bizarre idea. It would be like... like arming a penguin.” They both laughed. “Alain is not the type,” Andrea said “He’d shoot his foot off in the middle of some passionate declaration about the state of art and the amount of the dinner bill. He’s a big shit, Alain, but that’s hardly news. If I were you, I’d expend a bit more worry on this Paco. What reason do you have for accepting that he works for Virek?” She took a bite of omelet and reached for the salt.
   “I saw him. He was there in Virek’s construct.”
   “You saw something – an image only, the image of a child – which only resembled this man.”
   Marly watched Andrea eat her half of the omelet, letting her own grow cold on the plate How could she explain, about the sense she’d had, walking from the Louvre? The conviction that something surrounded her now, monitoring her with relaxed precision; that she had become the focus of at least a part of Virek’s empire. “He’s a very wealthy man,” she began.
   “Virek?” Andrea put her knife and fork down on the plate and took up her coffee. “I should say he is. If you believe the journalists, he’s the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there’s the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No. Aren’t you going to eat that?”
   Marly began to mechanically cut and fork sections of the cooling omelet, while Andrea continued: “You should look at the manuscript we’re working on this month.”
   Marly chewed, raised her eyebrows questioningly.
   “It’s a history of the high-orbit industrial clans. A man at the University of Nice did it. Your Virek’s even in it, come to think; he’s cited as a counterexample, or rather as a type of parallel evolution. This fellow at Nice is interested in the paradox of individual wealth in a corporate age. in why it should still exist at all. Great wealth, I mean. He sees the high-orbit clans, people like the Tessier-Ashpools, as a very late variant on traditional patterns of aristocracy, late because the corporate mode doesn’t really allow for an aristocracy.” She put her cup down on her plate and carried the plate to the sink “Actually, now that I’ve started to describe it, it isn’t that interesting. There’s a great deal of very gray prose about the nature of Mass Man. With caps, Mass Man. He’s big on caps Not much of a stylist.” She spun the taps and water hissed out through the filtration unit.
   “But what does he say about Virek?”
   “He says, if I remember all this correctly, and I’m not at all certain that I do, that Virek is an even greater fluke than the industrial clans in orbit. The clans are trans-generational, and there’s usually a fair bit of medicine involved: cryogenics, genetic manipulation, various ways to combat aging. The death of a given clan member, even a founding member, usually wouldn’t bring the clan, as a business entity. to a crisis point. There’s always someone to step in, someone waiting. The difference between a clan and a corporation, however, is that you don’t need to literally marry into a corporation
   “But they sign indentures.”
   Andrea shrugged. “That’s like a lease. It isn’t the same thing. It’s job security, really. But when your Herr Virek dies, finally, when they run out of room to enlarge his vat, whatever, his business interests will lack a logical focus. At that point, our man in Nice has it, you’ll see Virek and Company either fragment or mutate, the latter giving us the Something Company and a true multinational, yet another home for capital-M Mass Man.” She wiped her plate, rinsed it, dried it. and placed it in the pine rack beside the sink “He says that’s too bad, in a way, because’ there are so few people left who can even see the edge.”
   “The edge?”
   “The edge of the crowd. We’re lost in the middle, you and I Or I still am, at any rate.” She crossed the kitchen and put her hands on Marly’s shoulders “You want to take care in this. A part of you is already much happier, but now I see that I could have brought that about myself, simply by arranging a little lunch for you with your pig of a former lover The rest of it, I’m not sure I think our academic’s theory is invalidated by the obvious fact that Virek and his kind are already far from human. I want you to be careful...” Then she kissed Marly’s cheek and went off to her work as an assistant editor in the fashionably archaic business of printing books.

   She spent the morning at Andrea’s, with the Braun, viewing the holograms of the seven works. Each piece was extraordinary in its own way, but she repeatedly returned to the box Virek had shown her first. If I had the original here, she thought, and removed the glass, and one by one removed the objects inside, what would be left? Useless things, a frame of space, perhaps a smell like dust.
   She sprawled on the couch, the Braun resting on her stomach, and stared into the box. It ached It seemed to her that the construction evoked something perfectly, but it was an emotion that lacked a name. She ran her hands through the bright illusion, tracing the length of the fluted, avian bone.
   She was certain that Virek had already assigned an ornithologist the task of identifying the bird from whose wing that bone had come And it would be possible to date each object with the greatest precision, she supposed. Each tab of holofiche also housed an extensive report on the known origin of each piece, but something in her had deliberately avoided these. It was sometimes best, when you came to the mystery that was art, to come as a child. The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.
   She put the Braun down on the low table beside the couch and crossed to Andrea’s phone, intending to check the time. She was meeting Paco at one, to discuss the mechanics of Alain’s payment. Alain had told her he would phone her at Andrea’s at three. When she punched for the time service, an automatic recap of satellite news strobed across the screen: a JAL shuttle had disintegrated during reentry over the Indian Ocean, investigators from the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis had been called in to examine the site of a brutal and apparently pointless bombing in a drab New Jersey residential suburb, militiamen were supervising the evacuation of the southern quadrant of New Bonn following the discovery, by construction workers, of two undetonated wartime rockets believed to be armed with biological weapons, and official sources in Arizona were denying Mexico’s accusation of the detonation of a small-scale atomic or nuclear device near the Sonora border... As she watched, the recap cycled and the simulation of the shuttle began its fire-death again. She shook her head, tapping the button. It was noon.

   Summer had come, the sky hot and blue above Paris, and she smiled at the smell of good bread and black tobacco. Her sense of being observed had receded now, as she walked from the metro to the address Paco had given her. Faubourg St. Honoré. The address seemed vaguely familiar. A gallery, she thought.
   Yes. The Roberts. The owner an American who operated three galleries in New York as well. Expensive, but no longer quite chic. Paco was waiting beside an enormous panel on which were layered, beneath a thick and uneven coat of varnish, hundreds of small square photographs, the kind produced by certain very old-fashioned machines in train stations and bus terminals. All of them seemed to be of young girls. Automatically, she noted the name of the artist and the work’s title: Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead.
   “I suppose you understand this sort of thing,” the Spaniard said glumly. He wore an expensive-looking blue suit cut in Parisian business style, a white broadcloth shirt, and a very English-looking tie, probably from Charvet He didn’t look at all like a waiter now. There was an Italian bag of black ribbed rubber slung over his shoulder “What do you mean?” she asked.
   “Names of the dead,” and he nodded in the direction of the panel. “You were a dealer in these things.” “What don’t you understand?”
   “I sometimes feel as though this, this culture, is entirely a trick. A ruse. All my life I have served Señor, in one guise or another, you understand? And my work has not been without its satisfactions, moments of triumph But never, when he involved me with this business of ah, have I felt any satisfaction. He is wealth itself. The world is filled with objects of great beauty. And yet Señor pursues... He shrugged.
   “You know what you like, then “ She smiled at him.
   “Why did you choose this gallery for our meeting?” “Señor’s agent purchased one of the boxes here. Haven’t you read the histories we provided you with in Brussels?” “No,” she said. “It might interfere with my intuition.
   Herr Virek is paying for my intuition.”
   He raised his eyebrows. “I will introduce you to Picard, the manager. Perhaps he can do something for this intuition of yours.”
   He led her across the room and through a doorway. A graying, heavyset Frenchman in a rumpled corduroy suit was speaking into the handset of a phone. On the phone’s screen she saw columns of letters and figures. The day’s quotations on the New York market.
   “Ah,” the man said, “Estevez. Excuse me. Only a moment. He smiled apologetically and returned to his conversation. Marly studied the quotations Pollock was down again. This, she supposed, was the aspect of art that she had the most difficulty understanding. Picard, if that was the man’s name, was speaking with a broker in New York, arranging the purchase of a certain number of “points” of the work of a particular artist. A “point” might be defined in any number of ways, depending on the medium involved, but it was almost certain that Picard would never see the works he was purchasing. If the artist enjoyed sufficient status, the originals were very likely crated away in some vault, where no one saw them at all. Days or years later, Picard might pick up that same phone and order the broker to sell.
   Marly’s gallery had sold originals. There was relatively little money in it, but it had a certain visceral appeal. And, of course, there had been the chance that one would get lucky. She had convinced herself that she’d gotten very lucky indeed when Alain had arranged for the forged Cornell to surface as a wonderful, accidental find. Cornell had his place on the broker’s board, and his “points” were very expensive.
   “Picard,” Paco said, as though he were addressing a servant, “this is Many Krushkhova. Señor has brought her into the matter of the anonymous boxes. She may wish to ask you questions.”
   “Charmed,” Picard said, and smiled warmly, but she thought she detected a flicker in his brown eyes. Very likely, he was trying to connect the name to some scandal, relatively recent.
   “I understand that your gallery handled the transaction, then?”
   “Yes,” Picard said “We had displayed the work in our New York rooms, and it had attracted a number of bids. We decided to give it its day in Paris, however,” – he beamed – “and your employer made our decision most worthwhile. How is Herr Virek, Estevez? We have not seen him in several weeks.
   Marly glanced quickly at Paco, but his dark face was smooth, utterly controlled “Señor is very well, I would think,” he said. “Excellent,” said Picard, somewhat too enthusiastically. He turned to Marly. “A marvelous man. A legend. A great patron. A great scholar.”
   Marly thought she heard Paco sigh.
   “Could you tell me, please, where your New York branch obtained the work in question?”
   Picard’s face fell. He looked at Paco, then back at Marly.
   “You don’t know? They haven’t told you?”
   “Could you tell me, please?”
   “No,” Picard said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t. You see, we don’t know.”
   Marly stared at him “I beg your pardon, but I don’t quite see how that is possible.”
   “She hasn’t read the report, Picard. You tell her. It will be good for her intuition, to hear it from your own lips.”
   Picard gave Paco an odd look, then regained his composure. “Certainly,” he said. “A pleasure...”
   “Do you think it’s true?” she asked Paco as they stepped out into Faubourg St. Honoré and summer sunlight. The crowds were thick with Japanese tourists.
   “I went to the Sprawl myself,” Paco said, “and inter-viewed everyone involved. Roberts left no record of the purchase, although ordinarily he was no more secretive than the next art dealer.”
   “And his death was accidental?”
   He put on a pair of mirrored Porsche glasses. “As accidental as that sort of death ever is,” he said. “We have no way of knowing when or how he obtained the piece We located it, here, eight months ago, and all’ our attempts to work backward end with Roberts, and Roberts has been dead for a year Picard neglected to tell you that they very nearly lost the thing. Roberts kept it in his country house, along with a number of other things that his survivors regarded as mere curiosities. The whole lot came close to being sold at public auction. Sometimes I wish it had been.”
   “These other things,” she asked, falling into step beside him, “what are they?”
   He smiled. “You think we haven’t tracked them, each one? We have They were” – here he frowned, exaggerating the effort of memory -”a number of rather unremarkable examples of contemporary folk art.”
   “Was Roberts known to be interested in that sort of thing?”
   “No,” he said, “but approximately a year before his death, we know that he made application for membership in the Institut de l’Art Brut, here in Paris, and arranged to become a patron of the Aeschmann Collection in Hamburg”
   Marly nodded The Aeschmann Collection was restricted to the works of psychotics.
   “We are reasonably certain,” Paco continued, taking her elbow and guiding her around a corner, into a side street, “that he made no attempt to use the resources of either, unless he employed an intermediary, and we regard that as unlikely. Señor, of course, has employed several dozen scholars to sweep the records of both institutions. To no avail...”
   “Tell me,” she said, “why Picard assumed that he had recently seen Herr Virek. How is that possible?”
   “Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation.”
   Now he led her into a chrome-trimmed barn of a place, glittering with mirrors, bottles, and arcade games. The mirrors lied about the depth of the room; at its rear, she could see the reflected pavement, the legs of pedestrians, the flash of sunlight on a hubcap. Paco nodded to a lethargic-looking man behind the bar and took her hand, leading her through the tightly packed shoal of round plastic tables.
   “You can take your call from Alain here,” he said. “We have arranged to reroute it from your friend’s apartment.” He drew a chair out for her, an automatic bit of professional courtesy that made her wonder if he might actually once have been a waiter, and placed his bag on the tabletop.
   “But he’ll see that I’m not there,” she said. “If I blank the video, he’ll become suspicious.”
   “But he won’t see that We’ve generated a digital image of your face and the required background We’ll key that to the image on this phone “He took an elegant modular unit from the bag and placed it in front of her. A paper thin polycarbon screen unfurled silently from the top of the unit and immediately grew rigid. She had once watched a butterfly emerge into the world, and seen the transformation of its drying wings. “How is that done?” she asked, tentatively touching the screen. It was like thin steel.
   “One of the new polycarbon variants,” he said, “one of the Maas products...”
   The phone purred discreetly He positioned it more carefully in front of her, stepped to the far side of the table, and said, “Your call. Remember, you are at home!” He reached forward and brushed a titanium-coated stud.
   Alain’s face and shoulders filled the little screen. The image had the smudged, badly lit look of a public booth. “Good afternoon, my dear,” he said.
   “Hello, Alain.”
   “How are you, Marly? I trust you’ve gotten the money we discussed?” She could see that he was wearing a jacket of some kind, dark, but she could make out no details. “Your roommate could do with a lesson in housecleaning,” he said, and seemed to be peering back over her shoulder.
   “You’ve never cleaned a room in your life,” she said
   He shrugged, smiling. “We each have our talents,” he said. “Do you have my money, Marly?”
   She glanced up at Paco, who nodded. “Yes,” she said, “of course.”
   “That’s wonderful, Marly. Marvelous We have only one small difficulty.” He was still smiling.
   “And what is that?”
   “My informants have doubled their price. Consequently, I must now double mine.”
   Paco nodded. He was smiling, too.
   “Very well. I will have to ask, of course...” He sickened her now. She wanted to be off the phone.
   “And they, of course, will agree.”
   “Where shall we meet, then?”
   “I will phone again, at five,” he said. His image shrank to a single blip of blue-green, and then that was gone as well.
   “You look tired,” Paco said as he collapsed the screen and replaced the phone in his bag “You look older when you’ve talked with him.”
   “Do I?” For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the Roberts, all those faces Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she’d been through the long season of youth.

16 LEGBA

   “HEY, SHITHEAD.” RHEA poked him none too lightly in the ribs “Get your ass up.”
   He came up fighting with the crocheted comforter, with the half-formed shapes of unknown enemies. With his mother’s murderers. He was in a room he didn’t know, a room that might have been anywhere. Gold plastic gilt frames on a lot of mirrors. Fuzzy scarlet wallpaper. He’d seen Gothicks decorate rooms that way, when they could afford it, but he’d also seen their parents do whole condos in the same style Rhea flung a bundle of clothes down on the temperfoam and shoved her hands in the pockets of a black leather jacket.
   The pink and black squares of the comforter were bunched around his waist. He looked down and saw the segmented length of the centipede submerged in a finger-wide track of fresh pink scar tissue. Beauvoir had said that the thing accelerated healing. He touched the bright new tissue with a hesitant fingertip, found it tender but bearable. He looked up at Rhea. “Get your ass up on this,” he said, giving her the finger.
   They glared at each other, for a few seconds, over Bobby’s upraised middle finger. Then she laughed “Okay,” she said, “you got a point. I’ll get off your case But pick those clothes up and get ‘em on. Should be something there that fits Lucas is due by here soon to pick you up, and Lucas doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
   “Yeah? Well, he seems like a pretty relaxed guy to me.” He began to sort through the heap of clothing, discarding a black shirt with a paisley pattern printed on it in laundered-out gold, a red satin number with a fringe of white imitation leather down the sleeves, a black sort of leotard thing with panels of some translucent material... “Hey,” he said, “where did you get this stuff? I can’t wear shit like this.”
   “It’s my little brother’s,” Rhea said. “From last season, and you better get your white ass dressed before Lucas gets down here. Hey,” she said, “that’s mine,” snatching up the leotard as though he might be about to steal it.
   He pulled the black and gold shirt on and fumbled with domed snaps made of black imitation pearl. He found a pair of black jeans, but they proved to be baggy and elaborately pleated, and didn’t seem to have any pockets “This all the pants you got?”
   “Jesus,” she said. “I saw the clothes Pye cut off you, man. You aren’t anybody’s idea of a fashion plate. Just get dressed, okay? I don’t want any trouble with Lucas. He may come on all mellow with you, but ‘that just means you got something he wants bad enough to take the trouble. Me, I sure don’t, so Lucas got no compunctions, as far as I’m concerned.”
   He stood up unsteadily beside the bedslab and tried to zip up the black jeans. “No zip,” he said, looking at her.
   “Buttons In there somewhere. It’s part of the style you know?”
   Bobby found the buttons. It was an elaborate arrangement and he wondered what would happen if he had to piss in a hurry He saw the black nylon thongs beside the slab and shoved his feet into them. “What about Jackie?” he asked, padding to where he could see himself in the gold-framed mirrors. ‘Lucas got any compunctions about her?” He watched her in the mirror, saw something cross her face.
   “What’s that mean?”
   “Beauvoir, he told me she was a horse”
   “You hush,” she said, her voice gone low and urgent. “Beauvoir mention anything like that to you, that’s his business. Otherwise, it’s nothing you talk about, understand? There’s things bad enough, you’d wish you were back out there getting your butt carved up.”
   He watched her eyes, reflected in the mirror, dark eyes shadowed by the deep brim of the soft felt hat. Now they seemed to show a little more white than they had before.
   “Okay,” he said, after a pause, and then added, “Thanks.” He fiddled with the collar of the shirt, turning it up in the back, down again, trying it different ways.
   “You know,” Rhea said, tilting her head to one side, “you get a few clothes on you, you don’t look too bad. ‘Cept you got eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank...

   “Lucas.” Bobby said, when they were in the elevator, “do you know who it was offed my old lady?” It wasn’t a question he’d planned on asking, but somehow it had come rushing up like a bubble of swamp gas.
   Lucas regarded him benignly, his long face smooth and black. His black suit, beautifully cut, looked as though it had been freshly pressed. He carried a stout stick of oiled and polished wood, the grain all swirly black and red, topped with a large knob of polished brass. Finger-long splines of brass ran down from the knob, inlaid smoothly in the cane’s shaft. “No, we do not.” His wide lips formed a straight and very serious line. “That’s something we’d very much like to know...”
   Bobby shifted uncomfortably. The elevator made him self-conscious. It was the size of a small bus, and although it wasn’t crowded, he was the only white Black people, he noted, as his eyes shifted restlessly down the thing’s length, didn’t look half dead under fluorescent light, the way white people did.
   Three times, in their descent, the elevator came to a halt at some floor and remained there, once for nearly fifteen minutes. The first time this happened, Bobby had looked questioningly at Lucas. “Something in the shaft,” Lucas had said. “What?” “Another elevator.” The elevators were located at the core of the arcology, their shafts bundled together with water mains, sewage lines, huge power cables, and insulated pipes that Bobby assumed were part of the geothermal system that Beauvoir had described. You could see it all whenever the doors opened; everything was exposed, raw, as though the people who built the place had wanted to be able to see exactly how everything worked and what was going where. And everything, every visible surface, was covered with an interlocking net of graffiti, so dense and heavily overlaid that it was almost impossible to pick out any kind of message or symbol.
   “You never were up here before, were you, Bobby?” Lucas asked as the doors jolted shut once again and they were on their way down. Bobby shook his head. “That’s too bad,” Lucas said. “Understandable, certainly, but kind of a shame Two-a-Day tells me you haven’t been too keen on sitting around Barrytown. That true?”
   “Sure is,” Bobby agreed.
   “I guess that’s understandable, too. You seem to me to be a young man of some imagination and initiative Would you agree?” Lucas spun the cane’s bright brass head against his pink palm and looked at Bobby steadily.
   “I guess so I can’t stand the place. Lately I’ve kind of been noticing how, well, nothing ever happens, you know? I mean, things happen, but it’s always the same stuff, over and fucking over, like it’s all a rerun, every summer like the last one...” His voice trailed off, uncertain what Lucas would think of him.
   “Yes,” Lucas said, “I know that feeling. It may be a little more true of Barrytown than of some other places, but you can feel the same thing as easily in New York or Tokyo.”
   Can’t be true, Bobby thought, but nodded anyway, Rhea’s warning in the back of his head. Lucas was no more threatening than Beauvoir, but his bulk alone was a caution. And Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn’t quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous. This ran directly opposite to the rule around Big Playground, where kids who had no real clout whatever went to great pains to advertise their chrome-studded rabidity. Which probably did them some good, at least in terms of the local action. But Lucas was very clearly nothing to do with local action.
   “I see you doubt it,” Lucas said. “Well, you’ll probably find out soon enough, but not for a while. The way your life’s going now, things should remain new and exciting for quite a while.”
   The elevator door shuddered open, and Lucas was moving, shooing Bobby in front of him like a child They stepped out into a tiled foyer that seemed to stretch forever, past kiosks and cloth-draped stalls and people squatting beside blankets with things spread out on them. “But not to linger,” Lucas said, giving Bobby a very gentle shove with one large hand when Bobby paused in front of stacks of jumbled software. “You are on your way to the Sprawl, my man, and you are going in a manner that befits a count.”
   “How’s that?”
   “In a limo.”

   Lucas’s car was an amazing stretch of gold-flecked black bodywork and mirror-finished brass, studded with a collection of baroque gadgets whose purpose Bobby only had time to guess at. One of the things was a dish antenna, he decided, but it looked more like one of those Aztec calendar wheels, and then he was inside, Lucas letting the wide door clunk gently shut behind them. The windows were tinted so dark, it looked like nighttime outside, a bustling nighttime where the Projects’ crowds went about their noonday business The interior of the vehicle was a single large compartment padded with bright rugs and pale leather cushions, although there seemed to be no particular place to sit. No steering wheel either, the dash was a padded expanse of leather unbroken by controls of any kind. He looked at Lucas, who was loosening his black tie. “How do you drive it?”
   “Sit down somewhere. You drive it like this: Ahmed, get our asses to New York, lower east.”
   The car slid smoothly away from the curb as Bobby dropped to his knees on a soft pile of rugs.
   “Lunch will be served in thirty minutes, sir, unless you’d care for something sooner,” a voice said. It was soft, melodious, and seemed to come from nowhere in particular.
   Lucas laughed. “They really knew how to build ‘em in Damascus,” he said.
   “Where?”
   “Damascus,” Lucas said as he unbuttoned his suit coat and settled back into a wedge of pale cushions. “This is a Rolls. Old one. Those Arabs built a good car, while they had the money.”
   “Lucas,” Bobby said, his mouth half full of cold fried chicken, “how come it’s taking us an hour and a half to get to New York? We aren’t exactly crawling...”
   “Because,” Lucas said, pausing for another sip of cold white wine, “that’s how long it’s taking us. Ahmed has all the factory options, including a first-rate counter-surveillance system. On the road, rolling, Ahmed provides a remarkable degree of privacy, more than I’m ordinarily willing to pay for in New York. Ahmed, you get the feeling anybody’s trying to get to us, listen in or anything?”
   “No, sir,” the voice said. “Eight minutes ago our identification panel was infra-scanned by a Tactical helicopter. The helicopter’s number was MH-dash-3-dash-848, piloted by Corporal Roberto -”
   “Okay, okay,” Lucas said. “Fine. Never mind You see? Ahmed got more on those Tacs than they got on us.” He wiped his hands on a thick white linen napkin and took a gold toothpick from his jacket pocket.
   “Lucas,” Bobby said, while Lucas probed delicately at the gaps between his big square teeth, “what would happen if, say, I asked you to take me to Times Square and let me out?”
   “Ah,” Lucas said, lowering the toothpick, “the city’s most resonant acre What’s the matter, Bobby, a drug problem?”
   “Well, no, but I was wondering.”
   “Wondering what? You want to go to Times Square?”
   “No, that was just the first place I thought of. What I mean is, I guess, would you let me go?”
   “No,” Lucas said, “not to put too fine a point on it. But you don’t have to think of yourself as a prisoner. More like a guest. A valued guest.”
   Bobby smiled wanly. “Oh. Okay. Like what they call protective custody, I guess.”
   “Right,” Lucas said, bringing the gold toothpick into play again. “And while we are here, securely screened by the good Ahmed, it’s time we have a talk. Brother Beauvoir has already told you a little about us, I think What do you think, Bobby. about what he’s told you?”
   “Well,” Bobby said, “it’s real interesting, but I’m not sure I understand it.”
   “What don’t you understand?”
   “Well, I don’t know about this voodoo stuff...”
   Lucas raised his eyebrows.
   “I mean, it’s your business, what you wanna buy, I mean, believe, right? But one minute Beauvoir’s talking biz, street tech, like I never heard before, and the next he’s talking mambos and ghosts and snakes and, and...”
   “And what?”
   “Horses,” Bobby said, his throat tight.
   “Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?”
   “A component? Like a capacitor?”
   “No. Never mind metaphor, then. When Beauvoir or I talk to you about the ba and their horses, as we call those few the ba choose to ride, you should pretend that we are talking two languages at once. One of them, you already understand. That’s the language of street tech, as you call it. We may be using different words, but we’re talking tech. Maybe we call something Ougou Feray that you might call an icebreaker, you understand? But at the same time, with the same words, we are talking about other things, and that you don’t understand. You don’t need to.” He put his toothpick away.
   Bobby took a deep breath. “Beauvoir said that Jackie’s a horse for a snake, a snake called Danbala. You run that by me in street tech?”
   “Certainly. Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a cyberspace deck, a very pretty one with nice ankles.” Lucas grinned and Bobby blushed. “Think of Danbala, who some people call the snake, as a program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots into the Jackie deck, Jackie cuts ice. That’s all.”
   “Okay,” Bobby said, getting the hang of it, “then what’s the matrix? If she’s a deck, and Danbala’s a program, what’s cyberspace?”
   “The world,” Lucas said.

   “Best if we walk from here,” Lucas said.
   The Rolls came to a silent, silken halt and Lucas stood, buttoning his suit coat. “Ahmed attracts too much attention.” He picked up his cane, and the door made a soft chunking sound as it unlocked itself.
   Bobby climbed down behind him, into the unmistakable signature smell of the Sprawl, a rich amalgam of stale subway exhalations, ancient soot, and the carcinogenic tang of fresh plastics, all of it shot through with the carbon edge of illicit fossil fuels. High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl’s patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. There was a stiff wind blowing, as Bobby followed Lucas down the street, a warm, gritty breeze that probably had something to do with pressure shifts in the Sprawl-long subway system.
   “Remember what I told you,” Lucas said, his eyes nar-rowed against the grit. “The man is far more than he seems. Even if he were nothing more than what he seems, you would owe him a degree of respect. If you want to be a cowboy, you’re about to meet a landmark in the trade.”
   “Yeah, right.” He skipped to avoid a graying length of printout that tried to wrap itself around his ankle. “So he’s the one you an’ Beauvoir bought the -”
   “Ha! No! Remember what I told you. You speak in the open street, you may as well put your words up on a bulletin-board...”
   Bobby grimaced, then nodded. Shit. He kept blowing it. Here he was with a major operator, up to his neck in some amazing kind of biz, and he kept acting like a wilson. Operator. That was the word for Lucas, and for Beauvoir, too, and that voodoo talk was Just some game they ran on people, he’d decided. In the Rolls, Lucas had launched into some strange extended number about Legba, who he said was the ba of communication, “the master of roads and pathways,” all about how the man he was taking Bobby to meet was a favorite of Legba’s. When Bobby asked if the man was another oungan, Lucas said no; he said the man had walked with Legba all his life, so close that he’d never known the ba was there at all, like it was just a part of him, his shadow. And this was the man, Lucas had said, who’d sold them the software that Two-a-Day had rented to Bobby...
   Lucas rounded a corner and stopped, Bobby close behind. They stood in front of a blackened brownstone whose windows had been sealed decades before with sheets of corrugated steel. Part of the ground floor had once been a shop of some kind, its cracked display windows opaque with grime. The door, between the blind windows, had been reinforced with the same steel that sealed the windows of the upper floors, and Bobby thought he could make out some sort of sign behind the window to his left, discarded neon script tilted diagonally in the gloom. Lucas just stood there, facing the doorway, his face expressionless, the tip of his cane planted neatly on the sidewalk and his large hands one atop the other on the brass knob. “First thing that you learn,” he said, with the tone of a man reciting a proverb, “is that you always gotta wait...”
   Bobby thought he heard something scrape, behind the door, and then there was a rattle like chains. “Amazing,” Lucas said, “almost as though we were expected.”
   The door swung ten centimeters on well-oiled hinges and seemed to catch on something. An eye regarded them, un-blinking, suspended there in that crack of dust and dark, and at first it seemed to Bobby that it must be the eye of some large animal, the iris a strange shade of brownish yellow, and the whites, mottled and shot through with red, the lower lid gaping redder still below. “Hoodoo man,” said the invisible face the eye belonged to, then, “hoodoo man and some little lump of shit. Jesus...” There was an awful, gurgling sound, as of antique phlegm being drawn up from hidden recesses, and then the man spat. “Well, move it, Lucas.” There was another grating sound and the door swung inward on the dark. “I’m a busy man...” This last from a meter away, receding, as though the eye’s owner were scurrying from the light admitted by the open door.
   Lucas stepped through, Bobby on his heels, Bobby feeling the door swing smoothly shut behind him. The sudden dark-ness brought the hairs on his forearms up. It felt alive, that dark, cluttered and dense and somehow sentient.
   Then a match flared and some sort of pressure lamp hissed and spat as the gas in its mantle ignited. Bobby could only gape at the face beyond the lantern, where the bloodshot yellow eye waited with its mate in what Bobby would very much have liked to believe was a mask of some kind.
   “I don’t suppose you were expecting us, were you, Finn?” Lucas asked.
   “You wanna know,” the face said, revealing large flat yellow teeth, “I was on my way out to find something to eat.” He looked to Bobby as though he could survive on a diet of moldering carpet, or burrow patiently through the brown wood pulp of the damp-swollen books stacked shoulder-high on either side of the tunnel where they stood. “Who’s the little shit, Lucas?”
   “You know, Finn, Beauvoir and I are experiencing difficulties with something we acquired from you in good faith.” Lucas extended his cane and prodded delicately at a dangerous-looking overhang of crumbling paperbacks.
   “Are you, now?” The Finn pursed his gray lips in mock concern. “Don’t fuck with those first editions, Lucas. You bring ‘em down, you pay for ‘em.”
   Lucas withdrew the cane. Its polished ferrule flashed in the lantern glare.
   “So,” the Finn said. “You got problems Funny thing, Lucas, funny fucking thing.” His cheeks were grayish, seamed with deep diagonal creases. “I got some problems, too, three of ‘em. I didn’t have ‘em, this morning. I guess that’s just the way life is, sometimes “ He put the hissing lantern down on a gutted steel filing cabinet and fished a bent, unfiltered cigarette from a side pocket of something that might once have been a tweed jacket. “My three problems, they’re upstairs. Maybe you wanna have a look at them...” He struck a wooden match on the base of the lantern and lit his cigarette. The pungent reek of black Cuban tobacco gathered in the air between them.

   “You know,” the Finn said, stepping over the first of the bodies, “I been at this location ‘a long time. Everybody knows me. They know I’m here You buy from the Finn, you know who you’re buying from. And I stand behind my product, every time...”
   Bobby was staring down at the upturned face of the dead man, at the eyes gone dull. There was something wrong with the shape of the torso, wrong with the way it lay there in the black clothes. Japanese face, no expression, dead eyes.
   “And all that time,” the Finn continued, “you know how many people ever dumb enough to try to get in here to take me off? None’ Not one, not till this morning, and I get fucking three already. Well,” he shot Bobby a hostile glance, “that’s not counting the odd little lump of shit, I guess, but...” He shrugged.
   “He looks kind of lopsided,” Bobby said still staring at the first corpse.
   “That’s ‘cause he’s dog food, inside “ The Finn leered “All mashed up.”
   “The Finn collects exotic weapons,” Lucas said, nudging the wrist of a second body with the tip of his cane. “Have you scanned them for implants, Finn?”
   “Yeah. Pain in the butt. Hadda carry ‘em downstairs to the back room. Nothing. other than what you’d expect. They’re just a hit team.” He sucked his teeth noisily. “Why’s any-body wanna hit me?”
   “Maybe you sold them a very expensive product that wouldn’t do its job,” Lucas volunteered.
   “I hope you aren’t sayin’ you sent ‘em, Lucas,” the Finn said levelly, “unless you wanna see me do the dog-food trick.”
   “Did I say you’d sold us something that doesn’t work?”
   Experiencing difficulties,’ you said. And what else have you guys bought from me recently?”
   “Sorry, Finn, but they’re not ours. You know it, too.”
   “Yeah, I guess I do So what the fuck’s got you down here, Lucas? You know that stuff you bought wasn’t covered by the usual guarantees...”

   “You know,” said the Finn, after listening to the story of Bobby’s abortive cyberspace run, “that’s some weird shit out there.’ He slowly shook his narrow, strangely elongated head. “Didn’t used to be this way.” He looked at Lucas. “You people know, don’t you?”
   They were seated around a square white table in a white room on the ground floor, behind the junk-clogged storefront. The floor was scuffed hospital tile, molded in a nonslip pattern, and the walls broad slabs of dingy white plastic concealing dense layers of antibugging circuitry. Compared to the storefront, the white room seemed surgically clean. Several alloy tripods bristling with sensors and scanning gear stood around the table like abstract sculpture.
   “Know what?” Bobby asked. With each retelling of his story, he felt less like a wilson. Important. It made him feel Important.
   “Not you, pisshead,” the Finn said wearily. “Him. Big hoodoo man. He knows. Knows it’s not the same. Hasn’t been, not for a long time. I been in the trade forever. Way back. Before the war, before there was any matrix, or anyway before people knew there was one.” He was looking at Bobby now. ‘I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice. Right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way “ He lit his fifteenth cigarette of the evening, and smoke began to fill the white room.
   “Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there’s been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don’t they. Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all of ‘em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got allies, don’t they, Lucas?”
   Lucas took his gold toothpick out of his pocket and began to work on a rear molar, his face dark and serious.
   “Thrones and dominions,” the Finn said obscurely. “Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?
   Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded, sounds like...”
   “For us,” Lucas said, “the world has always worked that way.”
   “Yeah” the Finn said, “so you guys could slot right into it, tell people the things you were cutting deals with were your same old bush gods...”
   “Divine Horsemen...”
   “Sure. Maybe you believe it. But I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t like that. Ten years ago, you went in the Gentleman Loser and tried telling any of the top jocks you talked with ghosts in the matrix, they’d have figured you were crazy.”
   “A wilson,” Bobby put in. feeling left out and no longer as Important.
   The Finn looked at him, blankly. “A what?”
   “A wilson A fuck-up. It’s hotdogger talk, I guess...” Did it again. Shit.
   The Finn gave him a very strange look. “Jesus. That’s your word for it, huh? Christ I know the guy...”
   “Who?”
   “Bodine Wilson,” he said. ‘First guy I ever knew wound up as a figure of speech.”
   “Was he stupid?” Bobby asked, immediately regretting it
   “Stupid? Shit, no, he was smart as hell.” The Finn stubbed his cigarette out in a cracked ceramic Campari ashtray. lust a total fuck-up, was all He worked with the Dixie Flatline once The bloodshot yellow eyes grew distant.
   “Finn,” Lucas said, “where did you get that icebreaker you sold us?”
   The Finn regarded him bleakly. “Forty years in the business, Lucas. You know how many times I’ve been asked that question? You know how many times I’d be dead if I’d answered it?”
   Lucas nodded. “I take your point. But at the same time, I put one to you.” He held the toothpick out toward the Finn like a toy dagger. “The real reason you’re willing to sit here and bullshit is that you think those three stiffs upstairs have something to do with the icebreaker you sold us. And you sat up and took special notice when Bobby told you about his mother’s condo getting wiped, didn’t you?”
   The Finn showed teeth “Maybe.”
   “Somebody’s got you on their list, Finn. Those three dead ninjas upstairs cost somebody a lot of money. When they don’t come back, somebody’ll be even more determined, Finn.”
   The red-rimmed yellow eyes blinked. “They were all tooled up,” he said, “ready for a hit, but one of ‘em had some other things. Things for asking questions “ His nicotine-stained fingers, almost the color of cockroach wings, came up to slowly massage his short upper lip. “I got it off Wigan Ludgate,” he said, “the Wig.”
   “Never heard of him,” Lucas said.
   “Crazy little motherfucker,” the Finn said, “used to be a cowboy”
   How it was, the Finn began, and to Bobby it was all infinitely absorbing, even better than listening to Beauvoir and Lucas, Wigan Ludgate had had five years as a top jock, which is a decent run for a cyberspace cowboy. Five years tends to find a cowboy either rich or brain-dead, or else financing a stable of younger cracksmen and strictly into the managerial side. The Wig, in his first heat of youth and glory, had stormed off on an extended pass through the rather sparsely occupied sectors of the matrix representing those geographical areas which had once been known as the Third World.
   Silicon doesn’t wear out; microchips were effectively immortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became obsolete, which was worse than wearing out; this fact was a grim and accepted constant for the Wig, like death or taxes, and in fact he was usually more worried about his gear falling behind the state of the art than he was about death (he was twenty-two) or taxes (he didn’t file, although he paid a Singapore money laundry a yearly percentage that was roughly equivalent to the income tax he would have been required to pay if he’d declared his gross). The Wig reasoned that all that obsolete silicon had to be going somewhere. Where it was going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously. The Wig punched himself through a couple of African back-waters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.
   The Wig sat on the beach at Cannes for two years, ingesting only the most expensive designer drugs and periodically flicking on a tiny Hosaka television to study the bloated bodies of dead Africans with a strange and curiously innocent intensity. At some point, no one could quite say where or when or why, it began to be noted that the Wig had gone over the edge. Specifically, the Finn said, the Wig had become convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace was God, or some new manifestation of same. The Wig’s ventures into theology tended to be marked by major paradigm shifts, true leaps of faith. The Finn had some idea of what the Wig was about in those days; shortly after his conversion to his new and singular faith, Wigan Ludgate had returned to the Sprawl and embarked on an epic if somewhat random voyage of cybernetic discovery. Being a former console jockey, he knew where to go for the very best in what the Finn called the hard and the soft. The Finn provided the Wig with all manner of both, as the Wig was still a rich man. The Wig explained to the Finn that his technique of mystical exploration involved projecting his consciousness into blank, unstructured sectors of the matrix and waiting. To the man’s credit, the Finn said, he never actually claimed to have met God, although he did maintain that he had on several occasions sensed His presence moving upon the face of the grid. In due course, the Wig ran out of money.
   His spiritual quest having alienated the few remaining business connections from his pre-African days, he sank without a trace.
   “But then he turned up one day,” the Finn said, “crazy as a shithouse rat. He was a pale little fucker anyway, but now he wore all this African shit, beads and bones and every-thing.” Bobby let go of the Finn’s narrative long enough to wonder how anyone who looked like the Finn could describe somebody as a pale little fucker, then glanced over at Lucas, whose face was dead grim. Then it occurred to Bobby that Lucas might take the Africa stuff personally, sort of. But the Finn was continuing his story.
   “He had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell. Decks, peripherals, software. It was all a couple of years old, but it was top gear, so I gave him a price on it. I noticed he’d had a socket implant, and he kept this one sliver of microsoft jacked behind his ear. What’s the soft? It’s blank, he says. He’s sitting right where you are now, kid, and he says to me, it’s blank and it’s the voice of God, and I live forever in His white hum, or some shit like that. So I think, Christ, the Wig’s gone but good now, and there he is counting up the money I’d given him for about the fifth time. Wig, I said, time’s money but tell me what you intend to do now? Because I was curious. Known the guy years, in a business way Finn, he says, I gotta get up the gravity well, God’s up there. I mean, he says, He’s everywhere but there’s too much static down here, it obscures His face. Right, I say... you got it. So I show him the door and that’s it. Never saw him again.”
   Bobby blinked, waited, squirmed a little on the hard seat of the folding chair.
   “Except, about a year later, a guy turns up, high-orbit rigger down the well on a leave, and he’s got some good software for sale. Not great, but interesting. He says it’s from the Wig. Well, maybe the Wig’s a freak, and long out of the game, but he can still spot the good shit. So I buy it. That was maybe ten years ago, right? And every year or so, some guy would turn up with something. ‘The Wig told me I should offer you this.’ And usually I’d buy it. It was never anything special, but it was okay. Never the same guy bring-ing it, either.”
   “Was that it, Finn, just software?” Lucas asked
   “Yeah, mainly, except for these weird sculpture things. I’d forgotten that. I figured the Wig made ‘em. First time a guy came in with one of those, I bought the ‘ware he had, then said what the fuck do you call that? Wig said you might be interested, the guy said. Tell him he’s crazy, I said. The guy laughed. Well, you keep it, he says I’m not carrying the Goddamn thing back up with me. I mean, it was about the size of a deck, this thing, just a bunch of garbage and shit, stuck together in a box... So I pushed it behind this Coke crate fulla scrap iron, and forgot it, except old Smith – he’s a colleague of mine in those days, dealt mostly art and collectibles – she sees it and wants it. So we do some dipshit deal. Any more of these, Finn, he says, get ‘em. There’s assholes uptown go for this kind of shit. So the next time a guy turned up from the Wig, I bought the sculpture thing, too, and traded it to Smith. But it was never much money for any of it . . The Finn shrugged. “Not until last month, anyway. Some kid came in with what you bought. It was from the Wig. Listen. he says, this is biosoft and its a breaker. Wig says it’s worth a lot. I put a scan on it and it looked right. I thought it looked interesting, you know? Your partner Beauvoir thought it looked pretty interesting, too. I bought it. Beauvoir bought it off me. End of story.” The Finn dragged out a cigarette, this one broken, bent double. “Shit,” he said He pulled a faded pack of cigarette papers from the same pocket and extracted one of the fragile pink leaves, rolling it tightly around the broken cigarette, a sort of splint. When he licked the glue, Bobby caught a glimpse of a very pointed gray-pink tongue.
   “And where, Finn, does Mr. Wig reside?” Lucas asked, his thumbs beneath his chin, his large fingers forming a steeple in front of his face.
   “Lucas, I haven’t got the slightest fucking clue. In orbit somewhere. And modestly, if the kind of money he was getting out of me meant anything to him. You know, I hear there’s places up there where you don’t need money, if you fit into the economy, so maybe a little goes a long way. Don’t ask me, though, I’m agoraphobic.” He smiled nastily at Bobby, who was trying to get the image of that tongue out of his mind. “You know,” he said, squinting at Lucas, “it was about that time that I started hearing about weird shit happening in the matrix.”
   “Like what?” Bobby asked.
   “Keep the fuck out of this,” the Finn said, still looking at Lucas. “That was before you guys turned up, the new hoodoo team. I knew this street samurai got a job working for a Special Forces type made the Wig look flat fucking normal. Her and this cowboy they’d scraped up out of Chiba, they were on to something like that. Maybe they found it. Istanbul was the last I saw of ‘em. Heard she lived in London, once, a few years ago. Who the fuck knows? Seven, eight years.” The Finn suddenly seemed tired, and old, very old. He looked to Bobby like a big, mummified rat animated by springs and hidden wires. He took a wristwatch with a cracked face and a single greasy leather strap from his pocket and consulted it. “Jesus. Well, that’s all you get from me. Lucas. I’ve got some friends from an organ bank coming by in twenty minutes to talk a little biz.”
   Bobby thought of the bodies upstairs. They’d been there all day.
   “Hey,” the Finn said, reading the expression on his face, “organ banks are great for getting rid of things. I’m paying them. Those motherless assholes upstairs, they don’t have too much left in the way of organs...” And the Finn laughed
   “You said he was close to... Legba? And Legba’s the one you and Beauvoir said gave me luck when I hit that black ice?”
   Beyond the honeycomb edge of the geodesics, the sky was lightening.
   “Yes,” Lucas said. He seemed lost in thought.
   “But he doesn’t seem to trust that stuff at all.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” Lucas said as the Rolls came into view. “He’s always been close to the spirit of the thing.”

17 THE SQUIRREL WOOD

   THE PLANE HAD GONE to ground near the sound of running water. Turner could hear it, turning in the g-web in his fever or sleep, water down stone, one of the oldest songs The plane was smart, smart as any dog, with hard-wired instincts of concealment. He felt it sway on its landing gear, some-where in the sick night, and creep forward, branches brushing and scraping against the dark canopy. The plane crept into deep green shadow and sank down on its knees, its airframe whining and creaking as it flattened itself, belly down, into loam and granite like a manta ray into sand. The mimetic polycarbon coating its wings and fuselage mottled and darkened, taking on the colors and patterns of moon-dappled stone and forest soil. Finally it was silent, and the only sound was the sound of water over a creekbed.
   He came awake like a machine, eyes opening, vision plugged in, empty, remembering the red flash of Lynch’s death out beyond the fixed sights of the Smith & Wesson. The arc of the canopy above him was laced with mimetic approximations of leaves and branches Pale dawn and the sound of running water He was still wearing Oakey’s blue work shirt It smelled of sour sweat now, and he’d ripped the sleeves out the day before. The gun lay between his legs, pointing at the jet’s black joystick. The g-web was a limp tangle around his hips and shoulders. He twisted around and saw the girl, oval face and a brown dried trickle of blood beneath a nostril She was still out, sweating, her lips slightly parted, like a doll’s.
   “Where are we?”
   “We are fifteen meters south-southeast of the landing coordinates you provided,” the plane said. “You were unconscious again. I opted for concealment.”
   He reached back and removed the interface plug from his socket, breaking his link with the plane. He gazed dully around the cockpit until he found the manual controls for the canopy. It sighed up on servos, the lacework of polycarbon leaves shifting as it moved. He got his leg over the side, looked down at his hand flat against the fuselage at the edge of the cockpit. Polycarbon reproduced the gray tones of a nearby boulder; as he watched, it began to paint a hand-sized patch the color of his palm He pulled his other leg over, the gun forgotten on the seat, and slid down into earth and long sweet grass. Then he slept again, his forehead against the grass and dreamed of running water.
   When he woke, he was crawling forward on his hands and knees, through low branches heavy with dew. Finally he reached a cleaning and pitched forward, rolling over, his arms spread in what felt like surrender. High above him, something small and gray launched itself from one branch, caught an-other, swung there for an instant, then scrambled away, out of his sight.
   Lie still, he heard a voice telling him, years away. Just lay out and relax and pretty soon they’ll forget you, forget you in the gray and the dawn and the dew. They’re out to feed, feed and play, and their brains can’t hold two messages, not for long. He lay there on his back, beside his brother, the nylon-stocked Winchester across his chest, breathing the smell of new brass and gun oil, the smell of their campfire still in his hair. And his brother was always right, about the squirrels. They came. They forgot the clear glyph of death spelled out below them in patched denim and blue steel; they came, racing along limbs, pausing to sniff the morning, and Turner’s .22 cracked, a limp gray body tumbling down. The others scattered, vanishing, and Turner passed the gun to his brother. Again, they waited, waited for the squirrels to forget them.
   “You’re like me,” Turner said to the squirrels, bobbing up out of his dream. One of them sat up suddenly on a fat limb and looked directly at him. “I always come back.” The squirrel hopped away. “I was coming back when I ran from the Dutchman. I was coming back when I flew to Mexico. I was coming back when I killed Lynch.”
   He lay there for a long time, watching the squirrels, while the woods woke and the morning warmed around him. A crow swept in, banking, braking with feathers it spread like black mechanical fingers. Checking to see if he were dead.
   Turner grinned up at the crow as it flapped away.
   Not yet.

   He crawled back in, under the overhanging branches, and found her sitting up in the cockpit. She wore a baggy white T-shirt slashed diagonally with the MAAS-NEOTEK logo. There were lozenges of fresh red blood across the front of the shirt. Her nose was bleeding again. Bright blue eyes, dazed and disoriented, in sockets bruised yellow-black, like exotic makeup.
   Young, he saw, very young.
   “You’re Mitchell’s daughter,” he said, dragging the name up from the biosoft dossier. “Angela.”
   “Angie,” she said, automatically “Who’ re you? I’m bleeding. She held out a bloody carnation of wadded tissue.
   “Turner. I was expecting your father.” Remembering the gun now, her other hand out of sight, below the edge of the cockpit. “Do you know where he is?”
   “In the mesa. He thought he could talk with them, explain it Because they need him.”
   “With who?” He took a step forward.
   “Maas. The Board. They can’t afford to hurt him. Can they?”
   “Why would they?” Another step
   She dabbed at her nose with the red tissue. “Because he sent me out. Because he knew they were going to hurt me, kill me maybe. Because of the dreams.”
   “The dreams?”
   “Do you think they’ll hurt him?”
   “No, no, they wouldn’t do that. I’m going to climb up there now. Okay?”
   She nodded. He had to run his hands over the side of the fuselage to find the shallow, recessed handholds; the mimetic coating showed him leaf and lichen, twigs... And then he was up, beside her, and he saw the gun beside her sneakered foot. “But wasn’t he coming himself? I was expecting him, your father.”
   “No. We never planned that. We only had the one plane. Didn’t he tell you?” She started to shake. “Didn’t he tell you anything?”
   “Enough,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “he told us enough. It’ll be all right...” He swung his legs over, bent, moved the Smith & Wesson away from her foot, and found the interface cable. His hand still on her, he raised it, snapped it into place behind his ear.
   ‘Give me the procedures for erasing anything you stored in the past forty-eight hours,” he said. “I want to dump that course for Mexico City, your flight from the coast, anything...”
   “There was no plan logged for Mexico City,” the voice said, direct neural input on audio.
   Turner stared at the girl, rubbed his jaw.
   “Where were we going?”
   “Bogotá,” and the jet reeled out coordinates for the landing they hadn’t made.
   She blinked at him, her lids bruised dark as the surrounding skin. “Who are you talking to?”
   “The plane. Did Mitchell tell you where he thought you’d be going”“
   “Japan...”
   Know anyone in Bogotá? Where’s your mother?”
   “No. Berlin, I think. I don’t really know her.”

   He wiped the plane’s banks, dumping Conroy’s programming, what there was of it: the approach from California, identification data for the site, a flight plan that would have taken them to a strip within three hundred kilometers of Bogotá’s urban core...
   Someone would find the jet eventually. He thought about the Maas orbital recon system and wondered if the stealth-and-evasion programs he’d ordered the plane to run had done any real good. He could offer the jet to Rudy for salvage, but he doubted Rudy would want to be involved. For that matter, simply showing up at the farm, with Mitchell’s daughter in tow, dragged Rudy in right up to his neck But there was nowhere else to go, not for the things he needed now.
   It was a four-hour walk, along half-remembered trails and down a weed-grown, winding stretch of two-lane blacktop.
   The trees were different, it seemed to him, and then he remembered how much they would have grown over the years since he’d been back. At regular intervals they passed the stumps of wooden poles that had once supported telephone wires, overgrown now with bramble and honeysuckle, the wires pulled down for fuel. Bees grazed in flowering grass at the roadside...
   “Is there food where we’re going?” the girl asked, the soles of her white sneakers scuffing the weathered blacktop.
   “Sure,” Turner said, “all you want.”
   “What I want right now’s water.” She swiped a lank strand of brown hair back from a tanned cheek. He’d noticed she was developing a limp, and she’d started to wince each time she put her right foot down.
   “What’s wrong with your leg?”
   “Ankle. Something, I think when I decked the ‘light “ She grimaced, kept walking.
   “We’ll rest.”
   “No. I want to get there, get anywhere.”
   “Rest, he said, taking her hand, leading her to the edge of the road. She made a face, but sat down beside him, her right leg stretched carefully in front of her.
   “That’s a big gun,” she said. It was hot now, too hot for the parka. He’d put the shoulder rig on bareback, with the sleeveless work shirt over it, tails out and flapping. “Why’s the barrel look like that, like a cobra’s head, underneath?”
   “That’s a sighting device, for night-fights.” He leaned forward to examine her ankle. It was swelling quickly now. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll want to walk on that,” he said.
   “You get into a lot of fights, at night? With guns?”
   “No.”
   “I don’t think I understand what it is that you do
   He looked up at her. I don’t always understand that myself, not lately I was expecting your father. He wanted to change companies, work for somebody else. The people he wanted to work for hired me and some other people to make sure he got out of his old contract.”
   “But there wasn’t any way out of that contract,” she said. “Not legally.”
   “That’s right “ Undoing the knot, unlacing the sneaker. “Not legally.”
   “Oh So that’s what you do for a living?”
   “Yes.” Sneaker off now, she wore no sock, the ankle swelling badly. “This is a sprain.”
   ‘What about the other people, then? You had more peoples back there, in that ruin? Somebody was shooting, and those flares...”
   “Hard to say who was shooting,” he said, “but the flares weren’t ours. Maybe Maas security team, following you out. Did you think you got out clean?”
   “I did what Chris told me,” she said. “Chris, that’s my father.”
   “I know. I think I’m going to have to carry you the rest of the way.”
   “But what about your friends?”
   “What friends?”
   “Back there, in Arizona.”
   “Right. Well,” and he wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, “can’t say. Don’t really know.”
   Seeing the white-out sky, flare of energy, brighter than the sun. But no pulse of electromagnetics, the plane had said The first of Rudy’s augmented dogs picked them up fifteen minutes after they started out again. Angie riding Turner’s back, arms around his shoulders, skinny thighs under his armpits, his fingers locked in front of his sternum in a double fist. She smelled like a kid from the up-line ‘burbs, some vaguely herbal hint of soap or shampoo. Thinking that, he thought about what he must smell like to her. Rudy had a shower “Oh, shit, what’s that?” Stiffening on his back, pointing.
   A lean gray hound regarded them from a high clay bank at a turning in the road, its narrow head sheathed and blindered in a black hood studded with sensors. It panted, tongue lolling, and slowly swung its head from side to side.
   “It’s okay,” Turner said. “Watchdog. Belongs to my friend.”

   The house had grown, sprouting wings and workshops, but Rudy had never painted the peeling clapboard of the original structure. Rudy had thrown up a taut square of chainlink, since Turner’s time, fencing away his collection of vehicles, but the gate was open when they arrived, the hinges lost in morning glory and rust. The real defenses, Turner knew, were elsewhere. Four of the augmented hounds trotted after him as he trudged up the gravel drive, Angie’s head limp on his shoulder, her arms still locked around him.
   Rudy was waiting on the front porch, in old white shorts and a navy T-shirt, its single pocket displaying at least nine pens of one kind or another. He looked at them and raised a green can of Dutch beer in greeting. Behind him, a blonde in a faded khaki shirt stepped out of the kitchen, a chrome spatula in her hand; her hair was clipped short, swept up and back in a cut that made Turner think of the Korean medic in Hosaka’s pod, of the pod burning, of Webber, of the white sky... He swayed there, in Rudy’s gravel driveway, legs wide to support the girl, his bare chest streaked with sweat, with dust from the mall in Arizona, and looked at Rudy and the blonde.
   “We got some breakfast for you,” Rudy said. “When you came up on the dog screens, we figured you’d be hungry His tone was carefully noncommittal.
   The girl groaned.
   “That’s good,” Turner said. “She’s got a bum ankle, Rudy. We better look at that. Some other things I have to talk to you about, too.”
   “Little young for you. I’d say,” Rudy said, and took another swig of his beer.
   “Fuck off, Rudy,” the woman beside him said, “can’t you see she’s hurt? Bring her in this way,” she said to Turner, and was gone, back through the kitchen door.
   “You look different,” Rudy said, peering at him, and Turner saw that he was drunk. “The same, but different.”
   “It’s been a while,” Turner said, starting for the wooden steps.
   “You get a face job or something?”
   “Reconstruction. They had to build it back from records He climbed the steps, his lower back stabbed through with pain at every move.
   “It’s not bad,” Rudy said. “I almost didn’t notice.” He belched. He was shorter than Turner, and going to fat, but they had the same brown hair, very similar features.
   Turner paused, on the stair, when their eyes were level. “You still do a little bit of everything. Rudy? I need this kid scanned. I need a few other things, too.”
   “Well,” his brother said, “we’ll see what we can do. We heard something last night. Maybe a sonic boom. Anything to do with you?”
   “Yeah. There’s a jet up by the squirrel wood, but it’s pretty well out of sight.”
   Rudy sighed “Jesus... Well, bring her in...”

   Rudy’s years in the house had stripped it of most of the things that Turner might have remembered, and something in him was obscurely grateful for that. He watched the blonde crack eggs into a steel bowl, dark yellow free-range yolks;
   Rudy kept his own chickens. “I’m Sally,” she said, whisking the eggs around with a fork.
   “Turner.”
   ‘That’s all he ever calls you either,” she said. “He never has talked about you much.”
   “We haven’t kept all that much in touch. Maybe I should go up now and help him.”
   “You sit. Your little girl’s okay with Rudy. He’s got a good touch.”
   “Even when he’s pissed?”
   “Half pissed. Well, he’s not going to operate, just derm her and tape that ankle.” She crushed dry tortilla chips into a black pan, over sizzling butter, and poured the eggs on top. “What happened to your eyes, Turner? You and her...” She stirred the mixture with the chrome spatula, slopping in salsa from a plastic tub.
   “G-force. Had to take off quick.”
   “That how she hurt her ankle?”
   “Maybe. Don’t know.”
   “People after you now? After her?” Busy taking plates from the cabinet above the sink, the cheap brown laminate of the cabinet doors triggering a sudden rush of nostalgia in Turner, seeing her tanned wrists as his mother’s...
   “Probably,” he said. “I don’t know what’s involved, not yet.”
   “Eat some of this.” Transferring the mixture to a white plate, rummaging for a fork. “Rudy’s scared of the kind of people you might get after you.”
   Taking the plate, the fork. Steam rising from the eggs. “So am I.”
   “Got some clothes,” Sally said, over the sound of the shower, “friend of Rudy’s left ‘em here, ought to fit you. The shower was gravity-operated, rainwater from a roof tank, a fat white filtration unit strapped into the pipe above the spray head. Turner stuck his head out between cloudy sheets of plastic and blinked at her. “Thanks.”
   “Girl’s unconscious,” she said. “Rudy thinks it’s shock, exhaustion. He says her crits are high, so he might as well run his scan now.” She left the room then, taking Turner’s fatigues and Oakey’s shirt with her.

   * * *

   “What is she?” Rudy extending a crumpled scroll of silvery printout.
   “I don’t know how to read that,” Turner said, looking around the white room, looking for Angie. “Where is she?”
   “Sleeping. Sally’s watching her.” Rudy turned and walked back, the length of the room, and Turner remembered it had been the living room once. Rudy began to shut his consoles down, the tiny pilot lights blinking out one by one. “I don’t know, man. I just don’t know. What is it, some kind of cancer?”
   Turner followed him down the room, past a worktable where a micromanipulator waited beneath its dustcover Past the dusty rectangular eyes of a bank of aged monitors, one of them with a shattered screen.
   “It’s all through her head,” Rudy said “Like long chains of it. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen, ever.”
   Nothing
   “How much do you know about biochips, Rudy?”
   Rudy grunted. He seemed very sober now, but tense, agitated. He kept running his hands back through his hair “That’s what I thought. It’s some kind of... Not an implant. Graft.”
   “What’s it for?”
   “For? Christ Who the fuck knows? Who did it to her? Somebody you work for?”
   “Her father, I think.”
   “Jesus.” Rudy wiped his hand across his mouth. “It shadows like tumor, on the scans, but her crits are high enough, normal What’s she like, ordinarily?”
   “Don’t know. A kid.” He shrugged.
   “Fucking hell,” Rudy said. “I’m amazed she can walk.”
   He opened a little lab freezer and came up with a frosted bottle of Moskovskaya “Want it out of the bottle?” he asked.
   “Maybe later.”
   Rudy sighed, looked at the bottle, then returned it to the fridge. “So what do you want? Anything as weird as what’s in that little girl’s head, somebody’s going to be after it soon. If they aren’t already.”
   “They are,” Turner said. “I don’t know if they know she’s here.”
   “Yet.” Rudy wiped his palms on his grubby white shorts.
   “But they probably will, right?”
   Turner nodded.
   “Where you going to go, then?”
   “The Sprawl.”
   “Why?”
   “Because I’ve got money there I’ve got credit lines in four different names, no way to link ‘em back to me Because I’ve got a lot of other connections I may be able to use. And because it’s always cover, the Sprawl. So damned much of it, you know?”
   “Okay,” Rudy said. “When?”
   “You that worried about it, you want us right out?”
   “No I mean, I don’t know It’s all pretty interesting, what’s in your girl friend’s head. I’ve got a friend in Atlanta could rent me a function analyzer, brain map, one to one; put that on her, I might start to figure out what that thing is. Might be worth something.”
   “Sure If you knew where to sell it.”
   “Aren’t you curious? I mean, what the hell is she? You pull her out of some military lab?” Rudy opened the white freezer door again, took out the bottle of vodka, opened it, and took a swallow.
   Turner took the bottle and tilted it, letting the icy fluid splash against his teeth. He swallowed, shuddered. “It’s corporate. Big. I was supposed to get her father out, but he sent her instead Then somebody took the whole site out, looked like a baby nuke. We just made it. This far.” He handed Rudy the bottle. “Stay straight for me, Rudy You get scared, you drink too much.”
   Rudy was staring at him, ignoring the bottle. “Arizona,” he said. “It was on the news. Mexico’s still kicking about it. But it wasn’t a nuke. They’ve had crews out there, all over it.
   No nuke.”
   “What was it?”
   “They think it was a railgun They think somebody put up a hypervelocity gun in a cargo blimp and blew hell out of some derelict mall out there in the boonies. They know there was a blimp near there, and so far nobody’s found it You can rig a railgun to blow itself to plasma when it discharges. The projectile could have been damn near anything, at those velocities. About a hundred and fifty kilos of ice would do the trick.” He took the bottle, capped it, and put it down on the counter beside him. “All that land around there, it belongs to Maas, Maas Biolabs, doesn’t it? They’ve been on the news, Maas. Cooperating fully with various authorities. You bet. So that tells us where you got your little honey from, I guess.”
   “Sure. But it doesn’t tell me who used the railgun Or why.”
   Rudy shrugged.
   “You better come see this,” Sally said from the door.

   Much later, Turner sat with Sally on the front porch. The girl had lapsed, finally, into something Rudy’s EEG called sleep. Rudy was back in one of his workshops, probably with his bottle of vodka. There were fireflies around the honeysuckle vines beside the chainlink gate. Turner found that if he half closed his eyes, from his seat on the wooden porch swing, he could almost see an apple’ tree that was no longer there, a tree that had once supported a length of silvery-gray hemp rope and an ancient automobile tire. There were fire-flies then as well, and Rudy’s heels thumping a bare hard skid of earth as he pumped himself out on the swing’s arc, legs kicking, and Turner lay on his back in the grass, watching the stars. .
   “Tongues,” Sally said, Rudy’s woman, from the creaking rattan chair, her cigarette a red eye in the dark “Talking in the tongues.”
   “What’s that?”
   “What your kid was doing, upstairs. You know any French?”
   “No, not much. Not without a lexicon.”
   “Some of it sounded French to me.” The red amber was a short slash for an instant, when she tapped ash “When I was little, my old man took me one time to this stadium, and I saw the testifying and the speaking in tongues. It scared me I think it scared me more, today, when she started “Rudy taped the end of it, didn’t he?”
   “Yeah. You know, Rudy hasn’t been doing too good.
   That’s mainly why I moved back in here. I told him I wasn’t staying unless he straightened himself out, but then it got real bad, so about two weeks ago I moved back in. I was about ready to go when you showed up” The coal of the cigarette arced out over the railing and fell on the gravel that covered the yard.
   “Drinking?”
   “That and the stuff he cooks for himself in the lab You know, that man knows a little bit of damn near everything. He’s still got a lot of friends, around the county; I’ve heard ‘em tell stories about when you and him were kids, before you left.”
   “He should have left, too,” he said.
   “He hates the city,” she said. “Says it all comes in on line anyway, so why do you need to go there?”
   “I went because there was nothing happening here Rudy could always find something to do. Still can, by the look of it.”
   “You should’ve stayed in touch. He wanted you here when your mother was dying.”
   “I was in Berlin. Couldn’t leave what I was doing.”
   “I guess not. I wasn’t here then either I came later. That was a good summer. Rudy just pulled me out of this sleaze-ass club in Memphis; came in there with a bunch of country boys one night. and next day I was back here, didn’t really know why. Except he was nice to me, those days, and funny, and he gave my head a chance to slow down. He taught me to cook.” She laughed. “I liked that, except I was scared of those Goddamn chickens out back.” She stood up then and stretched, the old chair creaking, and he was aware of the length of her tanned legs, the smell and summer heat of her, close to his face.
   She put her hands on his shoulders. His eyes were level with the band of brown belly where her shorts rode low, her navel a soft shadow, and remembering Allison in the white hollow room, he wanted to press his face there, taste it all . He thought she swayed slightly, but he wasn’t sure.
   “Turner,” she said, “sometimes bein’ here with him, it’s like bein’ here alone.”
   So he stood, rattle of the old swing chain where the eye-bolts were screwed deep in the tongue and groove of the porch roof, bolts his father might have turned forty years before, and kissed her mouth as it opened, cut loose in time by talk and the fireflies and the subliminal triggers of memory, so that it seemed to him, as he ran his palms up the warmth of her bare back, beneath the white T-shirt, that the people in his life weren’t beads strung on a wire of sequence, but clustered like quanta, so that he knew her as well as he’d known Rudy, or Allison, or Conroy, as well as he knew the girl who was Mitchell’s daughter.
   “Hey,” she whispered, working her mouth free, “you come upstairs now “

18 NAMES OF THE DEAD

   ALAIN PHONED AT FIVE and verified the availability of the amount he required, fighting to control the sickness she felt at his greed. She copied the address carefully on the back of a card she’d taken from Picard’s desk in the Roberts Gallery. Andrea returned from work ten minutes later, and Marly was glad that her friend hadn’t been there for Alain’s call.
   She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition. Andrea had wedged a kind of plywood shelf there, on the stone ledge, wide enough to support the little hibachi she kept beneath the sink. Now she was arranging the black squares of charcoal neatly on the grate. “I had a talk about your employer today,” she said, placing the hibachi on the plywood and igniting the greenish fire-starter paste with the spark gun from the stove. “Our academic was in from Nice. He’s baffled as to why I’d choose Josef Virek as my focus of interest, but he’s also a horny old goat, so he was more than glad to talk.”
   Marly stood beside her, watching the nearly invisible flames lick around the coals.
   “He kept dragging the Tessier-Ashpools into it,” Andrea continued, “and Hughes. Hughes was mid to late twentieth century, an American. He’s in the book as well, as a sort of proto-Virek I hadn’t known that Tessier-Ashpool had started to disintegrate... She went back to the counter and un-wrapped six large tiger prawns.
   “They’re Franco-Australian? I remember a documentary, I think They own one of the big spas?”
   “Freeside. It’s been sold now, my professor tells me. It seems that one of old Ashpool’s daughters somehow managed to gain personal control of the entire business entity, became increasingly eccentric, and the clan’s interests went to hell. This over the past seven years.”
   “I don’t see what it has to do with Virek,” Marly said, watching Andrea skewer each prawn on a long needle of bamboo.
   “Your guess is as good as mine. My professor maintains that both Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools are fascinating anachronisms and that things can be learned about corporate evolution by watching them. He’s convinced enough of our senior editors, at any rate.”
   “But what did he say about Virek?”
   “That Virek’s madness would take a different form.”
   “Madness?”
   “Actually, he avoided calling it that. But Hughes was mad as birds, apparently, and old Ashpool as well, and his daughter totally bizarre. He said that Virek would be forced, by evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of ‘jump.’ ‘Jump was his word.”
   “Evolutionary pressures?”
   “Yes,” Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the hibachi. “He talks about corporations as though they were animals of some kind.”

   After dinner, they went out walking. Marly found herself straining, at times, to sense the imagined mechanism of Virek’s surveillance, but Andrea filled the evening with her usual warmth and common sense, and Marly was grateful to walk through a city where things were simply themselves. In Virek’s world, what could be simple? She remembered the brass knob in the Galerie Duperey, how it had squirmed so indescribably in her fingers as it drew her into Virek’s model of the Parque Guell. Was he always there, she wondered, in Gaudi’s park, in an afternoon that never ended? Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation. She shivered in the warm evening air, moved closer to Andrea.
   The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs were more so, she decided.
   Andrea paused at a kiosk to buy her English cigarettes and the new Elle. Marly waited on the pavement, the pedestrian traffic parting automatically for her, faces sliding past, students and businessmen and tourists. Some of them, she assumed, were part of Virek’s machine, wired into Paco. Paco with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles moving beneath his broadcloth shirt. Paco, who had worked for Señor all his life.
   “What’s wrong? You look as though you’ve just swallowed something.” Andrea, stripping the cellophane from her twenty Silk Cut.
   “No,” Marly said, and shivered, “But it occurs to me that I very nearly did...”
   And walking home, in spite of Andrea’s conversation, her warmth, the shop windows had become boxes, each one, constructions, like the works of Joseph Cornell or the mysterious boxmaker Virek sought. The books and furs and Italian cot-tons arranged to suggest geometries of nameless longing.

   And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea’s couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing. In a gray morning of Paris rain.

   “No,” she told Paco, “I’ll go myself. I prefer it.”
   “That is a great deal of money.” He looked down at the
   Italian bag on the café table between them. “It’s dangerous, you understand?”
   “There’s no one to know I’m carrying it, is there? Only Alain. Alain and your friends. And I didn’t say I’d go alone, only that I don’t feel like company.’
   “Is something wrong?” The serious deep lines at the corners of his mouth “You are upset?”
   “I only mean that I wish to be by myself. You and the others, whoever they are, are welcome to follow, to follow and observe. If you should lose me, which I think unlikely, I’m sure you have the address.”
   “That is true,” he said. “But for you to carry several million New Yen, alone, through Paris He shrugged.
   “And if I were to lose it? Would Señor register the loss? Or would there be another bag, another four million?” She reached for the shoulder strap and stood.
   “There would be another bag, certainly, although it requires some effort on our part to assemble that amount of cash. And, no, Señor would not ‘register’ its loss, in the sense you mean, but I would be disciplined even for the pointless loss of a lesser sum. The very rich have the common characteristic of taking care with their money, you will find.”
   “Nonetheless. I go by myself. Not alone, but leave me with my thoughts.”
   “Your intuition.”
   “Yes.”

   If they followed, and she was sure they did, they were invisible as ever. For that matter, it seemed most likely that they would leave Alain unobserved. Certainly the address he had given her that morning would already be a focus of their attention, whether he were there or not.
   She felt a new strength today She had stood up to Paco It had had something to do with her abrupt suspicion, the night before, that Paco might be there, in part, for her, with his humor and his manliness and his endearing ignorance of art. She remembered Virek saying that they knew more about her life than she herself did. What easier way, then, for them to pencil in those last few blanks in the grid that was Marly Krushkhova? Paco Estevez. A perfect stranger Too perfect.
   She smiled at herself in a wall of blue mirror as the escalator carried her down into the métro, pleased with the cut of her dark hair and the stylishly austere titanium frames of the black Porsche glasses she’d bought that morning. Good lips, she thought, really not bad lips at all, and a thin boy in a white shirt and dark leather jacket smiled at her from the up escalator, a huge black portfolio case beneath his arm.
   I’m in Paris, she thought. For the first time in a very long time, that alone seemed reason to smile. And today I will give my disgusting fool of a former lover four million New Yen, and he will give me something in return A name, or an address, perhaps a phone number. She bought a first-class ticket; the car would be less crowded, and she could pass the time guessing which of her fellow passengers belonged to Virek.

   * * *

   The address Alain had given her, in a grim northern suburb, was one of twenty concrete towers rising from a plain of the same material, speculative real estate from the middle of the previous century. The rain was falling steadily now, but she felt as though she were somehow in collusion with it; it lent the day something conspiratorial, and beaded on the chic rubber bag stuffed with Alain’s fortune. How queer to stroll through this hideous landscape with millions beneath her arm, on her way to reward her utterly faithless former lover with these bales of New Yen.
   There was no answer when she buzzed the apartment’s numbered speaker button. Beyond smudged sheet glass, a darkened foyer, entirely bare. The sort of place where you turned the lights on as you entered; they turned themselves off again, automatically, invariably before your elevator had arrived, leaving you to wait there in the smell of disinfectant and tired air. She buzzed again. “Alain?” Nothing.
   She tried the door. It wasn’t locked. There was no one in the foyer. The dead eye of a derelict video camera regarded her through a film of dust. The afternoon’s watery light seeped in from the concrete plain behind her. Bootheels clicking on brown tile, she crossed to the bank of elevators and pressed button 22. There was a hollow thump, a metallic groan, and one of the elevators began to descend. The plastic indicators above the doors remained unlit. The car arrived with a sigh and a high-pitched, fading whine. “Cher Alain, you have come down in the world. This place is the shits, truly.” As the doors slid open on the darkness of the car, she fumbled beneath the Italian bag for the flap of her Brussels purse She found the flat little green tin flashlight she’d carried since her first walk in Paris, with the lion-headed Pile Wonder trademark embossed on its front, and pulled it out. In the elevators of Paris, you could step into many things: the arms of a mugger, a steaming pile of fresh dog shit.
   And the weak beam picking out the silver cables, oiled and shining, swaying gently in the vacant shaft, the toe of her right boot already centimeters past the scuffed steel edge of the tile she stood on; her hand automatically jerking the beam down in terror, down to the dusty, littered roof of the car, two levels below. She took in an extraordinary amount of detail in the seconds her flash wavered on the elevator. She thought of a tiny submarine diving the cliffs of some deep seamount, the frail beam wavering on a patch of silt undisturbed for centuries: the soft bed of ancient furry soot, a dried gray thing that was a used condom, the bright reflected eyes of crumpled bits of tinfoil, the frail gray barrel and white plunger of a diabetic syringe... She held the edge of the door so tightly that her knuckle joints ached. Very slowly, she shifted her weight backward, away from the pit. Another step and she clicked off her light.
   “Damn you,” she said. “O Jesus.”
   She found the door to the stairwell. Clicking the little flash back on, she began to climb. Eight floors up, the numbness began to fade, and she was shaking, tears ruining her makeup.

   Rapping on the door again. It was pressboard, laminated with a ghastly imitation of rosewood, the lithographed grain just visible in the light from the long corridor’s single strip of biofluorescence. “Damn you Alain? Alan!” The myopic fisheye of the door’s little spyglass, looking through her, blank and vacant. The corridor held a horrible smell, embalmed cooking odors trapped in synthetic carpeting.
   Trying the door, knob turning, the cheap brass greasy and cold, and the bag of money suddenly heavy, the strap cutting into her shoulder. The door opening easily. A short stretch of orange carpet flecked with irregular rectangles of salmon-pink, decades of dirt ground into it in a clearly defined track by thousands of tenants and their visitors.
   “Alain?” The smell of black French cigarettes, almost comforting. And finding him there in that same watery light, silver light, the other tower blocks featureless, beyond a rectangle of window, against pale rainy sky, where he lay curled like a child on the hideous orange carpet, his spine a question mark beneath the taut back of his bottle-green velour jacket, his left hand spread above his ear, white fingers, faintest bluish tint at the base of his nails.
   Kneeling, she touched his neck. Knew. Beyond the window, all the rain sliding down, forever. Cradling his head, legs open, holding him, rocking, swaying, the dumb sad animal keening filling the bare rectangle of the room. And after a time, becoming aware of the sharp thing under her palm, the neat stainless end of a length of very fine, very rigid wire, that protruded from his ear and between the spread cool fingers.
   Ugly, ugly, that was no way to die; it got her up, anger, her hands like claws To survey the silent room where he had died. There was no sense of him there, nothing, only his ragged attaché Opening that, she found two spiral notebooks, their pages new and clean, an unread but very fashionable novel, a box of wooden matches, and a half-empty blue packet of Gauloise. The leather-bound agenda from Browns was gone. She patted his jacket, slid fingers through his pockets, but it was gone.
   No, she thought, you wouldn’t have written it there, would you? But you could never remember a number or an address, could you? She looked around the room again, a weird calm overtaking her. You had to write things down, but you were secretive, and you didn’t trust my little book from Browns, no; you’d meet a girl in some cafe and write her number in a matchbook or on the back of some scrap, and forget it, so that I found it weeks later, straightening up your things.
   She went into the tiny bedroom. There was a bright red folding chair and a slab of cheap yellow foam that served as a bed. The foam was marked with a brown butterfly of menstrual blood. She lifted it, but there was nothing there.
   “You’d have been scared,” she said, her voice shaking with a fury she didn’t try to understand, her hands cold, colder than Alain’s, as she ran them down the red wallpaper, striped with gold, seeking some loose seam, a hiding place.
   “You poor stupid shit. Poor stupid dead shit...”
   Nothing. Back into the living room, and amazed, somehow, that he hadn’t moved; expecting him to jump up, hello, waving a few centimeters of trick wire. She removed his shoes. They needed resoling, new heels. She looked inside, felt the lining. Nothing. “Don’t do this to me “And back into the bedroom. The narrow closet. Brushing aside a clatter of cheap white plastic hangers, a limp shroud of drycleaner’s plastic. Dragging the stained bedslab over and standing on it, her heels sinking into the foam, to slide her hands the length of a pressboard shelf, and find, in the far corner, a hard little fold of paper, rectangular and blue. Opening it, noticing how the nails she’d done so carefully were chipped, and finding the number he’d written there in green feltpen. It was an empty Gauloise packet.
   There was a knock at the door.
   And then Paco’s voice: “Marly? Hello? What has happened?”
   She thrust the number into the waistband of her jeans and turned to meet his calm, serious eyes.
   “It’s Alain,” she said, “he’s dead.”

19 HYPERMART

   HE SAW LUCAS for the last time in front of a big old department store on Madison Avenue. That was how he remembered him, after that, a big black man in a sharp black suit, about to step into his long black car, one black, softly polished shoe already on the lush carpet of Ahmed’s interior, the other still on the crumbling concrete of the curb.
   Jackie stood beside Bobby, her face shadowed by the wide brim of her gold-hung fedora, an orange silk headscarf knotted at the back of her neck.
   “You take care of our young friend, now,” Lucas said, pointing the knob of his cane at her. “He’s not without his enemies, our Count.”
   “Who is?” Jackie asked.
   “I’ll take care of myself,” Bobby said, resenting the idea of Jackie being seen as more capable, yet at the same time knowing that she almost certainly was.
   “You do that,” Lucas said, the knob swinging, lined up now with Bobby’s eyes. “Sprawltown’s a twisty place, my man Things are seldom what they seem.” To illustrate his point, he did something to the cane that caused the long brass splines below the ball to open smoothly. for an instant, silently, extended like the ribs of an umbrella, each one glinting sharp as a razor, pointed like needles. Then they were gone, and Ahmed’s wide door swung shut with an armor-plated thud.
   Jackie laughed. “Shee-it. Lucas still carryin’ that killin’ stick. Bigtime lawyer now, but the street leaves a mark on you. Guess it’s a good thing...”
   “Lawyer?”
   She looked at him. “You never mind, honey. You just come with me, do like I tell you, you be okay.”
   Ahmed merged with the sparse traffic, a pedicab jockey blaring pointlessly at the receding brass bumper with a hand-held air horn.
   Then, one manicured, gold-ringed hand on his shoulder, she led him across the sidewalk, past a sleeping huddle of rag-bundled transients, and into the slowly waking world of Hypermart.

   Fourteen floors, Jackie said, and Bobby whistled. “All like this?” She nodded, spooning brown crystals of rock sugar into the tan foam atop her coffee glass. They sat on scrolly castiron stools at a marble counter in a little booth, where a girl Bobby’s age, her hair dyed and lacquered into a kind of dorsal fin, worked the knobs and levers of a big old machine with brass tanks and domes and burners and eagles with spread chrome wings. The countertop had been something else, originally; Bobby saw where one end was bashed off in a long crooked jag to allow it to fit between two green-painted steel pillars.
   “You like it, huh?” She sprinkled the foam with powdered cinnamon from a heavy old glass shaker. “ ‘Bout as far from Barrytown as you been, some ways.”
   Bobby nodded, his eyes confused by the thousand colors and textures of the things in the stalls, the stalls themselves. There seemed to be no regularity to anything, no hint of any central planning agency. Crooked corridors twisted off from the area in front of the espresso booth. There seemed to be no central source of lighting either. Red and blue neon glowed beyond the white hiss of a Primus lantern, and one stall, just being opened by a bearded man with leather pants, seemed to be lit with candles, the soft light reflecting off hundreds of polished brass buckles hung against the reds and blacks of old rugs. There was a morning rattle to the place, a coughing and a clearing of throats. A blue Toshiba custodial unit whirred out of a corridor, dragging a battered plastic cart stacked with green plastic bales of garbage. Someone had glued a big plastic doll head to the Toshiba’s upper body segment, above the clustered camera eyes and sensors, a grinning blue-eyed thing once intended to approximate the features of a leading stimstar without violating Sense/Net copyrights. The pink head, its platinum hair bound up in a length of pale blue plastic pearls, bobbed absurdly as the robot rolled past. Bobby laughed.
   “This place is okay,” he said, and gestured to the girl to refill his cup.
   “Wait a sec, asshole,” the countergirl said, amiably enough. She was measuring ground coffee into a dented steel hopper on one end of an antique balance. “You get any sleep last night, Jackie, after the show?”
   “Sure,” Jackie said, and sipped at her coffee “I danced their second set, then I slept at Jammer’s. Hit the couch, you know?”
   “Wish I’d got some. Every time Henry sees you dance, he won’t let me alone...” She laughed, and refilled Bobby’s cup from a black plastic thermos.
   “Well,” Bobby said, when the girl was busy again with the espresso machine, “what’s next?”
   “Busy man, huh?” Jackie regarded him coolly from beneath the gold-pinned hat brim. “Got places you need to go, people to see?”
   “Well, no. Shit. I just mean, well, is this it?”
   “Is what it?”
   “This place. We’re staying here?”
   “Top floor. Friend of mine named Jammer runs a club up there. Very unlikely anyone could find you there, and even if they do, it’s a hard place to sneak up on. Fourteen floors of mostly stalls, and a whole lot of these people sell stuff they don’t have out in plain view, right? So they’re all very sensitive to strangers turning up, anyone asking questions. And most of them are friends of ours, one way or another Anyway, you’ll like it here. Good place for you. Lots to learn, if you remember to keep your mouth shut.”
   “How am I gonna learn if I don’t ask questions?”
   “Well, I mean keep your ears open, more like it. And be polite. Some tough people in here, but you mind your biz, they’ll mind theirs. Beauvoir’s probably coming by here late this afternoon. Lucas has gone out to the Projects to tell him whatever you learned from the Finn. What did you learn from the Finn, hon?”
   “That he’s got these three dead guys stretched out on his floor. Says they’re ninjas.” Bobby looked at her. “He’s pretty weird...”
   “Dead guys aren’t part of his usual line of goods. But, yeah, he’s weird all right. Why don’t you tell me about it? Calmly, and in low, measured tones. Think you can do that?”
   Bobby told her what he could remember of his visit to the Finn. Several times she stopped him, asked questions he usually wasn’t able to answer. She nodded when he first mentioned Wigan Ludgate. “Yeah,” she said, “Jammer talks about him, when he gets going on the old days. Have to ask him...” At the end of his recitation, she was lounging back against one of the green pillars, the hat very low over her dark eyes.
   “Well?” he asked
   “Interesting,” she said, but that was all she’d say.
   “I want some new clothes,” Bobby said when they’d climbed the immobile escalator to the second floor.
   “You got any money?” she asked.
   “Shit,” he said, his hands in the pockets of the baggy, pleated jeans. “I don’t have any fucking money, but I want some clothes. You and Lucas and Beauvoir are keeping my ass on ice for something, aren’t you? Well, I’m tired of this God-awful shirt Rhea palmed off on me, and these pants always feel like they’re about to fall off my ass. And I’m here because Two-a-Day, who’s a lowlife fuck, wanted to risk my butt so Lucas and Beauvoir could test their fucking software. So you can fucking well buy me some clothes, okay?”
   “Okay,” she said, after a pause. “I’ll tell you what.” She pointed to where a Chinese girl in faded denim was furling the sheets of plastic that had fenced a dozen steel-pipe garment racks hung with clothing. “You see Lin, there? She’s a friend of mine. You pick out what you want, I’ll straighten it out between Lucas and her.”
   Half an hour later, he emerged from a blanket-draped fitting room and put on a pair of Indo-Javanese mirrored aviator glasses. He grinned at Jackie. “Real sharp,” he said.
   “Oh, yeah.” She did a thing with her hand, a fanning movement, as though something nearby were too hot to touch. “You didn’t like that shirt Rhea loaned you?”
   He looked down at the black T-shirt he’d chosen, at the square holodecal of cyberspace on his chest. It was done so you seemed to be punching fast-forward through the matrix, grid lines blurring at the edges of the decal. “Yeah. It was too tacky.”
   “Right,” Jackie said, taking in the tight black jeans, the heavy leather boots with spacesuit-style accordion folds at the ankles, the black leather garrison belt trimmed with twin lines of pyramidal chrome studs. “Well, I guess you look more like the Count. Com on, Count, I got a couch for you to sleep on, up in Jammer’s place.”
   He leered at her, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of the black Levis.
   “Alone,” she added, “no fear.”

20 ORLY FLIGHT

   PACO SLUNG THE Citroen-Dornier down the Champs, along the north bank of the Seine, then up through Les Halles. Marly sank back into the astonishingly soft leather seat, more beautifully stitched than her Brussels jacket. And willed her mind to blankness, lack of affect. Be eyes, she told herself. Only eyes, your body a weight pressed evenly back by the speed of this obscenely expensive car. Humming past the Square des Innocents, where whores dickered with the drivers of cargo hovers in bleu de travail, Paco steering effortlessly through the narrow streets.
   “Why did you say, ‘Don’t do this to me’?” He took his hand from the steering console and tapped his ear-bead into position.
   “Why were you listening?”
   “Because that is my job. I sent a woman up, up into the tower opposite his, to the twenty-second floor, with a parabolic microphone. The phone in the apartment was dead; otherwise, we could have used that. She went up, broke into a vacant unit on the west face of the tower, and aimed her microphone in time to hear you say, ‘Don’t do this to me.’ And you were alone?”
   “Yes.”
   “He was dead?”
   “Yes.”
   “Why did you say it, then?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “Who did you feel was doing something to you?”
   “I don’t know. Perhaps Alan.”
   “Doing what?”
   “Being dead? Complicating matters? You tell me.”
   “You are a difficult woman.”
   “Let me out.”
   “I will take you to your friend’s apartment...”
   “Stop the car.”
   “I will take you to – “
   “I’ll walk.”
   The low silver car slid up to the curb.
   “I will call you, in the – “
   “Good night.”

   “You’re certain you wouldn’t prefer one of the spas?” asked Mr. Paleologos, thin and elegant as a mantis in his white hopsack jacket. His hair was white as well, brushed back from his forehead with extreme care. “It would be less expensive, and a great deal more fun. You’re a very pretty girl.
   “Pardon?” Jerking her attention back from the street beyond the rain-streaked window. “A what?” His French was clumsy, enthusiastic, strangely inflected.
   “A very pretty girl.” He smiled primly. “You wouldn’t prefer a holiday in a Med cluster? People your own age? Are you Jewish?”
   “I beg your pardon?”
   “Jewish. Are you?”
   “No.”
   “Too bad,” he said. “You have the cheekbones of a certain sort of elegant young Jewess... I’ve a lovely discount on fifteen days to Jerusalem Prime, a marvelous environment for the price. Includes suit rental, three meals per diem, and direct shuttle from the JAL torus.”
   “Suit rental?”
   “They haven’t entirely established atmosphere, in Jerusalem Prime,” Mr. Paleologos said, shuffling a stack of pink flimsies from one side of his desk to the other. His office was a tiny cubicle walled with hologram views of Poros and Macau. She’d chosen his agency for its evident obscurity, and because it had been possible to slip in without leaving the little commercial complex in the metro station nearest Andrea’s.
   “No” she said, “I’m not interested in spas I want to go here.” She tapped the writing on the wrinkled blue wrapper from a pack of Gauloise
   “Well,” he said, “it’s possible, of course, but I have no listing of accommodations. Will you be visiting friends?”
   “A business trip,” she said impatiently. “I must leave immediately.”
   “Very well, very well,” Mr. Paleologos said, taking a cheap-looking lap terminal from a shelf behind his desk. “Can you give me your credit code, please?”
   She reached into her black leather bag and took out the thick bundle of New Yen she’d removed from Paco’s bag while he’d been busy examining the apartment where Alain had died. The money was fastened with a red band of translucent elastic “I wish to pay cash.”
   “Oh, dear,” Mr. Paleologos said, extending a pink finger-tip to touch the top bill, as though he expected the lot of it to vanish. “I see. Well, you understand, I wouldn’t ordinarily do business this way... But, I suppose, something can be arranged. .
   “Quickly,” she said, “very quickly...”
   He looked at her. “I understand. Can you tell me, please,” – his fingers began to move over the keys of the lap terminal – “the name under which you wish to travel?”

21 HIGHWAY TIME

   TURNER WOKE TO the silent house, the sound of birds in the apple trees in the overgrown orchard. He’d slept on the broken couch Rudy kept in the kitchen. He drew water for coffee, the plastic pipes from the roof tank chugging as he filled the pot, put the pot on the propane burner, and walked out to the porch.
   Rudy’s eight vehicles were filmed with dew, arranged in a neat row on the gravel One of the augmented hounds trotted through the open gate as Turner came down the steps, its black hood clicking softly in the morning quiet. It paused, drooling, swayed its distorted head from side to side, then scrambled across the gravel and out of sight, around the corner of the porch.
   Turner paused by the hood of a dull brown Suzuki Jeep, a hydrogen-cell conversion Rudy would have done the work himself, Four-wheel drive, big tires with off-road lugs crusted in pale dry river mud. Small, slow, reliable, not much use on the road.
   He passed two rust-flecked Honda sedans, identical, same year and model. Rudy would be ripping one for parts from the other; neither would be running. He grinned absently at the immaculate brown and tan paintwork on the 1949 Chevrolet van, remembering the rusted shell Rudy had hauled home from Arkansas on a rented flatbed. The thing still ran on gasoline, the inner surfaces of its engine likely as spotless as the hand-rubbed chocolate lacquer of its fenders.
   There was half of a Dornier ground-effect plane, under gray plastic tarps, and then a wasplike black Suzuki racing bike on a homemade trailer. He wondered how long it had been since Rudy had done any serious racing. There was a snowmobile under another tarp, an old one, next to the bike trailer. And then the stained gray hovercraft, surplus from the war, a squat wedge of armored steel that smelled of the kerosene its turbine burned, its mesh-reinforced apron bag slack on the gravel. Its windows were narrow slits of thick, high-impact plastic. There were Ohio plates bolted to the thing’s ram-like bumpers. They were current. “I can see what you’re thinking,” Sally said, and he turned to see her at the porch rail with the pot of steaming coffee in her hand. “Rudy says, if it can’t get over something, it can anyway get through it.”
   ‘Is it fast?” Touching the hover’s armored flank.
   “Sure, but you’ll need a new spine after about an hour.”
   “How about the law?”
   “Can’t much say they like the way it looks, but it’s certified street-legal. No law against armor that I know of.”

   “Angie’s feeling better,” Sally said as he followed her in through the kitchen door, “aren’t you, honey?”
   Mitchell’s daughter looked up from the kitchen table. Her bruising, like Turner’s, had faded to a pair of fat commas, like painted blue-black tears.
   “My friend here’s a doctor,” Turner said. “He checked you out when you were under. He says you’re doing okay.”
   “Your brother He’s not a doctor”
   “Sorry, Turner,” Sally said, at the stove. “I’m pretty much straightforward.”
   “Well, he’s not a doctor,” he said, “but he’s smart. We were worried that Maas might have done something to you, fixed it so you’d get sick if you left Arizona . .
   “Like a cortex bomb?” She spooned cold cereal from a cracked bowl with apple blossoms around the rim, part of a set that Turner remembered.
   “Lord,” Sally said, “what have you gotten yourself into, Turner?”
   “Good question.” He took a seat at the table. Angie chewed her cereal, staring at him.
   “Angie,” he said, “when Rudy scanned you, he found something in your head.”
   She stopped chewing.
   “He didn’t know what it was. Something someone put there, maybe when you were a lot younger. Do you know what I mean?”
   She nodded.
   “Do you know what it is?”
   She swallowed. “No.”
   “But you know who put it there?”
   “Yes.”
   “Your father?”
   “Yes.”
   “Do you know why?”
   “Because I was sick.”
   “How were you sick?”
   “I wasn’t smart enough.”
   He was ready by noon, the hovercraft fueled and waiting by the chainlink gates. Rudy had given him a rectangular black ziploc stuffed with New Yen, some of the bills worn almost translucent with use.
   “I tried that tape through a French lexicon,” Rudy said, while one of the hounds rubbed its dusty ribs against his legs. “Doesn’t work. I think it’s some kind of Creole. Maybe African. You want a copy?”
   “No,” Turner said, “you hang on to it.”
   “Thanks,” Rudy said, “but no thanks. I don’t plan on admitting you were ever here if anybody asks. Sally and I, we’re heading in to Memphis this afternoon, stay with a couple of friends. Dogs’ll watch the house.” He scratched the animal behind its plastic hood. “Right, boy?” The dog whined and twitched. “I had to train ‘em off coon hunting when I put their infrareds in,” he said. “There wouldn’t’ve been any coons left in the county.
   Sally and the girl came down the porch steps, Sally carrying a broken-down canvas carryall she’d filled with sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. Turner remembered her in the bed upstairs and smiled. She smiled back. She looked older today, tired. Angie had discarded the bloodstained MAAS-NEOTEK T-shirt in favor of a shapeless black sweatshirt Sally had found for her. It made her look even younger than she was. Sally had also managed to incorporate the remaining bruises into a baroque job of eye makeup that clashed weirdly with her kid’s face and baggy shirt.
   Rudy handed Turner the key to the hovercraft. “I had my old Cray cook me a precis of recent corporate news this morning One thing you should probably know is that Maas Biolabs has announced the accidental death of Dr. Christopher Mitchell.”
   “Impressive, how vague those people can be.”
   “And you Just keep the harness on real tight,” Sally was saying, or your ass’ll be black and blue before you hit that Statesboro bypass.”
   Rudy glanced at the girl, then back at Turner. Turner could see the broken veins at the base of his brother’s nose. His eyes were bloodshot and there was a pronounced tic in his left eyelid. “Well, I guess that’s it. Funny, but I’d come to figure I wouldn’t see you again. Kind of funny to see you back here.”
   “Well,” Turner said, “you’ve both done more than I’d any right to expect
   Sally glanced away.
   “So thanks. I guess we better go” He climbed up into the cab of the hover, wanting to be gone Sally squeezed the girl’s wrist, gave her the carryall, and stood beside her while she climbed up the two hinged footrests. Turner settled into the driver’s seat.
   “She kept asking for you,” Rudy said. “After a while it got so bad, the endorphin analogs couldn’t really cut the pain, and every two hours or so, she’d ask where you were, when you were coming.”
   “I sent you money,” Turner said “Enough to take her to Chiba. The clinics there could have tried something new.”
   Rudy snorted. “Chiba? Jesus. She was an old woman. What the hell good would it have done, keeping her alive in Chiba for a few more months? What she mainly wanted was to see you.”
   “Didn’t work out that way.” Turner said as the girl got into the seat beside his and placed the bag on the floor, between her feet. “Be seeing you, Rudy.” He nodded.
   “Sally.”
   “So long,” Sally said, her arm around Rudy.
   “Who were you talking about?” Angie asked, as the hatch came down. Turner put the key in the ignition and fired up the turbine, simultaneously inflating the apron bag. Through the narrow window at his side, he saw Rudy and Sally back quickly away from the hover, the hound cowering and snapping at the noise of the turbine. The pedals and hand controls were oversized, designed to permit ease of operation for a driver wearing a radiation suit. Turner eased them out through the gates and swung around on a wide patch of gravel drive. Angie was buckling her harness.
   “My mother,” he said.
   He revved the turbine and they jolted forward
   “I never knew my mother,” she said, and Turner remembered that her father was dead, and that she didn’t know it yet. He hit the throttle and they shot off down the gravel drive, barely missing one of Rudy’s hounds.

   Sally had been right about the thing’s ride; there was constant vibration from the turbine. At ninety kilometers per hour, on the skewed asphalt of the old state highway, it shook their teeth. The armored apron bag rode the broken surfaces heavily; the skim effect of a civilian sport model would only be possible on a perfectly smooth, flat surface.
   Turner found himself liking it, though You pointed, eased back the throttle, and you went. Someone had hung a pair of pink sun-faded foam dice above the forward vision-slit, and the whine of the turbine was a solid thing behind him. The girl seemed to relax, taking in the roadside scenery with an absent, almost contented expression, and Turner was grateful that he wasn’t required to make conversation. You’re hot, he thought, glancing sidelong at her, you’re probably the single most hotly pursued little item on the face of the planet today, and here I am hauling you off to the Sprawl in Rudy’s kidstuff war wagon, no fucking idea what I’m going to do with you now... Or who it was zapped the mall...
   Run it through, he told himself, as they swung down into the valley, run it through again, eventually something’ll click. Mitchell had contacted Hosaka, said he was coming over Hosaka hired Conroy and assembled a medical crew to check Mitchell for kinks. Conroy had put the teams together, working with Turner’s agent. Turner’s agent was a voice in Geneva. A telephone number. Hosaka had sent Allison in to vet him in Mexico, then Conroy had pulled him out Webber, just before the shit hit the fan, had said that she was Conroy’s plant at the site... Someone had jumped them, as the girl was coming in, flares and automatic weapons. That felt like Maas, to him, it was the sort of move he’d expect, the sort of thing his hired muscle was there to deal with Then the white sky... He thought about what Rudy had said about a railgun... Who? And the mess in the girl’s head, the things Rudy had turned up on his tomograph and his NMR imager. She said her father had never planned on coming out himself.
   “No company,” she said, to the window.
   “How’s that?”
   “You don’t have a company, do you? I mean, you work for whoever hires you.”
   “That’s right.”
   “Don’t you get scared?”
   “Sure, but not because of that.
   “We’ve always had the company. My father said I’d be all right, that I was just going to another company...”
   “You’ll be fine. He was right. I just have to find out what’s going on. Then I’ll get you where you need to go “To Japan?”
   “Wherever.”
   “Have you been there?”
   “Sure.”
   “Would I like it?”
   “Why not?”
   Then she lapsed into silence again, and Turner concentrated on the road.

   “It makes me dream,” she said as he leaned forward to turn on the headlights, her voice barely audible above the turbine.”
   “What does?” He pretended to be lost in his driving, careful not to glance her way.
   “The thing in my head. Usually it’s only when I’m asleep.”
   “Yeah?” Remembering the whites of her eyes in Rudy’s bedroom, the shuddering, the rush of words in a language he didn’t know.
   “Sometimes when I’m awake. It’s like I’m jacked into a deck, only I’m free of the grid, flying, and I’m not alone there. The other night I dreamed about a boy, and he’d reached out, picked up something, and it was hurting him, and he couldn’t see that he was free, that he only needed to let go. So I told him. And for just a second, I could see where he was, and that wasn’t like a dream at all, just this ugly little room with a stained carpet, and I could tell he needed a shower, and feel how the insides of his shoes were sticky, because he wasn’t wearing socks... That’s not like the dreams...”
   “No?”
   “No. The dreams are all big, big things, and I’m big too, moving, with the others.”
   Turner let his breath out as the hover whined up the concrete ramp to the Interstate, suddenly aware that he’d been holding it. “What others?”
   “The bright ones.” Another silence. “Not people...”
   “You spend much time in cyberspace, Angie? I mean jacked in, with a deck?”
   “No. Just school stuff. My father said it wasn’t good for me.”
   “He say anything about those dreams?”
   “Only that they were getting realer. But I never told him about the others.
   “You want to tell me? Maybe it’ll help me understand, figure out what we need to do...”
   “Some of them tell me things Stories. Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around Then something happened, and it it knew itself. There’s a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the whole thing know itself... And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others, the bright ones. But it’s hard to tell, because they don’t tell it with words, exactly...”
   Turner felt the skin on his neck prickle. Something coming back to him, up out of the drowned undertow of Mitchell’s dossier Hot burning shame in a hallway, dirty cream paint peeling, Cambridge, the graduate dorms... “Where were you born, Angie?”
   “England. Then my father got into Maas, we moved. To Geneva.”

   Somewhere in Virginia he eased the hovercraft over onto the gravel shoulder and out into an overgrown pasture, dust from the dry summer swirling out behind them as he swung them left and into a stand of pine. The turbine died as they settled into the apron bag.
   “We might as well eat now.” he said, reaching back for Sally’s canvas carryall.
   Angie undid her harness and unzipped the black sweatshirt Under it, she wore something tight and white, a child’s smooth tanned flesh showing in the scoop neck above young breasts. She took the bag from him and began unwrapping the sandwiches Sally had made for him. “What’s wrong with your brother?” she asked, handing him half a sandwich.
   “How do you mean?”
   “Well, there’s something... He drinks all the time, Sally said. Is he unhappy?”
   “I don’t know,” Turner said, hunching and twisting the aches out of his neck and shoulders. “I mean, he must be, but I don’t know exactly why. People get stuck, sometimes.”
   “You mean when they don’t have companies to take care of them?” She bit into her sandwich.
   He looked at her. “Are you putting me on?”
   She nodded, her mouth full Swallowed “A little bit I know that a lot of people don’t work for Maas. Never have and never will You’re one, your brother’s another. But it was a real question. I kind of liked Rudy, you know? But he just seemed so -”
   “Screwed up,” he finished for her, still holding his sandwich. “Stuck. What it is, I think there’s a jump some people have to make, sometimes, and if they don’t do it, then they’re stuck good. And Rudy never did it.”
   “Like my father wanting to get me out of Maas? Is that a jump?”
   “No. Some jumps you have to decide on for yourself.
   Just figure there’s something better waiting for you somewhere...” He paused, feeling suddenly ridiculous, and bit into the sandwich.
   “Is that what you thought?”
   He nodded, wondering if it were true.
   “So you left, and Rudy stayed -”
   “He was smart Still is, and he’d rolled up a bunch of degrees, did it all on the line. Got a doctorate in biotechnology from Tulane when he was twenty, a bunch of other stuff. Never sent out any resumes, nothing. We’d have recruiters turn up from all over, and he’d bullshit them, pick fights... I think he thought he could make something on his own. Like those hoods on the dogs I think he’s got a couple of original patents there, but... Anyway, he stayed there. Got into dealing and doing hardware for people, and he was hot stuff in the county. And our mother got sick, she was sick for a long time, and I was away.
   “Where were you?” She opened the thermos and the smell of coffee filled the cabin.
   “As far away as I could get,” he said, startled by the anger in his voice.
   She passed him the plastic mug, filled to the brim with hot black coffee.
   “How about you? You said you never knew your mother.”
   “I didn’t. They split when I was little. She wouldn’t come back in on the contract unless he agreed to cut her in on some kind of stock plan. That’s what he said anyway.”
   “So what’s he like?” He sipped coffee, then passed it back.
   She looked at him over the rim of the red plastic mug, her eyes ringed with Sally’s makeup. ‘You tell me,” she said. “Or else ask me in twenty years. I’m seventeen, how the hell am I supposed to know?”
   He laughed. “You’re starting to feel a little better now?”
   “I guess so. Considering the circumstances.”
   And suddenly he was aware of her, in a way he hadn’t been before, and his hands went anxiously to the controls.
   “Good. We still have a long way to go.”

   They slept in the hovercraft that night, parked behind the rusting steel lattice that had once supported a drive-in theater screen in southern Pennsylvania, Turner’s parka spread on the armor-plate floorboards below the turbine’s long bulge. She’d sipped the last of the coffee, cold now, as she sat in the square hatch opening above the passenger seat, watching the lightning bugs pulse across a field of yellowed grass.
   Somewhere in his dreams – still colored with random flashes from her father’s dossier – she rolled against him, her breasts soft and warm against his bare back through the thin fabric of her T-shirt, and then her arm came over him to stroke the flat muscles of his stomach, but he lay still, pretending to a deeper sleep, and soon found his way down into the darker passages of Mitchell’s biosoft, where strange things came to mingle with his own oldest fears and hurts. And woke at dawn to hear her singing softly to herself from her perch in the roof hatch.
   “My daddy he’s a handsome devil
   got a chain ‘bout nine miles long
   And from every link
   A heart does dangle
   Of another maid
   He’s loved and wronged.”

22 JAMMER’S

   JAMMER’S WAS UP twelve more flights of dead escalator and occupied the rear third of the top floor. Aside from Leon’s place, Bobby had never seen a nightclub, and he found Jammer’s both impressive and scary. Impressive because of its scale and what he took to be the exceptional quality of the fittings, and scary because a nightclub, by day, is somehow inately unreal. Witchy. He peered around, thumbs snagged in the back pockets of his new jeans, while Jackie conducted a whispered conversation with a long-faced white man in rum-pled blue coveralls. The place was fitted out with dark ultrasuede banquettes, round black tables, and dozens of or-nate screens of pierced wood. The ceiling was painted black, each table faintly illuminated by its own little recessed flood aimed straight down out of the dark There was a central stage, brightly lit now with work lights strung on yellow flex, and, in the middle of the stage, a set of cherry-red acoustic drums. He wasn’t sure why, but it gave him the creeps; some sidelong sense of a half-life, as though something was about to shift, just at the edge of his vision...
   “Bobby,” Jackie said, “come over here and meet Jammer.”
   He crossed the stretch of plain dark carpet with all the cool
   he could muster and faced the long-faced man, who had dark, thinning hair and wore a white evening shirt under his coveralls. The man’s eyes were narrow, the hollows of his cheeks shadowed with a day’s growth of beard.
   “Well,” the man said, “you want to be a cowboy?” He was looking at Bobby’s T-shirt and Bobby had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be about to laugh.
   “Jammer was a jockey,” Jackie said. “Hot as they come.
   Weren’t you, Jammer?”
   “So they say,” Jammer said, still looking at Bobby. “Long time ago, Jackie. How many hours you logged, running?” he asked Bobby.
   Bobby’s face went hot. “Well, one, I guess.”
   Jammer raised his bushy eyebrows. “Gotta start somewhere.” He smiled, his teeth small and unnaturally even and, Bobby thought, too numerous.
   “Bobby,” Jackie said, “why don’t you ask Jammer about this Wig character the Finn was telling you about?”
   Jammer glanced at her, then back to Bobby. “You know the Finn? For a hotdogger you’re in pretty deep, aren’t you?” He took a blue plastic inhaler from his hip pocket and inserted it in his left nostril, snorted, then put it back in his pocket. “Ludgate. The Wig. Finn’s talking about the Wig? Must be in his dotage.”
   Bobby didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. “Well,” Bobby ventured, “this Wig’s up in orbit somewhere, and he sells the Finn stuff, sometimes...”
   “No shit? Well, you coulda fooled me. I woulda told you the Wig was either dead or drooling. Crazier than your usual cowboy, you know what I mean? Batshit. Gone. Haven’t heard of him in years.”
   “Jammer,” Jackie said, “I think it’s maybe best if Bobby just tells you the story. Beauvoir’s due here this afternoon, and he’ll have some questions for you, so you better know where things stand...”
   Jammer looked at her. “Well. I see. Mr. Beauvoir’s calling in that favor, is he?”
   “Can’t speak for him,” she said, “but that would be my guess. We need a safe place to store the Count here.” “What count?”
   “Me,” Bobby said, “that’s me.”
   “Great,” Jammer said, with a total lack of enthusiasm. “So come on back into the office.”
   Bobby couldn’t keep his eyes off the cyberspace deck that took up a third of the surface of Jammer’s antique oak desk It was matte black, a custom job, no trademarks anywhere. He kept craning forward, while he told Jammer about Two-a-Day and his attempted run, about the girl-feeling thing and his mother getting blown up. It was the hottest-looking deck he’d ever seen, and he remembered Jackie saying that Jammer had been such a shithot cowboy in his day.
   Jammer slumped back in his chair when Bobby was finished. “You wanna try it?” he asked. He sounded tired.
   “Try it?”
   “The deck. I think you might wanna try it It’s something about the way you keep rubbing your ass on the chair. Either you wanna try it or you gotta piss bad”
   “Shit yeah. I mean, yeah, thanks, yeah, I would...”
   “Why not? No way for anybody to know it’s you and not me, right? Why don’t you jack in with him, Jackie? Kinda keep track.” He opened a desk drawer and took out two trode sets. “But don’t do anything, right? I mean, just buzz on out and spin. Don’t try to run any numbers I owe Beauvoir and Lucas a favor, and it looks like how I’m paying it back is by helping keep you intact.” He handed one set of trodes to Jackie, the other to Bobby. He stood up, grabbed handles on either side of the black console, and spun it around so it faced Bobby. “Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Thing’s ten years old and it’ll still wipe ass on most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight up from scratch He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist, once. The two of ‘em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born.”
   Bobby already had his trodes on. Now he looked at Jackie “You ever jack tandem before?”
   He shook his head.
   “Okay. We’ll jack, but I’ll hang off your left shoulder. I say jack out, jack out. You see anything funny. It’ll be because I’m with you, understand?”
   He nodded.
   She undid a pair of long, silver-headed pins at the rear of her fedora and took it off, putting it down on the desk beside Jammer’s deck. She slid the trodes on over the orange silk headscarf and smoothed the contacts against her forehead.
   “Let’s go,” she said.
   Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer’s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he didn’t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the nonplace that was cyberspace. “Slow it down, Bobby.” Jackie’s voice low and sweet, beside him in the void.
   “Jesus Christ, this thing’s slick!”
   “Yeah, but damp it down. The rush isn’t any good for us. You want to cruise. Keep us up here and slow it down.
   He eased off on forward until they seemed to coast along. He turned to the left, expecting to see her there, but there was nothing.
   “I’m here,” she said, “don’t worry
   “Who was Quine?”
   “Quine? Some cowboy Jammer knew. He knew ‘em all, in his day.”
   He took a right-angle left at random, pivoting smoothly at the grid intersection, testing the deck for response. It was amazing, totally unlike anything he’d felt before in cyberspace. “Holy shit. This thing makes an Ono-Sendai look like a kid’s toy.
   “It’s probably got O-S circuitry in it. That’s what they used to use, Jammer says. Takes us up a little more...”
   They rose effortlessly through the grid, the data receding below them “There isn’t a hell of a lot to see up here,” he complained.
   “Wrong. You see some interesting stuff, you hang out long enough in the blank parts...”
   The fabric of the matrix seemed to shiver, directly in front of them...”
   “Uh, Jackie...”
   “Stop here. Hold it. It’s okay. Trust me.”
   Somewhere, far away, his hands moving over the unfamiliar keyboard configuration He held them steady now, while a section of cyberspace blurred, grew milky. “What is -”
   “Danbala ap monte I,” the voice said, harsh in his head, and in his mouth a taste like blood. “Danbala is nding her.” He knew, somehow, what the words meant, but the voice was iron in his head The milky fabric divided, seemed to bubble, became two patches of shifting gray.
   “Legba,” she said, “Legba and Ougou Feray, god of war. Papa Ougou’ St. Jacques Majeur! Viv Ia Vyéj!”
   Iron laughter filled the matrix, sawing through Bobby’s head.
   “Map kite tout mizé ak tout giyon,” said another voice, fluid and quicksilver and cold. “See, Papa, she has come here to throw away her bad luck!” And then that one laughed as well, and Bobby fought down a wave of sheer hysteria as the silver laughter rose through him like bubbles.
   “Has she bad luck, the horse of Danbala?” boomed the iron voice of Ougou Feray, and for an instant Bobby thought he saw a figure flicker in the gray fog. The voice hooted its terrible laughter. “Indeed! Indeed! But she knows it not! She is not my horse, no, else I would cure her luck!” Bobby wanted to cry, to die, anything to escape the voices, the utterly impossible wind that had started to blow out of the gray warps, a hot damp wind that smelled of things he couldn’t identify. “And she calls praise on the Virgin! Hear me, little sister! La Vyéj draws close indeed!”
   “Yes,” said the other, “she moves through my province now, I who rule the roads, the highways.”
   “But I, Ougou Feray, tell you that your enemies draw near as well! To the gates, sister, and beware”‘
   And then the gray areas faded, dwindled, shrank...
   “Jack us out,” she said her voice small and distant And then she said, “Lucas is dead.”

   Jammer took a bottle of Scotch from his desk drawer and carefully poured six centimeters of the stuff into a plastic highball glass. “You look like shit,” he said to Jackie, and Bobby was startled by the gentleness in the man’s voice They’d been jacked out for at least ten minutes and nobody had said anything at all. Jackie looked crushed and kept gnawing at her lower lip. Jammer looked either unhappy or angry, Bobby wasn’t sure.
   “How come you said Lucas was dead?” Bobby ventured, because it seemed to him that the silence was silting up in Jammer’s cramped office like something that could choke you.
   Jackie looked at him but didn’t seem to focus. “They wouldn’t come to me like that if Lucas were alive,” she said. “There are pacts, agreements. Legba is always invoked first, but he should have come with Danbala. His personality depends on the ba he manifests with. Lucas must be dead.”
   Jammer pushed the glass of whiskey across the desk, but Jackie shook her head, the trode set still riding her forehead, chrome and black nylon. He made a disgusted face, pulled the glass back, and downed it himself. “What a load of shit Things made a lot more sense before you people started screwing around with them.”
   “We didn’t bring them here, Jammer,” she said. “They were just there, and they found us because we understood them!”
   “Same load of shit,” Jammer said, wearily. “Whatever they are, wherever they came from, they just shaped them-selves to what a bunch of crazed spades wanted to see. You follow me? There’s no way in hell there’d be anything out there that you had to talk to in fucking bush Haitian! You and your voodoo cult, they just saw that and they saw a setup, and Beauvoir and Lucas and the rest, they’re businessmen first. And those Goddamn things know how to make deals!
   It’s a natural!” He tightened the cap on his bottle and put it back in the drawer. “You know, hon. it could just be that somebody very big, with a lot of muscle on the grid, they’re just taking you for a ride. Projecting those things, all that shit... And you know it’s possible, don’t you? Don’t you, Jackie?”
   “No way,” Jackie said, her voice cold and even. “But how I know that’s not anything I can explain...”
   Jammer took a black slab of plastic from his pocket and began to shave. “Sure,” he said. The razor hummed as he worked on the line of his jaw. “I lived in cyberspace for eight years, right? Well, I know there wasn’t anything out there, not then... Anyway, you want me to phone Lucas, set your mind at ease one way or the other? You got the phone number for that Rolls of his?”
   “No,” Jackie said, “don’t bother Best we lay low till Beauvoir turns up.” She stood, pulling off the trodes and picking up her hat. “I’m going to lie down, try to sleep. You keep an eye on Bobby.” She turned and walked to the office door. She looked as though she were sleepwalking, all the energy gone out of her.
   “Wonderful.” Jammer said, running the shaver along his upper lip. “You want a drink?” he asked Bobby.
   “Well,” Bobby said, “it’s kind of early...”
   “For you. maybe.” He put the razor back in his pocket.
   The door closed behind Jackie. Jammer leaned forward slightly.
   “What did they look like, kid? You get a make?”
   “Just kind of grayish. Fuzzy...”
   Jammer looked disappointed. He slouched back in his chair again. “I don’t think you can get a good look at ‘em unless you’re part of it.” He drummed his fingers on the chair arm. “You think they’re for real?”
   “Well, I wouldn’t wanna try messing one around...”
   Jammer looked at him. “No? Well, maybe you’re smarter than you look, there. I wouldn’t wanna try messing one around myself. I got out of the game before they started turning up.
   “So what do you think they are?”
   “Ah, still getting smarter... Well, I don’t know Like I said, I don’t think I can swallow them being a bunch of Haitian voodoo gods, but who knows?” He narrowed his eyes. “Could be, they’re virus programs that have gotten loose in the matrix and replicated, and gotten really smart That’s scary enough; maybe the Turing people want it kept quiet. Or maybe the Al’s have found a way to split parts of themselves off into the matrix, which would drive the Turings crazy. I knew this Tibetan guy did hardware mod for jockeys, he said they were tulpas...”
   Bobby blinked.
   ‘A tulpa’s a thought form, kind of. Superstition. Really heavy people can split off a kind of ghost, made of negative energy.” He shrugged “More horseshit Like Jackie’s voodoo guys.”
   “Well, it looks to me like Lucas and Beauvoir and the others, they sure as hell play it like it was all real, and not just like it was an act.”
   Jammer nodded. “You got it And they been doing damn well for themselves by it, too, so there’s something there He shrugged and yawned “I gotta sleep, too. You can do whatever you want, as long as you keep your hands off my deck. And don’t try to go outside, or ten kinds of alarms will start screaming. There’s juice and cheese and shit in the fridge behind the bar.
   Bobby decided that the place was still scary, now that he had it to himself, but that it was interesting enough to make the scariness worthwhile. He wandered up and down behind the bar, touching the handles of the beer taps and the chrome drink nozzles. There was a machine that made ice, and another one that dispensed boiling water. He made himself a cup of Japanese instant coffee and sorted through Jammer’s file of audio cassettes. He’d never heard of any of the bands or artists. He wondered whether that meant that Jammer, who was old, liked old stuff, or if this was all really new stuff that wouldn’t filter out to Barrytown, probably by way of Leon’s, for another two weeks... He found a gun under the black and silver universal credit console at the end of the bar, a kind of fat little machine gun with a magazine that stuck straight down out of the handle. It was stuck under the bar with a strip of lime-green Velcro, and he didn’t think it was a good idea to touch it. After a while, he didn’t feel frightened anymore, just kind of bored and edgy. He took his cooling coffee and walked out into the middle of the seating area. He sat at one of the tables and pretended he was Count Zero, top console artist in the Sprawl, waiting for some dudes to show and talk about a deal, some run they needed done and nobody but the Count was even remotely up for it. “Sure,” he said, to the empty nightclub, his eyes hooded, “I’ll cut it for you... If you got the money...” They paled when he named his price.
   The place was soundproofed; you couldn’t hear the bustle of the fourteenth floor’s stalls at all, only the hum of some kind of air conditioner and the occasional gurgles of the hot-water machine. Tired of the Count’s power plays, Bobby left the coffee cup on the table and crossed to the entrance-way, running his hand along an old stuffed velvet rope that was slung between polished brass poles. Careful not to touch the glass doors themselves, he settled himself on a cheap steel stool with a tape-patched leatherette top, beside the coat-check window A dim bulb burned in the coatroom; you could see a couple of dozen old wooden hangers dangling from steel rods, each one hung with a round yellow hand-numbered tag. He guessed Jammer sat here sometimes to check out the clientele. He didn’t really see why anybody who’d been a shithot cowboy for eight years would want to run a nightclub, but maybe it was sort of a hobby. He guessed you could get a lot of girls, running a nightclub, but he’d assumed you could get a lot anyway if you were rich. And if Jammer had been a top jock for eight years, Bobby figured he had to be rich...
   He thought about the scene in the matrix, the gray patches and the voices. He shivered. He still didn’t see why it meant Lucas was dead. How could Lucas be dead? Then he remembered that his mother was dead, and somehow that didn’t seem too real either. Jesus. It all got on his nerves. He wished he were outside, on the other side of the doors, checking out the stalls and the shoppers and the people who worked there. He reached out and drew the velour curtain aside, just wide enough to peer out through the thick old glass, taking in the rainbow jumble of stalls and the characteristic grazing gait of the shoppers. And framed for him, square in the middle of it all, beside a table jammed with surplus analog VOM’s, logic probes, and power conditioners, was the raceless, bone-heavy face of Leon, and the deepset, hideous eyes seemed to look into Bobby’s with an audible click of recognition. And then Leon did something Bobby couldn’t remember ever having seen him do. He smiled.