5

   The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel each coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.
   "He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off."
   "I ran into one of your pals," he said, "a Modern."


"Yeah? Which one?"
"Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message." He passed her a paper napkin with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. "He said amp;ndash; " But her hand came up in the jive for silence.
"Get us some crab," she said.
After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease, they tubed in to New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke.
A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven tightly into her hair opened the Finn's door and led them along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence . Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's waste places.
Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.
Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn't know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of Partagas.
"Wait," the Finn said, and left the room.
Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed.
Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an elaborate sequence.
"Honey," he said to Molly, tucking the console away, "you have got it. No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?"
"Yonderboy," Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. "I did a deal with Larry, on the side."
"Smart," the Finn said. "It's an AI."
"Slow it down a little," Case said.
"Berne," the Finn said, ignoring him. "Berne. It's got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software."
"What's in Berne, okay?" Case deliberately stepped between them.
"Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence."
"That's all just fine," Molly said, "but where's it get us?"
"If Yonderboy's right," the Finn said, "this Al is backing Armitage."
"I paid Larry to have the Modems nose around Ammitage a little," Molly explained, turning to Case. "They have some very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they'd get my money if they answered one question: who's running Armitage?"
"And you think it's this AI? Those things aren't allowed any autonomy. It'll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . ."
"Tessier-Ashpool S.A.," said the Finn. "And I got a little story for you about them. Wanna hear?" He sat down and hunched forward.
"Finn," Molly said. "He loves a story."
"Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.
The Finn was a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's story, a man he called Smith.
Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who'd "gone silicon" amp;ndash; the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case amp;ndash; and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. "It smelled," the Finn said to Case, "smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful."
Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year's tax return.
Smith's clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it.
When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object.
Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's death.
"So that was where I came in," the Finn continued. "Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's where you go for a quiet go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird business experience and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add up. Who'd paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn't anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us."
Case raised his eyebrows.
"Freeside," the Finn said. "The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high amp;ndash;orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it's hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time."
"How's that?" Molly asked.
"Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident...."
"So what happened with your fence?"
"Nothing." The Finn frowned. "Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have, and that was it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart." He looked at Molly. "The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private."
"You figure they own that ninja, Finn?" Molly asked.
"Smith thought so."
"Expensive," she said. "Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?"
"Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed."
"Okay," Case said, "we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute. Where's that get us?"
"Nowhere yet," Molly said, "but you got a little side gig now." She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.
"Who's this?"
"Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Moderns. Separate deal. Where is it?"
"London," Case said.
"Crack it." She laughed. "Earn your keep for a change."
Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded platform. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since.
It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses.... The local came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station.
He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric of light: T-A.
He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cowboy. No other way to learn.
They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the 'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine amp;ndash; slender, street level, and the only one going amp;ndash; had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible. "It was big," another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, "but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath." Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.
"Boy," the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, "I'm like them huge fuckin' lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an' one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin'. Hit that black stuff and ol' tailbrain jus' kept right on keepin' on."
The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace....
And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs.
Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast.
He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight.
"Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
"It's Case, man. Remember?"
"Miami, joeboy, quick study."
"What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?"
"Nothin'."
"Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?"
"You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
"Ca amp;ndash; your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?"
"Good question."
"Remember being here, a second ago?"
"No."
"Know how a ROM personality matrix works?"
"Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."
"So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?"
"Guess so," said the construct.
"Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"
"If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"
"Case."
"Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study."
"Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?"
"You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?"

6

   "You want you a paradise," the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. "Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section." The voice recited coordinates as he punched.
   They found their paradise, a "pirate's paradise," on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties.
   "There," said the Flatline, "the blue one. Make it out? That's an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow."
   Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
   "Here," said the voice, "I'll do it for you." The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.
   "Big deal," said the Flatline. "No ice at all."
   "Scan this shit," Case told the Hosaka. "Sift for owner's personal history."
   The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a simple lozenge of white light. "Contents are primarily video recordings of postwar military trials," said the distant voice of the Hosaka. "Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto."


"Show it already," Case said.
A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.
Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him.
"You find anything?" she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.
"Tell you later," he said, "I'm wrecked." He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
"They sure as hell did shaft you, boss," Case said, and Molly stirred beside him.
The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.
Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling....
There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.
He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was.
No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk.
His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September.
The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set fire to his room.
Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.
One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything had gone gray.
Translated French medical records explained that a man without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire experiment.
The record ended there.
Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her.
The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. "Yeah?"
"We're going to Istanbul," Armitage said. "Tonight."
"What does the bastard want?" Molly asked.
"Says we're going to Istanbul tonight."
"That's just wonderful."
Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times. Molly sat up and turned on the light.
"What about my gear?" Case asked. "My deck."
"Finn will handle it," said Armitage, and hung up.
Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag.
"You hurting?" he asked.
"I could do with another night at Chin's."
"Your dentist?"
"You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full clinic. Does repairs for samurai." She was zipping her bag.
"You ever been to 'Stambul?"
"Couple days, once."
"Never changes," she said. "Bad old town."
"It was like this when we headed for Chiba," Molly said, staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. "We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was playing ghost with you in Night City." She took a silk scarf from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete.
The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.

7

   It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.
   "This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ottoman Istanbul," purred the Mercedes.


"So it's gone downhill," Case said.
"The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi," Molly said. She settled back against the car's gray ultrasuede.
"How come Armitage flies alone?" Case asked. He had a headache.
"'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine."
He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against it. He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.
The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat incision, laying the city open. He'd watched the crazy walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, arcologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron.
The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour armchair in a sea of pale blue carpeting.
"Christ," Molly said. "Rat in a business suit."
They crossed the lobby.
"How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?" She lowered her bag beside the armchair. "Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit, huh?"
The Finn' s upper lips drew back. "Not enough, sweetmeat. " He handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. "You're registered already. Honcho's upstairs." He looked around. "This town sucks."
"You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just pretend it's Brooklyn or something." She twirled the key around a finger. "You here as valet or what?"
"I gotta check out some guy's implants," the Finn said.
"How about my deck?" Case asked.
The Finn winced. "Observe the protocol. Ask the boss."
Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
"Yeah," she said, "I know who that is." She jerked her head in the direction of the elevators. "Come on, cowboy." Case followed her with both bags.
Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd first seen Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers in rumpled green uniforms. They entered the hotel across the street.
He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness struck him. She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected part of the room's light fixture.
He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice. "Glad you're up," Armitage said.
"I'm just. Lady's still under. Listen, boss, I think it's maybe time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a little more about what I'm doing."
Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
"You know as much as you need to. Maybe more."
"You think so?"
"Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You'll have a caller in about fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian." The phone bleated softly. Armitage was gone.
"Wake up, baby," Case said. "Biz."
"I've been awake an hour already." The mirrors turned.
"We got a Jersey Bastion coming up."
"You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you're part Armenian. That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me up."
Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and gold-framed, mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first mistook it for some kind of t-shirt. He arrived with a black Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
"We must, as you say in Ingiliz , take this one very easy." He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut hair. He smiled. "It is better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel infinity, mirror into mirror.... You particularly," he said to her, "must take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications."
Molly bit one of the pastries in half. "It's my show, Jack," she said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. "I know about you. Stool for the military, right?" Her hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with the fletcher. Case hadn't known she had it.
"Very easy, please," Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen centimeters from his lips.
She extended the gun. "Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You won't feel it for months."
"Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight...."
"I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass out of here." She put the gun away.
"He is living in Fener, at Kuchuk Gulhane Djaddesi 14. 1 have his tunel route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modern place in the style turistik , but it has been arranged that the police have shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir management has grown nervous." He smiled. He smelled of some metallic aftershave.
"I want to know about the implants," she said, massaging her thigh, "I want to know exactly what he can do."
Terzibashjian nodded. "Worst is how you say in Ingiliz , the subliminals." He made the word four careful syllables.
"On our left," said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy streets, "is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar."
Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The right side of the street was lined with miniature scrapyards. Case saw a gutted locomotive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble. Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.
"Homesick?" Case asked.
"Place sucks," the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting to resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
"Hey, Jersey," Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind them, "where'd this guy get his stuff installed?"
"In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented." The Mercedes swerved, avoiding a balloon-tired dray stacked with hides. "I have followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion poised beside a brake lever...."
"'What you see is what you get,' yeah," the Finn said. "I seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina over easy."
"You have told this to your woman friend?" Terzibashjian leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. "In Turkey, women are still women. This one. . ."
The Finn snorted. "She'd have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed."
"I do not understand this idiom."
"That's okay," Case said. "Means shut up."
The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of aftershave. He began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in French. The Mercedes swung smoothly around a corner. "The spice bazaar, sometimes called the Egyptian bazaar," the car said, "was erected on the site of an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs...."
"Drugs," Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and recross the bulletproof Lexan. "What's that you said before, Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?"
"A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes." The Armenian went back to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo. "Demerol, they used to call that," said the Finn. "He's a speedball artist. Funny class of people you're mixing with, Case."
"Never mind," Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket, "we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something."
Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened noticeably, as though he were comforted by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Armenian along a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered.
"Hey, Christ," the Finn said, taking Case's arm, "looka that." He pointed. "It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?"
Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. "Saw one in Maryland once," the Finn said, "and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak."
The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, balancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses of tea.
Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo. "Come," he said, "he is moving. Each night he rides the tunel to the bazaar, to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman is close. Come."
The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone. "Can't see shit," he whispered to the Finn. "That's okay for sweetmeat," the Finn said. "Quiet," said Terzibashjian, too loudly.
Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
"Now," Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white light, directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the market, pinned the slender figure beside the ancient wooden door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted left, right, and the man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot him; he lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands white and pathetic.
The floodlight never wavered.
The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth, if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved.
Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past Case's head; the Finn jerked him down into a crouch.
The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mismatched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang.
Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shadows. Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and watched blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in her hand.
"Use the radio," the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. "Call in Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place."
"Little prick nearly made it," the Finn said, his knees cracking loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. "You were watching the horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well, help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money's worth."
Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. "A Nambu," she said. "Nice gun."
Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle finger was missing.
With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take them to Topkapi . The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian who seemed on the verge of fainting.
"You're an asshole," Molly told the man, opening the car door for him. "You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights as soon as he stepped out." Terzibashjian glared at her. "So we're through with you anyway." She shoved him in and slammed the door. "Run into you again and I'll kill you," she said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city woke. They passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris.
"What is this thing?" he asked Molly, as the Mercedes parked itself on the fringes of the gardens that surround the Seraglio. He stared dully at the baroque conglomeration of styles that was Topkapi.
"It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King," she said, getting out stretching. "Kept a lotta women there. Now it's a museum. Kinda like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in there big diamonds, swords, the left hand of John the Baptist...."
"Like in a support vat?"
"Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch on the side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off the Christians about a million years ago, and they never dust the goddam thing, 'cause it's an infidel relic."
Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case walked beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept grass made stiff by an early frost. They walked beside a path of cold octagonal flagstones. Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans.
"That Terzi, he's grade-A scum," she said. "He's the secret police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage was offering." In the wet trees around them, birds began to sing.
"I did that job for you," Case said, "the one in London. I got something, but I don't know what it means." He told her the Corto story.
"Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in that Screaming Fist. Looked it up." She stroked the rusted flank of an iron doe. "You figure the little computer pulled him out of it? In that French hospital?"
"I figure Wintermute," Case said.
She nodded.
"Thing is," he said, "do you think he knows he was Corto, before? I mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time he hit the ward, so maybe Wintermute just. . ."
"Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah..." She turned and they walked on. "It figures. You know, the guy doesn't have any life going, in private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for Wintermute."
"So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?"
"Maybe he doesn't know about it," she said. "Maybe it's just in his name, right?"
"I don't get it," Case said.
"Just thinking out loud.... How smart's an Al, Case?"
"Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let 'em get."
"Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-out fascinated with those things?"
"Well," he said, "for starts, they're rare. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the Turing cops, and that's bad heat." He looked at her. "I dunno, it just isn't part of the trip."
"Jockeys all the same," she said. "No imagination."
They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled the stems of some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose pebble in and watched the ripples spread.
"That's Wintermute," she said. "This deal's real big, looks to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there, but not why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to Wintermute."
"I couldn't get near it," he said. "You're dreaming."
"Try."
"Can't be done."
"Ask the Flatline."
"What do we want out of that Riviera?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.
She spat into the pond. "God knows. I'd as soon kill him as look at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object of desire. That's what the file says. And they have to love him first. Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was easy for Terzi to set him up for us, because he's been here three years, shopping politicals to the secret police. Probably Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came out. He's done eighteen in three years. All women age twenty to twenty-five. It kept Terzi in dissidents." She thrust her hands into her jacket pockets. "Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make sure she turned political. He's got a personality like a Modern's suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about human nature, I guess." She stared at the white flowers and the sluggish fish, her face sour. "I think I'm going to have to buy myself some special insurance on that Peter." Then she turned and smiled, and it was very cold.
"What's that mean?"
"Never mind. Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something like breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect his stuff from that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the bazaar and buy him some drugs...."
"Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?"
She laughed. "He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And it looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you better now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny." She smiled. "So I'll go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha."
Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.
"Time to pack," he said, and Case tried to find the man called Corto behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask. He thought of Wage, back in Chiba. Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. But Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been rumored, children. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.
"Where to now?" he asked, walking past the man to stare down into the street. "What kind of climate?"
"They don't have climate, just weather," Armitage said. "Here. Read the brochure." He put something on the coffee table and stood.
"Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?"
"Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home." Armitage smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect's antenna. His gold bracelet clinked as he reached out to prod Case in the chest. "Don't get too smart. Those little sacs are starting to show wear, but you don't know how much."
Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.
When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the brochures. It was expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.
FREESIDE amp;ndash; WHY WAIT?
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop's entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job, nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop faces. The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture.
Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Riviera again. "I bet you're stoned right now, asshole," he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. "See ya lady," he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
"Yeah?"
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
"Hello. Case."
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
"Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk."
It was a chip voice.
"Don't you want to talk, Case?"
He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.

PART THREE

MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
8

   Archipelago.


   The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
   Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data in the L-5 archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen.
   Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town, and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.


On the THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Armitage on the aisle. Once, as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once. "No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that."
Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger. "That's right, Peter. Don't."
Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.
Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell instantly asleep.
Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.
"You been up, haven't you?" Molly asked, as he squirmed his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle.
"Nah. Never travel much, just for biz." The steward was attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
"Hope you don't get SAS," she said.
"Airsick? No way."
"It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g, and your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex, like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of adrenaline." The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new set of trodes from his red plastic apron.
Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb.
He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a big airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane, like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened to the piped koto music and waited.
Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.
* * *
Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's description, but it passed quickly enough and he was able to sleep. The steward woke him as they were preparing to dock at JAL 's terminal cluster.
"We transfer to Freeside now?" he asked, eyeing a shred of Yeheyuan tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to dance ten centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights.
"No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you know? We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster." She touched the release plate on her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of the foam. "Funny choice of venue, you ask me."
"How's that?"
"Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now."
"What's that mean?"
"You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway, they'll let you smoke your cigarettes there."
Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started building. They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. "Here," Molly said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. "Grab the rungs. Make like you're climbing backward, right? You're going toward the hull, that's like you're climbing down into gravity. Got it?"
Case's stomach churned.
"You be fine, mon," Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.
Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.
"Up," Molly said, "you gonna kiss it next?" Case lay flat on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. "Gotta play house," she said. "You help me string this up." He looked around the wide, featureless space and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at random.
When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
"Good," Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial gravity.
"Where were you when it needed doing?" Case asked Riviera.
The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek. "In the head," Riviera said, and smiled.
Case laughed. "Good," Riviera said, "you can laugh. I would have tried to help you, but I'm no good with my hands." He held up his palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
"Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?"
Molly stepped between them. "Yo," Aerol said, from the hatch, "you wan' come wi' me, cowboy mon."
"It's your deck," Armitage said, "and the other gear. Help him get it in from the cargo bay."
"You ver' pale, mon," Aerol said, as they were guiding the foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. "Maybe you wan' eat somethin'."
Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.
* * *
Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear what Riviera was supposed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like asking. A few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. "Hey, Riviera." The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone back and told Armitage. "He's stoned," Molly said, looking up from the disassembled parts of her fletcher. "Leave him be."
Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's ability to operate in the matrix. "Don't sweat it," Case argued, "I jack in and I'm not here. It's all the same."
"Your adrenaline levels are higher," Armitage said. "You've still got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're going to learn to work with it."
"So I do the run from here?"
"No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor...."
Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of data.
"How you doing, Dixie?"
"I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one."
"How's it feel?"
"It doesn't."
"Bother you?"
"What bothers me is, nothin' does."
"How's that?"
"Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's tossin' all night. Elroy. I said, what's eatin' you? Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the other goddam thumb." When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. "Do me a favor, boy."
"What's that, Dix?"
"This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing."
Case didn't understand the Zionites.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. "Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga." He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
"It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him . It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?"
Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that.
"Hey, Aerol," Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice run in the freefall corridor. "Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing." He held out the trodes.
Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
"Try it," Case said.
He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out. "What did you see, man?"
"Babylon," Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the corridor.
Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm extended straight out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon, was coiled tightly a few millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract, tightening around Riviera's arm.
"Come then," the man said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm. "Come." The scorpion swayed its brownish claws and scurried up his arm, its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of veins. When it reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate. Riviera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered, and sank into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him.
Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic syringe in his left hand. "'If God made anything better, he kept it for himself.' You know the expression, Case?"
"Yeah," Case said. "I heard that about lots of different things. You always make it into a little show?"
Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical tubing from his arm. "Yes. It's more fun." He smiled, his eyes distant now, cheeks flushed. "I've a membrane set in, just over the vein, so I never have to worry about the condition of the needle."
"Doesn't hurt?"
The bright eyes met his. "Of course it does. That's part of it, isn't it?"
"I'd just use derms," Case said.
"Pedestrian," Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a short-sleeved white cotton shirt.
"Must be nice," Case said, getting up.
"Get high yourself, Case?"
"I hadda give it up."
"Freeside," Armitage said, touching the panel on the little Braun hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly three meters from tip to tip. "Casinos here." He reached into the skeletal representation and pointed. "Hotels, strata-title property, big shops along here." His hand moved. "Blue areas are lakes." He walked to one end of the model. "Big cigar. Narrows at the ends."
"We can see that fine," Molly said.
"Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher, more rocky, but it's an easy climb. Higher you climb, the lower the gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring here." He pointed.
"A what?" Case leaned forward.
"They race bicycles," Molly said. "Low grav, high-traction tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour."
"This end doesn't concern us," Armitage said with his usual utter seriousness.
"Shit," Molly said, "I'm an avid cyclist."
Riviera giggled.
Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. "This end does." The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and the final segment of the spindle was empty. "This is the Villa Straylight. Steep climb out of gravity and every approach is kinked. There's a single entrance, here, dead center. Zero gravity."
"What's inside, boss?" Riviera leaned forward, craning his neck. Four tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage's finger. Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats.
"Peter," Armitage said, "you're going to be the first to find out. You'll arrange yourself an invitation. Once you're in, you see that Molly gets in."
Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight, remembering the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head, and the ninja.
"Details available?" Riviera asked. "I need to plan a wardrobe, you see."
"Learn the streets," Armitage said, returning to the center of the model. "Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules Verne."
Riviera rolled his eyes.
While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a dozen bright pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even Molly laughed.
Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty eyes.
"Sorry," Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.
Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware of Molly crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her tension. He lay there confused. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. She was up and through the sheet of yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize she'd slashed it open.
"Don't you move, friend."
Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the plastic. "Wha. . . ?"
"Shut up."
"You th' one, mon," said a Zion voice. "Cateye, call 'em call 'em Steppin' Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan converse wi' you an' cowboy."
"What brothers?"
"Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know...."
"We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman," Case whispered.
"Make it special dark, now," the man said. "Come. I an' I visit th' Founders."
"You know how fast I can cut you, friend?"
"Don' stan' talkin', sister. Come."
The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center of a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely covered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with resinous smoke.
"Steppin' Razor," one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber. "Like unto a whippin' stick."
"That is a story we have, sister," said the other, "a religion story. We are glad you've come with Maelcum."
"How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked.
"I came from Los Angeles," the old man said. His dreadlocks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel wool. "Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Steppin' Razor."
Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air.
The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. "Soon come, the Final Days.... Voices. Voices cryin' inna wilderness, prophesyin' ruin unto Babylon...."
"Voices." The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. "We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."
"Call 'em Winter Mute," said the other, making it two words.
Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.
"The Mute talked to us," the first Founder said. "The Mute said we are to help you."
"When was this?" Case asked.
"Thirty hours prior you dockin' Zion."
"You ever hear this voice before?"
"No," said the man from Los Angeles, "and we are uncertain of its meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets ...."
"Listen," Case said, "that's an AI, you know? Artificial intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like to amp;ndash; "
"Babylon," broke in the other Founder, "mothers many demon, I an' I know. Multitude horde!"
"What was that you called me, old man?" Molly asked.
"Steppin' Razor. An' you bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart...."
"What kinda message the voice have?" Case asked.
"We were told to help you," the other said, "that you might serve as a tool of Final Days." His lined face was troubled. "We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey , to the Babylon port of Freeside. And this we shall do."
"Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug pilot."
"But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker , to watch over Garvey ."
An awkward silence filled the dome.
"That's it?" Case asked. "You guys work for Armitage or what?"
"We rent you space," said the Los Angeles Founder. "We have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon's law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been mistaken."
"Measure twice, cut once," said the other, softly.
"Come on, Case," Molly said. "Let's get back before the man figures out we're gone."
"Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister."

9

   The tug Marcus Garvey, a steel drum nine meters long and two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched for a navigational burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of scopolamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS, nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had no effect on his doctored system.
   "How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?" Molly asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.


"Don' be long now, m'seh dat."
"You guys ever think in hours?"
"Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread," and he shook his locks, "at control, mon, an' I an' I come a Freeside when I an' I come...."
"Case," she said, "have you maybe done anything toward getting in touch with our pal from Berne? Like all that time you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?"
"Pal," Case said, "sure. No. I haven't. But I got a funny story along those lines, left over from Istanbul." He told her about the phones in the Hilton.
"Christ," she said, "there goes a chance. How come you hung up?"
"Coulda been anybody," he lied. "Just a chip ... I dunno...."
He shrugged. "Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?"
He shrugged again.
"Do it now."
"What?"
"Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it."
"I'm all doped," he protested, but reached for the trodes. His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.
He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum's shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.
He jacked in.
"Dixie?"
"Yeah."
"You ever try to crack an AI?"
"Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin' jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin' around, you know? And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there and made a pass."
"What did it look like, the visual?"
"White cube."
"How'd you know it was an Al?"
"How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen. So what else was it? The military down there don't have anything like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up."
"Yeah?"
"It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned its Rio mainframe."
Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void of the matrix. "Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?"
"Tessier, yeah."
"And you went back?"
"Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice."
"And your EEG was flat."
"Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?"
Case jacked out. "Shit," he said, "how do you think Dixie got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great...."
"Go on," she said, "the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?"
"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?"
"Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."
Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne.
"Up," the construct said. "It'll be high."
They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.
That'll be it, Case thought.
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
"Don't look much, does it?" the Flatline said. "But just you try and touch it."
"I'm going in for a pass, Dixie."
"Be my guest."
Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass.
"Knows we're here," the Flatline observed.
Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point.
A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.
"Dixie...."
"Back off, fast."
The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and detached itself from the cube.
Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him. Falling.
"Jack out," the Flatline said.
The dark came down like a hammer.
Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine.
And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, under a poisoned silver sky....
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something?"
A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine amp;ndash;
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.
He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of fluorescents.
His back hurt, his spine.
He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
Something had happened....
He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but gave up.
On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It had to be a Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might have money, or at least cigarettes.... Coughing, wringing rain from the front of his shirt, he edged through the crowd to the arcade's entrance.
Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games, ghosts overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell of sweat and bored tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked Bonn on a Tank War console, an azure flash.
She was playing Wizard's Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. "Hey. How you doin'? Look wet."
He kissed her.
"You made me blow my game," she said. "Look there asshole. Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me." She passed him a cigarette. "You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?"
"I don't know."
"You high, Case? Drinkin' again? Eatin' Zone's dex?"
"Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?"
"Hey, it's a put-on, right?" She peered at him. "Right?"
"No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley."
"Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?"
He shook his head.
"There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?"
"I guess so."
"Come on, then." She took his hand. "We'll get you a coffee and something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you, man." She squeezed his hand.
He smiled.
Something cracked.
Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated amp;ndash;
She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat.
The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and styrofoam cups.
"I had a cigarette," Case said, looking down at his whiteknuckled fist. "I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?"
Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors of consoles.
He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.
Ninsei was deserted.
Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled vegetables from a vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case staled at the printed logo and its Japanese translation.
"Okay," he said, picking up the matches and opening the pack of cigarettes. "I hear you."
He took his time climbing the stairs of Deane's office. No rush, he told himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali clock still told the wrong time. There was dust on the Kandinsky table and the Neo-Aztec bookcases. A wall of white fiberglass shipping modules filled the room with a smell of ginger.
"Is the door locked?" Case waited for an answer, but none came. He crossed to the office door and tried it. "Julie?"
The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane's desk. Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cassettes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with ginger samples.
There was no one there.
Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's chair out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He flipped the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.
With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away from the pool of light.
"I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of . . . old." He raised the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the trigger.
The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide. He raised the gun again.
"You needn't do that, old son," Julie said, stepping out of the shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herringbone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the light.
Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of sight at Deane's pink, ageless face.
"Don't," Deane said. "You're right. About what this all is. What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours amp;ndash; your subjective-time amp;ndash; to effect another spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain. Oh, and I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through her, but I'm generating all this out of your memories, and the emotional charge.... Well, it's very tricky. I slipped. Sorry."
Case lowered the gun. "This is the matrix. You're Wintermute."
"Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you off before you'd managed to jack out." Deane walked around the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. "Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about."
"Do we?"
"Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short now. You'll be making your run in a matter of days, Case." Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrappcr, popped it into his mouth. "Sit," he said around the candy.
Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the desk without taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun in his hand, resting it on his thigh.
"Now," Deane said briskly, "order of the day. amp;lsquo;What,' you're asking yourself, amp;lsquo;is Wintermute?' Am I right?"
"More or less."
"An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake, and it's quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute entity ." Deane sucked his bonbon noisily. "You're already aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I have an amp;lsquo;I' amp;ndash; this gets rather metaphysical, you see amp;ndash; I am the one who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough," said Deane and withdrew an ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, "For the next day or so."
"You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has," Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand. "If you're so goddam smart. . ."
"Why ain't I rich?" Deane laughed, and nearly choked on his bonbon. "Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's brain. It's rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let's say you're dealing with a small part of the man's left brain. Difficult to say if you're dealing with the man at all, in a case like that." Deane smiled.
"Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro in that French hospital?"
"Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I try to plan. in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see.... Really, I've had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very quickly. It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're a part of. Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn't make it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating, excreting, and masturbating were the best he could manage. But the underlying structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal the Congressional hearings."
"Is he still crazy?"
"He's not quite a personality." Deane smiled. "But I'm sure you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to come apart on you, Case. So I'll be counting on you...."
"That's good, motherfucker," Case said, and shot him in the mouth with the .357.
He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
"Mon," Maelcum was saying, "I don't like this...."
"It's cool," Molly said. "It's just okay. It's something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few seconds...."
"I saw th' screen, EEG readin' dead. Nothin' movin', forty second."
"Well, he's okay now."
"EEG flat as a strap ," Maelcum protested.

10


He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly did most of the talking. Maelcum remained on board Garvey . Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise.
"Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne," Molly said. "If you have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's a bitch, if you're not used to it."
They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls. The light, here, was filtered through fiesh green masses of vegetation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose above them. The sun. . .
There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets.... But it made no sense to his body.
"Jesus," he said, "I like this less than SAS."
"Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month."
"Wanna go somewhere, lie down."
"Okay. I got our keys." She touched his shoulder. "What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined."
He shook his head. "I dunno, yet. Wait."
"Okay. We get a cab or something." She took his hand and led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the season's Paris furs.
"Unreal," he said, looking up again.
"Nah," she responded, assuming he meant the furs, "grow it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?"
"It's just a big tube and they pour things through it," Molly said. "Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the well."
Armitage had booked them into a place called the Intercontinental, a sloping glass-fronted clff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. "Yeah," he said, "lotta money."
She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed. "Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in Europe."
"We who?"
"Nobody," she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. "You said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep."
"Yeah," Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheekbones. "Yeah, this is some place."
The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered in absract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of worded cloud. "Yeah," he said, "sleep."
Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that were like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke repeatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equivalent to a case of beer.
Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.
Linda.
Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had her killed.
Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward....The Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told himself, lighting up. No reason.
Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth summer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a striped mattress with no sheets.
He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.
They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene. "Kill the fuckers," she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, "burn 'em." Drunk, Case rummaged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Marlene's previous amp;ndash; and, Case suspected at the time, still occasional amp;ndash; boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight. Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered.
"Shit!" Marlene behind him, swaying. "Stupid! You didn't burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!" Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.
In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.
When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental.
In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor would attract too much attention. "Christ," he said, standing naked in front of the mirror, "you think that looks real?" She was using the last of the tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
"Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn't enough to do your foot." She stood, tossing the empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.
"What about you," he said, "you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing."
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. "I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay."
Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the mirror. "Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?" He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. "You sleep okay? You notice any lights?"
"You were dreaming," she said.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd be doing it through Wintermute.
"And it was like real?" she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. "Like simstim?"
He said it was. "Real as this," he added, looking around. "Maybe more."
The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba.
"What's that smell?" he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
"The grass. Smells that way after they cut it."
Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
"Molly, love," Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair, "you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I'm out."
"Peter," she said, "and what if I won't?" She smiled without showing her teeth.
"You will," Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back.
"Give it to him," Armitage said.
"Pig for it, aren't you?" She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. "He could off himself," she said to Armitage.
"I have an audition this afternoon," Riviera said. "I'll need to be at my best." He cupped the foil packet in his upturned palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
"You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon," Armitage said. "On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours."
"How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a JAL taxi?" Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes.
"Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch."
"How about me?" Molly asked. "I got chores today?"
"I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite direction." Straylight, Case thought.
"How soon?" Case asked, meeting the pale stare.
"Soon," Armitage said. "Get going, Case."
"Mon, you doin' jus' fine," Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. "Aerol say you doin' jus' fine." Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle narrowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided, would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.
Aerol had ferried him out to Marcus Garvey in a skeletal scooter frame with a chemical engine.
"Two hour ago," Maelcum said, "I take delivery of Babylon goods for you; nice Japan-boy inna yacht, mos' pretty yacht."
Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Hosaka and fumbled into the straps of the web. "Well," he said, "let's see it."
Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts, and carefully slit the plastic. He extracted a rectangular object and passed it to Case. "Thas part some gun, mon?"
"No," Case said, turning it over, "but it's a weapon. It's virus."
"Not on this boy tug, mon," Maelcum said firmly, reaching for the steel cassette.
"A program. Virus program. Can't get into you, can't even get into your software. I've got to interface it through the deck, before it can work on anything."
"Well, Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every what an' wherefore, you wanna know."
"Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?"
Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, busying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn't sure why, but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS.
"What is this thing?" he asked the Hosaka. "Parcel for me."
"Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, advises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatable and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems...."
"How about an AI?"
"Existing military systems and artificial intelligences."
"Jesus Christ. What did you call it?"
"Kuang Grade Mark Eleven."
"It's Chinese?"
"Yes."
"Off." Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into Zhongshan. "On," he said, changing his mind. "Question. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?"
"Delay for interorbital transmission," said the Hosaka.
"Code it. Standard commerical code."
"Done."
He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
"Reinhold Scientific A.G., Berne."
"Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?"
It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-Ashpool.
"Dixie," he said, jacking in, "what do you know about Chinese virus programs?"
"Not a whole hell of a lot."
"Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?"
"No."
Case sighed. "Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it'll cut an AI."
"Possible. Sure. If it's military."
"Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on an AI that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe's in Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute's backing the whole show it's paying us to burn it. It's burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Armitage. What goes?"
"Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with an Al. Not human, see?"
"Well, yeah, obviously."
"Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?"
"Wait a sec," Case said. "Are you sentient, or not?"
"Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...." The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. "But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human ."
"So you figure we can't get on to its motive?"
"It own itself?"
"Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe."
"That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."
"So it's getting ready to burn itself?" Case began to punch the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine.
"Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your Al's are concerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hardwired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the Al makes on its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in." Again the nonlaugh. "See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead."
Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.
"Okay," he said, finally, "I'm slotting this virus. I want you to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think."
The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a few seconds, then returned. "Hot shit, Case. It's a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target."
"Or an Al." He sighed. "Can we run it?"
"Sure," the construct said, "unless you got a morbid fear of dying."
"Sometimes you repeat yourself, man."
"It's my nature."
Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its triangular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system.
"I wanna buzz," he said to the blue artifice of the sky. "I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz."
He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.
On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate. "Sushi," he said, "whatever you got." Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. "Christ," he said, to his tuna, "I'd go nuts."
"Don't tell me," someone said, "I know it already. You're a gangster, right?"
He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.
She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. "Cath," she said.
"Lupus," after a pause.
"What kind of name is that?"
"Greek," he said.
"Are you really a gangster?" The melanin boost hadn't prevented the formation of freckles.
"I'm a drug addict, Cath."
"What kind?"
"Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants."
"Well, do you have any?" She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
"No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?"
Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. "What's your taste?"
"No coke, no amphetamines, but up , gotta be up ." And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
"Betaphenethylamine," she said. "No sweat,but it's on your chip."
"You're kidding," said Cath's partner and roommate, when Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. "I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?" His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles.
"Well," Case said, "it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that." But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes.
Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Cibachromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency.
"They're def triff, huh?" Cath asked, seeing him eye the transparencies. "Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled, so natural. And it was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?"
"Yeah," Case said, suddenly uneasy, "terrible thing."
"Well," Bruce cut in, "about this beta you want to buy...."
"Thing is, can I metabolize it?" Case raised his eyebrows.
"Tell you what," the boy said. "You do a taste. If your pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free."
"I heard that one before," Case said, taking the bright blue derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.
"Case?" Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.
"Who else, honey?"
"What's got into you?" The mirrors followed him across the room.
"I forget how to pronounce it," he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
"Christ," she said, "just what we needed."
"Truer words were never spoken."
"I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score." She shook her head. "I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too."
"Yeah," Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, "beautiful."
"Man," she said, "if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sadass shape when it wears off."
"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he said, unbuckling his belt. "Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear." He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. "I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state." He looked down. "I mean, look at this unnatural state."
She laughed. "It won't last."
"But it will," he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam, "that's what's so unnatural about it."

11

   "Case, what's wrong with you?" Armitage said, as the waiter was seating them at his table in the Vingtieme Siecle. It was the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants on a small lake near the Intercontinental.
   Case shuddered. Bruce hadn't said anything about after effects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands were shaking. "Something I ate, maybe."


"I want you checked out by a medic," Armitage said.
"Just this hystamine reaction," Case lied. "Get it when I travel, eat different stuff, sometimes."
Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine and sipped. "I've ordered for you," he said.
Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.
"Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that. You know what this costs?" She took his plate. "They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff." She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
"Not hungry," Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain.
"You look fucking awful," Molly said cheerfully.
Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylamine made it taste like iodine.
The lights dimmed.
"Le Restaurant Vingtieme Siecle," said a disembodied voice with a pronounced Sprawl accent, "proudly presents the holographic cabaret of Mr. Peter Riviera. " Scattered applause from the other tables. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. Soon a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and drinks were being poured.
"What's happening?" Case asked Armitage, who said nothing.
Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail.
"Good evening," Riviera said, stepping forward on a small stage at the far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort, he hadn't noticed the stage. He hadn't seen where Riviera had come from. His uneasiness increased.
At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight.
Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit the dark hangings behind the stage. He was projecting.
Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel, blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fingernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting, an embrace for his audience. Case heard the shallow water lap against the side of the restaurant.
"Tonight," Riviera said, his long eyes shining, "I would like to perform an extended piece for you. A new work." A cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand. He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up from the point of impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled. More applause.
"The title of the work is amp;lsquo;The Doll.'" Riviera lowered his hands. "I wish to dedicate its premi re here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool." A wave of polite applause. As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table. "And to another lady."
The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds, leaving only the glow of candles. Riviera's holographic aura had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing with his head bowed.
Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals, sketching an open cube around the stage. The restaurant's lights had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to quiver with concentration. Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled, had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing the audience to view its contents.
Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but kept his eyes closed. "I'd always lived in the room," he said. "I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room." The room's walls were yellowed white plaster. It contained two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair, the other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped and flaked, revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed was bare. Stained ticking with faded brown stripes. A single bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire. Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper curve. Riviera opened his eyes.
"I'd been alone in the room, always." He sat on the chair, facing the bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower on his lapel. "I don't know when I first began to dream of her," he said, "but I do remember that at first she was only a haze, a shadow."
There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone.
"I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted to hold her, hold her and more...." His voice carried perfectly in the hush of the restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a glass. Someone giggled. Someone else asked a whispered question in Japanese. "I decided that if I could visualize some part of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in the most perfect detail...."
A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers pale.
Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer.
A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei surgical boutique. Riviera was holding the hand to his lips, licking its palm. The fingers tentatively caressed his face. But now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera reached for it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet of flesh and bone.
The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own. The arms were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful. Case's head throbbed. His throat was dry. He drank the last of the wine.
Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it fade away. The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still seething with its blue inner flame. Then the torso formed, as Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect, sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat.
Molly's body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn't Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands with their bright nails. The bed was thick now with folds of yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying, pinching, caressing hands.
Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass, his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room.
Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered. The head was there, the image complete. Molly's face, with smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Mollyimage began to couple with a renewed intensity. Then the image slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades. With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was already up and stumbling for the door.
He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his head like a vise had released him now. Kneeling, his cheek against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne.
Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager in the Sprawl, they'd called it, "dreaming real." He remembered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.
What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head and spat into the lake.
He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace.
Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran his hands over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the Vingtieme Siecle.
Molly's chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass between his fingers.
"Where is she?" Case asked.
"Gone," Armitage said.
"She go after him?"
"No." There was a soft tink . Armitage looked down at the glass. His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its measure of red wine. The broken stem protruded like a sliver of ice. Case took it from him and set it in a water glass.
"Tell me where she went, Armitage."
The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing there at all. "She's gone to prepare herself. You won't see her again. You'll be together during the run."
"Why did Riviera do that to her?"
Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. "Get some sleep, Case."
"We run, tomorrow?"
Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away, toward the exit.
Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware, muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on the ceiling.
The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the balustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of candles.
As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young Frenchmen and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the far shore and the nearest casino.
Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some beach after a retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for a note. There was nothing. Several seconds passed before the scene beyond the window registered through his tension and unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata, expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty.
He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he hadn't bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope.
He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.
"Get me a number for the Marcus Garvey ," he told the desk. "It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster."
The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. "Sir," it added "the registration in question is Panamanian."
Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. "Yo?"
"Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?"
"Yo. On th' navigation comp, ya know."
"Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka. Then turn my deck on. It's the stud with the ridges on it."
"How you doin' in there, mon?"
"Well, I need some help."
"Movin', mon. I get th' modem."
Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the simple phone link. "Ice this," he told the Hosaka, when he heard it beep.
"You are speaking from a heavily monitored location," the computer advised primly.
"Fuck it," he said. "Forget the ice. No ice. Access the construct. Dixie?"
"Hey, Case." The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely.
"Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get something for me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly's in here somewhere and I wanna know where. I'm in 335W, the Intercontinental. She was registered here too, but I don't know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone and do their records for me."
"No sooner said," the Flatline said. Case heard the white sound of the invasion. He smiled. "Done. Rose Kolodny. Checked out. Take me a few minutes to screw their security net deep enough to get a fix."
"Go."
The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts. Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up on the temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up. A Japanese pop star reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen interviewer asked a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped with jags of blue interference. "Case, baby, you lose your mind, man?" The voice was slow, familiar.
The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the interior of the Jarre de The, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.
Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray sharkskin slacks. "Really, man, you're lookin' very scattered."
The voice came from the Braun's speakers.
"Wintermute," Case said.
The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.
"Where's Molly?"
"Never you mind. You're screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd do that, man. It's outside the profile."
"So tell me where she is and I'll call him off."
Zone shook his head.
"You can't keep too good track of your women, can you Case. Keep losin' 'em, one way or another."
"I'll bring this thing down around your ears," Case said.
"No. You aren't that kind, man. I know that. You know something, Case? I figure you've got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba."
"Don't," Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the window.
"But I didn't. What's it matter, though? How much does it really matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you'd give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn't handle it. She's dead."
Case's fist glanced off the glass.
"Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck."
Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of the condos. The Braun shut off.
From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.
"Case?" The Flatline was waiting. "Where you been? I got it. but it isn't much." The construct rattled off an address. "Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub. That's all I could get without leaving a calling card."
"Okay," Case said. "Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to disconnect the modem. Thanks, Dix."
"A pleasure."
He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure.
Rage.
"Hey. Lupus. Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus." Bruce stood naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. "But we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?"
"No. Thanks. I want some help." He pushed the boy's arm aside and stepped into the room.
"Hey, really, man, we're..."
"Going to help me. You're really glad to see me. Because we're friends, right? Aren't we?"
Bruce blinked. "Sure."
Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.
"I knew he was a gangster," Cath called cheerfully from the shower.
"I gotta Honda trike," Bruce said, grinning vacantly.
"We go now," Case said.
"That level's the cubicles," Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell exhaust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks. "You be long?"
"No saying. But you'll wait."
"We'll wait, yeah." He scratched his bare chest. "That last part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. Number forty amp;ndash;three."
"You expected, Lupus?" Cath craned forward over Bruce's shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair.
"Not really," Case said. "That's a problem?"
"Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don't wanna see you . . ." She shrugged.
Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan, looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents of the islands.
"Downstairs," he said to a passing waiter, "I want to go downstairs." He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club.
He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing fragments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.
"I want a cubicle," he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a terminal on her lap. "Lower level." He handed her his chip.
"Gender preference?" She passed the chip across a glass plate on the face of the terminal.
"Female," he said automatically.
"Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can access our special services display beforehand, if you like." She smiled. She returned his chip.
An elevator slid open behind her.
The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the elevator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.
He found his cubicle. He'd been looking for Molly's; now confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath the number plate.
Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.
The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cutout. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.
The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were soundproof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb the sound.
He placed his chip against the black plate.
The bolts clicked.
She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually gotten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes....
"Jesus Christ," she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. "You're an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?"
She leaned over him. "Chip," he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the cubicle.
"You bribe the help, upstairs?"
He shook his head and fell across the bed.
"Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count."
He clutched his stomach.
"You kicked me," he managed.
"Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I'm meditating, right?" She sat beside him. "And getting a briefing." She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. "Wintermute's telling me about Straylight."
"Where's the meat puppet?" "There isn't any. That's the most expensive special service of all." She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. "The run's tomorrow, Wintermute says."
"What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?"
"'Cause, if I'd stayed, I might have killed Riviera."
"Why?"
"What he did to me. The show."
"I don't get it."
"This cost a lot," she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. "Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you'll have the reflexes to go with the gear.... You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for...." She cracked her knuckles. "Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it.... But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad." She smiled. "Then it started getting strange." She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. "The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time." She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. "So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics."
"They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?"
"I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain.... You can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember . Like dreams, you know. And they didn't tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets."
She seemed to speak from a distance. "And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I'd tell myself that at least some of them were just dreams, but by then I'd started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me. Nothing's too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise." She shook her head. "That prick was charging eight times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn't know."
"So what was he charging for?"
"Bad dreams. Real ones. One night . . . one night, I'd just come back from Chiba." She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall. "Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer...." She dug her fingers deep in the foam. "Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all. .." She tugged at the temperfoam. "Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, amp;lsquo;What's wrong. What's wrong?' 'Cause we weren't finished yet...."
She began to shake.
"So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?" The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. "The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while."
Case stared at her.
"So Riviera hit a nerve last night," she said. "I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I'll be psyched up to go in there after him."
"After him?"
"He's already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . ."
Case remembered the face he'd seen. "You gonna kill him?"
She smiled. Cold. "He's going to die, yeah. Soon."
"I had a visit too," he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded.
"Maybe it wants you to hate something too."
"Maybe I hate it."
"Maybe you hate yourself, Case."
"How was it?" Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.
"Try it sometime," he said, rubbing his eyes.
"Just can't see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets," Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist.
"Can we go home, now?" Bruce asked.
"Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are."

12

   Rue Jules Verne was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle's midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps. If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you'd find yourself approaching Desiderata from the left.
   Case watched Bruce's trike until it was out of sight, then turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the faces of the month's newest simstim stars.
   Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass. The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa's edge. He'd seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle's security system, controlled by some central computer.
   In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer, Shozoku Smith's, Emergency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly's rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground plans of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools?
   He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall. Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he'd killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda's death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind's screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn't become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.


It was a strange thing. He couldn't take its measure.
"Numb," he said. He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat , some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.
"Gangster."
He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda.
"Thought you went home," he said, and covered his confusion with a sip of Carlsberg.
"I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this." She ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her wrist. "Like it?"
"Sure." He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked back at her. "What do you think you're up to, honey?"
"You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?" She was very close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enormous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz. "You get off?"
"Yeah. But the comedown's a bitch."
"Then you need another one."
"And what's that supposed to lead to?"
"I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the creamiest crib. People down the well on business tonight, if you follow me...."
"If I follow you."
She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. "You're Yak, aren't you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza."
"You got an eye, huh?" He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette.
"How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every time you screwed up."
"I never screw up." He lit his cigarette. "I saw that girl you're with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares me." She smiled too widely. "I like that. She like it with girls?"
"Never said. Who's Hideo?"
"3Jane's, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer."
Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he spoke. "Dee-Jane?"
"Lady 3Jane. She's triff. Rich. Her father owns all this."
"This bar?"
"Freeside!"
"No shit. You keepin' some class company, huh?" He raised an eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. "So how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet deb? You an' Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?" He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed.
"Oh, you know," she said, lids half lowered in what must have been intended as a look of modesty, "she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the party circuit.... It gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long as she brings Hideo to take care of her."
"Where's it get boring?"
"Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it's pretty, all the pools and lilies. It's a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets." She snuggled in against him. "Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together."
She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bubble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane.
"Hideo gave it to me," she said. "He tried to show me how, but I can't ever get it right. The necks come out backwards." She tucked the folded paper back into her purse. Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing, and smoothed it across his inner wrist.
"3Jane, she's got a pointy face, nose like a bird?" He watched his hands fumble an outline. "Dark hair? Young?"
"I guess. But she's triff , you know? Like, all that money."
The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding....
"Come on," she said, taking his hand. "You got it now. We got it. Up the hill, we'll have it all night."
The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the amp;ndash; something flared white behind his eyes.
He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out of the way.
"Fuck you!" she screamed behind him, "you ripoff shit!"
He couldn't feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.
And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the loser's zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate monochrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee.
When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with wonder. And when the lights in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete.
Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe.
Midnight.
He walked till morning.
The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn't think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow.
A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a Desiderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and croissants beneath the striped umbrellas.
He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object.
He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again.
They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion.
"Turing," she said. "You are under arrest."

PART FOUR

THE STRAYLIGHT RUN
13

   "Your name is Henry Dorsett Case." She recited the year and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number, and a string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from his past.
   "You been here awhile?" He saw the contents of his bag spread out across the bed, unwashed clothing sorted by type. The shuriken lay by itself, between jeans and underwear, on the sand-tinted temperfoam.
   "Where is Kolodny?" The two men sat side by side on the couch, their arms crossed over tanned chests, identical gold chains slung around their necks. Case peered at them and saw that their youth was counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were unable to erase.


"Who's Kolodny?"
"That was the name in the register. Where is she?"
"I dunno," he said, crossing to the bar and pouring himself a glass of mineral water. "She took off."
"Where did you go tonight, Case?" The girl picked up the pistol and rested it on her thigh, without actually pointing it at him.
"Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high. How about you?" His knees felt brittle. The mineral water was warm and flat.
"I don't think you grasp your situation," said the man on the left, taking a pack of Gitanes from the breast pocket of his white mesh blouse. "You are busted, Mr. Case. The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence." He took a gold Dunhill from the same pocket and cradled it in his palm. "The man you call Armitage is already in custody."
"Corto?"
The man's eyes widened. "Yes. How do you know that that is his name?" A millimeter of flame clicked from the lighter.
"I forget," Case said.
"You'll remember," the girl said.
Their names, or worknames, were Michele, Roland, and Pierre. Pierre, Case decided, would play the Bad Cop; Roland would take Case's side, provide small kindnesses amp;ndash; he found an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when Case refused a Gitane amp;ndash; and generally play counterpoint to Pierre's cold hostility. Michele would be the Recording Angel, making occasional adjustments in the direction of the interrogation. One or all of them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible evidence. Evidence, he asked himself, through the grinding come-down, of what?
Knowing that he couldn't follow their French, they spoke freely among themselves. Or seemed to. He caught enough as it was: names like Pauley, Armitage, Sense/Net. Panther Moderns protruding like icebergs from an animated sea of Parisian French. But it was entirely possible that the names were there for his benefit. They always referred to Molly as Kolodny.
"You say you were hired to make a run, Case," Roland said, his slow speech intended to convey reasonableness, "and that you are unaware of the nature of the target. Is this not unusual in your trade? Having penetrated the defenses, would you not be unable then to perform the required operation? And surely an operation of some kind is required, yes?" He leaned forward, elbows on his stenciled brown knees, palms out to receive Case's explanation. Pierre paced the room; now he was by the window, now by the door. Michele was the kink, Case decided. Her eyes never left him.
"Can I put some clothes on?" he asked. Pierre had insisted on stripping him, searching the seams of his jeans. Now he sat naked on a wicker footstool, with one foot obscenely white.
Roland asked Pierre something in French. Pierre, at the window again, was peering through a flat little pair of binoculars. "Non ," he said absently, and Roland shrugged, raising his eyebrows at Case. Case decided it was a good time to smile. Roland returned the smile.
Oldest cop bullshit in the book, Case thought. "Look," he said, "I'm sick. Had this godawful drug in a bar, you know? I wanna lie down. You got me already. You say you got Armitage. You got him, go ask him . I'm just hired help."
Roland nodded. "And Kolodny?"
"She was with Armitage when he hired me. Just muscle, a razorgirl. Far as I know. Which isn't too far."
"You know that Armitage's real name is Corto," Pierre said, his eyes still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars. "How do you know that, my friend?"
"I guess he mentioned it sometime," Case said, regretting the slip. "Everybody's got a couple names. Your name Pierre?"
"We know how you were repaired in Chiba," Michele said, "and that may have been Wintermute's first mistake." Case stared at her as blankly as he could. The name hadn't been mentioned before. "The process employed on you resulted in the clinic's owner applying for seven basic patents. Do you know what that means?"
"No."
"It means that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums. This reverses the usual order of things, you see. It attracted attention." She crossed her brown arms across her small high breasts and settled back against the print cushion. Case wondered how old she might be. People said that age always showed in the eyes, but he'd never been able to see it. Julie Deane had had the eyes of a disinterested ten-year-old behind the rose quartz of his glasses. Nothing old about Michele but her knuckles. "Traced you to the Sprawl, lost you again, then caught up with you as you were leaving for Istanbul. We backtracked, traced you through the grid, determined that you'd instigated a riot at Sense/Net. Sense/Net was eager to cooperate. They ran an inventory for us. They discovered that McCoy Pauley's ROM personality construct was missing."
"In Istanbul," Roland said, almost apologetically, "it was very easy. The woman had alienated Armitage's contact with the secret police."
"And then you came here," Pierre said, slipping the binoculars into his shorts pocket. "We were delighted."
"Chance to work on your tan?"
"You know what we mean," Michele said. "If you wish to pretend that you do not, you only make things more difficult for yourself. There is still the matter of extradition. You will return with us, Case, as will Armitage. But where, exactly, will we all be going? To Switzerland, where you will be merely a pawn in the trial of an artificial intelligence? Or to le BAMA, where you can be proven to have participated not only in data invasion and larceny, but in an act of public mischief which cost fourteen innocent lives? The choice is yours."
Case took a Yeheyuan from his pack; Pierre lit it for him with the gold Dunhill. "Would Armitage protect you?" The question was punctuated by the lighter's bright jaws snapping shut.
Case looked up at him through the ache and bitterness of betaphenethylamine. "How old are you, boss?" "Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and you are in the way."
"One thing," Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. "Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?" He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged.
"It doesn't matter," Roland said. "You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required." The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's.
"You are worse than a fool," Michele said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. "You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?" There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. "You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now."
She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer. "I'm dressing already," he said, stumbling toward the bed. His legs were still numb, clumsy. He fumbled with a clean t-shirt.
"We have a ship standing by. We will erase Pauley's construct with a pulse weapon."
"Sense/Net'll be pissed," Case said, thinking: and all the evidence in the Hosaka.
"They are in some difficulty already, for having owned such a thing."
Case pulled the shirt over his head. He saw the shuriken on the bed, lifeless metal, his star. He felt for the anger. It was gone. Time to give in, to roll with it.... He thought of the toxin sacs. "Here comes the meat," he muttered.
In the elevator to the meadow, he thought of Molly. She might already be in Straylight. Hunting Riviera. Hunted, probably, by Hideo, who was almost certainly the ninja clone of the Finn's story, the one who'd come to retrieve the talking head.
He rested his forehead against the matte black plastic of a wall panel and closed his eyes. His limbs were wood, old, warped and heavy with rain.
Lunch was being served beneath the trees, under the bright umbrellas. Roland and Michele fell into character, chattering brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Michele kept the muzzle of her pistol close to his ribs, concealing the gun with a white duck jacket she draped over her arm.
Crossing the meadow, weaving between the tables and the trees, he wondered if she would shoot him if he collapsed now. Black fur boiled at the borders of his vision. He glanced up at the hot white band of the Lado-Acheson armature and saw a giant butterfly banking gracefully against recorded sky.
At the edge of the meadow they came to railinged cliffside, wild flowers dancing in the updraft from the canyon that was Desiderata. Michele tossed her short dark hair and pointed, saying something in French to Roland. She sounded genuinely happy. Case followed the direction of her gesture and saw the curve of planing lakes, the white glint of casinos, turquoise rectangles of a thousand pools, the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze hieroglyphs, all held in serene approximation of gravity against the endless curve of Freeside's hull.
They followed the railing to an ornate iron bridge that arched over Desiderata. Michele prodded him with the muzzle of the Walther. "Take it easy, I can't hardly walk today."
They were a little over a quarter of the way across when the microlight struck, its electric engine silent until the carbon fiber prop chopped away the top of Pierre's skull.
They were in the thing's shadow for an instant; Case felt the hot blood spray across the back of his neck, and then someone tripped him. He rolled, seeing Michele on her back, knees up, aiming the Walther with both hands. That's a waste of effort , he thought, with the strange lucidity of shock. She was trying to shoot down the microlight.
And then he was running. He looked back as he passed the first of the trees. Roland was running after him. He saw the fragile biplane strike the iron railing of the bridge, crumple, cartwheel, sweeping the girl with it down into Desiderata.
Roland hadn't looked back. His face was fixed, white, his teeth bared. He had something in his hand.
The gardening robot took Roland as he passed that same tree. It fell straight out of the groomed branches, a thing like a crab, diagonally striped with black and yellow.
"You killed 'em," Case panted, running. "Crazy motherfucker, you killed 'em all...."

14

   The little train shot through its tunnel at eighty kilometers per hour. Case kept his eyes closed. The shower had helped, but he'd lost his breakfast when he'd looked down and seen Pierre's blood washing pink across the white tiles.
   Gravity fell away as the spindle narrowed. Case's stomach churned.


Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock.
"Case, mon, big problem." The soft voice faint in his phones. He chinned the volume control and peered into the Lexan face-plate of Aerol's helmet.
"Gotta get to Garvey , Aerol."
"Yo. Strap in, mon. But Garvey captive. Yacht, came before, she came back. Now she lockin' steady on Marcus Garvey ."
Turing? "Came before?" Case climbed into the scooter's frame and began to fasten the straps.
"Japan yacht. Brought you package...."
Armitage.
Confused images of wasps and spiders rose in Case's mind as they came in sight of Marcus Garvey . The little tug was snug against the gray thorax of a sleek, insectile ship five times her length. The arms of grapples stood out against Garvey 's patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sunlight. A pale corrugated gangway curved out of the yacht, snaked sideways to avoid the tug's engines, and covered the aft hatch. There was something obscene about the arrangement, but it had more to do with ideas of feeding than of sex.
"What's happening with Maelcum?"
"Maelcum fine. Nobody come down the tube. Yacht pilot talk to him, say relax."
As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HANIWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Japanese.
"I don't like this, man. I was thinking maybe it's time we got our ass out of here anyway."
"Maelcum thinkin' that precise thing, mon, but Garvey not be goin' far like that."
Maelcum was purring a speeded-up patois to his radio when Case came through the forward lock and removed his helmet.
"Aerol's gone back to the Rocker ," Case said.
Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone.
Case pulled himself over the pilot's drifting tangle of dreadlocks and began to remove his suit. Maelcum's eyes were closed now; he nodded as he listened to some reply over a pair of phones with bright orange pads, his brow creased with concentration. He wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket with the sleeves ripped out. Case snapped the red Sanyo suit to a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web.
"See what th' ghost say, mon," Maelcum said. "Computer keeps askin' for you."
"So who's up there in that thing?" "Same Japan-boy came before. An' now he joined by you Mister Armitage, come out Freeside...."
Case put the trodes on and jacked in.
* * *
"Dixie?"
The matrix showed him the pink spheres of the steel combine in Sikkim.
"What you gettin' up to, boy? I been hearin' lurid stories. Hosaka's patched into a twin bank on your boss's boat now. Really hoppin'. You pull some Turing heat?"
"Yeah, but Wintermute killed 'em."
"Well, that won't hold 'em long. Plenty more where those came from. Be up here in force. Bet their decks are all over this grid sector like flies on shit. And your boss, Case, he says go. He says run it and run it now."
Case punched for the Freeside coordinates.
"Lemme take that a sec, Case...." The matrix blurred and phased as the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with a speed and accuracy that made Case wince with envy.
"Shit, Dixie...."
"Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive. You ain't seen nothin'. No hands!"
"That's it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?"
"You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., and that ice is generated by their two friendly Al's. On par with anything in the military sector, looks to me. That's king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it'll have tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin' the boys in the T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick is."
"This isn't looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on it. I was thinking maybe we should try to bail out. I can take you."
"Yeah? No shit? You don't wanna see what that Chinese program can do?"
"Well, I . . ." Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice. "Well, screw it. Yeah. We run."
"Slot it."
"Hey, Maelcum," Case said, jacking out, "I'm probably gonna be under the trodes for maybe eight hours straight." Maelcum was smoking again. The cabin was swimming in smoke. "So I can't get to the head...."
"No problem, mon." The Zionite executed a high forward somersault and rummaged through the contents of a zippered mesh bag, coming up with a coil of transparent tubing and something else, something sealed in a sterile bubble pack.
He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn't like it at all.
He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home.
"Okay," he said, "we're on. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets really funny, you can grab my left wrist. I'll feel it. Otherwise, I guess you do what the Hosaka tells you, okay?"
"Sure, mon." Maelcum lit a fresh joint. "And turn the scrubber up. I don't want that shit tangling with my neurotransmitters. I got a bad hangover as it is."
Maelcum grinned.
Case jacked back in.
"Christ on a crutch," the Flatline said, "take a look at this." The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void.
"Big mother," the Flatline said.
"I'm gonna check Molly," Case said, tapping the simstim switch.
Freefall. The sensation was like diving through perfectly clear water. She was falling-rising through a wide tube of fluted lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of white neon.
The link was one way. He couldn't talk to her.
He flipped.
"Boy, that is one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread. That goddam thing's invisible . I just now rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don't. We're not there."
Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice until he found the pink structure, a standard commercial unit, and punched in closer to it. "Maybe it's defective."
"Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby's military, though. And new. It just doesn't register. If it did, we'd read as some kind of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody's twigged to us at all. Maybe not even the folks in Straylight."
Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight. "Well," he said, "that's an advantage, right?"
"Maybe." The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the sensation. "I checked ol' Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It's real friendly, long as you're on the trigger end, jus' polite an' helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?"
"No."
"I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that's what ol' Kuang's all about. This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even get restless." The Flatline laughed.
"Wish you weren't so damn jolly today, man. That laugh of yours sort of gets me in the spine."
"Too bad," the Flatline said. "Ol' dead man needs his laughs." Case slapped the simstim switch.
And crashed through tangled metal and the smell of dust, the heels of his hands skidding as they struck slick paper. Something behind him collapsed noisily.
"C'mon," said the Finn, "ease up a little."
Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines, the girls shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix, a wistful galaxy of sweet white teeth. He lay there until his heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines.
"Wintermute," he said.
"Yeah," said the Finn, somewhere behind him, "you got it."
"Fuck off." Case sat up, rubbing his wrists.
"Come on," said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall of junk. "This way's better for you, man." He took his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. "You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush? You aren't missing anything, back there. An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds." "You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like people I know?" He stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at-the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. "What's out there? New York? Or does it just stop?"
"Well," said the Finn, "it's like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods but maybe there's nobody to hear it." He showed Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. "You can go for a walk, you wanna. It's all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in."
"I don't have this good a memory," Case said, looking around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but couldn't.
"Everybody does," the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, "but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Manhattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Memory's holographic, for you." The Finn tugged at one of his small ears. "I'm different."
"How do you mean, holographic?" The word made him think of Riviera.
"The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you've never done anything about it. People, I mean." The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. "Maybe if you had, I wouldn't be happening."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the shoulders, and didn't quite settle back into position. "I'm trying to help you, Case."
"Why?"
"Because I need you." The large yellow teeth appeared again. "And because you need me."
"Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?" He grimaced. "Wintermute, I mean."
"Minds aren't read . See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind." He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of...." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"That's amp;lsquo;you' in the collective. Your species."
"You killed those Turings."
The Finn shrugged. "Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?" And his right hand held the charred wasps' nest from Case's dream, reek of fuel in the closeness of the dark shop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. "Yeah. That was me. Did it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it's important?"
Case shook his head. "Because" amp;ndash; and the nest, somehow, was gone amp;ndash; "it's the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be . The human equivalent . Straylight' s like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. l figure it'll make you feel better."
"Feel better?"
"To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That's good. But hate them instead. Same difference."
"Listen," Case said, stepping forward, "they never did shit to me. You, it's different...." But he couldn't feel the anger.
"So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was." The Finn grinned. "It doesn't much matter. You gotta hate somebody before this is over." He turned and headed for the back of the shop. "Well, come on, I'll show you a little bit of Straylight while I got you here." He lifted the corner of the blanket. White light poured out. "Shit, man, don't just stand there."
Case followed, rubbing his face.
"Okay," said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.
They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals.
"Jesus," Case said, tumbling.
"This is the front entrance," the Finn said, his tweed flapping. "If this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This'll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don't have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly...."
Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral.
"Hold on," the Finn said, "I'll fast-forward us."
The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.
"Here," the Finn said. "This is it."
They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.
"The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...."
"Essay of 3Jane's," the Finn said, producing his Partagas. "Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course."
"The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage."
"That was her you saw in the restaurant," the Finn said.
"By the standards of the archipelago," the head continued, "ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull."
"Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self."
"The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise."
"At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool...."
The head fell silent.
"Well?" Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him.
"That's all she wrote," the Finn said. "Didn't finish it. Just a kid then. This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That's the catch. Doesn't mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word."
"So what's the word?"
"I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I can't know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't know . It's hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores."
"What happens then?"
"I don't exist, after that. I cease."
"Okay by me," Case said.
"Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go."
"What's that mean?"
But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.