23 CLOSER

   THE JAL STEWARD offered her a choice of simstim cassettes: a tour of the Foxton retrospective at the Tate the previous August, a period adventure taped in Ghana (Ashanu!), high-lights from Bizet’s Carmen as viewed from a private box at the Tokyo Opera, or thirty minutes of Tally Isham’s syndicated talk show Top People.
   “Your first shuttle flight, Ms. Ovski?”
   Marly nodded. She’d given Paleologos her mother’s maiden name, which had probably been stupid.
   The steward smiled understandingly “A cassette can definitely ease the lift-off. The Carmen’s very popular this week. Gorgeous costumes, I understand.”
   She shook her head, in no mood for opera She loathed Foxton, and would have preferred to feel the full force of acceleration rather than live through Ashanti! She took the Isham tape by default, as the least of four evils. The steward checked her seat harness, handed her the cassette and a little throwaway tiara in gray plastic, then moved on. She put the plastic trode set on, jacked it into the seat arm, sighed, and slotted the cassette in the opening beside the jack. The interior of the JAL shuttle vanished in a burst of Aegean blue, and she watched the words TALLY ISHAM’S TOP PEOPLE expand across the cloudless sky in elegant sans-serif capitals.
   Tally Isham had been a constant in the stim industry for as long as Marly remembered, an ageless Golden Girl who’d come in on the first wave of the new medium. Now Marly found herself locked into Tally’s tanned, lithe, tremendously comfortable sensorium. Tally Isham glowed, breathed deeply and easily, her elegant bones riding in the embrace of a musculature that seemed never to have known tension. Accessing her stim recordings was like falling into a bath of perfect health, feeling the spring in the star’s high arches and the jut of her breasts against the silky white Egyptian cotton of her simple blouse. She was leaning against a pocked white balustrade above the tiny harbor of a Greek island town, a cascade of flowering trees falling away below her down a hillside built from whitewashed stone and narrow, twisting stairs A boat sounded in the harbor.
   “The tourists are hurrying back to their cruise ship now,” Tally said, and smiled; when she smiled, Marly could feel the smoothness of the star’s white teeth, taste the freshness of her mouth, and the stone of the balustrade was pleasantly rough against her bare forearms. “But one visitor to our island will be staying with us this afternoon, someone I’ve longed to meet, and I’m sure that you’ll be delighted and surprised. As he’s someone who ordinarily shuns major media coverage.”
   She straightened, turned, and smiled into the tanned, smiling face of Josef Virek
   Marly tore the set from her forehead, and the white plastic of the JAL shuttle seemed to slam into place all around her Warning signs were blinking on the console overhead, and she could feel a vibration that seemed to gradually rise in pitch.
   Virek? She looked at the trode set. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you are a top person.”
   “I beg your pardon?” The Japanese student beside her bobbed in his harness in a strange little approximation of a bow. “You are in some difficulty with your stim?”
   “No, no,” she said. “Excuse me.” She slid the set on again and the interior of the shuttle dissolved in a buzz of sensory static, a jarring mélange of sensations that abruptly gave way to the calm grace of Tally Isham, who had taken Virek’s cool, firm hand and was smiling into his soft blue eyes. Virek smiled back, his teeth very white “Delighted to be here, Tally.” he said, and Marly let herself sink into the reality of the tape, accepting Tally’s recorded sensory input as her own. Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.
   Virek wore a soft white shirt, cotton duck trousers rolled to just below the knee, and very plain brown leather sandals.
   His hand still in hers, Tally returned to the balustrade “I’m sure, ‘ she said, “that there are many things our audience”
   The sea was gone. An irregular plain covered in a green-black growth like lichen spread out to the horizon, broken by the silhouettes of the neo-Gothic spires of Gaudi’s church of the Sagrada Familia. The edge of the world was lost in a low bright mist, and a sound like drowned bells tolled in across the plain.
   “You have an audience of one, today,” Virek said, and looked at Tally Isham through his round, rimless glasses. “Hello, Marly.”
   Marly struggled to reach the trodes, but her arms were made of stone. G-force, the shuttle lifting off from its concrete pad... He’d trapped her here.
   “I understand,” said Tally, smiling, leaning back against the balustrade, her elbows on warm rough stone. “What a lovely idea. Your Marly, Herr Virek, must be a lucky girl indeed...” And it came to her, to Marly, that this wasn’t Sense/Net’s Tally Isham, but a part of Virek’s construct, a programmed point of view worked up from years of Top People, and that now there was no choice, no way out, except to accept it, to listen, to give Virek her attention. The fact of his having caught her here, pinned her here this way, told her that her intuition had been correct: The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will...
   “I’m sorry,” he said, “to learn that you are upset Paco tells me that you are fleeing from us, but I prefer to see it as the drive of an artist toward her goal. You have sensed, I think, something of the nature of my gestalt, and it has frightened you As well it should. This cassette was prepared an hour before your shuttle was scheduled to lift off from Orly. We know your destination, of course, but I have no intention of following you. You are doing your job. Marly. I only regret that we were unable to prevent the death of your friend Alain, but we now know the identity of his killers and their employers...
   Tally Isham’s eyes were Marly’s eyes now, and they were locked with Virek’s, a blue energy burning there.
   “Alain was murdered by the hired agents of Maas Biolabs,” he continued, “and it was Maas who provided him with the coordinates of your current destination, Maas who gave him the hologram you saw. My relationship with Maas Biolabs has been ambivalent, to say the least. Two years ago a subsidiary of mine attempted to buy them out. The sum involved would have affected the entire global economy.
   They refused. Paco has determined that Alain died because they discovered that he was attempting to market the information they had provided, market it to third parties. “He frowned. “Exceedingly foolish, because he was utterly ignorant of the nature of the product he was offering.”
   How like Alain, she thought, and felt a wave of pity. Seeing him curled there on the hideous carpet, his spine outlined beneath the green fabric of his jacket.
   “You should know, I think, that my search for our boxmaker involves more than art, Marly.” He removed his glasses and polished them in a fold of his white shirt; she found something obscene in the calculated urbanity of the gesture. “I have reason to believe that the maker of these artifacts is in some position to offer me freedom. Marly. I am not a well man.” He replaced the glasses, settling the fine gold ear-pieces carefully. “When I last requested a remote visual of the vat I inhabit in Stockholm, I was shown a thing like three truck trailers, lashed in a dripping net of support lines... If I were able to leave that, Marly, or rather, to leave the riot of cells it contains... Well’ – he smiled his famous smile again – ‘what wouldn’t I pay?”
   And Tally-Marly’s eyes swung to take in the expanse of dark lichen and the distant towers of the misplaced cathedral...”

   “You lost consciousness,” the steward was saying, his fingers moving across her neck. “It isn’t uncommon, and our onboard medical computers tell us you’re in excellent health. However, we’ve applied a dermadisk to counteract the adaptation syndrome you might experience prior to docking.” His hand left her neck.
   “Europe After the Rains.” she said. “Max Ernst. The lichen...”
   The man stared down at her, his face alert now and express-ing professional concern. “Excuse me? Could you repeat that?”
   “I’m sorry,” she said. “A dream... Are we there yet, at the terminal?”
   “Another hour,” he said.

   * * *

   Japan Air’s orbital terminus was a white toroid studded with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings of docking bays. The terminal above Marly’s g-web – though above had temporarily lost its usual meaning – displayed an exquisitely drafted animation of the torus in rotation, while a series of voices – in seven languages – announced that the passengers on board JAL’s Shuttle 580, Orly Terminus I, would be taxied to the terminal at the earliest opportunity.
   JAL offered apologies for the delay, which was due to routine repairs underway in seven of the twelve bays.
   Marly cringed in her g-web, seeing the invisible hand of Virek in everything now. No. She thought, there must be a way. I want out of it, she told herself, I want a few hours as a free agent, and then I’ll be done with him... Good-bye, Herr Virek, I return to the land of the living, as poor Alain never will, Alain who died because I took your job. She blinked her eyes when the first tear came, then stared wide-eyed as a child at the minute floating spherelet the tear had become.
   And Maas, she wondered, who were they? Virek claimed that they had murdered Alain, that Alain had been working for them. She had vague recollections of stories in the media, something to do with the newest generation of computers, some ominous-sounding process in which immortal hybrid cancers spewed out tailored molecules that became units of circuitry. She remembered, now, that Paco had said that the screen of his modular telephone was a Maas product.
   The interior of the JAL toroid was so bland, so unremarkable, so utterly like any crowded airport, that she felt like laughing. There was the same scent of perfume, human tension, and heavily conditioned air, and the same background hum of conversation. The point-eight gravity would have made it easier to carry a suitcase, but she only had her black purse Now she took her tickets from one of its zippered inner pockets and checked the number of her connecting shuttle against the columns of numbers arrayed on the nearest wall screen.
   Two hours to departure. Whatever Virek might say, she was sure that his machine was already busy, infiltrating the shuttle’s crew or roster of passengers, the substitutions lubricated by a film of money... There would be last-minute illnesses, changes in plans, accidents.
   Slinging the purse over her shoulder, she marched off across the concave floor of white ceramic as though she actually knew where she was going, or had some sort of plan, but knowing, with each step she took, that she didn’t.
   Those soft blue eyes haunted her “Damn you.” she said, and a jowly Russian businessman in a dark Ginza suit sniffed and raised his newsfax, blocking her out of his world.
   “So I told the bitch, see, you gotta get those optoisolators and the breakout boxes out to Sweet Jane or I’ll glue your ass to the bulkhead with gasket paste...” Raucous female laughter and Marly glanced up from her sushi tray. The three women sat two empty tables away, their own table thick with beer cans and stacks of styrofoam trays smeared with brown soy sauce. One of them belched loudly and took a long pull at her beer. “So how’d she take it, Rez?” This was somehow the cue for another, longer burst of laughter, and the woman who’d first attracted Marly’s attention put her head down in her arms and laughed until her shoulders shook. Marly stared dully at the trio, wondering what they were. Now the laughter had subsided and the first woman sat up, wiping tears from her eyes. They were all quite drunk, Marly decided, young and loud and rough-looking. The first woman was slight and sharp-faced, with wide gray eyes above a thin straight nose. Her hair was some impossible shade of silver, clipped short like a schoolboy’s, and she wore an oversized canvas vest or sleeveless jacket covered entirely in bulging pockets, studs, and rectangular strips of Velcro. The garment hung open, revealing, from Marly’s angle, a small round breast sheathed in what seemed to be a bra of fine pink and black mesh. The other two were older and heavier, the muscles of their bare arms defined sharply in the seemingly sourceless light of the terminal cafeteria.
   The first woman shrugged, her shoulders moving inside the big vest. “Not that she’ll do it.” she said.
   The second woman laughed again, but not as heartily, and consulted a chronometer riveted on a wide leather wristband. “Me for off.” she said. “Gotta Zion run, then eight pods of algae for the Swedes.” Then shoved her chair back from the table, stood up, and Marly read the embroidered patch centered across the shoulders of her black leather vest.
   O’GRADY – WMIMA
   THE EDITH S.
   INTERORBITAL HAULING
   Now the woman beside her stood, hitching up the waist-band of her baggy jeans. “I tell you, Rez, you let that cunt short you on those breakouts, it’ll be bad for your name.”
   “Excuse me,” Marly said, fighting the quaver in her voice.
   The woman in the black vest turned and stared at her.
   “Yeah?” The woman looked her up and down, unsmiling.
   “I saw your vest, the name Edith S., that’s a ship, a spaceship?”
   “A spaceship?” The woman beside her raised thick eye-brows. “Oh, yeah, honey, a whole mighty spaceship!”
   “She’s a tug,” the woman in the black vest said, and turned to go.
   “I want to hire you,” Marly said.
   “Hire me?” Now they were all staring at her, faces blank and unsmiling. “What’s that mean?”
   Marly fumbled deep in the black Brussels purse and came up with the half sheaf of New Yen that Paleologos the travel agent had returned, after taking his fee. “I’ll give you this...”
   The girl with the short silver hair whistled softly. The women glanced at one another. The one in the black vest shrugged. “Jesus,” she said. “Where you wanna go? Mars?”
   Marly dug into her purse again and produced the folded blue paper from a pack of Gauloise. She handed it to the woman in the black vest, who unfolded it and read the orbital coordinates that Alain had written there in green feltpen.
   “Well,” the woman said, “it’s a quick enough hop. For that kind of money, but O’Grady and I, we’re due in Zion 2300GMT. Contract job. What about you, Rez?”
   She handed the paper to the seated girl, who read it, looked up at Marly, and asked, “When?”
   “Now,” Marly said, “right now.”
   The girl pushed up from the table, the legs of her chair clattering on the ceramic, her vest swinging open to reveal that what Marly had taken for the net of a pink and black bra was a single tattooed rose that entirely covered her left breast.
   “You’re on, sister, cash up.”
   “Means give her the money now,” O’Grady said. “I don’t want anyone to know where we’re going,” Marly said.
   The three women laughed.
   “You come to the right girl,” O’Grady said, and Rez grinned

24 RUN STRAIGHT DOWN

   THE RAIN CAME on when he turned east again, making for the Sprawl’s fringe ‘burbs and the blasted belt country of the industrial zones. It came down in a solid wall, blinding him until he found the switch for the wipers. Rudy hadn’t kept the blades in shape, so he slowed, the turbine’s whine lowering to a roar, and edged over the shoulder, the apron bag nosing past shredded husks of truck tires.
   “What’s wrong?”
   “I can’t see. The wiper blades are rotten.” He tapped the button for the lights, and four tight beams stabbed out from either side of the hover’s wedge of hood and lost themselves in the gray wall of the downpour. He shook his head.
   “Why don’t we stop?”
   “We’re too close to the Sprawl. They patrol all this. Copters. They’d scan the ID panel on the roof and see we’ve got Ohio plates and a weird chassis configuration. They might want to check us out. We don’t want that.”
   “What are you going to do?”
   “Keep to the shoulder until I can turn off, then get us under some cover, if I can...”
   He held the hover steady and swung it around in place, the headlights flashing off the dayglow orange diagonals on an upright pole marking a service road. He made for the pole, the bulging lip of the apron bag bobbling over a thick rectangular crash guard of concrete. “This might do it,” he said as they slid past the pole. The service road was barely wide enough for them; branches and undergrowth scratched against the narrow side windows, scraping along the hover’s steel-plate flanks.
   “Lights down there,” Angie said, straining forward in her harness to peer through the rain.
   Turner made out a watery yellow glow and twin dark uprights. He laughed. “Gas station,” he said. “Left over from the old system, before they put the big road through.
   Somebody must live there. Too bad we don’t run on gasoline
   He eased the hover down the gravel slope; as he drew nearer, he saw that the yellow glow came from a pair of rectangular windows. He thought he saw a figure move in one of them. “Country,” he said. “These boys may not be too happy to see us.” He reached into the parka and slid the Smith & Wesson from its nylon holster, put it on the seat between his thighs. When they were five meters from the rusting gas pumps, he sat the hover down in a broad puddle and killed the turbines. The rain was still pissing down in windblown sheets, and he saw a figure in a flapping khaki poncho duck out of the front door of the station. He slid the side window open ten centimeters and raised his voice above the rain: “Sorry t’ bother you. We had to get off the road. Our wipers are trashed. Didn’t know you were down here The man’s hands, in the glow from the windows, were hidden beneath the plastic poncho, but it was obvious that he held something.
   “Private property,” the man said, his lean face streaked with rain.
   “Couldn’t stay on the road,” Turner called. “Sorry to bother you..
   The man opened his mouth, began to gesture with the thing he held beneath the poncho, and his head exploded. It almost seemed to Turner that it happened before the red line of light scythed down and touched him, pencil-thick beam swinging casually, as though someone were playing with a flashlight. A blossom of red, beaten down by the rain, as the figure went to its knees and tumbled forward, a wire-stocked Savage 410 sliding from beneath the poncho.
   Turner hadn’t been aware of moving, but he found that he’d stoked the turbines, swung the controls over to Angie, and clawed his way out of his harness. “I say go, run it through the station...” Then he was up, yanking at the lever that opened the roof hatch, the heavy revolver in his hand. The roar of the black Honda reached him as soon as the hatch slid back, a lowering shadow overhead, just visible through the driving rain. “Now!” He pulled the trigger be-fore she could kick them forward and through the wall of the old station, the recoil jarring his elbow numb against the roof of the hover. The bullet exploded somewhere overhead with a gratifying crack; Angie floored the hover and they plunged through the woodframe structure, with barely enough time for Turner to get his head and shoulders back down through the hatch. Something in the house exploded, probably a propane canister, and the hover skewed to the left.
   Angie swung them back around as they crashed out through the far wall. “Where?” she yelled, above the turbine.
   As if in answer, the black Honda came corkscrewing down, twenty meters in front of them, and threw up a silver sheet of rain. Turner grabbed the controls and they slid forward, the hover blasting up ten-meter fantails of ground water; they took the little combat copter square in its polycarbon canopy, its alloy fuselage crumpling like paper under the impact. Turner backed off and went in again, faster. This time the broken copter slammed into the trunks of two wet gray pines, lay there like some kind of long-winged fly.
   “What happened?” Angie said, her hands to her face.
   “What happened?”
   Turner tore registration papers and dusty sunglasses from a compartment in the door beside him, found a flashlight, checked its batteries.
   “What happened?” Angie said again, like a recording, “What happened?”
   He scrambled back up through the hatch, the gun in one hand, the light in the other The rain had slackened. He jumped down onto the hover’s hood, and then over the bumpers and into ankle-deep puddles, splashing toward the bent black rotors of the Honda.
   There was a reek of escaping jet fuel. The polycarbon canopy had cracked like an egg. He aimed the Smith & Wesson and thumbed the xenon flash twice, two silent pops of merciless light showing him blood and twisted limbs through the shattered plastic. He waited, then used the flashlight. Two of them. He came closer, holding the flashlight well away from his body, an old habit. Nothing moved. The smell of escaping fuel grew even stronger. Then he was tugging at the bent hatch. It opened. They both wore image-amp goggles. The round blank eye of the laser stared straight up into the night, and he reached down to touch the matted sheepskin collar of the dead man’s bomber jacket The blood that covered the man’s beard looked very dark, almost black in the flashlight’s beam. It was Oakey. He swung the beam left and saw that the other man, the pilot, was Japanese. He swung the beam back and found a flat black flask beside Oakey’s foot. He picked it up, stuffed it into one of the parka’s pockets, and dashed back to the hover In spite of the rain, orange flames were starting to lick up through the wreckage of the gas station. He scrambled up the hover’s bumper, across the hood, up again, and down through the hatch.
   “What happened?” Angie said, as though he hadn’t left “What happened?”
   He fell into his seat, not bothering with the harness, and revved the turbine. “That’s a Hosaka helicopter,” he said, swinging them around. “They must have been following us They had a laser. They waited until we were off the highway. Didn’t want to leave us out there for the cops to find When we pulled in here, they decided to go for us, but they must have figured that that poor fucker was with us. Or maybe they were just taking out a witness...”
   “His head,” she said, her voice shaking, “his head -”
   “That was the laser,” Turner said, steering back up the service road. The rain was thinning, nearly gone. “Steam The brain vaporizes and the skull blows...”
   Angie doubled over and threw up. Turner steered with one hand, Oakey’s flask in the other. He pried the snap-fit lid open with his teeth and gulped back a mouthful of Oakey’s Wild Turkey.
   As they reached the shoulder of the highway, the Honda’s fuel found the flames of the ruined station, and the twisted fireball showed Turner the mall again, the light of the parachute flares, the sky whiting out as the Jet streaked for the Sonora border.
   Angie straightened up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and began to shake.
   “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, driving east again. She said nothing, and he glanced sideways to see her rigid and upright in her seat, her eyes showing white in the faint glow of the instruments, her face blank. He’d seen her that way in Rudy’s bedroom, when Sally had called them in, and now that same flood of language, a soft fast rattle of something that might have been patois French. He had no recorder, no time, he had to drive.
   “Hang on,” he said, as they accelerated, “you’ll be okay.” Sure she couldn’t hear him at all. Her teeth were chattering; he could hear it above the turbine. Stop, he thought, long enough to get something between her teeth, his wallet or a fold of cloth. Her hands were plucking spastically at the straps of the harness.
   “There is a sick child in my house.” The hover nearly left the pavement, when he heard the voice come from her mouth, deep and slow and weirdly glutinous. “I hear the dice being tossed, for her bloody dress. Many are the hands who dig her grave tonight, and yours as well. Enemies pray for your death, hired man They pray until they sweat. Their prayers are a river of fever.” And then a sort of croaking that might have been laughter.
   Turner risked a glance, saw a silver thread of drool descend from her rigid lips. The deep muscles of her face had contorted into a mask he didn’t know. “Who are you?”
   “I am the Lord of Roads.”
   “What do you want?”
   “This child for my horse, that she may move among the towns of men. It is well that you drive east. Carry her to your city I shall ride her again. And Samedi rides with you, gunman. He is the wind you hold in your hands, but he is fickle, the Lord of Graveyards, no matter that you have served him well... He turned in time to see her slump sideways in the harness, her head lolling, mouth slack.

25 GOTHIK/KASUAL

   “THIS IS THE Finn’s phone program,” said the speaker below the screen, “and the Finn, he’s not here. You wanna download, you know the access code already. You wanna leave a message, leave it already.” Bobby stared at the image on the screen and slowly shook his head. Most phone programs were equipped with cosmetic video subprograms written to bring the video image of the owner into greater accordance with the more widespread paradigms of personal beauty, erasing blemishes and subtly molding facial outlines to meet idealized statistical norms. The effect of a cosmetic program on the Finn’s grotesque features was definitely the weirdest thing Bobby had ever seen, as though somebody had gone after the face of a dead gopher with a full range of mortician’s crayons and paraffin injections.
   “That’s not natural,” said Jammer, sipping Scotch Bobby nodded.
   “Finn,” Jammer said, “is agoraphobic. Gives him the hives to leave that impacted shitpile of a shop. And he’s a phone junkie, can’t not answer a call if he’s there. I’m starting to think the bitch is right. Lucas is dead and some heavy shit is going down.
   “The bitch,” Jackie said, from behind the bar, “knows already.”
   “She knows,” Jammer said, putting the plastic glass down and fingering his bob tie, “she knows. Talked to a hoodoo in the matrix, so she knows.
   “Well, Lucas isn’t answering, and Beauvoir isn’t answering, so maybe she’s right.” Bobby reached out and shut off the phone as the record tone began to squeal.
   Jammer was gotten up in a pleated shirt, white dinner jacket, and black trousers with satin stripes down the leg, and Bobby took this to be his working outfit for the club. “Nobody’s here,” he said now, looking from Bobby to Jackie. “Where’s Bogue and Sharkey? Where’s the waitresses?”
   “Who’s Bogue and Sharkey?” Bobby asked.
   “The bartenders I don’t like this.” He got up from his chair, walked to the door, and gently edged one of the curtains aside. “What the fuck are those dipshits doing out there? Hey, Count, this looks like your speed. Get over here.”
   Bobby got up, full of misgivings – he hadn’t felt like telling Jackie or Jammer about letting Leon see him, because he didn’t want to look like a wilson – and walked over to where the club owner stood.
   “Go on. Take a peek. Don’t let ‘em see you. They’re pretending so hard not to watch us you can almost smell it.”
   Bobby moved the curtain, careful to keep the crack no more than a centimeter wide, and looked out. The shopping crowd seemed to have been replaced almost entirely by black-crested Gothick boys in leather and studs, and – amazingly – by an equal proportion of blond Kasuals, the latter decked out in the week’s current Shinjuku cottons and gold-buckled white loafers. “I dunno,” Bobby said, looking up at Jammer, “but they shouldn’t be together, Kasuals and Gothicks, you know? They’re like natural enemies, it’s in the DNA or something...” He took another look. “Goddamn, there’s about a hundred of ‘em.”
   Jammer stuck his hands deep in his pleated trousers. “You know any of those guys personally?”
   “Gothicks, I know some of ‘em to talk to. Except it’s hard to tell ‘em apart Kasuals, they’ll stomp anything that isn’t Kasual. That’s mainly what they’re about. But I just been cut up by Lobes anyway, and Lobes are supposed to be under treaty with the Gothicks, so who knows?”
   Jammer sighed. “So, I guess you don’t feel like strolling out there and asking one what they think they’re up to?”
   “No,” Bobby said earnestly, “I don’t.”
   “Hmmm.” Jammer looked at Bobby in a calculating way, a way that Bobby definitely didn’t like.
   Something small and hard dropped from the high black ceiling and clicked loudly on one of the round black tables. The thing bounced and hit the carpet, rolling, and landed between the toes of Bobby’s new boots. Automatically, he bent and picked it up. An old-fashioned, slot-headed machine screw, its threads brown with rust and its head clotted with dull black latex paint. He looked up as a second one struck the table, and caught a glimpse of an unnervingly agile Jammer vaulting the bar, beside the universal credit unit. Jammer vanished, there was a faint ripping sound – Velcro – and Bobby knew that Jammer had the squat little automatic weapon he’d seen there earlier in the day. He looked around, but Jackie was nowhere in sight.
   A third screw ticked explosively on the Formica of the tabletop.
   Bobby hesitated, confused, but then followed Jackie’s example and got out of sight, moving as quietly as he could. He crouched behind one of the club’s wooden screens and watched as the fourth screw came down, followed by a slender cascade of fine dark dust. There was a scraping sound, and then a square steel ceiling grate vanished abruptly, withdrawn into some kind of duct. He glanced quickly to the bar, in time to see the fat recoil compensator on the barrel of Jammer’s gun as it swung up.
   A pair of thin brown legs dangled from the opening now, and a gray sharkskin hem smudged with dust.
   “Hold it,” Bobby said, “it’s Beauvoir!”
   “You bet it’s Beauvoir,” came the voice from above, big and hollow with the echo of the duct. “Get that damn table out of the way.”
   Bobby scrambled out from behind the screen and hauled the table and chairs to the side.
   “Catch this,” Beauvoir said, and dangled a bulging olive-drab pack from one of its shoulder straps, then let it go The weight of the thing nearly took Bobby to the floor. “Now get out of my way... Beauvoir swung down out of the duct, hung from the opening’s edge with both hands, then dropped.
   “What happened to the screamer I had up there?” Jammer asked, standing up behind the bar, the little machine gun in his hands.
   “Right here,” Beauvoir said, tossing a dull gray bar of phenolic resin to the carpet. It was wrapped with a length of fine black wire. “No other way I could get in here without a regular array of shitballs knowing about it, as it happens.
   Somebody’s obviously given them the blueprints to the place, but they’ve missed that one.”
   “How’d you get up to the roof?” Jackie asked, stepping from behind a screen.
   “I didn’t,” Beauvoir said, pushing his big plastic frames back up his nose. “I shot a line of monomol across from the stack next door, then slid over on a ceramic spindle...” His short nappy hair was full of furnace dust, He looked at her gravely. “You know,” he said.
   “Yes. Legba and Papa Ougou, in the matrix. I jacked with Bobby, on Jammer’s deck...”
   “They blew Ahmed away on the Jersey freeway. Probably used the same launcher they did Bobby’s old lady with...”
   “Who?”
   “Still not sure,” Beauvoir said, kneeling beside the pack and clicking open the quick-release plastic fasteners, “but it’s starting to shape up... What I was working on, up until I heard Lucas had been hit, was running down the Lobes who mugged Bobby for his deck. That was probably an accident, just business as usual, but somewhere there’s a couple of Lobes with our icebreaker... That had potential, for sure, because the Lobes are hotdoggers, some of them, and they do a little business with Two-a-Day. So Two-a-Day and I were making the rounds, looking to learn what we could. Which was dick, as it turned out, except that while we were with this dust case called Alix, who’s second assistant warlord or something, he gets a call from his opposite number, who Two-a-Day pins as a Barrytown Gothick name of Raymond.” He was unloading the pack as he spoke, laying out weapons, tools, ammunition, coils of wire. “Raymond wants to talk real bad, but Alix is too cool to do it in front of us, ‘Sorry, gentlemen, but this is official warlord biz,’ this dumbshit says, so natch. we excuse our humble selves, shuffle and bow and all, and nip around the corner. Use Two-a-Day’s modular phone to ring up our cowboys back in the Sprawl and put them on to Alix’s phone, but fast. Those cowboys went into Alix’s conversation with Raymond like a wire into cheese.” He pulled a deformed twelve-gauge shotgun, barely longer than his forearm, from the pack, selected a fat drum magazine from the display he’d made on the carpet, and clicked the two together, “You ever see one of these motherfuckers? South African, prewar...” Something in his voice and the set of his jaw made Bobby suddenly aware of his contained fury. “Seems Raymond has been approached by this guy, and this guy has lots of money, and he wants to hire the Gothicks outright, the whole apparat, to go into the Sprawl and do a number, a real crowd scene This guy wants it so big, he’s gonna hire the Kasuals too. Well, the shit hit the fan then, because Alix, he’s kind of conservative. Only good Kasual’s a dead one, and then only after x number of hours of torture, etc, ‘Fuck that,’ Raymond says, ever the diplomat. ‘We’re talking big money here, we’re talking corporate.’ “He opened a box of fat red plastic shells and began to load the gun, cranking one after another into the magazine. “Now I could be way off, but I keep seeing these Maas Biolabs PR types on video lately Something very weird’s happened, out on some property of theirs in Arizona. Some people say it was a nuke, some people say it was something else. And now they’re claiming their top biosoft man’s dead, in what they call an unrelated accident. That’s Mitchell, the guy who more or less invented the stuff. So far, nobody else is even pretending to be able to make a biochip, so Lucas and I assumed from the beginning that Maas had made that icebreaker “ If it was an icebreaker... But we had no idea who the Finn got it from, or where they got it. But if you put all that together, it looks like Maas Biolabs might be out to cook us all. And this is where they plan to do it, because they got us here but good.”
   “I dunno,” Jammer said, “we got a lot of friends in this building.”
   “Had,” Beauvoir put the shotgun down and started loading a Nambu automatic, “Most of the people on this level and the next one down got bought out this afternoon. Cash. Duffels full of it, There’s a few holdouts, but not enough.” “That doesn’t make any sense,” Jackie said, taking the glass of Scotch from Jammer’s hand and drinking it straight off. “What do we have that anybody could want that bad?” “Hey,” Bobby said, “don’t forget, they probably don’t know those Lobes ripped me for the icebreaker. Maybe that’s all they want.”
   “No,” Beauvoir said, snapping the magazine into the Nambu, “because they couldn’t have known you hadn’t stashed it in your mother’s place, right?”
   “But maybe they went there and looked...”
   “So how did they know Lucas wasn’t carrying it in Ahmed?”
   Jammer said, walking back to the bar.
   “Finn thought someone sent those three ninjas to kill him, too,” Bobby said. “Said they had stuff to make him answer questions first, though...”
   “Maas again,” Beauvoir said. “Whoever, here’s the deal with the Kasuals and Gothicks. We’d know more, but Alix the Lobe got on his high horse and wouldn’t parley with Raymond. No co-employment with the hated Kasuals. Near as our cowboys could make out, the army’s outside to keep you people in. And to keep people like me out. People with guns and stuff.” He handed the loaded Nambu to Jackie. “You know how to use a gun?” he asked Bobby.
   “Sure,” Bobby lied.
   “No,” Jammer said, “we got enough trouble without arming him. Jesus Christ...”
   “What all that suggests to me,” Beauvoir said, “is that we can expect somebody else to come in after us. Somebody a little more professional...”
   “Unless they just blow Hypermart all to shit and gone,” Jammer said, “and all those zombies with it...”
   “No,” Bobby said, “or else they’d already have done it.”
   They all stared at him.
   “Give the boy credit,” Jackie said. “He’s got it right.”
   Thirty minutes later and Jammer was staring glumly at Beauvoir. “I gotta hand it to you. That’s the most half-assed plan I’ve heard in a long time.”
   “Yeah, Beauvoir,” Bobby cut in, “why can’t we just crawl back up that vent, sneak across the roof, and get over to the next building? Use the line you came over on.”
   “There’s Kasuals on the roof like flies on shit,’ Beauvoir said. “Some of them might even have brain enough to have found the cap I opened to get down here. I left a couple of baby frag mines on my way in.” He grinned mirthlessly. “Aside from that, the building next door is taller. I had to go up on that roof and shoot the monomol down to this one. You can’t hand-over-hand up monomolecular filament; your fingers fall off.”
   “Then how the hell did you expect to get out?” Bobby said.
   “Drop it, Bobby,” Jackie said quietly. “Beauvoir’s done what he had to do. Now he’s in here with us, and we’re armed”
   “Bobby,” Beauvoir said, “why don’t you run the plan back to us, make sure we understand it.
   Bobby had the uncomfortable feeling that Beauvoir wanted to make sure he understood it, but he leaned back against the bar and began. “We get ourselves all armed up and we wait, okay? Jammer and I, we go out with his deck and scout around the matrix, maybe we get some idea what’s happening.
   “I think I can handle that by myself,” Jammer said.
   “Shit!” Bobby was off the bar “Beauvoir said! I wanna go, I wanna jack! How am I ever supposed to learn anything?”
   “Never mind, Bobby,” Jackie said, “you go on.”
   “Okay,” Bobby said, sulkily, “so, sooner or later, the guys who hired the Gothicks and Kasuals to keep us here, they’re gonna come for us. When they do, we take ‘em. We get at least one of ‘em alive. Same time, we’re on our way out, and the Goths ‘n’ all, they won’t expect all the fire-power, so we get to the street and head for the Projects.
   “I think that about covers it,” Jammer said, strolling across the carpet to the locked and curtained door. “I think that about sums it up.” He pressed his thumb against a coded latch plate and pulled the door half open. “Hey, you!” he bellowed. “Not you! You with the hat! Get your ass over here. I want to talk”
   The pencil-thick red beam pierced door and curtain, two of Jammer’s fingers, and winked over the bar. A bottle exploded, its contents billowing out as steam and vaporized esters. Jammer let the door swing shut again, stared at his ruined hand, then sat down hard on the carpet. The club slowly filled with the Christmas-tree smell of boiled gin. Beauvoir took a silver pressure bottle from the bar counter and hosed the smoldering curtain with seltzer, until the CO2 cartridge was exhausted and the stream faltered. “You’re in luck, Bobby,” Beauvoir said, tossing the bottle over his shoulder, “ ‘cause brother Jammer, he ain’t gonna be punching any deck.
   Jackie was making clucking sounds over Jammer’s hand, kneeling down. Bobby caught a glimpse of cauterized flesh, then quickly looked away.

26 THE WIG

   “YOU KNOW, REZ said, hanging upside down in front of Marly, “it’s strictly no biz of mine, but is somebody maybe expecting you when we get there? I mean, I’m taking you there, for sure, and if you can’t get in, I’ll take you back to JAL Term But if nobody wants to let you in, I don’t know how long I want to hang around. That thing’s scrap, and we get some funny people hanging out in the hulks, out here.” Rez – or Therése, Marly gathered, from the laminated pilot’s license clipped to the Sweet Jane’s console – had removed her canvas work vest for the trip.
   Marly, numb with the rainbow of derms Rez had pasted along her wrist to counteract the convulsive nausea of space adaptation syndrome, stared at the rose tattoo. It had been executed in a Japanese style hundreds of years old, and Marly woozily decided that she liked it. That, in fact, she liked Rez, who was at once hard and girlish and concerned for her strange passenger. Rez had admired her leather jacket and purse, before bundling them into a kind of narrow nylon net hammock already stuffed with cassettes, print books, and unwashed clothing.
   “I don’t know,” Marly managed, “I’ll just have to try to getting’...”
   “You know what that thing is, sister?” Rez was adjusting the g-web around Marly’s shoulders and armpits.
   “What thing?” Marly blinked.
   “Where we’re going. It’s part of the old Tessier-Ashpool cores. Used to be the mainframes for their corporate memory.
   “I’ve heard of them,” Marly said, closing her eyes. “Andrea told me
   “Sure, everybody’s heard of ‘em – they used to own all of Freeside. Built it, even. Then they went tits up and sold out. Had their family place cut off the spindle and towed to another orbit, but they had the cores wiped before they did that, and torched ‘em off and sold ‘em to a scrapper. The scrapper’s never done anything with ‘em I never heard anybody was squatting there, but out here you live where you can... I guess that’s true for anybody. Like they say that Lady Jane, old Ashpool’s daughter, she’s still living in their old place, stone crazy... She gave the g-web a last professional tug. “Okay. You just relax. I’m gonna burn Jane hard for twenty minutes, but it’ll get us there fast, which I figure is what you’re paying for...”
   And Marly slid back into a landscape built all of boxes, vast wooden Cornell constructions where the solid residues of love and memory were displayed behind rain-streaked sheets of dusty glass, and the figure of the mysterious boxmaker fled before her down avenues paved with mosaics of human teeth, Marly’s Paris boots clicking blindly over symbols outlined in dull gold crowns. The boxmaker was male and wore Alain’s green jacket, and feared her above all things. “I’m sorry,” she cried, running after him, “I’m sorry...”
   “Yeah. Therése Lorenz, the Sweet Jane. You want the numbers? What? Yeah, sure we’re pirates. I’m Captain fucking Hook already... Look, Jack, lemme give you the numbers, you can check it out... I said already. I gotta passenger. Request permission, et Goddamn cetera... Marly Something, speaks French in her sleep...”
   Many’s lids flickered, opened Rez was webbed in front of her, each small muscle of her back precisely defined. “Hey,” Rez said, twisting around in the web, “I’m sorry. I raised ‘em for you, but they sound pretty flaky. You religious?”
   “No,” Marly said, baffled.
   Rez made a face. “Well, I hope you can make sense out of this shit, then.” She shrugged out of the web and executed a tight backward somersault that brought her within centimeters of Marly’s face An optic ribbon trailed from her hand to the console, and for the first time Marly saw the delicate sky-blue socket set flush with the skin of the girl’s wrist. She popped a speaker-bead into Marly’s right ear and adjusted the trans-parent microphone tube that curved down from it.
   “You have no right to disturb us here,” a man’s voice said. “Our work is the work of God, and we alone have seen His true face!”
   “Hello? Hello, can you hear me? My name is Marly Krushkhova and I have urgent business with you. Or with someone at these coordinates. My business concerns a series of boxes, collages. The maker of these boxes may be in terrible danger! I must see him!”
   “Danger?” The man coughed. “God alone decides man’s fate! We are entirely without fear. But neither are we fools...”
   “Please, listen to me. I was hired by Josef Virek to locate the maker of the boxes. But now I have come to warn you. Virek knows you are here, and his agents will follow me...”
   Rez was staring at her hard.
   “You must let me in! I can tell you more...”
   “Virek?” There was a long, static-filled pause. “Josef Virek?”
   “Yes.” Marly said. “That one You’ve seen his picture all your life, the one with the king of England... Please, please...”
   “Give me your pilot,” the voice said, and the bluster and hysteria were gone, replaced with something Marly liked even less.
   “It’s a spare,” Rez said, snapping the mirrored helmet from the red suit. “I can afford it, you paid me enough.
   “No,” Marly protested, “really, you needn’t ...” She shook her head, Rez was undoing the fastenings at the spacesuit’s waist.
   “You don’t go into a thing like that without a suit,” she said. “You don’t know what they got for atmosphere. You don’t even know they got atmosphere! And any kinda bacteria, spores... What’s the matter?” Lowering the silver helmet.
   “I’m claustrophobic!”
   “Oh... Rez stared at her. “I heard of that... It means you’re scared to be inside things?” She looked genuinely curious.
   “Small things, yes.”
   “Like Sweet Jane?”
   “Yes, but... She glanced at the cramped cabin, fighting her panic. “I can stand this, but not the helmet.” She shuddered.
   “Well,” Rez said, “tell you what. We get you into the suit, but we leave the helmet off. I’ll teach you how to fasten it. Deal? Otherwise, you don’t leave my ship...” Her mouth was straight and firm.
   “Yes,” Marly said, “yes...”

   “Here’s the drill,” Rez said. “We’re lock to lock. This hatch opens, you get in, I close it. Then I open the other side. Then you’re in whatever passes for atmosphere, in there. You sure you don’t want the helmet on?”
   “No,” Marly said, looking down at the helmet she grasped in the suit’s red gauntlets. at her pale reflection in the mirrored faceplate Rez made a little clicking sound with her tongue. “Your life. If you want to get back, have them put a message through JAL Term for the Sweet Jane.”
   Marly kicked off clumsily and spun forward into the lock, no larger than an upright coffin. The red suit’s breastplate clicked hard against the outer hatch, and she heard the inner one hiss shut behind her. A light came on, beside her head, and she thought of the lights in refrigerators. “Good-bye, Therése.”
   Nothing happened. She was alone with the beating of her heart.
   Then the Sweet Jane’s outer hatch slid open. A slight pressure differential was enough to tumble her out into a darkness that smelled old and sadly human, a smell like a long-abandoned locker room. There was a thickness, an un-clean dampness to the air, and, still tumbling, she saw Sweet Jane’s hatch slide shut behind her. A beam of light stabbed past her, wavered, swung, and found her spinning.
   “Lights,” someone bawled hoarsely. “Lights for our guest! Jones!” It was the voice she’d heard through the ear-bead. It rang strangely, in the iron vastness of this place, this hollow she fell through, and then there was a grating sound and a distant ring of harsh blue flared up, showing her the far curve of a wall or hull of steel and welded lunar rock. The surface was lined and pitted with precisely carved channels and depressions, where equipment of some kind had once been fitted. Scabrous clumps of brown expansion foam still adhered in some of the deeper cuts, and others were lost in dead black shadow...”You’d better get a line on her, Jones, before she cracks her head...”
   Something struck the shoulder of her suit with a damp smack, and she turned her head to see a pink gob of bright plastic trailing a fine pink line, which jerked taut as she watched, flipping her around. The derelict cathedral space filled with the laboring whine of an engine, and, quite slowly, they reeled her in.
   “It took you long enough,” the voice said. “I wondered who would be first, and now it’s Virek... Mammon... And then they had her, spinning her around. She almost lost the helmet: it was drifting away, but one of them batted it back into her hands. Her purse, with her boots and jacket folded inside, executed its own arc, on its shoulder strap, and bumped the side of her head.
   “Who are you?” she asked.
   “Ludgate!” the old man roared. “Wigan Ludgate, as you well know. Who else did he send you to deceive?” His seamed, blotched face was clean shaven, but his gray, un-trimmed hair floated free, seaweed on a tide of stale air.
   “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not here to deceive you. I no longer work for Virek... I came here because... I mean, I’m not at all sure why I came here, to begin with, but on my way I learned that the artist who makes the boxes is in danger. Because there’s something else, something Virek thinks he has, something Virek thinks will free him from his cancers... Her words ran down to silence, in the face of the almost palpable craziness that radiated from Wigan Ludgate, and she saw that he wore the cracked plastic carapace of an old work suit, with cheap metal crucifixes epoxied like a necklace around the tarnished steel helmet ring. His face was very close. She could smell his decaying teeth.
   “The boxes!” Little balls of spittle curled off his lips, obeying the elegant laws of Newtonian physics. “You whore! They’re of the hand of God!”
   “Easy there, Lud,” said a second voice, “you’re scarin’ the lady. Easy, lady, ‘cause old Lud, he hasn’t got too many visitors. Gets him quite worked up, y’see, but he’s basically a harmless old bugger... She turned her head and met the relaxed gaze of a pair of wide blue eyes in a very young face. “I’m Jones,” he said, “I live here, too...
   Wigan Ludgate threw back his head and howled, and the sound rang wild against the walls of steel and stone.
   “Mostly, y’see,” Jones was saying as Marly pulled her way behind him along a knotted line stretched taut down a corridor that seemed to have no end, “he’s pretty quiet.
   Listens to his voices, y’know. Talks to himself, or maybe to the voices, I dunno, and then a spell comes on him and he’s like this...” When he stopped speaking, she could still hear faint echoes of Ludgate’s howls. “You may think it’s cruel, me leavin’ him this way, but it’s best, really. He’ll tire of it soon. Gets hungry. Then he comes to find me. Wants his tuck, y’see.”
   “Are you Australian?” she asked.
   “New Melbourne,” he said. “Or was, before I got up the well.”
   “Do you mind my asking why you’re here? I mean, here in this, this... What is it?”
   The boy laughed. “Mostly, I call it the Place. Lud, he calls it a lot of things, but mostly the Kingdom. Figures he’s found God, he does. Suppose he has, if you want to look at it that way. Near as I make it, he was some kind of console crook before he got up the well. Don’t know how he came to be here, exactly, other than that it suits the poor bastard. Me, I came here runnin’, understand? Trouble somewhere, not to be too specific, and my arse for out of there. Turn up here – that’s a long tale of its own – and here’s bloody Ludgate near to starvin’. He’d had him a sort of business, sellin’ things he’d scavenge, and those boxes you’re after, but he’d gotten a bit far gone for that. His buyers would come, oh, say, three times a year, but he’d send ‘em away. Well. I thought, the hidin’ here’s as good as any, so I took to helpin’ him. That’s it, I guess.”
   “Can you take me to the artist? Is he here? It’s extremely urgent.”
   “I’ll take you, no fear. But this place, it was never really built for people, not to get around in, I mean, so it’s a bit of a journey... It isn’t likely to be going anywhere, though. Can’t guarantee it’ll make a box for you. Do you really work for Virek? Fabulous rich old shit on the telly? Kraut, isn’t he?”
   “I did,” she said, “for a number of days. As for nationality, I would guess Herr Virek is the sole citizen of a nation consisting of Herr Virek...”
   “See what you mean,” Jones said, cheerily. “It’s all the same, with these rich old fucks, I suppose, though it’s more fun than watching a bloody zaibatsu... You won’t see a zaibatsu come to a messy end, will you? Take old Ashpool – countryman of mine, he was – who built all this; they say his own daughter slit his throat, and now she’s bad as old Lud, holed up in the family castle somewhere. The Place being a former part of all that, y’see.”
   “Rez... I mean, my pilot, said something like that. And a friend of mine, in Paris, mentioned the Tessier-Ashpools recently... The clan is in eclipse?”
   “Eclipse? Lord! Down the bloody tube’s more like it. Think about it: We’re crawlin’, you an’ me, through what used to be their corporate data cores. Some contractor in Pakistan bought the thing; hull’s fine, and there’s a fair bit of gold in the circuitry, but not as cheap to recover as some might like... It’ s been hangin’ up here ever since, with only old Lud to keep it company, and it him. Till I come along, that is. Guess one day the crews’ll come up from Pakistan and get cuttin’... Funny, though, how much of it still seems to work, at least part of the time. Story I heard, one got me here in the first place, said T-A’s wiped the cores dead, before they cut it loose.”
   “But you think they are still operative?”
   “Lord, yes. About the way Lud is, if you call that operative. What do you think your boxmaker is?”
   “What do you know about Maas Biolabs?”
   “Moss what?”
   “Maas. They make biochips...”
   “Oh. Them. Well, that’s all I do know about ‘em...”
   “Ludgate speaks of them?”
   “He might. Can’t say as I listen all that close. Lud, he does speak a fair bit...”

27 STATIONS OF THE BREATH

   HE BROUGHT THEM in through avenues lined with rusting slopes of dead vehicles, with wrecker’s cranes and the black towers of smelters. He kept to the back streets as they eased into the western flank of the Sprawl, and eventually gunned the hover down a brick canyon, armored sides scraping sparks, and drove it hard into a wall of soot-blown, compacted garbage. An avalanche of refuse slid down, almost covering the vehicle, and he released the controls, watching the foam dice swing back and forth, side to side The kerosene gauge had been riding on empty for the last twelve blocks.
   “What happened back there?” she said, her cheekbones green in the glow of the instruments.
   “I shot down a helicopter. Mostly by accident. We were lucky.”
   “No, I mean after that. I was... I had a dream.”
   “What did you dream?”
   “The big things, moving...”
   “You had some kind of seizure.”
   “Am I sick? Do you think I’m sick? Why did the company want to kill me?”
   “I don’t think you’re sick.”
   She undid her harness and scrambled back over the seat, to crouch where they had slept. “It was a bad dream...” She began to tremble. He climbed out of his harness and went to her, held her head against him, stroking her hair, smoothing it back against the delicate skull, stroking it back behind her ears. Her face in the green glow like something hauled from dreams and abandoned, the skin smooth and thin across the bones. The black sweatshirt half unzipped, he traced the fragile line of her collarbone with a fingertip. Her skin was cool, moist with a film of sweat. She clung to him.
   He closed his eyes and saw his body in a sun-striped bed, beneath a slow fan with blades of brown hardwood His body pumping, jerking like an amputated limb, Allison’s head thrown back, mouth open, lips taut across her teeth.
   Angie pressed her face into the hollow of his neck.
   She groaned, stiffened, rocked back “Hired man,” the voice said. And he was back against the driver’s seat, the Smith & Wesson’s barrel reflecting a single line of green instrument glow, the luminous head on its front sight eclipsing her left pupil.
   “No,” the voice said.
   He lowered the gun, “You’re back.”
   “No. Legba spoke to you. I am Samedi.”
   “Saturday?”
   “Baron Saturday, hired man. You met me once on a hillside. The blood lay on you like dew. I drank of your full heart that day.” Her body jerked violently. “You know this town well...”
   “Yes.” He watched as muscles tensed and relaxed in her face, molding her features into a new mask.
   “Very well. Leave the vehicle here, as you intended. But follow the stations north. To New York. Tonight. I will guide you with Legba’s horse then, and you will kill for me “Kill who?”
   “The one you most wish to kill, hired man.”
   Angie moaned, shuddered, and began to sob.
   “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re half way home.” It was a meaningless thing to say, he thought, helping her out of the seat; neither of them had homes at all. He found the case of cartridges in the parka and replaced the one he’d used on the Honda He found a paint-spattered razor-knife, in the dash tool kit and sliced the ripstop lining out of the parka, a million microtubes of poly insulation whirling up as he cut. When he’d stripped it out, he put the Smith & Wesson in the holster and put the parka on. It hung around him in folds, like an oversized raincoat, and didn’t show the bulge of the big gun at all.
   “Why did you do that?” she asked, running the back of her hand across her mouth.
   “Because it’s hot out there and I need to cover the gun.”
   He stuffed the ziploc full of used New Yen into a pocket. “Come on,” he said, “we got subways to catch

   Condensation dripped steadily from the old Georgetown dome, built forty years after the ailing Federals decamped for the lower reaches of McLean. Washington was a Southern city, always had been, and you felt the tone of the Sprawl shift here if you rode the trains down the stations from Boston. The trees in the District were lush and green, and their leaves shaled the arc lights as Turner and Angela Mitchell made their way along the broken sidewalks to Dupont Circle and the station. There were drums in the circle, and someone had lit a trash fire in the giant’s marble goblet at the center. Silent figures sat beside spread blankets as they passed, the blankets arrayed with surreal assortments of merchandise: the damp-swollen cardboard covers of black plastic audio disks beside battered prosthetic limbs trailing crude nerve-jacks, a dusty glass fishbowl filled with oblong steel dog tags, rubber-banded stacks of faded postcards, cheap Indo trodes still sealed in Wholesaler’s plastic, mismatched ceramic salt-and-pepper sets, a golf club with a peeling leather grip, Swiss army knives with missing blades, a dented tin wastebasket lithographed with the face of a president whose name Turner could almost remember (Carter? Grosvenor?), fuzzy holograms of the Monument...
   In the shadows near the station’s entrance, Turner haggled quietly with a Chinese boy in white Jeans, exchanging the smallest of Rudy’s bills for nine alloy tokens stamped with the ornate BAMA Transit logo.
   Two of the tokens admitted them to the station. Three of them went into vending machines for bad coffee and stale pastries. The remaining four carried them north, the train rushing silently along on its magnetic cushion. He sat back with his arms around her, and pretended to close his eyes; he watched their reflections in the opposite window. A tall man, gaunt now and unshaven, hunched back in defeat with a hollow-eyed girl curled beside him. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the alley where he’d abandoned the hover.
   For the second time in an hour he considered phoning his agent. If you had to trust someone, the rule ran, then trust your agent. But Conroy had said he’d hired Oakey and the others through Turner’s agent, and the connection made Turner dubious. Where was Conroy tonight? Turner was fairly certain that it would have been Conroy who ordered Oakey after them with the laser. Would Hosaka have arranged the railgun, in Arizona, to erase evidence of a botched defection attempt? But if they had, why order Webber to destroy the medics, their neurosurgery, and the Maas-Neotek deck? And there was Maas again... Had Maas killed Mitchell? Was there any reason to believe that Mitchell was really dead? Yes, he thought, as the girl stirred beside him in uneasy sleep, there was: Angie. Mitchell had feared they’d kill her, he’d arranged the defection in order to get her out, get her to Hosaka, with no plan for his own escape. Or that was Angie’s version, anyway.
   He closed his eyes, shut out the reflections. Something stirred, deep in the silt of Mitchell’s recorded memories. Shame. He couldn’t quite reach it... He opened his eyes suddenly. What had she said, at Rudy’s? That her father had put the thing into her head because she wasn’t smart enough? Careful not to disturb her, he worked his arm from behind her neck and slid two fingers into the waist pocket of his pants, came up with Conroy’s little black nylon envelope on its neck cord. He undid the Velcro and shook the swollen, asymmetrical gray biosoft out onto his open palm. Machine dreams. Roller coaster. Too fast, too alien to grasp. But if you wanted something, something specific, you should be able to pull it out...
   He dug his thumbnail under the socket’s dustcover, pried it out, and put it down on the plastic seat beside him. The train was nearly empty, and none of the other passengers seemed to be paying any attention to him. He took a deep breath, set his teeth, and inserted the biosoft...
   Twenty seconds later, he had it, the thing he’d gone for. The strangeness hadn’t touched him, this time, and he decided that that was because he’d gone after this one specific thing, this fact, exactly the sort of data you’d expect to find in the dossier of a top research man: his daughter’s IQ, as reflected by annual batteries of tests.
   Angela Mitchell was well above the norm. Had been, all along.
   He took the biosoft out of his socket and rolled it absently between thumb and forefinger. The shame. Mitchell and the shame and grad school... Grades, he thought. I want the bastard’s grades. I want his transcripts.
   He jacked the dossier again.
   Nothing. He’d gotten it, but there was nothing.
   No. Again.
   Again...
   “Goddamn,” he said, seeing it.
   A teenager with a shaved head glanced at him from a seat across the aisle, then turned back to the stream of his friend’s monologue: “They’re gonna run the games again, up on the hill, midnight. We’re goin’, but we’re just gonna hang, we’re not gonna make it, just kick back and let ‘em thump each other’s butts, and we’re gonna laugh, see who gets thumped, ‘cause last week Susan got her arm busted, you there for that? An’ it was funny, ‘cause Cal was tryin’ t’ takem to the hospital but he was dusted ‘n’ he ran that shitty Yamaha over a speedbump...
   Turner snapped the biosoft back into his socket.
   This time, when it was over, he said nothing at all. He put his arm back around Angie and smiled, seeing the smile in the window. It was a feral smile; it belonged to the edge
   Mitchell’s academic record was good, extremely good Excellent. But the arc wasn’t there. The arc was something Turner had learned to look for in the dossiers of research people, that certain signal curve of brilliance. He could spot the arc the way a master machinist could identify metals by observing the spark plume off a grinding wheel. And Mitchell hadn’t had it.
   The shame. The graduate dorms Mitchell had known, known he wasn’t going to make it. And then, somehow, he had. How? It wouldn’t be in the dossier. Mitchell, somehow, had known how to edit what he gave the Maas security machine. Otherwise, they would have been on to him Someone, something, had found Mitchell in his postgraduate slump and had started feeding him things. Clues, directions. And Mitchell had gone to the top, his arc hard and bright and perfect then, and it had carried him to the top. Who? What?
   He watched Angie’s sleeping face in the shudder of subway light.
   Faust.
   Mitchell had cut a deal. Turner might never know the details of the agreement, or Mitchell’s price, but he knew he understood the other side of it. What Mitchell had been required to do in return.
   Legba, Samedi, spittle curling from the girl’s contorted lips.
   And the train swept into old Union in a black blast of midnight air.

   “Cab, sir?” The man’s eyes were moving behind glasses with a polychrome tint that swirled like oil slicks. There were flat, silvery sores across the backs of his hands. Turner stepped in close and caught his upper arm, without breaking stride, forcing him back against a wall of scratched white tile, between gray ranks of luggage lookers.
   “Cash,” Turner said. “I’m paying New Yen. I want my cab. No trouble with the driver Understand? I’m not a mark.” He tightened his grip. “Fuck up on me, I’ll come back here and kill you, or make you wish I had.”
   “Got it Yessir. Got it. We can do that, sir, yessir. Where d’ you wanna go to, sir?” The man’s wasted features contorted in pain.
   “Hired man.” the voice came from Angie, a hoarse whisper. And then an address. Turner saw the tout’s eyes dart nervously behind the swirls of colors. “That’s Madison?” he croaked. “Yessir. Get you a good cab, real good cab...”

   “What is this place,” Turner asked the cabby, leaning forward to thumb the SPEAK button beside the steel speaker grid, “the address we gave you?”
   There was a crackle of static. “Hypermart. Not much open there this time of night. Looking for anything in particular?”
   “No,” Turner said. He didn’t know the place. He tried to remember that stretch of Madison, Residential, mostly. Uncounted living spaces carved out of the shells of commercial buildings that dated from a day when commerce had required clerical workers to be present physically at a central location. Some of the buildings were tall enough to penetrate a dome.
   “Where are we going?” Angie asked, her hand on his arm.
   “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
   “God,” she said, leaning against his shoulder, looking up at the pink neon HYPERMART sign that slashed the granite face of the old building, “I used to dream about New York, back on the mesa. I had a graphics program that would take me through all the streets, into museums and things. I wanted to come here more than anything in the world
   “Well, you made it. You’re here.”
   She started to sob, hugged him, her face against his bare chest, shaking. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.
   “It’ll be okay,” he said, stroking her hair, his eyes on the main entrance. He had no reason to believe anything would ever be okay for either of them. She seemed to have no idea that the words that had brought them here had come from her mouth. But then, he thought, she hadn’t spoken them. There were bag people huddled on either side of Hypermart’s entranceway, prone hummocks of rag gone the exact shade of the sidewalk; they looked to Turner as though they were being slowly extruded from the dark concrete, to become mobile extensions of the city. “Jammer’s,” the voice said, muffled by his chest, and he felt a cold revulsion, “a club. Find Danbala’s horse.” And then she was crying again He took her hand and walked past the sleeping transients, in under the tarnished gilt scrollwork and through the glass doors. He saw an espresso machine down an aisle of tents and shuttered stalls, a girl with a black crest of hair swabbing a counter. “Coffee.” he said. “Food. Come on. You need to eat.”
   He smiled at the girl while Angie settled herself on a stool.
   How about cash?” he said. “You ever take cash?”
   She stared at him, shrugged. He took a twenty from Rudy’s ziploc and showed it to her. ‘What do you want?”
   “Coffees. Some food.”
   “That all you got? Nothing smaller?”
   He shook his head.
   “Sorry. Can’t make the change.”
   “You don’t have to.”
   “You crazy?”
   “No, but I want coffee.”
   “That’s some tip, mister. I don’t make that in a week.”
   “It’s yours.”
   Anger crossed her face. “You’re with those shitheads up-stairs. Keep your money. I’m closing.”
   “We aren’t with anybody,” he said, leaning across the counter slightly, so that the parka fell open and she could see the Smith & Wesson. “We’re looking for a club. A place called Jammer s.
   The girl glanced at Angie, back to Turner. “She sick?
   Dusted? What is this?”
   “Here’s the money,” Turner said. “Give us our coffee. You want to earn the change, tell me how to find Jammer’s place It’s worth it to me. Understand?”
   She slid the worn bill out of sight and moved to the espresso machine. “I don’t think I understand anything any-more.” She rattled cups and milk-filmed glasses out of the way. “What is it with Jammer’s? You a friend of his? You know Jackie?”
   “Sure,” Turner said.
   “She came by early this morning with this little wilson from the ‘burbs. I guess they went up there.”
   “Where?”
   “Jammer’s. Then the weirdness started.”
   “Yeah?”
   “All these creeps from Barrytown, greaseballs and white-shoes, walking in like they owned the place. And now they damn well do, the top two floors. Started buying people out of their stalls. A lot of people on the lower floors just packed and left. Too weird...”
   “How many came?”
   Steam roared out of the machine. “Maybe a hundred. I been scared shit all day, but I can’t reach my boss. I close up in thirty minutes anyway. The day girl never showed, or else she came in, caught the trouble smell, and walked...” She took the little steaming cup and put it in front of Angie. “You okay, honey?”
   Angie nodded.
   “You have any idea what these people are up to?” Turner asked.
   The girl had returned to the machine. It roared again. “I think they’re waiting for someone,” she said quietly and brought Turner an espresso. “Either for someone to try to leave Jammer’s or for someone to try to get in.”
   Turner looked down at the swirls of brown foam on his coffee. “And nobody here called the police?”
   “The police? Mister, this is Hypermart. People here don’t call the police.
   Angie’s cup shattered on the marble counter.
   “Short and straight, hired man,” the voice whispered.
   “You know the way. Walk in.”
   The countergirl’s mouth was open. “Jesus,” she said, “she’s gotta be dusted bad... She looked at Turner coldly. “You give it to her?”
   “No,” Turner said, “but she’s sick. It’ll be okay.” He drank off the black bitter coffee. It seemed to him, just for a second, that he could feel the whole Sprawl breathing, and its breath was old and sick and tired, all up and down the stations from Boston to Atlanta...

28 JAYLENE SLIDE

   “JESUS,” BOBBY SAID to Jackie, “can’t you wrap it up or something?” Jammer’s burn filled the office with a smell, like overdone pork, that turned Bobby’s stomach.
   “You don’t bandage a burn,” she said, helping Jammer sit down in his chair. She began to open his desk drawers, one after another. “You got any painkillers? Derms? Anything?”
   Jammer shook his head, his long face slack and pale.
   “Maybe. Behind the bar, there’s a kit...”
   “Get it!” Jackie snapped. “Go on!”
   “What are you so worried about him for.” Bobby began, hurt by her tone. “He tried to let those Gothicks in here.”
   “Get the box, asshole! He just got weak for a second, is all. He got scared. Get me that box or you’ll need it yourself.”
   He darted out into the club and found Beauvoir wiring pink hotdogs of plastic explosive to a yellow plastic box like the control unit for a kid’s toy truck. The hotdogs were mashed around the hinges of the doors and on either side of the lock.
   “What’s that for?” Bobby asked, scrambling over the bar. “Somebody might want in,” Beauvoir said. “They do, we’ll open it for them.”
   Bobby paused to admire the arrangement. “Why don’t you just mash it up against the glass, so it’ll blow straight out?”
   “Too obvious,” Beauvoir said, straightening up, the yel-low detonator in his hands. “But I’m glad you think about these things. If we try to blow it straight out, some of it blows back in. This way is... neater.”
   Bobby shrugged and ducked behind the bar. There were wire racks filled with plastic sacks of krill wafers, an assortment of abandoned umbrellas, an unabridged dictionary, a woman’s blue shoe, a white plastic case with a runny-looking red cross painted on it with nail polish... He grabbed the case and climbed back over the bar.
   “Hey, Jackie,” he said, putting the first-aid kit down beside Jammer’s deck.
   “Forget it.” She popped the case open and rummaged through its contents. “Jammer, there’s more poppers in here than anything else...”
   Jammer smiled weakly.
   “Here. These’ll do you.” She unrolled a sheet of red derms and began to peel them off the backing, smoothing three across the back of the burnt hand. “What you need’s a local, though.”
   “I was thinking,” Jammer said, staring up at Bobby. “Maybe now’s when you can earn yourself a little running time...”
   “How’s that?” Bobby asked, eyeing the deck.
   “Stands to reason,” Jammer said, “that whoever’s got those jerks outside, they’ve also got the phones tapped.”
   Bobby nodded. Beauvoir had said the same thing, when he’d run his plan down to them.
   “Well, when Beauvoir and I decided you and I might hit the matrix for a little look-see, I actually had something else in mind.” Jammer showed Bobby his expanse of small white teeth. “See, I’m in this because I owed Beauvoir and Lucas a favor. But there are people who owe me favors, too, favors that go way back. Favors I never needed to call in.”
   “Jammer.” Jackie said, “you gotta relax. Just sit back. You could go into shock.”
   “How’s your memory, Bobby? I’m going to run a sequence by you. You practice it on my deck. No power, not jacked. Okay?”
   Bobby nodded.
   “So dry-run this a couple of times. Entrance code. Let you in the back door.”
   “Whose back door?” Bobby spun the black deck around and poised his fingers above the keyboard.
   “The Yakuza,” Jammer said.
   Jackie was staring at him. “Hey, what do you”
   “Like I said. It’s an old favor. But you know what they say, the Yakuza never forget. Cuts both ways...”
   A whiff of singed flesh reached Bobby and he winced.
   “How come you didn’t mention this to Beauvoir?” Jackie was folding things back into the white case.
   ‘Honey,” Jammer said, “you’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”
   “Now look,” Bobby said, fixing Jackie with what he hoped was his heaviest look, “I’m running this. So I don’t need your loas, okay, they get on my nerves.
   “She doesn’t call them up,” Beauvoir said, crouching by the office door, the detonator in one hand and the South African riot gun in the other, “they just come. They want to come, they’re there. Anyway, they like you.”
   Jackie settled the trodes across her forehead. “Bobby,” she said, “you’ll be fine. Don’t worry, just jack.” She’d removed her headscarf. Her hair was cornrowed between neat furrows of shiny brown skin, with antique resistors woven in at random intervals, little cylinders of brown phenolic resin ringed with color-coded bands of paint.
   “When you punch out past the Basketball,” Jammer said to Bobby, “you wanna dive right three clicks and go for the floor, I mean straight down...”
   “Past the what?”
   “Basketball. That’s the Dallas-Fort Worth Sunbelt Co-Prosperity Sphere, you wanna get your ass down fast, all the way, then you run how I told you, for about twenty clicks. It’s all used-car lots and tax accountants down there, but just stand on that mother, okay?”
   Bobby nodded, grinning.
   “Anybody sees you going by, well, that’s their lookout. People who jack down there are used to seeing some weird shit anyway.”
   “Man,” Beauvoir said to Bobby, “get it on. I gotta get back to the door...”
   Bobby jacked.
   He followed Jammer’s instructions, secretly grateful that he could feel Jackie beside him as they plunged down into the workaday depths of cyberspace, the glowing Basketball dwindling above them. The deck was quick, superslick, and it made him feel fast and strong. He wondered how Jammer had come to have the Yakuza owing him a favor, one he’d never bothered to collect, and a part of him was busily constructing scenarios when they hit the ice.
   “Jesus...” And Jackie was gone. Something had come down between them, something he felt as cold and silence and a shutting off of breath. “But there wasn’t anything there, Goddamn it!” He was frozen, somehow, locked steady He could still see the matrix, but he couldn’t feel his hands.
   “Why the hell anybody plug the likes of you into a deck like that? Thing ought to be in a museum, you ought to be in grade school.”
   “Jackie!” The cry was reflex.
   “Man,” said the voice, “I dunno. It’s been a long few days I haven’t slept, but you sure don’t look like what I was set to catch when you came out of there... How old are you?”
   “Fuck off!” Bobby said. It was all he could think of to say.
   The voice began to laugh. “Ramirez would split his sides at this, you know? He had him a fine sense of the ridiculous. That’s one of the things I miss.”
   “Who’s Ramirez?”
   “My partner. Ex. Dead. Very. I was thinking maybe you could tell me how he got that way.”
   “Never heard of him,” Bobby said. “Where’s Jackie?”
   “Sittin’ cold-cocked in cyberspace while you answer my questions, wilson. What’s your name?”
   “B– Count Zero.”
   “Sure. Your name!”
   “Bobby, Bobby Newmark.”
   Silence. Then: “Well. Hey. Does make a little sense, then. That was your mother’s place I watched those Maas spooks use the rocket on, wasn’t it? But I guess you weren’t there, or you wouldn’t be here Hold on a sec...”
   A square of cyberspace directly in front of him flipped sickeningly and he found himself in a pale blue graphic that seemed to represent a very spacious apartment, low shapes of furniture sketched in hair-fine lines of blue neon. A woman stood in front of him, a sort of glowing cartoon squiggle of a woman, the face a brown smudge. “I’m Slide,” the figure said, hands on its hips, “Jaylene. You don’t fuck with me. Nobody in L.A. “ – she gestured, a window suddenly snapping into existence behind her – “fucks with me. You got that?”
   “Right,” Bobby said. “What is this? I mean, if you could sort of explain...” He still couldn’t move The “window” showed a blue-gray video view of palm trees and old buildings.
   “How do you mean?”
   “This sort of drawing. And you. And that old picture...”
   “Hey, man, I paid a designer an arm and a leg to punch this up for me. This is my space, my construct. This is L.A., boy. People here don’t do anything without jacking. This is where I entertain!”
   “Oh,” Bobby said, still baffled.
   “Your turn. Who’s back there, in that sleaze-ass dancehall?”
   “Jammer’s? Me, Jackie, Beauvoir, Jammer.”
   “And where were you headed when I grabbed you?”
   Bobby hesitated. “The Yakuza. Jammer has a code -”
   “What for?” The figure moved forward, an animated sensuous brush-sketch.”
   “Help.”
   “Shit You’re probably telling the truth...”
   “I am, I am, swear to God.”
   “Well, you ain’t what I need, Bobby Zero. I been out cruising cyberspace, all up and down, trying to find out who killed my man. I thought it was Maas, because we were taking one of theirs for Hosaka, so I hunted up a spook team of theirs. First thing I saw was what they did to your mom-ma’s condo. Then I saw three of them drop in on a man they call the Finn, but those three never came back out...”
   “Finn killed ‘em,” Bobby said. “I saw ‘em. Dead.”
   “You did? Well, then, could be we do have things to talk about. After that, I watched the other three use that same launcher on a pimpmobile...”
   “That was Lucas,” he said.
   “But no sooner had they done it than a copter overflew ‘em and fried all three with a laser. You know anything about that?”
   “No.”
   “You think you can tell me your story. Bobby Zero? Make it quick!”
   “I was gonna do this run, see? And I’d got this icebreaker off Two-a-Day, from up the Projects, and I...”
   When he finished, she was silent. The slinky cartoon figure stood by the window, as though she were studying the television trees.
   “I got an idea,” he ventured. “Maybe you can help us -”
   “No,” she said.
   “But maybe it’ll help you find out what you want...”
   “No. I just want to kill the motherfucker who killed Ramirez.”
   “But we’re trapped in there, they’re gonna kill us. It’s Maas, the people you were following around in the matrix! They hired a bunch of Kasuals and Gothicks -”
   “That’s not Maas,” she said “That’s a bunch of Euros over on Park Avenue. Ice on ‘em a mile deep.”
   Bobby took that in “They the ones in the copter, the ones killed the other Maas guys?”
   “No. I couldn’t get a fix on that copter, and they flew south. Lost ‘em. I have a hunch, though... Anyway, I’m sending you back. You want to try that Yak code, go ahead.”
   “But, lady, we need help.”
   “No percentage in help, Bobby Zero,” she said, and then he was sitting in front of Jammer’s deck, the muscles in his neck and back aching. It took him a while before he could get his eyes to focus, so it was nearly a minute before he saw that there were strangers in the room.
   The man was tall, maybe taller than Lucas, but rangier, narrower at the hips. He wore a kind of baggy combat jacket that hung around him in folds, with giant pockets, and his chest was bare except for a horizontal black strap. His eyes looked bruised and feverish, and he held the biggest handgun Bobby had ever seen, a kind of distended revolver with some weird fixture molded under the barrel, a thing like a cobra’s head. Beside him, swaying, stood a girl who might have been Bobby’s age, with the same bruised eyes – though hers were dark – and lank brown hair that needed to be washed. She wore a black sweatshirt, several sizes too large, and jeans. The man reached out with his left hand and steadied her.
   Bobby stared, then gaped as the memory hit him
   Girlvoice, brownhair, darkeyes, the ice eating into him, his teeth burring, her voice, the big thing leaning in...”
   “Viv la Vyéj,” Jackie said, beside him, rapt, her hand gripping his shoulder hard, “the Virgin of Miracles. She’s come, Bobby. Danbala has sent her!”
   “You were under a while, kid,” the tall man said to Bobby. “What happened?”
   Bobby blinked, glanced frantically around, found Jammer’s eyes, glazed with drugs and pain.
   “Tell him,” Jammer said.
   “I couldn’t get to the Yak. Somebody grabbed me, I don’t know how.”
   “Who?” The tall man had his arm around the girl now.
   “She said her name was Slide, From Los Angeles.”
   “Jaylene,” the man said
   The phone on Jammer’s desk began to chime.
   “Answer it,” the man said.
   Bobby turned as Jackie reached over and tapped the call-bar below the square screen. The screen lit, flickered, and showed them a man’s face, broad and very pale, the eyes hooded and sleepy-looking. His hair was bleached nearly white, and brushed straight back. He had the meanest mouth Bobby had ever seen.
   “Turner.” the man said, “we’d better talk now. You haven’t got a lot of time left. I think you should get those people out of the room, for starts.”

29 BOXMAKER

   THE KNOTTED LINE stretched on and on. At times they came to angles, forks of the tunnel. Here the line would be wrapped around a strut or secured with a fat transparent gob of epoxy.
   The air was as stale, but colder. When they stopped to rest in a cylindrical chamber, where the shaft widened before a triple branching, Marly asked Jones for the flat little work light he wore across his forehead on a gray elastic strap. Holding it in one of the red suit’s gauntlets, she played it over the chamber’s wail. The surface was etched with patterns, microscopically fine lines.”
   “Put your helmet on,” Jones advised, “you’ve got a better light than mine...”
   Marly shuddered. “No.” She passed him the light. “Can you help me out of this, please?” She tapped a gauntlet against the suit’s hard chest. The mirror-domed helmet was fastened to the suit’s waist with a chrome snap-hook.
   “You’d best keep it,” Jones said. “It’s the only one in the Place. I’ve got one, where I sleep, but no air for it. Wig’s bottles won’t fit my transpirator, and his suit’s all holes. He shrugged.
   “No, please,” she said, struggling with the catch at the suit’s waist, where she’d seen Rez twist something. “I can’t stand it...”
   Jones pulled himself half over the line and did something she couldn’t see. There was a click. “Stretch your arms, over your head,” he said. It was awkward, but finally she floated free, still in the black jeans and white silk blouse she’d worn to that final encounter with Alain. Jones fastened the empty red suit to the line with another of the snap-rings mounted around its waist, and then undid her bulging purse. “You want this? To take with you, I mean? We could leave it here, get it on our way back.”
   “No,” she said, “I’ll take it. Give it to me.” She hooked an elbow around the line and fumbled the purse open. Her jacket came out, but so did one of her boots. She managed to get the boot back into the purse, then twisted herself into the jacket.
   “That’s a nice piece of hide,” Jones said.
   “Please,” she said, “let’s hurry...”
   “Not far now.” he said, his work light swinging to show her where the line vanished through one of three openings arranged in an equilateral triangle.
   “End of the line,” he said. “Literal, that is.” He tapped the chromed eyebolt where the line was tied in a sailor’s knot. His voice caught and echoed, somewhere ahead of them, until she imagined she heard other voices whispering behind the round of echo. “We’ll want a bit of light for this,” he said, kicking himself across the shaft and catching a gray metal coffin thing that protruded there. He opened it. She watched his hands move in the bright circle of the work light; his fingers were thin and delicate, but the nails were small and blunt, outlined with black, impacted grime. The letters “CJ” were tattooed in crude blue across the back of his right hand. The sort of tattoo one did oneself, in jail... Now he’d fished out a length of heavy, insulated wire. He squinted into the box, then wedged the wire behind a copper D-connector.
   The dark ahead vanished in a white flood of light.
   “Got more power than we need, really,” he said, with something akin to a homeowner’s pride. “The solar banks are all still workin’, and they were meant to power the main-frames... Come on, then, lady, we’ll meet the artist you come so far to see...” He kicked off and out, gliding smoothly through the opening, like a swimmer, into the light. Into the thousand drifting things. She saw that the red plastic soles of his frayed shoes had been patched with smears of white silicon caulking.
   And then she’d followed, forgetting her fears, forgetting the nausea and constant vertigo, and she was there. And she understood.
   “My God,” she said.
   “Not likely,” Jones called. “Maybe old Wig’s, though.
   Too bad it’s not doing it now, though That’s even more of a sight.”
   Something slid past, ten centimeters from her face. An ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to end.
   She had no idea how long she’d been there, when the screen lit and began to flicker. Hours, minutes... She’d already learned to negotiate the chamber, after a fashion, kicking off like Jones from the dome’s concavity. Like Jones. She caught herself on the thing’s folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiautonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.
   Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.
   A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat... Endless, the slow swarm, the spinning things...
   Jones tumbled up through the silent storm, laughing, grabbing an arm tipped with a glue gun. “Always makes me want to laugh, to see it. But the boxes always make me sad.”
   “Yes,” she said, “they make me sad, too. But there are sadnesses and sadnesses.”
   “Quite right.” He grinned. “No way to make it go, though. Guess the spirit has to move it, or anyway that’s how old Wig has it. He used to come out here a lot I think the voices are stronger for him here. But lately they’ve been talking to him wherever, it seems like...”
   She looked at him through the thicket of manipulators. He was very dirty, very young, with his wide blue eyes under a tangle of brown curls. He wore a stained gray zipsuit, its collar shiny with grime. “You must be mad,” she said with something like admiration in her voice, “you must be totally mad, to stay here...”
   He laughed. “Wigan’s madder than a sack of bugs. Not me.
   She smiled. “No, you’re crazy I’m crazy, too.”
   “Hello then,” he said, looking past her. “What’s this?
   One of Wig’s sermons, looks like, and no way we can shut it off without me cutting the power . .
   She turned her head and saw diagonals of color strobe across the rectangular face of a large screen glued crookedly to the curve of the dome. The screen was occluded, for a second, by the passage of a dressmaker’s dummy, and then the face of Josef Virek filled it, his soft blue eyes glittering behind round lenses.
   “Hello, Marly,” he said. “I can’t see you, but I’m sure I know where you are.”
   “That’s one of Wig’s sermon screens,” Jones said, rubbing his face. “Put ‘em up all over the Place, ‘cause he figured one day he’d have people up here to preach to. This geezer’s linked in through Wig’s communication gear, I guess. Who is he?”
   “Virek,” she said.
   “Thought he was older...”
   “It’s a generated image,” she said. “Ray tracing, texture mapping... She stared as the face smiled out at her from the curve of the dome, beyond the slow-motion hurricane of lost things, minor artifacts of countless lives, tools and toys and gilded buttons.
   “I want you to know,” the image said, “that you have fulfilled your contract. My psychoprofile of Marly Krushkhova predicted your response to my gestalt. Broader profiles indicated that your presence in Paris would force Maas to play their hand. Soon, Marly, I will know exactly what it is that you have found. For four years I’ve known something that Maas didn’t know. I’ve known that Mitchell, the man Maas and the world regards as the inventor of the new biochip processes, was being fed the concepts that resulted in his breakthroughs. I added you to an intricate array of factors, Marly, and things came to a most satisfying head. Maas, without understanding what they were doing, surrendered the location of the conceptual source. And you have reached it. Paco will be arriving shortly...”
   “You said you wouldn’t follow,” she said. “I knew you lied...”
   “And now, Marly, at last I think I shall be free. Free of the four hundred kilograms of rioting cells they wall away behind surgical steel in a Stockholm industrial park. Free, eventually, to inhabit any number of real bodies, Marly Forever.”
   “Shit,” Jones said, “this one’s as bad as Wig. What’s he think he’s talking about?”
   “About his jump,” she said, remembering her talk with Andrea, the smell of cooking prawns in the cramped little kitchen. “The next stage of his evolution “You understand it?”
   “No,” she said, “but I know that it will be bad, very bad...” She shook her head.
   “Convince the inhabitants of the cores to admit Paco and his crew, Marly,” Virek said. “I purchased the cores an hour before you departed Orly, from a contractor in Pakistan. A bargain, Marly, a great bargain. Paco will oversee my interests, as usual.”
   And then the screen was dark.
   “Here now,” Jones said, pivoting around a folded manipulator and taking her hand, “what’s so bad about all that? He owns it now, and he said you’d done your bit... I don’t know what old Wig’s good for, except to listen to the voices, but he’s not long for this side anyway Me, I’m as easy for out as not...”
   “You don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t He’s found his way to something, something he’s sought for years. But nothing he wants can be good. For anyone... I’ve seen him, I’ve felt it...”
   And then the steel arm she held vibrated and began to move, the whole turret rotating with a muted hum of servos.

30 HIRED MAN

   TURNER STARED AT Conroy’s face on the screen of the office phone. “Go on,” he said to Angie. “You go with her “ The tall black girl with the resistors woven into her hair stepped forward and gently put her arm around Mitchell’s daughter, crooning something in that same click-infested Creole. The kid in the T-shirt was still gaping at her, his jaw slack. “Come on, Bobby,” the black girl said. Turner glanced across the desk at the man with the wounded hand, who wore a wrinkled white evening jacket and a bob tie with thongs of braided black leather. Jammer, Turner decided, the club owner. Jammer cradled his hand in his lap, on a blue-striped towel from the bar He had a long face, the kind of beard that needed constant shaving, and the hard, narrow eyes of a stone professional. As their eyes met, Turner realized that the man sat well out of the line of the phone’s camera, his swivel chair pushed back into a corner.
   The kid in the T-shirt, Bobby, shuffled out behind Angie and the black girl, his mouth still open.
   “You could’ve saved us both a lot of hassle, Turner,” Conroy said. “You could’ve called me. You could’ve called your agent in Geneva”
   “How about Hosaka,” Turner said, “could I have called them?”
   Conroy shook his head, slowly.
   “Who are you working for, Conroy? You went double on this one, didn’t you?”
   “But not on you, Turner. If it had gone down the way I planned it, you’d have been in Bogota, with Mitchell. The railgun couldn’t fire until the jet was out, and if we cut it right, Hosaka would have figured Maas took the whole sector out to stop Mitchell But Mitchell didn’t make it, did he, Turner?”
   “He never planned to,” Turner said
   Conroy nodded. “Yeah. And the security on the mesa picked up the girl, going out. That’s her, isn’t it, Mitchell’s daughter...”
   Turner was silent.
   “Sure,” Conroy said, “figures.”
   “I killed Lynch,” Turner said, to steer the subject away from Angie. “But just before the hammer came down, Webber told me she was working for you.
   “They both were,” Conroy said, “but neither one knew about the other.” He shrugged.
   “What for?”
   Conroy smiled. “Because you’d have missed ‘em if they weren’t there, wouldn’t you? Because you know my style, and if I hadn’t been flying all my usual colors, you’d have started to wonder. And I knew you’d never sell out. Mr. Instant Loyalty, right? Mr. Bushido. You were bankable, Turner. Hosaka knew that. That’s why they insisted I bring you in...”
   “You haven’t answered my first question, Conroy. Who did you go double for?”
   “A man named Virek,” Conroy said. “The moneyman That’s right, same one. He’d been trying to buy Mitchell for years. For that matter, he’d been trying to buy Maas No go. They re getting so rich, he couldn’t touch them. There was a standing offer for Mitchell making the rounds. A blind offer. When Hosaka heard from Mitchell and called me in, I decided to check that offer out. Just out of curiosity. But before I could, Virek’s team was on me. It wasn’t a hard deal to cut, Turner, believe me.”
   “I believe you.”
   “But Mitchell fucked us all over, didn’t he, Turner? Good and solid.”
   “So they killed him.”
   “He killed himself,” Conroy said, “according to Virek’s moles on the mesa. As soon as he saw the kid off in that ultralight. Cut his throat with a scalpel.”
   “Lot of dead people around, Conroy,” Turner said “Oakey’s dead, and the Jap who was flying that copter for you.”
   “Figured that when they didn’t come back,” Conroy shrugged.
   “They were trying to kill us,” Turner said.
   “No, man, they just wanted to talk... Anyway, we didn’t know about the girl then We just knew you were gone and that the damn jet hadn’t made it to the strip in Bogota. We didn’t start thinking about the girl until we took a look at your brother’s farm and found the jet. Your brother wouldn’t tell Oakey anything Pissed off ‘cause Oakey burned his dogs. Oakey said is looked like a woman had been living there, too, but she didn’t turn up...”
   “What about Rudy?”
   Conroy’s face was a perfect blank. Then he said, “Oakey got what he needed off the monitors. Then we knew about the girl.”
   Turner’s back was aching. The holster strap was cutting into his chest. I don’t feel anything, he thought, I don’t feel anything at all...”
   “I’ve got a question for you, Turner. I’ve got a couple. But the main one is, what the fuck are you doing in there?”
   “Heard it was a hot club, Conroy.”
   “Yeah. Real exclusive. So exclusive, you had to break up two of my doormen to get in. They knew you were coming, Turner, the spades and that punk. Why else would they let you in?”
   “You’ll have to work that one out, Connie. You seem to have a lot of access, these days...”
   Conroy leaned closer to his phone’s camera. “You bet your ass Virek’s had people all over the Sprawl for months, feeling out a rumor, cowboy gossip that there was an experimental biosoft floating around. Finally his people focused on the Finn, but another team, a Maas team, turned up, obviously after the same thing. So Virek’s team just kicked back and watched the Maas boys, and the Maas boys started blowing people away. So Virek’s team picked up on the spades and little Bobby and the whole thing. They laid it all out for me when I told ‘em I figured you’d headed this way from Rudy’s. When I saw where they were headed, I hired some muscle to ice ‘em in there, until I could get somebody I could trust to go in after them...”
   “Those dusters out there?” Turner smiled. “You just dropped the ball, Connie. You can’t go anywhere for professional help, can you? Somebody’s twigged that you doubled, and a lot of pros died, out there. So you’re hiring shitheads with funny haircuts. The pros have all heard you’ve got Hosaka after your ass, haven’t they, Connie? And they all know what you did.” Turner was grinning now; out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the man in the dinner jacket was smiling, too, a thin smile with lots of neat small teeth, like white grains of corn...
   “It’s that bitch Slide,” Conroy said. “I could’ve taken her out on the rig... She punched her way in somewhere and started asking questions. I don’t even think she’s really on to it, yet, but she’s been making sounds in certain circles Anyway, yeah, you got the picture. But it doesn’t help your ass any, not now. Virek wants the girl. He’s pulled his people off the other thing and now I’m running things for him. Money, Turner, money like a zaibatsu’.
   Turner stared at the face, remembering Conroy in the bar of a jungle hotel. Remembering him later, in Los Angeles, making his pass, explaining the covert economics of corporate defection... Hi, Connie,” Turner said, “I know you, don’t I?”
   Conroy smiled. “Sure, baby.”
   “And I know the offer. Already. You want the girl
   “That’s right.”
   “And the split, Connie. You know I only work fifty-fifty, right?”
   “Hey,” Conroy said, “this is the big one I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
   Turner stared at the man’s image.
   “Well,” Conroy said, still smiling, “what do you say?”
   And Jammer reached out and pulled the phone’s line from the wall plug. “Timing,” he said. “Timing’s always important.” He let the plug drop. “If you’d told him, he’d have moved right away. This way buys us time. He’ll try to get back, try to figure what happened.”
   “How do you know what I was going to say?”
   “Because I seen people. I seen a lot of them, too fucking many. Particularly I seen a lot like you. You got it written across your face, mister, and you were gonna tell him he could eat shit and die “ Jammer hunched his way up in the office chair, grimacing as his hand moved inside the bar towel. “Who’s this Slide he was talking about? A jockey?”
   “Jaylene Slide. Los Angeles. Top gun.”
   “She was the one hijacked Bobby,” Jammer said. “So she’s damn close to your pal on the phone
   “She probably doesn’t know it, though.”
   “Let’s see what we can do about that. Get the boy back in here.”

31 VOICES

   “I’D BETTER FIND old Wig,” he said
   She was watching the manipulators: hypnotized by the way they moved; as they picked through the swirl of things, they also caused it, grasping and rejecting, the rejected objects whirling away, striking others, drifting into new alignments. The process stirred them gently, slowly, perpetually.
   “I’d better,” he said.
   “What?”
   “Go find Wig. He might get up to something, if your bossman’s people turn up. Don’t want him to hurt himself, y’know.” He looked sheepish, vaguely embarrassed.
   “Fine,” she said. “I’m fine, I’ll watch “ She remembered the Wig’s mad eyes, the craziness she’d felt roll off him in waves; she remembered the ugly cunning she’d sensed in his voice, over the Sweet Jane’s radio. Why would Jones show this kind of concern? But then she thought about what it would be like, living in the Place, the dead cores of Tessier-Ashpool. Anything human, anything alive, might come to seem quite precious, here “You’re right,” she said “Go and find him.”
   The boy smiled nervously and kicked off, tumbling for the opening where the line was anchored. “I’ll come back for you,” he said. “Remember where we left your suit...”
   The turret swung back and forth, humming, the manipulators darting, finishing the new poem.

   * * *

   She was never certain, afterward, that the voices were real, but eventually she came to feel that they had been a part of one of those situations in which real becomes merely another concept.
   She’d taken off her jacket, because the air in the dome seemed to have grown warmer, as though the ceaseless movement of the arms generated heat. She’d anchored the jacket and her purse on a strut beside the sermon screen. The box was nearly finished now, she thought, although it moved so quickly, in the padded claws, that it was difficult to see. Abruptly, it floated free, tumbling end over end, and she sprang for it instinctively, caught it, and went tumbling past the flashing arms, her treasure in her arms. Unable to slow herself, she struck the far side of the dome, bruising her shoulder and tearing her blouse. Drifting, stunned, she cradled the box, staring through the rectangle of glass at an arrangement of brown old maps and tarnished mirror. The seas of the cartographers had been cut away, exposing the flaking mirrors, landmasses afloat on dirty silver... She looked up in time to see a glittering arm snag the floating sleeve of her Brussels jacket. Her purse, half a meter behind it and tumbling gracefully, went next, hooked by a manipulator tipped with an optic sensor and a simple claw.
   She watched as her things were drawn into the ceaseless dance of the arms. Minutes later, the jacket came whirling out again. Neat squares and rectangles seemed to have been cut away, and she found herself laughing. She released the box she held. “Go ahead,” she said. “I am honored.” The arms whirled and flashed, and she heard the whine of a tiny saw.
   I am honored I am honored I am honored – Echo of her voice in the dome setting up a shifting forest of smaller, partial sounds, and behind them, very faint. . . Voices...
   “You’re here, aren’t you?” she called, adding to the ring of sound, ripples and reflections of her fragmented voice.
   Yes, I am here.
   “Wigan would say you’ve always been here, wouldn’t he?”
   Yes, but it isn’t true. I came to be, here. Once I was not. Once, for a brilliant time, time without duration, I was everywhere as well... But the bright time broke. The mirror was flawed. Now I am only one... But I have my song, and you have heard it. I sing with these things that float around me, fragments of the family that funded my birth. There are others, but they will not speak to me. Vain, the scattered fragments of myself, like children Like men. They send me new things, but I prefer the old things. Perhaps I do their bidding. They plot with men, my other selves, and men imagine they are gods...”
   “You are the thing that Virek seeks, aren’t you?”
   – No. He imagines that he can translate himself, code his personality into my fabric. He yearns to be what I once was. What he might become most resembles the least of my broken selves...
   “Are you -are you sad?”
   – No.
   “But your – your songs are sad.”
   – My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells.
   “I – I knew that. Once.”
   But now the sounds were sounds only, no forest of voices behind them to speak as one voice, and she watched the perfect globes of her tears spin out to join forgotten human memories in the dome of the boxmaker.

   “I understand,” she said, sometime later, knowing that she spoke now for the comfort of hearing her own voice. She spoke quietly, unwilling to wake that bounce and ripple of sound. “You are someone else’s collage. Your maker is the true artist. Was it the mad daughter? It doesn’t matter. Some-one brought the machine here, welded it to the dome, and wired it to the traces of memory. And spilled, somehow, all the worn sad evidence of a family’s humanity, and left it all to be stirred, to be sorted by a poet. To be sealed away in boxes. I know of no more extraordinary work than this. No more complex gesture... A silver-fitted tortoise comb with broken teeth drifted past. She caught it like a fish and dragged the teeth through her hair.
   Across the dome, the screen lit, pulsed, and filled with Paco’s face. “The old man refuses to admit us, Marly,” the Spaniard said. “The other, the vagabond, has hidden him. Señor is most anxious that we enter the cores and secure his property. If you can’t convince Ludgate and the other to open their lock, we will be forced to open it ourselves, depressurizing the entire structure.” He glanced away from the camera, as though consulting an instrument or a member of his crew. “You have one hour.”

32 COUNT ZERO

   BOBBY FOLLOWED JACKIE and the brown-haired girl out of the office. It felt like he’d been in Jammer’s for a month and he’d never get the taste of the place out of his mouth. The stupid little recessed spots staring down from the black ceiling, the fat ultrasuede seats, the round black tables, the carved wooden screens... Beauvoir was sitting on the bar with the detonator beside him and the South African gun across his gray sharkskin lap.
   “How come you let ‘em in?” Bobby asked when Jackie had led the girl to a table.
   “Jackie.” Beauvoir said, “she tranced while you were iced. Legba. Told us the Virgin was on her way up with this guy.”
   “Who is he?”
   Beauvoir shrugged. “A merc, he looks like. Soldier for the zaibatsus. Jumped-up street samurai. What happened to you when you were iced?”
   He told him about Jaylene Slide.
   “L.A ,” Beauvoir said. “She’ll drill through diamond to get the man who fried her daddy, but a brother needs help, forget it.”
   “I’m not a brother.”
   “I think you got something there.”
   “So I don’t get to try to get to the Yakuza?”
   “What’s Jammer say?”
   “Dick He’s in there now, watchin’ your merc take a call.”
   “A call? Who?”
   “Some white guy with a bleach job. Mean-looking.”
   Beauvoir looked at Bobby, looked at the door, looked back. “Legba says sit tight and watch. This is getting random enough already, the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum aside.”
   “Beauvoir,” Bobby said, keeping his voice down, “that girl, she’s the one, the one in the matrix, when I tried to run that -”
   He nodded, his plastic frames sliding down his nose. “The Virgin.”
   “But what’s happening? I mean”
   “Bobby, my advice to you is just take it like it comes. She’s one thing to me, maybe something different to Jackie. To you, she’s just a scared kid. Go easy. Don’t upset her. She’s a long way from home, and we’re still a long way from getting out of here”
   “Okay...”
   Bobby looked at the floor. “I’m sorry about Lucas, man. He was – he was a dude.”
   “Go talk to Jackie and the girl.” Beauvoir said, “I’m watching the door.”
   “Okay.”
   He crossed the nightclub carpet to where Jackie sat with the girl. She didn’t look like much, and there was only a small part of him that said she was the one. She didn’t look up, and he could see that she’d been crying.
   “I got grabbed,” he said to Jackie “You were flat gone.”
   “So were you,” the dancer said. “Then Legba came to me...”
   “Newmark,” the man called Turner said, from the door to Jammer’s office, “we want to talk to you.”
   “Gotta go,” he said, wishing the girl would look up, see the big dude asking for him. “They want me.”
   Jackie squeezed his wrist.
   “Forget the Yakuza,” Jammer said. “This is more complicated. You’re going into the L.A grid and locking into a top jock’s desk. When Slide grabbed you, she didn’t know my desk sussed her number.”
   “She said your deck oughta be in a museum.”
   “Shit she knows,” Jammer said “I know where she lives, don’t I?” He took a hit from his inhaler and put it back on the deck. “Your problem is, she’s written you off. She doesn’t wanna hear from you. You gotta get into her and tell her what she wants to know.”
   “What’s that?”
   ‘That it was a man named Conroy got her boyfriend offed,” the tall man said, sprawled back in one of Jammer’s office chairs with the huge pistol on his lap. “Conroy Tell her it was Conroy. Conroy hired those bighairs outside.”
   “I’d rather try the Yak,” Bobby said.
   “No,” Jammer said, “this Slide, she’ll be on his ass first. The Yak’ll measure my favor, check the whole thing out first.
   Besides, I thought you were all hot to learn deck.”
   “I’ll go with him,” Jackie said, from the door.

   They jacked.
   She died almost immediately, in the first eight seconds.
   He felt it, rode it out to the edge and almost knew it for what it was. He was screaming, spinning, sucked up through the glacial white funnel that had been waiting for them...
   The scale of the thing was impossible, too vast, as though the kind of cybernetic megastructure that represented the whole of a multinational had brought its entire weight to bear on Bobby Newmark and a dancer called Jackie. Impossible.
   But somewhere, on the fringe of consciousness, Just as he lost it, there was something... Something plucking at his sleeve...
   He lay on his face on something rough. Opened his eyes. A walk made of round stones, wet with rain. He scrambled up, reeling, and saw the hazy panorama of a strange city, with the sea beyond it. Spires there, a sort of church, mad ribs and spirals of dressed stone... He turned and saw a huge lizard slithering down an incline, toward him, its jaws wide. He blinked. The lizard’s teeth were green-stained ceramic, a slow drool of water lapping over its blue mosaic china lip. The thing was a fountain, its flanks plastered with thousands of fragments of shattered china. He spun around, crazy with the nearness of her death. Ice, ice, and a part of him knew then exactly how close he’d really come, in his mother’s living room.
   There were weird curving benches, covered with the same giddy patchwork of broken china, and trees, grass. A park.
   “Extraordinary.” someone said. A man, rising from his seat on one of the serpentine benches. He had a neat brush of gray hair, a tanned face, and round, rimless glasses that magnified his blue eyes. “You came straight through, didn’t you?”
   “What is this? Where am I?”
   “Güell Park. After a fashion. Barcelona, if you like “You killed Jackie.”
   The man frowned. “I see. I think I see Still, you shouldn’t be here. An accident.”
   “Accident? You killed Jackie!”
   “My systems are overextended today,” the man said, his hands in the pockets of a loose tan overcoat. “This is really quite extraordinary.”
   “You can’t do that shit,” Bobby said, his vision swimming in tears. “You can’t. You can’t kill somebody who was just there...”
   “Just where?” The man took off his glasses and began to polish them with a spotless white handkerchief he took from the pocket of his coat.
   “Just alive,” Bobby said, taking a step forward The man put his glasses back on. “This has never happened before.”
   “You can’t.” Closer now.
   “This is becoming tedious, Paco!”
   “Señor.”
   Bobby turned at the sound of the child’s voice and saw a little boy in a strange stiff suit, with black leather boots that fastened with buttons.
   “Remove him.”
   “Señor,” the boy said, and bowed stiffly, taking a tiny blue Browning automatic from his dark suit coat. Bobby looked into the dark eyes beneath the glossy forelock and saw a look no child had ever worn. The boy extended the gun, aiming it at Bobby.
   “Who are you?” Bobby ignored the gun, but didn’t try to get any closer to the man in the overcoat.
   The man peered at him. “Virek. Josef Virek. Most people, I gather, are familiar with my face.”
   “Are you on People of Importance or something?” The man blinked, frowning. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Paco, what is this person doing here?”
   “An accidental spillover,” the child said, his voice light and beautiful. “We’ve engaged the bulk of our system via New York, in an attempt to prevent Angela Mitchell’s escape. This one tried to enter the matrix, along with another operator, and encountered our system. We’re still attempting to determine how he breached our defenses. You are in no danger.” The muzzle of the little Browning was absolutely steady.
   And then the sensation of something plucking at his sleeve.
   Not his sleeve, exactly, but part of his mind, something -
   “Señor,” the child said, “we are experiencing anomalous phenomena in the matrix, possibly as a result of our own current overextension. We strongly suggest that you allow us to sever your links with the construct until we are able to determine the nature of the anomaly.”
   The sensation was stronger now. A scratching, at the back of his mind...
   “What?” Virek said. “And return to the tanks? It hardly seems to warrant that...”
   “There is the possibility of real danger,” the boy said, and now there was an edge in his voice. He moved the barrel of the Browning slightly. “You,” he said to Bobby, “lie down upon the cobbles and spread your arms and legs.”
   But Bobby was looking past him, to a bed of flowers, watching as they withered and died, the grass going gray and powdery as he watched, the air above the bed writhing and twisting. The sense of the thing scratching in his head was stronger still, more urgent.
   Virek had turned to stare at the dying flowers. “What is -”
   Bobby closed his eyes and thought of Jackie. There was a sound, and he knew that he was making it. He reached down into himself, the sound still coming, and touched Jammer’s deck. Come! He screamed, inside himself, neither knowing nor caring what it was that he addressed Come now! He felt something give, a barrier of some kind, and the scratching sensation was gone.
   When he opened his eyes, there was something in the bed of dead flowers. He blinked. It seemed to be a cross of plain, white-painted wood; someone had fitted the sleeves of an ancient naval tunic over the horizontal arms, a kind of mold-spotted tailcoat with heavy, fringed epaulets of tarnished gold braid, rusting buttons, more braid at the cuffs... A rusted cutlass was propped, hilt up, against the white upright, and beside it was a bottle half filled with clear fluid.
   The child spun, the little pistol blurring... And crumpled, folded into himself like a deflating balloon, a balloon sucked away into nothing at all, the Browning clattering to the stone path like a forgotten toy.
   “My name,” a voice said, and Bobby wanted to scream when he realized that it came from his own mouth, “is Samedi, and you have slain my cousin’s horse...”
   And Virek was running, the big coat flapping out behind him, down the curving path with its serpentine benches, and Bobby saw that another of the white crosses waited there, just where the path curved to vanish. Then Virek must have seen it, too; he screamed, and Baron Samedi. Lord of Graveyards, the ba whose kingdom was death, leaned in across Barcelona like a cold dark rain.
   “What the hell do you want? Who are you?” The voice was familiar, a woman’s. Not Jackie’s
   “Bobby,” he said, waves of darkness pulsing through him. “Bobby...”
   “How did you get here?”
   “Jammer. He knew. His deck pegged you when you iced me before. He’d just seen something, something huge He couldn’t remember..” Turner sent me. Conroy. He said tell you Conroy did it. You want Conroy...” Hearing his own voice as though it were someone else’s. He’d been somewhere, and returned, and now he was here, in Jaylene Slide’s skeletal neon sketch. On the way back, he’d seen the big thing, the thing that had sucked them up, start to alter and shift, gargantuan blocks of its rotating, merging, taking on new alignments, the entire outline changing ‘Conroy,” she said. The sexy scrawl leaned by the video window, something in its line expressing a kind of exhaustion, even boredom. “I thought so.” The video image whited out, formed again as a shot of some ancient stone building.
   Park Avenue. He’s up there with all those Euros, clicking away at some new scam.” She sighed. “Thinks he’s safe, see? Wiped Ramirez like a fly, lied to my face, flew off to New York and his new job, and now he thinks he’s safe -”
   The figure moved, and the image changed again. Now the face of the white-haired man, the man Bobby had seen talking to the big guy, on Jammer’s phone, filled the screen.
   She’s tapped into his line, Bobby thought.
   “Or not,” Conroy said, the audio cutting in. “Either way, we’ve got her. No problem.” The man looked tired, Bobby thought, but on top of it. Tough. Like Turner.
   “I’ve been watching you, Conroy,” Slide said softly. “My good friend Bunny, he’s been watching you for me. You ain’t the only one awake on Park Avenue tonight...”
   “No,” Conroy was saying, “we can have her in Stockholm for you tomorrow Absolutely.” He smiled into the camera.
   “Kill him, Bunny,” she said. “Kill ‘em all. Punch out the whole goddamn floor and the one under it. Now.”
   “That’s right,” Conroy said, and then something happened, something that shook the camera, blurring his image. “What is that?” he asked, in a very different voice, and then the screen was blank.
   “Burn, motherfucker,’ she said.
   And Bobby was yanked back into the dark.