Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its triangular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system.

"I wanna buzz," he said to the blue artifice of the sky. "I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz."

He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.

On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate. "Sushi," he said, "whatever you got." Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. "Christ," he said, to his tuna, "I'd go nuts."

"Don't tell me," someone said, "I know it already. You're a gangster, right?"

He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.

She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. "Cath," she said.

"Lupus," after a pause.

"What kind of name is that?"

"Greek," he said.

"Are you really a gangster?" The melanin boost hadn't prevented the formation of freckles.

"I'm a drug addict, Cath."

"What kind?"

"Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants."

"Well, do you have  any?" She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.

"No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get  some?"

Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. "What's your taste?"

"No coke, no amphetamines, but up , gotta be up ." And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.

"Betaphenethylamine," she said. "No sweat, but it's on your chip."



"You're kidding," said Cath's partner and roommate, when Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. "I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?" His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles.

"Well," Case said, "it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that." But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes.

Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Cibachromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency.

"They're def triff, huh?" Cath asked, seeing him eye the transparencies. "Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was that  close, and she just smiled, so  natural. And it was bad  there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?"

"Yeah," Case said, suddenly uneasy, "terrible thing."

"Well," Bruce cut in, "about this beta you want to buy. . . ."

"Thing is, can I metabolize it?" Case raised his eyebrows.

"Tell you what," the boy said. "You do a taste. If your pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free."

"I heard that one before," Case said, taking the bright blue derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.



"Case?" Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.

"Who else, honey?"

"What's got into you?" The mirrors followed him across the room.

"I forget how to pronounce it," he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.

"Christ," she said, "just what we needed."

"Truer words were never spoken."

"I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score." She shook her head. "I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too."

"Yeah," Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, "beautiful."

"Man," she said, "if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad-ass shape when it wears off."

"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he said, unbuckling his belt. "Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear." He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. "I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state." He looked down. "I mean, look  at this unnatural state."

She laughed. "It won't last."

"But it will," he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam, "that's what's so unnatural  about it."











Chapter 11









"Case, what's wrong with you?" Armitage said, as the waiter was seating them at his table in the Vingti?me Si?cle. It was the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants on a small lake near the Intercontinental.

Case shuddered. Bruce hadn't said anything about after effects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands were shaking. "Something I ate, maybe."

"I want you checked out by a medic," Armitage said.

"Just this histamine reaction," Case lied. "Get it when I travel, eat different stuff, sometimes."

Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine and sipped. "I've ordered for you," he said.

Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.

"Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that. You know what this costs?" She took his plate. "They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff." She forked a mouthful up and chewed.

"Not hungry," Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain.

"You look fucking awful," Molly said cheerfully.

Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylamine made it taste like iodine.

The lights dimmed.

"Le Restaurant Vingti?me Si?cle," said a disembodied voice with a pronounced Sprawl accent, "proudly presents the holographic cabaret of Mr. Peter Riviera." Scattered applause from the other tables. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. Soon a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and drinks were being poured.

"What's happening?" Case asked Armitage, who said nothing.

Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail.

"Good evening," Riviera said, stepping forward on a small stage at the far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort, he hadn't noticed the stage. He hadn't seen where Riviera had come from. His uneasiness increased.

At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight.

Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit the dark hangings behind the stage. He was projecting.

Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel, blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fingernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting, an embrace for his audience. Case heard the shallow water lap against the side of the restaurant.

"Tonight," Riviera said, his long eyes shining, "I would like to perform an extended piece for you. A new work." A cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand. He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up from the point of impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled. More applause.

"The title of the work is ƒ„The Doll.' " Riviera lowered his hands. "I wish to dedicate its premi?re here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool." A wave of polite applause. As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table. "And to another lady."

The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds, leaving only the glow of candles. Riviera's holographic aura had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing with his head bowed.

Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals, sketching an open cube around the stage. The restaurant's lights had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to quiver with concentration. Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled, had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing the audience to view its contents.

Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but kept his eyes closed. "I'd always lived in the room," he said. "I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room." The room's walls were yellowed white plaster. It contained two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair, the other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped and flaked, revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed was bare. Stained ticking with faded brown stripes. A single bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire. Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper curve. Riviera opened his eyes.

"I'd been alone in the room, always." He sat on the chair, facing the bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower on his lapel. "I don't know when I first began to dream of her," he said, "but I do remember that at first she was only a haze, a shadow."

There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone.

"I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted to hold her, hold her and more ..." His voice carried perfectly in the hush of the restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a glass. Someone giggled. Someone else asked a whispered question in Japanese. "I decided that if I could visualize some part of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in the most perfect detail. . . ."

A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers pale.

Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer.

A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei surgical boutique. Riviera was holding the hand to his lips, licking its palm. The fingers tentatively caressed his face. But now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera reached for it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet of flesh and bone.

The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own. The arms were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful. Case's head throbbed. His throat was dry. He drank the last of the wine.

Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it fade away. The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still seething with its blue inner flame. Then the torso formed, as Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect, sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat.

Molly's body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn't Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands with their bright nails. The bed was thick now with folds of yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying, pinching, caressing hands.

Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass, his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room.

Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered. The head was there, the image complete. Molly's face, with smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Molly-image began to couple with a renewed intensity. Then the image slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades. With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was already up and stumbling for the door.

He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his head like a vise had released him now.

Kneeling, his cheek against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne.

Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager in the Sprawl, they'd called it, "dreaming real." He remembered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.

What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head and spat into the lake.

He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace.

Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran his hands over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the Vingti?me Si?cle.



Molly's chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass between his fingers.

"Where is she?" Case asked.

"Gone," Armitage said.

"She go after him?"

"No." There was a soft tink .  Armitage looked down at the glass. His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its measure of red wine. The broken stem protruded like a sliver of ice. Case took it from him and set it in a water glass.

"Tell me where she went, Armitage."

The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing there at all. "She's gone to prepare herself. You won't see her again. You'll be together during the run."

"Why did Riviera do that to her?"

Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. "Get some sleep, Case."

"We run, tomorrow?"

Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away, toward the exit.

Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware, muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on the ceiling.

The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the balustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of candles.

As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young Frenchmen and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the far shore and the nearest casino.



Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some beach after a retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for a note. There was nothing. Several seconds passed before the scene beyond the window registered through his tension and unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata, expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty.

He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he hadn't bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope.

He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.

"Get me a number for the Marcus Garvey ," he told the desk. "It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster."

The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. "Sir," it added, "the registration in question is Panamanian."



Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. "Yo?"

"Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?"

"Yo. On th' navigation comp, ya know."

"Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka. Then turn my deck on. It's the stud with the ridges on it."

"How you doin' in there, mon?"

"Well, I need some help."

"Movin', mon. I get th' modem."

Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the simple phone link. "Ice this," he told the Hosaka, when he heard it beep.

"You are speaking from a heavily monitored location," the computer advised primly.

"Fuck it," he said. "Forget the ice. No ice. Access the construct. Dixie?"

"Hey, Case." The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely.

"Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get something for me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly's in here somewhere and I wanna know where. I'm in 335W, the Intercontinental. She was registered here too, but I don't know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone and do their records for me."

"No sooner said," the Flatline said. Case heard the white sound of the invasion. He smiled. "Done. Rose Kolodny. Checked out. Take me a few minutes to screw their security net deep enough to get a fix."

"Go."

The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts. Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up on the temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up. A Japanese pop star reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen interviewer asked a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped with jags of blue interference. "Case, baby, you lose your mind, man?" The voice was slow, familiar.



The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the interior of the Jarre de The, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.

Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray sharkskin slacks. "Really, man, you're lookin' very scattered."

The voice came from the Braun's speakers.

"Wintermute," Case said.

The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.

"Where's Molly?"

"Never you mind. You're screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd do that, man. It's outside the profile."

"So tell me where she is and I'll call him off."

Zone shook his head.

"You can't keep too good track of your women, can you, Case. Keep losin' 'em, one way or another."

"I'll bring this thing down around your ears," Case said.

"No. You aren't that kind, man. I know that. You know something, Case? I figure you've got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba."

"Don't," Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the window.

"But I didn't. What's it matter, though? How much does it really matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you'd give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn't handle it. She's dead."

Case's fist glanced off the glass.

"Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck."

Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of the condos. The Braun shut off.

From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.

"Case?" The Flatline was waiting. "Where you been? I got it, but it isn't much." The construct rattled off an address. "Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub. That's all I could get without leaving a calling card."

"Okay," Case said. "Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to disconnect the modem. Thanks, Dix."

"A pleasure."

He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure.

Rage.



"Hey. Lupus. Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus." Bruce stood naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. "But we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?"

"No. Thanks. I want some help." He pushed the boy's arm aside and stepped into the room.

"Hey, really, man, we're . . ."

"Going to help me. You're really glad to see me. Because we're friends, right? Aren't we?"

Bruce blinked. "Sure."

Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.

"I knew he was a gangster," Cath called cheerfully from the shower.

"I gotta Honda trike," Bruce said, grinning vacantly.

"We go now," Case said.



"That level's the cubicles," Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell exhaust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks. "You be long?"

"No saying. But you'll wait."

"We'll wait, yeah." He scratched his bare chest. "That last part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. Number forty-three."

"You expected, Lupus?" Cath craned forward over Bruce's shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair.

"Not really," Case said. "That's a problem?"

"Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don't wanna see you . . ." She shrugged.

Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan, looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents of the islands.

"Downstairs," he said to a passing waiter, "I want to go downstairs." He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club.

He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing fragments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.

"I want a cubicle," he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a terminal on her lap. "Lower level." He handed her his chip.

"Gender preference?" She passed the chip across a glass plate on the face of the terminal.

"Female," he said automatically.

"Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can access our special services display beforehand, if you like." She smiled. She returned his chip.

An elevator slid open behind her.

The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the elevator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.

He found his cubicle. He'd been looking for Molly's; now, confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath the number plate.

Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.

The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut-out. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.

The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were soundproof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb the sound.

He placed his chip against the black plate.

The bolts clicked.

She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually gotten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes ...

"Jesus Christ," she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. "You're an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?" She leaned over him.

"Chip," he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the cubicle.

"You bribe the help, upstairs?"

He shook his head and fell across the bed.

"Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count."

He clutched his stomach.

"You kicked me," he managed.

"Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I'm meditating, right?" She sat beside him. "And getting a briefing." She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. "Wintermute's telling me about Straylight."

"Where's the meat puppet?"

"There isn't any. That's the most expensive special service of all." She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a looseàdarkàshirt. "The run's tomorrow, Wintermute says."

â/´0:�»°9:´0:�066�0±·::�47:´2¹²9º°:¹07º¤·;�±·¶2�¼·:¹0·‘…�“¡°º¹2�43�¤2�9º°¼22�$�¶´34:´0»2�µ46¶22©4»´2¹0‘…‘+´¼�…‘+´0:´2²42º7�¶2*´2�9´·;‘…‘$²7·:�³2:�4:�…*´´9�±·9:�0¶7:�9´2�¹°42�2<º27²4·3´29¹´34:´072�°9:´·º34�4:´262�07�47»´¹41¶23¹º4:*´2³4»21¶0²²9�9¶42�·:::´27¹2:¹°1º>2�¹¶·7:4¶<‘¡·9º9º7�³7º7�!´4±0�±·9º9º7�³2::´2�¹:¹³2¹<�±·9º9º7´0»2:´²6µ°±5�¼·:9·29»·º9�¹¼9º²6�:8�¹7�¼·º66´0»2:´² reflexes to go with the gear ... You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for ..." She cracked her knuckles. "Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it. . . . But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad." She smiled. "Then it started getting strange." She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. "The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time." She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. "So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics."

"They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?"

"I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain ... You can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember.  Like dreams, you know. And they didn't tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets."

She seemed to speak from a distance. "And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I'd tell myself that at least some of them were  just dreams, but by then I'd started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele  going for me. Nothing's too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise." She shook her head. "That prick was charging eight  times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn't know."

"So what was he charging for?"

"Bad dreams. Real ones. One night . . . one night, I'd just come back from Chiba." She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall. "Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer ..." She dug her fingers deep in the foam. "Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all . . ." She tugged at the temperfoam. "Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ƒ„What's wrong. What's wrong?' 'Cause we weren't finished  yet ..."

She began to shake.

"So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?" The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. "The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while." Case stared at her.

"So Riviera hit a nerve last night," she said. "I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I'll be psyched up to go in there after him."

"After him?"

"He's already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . ."

Case remembered the face he'd seen. "You gonna kill him?"

She smiled. Cold. "He's going to die, yeah. Soon."

"I had a visit too," he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded.

"Maybe it wants you to hate something too."

"Maybe I hate it."

"Maybe you hate yourself, Case."



"How was it?" Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.

"Try it sometime," he said, rubbing his eyes.

"Just can't see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets," Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist.

"Can we go home, now?" Bruce asked.

"Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are."









Chapter 12









Rue Jules Verne was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle's midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating at either end in the supports of the Lado- Acheson light pumps. If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you'd find yourself approaching Desiderata from the left.

Case watched Bruce's trike until it was out of sight, then turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the faces of the month's newest simstim stars.



Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass. The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa's edge. He'd seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle's security system, controlled by some central computer.

In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer, Shozoku Smith's, Emergency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly's rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground plans of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools?

He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall. Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he'd killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda's death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind's screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn't become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.

It was a strange thing. He couldn't take its measure.

"Numb," he said. He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat , some part of him said. It's the meat talking , ignore it.

"Gangster."

He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda.

"Thought you went home," he said, and covered his confusion with a sip of Carlsberg.

"I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this." She ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her wrist. "Like it?"

"Sure." He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked back at her. "What do you think you're up to, honey?"

"You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?" She was very close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enormous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz. "You get off?"

"Yeah. But the comedown's a bitch."

"Then you need another one."

"And what's that supposed to lead to?"

"I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the creamiest crib. People down the well on business tonight, if you follow me ..."

"If I follow you."

She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. "You're Yak, aren't you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza."

"You got an eye, huh?" He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette.

"How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every time you screwed up."

"I never screw up." He lit his cigarette.

"I saw that girl you're with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares me." She smiled too widely. "I like that. She like it with girls?"

"Never said. Who's Hideo?"

"3Jane's, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer."

Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he spoke. "Dee-Jane?"

"Lady 3Jane. She's triff. Rich. Her father owns all this."

"This bar?"

"Freeside!"

"No shit. You keepin' some class company, huh?" He raised an eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. "So how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet deb? You an' Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?" He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed.

"Oh, you know," she said, lids half lowered in what must have been intended as a look of modesty, "she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the party circuit ... It gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long as she brings Hideo to take care of her."

"Where's it get boring?"

"Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it's pretty, all the pools and lilies. It's a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets." She snuggled in against him. "Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together."

She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bubble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane.

"Hideo gave it to me," she said. "He tried to show me how, but I can't ever get it right. The necks come out backwards." She tucked the folded paper back into her purse. Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing, and smoothed it across his inner wrist.

"3Jane, she's got a pointy face, nose like a bird?" He watched his hands fumble an outline. "Dark hair? Young?"

"I guess. But she's triff  , you know? Like, all that money."

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding ...

"Come on," she said, taking his hand. "You got it now. We got it. Up the hill, we'll have it all night."

The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the -- something flared white behind his eyes.

He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out of the way.

"Fuck you!" she screamed behind him, "you ripoff shit!"

He couldn't feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.

And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the loser's zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate monochrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee.

When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with wonder. And when the lights in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete.

Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe.

Midnight.



He walked till morning.

The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn't think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow.

A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a Desiderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and croissants beneath the striped umbrellas.

He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object.

He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again.

They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion.

"Turing," she said. "You are under arrest."









Chapter 13











"Your name is Henry Dorsett Case." She recited the year and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number, and a string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from his past.

"You been here awhile?" He saw the contents of his bag spread out across the bed, unwashed clothing sorted by type. The shuriken lay by itself, between jeans and underwear, on the sand-tinted temperfoam.

"Where is Kolodny?" The two men sat side by side on the couch, their arms crossed over tanned chests, identical gold chains slung around their necks. Case peered at them and saw that their youth was counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were unable to erase.

"Who's Kolodny?"

"That was the name in the register. Where is she?"

"I dunno," he said, crossing to the bar and pouring himself a glass of mineral water. "She took off."

"Where did you go tonight, Case?" The girl picked up the pistol and rested it on her thigh, without actually pointing it at him.

"Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high. How about you?" His knees felt brittle. The mineral water was warm and flat.

"I don't think you grasp your situation," said the man on the left, taking a pack of Gitanes from the breast pocket of his white mesh blouse. "You are busted, Mr. Case. The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence." He took a gold Dunhill from the same pocket and cradled it in his palm. "The man you call Armitage is already in custody."

"Corto?"

The man's eyes widened. "Yes. How do you know that that is his name?" A millimeter of flame clicked from the lighter.

"I forget," Case said.

"You'll remember," the girl said.



Their names, or worknames, were Mich?le, Roland, and Pierre. Pierre, Case decided, would play the Bad Cop; Roland would take Case's side, provide small kindnesses -- he found an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when Case refused a Gitane -- and generally play counterpoint to Pierre's cold hostility. Mich?le would be the Recording Angel, making occasional adjustments in the direction of the interrogation. One or all of them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible evidence. Evidence, he asked himself, through the grinding come-down, of what?

Knowing that he couldn't follow their French, they spoke freely among themselves. Or seemed to. He caught enough as it was: names like Pauley, Armitage, Sense/ Net. Panther Moderns protruding like icebergs from an animated sea of Parisian French. But it was entirely possible that the names were there for his benefit. They always referred to Molly as Kolodny.

"You say you were hired to make a run, Case," Roland said, his slow speech intended to convey reasonableness, "and that you are unaware of the nature of the target. Is this not unusual in your trade? Having penetrated the defenses, would you not be unable then to perform the required operation? And surely an operation of some kind is required, yes?" He leaned forward, elbows on his stenciled brown knees, palms out to receive Case's explanation. Pierre paced the room; now he was by the window, now by the door. Mich?le was the kink, Case decided. Her eyes never left him.

"Can I put some clothes on?" he asked. Pierre had insisted on stripping him, searching the seams of his jeans. Now he sat naked on a wicker footstool, with one foot obscenely white.

Roland asked Pierre something in French. Pierre, at the window again, was peering through a flat little pair of binoculars. "Non ," he said absently, and Roland shrugged, raising his eyebrows at Case. Case decided it was a good time to smile. Roland returned the smile.

Oldest cop bullshit in the book, Case thought. "Look," he said, "I'm sick. Had this godawful drug in a bar, you know? I wanna lie down. You got me already. You say you got Armitage. You got him, go ask him.  I'm just hired help."

Roland nodded. "And Kolodny?"

"She was with Armitage when he hired me. Just muscle, a razorgirl. Far as I know. Which isn't too far."

"You know that Armitage's real name is Corto," Pierre said, his eyes still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars. "How do you know that, my friend?"

"I guess he mentioned it sometime," Case said, regretting the slip. "Everybody's got a couple names. Your name Pierre?"

"We know how you were repaired in Chiba," Mich?le said, "and that may have been Wintermute's first mistake." Case stared at her as blankly as he could. The name hadn't been mentioned before. "The process employed on you resulted in the clinic's owner applying for seven basic patents. Do you know what that means?"

"No."

"It means that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums. This reverses the usual order of things, you see. It attracted attention." She crossed her brown arms across her small high breasts and settled back against the print cushion. Case wondered how old she might be. People said that age always showed in the eyes, but he'd never been able to see it. Julie Deane had had the eyes of a disinterested ten-year-old behind the rose quartz of his glasses. Nothing old about Mich?le but her knuckles. "Traced you to the Sprawl, lost you again, then caught up with you as you were leaving for Istanbul. We backtracked, traced you through the grid, determined that you'd instigated a riot at Sense/Net. Sense/Net was eager to cooperate. They ran an inventory for us. They discovered that McCoy Pauley's ROM personality construct was missing."

"In Istanbul," Roland said, almost apologetically, "it was very easy. The woman had alienated Armitage's contact with the secret police."

"And then you came here," Pierre said, slipping the binoculars into his shorts pocket. "We were delighted."

"Chance to work on your tan?"

"You know what we mean," Mich?le said. "If you wish to pretend that you do not, you only make things more difficult for yourself. There is still the matter of extradition. You will return with us, Case, as will Armitage. But where, exactly, will we all be going? To Switzerland, where you will be merely a pawn in the trial of an artificial intelligence? Or to le BAMA, where you can be proven to have participated not only in data invasion and larceny, but in an act of public mischief which cost fourteen innocent lives? The choice is yours."

Case took a Yeheyuan from his pack; Pierre lit it for him with the gold Dunhill. "Would Armitage protect you?" The question was punctuated by the lighter's bright jaws snapping shut.

Case looked up at him through the ache and bitterness of betaphenethylamine. "How old are you, boss?"

"Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and you are in the way."

"One thing," Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. "Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?" He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged.

"It doesn't matter," Roland said. "You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create  flexibility, in situations where it is required." The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's.

"You are worse than a fool," Mich?le said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. "You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?" There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. "You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now." She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer.

"I'm dressing already," he said, stumbling toward the bed. His legs were still numb, clumsy. He fumbled with a clean t-shirt.

"We have a ship standing by. We will erase Pauley's construct with a pulse weapon."

"Sense/Net'll be pissed," Case said, thinking: and all the evidence in the Hosaka.

"They are in some difficulty already, for having owned such a thing."

Case pulled the shirt over his head. He saw the shuriken on the bed, lifeless metal, his star. He felt for the anger. It was gone. Time to give in, to roll with it ... He thought of the toxin sacs. "Here comes the meat," he muttered.

In the elevator to the meadow, he thought of Molly. She might already be in Straylight. Hunting Riviera.

Hunted, probably, by Hideo, who was almost certainly the ninja clone of the Finn's story, the one who'd come to retrieve the talking head.

He rested his forehead against the matte black plastic of a wall panel and closed his eyes. His limbs were wood, old, warped and heavy with rain.

Lunch was being served beneath the trees, under the bright umbrellas. Roland and Mich?le fell into character, chattering brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Mich?le kept the muzzle of her pistol close to his ribs, concealing the gun with a white duck jacket she draped over her arm.

Crossing the meadow, weaving between the tables and the trees, he wondered if she would shoot him if he collapsed now. Black fur boiled at the borders of his vision. He glanced up at the hot white band of the Lado- Acheson armature and saw a giant butterfly banking gracefully against recorded sky.

At the edge of the meadow they came to railinged cliffside, wild flowers dancing in the updraft from the canyon that was Desiderata. Mich?le tossed her short dark hair and pointed, saying something in French to Roland. She sounded genuinely happy. Case followed the direction of her gesture and saw the curve of planing lakes, the white glint of casinos, turquoise rectangles of a thousand pools, the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze hieroglyphs, all held in serene approximation of gravity against the endless curve of Freeside's hull.

They followed the railing to an ornate iron bridge that arched over Desiderata. Mich?le prodded him with the muzzle of the Walther.

"Take it easy, I can't hardly walk today."

They were a little over a quarter of the way across when the microlight struck, its electric engine silent until the carbon fiber prop chopped away the top of Pierre's skull.

They were in the thing's shadow for an instant; Case felt the hot blood spray across the back of his neck, and then someone tripped him. He rolled, seeing Mich?le on her back, knees up, aiming the Walther with both hands. That's a waste of effort , he thought, with the strange lucidity of shock. She was trying to shoot down the microlight.

And then he was running. He looked back as he passed the first of the trees. Roland was running after him. He saw the fragile biplane strike the iron railing of the bridge, crumple, cartwheel, sweeping the girl with it down into Desiderata.

Roland hadn't looked back. His face was fixed, white, his teeth bared. He had something in his hand.

The gardening robot took Roland as he passed that same tree. It fell straight out of the groomed branches, a thing like a crab, diagonally striped with black and yellow.

"You killed 'em," Case panted, running. "Crazy motherfucker, you killed 'em all ..."









Chapter 14











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

Gravity fell away as the spindle narrowed. Case's stomach churned.

Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock.

"Case, mon, big problem." The soft voice faint in his phones. He chinned the volume control and peered into the Lexan face-plate of Aerol's helmet.

"Gotta get to Garvey , Aerol."

"Yo. Strap in, mon. But Garvey  captive. Yacht, came before, she came back. Now she lockin' steady on Marcus Garvey . "

Turing? "Came before?" Case climbed into the scooter's frame and began to fasten the straps.

"Japan yacht. Brought you package ..."

Armitage.



Confused images of wasps and spiders rose in Case's mind as they came in sight of Marcus Garvey.  The little tug was snug against the gray thorax of a sleek, insectile ship five times her length. The arms of grapples stood out against Garvey  's patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sunlight. A pale corrugated gangway curved out of the yacht, snaked sideways to avoid the tug's engines, and covered the aft hatch. There was something obscene about the arrangement, but it had more to do with ideas of feeding than of sex.

"What's happening with Maelcum?"

"Maelcum fine. Nobody come down the tube. Yacht pilot talk to him, say relax."

As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HANIWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Japanese.

"I don't like this, man. I was thinking maybe it's time we got our ass out of here anyway."

"Maelcum thinkin' that precise thing, mon, but Garvey  not be goin' far like that."



Maelcum was purring a speeded-up patois to his radio when Case came through the forward lock and removed his helmet.

"Aerol's gone back to the Rocker ," Case said.

Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone.

Case pulled himself over the pilot's drifting tangle of dreadlocks and began to remove his suit. Maelcum's eyes were closed now; he nodded as he listened to some reply over a pair of phones with bright orange pads, his brow creased with concentration. He wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket with the sleeves ripped out. Case snapped the red Sanyo suit to a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web.

"See what th' ghost say, mon," Maelcum said. "Computer keeps askin' for you."

"So who's up there in that thing?"

"Same Japan-boy came before. An' now he joined by you Mister Armitage, come out Freeside ..."

Case put the trodes on and jacked in.



"Dixie?"

The matrix showed him the pink spheres of the steel combine in Sikkim.

"What you gettin' up to, boy? I been hearin' lurid stories. Hosaka's patched into a twin bank on your boss's boat now. Really hoppin'. You pull some Turing heat?"

"Yeah, but Wintermute killed 'em."

"Well, that won't hold 'em long. Plenty more where those came from. Be up here in force. Bet their decks are all over this grid sector like flies on shit. And your boss, Case, he says go. He says run it and run it now."

Case punched for the Freeside coordinates.

"Lemme take that a sec, Case ..." The matrix blurred and phased as the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with a speed and accuracy that made Case wince with envy.

"Shit, Dixie ..."

"Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive. You ain't seen nothin'. No hands!"

"That's it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?"

"You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., and that ice is generated by their two friendly AI's. On par with anything in the military sector, looks to me. That's king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it'll have tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin' the boys in the T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick is."

"This isn't looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on it. I was thinking maybe we should try to bail out. I can take you."

"Yeah? No shit? You don't wanna see what that Chinese program can do?"

"Well, I . . ." Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice. "Well, screw it. Yeah. We run."

"Slot it."

"Hey, Maelcum," Case said, jacking out, "I'm probably gonna be under the trodes for maybe eight hours straight." Maelcum was smoking again. The cabin was swimming in smoke. "So I can't get to the head ..."

"No problem, mon." The Zionite executed a high forward somersault and rummaged through the contents of a zippered mesh bag, coming up with a coil of transparent tubing and something else, something sealed in a sterile bubble pack.

He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn't like it at all.

He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home.

"Okay," he said, "we're on. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets really funny, you can grab my left wrist. I'll feel it. Otherwise, I guess you do what the Hosaka tells you, okay?"

"Sure, mon." Maelcum lit a fresh joint.

"And turn the scrubber up. I don't want that shit tangling with my neurotransmitters. I got a bad hangover as it is."

Maelcum grinned.

Case jacked back in.

"Christ on a crutch," the Flatline said, "take a look at this."

The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void.

"Big mother," the Flatline said.

"I'm gonna check Molly," Case said, tapping the simstim switch.



Freefall. The sensation was like diving through perfectly clear water. She was falling-rising through a wide tube of fluted lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of white neon.

The link was one way. He couldn't talk to her.

He flipped.



"Boy, that is one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread. That goddam thing's invisible.  I just now rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don't. We're not there."

Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice until he found the pink structure, a standard commercial unit, and punched in closer to it. "Maybe it's defective."

"Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby's military, though. And new. It just doesn't register. If it did, we'd read as some kind of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody's twigged to us at all. Maybe not even the folks in Straylight."

Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight. "Well," he said, "that's an advantage, right?"

"Maybe." The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the sensation. "I checked ol' Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It's real friendly, long as you're on the trigger end, jus' polite an' helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?"

"No."

"I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that's what ol' Kuang's all about. This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even get restless." The Flatline laughed.

"Wish you weren't so damn jolly today, man. That laugh of yours sort of gets me in the spine."

"Too bad," the Flatline said. "Ol' dead man needs his laughs." Case slapped the simstim switch.



And crashed through tangled metal and the smell of dust, the heels of his hands skidding as they struck slick paper. Something behind him collapsed noisily.

"C'mon," said the Finn, "ease up a little."

Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines, the girls shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix, a wistful galaxy of sweet white teeth. He lay there until his heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines.

"Wintermute," he said.

"Yeah," said the Finn, somewhere behind him, "you got it."

"Fuck off." Case sat up, rubbing his wrists.

"Come on ," said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall of junk. "This way's better for you, man." He took his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. "You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush? You aren't missing anything, back there. An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds."

"You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like people I know?" He stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. "What's out there? New York? Or does it just stop?"

"Well," said the Finn, "it's like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods but maybe there's nobody to hear it." He showed Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. "You can go for a walk, you wanna. It's all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in."

"I don't have this good a memory," Case said, looking around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but couldn't.

"Everybody does," the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, "but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Manhattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Memory's holographic, for you." The Finn tugged at one of his small ears. "I'm different."

"How do you mean, holographic?" The word made him think of Riviera.

"The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you've never done anything about it. People, I mean."

The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. "Maybe if you had, I wouldn't be happening."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the shoulders, and didn't quite settle back into position. "I'm trying to help you, Case."

"Why?"

"Because I need you." The large yellow teeth appeared again. "And because you need me."

"Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?" He grimaced. "Wintermute, I mean."

"Minds aren't read.  See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access  your memory, but that's not the same as your mind." He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of ..." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle.

"You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"That's ƒ„you' in the collective. Your species."

"You killed those Turings."

The Finn shrugged. "Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?" And his right hand held the charred wasps' nest from Case's dream, reek of fuel in the closeness of the dark shop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. "Yeah. That was me. Did it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it's important?"

Case shook his head.

"Because" -- and the nest, somehow, was gone -- "it's the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. The human equivalent. Straylight's like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. I figure it'll make you feel better."

"Feel better?"

"To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That's good. But hate them instead. Same difference."

"Listen," Case said, stepping forward, "they never did shit to me. You, it's different ..." But he couldn't feel the anger.

"So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was." The Finn grinned. "It doesn't much matter. You gotta hate somebody before this is over." He turned and headed for the back of the shop. "Well, come on, I'll show you a little bit of Straylight while I got you here." He lifted the corner of the blanket. White light poured out. "Shit, man, don't just stand there."

Case followed, rubbing his face.

"Okay," said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.

They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals.

"Jesus," Case said, tumbling.

"This is the front entrance," the Finn said, his tweed flapping. "If this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This'll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don't have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly ..."

Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral.

"Hold on," the Finn said, "I'll fast-forward us."

The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.

"Here," the Finn said. "This is it."

They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.

"The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves ..."

"Essay of 3Jane's," the Finn said, producing his Partagas. "Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course."

"The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage."

"That was her  you saw in the restaurant," the Finn said.

"By the standards of the archipelago," the head continued, "ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull.

"Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

"The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.

"At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool ..."

The head fell silent.

"Well?" Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him.

"That's all she wrote," the Finn said. "Didn't finish it. Just a kid then. This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That's the catch. Doesn't mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word."

"So what's the word?"

"I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I can't  know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't know.  It's hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores."

"What happens then?"

"I don't exist, after that. I cease."

"Okay by me," Case said.

"Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go."

"What's that mean?"

But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.









Chapter 15













"You tryin' to break my record, son?" the Flatline asked. "You were braindead again, five seconds."

"Sit tight," Case said, and hit the simstim switch.

She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete.

CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link.

"Cute," she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed her palms together, cracked her knuckles. "What kept you?"

TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.

She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth. One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up ghost-pale and grainy. "Okay, honey. Now we go out to play."

Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind. She crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished brass. He saw enough of her arms and hands to know that she wore the polycarbon suit again. Under the plastic, he felt the familiar tension of thin tight leather. There was something slung under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood up, unzipped the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip.

"Hey, Case," she said, barely voicing the words, "you listening? Tell you a story ... Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . ." She turned and surveyed the corridor. "Johnny, his name was."



The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood. They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the hallway's walls, as though they'd been brought in and set up in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized that hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft patchwork of handwoven wool.

Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents, which irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disinterested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique weapons, a thing so densely studded with rusted nails that it was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry ...

"My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case." Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn't need to hear them spoken aloud. "We had a set-up with a squid, so we could read the traces of everything he'd ever stored. Ran it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house when I met him ..." She paused, edged around a sharp turn, and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides a color that reminded him of cockroach wings.

"Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody could ever touch us. I wasn't going to let them. Yakuza, I guess, they still wanted Johnny's ass. 'Cause I'd killed their man. 'Cause Johnny'd burned them. And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

"I didn't know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn't apply to us. Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I was young. Then they came, when we were thinking we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we'd do there, with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss orbital accounts and a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off your game.

"So that first one they'd sent, he'd been hot. Reflexes like you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods. But the second one, he was, I dunno, like a monk.  Cloned. Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud ..." Her voice trailed off as the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the left.



"One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was down by the Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It's the chemicals get into them. Big as I was, and all night one had been scrabbling under the floor of the squat. Round dawn somebody brought this old man in, seams down his cheeks and his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you'd keep steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old revolver and three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there, then he starts walking up and down the squat, we're hanging back by the walls.

"Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like he's forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet. Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun. Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back up and left.

"I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its eyes." She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at intervals along the corridor. "The second one, the one who came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he was like that. He killed that way." The corridor widened. The sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous candelabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR LEFT, blinked the readout.

She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. "I just saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out. We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with, and I'd put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight. I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my eye, as he was coming out. Didn't say a word. We just looked at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of something to say."

The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway. A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. "Never much found anybody I gave a damn about, after that."

She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfocused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remembered Cath's story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane's mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly perfumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she'd never told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story in the cubicle, she'd seldom said anything that had even indicated that she had a past.

She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he'd had the wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manipulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or a human agent.

She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois, carefully rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. "Guess you're kinda like he was," she said. "Think you're born to run. Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll do that sometimes, get you down to basics." She stood, stretched, shook herself. "You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny." She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to full auto.

The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it. Not the door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part of some more beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn down to fit a particular entrance. Even the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. They'd imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit. But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing ...

Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the door swung open easily.

The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers.

THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which was deeper contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face of the coin. The other was blank.

"He told me," she whispered. "Wintermute. How he played a waiting game for years. Didn't have any real power, then, but he could use the Villa's security and custodial systems to keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight." She closed her white fingers over the key. "So nobody would find it." She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit's kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. "They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was  the Finn, if I wasn't careful." Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests. "He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he could've gotten out a long time ago. But they didn't. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what he called her, but he talked like he liked her."

She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.

Case flipped.



Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.

"Dixie, you think this thing'll work?"

"Does a bear shit in the woods?" The Flatline punched them up through shining rainbow strata.

Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.

"That's the sting," the construct said. "When Kuang's good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin' that through."

"You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he is  under control," he added.

"He," the construct said. "He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you."

"It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever's waiting for us behind that ice."

"Well, you got time to kill, kid," the Flatline said. "Ol' Kuang's slow but steady."

Case jacked out.



Into Maelcum's stare.

"You dead awhile there, mon."

"It happens," he said. "I'm getting used to it."

"You dealin' wi' th' darkness, mon."

"Only game in town, it looks like."

"Jah love, Case," Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the man's dark arms.

He jacked back in.

And flipped.



Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg ...

The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.

She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bundled cables hugged the stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. The walls were splotched with damp.

She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions.

LEFT.

She shrugged. "Lemme look around, okay?"



LEFT.

"Relax. There's time." She started down the corridor that led off to her right.

STOP.

GO BACK.

DANGER.

She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor's field, her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher. She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone.

"What's this," said the slurred voice, "fancy dress?" A trembling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. "Come visit, child. Now."

She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the gun's barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.

He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingti?me Si?cle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. "Slow, darling." The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Telefunken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing.

"It would be customary," the old man said, "for me to kill you now." Case felt her tense, ready for a move. "But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?"

"Molly."

"Molly. Mine is Ashpool." He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.

"How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I'm curious." His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale.

Sick, Case decided. Or drugs.

"I don't cry, much."

"But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?"

"I spit," she said. "The ducts are routed back into my mouth."

"Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one so young." He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. "That is the way to handle tears." He drank again. "I'm busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy. Dying."

"I could go out the way I came," she said.

He laughed, a harsh high sound. "You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief."

"It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece."

"You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand. But perhaps I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell ... It would be very Egyptian of me." He drank again. "Come here then." He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. "Drink."

She shook her head.

"It isn't poisoned," he said, but returned the brandy to the table. "Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk."

"What about?" She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails.

"Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and I was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely they didn't need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren't born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn't dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel cold, either.



Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold ... Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset ... I'm old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold." The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The tendons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.

"You can get freezerburn," she said carefully.

"Nothing burns there," he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. "Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I'd deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?" The gun rose again. "There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight."

"Boss," she asked him, "you know Wintermute?"

"A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that very bed ... But I wander." He coughed wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near his one bare foot. "How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one's own daughter." His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. "Marie-France's eyes," he said, faintly, and smiled. "We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism." His head swayed sideways, recovered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded microchip."

The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.

"The dreams grow like slow ice," he said. His face was tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.

Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's automatic in her hand.

A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the patterned rugs. Twitching a comer of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant.

There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee.

Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck.

"I got your number, fucker," Case said, feeling his own lips moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast. Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda's deathmask.

Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.

It was still open when she turned and left the room.







Chapter 16











"Got your boss on hold," the Flatline said. "He's coming through on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that's riding us piggy-back. Called the Haniwa."

"I know," Case said, absently, "I saw it."

A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.

"Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care of mine," Case said.

Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his gaze. "You okay, Armitage?"

"Case" -- and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue stare -- "you've seen Wintermute, haven't you? In the matrix."

Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garvey  would relay the gesture to the Haniwa  monitor. He imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage.

"Case" -- and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his computer -- "what is he, when you see him?"

"A high-rez simstim construct."

"But who ?"

"Finn, last time ... Before that, this pimp I . . ."

"Not General Girling?"

"General who?"

The lozenge went blank.

"Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up," he told the construct.

He flipped.



The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none larger than Garvey  and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construction vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires.

CASE, flashed her chip.

"Hey," she said. "Waiting for a guide."

She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now. "I shoulda gone back to Chin," she muttered.

Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her left shoulder. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a microsecond burst of diffuse laserlight, and froze. It was a Braun microdrone, and Case had once owned the same model, a pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's equator. Its body was no larger than a baseball. "Okay," she said, "I hear you." She stood up, favoring her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse. It picked its methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet, pick up his console, and step back through the gap in the construction boat's hull. There was a rising whine of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten-meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the hole left by the elevator panel.

Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on.

"How you doin', Case? You back in Garvey  with Maelcum? Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I've always talked to myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell 'em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend they're telling me what they think about that, and I'll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . ." She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. "I was expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the way it smells ..."

The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder of U-shaped steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. "And while I'm feeling confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I never much expected to make it out of this one anyway. Been on this bad roll for a while, and you're the only good change come down since I signed on with Armitage." She looked up at the black circle. The drone's LED winked, climbing. "Not that you're all that shit hot." She smiled, but it was gone too quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to climb. The ladder continued up through a metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders.

She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis.

Her chip pulsed the time.

04:23:04.

It had been a long day. The clarity of her sensorium cut the bite of the betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it. He preferred the pain in her leg.



C A S E : 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .



"Guess it's for you," she said, climbing mechanically. The zeros strobed again and a message stuttered there, in the corner of her vision, chopped up by the display circuit.



G E N E R A L   G

I R L I N G : : :

T R A I N E D

C O R T O   F O R

S C R E A M I N G

F I S T   A N D

S O L D  H I S

A S S  T O

T H E  P E N T

A G O N : : : :

W / M U T E ' S

P R I M A R Y

G R I P   O N

A R M I T A G

E   I S   A

C O N S T R U

C T   O F   G

I R L I N G :

W / M U T E

S E Z   A ' S

M E N T I O N

O F   G

M E A N S

H E ' S

C R A C KI N G

: : : :

W A T C H

Y O U R

A S S

: : : :: :

D I X I E



"Well," she said, pausing, taking all of her weight on her right leg, "guess you got problems too." She looked down. There was a faint circle of light, no larger than the brass round of the Chubb key that dangled between her breasts. She looked up. Nothing at all. She tongued her amps and the tube rose into vanishing perspective, the Braun picking its way up the rungs. "Nobody told me about this part," she said.

Case jacked out.



"Maelcum . . ."

"Mon, you bossman gone ver' strange." The Zionite was wearing a blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the one Case had rented in Freeside, its helmet under his arm and his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap crocheted from purple cotton yarn. His eyes were slitted with ganja and tension. "Keep callin' down here wi' orders , mon, but be some Babylon war ..." Maelcum shook his head. "Aerol an' I talkin', an' Aerol talkin' wi' Zion, Founders seh cut an' run." He ran the back of a large brown hand across his mouth.

"Armitage?" Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hangover hit him with its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix or simstim. Brain's got no nerves in it, he told himself, it can't really feel this bad. "What do you mean, man? He's giving you orders? What?"

"Mon, Armitage, he tellin' me set course for Finland, ya know? He tellin' me there be hope, ya know? Come on my screen wi' his shirt all blood, mon, an' be crazy as some dog, talkin' screamin' fists an' Russian an' th' blood of th' betrayers shall be on our hands." He shook his head again, the dreadcap swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed. "Founders seh the Mute voice be false prophet surely, an' Aerol an' I mus' 'bandon Marcus Garvey  and return."

"Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?"

"Can't seh, ya know? But blood, an' stone crazy, Case."

"Okay," Case said, "So what about me? You're going home. What about me, Maelcum?"

"Mon," Maelcum said, "you comin' wi' me. I an' I come Zion wi' Aerol, Babylon Rocker.  Leave Mr. Armitage t' talk wi' ghost cassette, one ghost t' 'nother ..."

Case glanced over his shoulder: his rented suit swung against the hammock where he'd snapped it, swaying in the air current from the old Russian scrubber. He closed his eyes. He saw the sacs of toxin dissolving in his arteries. He saw Molly hauling herself up the endless steel rungs. He opened his eyes.

"I dunno, man," he said, a strange taste in his mouth. He looked down at his desk, at his hands. "I don't know." He looked back up. The brown face was calm now, intent. Maelcum's chin was hidden by the high helmet ring of his old blue suit. "She's inside," he said. "Molly's inside. In Straylight, it's called. If there's any Babylon, man, that's it. We leave on her, she ain't comin' out, Steppin' Razor or not."

Maelcum nodded, the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a captive balloon of crocheted cotton. "She you woman, Case?"

"I dunno. Nobody's woman, maybe." He shrugged. And found his anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. "Fuck this," he said. "Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute, and fuck you. I'm stayin' right here."

Maelcum's smile spread across his face like light breaking. "Maelcum a rude boy, Case. Garvey  Maelcum boat." His gloved hand slapped a panel and the bass-heavy rocksteady of Zion dub came pulsing from the tug's speakers. "Maelcum not runnin', no. I talk wi' Aerol, he certain t' see it in similar light."

Case stared. "I don't understand you guys at all," he said.

"Don' 'stan' you, mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one."

Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.



"Get my wire?"

"Yeah." He saw that the Chinese program had grown; delicate arches of shifting polychrome were nearing the T-A ice.

"Well, it's gettin' stickier," the Flatline said. "Your boss wiped the bank on that other Hosaka, and damn near took ours with it. But your pal Wintermute put me on to somethin' there before it went black. The reason Straylight's not exactly hoppin' with Tessier-Ashpools is that they're mostly in cold sleep. There's a law firm in London keeps track of their powers of attorney. Has to know who's awake and exactly when. Armitage was routing the transmissions from London to Straylight through the Hosaka on the yacht. Incidentally, they know the old man's dead."

"Who knows?"

"The law firm and T-A. He had a medical remote planted in his sternum. Not that your girl's dart would've left a resurrection crew with much to work with. Shellfish toxin. But the only T-A awake in Straylight right now is Lady 3Jane Marie-France. There's a male, couple years older, in Australia on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to cause that business to need this 8Jean's personal attention. But he's on his way home, or near as matters. The London lawyers give his Straylight ETA as 09:00:00, tonight. We slotted Kuang virus at 02:32:03. It's 04:45:20. Best estimate for Kuang penetration of the T-A core is 08:30:00. Or a hair on either side. I figure Wintermute's got somethin' goin' with this 3Jane, or else she's just as crazy as her old man was. But the boy up from Melbourne'll know the score. The Straylight security systems keep trying to go full alert, but Wintermute blocks 'em, don't ask me how. Couldn't override the basic gate program to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a record of all that on his Hosaka; Riviera must've talked 3Jane into doing it. She's been able to fiddle entrances and exits for years. Looks to me like one of T-A's main problems is that every family bigwig has riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and exceptions. Kinda like your immune system falling apart on you. Ripe for virus. Looks good for us, once we're past that ice."

"Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm ƒ~"

A white lozenge snapped into position, filled with a closeup of mad blue eyes. Case could only stare. Colonel Willie Corto, Special Forces, Strikeforce Screaming Fist, had found his way back. The image was dim, jerky, badly focused. Corto was using the Haniwa 's navigation deck to link with the Hosaka in Marcus Garvey.

"Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder."

"Say, I . . . Colonel?"

"Hang in there, boy. Remember your training."



But where have you been , man?  he silently asked the anguished eyes. Wintermute had built something called Armitage into a catatonic fortress named Corto. Had convinced Corto that Armitage was the real thing, and Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for Wintermute in that room in the Chiba Hilton ... And now Armitage was gone, blown away by the winds of Corto's madness. But where had Corto been , those years?

Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.

"Case, this will be difficult for you to accept, I know that. You're an officer. The training. I understand. But, Case, as God is my witness, we have been betrayed."

Tears started from the blue eyes.

"Colonel, ah, who? Who's betrayed us?"

"General Girling, Case. You may know him by a code name. You do know the man of whom I speak."

"Yeah," Case said, as the tears continued to flow, "I guess I do. Sir," he added, on impulse. "But, sir, Colonel, what exactly should we do? Now, I mean."

"Our duty at this point, Case, lies in flight. Escape. Evasion. We can make the Finnish border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop flying on manual. Seat of the pants, boy. But that will only be the beginning." The blue eyes slitted above tanned cheekbones slick with tears. "Only the beginning. Betrayal from above. From above . . ." He stepped back from the camera, dark stains on his torn twill shirt. Armitage's face had been masklike, impassive, but Corto's was the true schizoid mask, illness etched deep in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.

"Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want you to open the, ah . . . shit, what's it called, Dix?"

"The midbay lock," the Flatline said.

"Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there to open it, right? We'll be up there with you fast, Colonel. Then we can talk about getting out of here."

The lozenge vanished.

"Boy, I think you just lost me, there," the Flatline said.

"The toxins," Case said, "the fucking toxins," and jacked out.



"Poison?" Maelcum watched over the scratched blue shoulder of his old Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.

"And get this goddam thing off me ..." Tugging at the Texas catheter. "Like a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs knows how to counter it, and now he's crazier than a shithouse rat." He fumbled with the front of the red Sanyo, forgetting how to work the seals.

"Bossman, he poison  you?" Maelcum scratched his cheek. "Got a medical kit, ya know."

"Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit."

The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. "Easy, mon. Measure twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up there ..."



There was air in the corrugated gangway that led from Marcus Garvey  's aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called Haniwa , but they kept their suits sealed. Maelcum executed the passage with balletic grace, only pausing to help Case, who'd gone into an awkward tumble as he'd stepped out of Garvey. The white plastic sides of the tube filtered the raw sunlight; there were no shadows.

Garvey  's airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated with a laser-carved Lion of Zion. Haniwa 's midbay hatch was creamy gray, blank and pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved hand in a narrow recess. Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs came to life in the recess, counting down from fifty. Maelcum withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced against the hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit and bones. The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw into the side of Haniwa . Maelcum grabbed the recess with one hand and Case with the other. The lock took them with it.



Haniwa  was a product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her interior informed by a design philosophy similar to the one that had produced the Mercedes that had chauffeured them through Istanbul. The narrow midbay was walled in imitation ebony veneer and floored with gray Italian tiles. Case felt as though he were invading some rich man's private spa by way of the shower. The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had never been intended for re-entry. Her smooth, wasplike line was simply styling, and everything about her interior was calculated to add to the overall impression of speed.

When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed his lead. They hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine. Under it, a disturbing edge of burning insulation.

Maelcum sniffed. "Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell that ..."



A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly back into its housing. Maelcum kicked off the ebony wall and sailed neatly through the narrow opening, twisting his broad shoulders, at the last possible instant, for clearance. Case followed him clumsily, hand over hand, along a waist-high padded rail. "Bridge," Maelcum said, pointing down a seamless, cream-walled corridor, "be there." He launched himself with another effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy. It grew louder as he followed Maelcum through another doorway, into a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it.



0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0



"Systems crash?" The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the column of zeros.

"No," Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, "the Flatline said Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there."

"Smell like he wipe 'em wi' laser, ya know?" The Zionite braced his foot against the white cage of a Swiss exercise machine and shot through the floating maze of paper, batting it away from his face.

"Case, mon . . ."

The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back of the narrow articulated chair with a length of some sort of fine steel wire. The wire was invisible, where it crossed the black temperfoam of the headrest, and it had cut as deeply into his larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had congealed there like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl. Case saw the crude wooden handles that drifted at either end of the garrotte, like worn sections of broom handle.

"Wonder how long he had that on him?" Case said, remembering Corto's postwar pilgrimage.

"He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?"

"Maybe. He was Special Forces."

"Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin'. Doubt I pilot her easy myself. Ver' new boat . . ."

"So find us the bridge."

Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.

Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge, shredding and crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him in his passage. There were more of the articulated chairs, here, something that resembled a bar, and the Hosaka. The printer, still spewing its flimsy tongue of paper, was an in-built bulkhead unit, a neat slot in a panel of handrubbed veneer. He pulled himself over the circle of chairs and reached it, punching a white stud to the left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He turned and stared at the Hosaka. Its face had been drilled through, at least a dozen times. The holes were small, circular, edges blackened. Tiny spheres of bright alloy were orbiting the dead computer. "Good guess," he said to Maelcum.

"Bridge locked, mon," Maelcum said, from the opposite side of the lounge.

The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.

Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. "Wintermute?" He looked around the beige and brown lounge, the space scrawled with drifting curves of paper. "That you on the lights, Wintermute?"

A panel beside Maelcum's head slid up, revealing a small monitor. Maelcum jerked apprehensively, wiped sweat from his forehead with a foam patch on the back of a gloved hand, and swung to study the display. "You read Japanese, mon?" Case could see figures blinking past on the screen.

"No," Case said.

"Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin' down, looks like it. Suit up now." He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.

"What? He's takin' off? Shit!" He kicked off from the bulkhead and shot through the tangle of printout. "We gotta open this door, man!" But Maelcum could only tap the side of his helmet. Case could see his lips moving, through the Lexan. He saw a bead of sweat arc out from the rainbow braided band of the purple cotton net the Zionite wore over his locks. Maelcum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him smoothly, the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. Micro-LED monitors to the left of the faceplate lit as the neck ring connections closed. "No seh Japanese," Maelcum said, over his suit's transceiver, "but countdown's wrong." He tapped a particular line on the screen. "Seals not intact, bridge module. Launchin' wi' lock open."

"Armitage!" Case tried to pound on the door. The physics of zero-g sent him tumbling back through the printout. "Corto! Don't do it! We gotta talk! We gotta ƒ~"

"Case? Read you, Case . . ." The voice barely resembled Armitage's now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking. His helmet struck the far wall. "I'm sorry, Case, but it has to be this way. One of us has to get out. One of us has to testify. If we all go down here, it ends here. I'll tell them, Case, I'll tell them all of it. About Girling and the others. And I'll make it, Case. I know I'll make it. To Helsinki." There was a sudden silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like some rare gas. "But it's so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I'm blind."

"Corto, stop. Wait. You're blind , man. You can't fly! You'll hit the fucking trees . And they're trying to get you, Corto, I swear to God, they've left your hatch open. You'll die, and you'll never get to tell 'em, and I gotta get the enzyme, name of the enzyme, the enzyme, man ..." He was shouting, voice high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet's phone pads.

"Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do."

And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static, harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments of Russian, and then a stranger's voice, Midwestern, very young. "We are down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we . . ."

"Wintermute," Case screamed, "don't do this to me!" Tears broke from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets. Then Haniwa  thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck her hull. Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second's clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final minute of Screaming Fist.

"I'm gone, mon." Maelcum looked at the monitor. "Hatch open. Mute mus' override ejection failsafe."

Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked against Lexan.

"Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin' grapple control wi' bridge. Marcus Garvey  still stuck."

But Case was seeing Armitage's endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.