e screen bleeped a two-second warning.
     The  new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiber
optics.
     And one and two and –
     Cyberspace  slid into existence from  the  cardinal  points. Smooth, he
thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. . .
     Then he keyed the new switch.
     The  abrupt jolt into  other  flesh.  Matrix gone, a wave of  sound and
color.  . .  She  was moving  through  a crowded street, past stalls vending
discount software,  prices felt penned on sheets  of  plastic, fragments  of
music  from  countless  speakers. Smells of  urine,  free monomers, perfume,
patties  of  frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly
to  control  her body. Then  he willed  himself  into passivity, became  the
passenger behind her eyes.
     The  glasses didn't seem to  cut  down  the  sunlight at  all. He
wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically.  Blue alphanumerics
winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought.
     Her  body  language  was  disorienting,  her style  foreign. She seemed
continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of
her way, stepped sideways, made room.
     "How you doing, Case?" He heard the  words and  felt her form them. She
slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple  under warm silk.
The sensation made him  catch his breath.  She  laughed.  But the  link  was
one-way. He had no way to reply.
     Two blocks later,  she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case
kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his
way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating.
     The   transition  to   cyberspace,  when   he  hit   the   switch,  was
instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging  to
the  New  York Public  Library,  automatically  counting potential  windows.
Keying back  into her sensorium,  into the sinuous  flow  of muscle,  senses
sharp and bright.
     He found himself  wondering  about the  mind he shared these sensations
with. What did he know about  her? That she was  another  professional; that
she  said her being, like  his, was the thing she  did  to make a living. He
knew the way she'd moved against  him,  earlier,  when she woke, their
mutual  grunt of unity when  he'd entered her, and that  she liked her
coffee black, afterward. . .
     Her  destination was one of the dubious software  rental complexes that
lined  Memory Lane. There  was a stillness,  a hush. Booths  lined a central
hall. The clientele  were  young, few  of them out of their  teens. They all
seemed  to  have  carbon  sockets  planted  behind  the  left  ear, but  she
didn't focus on them. The counters  that fronted the  booths displayed
hundreds of  slivers  of microsoft,  angular fragments  of  colored  silicon
mounted  under  oblong  transparent bubbles on  squares of white  cardboard.
Molly went to  the seventh booth  along the south wall. Behind the counter a
boy  with  a shaven  head  stared vacantly into space,  a  dozen  spikes  of
microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear.
     "Larry, you  in,  man?" She positioned  herself in front  of  him.  The
boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried  a bright magenta
splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail .
     "Hey, Larry."
     "Molly." He nodded.
     "I have some work for some of your friends, Larry."
     Larry took  a flat plastic case from the pocket of  his red sport shirt
and flicked  it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand
hovered, selected  a  glossy black chip  that  was slightly longer  than the
rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed.
     "Molly's got a  rider,"  he said,  "and  Larry doesn't like
that."
     "Hey," she said, "I didn't  know  you were  so  . . .  sensitive.
I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive."
     "I know you, lady?" The blank look  returned.  "You looking to buy some
softs?"
     "I'm looking for the Moderns."
     "You  got a  rider,  Molly.  This says." He  tapped the black splinter.
"Somebody else using your eyes."
     "My partner."
     "Tell your partner to go."
     "Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry."
     "What are you talking about, lady?"
     "Case,  you take off," she said, and he hit the switch,  instantly back
in the  matrix. Ghost impressions of  the software  complex hung  for a  few
seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace.
     "Panther  Moderns," he said  to the Hosaka, removing the  trodes. "Five
minute precis."
     "Ready," the computer said.
     It wasn't  a name he knew. Something new, something that had come
in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the
speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for  a dozen
weeks, and then vanish  utterly. "Go," he said. The Hosaka  had accessed its
array of libraries, journals, and news services.
     The precis began with a long hold on a color still  that Case  at first
assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's  face snipped from another
image and  glued  to  a  photograph of  a paint-scrawled  wall.  Dark  eyes,
epicanthic  folds obviously the result of  surgery, an angry dusting of acne
across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the  freeze;  the  boy moved,
flowing  with  the  sinister  grace  of  a  mime  pretending to  be a jungle
predator.  His  body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating
the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight one piece. Mimetic
polycarbon.
     Cut to Dr.  Virginia Rambali, Sociology,  NYU,  her name,  faculty, and
school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.
     "Given  their  penchant for  these random  acts of  surreal  violence,"
someone  said, "it may  be difficult  for our viewers  to understand why you
continue to insist that this phenomenon isn't a form of terrorism."
     Dr. Rambali smiled.  "There is always  a point at  which  the terrorist
ceases to  manipulate the media gestalt.  A point at which  the violence may
well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has  become symptomatic of the
media  gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand  it  is inately
media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in
their degree  of  self-consciousness, in  their awareness  of the  extent to
which media divorce the  act of terrorism from the  original  sociopolitical
intent. . ."
     "Skip it," Case said.

     Case met his  first  Modern  two  days after  he'd  screened  the
Hosaka's  precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary
version of the Big Scientists of  his  own  late teens. There was a  kind of
ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something  that carried the coded
precepts  of  various  short-lived sub  cults  and  replicated them  at  odd
intervals. The Panther Moderns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. If
the technology  had been  available the  Big Scientists  would all have  had
sockets stuffed with microsofts.  It  was  the style that mattered  and  the
style  was  the  same.  The  Moderns  were  mercenaries,  practical  jokers,
nihilistic technofetishists.

     The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the
Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple  graft grown
on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous.  It was
one of the  nastiest  pieces  of elective surgery Case  had ever  seen. When
Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal,  Case
was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He'd seen that before.
     "You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly said.
Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net ice.
     This was it. This was what he was, who he was,  his being. He forgot to
eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the
long  table.  Sometimes he resented having to  leave  the deck  to  use  the
chemical  toilet they'd set  up in a  corner of the loft. Ice patterns
formed and reformed on the screen as  he probed for  gaps, skirted  the most
obvious   traps,   and   mapped    the   route   he'd   take   through
Sense/Net's ice. It  was good  ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned
there while he  lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the
red  dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was
the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not
bothering to dress,  and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost
track of days.
     And sometimes, falling  asleep, particularly when  Molly was off on one
of  her reconnaissance  trips  with  her rented cadre of  Moderns, images of
Chiba  came  flooding  back.  Faces and  Ninsei  neon. Once he  woke  from a
confused  dream  of  Linda  Lee,  unable  to  recall  who  she  was or  what
she'd ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked
for nine straight hours.
     The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. "I said
a week," Armitage  said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed
him his plan for the run. "You took your own good time."
     "Balls," Case  said, smiling at  the screen.  "That's  good work,
Armitage."
     "Yes," Armitage  admitted,  "but don't let  it  go  to your head.
Compared  to what you'll  eventually be up against, this  is an arcade
toy."

     "Love you, Cat Mother," whispered the Panther Modern's  link man.
His voice  was  modulated  static  in Case's headset. "Atlanta, Brood.
Looks go. Go, got it?" Molly's voice was slightly clearer.
     "To hear is to obey." The Moderns were  using some kind of chicken wire
dish  in New Jersey  to bounce the  link  man's scrambled signal off a
Sons of Christ the  King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above  Manhattan.
They chose to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private  joke, and
their  choice  of  comsats seemed  to have  been  deliberate.  Molly's
signals were being beamed up from a  one-meter umbrella dish epoxyed  to the
roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall as the Sense/Net building.
     Atlanta. The recognition code  was simple. Atlanta to Boston to Chicago
to  Denver, five  minutes  for  each  city. If  anyone managed  to intercept
Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her voice, the code would tip the
Moderns.  If she remained in the  building for more than twenty  minutes, it
was highly unlikely she'd be coming out at all.
     Case gulped the last of his  coffee, settled  the trodes  in place, and
scratched his chest  beneath his  black t-shirt. He had only a vague idea of
what  the Panther Moderns  planned as a diversion for the Sense/Net security
people. His job was  to make  sure  the intrusion program he'd written
would link  with the Sense/Net  systems when Molly needed it  to. He watched
the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.
     He jacked  in and  triggered his program. "Mainline," breathed the link
man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through  the glowing strata of
Sense/Net ice. Good.  Check Molly.  He  hit the Simstim and flipped into her
sensorium.
     The scrambler blurred  the visual  input  slightly. She  stood before a
wall  of  gold-flecked  mirror  in the building's  vast  white  lobby,
chewing gum, apparently  fascinated by  her own  reflection. Aside  from the
huge pair of sunglasses  concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look
remarkably  like  she  belonged  there,  another tourist girl  hoping for  a
glimpse of Tally Isham.  She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top,
loose white  pants cut  in a style  that had  been fashionable in  Tokyo the
previous year.  She grinned  vacantly  and popped her  gum. Case  felt  like
laughing. He  could  feel the  micro pore tape across her ribcage,  feel the
flat little units under it: the radio,  the Simstim unit, and the scrambler.
The  throat mike, glued to  her neck,  looked  as much as  possible  like an
analgesic  dermadisk.  Her  hands,  in the pockets of  the  pink coat,  were
flexing systematically  through  a series  of tension-release  exercises. It
took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of
her  fingers was caused by  the blades as they were partially extruded, then
retracted.
     He flipped back. His program had reached the  fifth gate. He watched as
his icebreaker  strobed and shifted in  front of him, only  faintly aware of
his hands playing across  the deck, making  minor  adjustments.  Translucent
planes  of color shuffled  like a trick deck.  Take a  card, he thought, any
card.
     The gate blurred past.  He laughed. The  Sense/Net ice had accepted his
entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex.
He  was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms  peeled  off, meshing with the
gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it
arrived.
     He  flipped  again. Molly  was strolling  past  the  enormous  circular
reception desk  at the rear of the  lobby. 12:01:20 as the readout flared in
her optic nerve.

     At midnight,  synched with  the chip behind Molly's eye, the link
man in Jersey had  given his  command. "Mainline."  Nine  Moderns, scattered
along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had  simultaneously  dialed MAX EMERG
from  pay  phones. Each Modern  delivered a short set speech,  hung up,  and
drifted out  into the night,  peeling off  surgical  gloves. Nine  different
police  departments  and  public  security   agencies   were  absorbing  the
information that an obscure  sub  sect of militant Christian fundamentalists
had just taken credit for  having introduced clinical levels of an  outlawed
psychoactive agent  known as  Blue Nine into the  ventilation  system of the
Sense/Net  Pyramid. Blue Nine,  known in  California as Grievous  Angel, had
been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal  psychosis in eighty-five
percent of experimental subjects.

     Case  hit the switch as his program surged  through  the  gates of  the
subsystem that  controlled security  for the Sense/Net research library.  He
found himself stepping into an elevator.
     "Excuse  me,  but are you an employee?" The  guard raised his eyebrows.
Molly popped her gum.  "No," she said, driving the first two knuckles of her
right hand into  the man's  solar plexus. As he  doubled over, clawing
for  the beeper on his belt she slammed his  head sideways, against the wall
of the elevator.
     Chewing  a little  more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and STOP on
the  illuminated  panel. She  took  a  black  box  from  her coat pocket and
inserted a lead in  the keyhole of the lock that  secured the  panel's
circuitry.

     The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes  for their first move to  take
effect, then  injected a second  carefully prepared  dose of misinformation.
This  time,  they  shot  it directly  into  the  Sense/Net  building's
internal video system.
     At  12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds
in a frequency that produced seizures in  a susceptible segment of Sense/Net
employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens,
its  features  stretched across  asymmetrical  expanses  of bone  like  some
obscene  Mercator  projection.  Blue  lips  parted  wetly  as  the  twisted,
elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump
of  gnarled  roots,  fumbled  toward  the  camera,  blurred,  and  vanished.
Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building's
water   supply  system,  gloved  hands  manipulating  laboratory  glassware,
something tumbling down into  darkness, a pale splash. . . The  audio track,
its pitch adjusted to run  at  just  less than twice the  standard  playback
speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of
a substance  known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth
factor.  Overdoses   of  HsG  threw   certain  bone  cells  into  overdrive,
accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.
     At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium held
just over  three thousand employees. At five minutes  after midnight, as the
Modems'  message  ended  in a flare  of  white  screen, the  Sense/Net
Pyramid screamed.
     Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of
Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system, were converging on the
Sense/Net Pyramid.  They  were  running  full  riot  lights.  A  BAMA  Rapid
Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker's.

     Case  triggered  his  second  program.  A  carefully  engineered  virus
attacked  the  code  fabric  screening primary custodial  commands  for  the
sub-basement  that  housed  the  Sense/Net  research   materials.  "Boston,"
Molly's  voice  came across  the link,  "I'm  downstairs."  Case
switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was unzipping the white
pants.  A bulky  packet,  exactly the shade of  her pale ankle,  was secured
there  with  micro pore.  She  knelt  and peeled the tape  away. Streaks  of
burgundy  flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she  unfolded the Modem
suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw  it down beside the  white pants,
and began to pull the suit on over the white mesh top.

     12:06:26.
     Case's  virus  had bored  a  window  through  the library's
command  ice. He punched himself through  and found  an infinite  blue space
ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In
the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed
unlimited  subjective  dimension; a  child's toy  calculator, accessed
through  Case's  Sendai,  would  have  presented  limitless  gulfs  of
nothingness  hung with  a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence
the  Finn  had  purchased from  a  mid-eschelon sarariman with  severe  drug
problems. He began to glide through the  spheres as  if he were on invisible
tracks.
     Here. This one.
     Punching  his way into the  sphere,  chill blue  neon  vault above  him
starless and  smooth  as  frosted glass,  he  triggered  a  subprogram  that
effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands.
     Out now.  Reversing smoothly, the  virus reknitting the  fabric  of the
window.
     Done.

        x x x
     In the Sense/Net lobby, two  Panther Moderns sat  alertly behind  a low
rectangular  planter, taping  the riot with a video camera.  They both  wore
chameleon suits. "Tacticals are spraying foam  barricades  now,"  one noted,
speaking for the benefit of his  throat mike.  "Rapids  are  still trying to
land their copter."

     Case hit the Simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone.
Molly was braced against  the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath
coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot
line of pain fading in his left thigh.
     "What's happening, Brood?" he asked the link man.
     "I dunno, Cutter. Mother's not talking. Wait."
     Case's program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of  crimson
neon extended from the center of the restored window to the shifting outline
of his icebreaker. He didn't  have time to wait. Taking a deep breath,
he flipped again.
     Molly took a single step, trying  to support her weight on the corridor
wall.  In  the  loft,  Case groaned.  The  second  step  took  her  over  an
outstretched  arm. Uniform  sleeve bright with  fresh blood.  Glimpse  of  a
shattered  fiberglass shock stave. Her  vision  seemed to have narrowed to a
tunnel.  With  the third step,  Case screamed and found himself back in  the
matrix.
     "Brood? Boston, baby. .  ." Her voice  tight  with  pain. She  coughed.
"Little problem with the natives. Think one of them broke my leg."
     "What you  need  now,  Cat  Mother?"  The  link  man's  voice was
indistinct, nearly lost behind static.
     Case forced  himself  to flip back.  She was leaning  against the wall,
taking all of her weight on her right leg. She  fumbled through the contents
of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of  plastic studded
with  a  rainbow  of dermadisks.  She selected three  and thumbed them  hard
against her left wrist, over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin
analog came down  on the pain like a hammer, shattering  it. Her back arched
convulsively.  Pink waves  of warmth lapped up her thighs.  She  sighed  and
slowly relaxed.
     "Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I'll need a medical team  when l come
out.  Tell my people. Cutter,  I'm  two minutes  from target. Can  you
hold?"
     "Tell her I'm in and holding," Case said.
     Molly began to limp down  the corridor.  When  she glanced back,  once,
Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. One of them
seemed to have no eyes.
     "Tacticals and Rapids  have sealed the  ground  floor, Cat Mother. Foam
barricades. Lobby's getting juicy."
     "Pretty juicy down here," she said, swinging  herself through a pair of
gray steel doors. "Almost there, Cutter."
     Case  flipped into the matrix and pulled the  trodes from his forehead.
He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead with a towel, took a quick
sip of water from the bicycle bottle beside the  Hosaka, and checked the map
of  the  library displayed on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through
the outline of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indicated
the location of the Dixie  Flat line's  construct. He wondered what it
was doing to her leg, to walk on  it that way. With enough endorphin analog,
she could walk on  a pair of bloody  stumps. He tightened the nylon  harness
that held him in the chair and replaced the trodes.
     Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.
     The Sense/Net research library  was a dead  storage area; the materials
stored here had  to be physically removed  before  they could be interfaced.
Molly hobbled between rows of identical gray lockers.
     "Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood," Case said.
     "Five more and ten left, Cat Mother," the link man said.
     She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between two lockers,
her  cheeks  wet,  eyes blank.  Molly ignored  her. Case wondered  what  the
Moderns had done to provoke  that level of terror.  He knew it had something
to do with a hoaxed threat, but he'd been too involved with his ice to
follow Molly's explanation.
     "That's it," Case said, but she'd already stopped in  front
of  the  cabinet  that held the  construct. Its lines  reminded Case of  the
Neo-Aztec bookcases in Julie Deane's anteroom in Chiba.
     "Do it, Cutter," Molly said.
     Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a  command pulsing down the crimson
thread  that  pierced  the library  ice.  Five  separate  alarm systems were
convinced  that  they  were  still  operative.  The  three  elaborate  locks
deactivated,  but  considered  themselves   to  have  remained  locked.  The
library's  central  bank  suffered a minute  shift  in  its  permanent
memory: the construct had been removed, per executive order, a month before.
Checking for the  authorization to  remove the  construct, a librarian would
find the records erased.
     The door swung open on silent hinges.
     "0467839,"  Case said,  and  Molly drew a  black  storage unit from the
rack. It  resembled  the magazine  of  a  large  assault rifle, its surfaces
covered with warning decals and security ratings.
     Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.
     He withdrew the line  through the library ice. It whipped back into his
program, automatically  triggering  a full  system  reversal.  The Sense/Net
gates  snapped past him as he backed out, subprograms whirling back into the
core of the icebreaker as he passed the gates where they had been stationed.
     "Out,  Brood,"  he   said,  and   slumped  in  his  chair.  After   the
concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked  in and still  retain
awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days to discover the theft of
the construct. The key would be the deflection of  the Los Angeles transfer,
which  coincided too neatly  with the Modern's terror  run. He doubted
that the three security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live
to talk about it. He flipped.
     The elevator,  with  Molly's  black box  taped beside the control
panel, remained where she'd left it. The guard still lay curled on the
floor. Case  noticed  the derm  on his neck for the first time. Something of
Molly's, to keep him under. She stepped over him and removed the black
box before punching LOBBY.
     As  the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward out  of the
crowd,  into  the elevator, and struck  the rear wall  with her head.  Molly
ignored her, bending over to peel the derm from the guard's neck. Then
she kicked  the white pants and the pink raincoat out  the door, tossing the
dark glasses after them, and  drew  the  hood  of her  suit down across  her
forehead. The construct, in the suit's kangaroo  pocket,  dug into her
sternum when she moved. She stepped out.
     Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.
     The Sense/Net employees, spilling out  of the elevators, had surged for
the street  doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the
sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced  that they were
containing  a  horde  of   potential  killers,   were  cooperating  with  an
uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the  shattered wreckage of the
main  street  doors, bodies  were  piled three deep  on the  barricades. The
hollow thumping  of  the riot guns  provided a  constant  background for the
sound the crowd  made as it surged back  and forth across the  lobby's
marble floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound.
     Neither, apparently,  had  Molly. "Jesus,"  she said, and hesitated. It
was a sort  of keening, rising into  a bubbling wail of  raw and total fear.
The lobby floor was covered  with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled
scrolls of yellow printout.
     "C'mon, sister. We're  for  out.  "  The  eyes  of  the two
Moderns  stared  out of  madly swirling shades  of polycarbon,  their  suits
unable to keep up  with the  confusion  of shape and color that raged behind
them.  "You  hurt?  C'mon.  Tommy'll  walk  you."  Tommy  handed
something to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon.
     "Chicago," she said, "I'm on my  way." And then she was  falling,
not  to  the marble floor, slick with blood and  vomit,  but down some blood
warm well, into silence and the dark.

     The  Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lupus  Yonderboy,
wore a polycarbon suit  with a recording feature that allowed  him to replay
backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some
kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded
eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of  microsofts bristled
behind his left ear; the ear was  pointed,  tufted  with more pink hair. His
pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat's. Case watched
the suit crawl with color and texture.
     "You let it get out of control," Armitage said. He stood  in the center
of  the  loft  like a  statue,  wrapped  in  the  dark  glossy folds  of  an
expensive-looking trench coat.
     "Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus  Yonderboy  said. "That  is our mode and modus.
That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with  her. Not with you,
Mr. Who."  His suit  had taken on a  weird angular pattern of beige and pale
avocado. "She needed  her medical team. She's  with them.  We'll
watch out for her. Everything's fine." He smiled again.
     "Pay him," Case said.
     Armitage glared at him. "We don't have the goods."
     "Your woman has it," Yonderboy said.
     "Pay him."
     Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New
Yen  from the pockets of his  trench coat. "You want to count it?" he  asked
Yonderboy.
     "No,"  the  Panther  Modern said. "You'll pay. You're a Mr.
Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name."
     "I hope that isn't a threat," Armitage said.
     "That's business,"  said Yonderboy,  stuffing  the money into the
single pocket on the front of his suit.
     The  phone rang. Case answered. "Molly," he told Armitage,  handing him
the phone.

     The Sprawl's geodesics were lightening into predawn  gray as Case
left  the building. His limbs felt  cold and disconnected. He couldn't
sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone, then Armitage, and Molly was
in  surgery  somewhere.  Vibration beneath his feet as a  train hissed past.
Sirens Dopplered in the distance.
     He  took corners at  random, his collar up, hunched  in a  new  leather
jacket, flicking  the  first of  a chain of Yeheyuans  into the  gutter  and
lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage's toxin sacs dissolving
in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner  as he walked.  It
didn't  seem real. Neither  did  the fear and  agony  he'd  seen
through Molly's  eyes  in the  lobby  of  Sense/Net. He found  himself
trying to remember the faces of the three people he'd killed in Chiba.
The  men  were  blanks; the  woman reminded  him of  Linda Lee.  A  battered
tricycle-truck  with  mirrored  windows  bounced  past  him,  empty  plastic
cylinders rattling in its bed.
     "Case."
     He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.
     "Message for  you, Case."  Lupus Yonderboy's  suit cycled through
pure primaries. "Pardon. Not to startle you."
     Case straightened up, hands in jacket  pockets. He was  a  head  taller
than the Modern. "You ought a be careful, Yonderboy."
     "This is the message. Wintermute." He spelled it out.
     "From you?" Case took a step forward.
     "No," Yonderboy said.
     "For you."
     "Who from?"
     "Wintermute," Yonderboy repeated,  nodding, bobbing his  crest of  pink
hair. His suit went matte black,  a  carbon shadow against  old concrete. He
executed  a  strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he
was gone. No. There. Hood  up to hide  the pink, the suit exactly  the right
shade of gray,  mottled and  stained as  the  sidewalk he stood on. The eyes
winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone.
     Case closed  his eyes,  massaged them with  numb  fingers, leaning back
against peeling brickwork.
     Ninsei had been a lot simpler.



        5
     The medical  team  Molly employed occupied  two floors of an  anonymous
condo-rack near the  old hub  of Baltimore.  The  building was modular, like
some giant  version of Cheap Hotel each coffin forty meters long.  Case  met
Molly as she emerged from one that wore  the elaborately worked logo of  one
GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.
     "He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off."
     "I ran into one of your pals," he said, "a Modern."
     "Yeah? Which one?"
     "Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message." He passed her a paper napkin with W I
N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat,  laborious capitals. "He
said-- " But her hand came up in the jive for silence.
     "Get us some crab," she said.

     After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease,
they tubed in to New York. Case had learned not to ask  questions; they only
brought the sign for  silence.  Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and  she
seldom spoke.
     A  thin  black  child  with  wooden  beads and  antique resistors woven
tightly into her  hair opened the Finn's door and  led them  along the
tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence
. Or else it seemed that  it was changing subtly, cooking  itself down under
the  pressure of time, silent  invisible  flakes settling to form a mulch, a
crystalline  essence  of discarded  technology,  flowering  secretly in  the
Sprawl's waste places.
     Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.
     Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something
on it, and passed it  to the Finn. He took it between thumb and  forefinger,
holding it away from  his body as though it might explode.  He  made  a sign
Case didn't  know, one  that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum
resignation.  He stood  up, brushing crumbs from  the front  of his battered
tweed jacket. A glass  jar of  pickled herring  stood on the table  beside a
torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the  butts of
Partagas.
     "Wait," the Finn said, and left the room.
     Molly  took his  place,  extruded the blade from  her index finger, and
speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered  aimlessly around the room,
fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed.
     Ten minutes  and the Finn came bustling  back, showing his  teeth  in a
wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs up salute, and gestured to
Case to  help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border
into place, the Finn took a flat little console from  his pocket and punched
out an elaborate sequence.
     "Honey," he said  to Molly, tucking the console away, "you have got it.
No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?"
     "Yonderboy," Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. "I did
a deal with Larry, on the side."
     "Smart," the Finn said. "It's an AI."
     "Slow it down a little," Case said.
     "Berne," the Finn said,  ignoring him.  "Berne. It's got  limited
Swiss citizenship under their equivalent  of the Act of '53. Built for
Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software."
     "What's in Berne, okay?" Case deliberately stepped between them.
     "Wintermute  is  the recognition code for  an  AI.  I've  got the
Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence."
     "That's all just  fine,"  Molly  said, "but where's  it get
us?"
     "If  Yonderboy's  right,"  the  Finn  said, "this Al  is  backing
Armitage."
     "I paid Larry to have the Modems  nose around Ammitage a little," Molly
explained,  turning  to   Case.  "They   have  some  very   weird  lines  of
communication.  Deal was,  they'd  get  my money  if they answered one
question: who's running Armitage?"
     "And you  think it's  this AI? Those things  aren't allowed
any autonomy. It'll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . ."
     "Tessier-Ashpool  S.A.," said the Finn.  "And I got a little story  for
you about them. Wanna hear?" He sat down and hunched forward.
     "Finn," Molly said. "He loves a story."
     "Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.

     The Finn  was  a  fence,  a trafficker in stolen  goods,  primarily  in
software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with
other  fences,  some of whom  dealt in the more traditional  articles of the
trade.  In precious metals, stamps,  rare  coins,  gems, jewelry,  furs, and
paintings and other works  of  art. The story  he told Case and  Molly began
with another man's story, a man he called Smith.
     Smith was also a fence,  but in  balmier seasons he surfaced as an  art
dealer.  He was  the  first person  the  Finn  had  known who'd  "gone
silicon"--  the  phrase  had  an  old-fashioned  ring  for  Case--  and  the
microsofts  he  purchased were art  history  programs and tables  of gallery
sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of
the  art  business  was  formidable,  at  least  by  the  standards  of  his
colleagues.  But  Smith had  come to  the Finn with  a  request  for help, a
fraternal request, one  businessman to another.  He wanted  a go-to  on  the
Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would
guarantee the  impossibility of the subject ever tracing  the inquiry to its
source.  It might be possible, the Finn had  opined, but an explanation  was
definitely required. "It smelled," the Finn said to Case, "smelled of money.
And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful."
     Smith, it developed,  had had a  supplier known  as Jimmy.  Jimmy was a
burglar and  other  things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit,
having carried certain things back down  the  gravity well. The most unusual
thing Jimmy had managed to score on  his swing through the archipelago was a
head,  an  intricately worked  bust, cloisonne  over  platinum, studded with
seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and
advised Jimmy to melt the thing down.  It was  contemporary, not an antique,
and had no value to  the collector. Jimmy  laughed. The thing was a computer
terminal, he said. It  could talk.  And  not in  a synth-voice,  but with  a
beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ  pipes. It was a  baroque
thing for anyone to have constructed, a  perverse thing, because synth-voice
chips cost next to  nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith  jacked the head into
his computer  and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures
of last year's tax return.
     Smith's clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion  for
clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged,  showing Jimmy  his
upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he
doubted he could get much for it.
     When  Jimmy had gone, leaving the  head, Smith  went over it carefully,
discovering certain  hallmarks. Eventually he'd been able  to trace it
to  an  unlikely  collaboration  between  two  Zurich  artisans,  an  enamel
specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had
been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
     Smith began to make preliminary  passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting
that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
     And then  he had  a visitor,  a visitor unannounced, one who walked  in
through   the  elaborate  maze   of  Smith's  security  as  though  it
didn't exist. A  small man, Japanese, enormously polite,  who bore all
the marks of a vatgrown ninja  assassin. Smith sat very still,  staring into
the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood.
Gently, almost apologetically, the  cloned killer  explained that it was his
duty  to find and return  a certain  artwork, a  mechanism of  great beauty,
which  had  been taken from the house  of  his master.  It  had come  to his
attention, the ninja said, that Smith might  know of the whereabouts of this
object.
     Smith  told the man that he had  no wish to die, and produced the head.
And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of
this  object? Smith  named a  figure  far lower  than  the  price he'd
intended  to set.  The  ninja  produced a credit  chip  and keyed Smith that
amount out of a numbered  Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you
this piece? Smith  told  him.  Within days, Smith  learned  of Jimmy's
death.
     "So that  was where I came in," the Finn continued. "Smith knew I dealt
a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and  that's where you go for a quiet
go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so
I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird
business experience and he'd come out  on top, but it didn't add
up.  Who'd paid, out  of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got  a
very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too,
always. Was it spook  stuff? Smith  didn't  think so. Spook  biz has a
vibe, you get so you can smell  it.  Well, I had  my  cowboy  buzz  the news
morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The  case wasn't
anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we
got the family address. Lotta good it did us."
     Case raised his eyebrows.
     "Freeside," the Finn said. "The  spindle.  Turns out they own damn near
the whole thing.  The  interesting  stuff was  the  picture we got when  the
cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family
organization. Corporate structure.  Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but
there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market
in  over  a  hundred years. On any market, as  far as I  know.  You're
looking at  a very quiet,  very eccentric first-generation  high–orbit
family,  run like a  corporation.  Big  money, very  shy of  media.  Lot  of
cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And
it's  hard  to  keep track  of  which generation,  or  combination  of
generations, is running the show at a given time."
     "How's that?" Molly asked.
     "Got their own cryogenic  setup. Even  under  orbital law, you're
legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though
nobody's  seen  the founding father  in about  thirty  years. Founding
momma, she died in some lab accident. . ."
     "So what happened with your fence?"
     "Nothing."  The Finn frowned.  "Dropped  it.  We  had a  look  at  this
fantastic tangle  of  powers of attorney the  T-A's have, and that was
it.  Jimmy  must've  gotten  into  Straylight,  lifted  the head,  and
Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it.
Maybe  he was smart." He looked at Molly. "The Villa Straylight.  Tip of the
spindle. Strictly private."
     "You figure they own that ninja, Finn?" Molly asked.
     "Smith thought so."
     "Expensive,"  she said. "Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja,
Finn?"
     "Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed."
     "Okay," Case said, "we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named
Wintermute. Where's that get us?"
     "Nowhere yet,"  Molly  said, "but  you got a little side gig  now." She
drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened
it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.
     "Who's this?"
     "Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the  Moderns. Separate
deal. Where is it?"
     "London," Case said.
     "Crack it." She laughed. "Earn your keep for a change."

     Case waited for  a trans-BAMA local on the crowded  platform. Molly had
gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green
bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since.
     It was disturbing  to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired
ROM  cassette  replicating a  dead man's  skills, obsessions, kneejerk
responses.  . . The local  came  booming in along the black induction strip,
fine grit  sifting from cracks in the tunnel's  ceiling. Case shuffled
into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of
predatory looking  Christian Scientists were edging toward  a trio of  young
office  techs  who wore  idealized holographic  vaginas on their wrists, wet
pink glittering under the harsh  lighting.  The techs  licked  their perfect
lips  nervously  and  eyed  the  Christian  Scientists  from beneath lowered
metallic lids. The  girls  looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying
gracefully  and unconsciously  with the  movement  of  the train, their high
heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the  car's floor.
Before they  could  stampede,  take flight from the  missionaries, the train
reached Case's station.
     He stepped out and caught sight of a white  holographic cigar suspended
against the wall  of the station,  FREESIDE  pulsing beneath it in contorted
capitals  that mimicked printed Japanese. He  walked  through the crowd  and
stood beneath  it, studying  the thing. WHY  WAIT? pulsed the sign. A  blunt
white spindle, flanged  and studded with grids and radiators,  docks, domes.
He'd seen the ad, or others like it,  thousands of times. It had never
appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach  the Freeside banks as easily
as he could reach Atlanta. Travel  was a meat thing.  But now he noticed the
little sigil, the size of  a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of
the ad's fabric of light: T-A.
     He  walked  back  to  the loft,  lost  in  memories  of  the  Flatline.
He'd  spent most of his  nineteenth summer  in  the  Gentleman  Loser,
nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a
deck, then,  but he knew what he wanted. There were  at  least  twenty other
hopefuls ghosting the  Loser, that  summer, each one bent  on working joeboy
for some cowboy. No other way to learn.
     They'd  all  heard   of  Pauley,  the  redneck  jockey  from  the
'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath  behind black ice. The
grapevine – slender, street level,  and the only one going – had
little to  say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible.
"It  was big," another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, "but who
knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian  payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead,
flat down braindeath." Case stared across the crowded bar  at a thickset man
in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.
     "Boy," the Flatline would tell him, months  later in  Miami, "I'm
like them  huge fuckin' lizards, you  know?  Had  themself two  goddam
brains, one in the head an'  one by the tailbone,  kept the  hind legs
movin'. Hit  that black stuff and ol'  tailbrain jus' kept
right on keepin' on."
     The  cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group
anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace. . .
     And his heart had  done for him in the  end. His surplus Russian heart,
implanted in  a  POW camp during the war.  He'd refused to replace the
thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing.
Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had  given him and made his way up the
stairs.
     Molly  was  snoring on the temperfoam. A  transparent cast ran from her
knee to a  few  millimeters  below  her crotch, the  skin beneath the  rigid
micropore  mottled  with bruises, the black  shading into ugly yellow. Eight
derms, each  a  different  size and color, ran in a  neat line down her left
wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected
to input trodes under the cast.
     He turned  on the  tensor  beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light
fell  directly  on  the  Flatline's  construct.  He slotted  some ice,
connected the construct, and jacked in.
     It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
     He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight.
     "Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
     "It's Case, man. Remember?"
     "Miami, joeboy, quick study."
     "What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?"
     "Nothin'."
     "Hang on."  He  disconnected the construct.  The  presence was gone. He
reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?"
     "You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
     "Ca – your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?"
     "Good question."
     "Remember being here, a second ago?"
     "No."
     "Know how a ROM personality matrix works?"
     "Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."
     "So I jack  it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential,
real time memory?"
     "Guess so," said the construct.
     "Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"
     "If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"
     "Case."
     "Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study."
     "Right. And for starts, Dix,  you and me, we're gonna sleaze over
to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?"
     "You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?"



        6
     "You  want  you  a  paradise,"  the  Flatline advised,  when  Case  had
explained  his  situation. "Check  Copenhagen,  fringes  of  the  university
section." The voice recited coordinates as he punched.
     They found their paradise, a  "pirate's paradise," on the jumbled
border  of  a low-security academic grid. At  first glance  it resembled the
kind of  graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions  of grid
lines,  faint  glyphs of colored light  that shimmered  against the confused
outlines of a dozen arts faculties.
     "There," said the Flatline, "the blue one. Make it out? That's an
entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get  in  here soon and
read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted.  Kids'll
steal the new ones tomorrow."
     Case tapped his way  into Bell Europa and switched  to a standard phone
code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base
that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
     "Here," said the voice, "I'll do it for you."  The Flatline began
to  chant a series of  digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch
the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.
     "Big deal," said the Flatline. "No ice at all."
     "Scan  this  shit,"  Case  told  the  Hosaka. "Sift  for  owner's
personal history."
     The  neuroelectronic scrawls  of the paradise  vanished, replaced by  a
simple  lozenge of white  light. "Contents are primarily video recordings of
postwar military  trials," said the  distant voice of  the  Hosaka. "Central
figure is Colonel Willis Corto."
     "Show it already," Case said.
     A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.

     Two  hours  later, Case fell  beside  Molly on the  slab  and  let  the
temperfoam mold itself against him.
     "You find anything?" she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.
     "Tell you  later," he  said, "I'm wrecked."  He was hungover  and
confused. He lay there, eyes closed,  and tried to sort the various parts of
a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data
and  assembled a precis, but it was full  of gaps. Some of the material  had
been print records, reeling smoothly down the  screen, too quickly, and Case
had had to ask the computer to read them  for him. Other segments were audio
recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
     Willis  Corto,  Colonel,  had  plummeted  through a blind spot  in  the
Russian defenses over Kirensk.  The shuttles had created the hole with pulse
bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their
wings snapping  taut in moonlight,  reflected  in jags  of  silver along the
rivers Angara and  Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see  for fifteen
months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch
capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
     "They sure as hell  did shaft you, boss," Case said, and Molly  stirred
beside him.
     The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight
of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX,
the first  true virus in the history of cybernetics.  Corto and his team had
been training for the run for three years. They  were through the ice, ready
to inject Mole IX, when the  emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the
jockeys  into electronic darkness; the  Nightwings  suffered  systems crash,
flight circuitry wiped clean.
     Then the lasers opened  up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile,
radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and  his dead console  man  fell
out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling. . .
     There  were  gaps  in the  story,  here, where  Case scanned  documents
concerning the  flight of  a  commandeered  Russian gunship that  managed to
reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in  a  spruce grove, by an antique
twenty-millimeter cannon  manned  by  a  cadre of reservists on  dawn alert.
Screaming  Fist  had  ended for  Corto on  the  outskirts of Helsinki,  with
Finnish  paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly  of the  helicopter.
The war ended nine days later, and Corto  was shipped to a military facility
in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It  took eleven months
for  the Congressional aide to find him there.  He listened to the  sound of
tubes  draining.  In Washington  and  McLean, the  show trials were  already
underway.  The  Pentagon  and  the  CIA  were  being  Balkanized,  partially
dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist.
Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.
     He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said,
but  that  could  be  arranged.  New  plumbing,  the  man  added,  squeezing
Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
     Corto heard the soft,  relentless dripping.  He  said he  preferred  to
testify as he was.
     No, the  aide explained, the trials were  being  televised. The  trials
needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
     Repaired,   refurnished,  and   extensively  rehearsed,   Corto's
subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and  largely the invention
of a Congressional cabal with certain vested  interests in saving particular
portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the
testimony he gave  was instrumental in saving the careers of  three officers
directly responsible for the  suppression of reports on the building  of the
emp installations at Kirensk.
     His  role in the  trials over, he was unwanted in  Washington. In an  M
Street  restaurant, over asparagus  crepes, the aide explained the  terminal
dangers  involved  in  talking  to  the  wrong  people.  Corto  crushed  the
man's  larynx  with  the  rigid   fingers  of  his  right  hand.   The
Congressional  aide strangled, his  face  in  an asparagus  crepe, and Corto
stepped out into cool Washington September.
     The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records,
and news files.  Case watched Corto work corporate defectors  in Lisbon  and
Marrakesh, where he seemed  to grow obsessed with  the idea of betrayal,  to
loathe  the  scientists  and technicians he  bought out  for  his employers.
Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a  Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set
fire to his room.
     Next he  surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as
enforcer for  a California gambling cartel, then as  a paid  killer  in  the
ruins  of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy,
the gaps longer.
     One  day,  he  said,  in  a  taped  segment  that   suggested  chemical
interrogation, everything had gone gray.
     Translated  French  medical  records  explained   that  a  man  without
identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as
schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to  a government institution
on the outskirts of  Toulon. He became a subject  in an experimental program
that  sought to  reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic
models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and
encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only
success in the entire experiment.
     The record ended there.
     Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her.

     The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. "Yeah?"
     "We're going to Istanbul," Armitage said. "Tonight."
     "What does the bastard want?" Molly asked.
     "Says we're going to Istanbul tonight."
     "That's just wonderful."
     Armitage was reading off  flight numbers and departure times. Molly sat
up and turned on the light.
     "What about my gear?" Case asked. "My deck."
     "Finn will handle it," said Armitage, and hung up.
     Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even
with  the cast  on,  it was like  watching a  dance.  No wasted  motion. His
clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag.
     "You hurting?" he asked.
     "I could do with another night at Chin's."
     "Your dentist?"
     "You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full clinic.
Does repairs for samurai." She was zipping her bag.
     "You ever been to 'stambul?"
     "Couple days, once."
     "Never changes," she said. "Bad old town."

     "It  was  like this when we headed for Chiba," Molly said,  staring out
the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon
warning aircraft away from a  fusion plant. "We were in L.A. He came in  and
said  Pack, we were  booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in
the Lisboa and he crossed  over into Zhongshan. Next day I was playing ghost
with you  in Night City." She took a silk scarf from the sleeve of her black
jacket  and polished  the insets.  The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke
confused memories of childhood  for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a
canted slab of freeway concrete.
     The train began  to decelerate ten kilometers  from  the  airport. Case
watched the sun rise on the landscape  of childhood, on broken  slag and the
rusting shells of refineries.



        7
     It  was raining  in Beyoglu,  and the  rented  Mercedes slid  past  the
grilled and  unlit  windows  of cautious  Greek and Armenian  jewelers.  The
street was  almost empty, only a  few dark-coated  figures  on the sidewalks
turning to stare after the car.
     "This  was  formerly  the   prosperous  European  section  of   Ottoman
Istanbul," purred the Mercedes.
     "So it's gone downhill," Case said.
     "The  Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi,"  Molly  said. She  settled
back against the car's gray ultrasuede.
     "How come Armitage flies alone?" Case asked. He had a headache.
     "'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine."
     He  wanted  to  tell  her  the  Corto story,  but  decided  against it.
He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.
     The road  in  from the  airport had been dead  straight,  like  a  neat
incision, laying  the  city  open.  He'd  watched  the crazy walls  of
patchwork  wooden  tenements  slide  by,  condos, arcologies,  grim  housing
projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron.
     The Finn, in  a new  Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting sourly
in the Hilton  lobby, marooned on a velour armchair  in a sea  of pale  blue
carpeting.
     "Christ," Molly said. "Rat in a business suit."
     They crossed the lobby.
     "How much you get paid to come  over here,  Finn?" She  lowered her bag
beside  the armchair. "Bet  not as much as  you get for  wearing  that suit,
huh?"
     The Finn' s upper lips drew  back. "Not  enough, sweetmeat.  " He
handed her a magnetic key with a round  yellow tag. "You're registered
already. Honcho's upstairs." He looked around. "This town sucks."
     "You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just pretend
it's Brooklyn or something." She twirled the key around a finger. "You
here as valet or what?"
     "I gotta check out some guy's implants," the Finn said.
     "How about my deck?" Case asked.
     The Finn winced. "Observe the protocol. Ask the boss."
     Molly's fingers moved in  the shadow of  her jacket, a flicker of
jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
     "Yeah,"  she said,  "I know who that is." She  jerked her  head in  the
direction  of the elevators. "Come on, cowboy." Case followed her with  both
bags.

     Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd first seen
Armitage.  He went  to the window, in  the morning,  almost expecting to see
Tokyo Bay. There  was another hotel across the street. It was still raining.
A few letter-writers had taken refuge  in doorways, their  old voiceprinters
wrapped in  sheets of  clear plastic,  evidence that the  written word still
enjoyed a certain prestige  here.  It was a sluggish  country. He  watched a
dull black Citroen  sedan,  a  primitive  hydrogen-cell  conversion,  as  it
disgorged five sullen-looking  Turkish officers in  rumpled  green uniforms.
They entered the hotel across the street.
     He  glanced back  at  the bed, at Molly,  and her paleness struck  him.
She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the
transdermal  inducer.  Her glasses reflected part of the  room's light
fixture.
     He  had the phone in his  hand before  it had a  chance to  ring twice.
"Glad you're up," Armitage said.
     "I'm  just.  Lady's still  under.  Listen,  boss,  I  think
it's maybe time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know
a little more about what I'm doing."
     Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
     "You know as much as you need to. Maybe more."
     "You think so?"
     "Get dressed,  Case. Get  her  up. You'll have a caller in  about
fifteen minutes.  His  name  is  Terzibashjian."  The phone  bleated softly.
Armitage was gone.
     "Wake up, baby," Case said. "Biz."
     "I've been awake an hour already." The mirrors turned.
     "We got a Jersey Bastion coming up."
     "You got an ear for  language,  Case. Bet  you're part  Armenian.
That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me up."
     Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in  a gray suit and gold-framed,
mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a mat of
dark hair so dense that Case at first  mistook it for  some kind of t-shirt.
He  arrived with a black Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups
of thick black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
     "We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy." He seemed to
stare  pointedly  at Molly, but at last he  removed the silver glasses.  His
eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut
hair. He  smiled. "It is  better, this way,  yes?  Else  we  make the  tunel
infinity, mirror into mirror. . . You  particularly," he  said to her, "must
take  care.  In  Turkey  there  is  disapproval  of  women  who  sport  such
modifications."
     Molly bit one of the pastries in half. "It's my show, Jack,"  she
said, her mouth full.  She chewed, swallowed, and licked  her lips.  "I know
about  you.  Stool for the military, right?" Her hand slid lazily  into  the
front of her jacket and came out with the fletcher. Case hadn't  known
she had it.
     "Very easy, please," Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen
centimeters from his lips.
     She extended  the gun.  "Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or
maybe you  get  a  cancer.  One dart, shitface. You won't feel  it for
months."
     "Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight. . ."
     "I call  it a bad morning. Now tell us  about your man and get your ass
out of here." She put the gun away.
     "He is living in Fener, at Kuchuk Gulhane Djaddesi 14. 1 have his tunel
route, nightly to the bazaar. He  performs most  recently at the  Yenishehir
Palas Oteli, a modern place in the style turistik, but  it has been arranged
that the police have shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir
management  has  grown nervous."  He  smiled.  He smelled  of some  metallic
aftershave.
     "I want to know about the implants," she said,  massaging her thigh, "I
want to know exactly what he can do."
     Terzibashjian   nodded.  "Worst  is   how  you   say  in  Ingiliz,  the
subliminals." He made the word four careful syllables.

     "On our left," said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy
streets, "is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar."
     Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in
the wrong direction. The right  side  of the street was lined with miniature
scrapyards. Case  saw  a gutted locomotive atop rust-stained, broken lengths
of fluted marble. Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.
     "Homesick?" Case asked.
     "Place  sucks,"  the  Finn  said.  His  black silk tie  was starting to
resemble  a worn  carbon ribbon. There were medallions  of kebab  gravy  and
fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
     "Hey,  Jersey,"  Case  said  to the  Armenian,  who  sat  behind  them,
"where'd this guy get his stuff installed?"
     "In Chiba City. He has no left lung.  The other  is boosted, is how you
say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented." The
Mercedes swerved, avoiding  a balloon-tired dray stacked with hides. "I have
followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day.
Find the cyclist in  a  hospital, the story  is  always the same. A scorpion
poised beside a brake lever. . ."
     " ‘What you see is what you get,' yeah," the  Finn said. "I
seen  the schematics  on  the  guy's  silicon.  Very  flash.  What  he
imagines, you see. I  figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry  a retina
over easy."
     "You have told this to your woman friend?" Terzibashjian leaned forward
between the ultrasuede buckets. "In Turkey, women are still women. This one.
. ."
     The Finn  snorted. "She'd have you wearing  your balls  for a bow
tie if you looked at her cross-eyed."
     "I do not understand this idiom."
     "That's okay," Case said. "Means shut up."
     The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of aftershave.  He began
to whisper to a  Sanyo  transceiver in  a  strange  salad of  Greek, French,
Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in  French.
The  Mercedes swung smoothly  around a  corner. "The spice bazaar, sometimes
called  the Egyptian bazaar,"  the car  said, "was erected on the site of an
earlier  bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in  1660. This is the  city's
central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs. . ."
     "Drugs," Case said, watching the  car's wipers cross  and recross
the bulletproof  Lexan.  "What's that  you  said before, Jersey, about
this Riviera being wired?"
     "A mixture of  cocaine and meperidine, yes."  The Armenian went back to
the conversation he was  having with the Sanyo. "Demerol,  they used to call
that," said the Finn.  "He's a speedball artist. Funny class of people
you're mixing with, Case."
     "Never  mind,"  Case  said,  turning  up  the  collar  of  his  jacket,
"we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something."

     Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened noticeably, as though
he  were  comforted by  the  crowd density and the  sense of enclosure. They
walked with  the  Armenian along  a  broad concourse,  beneath  soot-stained
sheets  of  plastic and green-painted ironwork out of  the age of  steam.  A
thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered.
     "Hey, Christ," the Finn said, taking Case's arm, "looka that." He
pointed. "It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?"
     Case glanced  at the  embalmed  animal  and  shook  his  head.  It  was
displayed on a  sort of pedestal,  near  the entrance to  a place  that sold
birds and monkeys.  The thing's legs had been  worn black and hairless
by decades of passing hands. "Saw one in Maryland once," the Finn said, "and
that was a  good three years after the pandemic.  There's Arabs  still
trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak."
     The  animal's  brown  glass eyes  seemed  to follow them as  they
passed. Terzibashjian led them into a  cafe  near  the core of the market, a
low-ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation
for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled  white coats dodged between the crowded
tables, balancing steel trays with bottles  of  Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses
of tea.
     Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The Armenian
was muttering to  his Sanyo.  "Come," he  said, "he is moving. Each night he
rides  the tunel to the bazaar, to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman
is close. Come."

     The alley was  an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark
stone. The pavement was uneven  and smelled  of  a century's  dripping
gasoline,  absorbed  by  ancient  limestone.  "Can't  see   shit,"  he
whispered to  the Finn.  "That's okay  for  sweetmeat," the Finn said.
"Quiet," said Terzibashjian, too loudly.
     Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge of
yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and  the
door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
     "Now,"  Terzibashjian  said, and  a  brilliant  beam  of  white  light,
directed from the rooftop  of the building opposite the market,  pinned  the
slender  figure beside the ancient wooden door in  a  perfect circle. Bright
eyes darted left, right, and the man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot
him; he lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands
white and pathetic.
     The floodlight never wavered.
     The  back of  the  fallen man's jacket  heaved  and  burst, blood
splashing the wall and  doorway. A pair  of  impossibly  long, rope-tendoned
arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The  thing  seemed  to pull itself up
out of the  pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin  that had been Riviera.
It was  two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to  be headless. Then
it  swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck.
It  was eyeless, the skin gleaming  a wet intestinal pink. The mouth,  if it
was  a  mouth,  was circular,  conical, shallow, and  lined  with a seething
growth of  hairs or bristles,  glittering like black chrome. It  kicked  the
rags of clothing and flesh aside and  took a step, the mouth seeming to scan
for them as it moved.
     Terzibashjian  said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing,
his arms  spread like a  man attempting  to dive  through  a window. He went
through  it.  Into the  muzzle-flash  of a pistol  from the dark  beyond the
circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past Case's  head; the Finn
jerked him down into a crouch.
     The  light from  the  rooftop vanished,  leaving  him  with  mismatched
afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang.
     Then  the  light   returned,  bobbing   now,  searching  the   shadows.
Terzibashjian  was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in  the
glare. He  held  his left wrist and watched  blood drip from a  wound in his
left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
     Molly  stepped  out of the shadows, all  in black, with her fletcher in
her hand.
     "Use the radio,"  the  Armenian said, through gritted  teeth. "Call  in
Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place."
     "Little prick nearly made it," the Finn said, his knees cracking loudly
as he stood up,  brushing ineffectually  at the legs of his  trousers.  "You
were watching the  horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out
of  sight.  Real cute. Well, help 'em get  his ass  outa here. I gotta
scan  all that gear  before  he wakes up, make sure Armitage  is getting his
money's worth."
     Molly bent and  picked something  up.  A  pistol. "A Nambu,"  she said.
"Nice gun."
     Terzibashjian made  a whining sound.  Case  saw that most of his middle
finger was missing.

     With the city  drenched in predawn blue, she told the  Mercedes to take
them to  Topkapi . The Finn and  an  enormous  Turk  named Mahmut  had taken
Riviera,  still unconscious, from the  alley. Minutes later, a dusty Citroen
had arrived for the Armenian who seemed on the verge of fainting.
     "You're an asshole," Molly told the man, opening the car door for
him. "You shoulda hung back.  I had him in  my sights as soon  as he stepped
out." Terzibashjian glared at her. "So we're through with you anyway."
She shoved him in  and slammed the door.  "Run into you again and I'll
kill you," she said to the  white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen
ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
     Now the  Mercedes  whispered through Istanbul as  the  city  woke. They
passed  the Beyoglu  tunel terminal and  sped past  mazes  of  deserted back
streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris.
     "What is this thing?" he asked Molly,  as the Mercedes parked itself on
the fringes of  the gardens that surround  the Seraglio.  He stared dully at
the baroque conglomeration of styles that was Topkapi.
     "It was sort of  a private  whorehouse for the King," she said, getting
out stretching. "Kept a lotta women there. Now  it's  a  museum. Kinda
like Finn's shop,  all this  stuff just jumbled in there big diamonds,
swords, the left hand of John the Baptist. . ."
     "Like in a support vat?"
     "Nah. Dead. Got it  inside  this brass hand thing, little hatch  on the
side so the Christians  could  kiss  it for luck. Got  it off the Christians
about  a  million  years  ago,   and  they  never  dust  the  goddam  thing,
'cause it's an infidel relic."
     Black iron  deer rusted  in the gardens  of the  Seraglio.  Case walked
beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept grass made stiff by
an  early  frost. They walked  beside a path of  cold  octagonal flagstones.
Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans.
     "That Terzi, he's grade-A scum," she said. "He's the secret
police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage
was offering." In the wet trees around them, birds began to sing.
     "I did  that job  for  you,"  Case  said, "the one  in  London.  I  got
something, but I  don't know what  it means."  He  told her the  Corto
story.
     "Well,  I  knew there wasn't  anybody  name of  Armitage in  that
Screaming Fist. Looked it up." She  stroked the rusted flank of an iron doe.
"You  figure  the little  computer pulled  him out  of  it?  In  that French
hospital?"
     "I figure Wintermute," Case said.
     She nodded.
     "Thing is," he said,  "do you  think  he knows he was Corto,  before? I
mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time he hit the ward, so
maybe Wintermute just. . ."
     "Yeah. Built him up  from go. Yeah. . ." She turned and they walked on.
"It  figures. You  know, the  guy doesn't  have  any  life  going,  in
private. Not  as  far  as  I can tell. You see a guy like that,  you  figure
there's  something he does when  he's alone. But  not  Armitage.
Sits and stares at  the wall,  man. Then  something clicks and he goes  into
high gear and wheels for Wintermute."
     "So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?"
     "Maybe  he  doesn't know  about it," she  said. "Maybe it's
just in his name, right?"
     "I don't get it," Case said.
     "Just thinking out loud. . . How smart's an Al, Case?"
     "Depends.  Some  aren't much  smarter  than  dogs.  Pets. Cost  a
fortune  anyway.  The real smart ones  are as smart as  the Turing  heat  is
willing to let 'em get."
     "Look, you're a cowboy. How come  you aren't just  flat-out
fascinated with those things?"
     "Well,"  he said,  "for  starts,  they're rare. Most  of them are
military,  the bright  ones, and we can't crack  the ice. That's
where ice all comes from,  you know? And then there's the Turing cops,
and that's bad heat." He looked at  her. "I dunno, it just isn't
part of the trip."
     "Jockeys all the same," she said. "No imagination."
     They came  to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled  the stems of
some  white  aquatic flower. She kicked a  loose pebble in and  watched  the
ripples spread.
     "That's Wintermute," she said. "This deal's real big, looks
to  me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't
see the rock that hit  the center. We know  something's there, but not
why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to Wintermute."
     "I couldn't get near it," he said. "You're dreaming."
     "Try."
     "Can't be done."
     "Ask the Flatline."
     "What do we want out of that Riviera?" he asked,  hoping  to change the
subject.
     She spat  into the pond. "God knows. I'd as soon kill him as look
at  him.  I  saw  his  profile.  He's  a  kind  of  compulsive  Judas.
Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object
of desire. That's what the file says. And they have to love him first.
Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was easy for Terzi  to set him
up for us, because he's been here three years,  shopping politicals to
the secret police. Probably Terzi let him watch,  when the cattle prods came
out.  He's done  eighteen  in three  years.  All  women age twenty  to
twenty-five. It  kept Terzi  in  dissidents." She thrust her hands into  her
jacket pockets. "Because if he  found one he  really wanted, he'd make
sure   she  turned  political.   He's  got  a   personality   like   a
Modern's suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one
in a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about human nature,
I guess." She  stared at the white  flowers and the sluggish fish,  her face
sour. "I think I'm going to have to  buy myself some special insurance
on that Peter." Then she turned and smiled, and it was very cold.
     "What's that mean?"
     "Never  mind. Let's go  back to Beyoglu  and find  something like
breakfast.  I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta  collect his stuff from
that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the bazaar and buy him some drugs.
. ."
     "Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?"
     She  laughed.  "He's  not dying on  the  wire, sweetheart. And it
looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you better
now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny." She  smiled. "So I'll
go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha."

     Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.
     "Time to pack," he said, and  Case tried to  find the man called  Corto
behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask. He  thought of Wage, back  in
Chiba.  Operators   above   a  certain  level  tended   to   submerge  their
personalities, he  knew. But  Wage had had vices, lovers.  Even, it had been
rumored, children. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.
     "Where  to now?"  he asked, walking past the man to stare down into the
street. "What kind of climate?"
     "They don't  have  climate, just weather," Armitage said.  "Here.
Read the brochure." He put something on the coffee table and stood.
     "Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?"
     "Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home." Armitage smiled, a
smile that  meant as much  as the twitch of some insect's antenna. His
gold bracelet  clinked  as  he  reached  out  to  prod Case  in  the  chest.
"Don't get too smart. Those little sacs are starting to show wear, but
you don't know how much."
     Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.
     When  Armitage  was  gone,  he picked up  one of the  brochures. It was
expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.
     FREESIDE – WHY WAIT?

     The four of them were booked on a THY flight  out of Yesilkoy  airport.
Transfer at Paris to the JAL  shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul
Hilton  and  watched  Riviera  browse   bogus  Byzantine  fragments  in  the
glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage,  his trenchcoat  draped over his shoulders
like a cape, stood in the shop's entrance.
     Riviera  was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his  English  accentless  and
fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been  difficult  to guess
his age. She also said he was legally stateless and  traveled under a forged
Dutch  passport. He  was  a  product  of the  rubble rings  that fringe  the
radioactive core of old Bonn.
     Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely
to  Armitage.  Armitage  crossed  the floor  of  the  shop  too quickly, too
obviously, to stand beside  Riviera. Riviera turned  and smiled. He was very
beautiful; Case assumed the features were  the work  of a Chiba  surgeon.  A
subtle job,  nothing  like  Armitage's blandly handsome  blend of  pop
faces.  The  man's forehead was  high and  smooth, gray eyes calm  and
distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have
been  broken and clumsily  reset.  The  suggestion  of brutality  offset the
delicacy of  his jaw  and  the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small,
even,  and very white. Case watched the white hands play over  the imitation
fragments of sculpture.
     Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night
before,  drugged   with  a   toxin-flechette,  abducted,  subjected  to  the
Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
     Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked
up at Riviera again. "I bet you're stoned right now, asshole," he said
to the  Hilton lobby. A graying  Italian  matron in a white  leather  tuxedo
jacket lowered  her  Porsche  glasses to stare  at him.  He  smiled broadly,
stood,  and shouldered  his  bag.  He  needed  cigarettes for the flight. He
wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL  shuttle.  "See ya lady,"
he said to the woman, who promptly slid  the sunglasses back up her nose and
turned away.
     There  were cigarettes in the  gift  shop, but he  didn't  relish
talking  with Armitage or  Riviera. He left the lobby and located  a vending
console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
     He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy
coins one after another, vaguely  amused by the anachronism  of the process.
The phone nearest him rang.
     Automatically, he picked it up.
     "Yeah?"
     Faint  harmonics,  tiny inaudible voices  rattling  across some orbital
link, and then a sound like wind.
     "Hello. Case."
     A fifty-lirasi  coin fell  from his  hand, bounced,  and rolled  out of
sight across Hilton carpeting.
     "Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk."
     It was a chip voice.
     "Don't you want to talk, Case?"
     He hung up. On his way back to the lobby,  his cigarettes forgotten, he
had to  walk the length  of the  ranked phones. Each rang  in turn, but only
once, as he passed.




         * PART THREE * MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE



        8
     Archipelago.
     The  islands.  Torus,  spindle,  cluster. Human DNA spreading out  from
gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
     Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data
in the L-5  archipelago.  One segment clicks  in  as  red  solid, a  massive
rectangle dominating your screen.
     Freeside. Freeside  is  many  things, not all  of them evident  to  the
tourists  who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside  is brothel and banking
nexus, pleasure dome and free  port, border  town, and spa. Freeside is  Las
Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon,  an orbital Geneva  and  home to a
family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and
Ashpool.

     On the THY liner to Paris,  they sat together in First Class,  Molly in
the window  seat, Case beside her, Riviera  and Armitage on the aisle. Once,
as  the plane banked over water, Case  saw the  jewel-glow of a Greek island
town. And  once, reaching  for his drink, he caught  the flicker of  a thing
like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
     Molly leaned across  him  and slapped Riviera's  face, once. "No,
baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you
real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that."
     Case  turned automatically  to  check  Armitage's  reaction.  The
smooth  face  was  calm,  the  blue eyes  alert,  but  there  was no  anger.
"That's right, Peter. Don't."
     Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black  rose,
its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.
     Peter  Riviera  smiled  sweetly, closed  his  eyes,  and fell instantly
asleep.
     Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.

     "You been up, haven't you?"  Molly asked,  as he squirmed his way
back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle.
     "Nah. Never travel  much, just  for  biz." The  steward  was  attaching
readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
     "Hope you don't get SAS," she said.
     "Airsick? No way."
     "It's  not  the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g,
and  your inner  ear'll go  nuts for  a  while.  Kicks in your  flight
reflex, like you'll be getting  signals to run like hell, and a lot of
adrenaline." The steward moved  on to  Riviera, taking  a new  set of trodes
from his red plastic apron.
     Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of  the old Orly
terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful  blast-deflectors of
wet concrete.  The one  nearest  the window bore  an Arabic  slogan  in  red
spraybomb.
     He closed  his  eyes  and  told  himself  the shuttle was  only  a  big
airplane, one  that flew very  high. It  smelled like an airplane, like  new
clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He  listened to the piped koto music
and waited.
     Twenty minutes, then  gravity came down  on him  like a great soft hand
with bones of ancient stone.

        x x x
     Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's description, but
it  passed quickly enough and he  was able to sleep. The steward woke him as
they were preparing to dock at JAL's terminal cluster.
     "We transfer to  Freeside now?" he asked,  eyeing a  shred  of Yeheyuan
tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to  dance ten
centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights.
     "No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the  plans, you know?
We're getting this taxi  out to Zion,  Zion cluster." She touched  the
release plate on her  harness and began to free herself from  the embrace of
the foam. "Funny choice of venue, you ask me."
     "How's that?"
     "Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now."
     "What's that mean?"
     "You'll   see.  It's   an  okay   place   by   me.  Anyway,
they'll let you smoke your cigarettes there."

     Zion had been  founded by five workers who'd refused  to  return,
who'd  turned  their   backs   on  the   well  and  started  building.
They'd suffered calcium loss  and  heart  shrinkage  before rotational
gravity was  established in  the colony's central torus. Seen from the
bubble  of  the  taxi,  Zion's  makeshift  hull  reminded  Case of the
patchwork  tenements   of   Istanbul,   the   irregular,  discolored  plates
laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
     Molly  and  a  skinny  Zionite called  Aerol  helped  Case  negotiate a
freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of
Armitage and  Riviera in  the  wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. "Here,"
Molly  said, shoving his  legs into a  narrow  hatchway overhead. "Grab  the
rungs. Make like you're  climbing backward, right? You're  going
toward the hull, that's like you're climbing  down into gravity.
Got it?"
     Case's stomach churned.
     "You be fine, mon," Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.
     Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the
weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.
     "Up," Molly said, "you gonna kiss it next?" Case lay flat on  the deck,
on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled
over and saw a fat  bundle of elastic cable. "Gotta play house,"  she  said.
"You help me string this up." He looked around  the wide,  featureless space
and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at random.
     When they'd strung the  cables, according to some complex  scheme
of Molly's, they hung them  with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As
they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly
through the cluster. It was called dub,  a sensuous mosaic cooked  from vast
libraries of digitalized pop; it  was worship,  Molly  said, and  a sense of
community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing  was light but
still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
     "Good,"  Armitage  said,  gliding  loose-kneed  through the  hatch  and
nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial
gravity.
     "Where were you when it needed doing?" Case asked Riviera.
     The man  opened his mouth to speak.  A small  trout swam out,  trailing
impossible  bubbles.  It  glided past  Case's cheek.  "In  the  head,"
Riviera said, and smiled.
     Case laughed. "Good," Riviera said,  "you can laugh. I would have tried
to  help  you, but I'm no good with my hands." He  held up  his palms,
which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
     "Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?"
     Molly  stepped  between them. "Yo,"  Aerol said,  from the hatch,  "you
wan' come wI' me, cowboy mon."
     "It's your deck," Armitage said,  "and the  other  gear. Help him
get it in from the cargo bay."
     "You  ver'  pale, mon," Aerol  said,  as  they  were  guiding the
foam-bundled  Hosaka  terminal  along  the  central  corridor.   "Maybe  you
wan' eat somethin'."
     Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.

        x x x
     Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion.  Molly  and Case  would
practice  in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in
it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear
what Riviera was supposed  to  be  doing, but Case  didn't  feel  like
asking.  A  few hours  after their  arrival, Armitage had  sent him into the
yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled like
a  cat  on  a  thin pad  of temperfoam,  naked, apparently asleep, his  head
orbited by a revolving halo of small  white geometric forms, cubes, spheres,
and pyramids. "Hey, Riviera." The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone
back and told Armitage. "He's stoned," Molly said, looking up from the
disassembled parts of her fletcher. "Leave him be."
     Armitage  seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's ability
to  operate in  the matrix. "Don't sweat  it," Case argued, "I jack in
and I'm not here. It's all the same."
     "Your adrenaline levels are higher," Armitage said. "You've still
got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're going to
learn to work with it."
     "So I do the run from here?"
     "No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor. . ."

     Cyberspace,  as  the deck presented it, had no  particular relationship
with  the  deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened
his  eyes  to the  familiar configuration of  the  Eastern Seaboard  Fission
Authority's Aztec pyramid of data.
     "How you doing, Dixie?"
     "I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that
one."
     "How's it feel?"
     "It doesn't."
     "Bother you?"
     "What bothers me is, nothin' does."
     "How's that?"
     "Had  me  this  buddy  in the  Russian camp,  Siberia,  his  thumb  was
frostbit.  Medics  came by  and  they  cut  it off.  Month  later he's
tossin'  all  night.  Elroy.  I  said, what's  eatin' you?
Goddam thumb's  itchin', he says. So I  told  him,  scratch  it.
McCoy, he  says,  it's  the other goddam  thumb."  When the  construct
laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold
down Case's spine. "Do me a favor, boy."
     "What's that, Dix?"
     "This  scam  of  yours,  when it's  over, you  erase  this goddam
thing."

     Case didn't understand the Zionites.
     Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who
had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja.
"Ver' small  baby, mon,  no long' you finga." He rubbed his palm
across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
     "It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They
don't make  much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells
you  it happened, well,  it happened to him.  It's not like  bullshit,
more like poetry. Get it?"
     Case nodded  dubiously. The Zionites always touched  you when they were
talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that.
     "Hey, Aerol," Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice
run in the freefall corridor. "Come here,  man. Wanna show  you this thing."
He held out the trodes.
     Aerol executed  a slow-motion tumble. His bare  feet  struck  the steel
wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent
waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
     "Try it," Case said.
     He took the band, put it on,  and Case adjusted the  trodes.  He closed
his  eyes.  Case hit  the  power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back
out. "What did you see, man?"
     "Babylon," Aerol said, sadly, handing him  the trodes  and kicking  off
down the corridor.

     Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm extended straight
out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon,
was  coiled  tightly  a few millimeters behind his elbow. Case  watched  the
snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract,
tightening around Riviera's arm.
     "Come then," the man  said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised
in the center of his upturned palm. "Come." The scorpion swayed its brownish
claws and scurried up his arm, its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of
veins. When  it  reached the  inner elbow, it halted and seemed  to vibrate.
Riviera  made a soft hissing  sound.  The sting came  up, quivered, and sank
into the skin above a  bulging vein.  The coral snake  relaxed, and  Riviera
sighed slowly as the injection hit him.
     Then the snake and the scorpion were gone,  and he held a milky plastic
syringe  in  his left hand. " ‘If God made anything better, he kept it
for himself.' You know the expression, Case?"
     "Yeah," Case  said. "I  heard that about lots of different  things. You
always make it into a little show?"
     Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical tubing from
his arm. "Yes. It's more fun." He smiled, his eyes distant now, cheeks
flushed. "I've a membrane set in,  just over the vein, so I never have
to worry about the condition of the needle."
     "Doesn't hurt?"
     The bright eyes met his. "Of course  it does.  That's part of it,
isn't it?"
     "I'd just use derms," Case said.
     "Pedestrian," Riviera sneered,  and laughed, putting on a short-sleeved
white cotton shirt.
     "Must be nice," Case said, getting up.
     "Get high yourself, Case?"
     "I hadda give it up."

     "Freeside," Armitage  said, touching  the  panel  on  the  little Braun
hologram projector. The image shivered into focus,  nearly three meters from
tip to tip. "Casinos  here." He reached into the skeletal representation and
pointed. "Hotels, strata-title  property,  big shops along  here."  His hand
moved. "Blue areas  are  lakes." He  walked to one  end  of the  model. "Big
cigar. Narrows at the ends."
     "We can see that fine," Molly said.
     "Mountain effect,  as it  narrows. Ground  seems  to  get higher,  more
rocky, but  it's an  easy  climb. Higher  you  climb,  the  lower  the
gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring here." He pointed.
     "A what?" Case leaned forward.
     "They  race bicycles," Molly said.  "Low grav, high-traction tires, get
up over a hundred kilos an hour."
     "This end doesn't concern us," Armitage said with his usual utter
seriousness.
     "Shit," Molly said, "I'm an avid cyclist."
     Riviera giggled.
     Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. "This end does."
The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and the final segment of the
spindle was empty. "This is the Villa Straylight. Steep climb out of gravity
and  every approach is kinked. There's a single  entrance, here,  dead
center. Zero gravity."
     "What's  inside, boss?" Riviera leaned forward, craning his neck.
Four  tiny  figures  glittered,  near  the  tip of  Armitage's finger.
Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats.
     "Peter,"  Armitage said, "you're going to be  the  first  to find
out. You'll arrange yourself an  invitation. Once you're in, you
see that Molly gets in."
     Case stared at the blankness  that  represented Straylight, remembering
the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head, and the ninja.
     "Details  available?" Riviera asked.  "I  need to plan  a wardrobe, you
see."
     "Learn  the streets," Armitage  said, returning to  the  center of  the
model. "Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules Verne."
     Riviera rolled his eyes.
     While Armitage  recited the names of  Freeside avenues, a dozen  bright
pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even Molly laughed.
     Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty eyes.
     "Sorry," Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.

     Case  woke, late  into  the sleeping period, and became aware of  Molly
crouched beside  him on the  foam. He  could  feel her tension. He lay there
confused. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. She  was up and
through  the sheet  of yellow plastic before he'd had time to  realize
she'd slashed it open.
     "Don't you move, friend."
     Case  rolled over  and  put his head through  the rent  in the plastic.
"Wha. . . ?"
     "Shut up."
     "You  th' one,  mon," said a Zion voice.  "Cateye, call 'em
call  'em  Steppin'  Razor.  I  Maelcum,  sister.  Brothers  wan
converse wI' you an' cowboy."
     "What brothers?"
     "Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know. . ."
     "We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman," Case whispered.
     "Make it special dark,  now," the man said.  "Come. I an' I visit
th' Founders."
     "You know how fast I can cut you, friend?"
     "Don' stan' talkin', sister. Come."

     The  two  surviving  Founders  of  Zion were  old  men,  old  with  the
accelerated  aging that overtakes men who spend  too many years  outside the
embrace of  gravity. Their brown  legs,  brittle  with  calcium loss, looked
fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center
of  a painted  jungle of  rainbow  foliage,  a  lurid  communal  mural  that
completely covered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with
resinous smoke.
     "Steppin' Razor," one  said, as Molly drifted  into  the chamber.
"Like unto a whippin' stick."
     "That  is a story we have, sister,"  said the other, "a religion story.
We are glad you've come with Maelcum."
     "How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked.
     "I came from Los Angeles," the old man said. His dreadlocks were like a
matted  tree with branches the color  of steel wool. "Long  time ago, up the
gravity  well  and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home.  Now  my brother
likens you to Steppin' Razor."
     Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air.
     The  other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. "Soon come, the Final
Days.  .  . Voices.  Voices  cryin' inna wilderness, prophesyin'
ruin unto Babylon. . ."
     "Voices." The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. "We monitor
many frequencies. We  listen always.  Came  a voice, out  of  the  babel  of
tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."
     "Call 'em Winter Mute," said the other, making it two words.
     Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.
     "The Mute talked to us," the first Founder  said. "The Mute said we are
to help you."
     "When was this?" Case asked.
     "Thirty hours prior you dockin' Zion."
     "You ever hear this voice before?"
     "No,"  said  the man from  Los  Angeles, "and we are  uncertain  of its
meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets . . ."
     "Listen,"  Case  said,  "that's  an  AI,   you  know?  Artificial
intelligence. The  music it played you, it  probably  just tapped your banks
and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like to – "
     "Babylon," broke in the other Founder, "mothers many demon, I an'
I know. Multitude horde!"
     "What was that you called me, old man?" Molly asked.
     "Steppin'  Razor. An'  you  bring  a  scourge  on  Babylon,
sister, on its darkest heart. . ."
     "What kinda message the voice have?" Case asked.
     "We were told to help  you," the other said, "that you might serve as a
tool of  Final Days." His  lined face  was troubled. "We  were  told to send
Maelcum with you,  in  his tug Garvey,  to the Babylon port of Freeside. And
this we shall do."
     "Maelcum a  rude  boy,"  said the  other,  "an'  a  righteous tug
pilot."
     "But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker, to watch
over Garvey."
     An awkward silence filled the dome.
     "That's it?" Case asked. "You guys work for Armitage or what?"
     "We rent you  space," said the Los Angeles Founder. "We have  a certain
involvement here with  various  traffics, and no  regard for Babylon's
law.  Our law is the  word of Jah.  But this time,  it may be, we  have been
mistaken."
     "Measure twice, cut once," said the other, softly.
     "Come  on, Case," Molly said.  "Let's  get  back before  the  man
figures out we're gone."
     "Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister."



        9
     The  tug  Marcus  Garvey,  a  steel  drum nine  meters long  and two in
diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum  punched for a navigational burn.
Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite's muscular back
through  a  haze of scopolamine. He'd taken  the  drug  to blunt  SAS,
nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had
no effect on his doctored system.
     "How long's it gonna take us to make  Freeside?" Molly asked from
her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.
     "Don' be long now, m'seh dat."
     "You guys ever think in hours?"
     "Sister, time,  it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,"  and he shook his
locks,  "at control,  mon,  an' I  an' I come a Freeside  when I
an' I come. . ."
     "Case," she said, "have you maybe done anything toward getting in touch
with our pal from Berne?  Like all  that time you spent  in Zion, plugged in
with your lips moving?"
     "Pal,"  Case said, "sure.  No. I haven't. But I got a funny story
along those lines, left over from Istanbul." He told h