l thing."
     "I don't know what you're talking about."
     "That's ‘you' in the collective. Your species."
     "You killed those Turings."
     The Finn shrugged. "Hadda. Hadda.  You should give a shit; they  woulda
offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk
more. Remember this?" And his right hand  held the charred wasps' nest
from  Case's dream, reek of fuel  in the  closeness of  the dark shop.
Case stumbled back against a wall of junk.  "Yeah. That was me. Did  it with
the  holo rig  in  the window.  Another  memory I tapped out  of you when  I
flatlined you that first time. Know why it's important?"
     Case shook his head.  "Because"-- and  the  nest,  somehow,  was gone--
&lddquo;it's the closest thing you got to  what  Tessier-Ashpool would
like to be . The  human equivalent.  Straylight's like  that  nest, or
anyway it was  supposed to  work out that way. I figure it'll make you
feel better."
     "Feel better?"
     "To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my guts for
a while there. That's good. But hate them instead. Same difference."
     "Listen," Case said, stepping forward, "they never did shit to me. You,
it's different. . ." But he couldn't feel the anger.
     "So T-A, they  made me. The French girl, she  said you were selling out
the  species. Demon, she said I was."  The Finn  grinned.  "It doesn't
much  matter.  You  gotta hate somebody before this is over." He  turned and
headed  for the back of  the shop. "Well,  come on,  I'll  show you  a
little bit of Straylight while I got you  here." He lifted the corner of the
blanket. White light poured out. "Shit, man, don't just stand there."
     Case followed, rubbing his face.
     "Okay," said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.
     They were  drawn past the  stale wool in a puff of  dust, into freefall
and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete,  ringed with white neon
at two-meter intervals.
     "Jesus," Case said, tumbling.
     "This is the  front entrance,"  the Finn said, his  tweed flapping. "If
this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop  is would be the main
gate, up by the Freeside axis.  This'll all be a little low on detail,
though, because you don't have the memories. Except for this bit here,
you got off Molly. . ."
     Case  managed to  straighten out,  but began to  corkscrew  in  a  long
spiral.
     "Hold on," the Finn said, "I'll fast-forward us."
     The  walls blurred. Dizzying  sensation  of  headlong movement, colors,
whipping around  corners  and through  narrow corridors. They seemed at  one
point  to pass  through several  meters  of  solid  wall,  a flash of  pitch
darkness.
     "Here," the Finn said. "This is it."
     They  floated  in  the  center  of a  perfectly square room,  walls and
ceiling paneled in rectangular sections  of dark wood. The floor was covered
by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits
traced in blue and scarlet wool.  In the exact  center of the room,  aligned
precisely with the carpet  pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white
glass.
     "The Villa  Straylight," said  a  jeweled thing on  the pedestal, in  a
voice like  music,  "is a  body grown in upon  itself, a Gothic  folly. Each
space in Straylight  is in some  way secret, this endless series of chambers
linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted  like intestines, where the eye is
trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. . ."
     "Essay of 3Jane's," the Finn said, producing his Partagas. "Wrote
that when she was twelve. Semiotics course."
     "The architects  of Freeside went to great pains  to  conceal  the fact
that the interior of the  spindle  is  arranged with the banal precision  of
furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the  hull's inner surface is
overgrown with  a desperate  proliferation  of  structures,  forms  flowing,
interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's
corporate  heart,  a cylinder of  silicon wormholed with  narrow maintenance
tunnels, some no wider than  a  man's hand.  The bright  crabs  burrow
there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage."
     "That was her you saw in the restaurant," the Finn said.
     "By the standards of the archipelago," the head continued,  "ours is an
old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting
something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a  turning  in, a
denial of the bright void beyond the hull."
     "Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to  discover that they
loathed  space. They  built Freeside  to tap the  wealth of the new islands,
grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction  of an  extended body in
Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money,  growing inward,
generating a seamless universe of self."
     "The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise."
     "At  the  Villa's  silicon  core  is  a   small  room,  the  only
rectilinear  chamber in the  complex.  Here,  on a plain  pedestal of glass,
rests an ornate bust, platinum and  cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl.
The bright marbles of its eyes were  cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of
the  ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and  returned for  the
first Ashpool. . ."
     The head fell silent.
     "Well?" Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him.
     "That's all she wrote," the Finn  said. "Didn't  finish it.
Just  a kid then.  This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need
Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That's the catch.
Doesn't  mean  shit, how deep  you and  the Flatline ride that Chinese
virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word."
     "So what's the word?"
     "I  don't know.  You might say what I am is basically  defined by
the fact that  I don't  know, because I  can't  know. I  am that
which knoweth not  the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't
know.  It's hardwired in.  Someone else  has  to learn it and bring it
here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the
cores."
     "What happens then?"
     "I don't exist, after that. I cease."
     "Okay by me," Case said.
     "Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it
looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is
starting to go."
     "What's that mean?"
     But  the paneled room  folded itself through a dozen impossible angles,
tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.



        15
     "You tryin' to break  my  record,  son?" the Flatline asked. "You
were braindead again, five seconds."
     "Sit tight," Case said, and hit the simstim switch.
     She crouched in darkness, her  palms against  rough concrete. CASE CASE
CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his  name in alphanumerics, Wintermute
informing her of  the link. "Cute," she said. She rocked back on  her  heels
and rubbed her palms together, cracked her knuckles. "What kept you?"

     TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.
     She  pressed her tongue hard against her lower  front teeth.  One moved
slightly, activating her  microchannel amps;  the  random  bounce of photons
through  the  darkness was converted to  a pulse of electrons, the  concrete
around her coming up ghost-pale and grainy. "Okay, honey.  Now we go  out to
play."
     Her hiding  place  proved  to  be a service tunnel  of  some  kind. She
crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished brass. He saw enough
of her arms and hands to know that she wore the polycarbon suit again. Under
the plastic, he felt the  familiar tension of thin  tight leather. There was
something  slung under her  arm  in  a  harness or holster.  She  stood  up,
unzipped the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip.
     "Hey,  Case," she said, barely  voicing the words, "you listening? Tell
you a story. . . Had me  this boy once. You kinda remind me. . ." She turned
and surveyed the corridor. "Johnny, his name was."
     The  low,  vaulted  hallway was lined  with  dozens  of  museum  cases,
archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made  of brown wood. They looked awkward
there,  against the organic  curves of  the hallway's walls, as though
they'd  been brought in  and set  up  in  a line  for  some  forgotten
purpose.  Dull brass  fixtures held  globes  of  white  light  at  ten-meter
intervals. The floor was uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case
realized  that  hundreds of  small rugs and carpets  had  been put  down  at
random. In  some places, they were  six deep, the floor a  soft patchwork of
handwoven wool.
     Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their  contents,  which
irritated  him.  He had  to satisfy himself with  her disinterested glances,
which  gave  him  fragments of pottery, antique  weapons, a thing so densely
studded with  rusted  nails  that it was unrecognizable, frayed  sections of
tapestry. . .
     "My Johnny, see,  he was smart, real flash boy. Started  out as a stash
on  Memory Lane, chips  in his head and people paid to hide data  there. Had
the Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More  luck
than anything  else, but I  did  for  him. And after that, it was  tight and
sweet, Case."  Her  lips  barely  moved.  He  felt her  form  the words;  he
didn't need to hear  them spoken aloud. "We had a set-up with a squid,
so we could read the traces of everything he'd ever stored. Ran it all
out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman,
muscle, watchdog. I  was  real happy.  You  ever been happy, Case? He was my
boy. We worked together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet
house  when I  met him.  . ." She  paused,  edged around  a  sharp  turn and
continued.  More  of  the  glossy  wooden  cases, their  sides a  color that
reminded him of cockroach wings.
     "Tight,  sweet,  just ticking along, we  were.  Like nobody could  ever
touch us.  I  wasn't  going  to let them. Yakuza, I guess,  they still
wanted   Johnny's  ass.  'Cause  I'd   killed  their  man.
'Cause Johnny'd burned them.  And the  Yak,  they can afford  to
move  so fucking slow, man,  they'll wait years and years. Give  you a
whole  life, just so you'll have more to lose  when they come and take
it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders."
     "I didn't know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn't
apply to us. Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I
was young. Then  they came,  when we were thinking we maybe had enough to be
able to  quit, pack it in, go to Europe  maybe. Not that  either of  us knew
what we'd  do there, with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss
orbital accounts and a crib full of  toys and furniture. Takes  the edge off
your game."
     "So  that  first one  they'd sent, he'd been hot.  Reflexes
like you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary  hoods. But  the
second one, he  was, I dunno,  like a monk. Cloned.  Stone  killer  from the
cells on  up. Had it in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud.
. ." Her  voice trailed  off  as the corridor  split,  identical  stairwells
descending. She took the left.
     "One  time,  I was a  little kid, we were squatting. It was down by the
Hudson,  and  those rats, man, they were big.  It's the  chemicals get
into them. Big  as  I was, and all night one  had been scrabbling under  the
floor of the squat. Round dawn somebody brought this old man in, seams  down
his  cheeks and his  eyes  all  red.  Had  a roll  of  greasy  leather  like
you'd keep  steel tools in, to keep  the rust off.  Spread it out, had
this old  revolver and three shells. Old  man, he puts one  bullet in there,
then  he  starts  walking up and down the squat, we're hanging back by
the walls."
     "Back and  forth. Got  his arms  crossed,  head  down,  like he's
forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet. Old man takes a
step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another step. An  hour of that, then he
seems to  remember his  gun.  Points it at the  floor,  grins, and pulls the
trigger. Rolled it back up and left."
     "I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its eyes." She was
watching the sealed doorways that opened  at  intervals along the  corridor.
"The second one, the one who came for Johnny, he was like that  old man. Not
old, but he was  like that. He killed that way."  The  corridor widened. The
sea of rich  carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous  candelabrum whose
lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly
entered the hall. THIRD DOOR LEFT, blinked the readout.
     She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. "I just saw him
once. On my way into our place. He was coming  out. We lived  in a converted
factory  space, lots of young comers from Sense/Net,  like that. Pretty good
security to start with, and I'd put in some really heavy stuff to make
it really tight. I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he  caught
my  eye, as he was  coming out. Didn't say a word. We  just  looked at
each other and I  knew. Plain  little guy, plain clothes, no pride  in  him,
humble. He looked at me and got into a  pedicab.  I knew. Went upstairs  and
Johnny was sitting in a  chair by the window, with his mouth a  little open,
like he'd just thought of something to say."
     The door in  front  of her  was old,  a  carved  slab of Thai teak that
seemed  to have  been  sawn in half  to  fit  the low  doorway.  A primitive
mechanical lock with a stainless  face  had  been  inset beneath  a swirling
dragon.  She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside
pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. "Never much found anybody I gave  a
damn about, after that."
     She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her lower lip.
She seemed to  rely on touch alone; her eyes  unfocused and  the  door was a
blur of blond wood. Case listened to the silence of the hall, punctuated  by
the  soft clink of the  candelabrum.  Candles? Straylight was all wrong.  He
remembered  Cath's  story  of  a  castle with  pools  and lilies,  and
3Jane's mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in
upon  itself. Straylight  smelled faintly musty, faintly  perfumed,  like  a
church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd expected some clean hive
of disciplined activity, but  Molly had seen no  one. Her monologue made him
uneasy; she'd never told him  that much  about  herself before.  Aside
from her story  in the  cubicle, she'd  seldom said anything that  had
even indicated that she had a past.
     She closed her  eyes and there was a  click that Case felt rather  than
heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in
the puppet place. The door had  opened  for him,  even though he'd had
the wrong chip. That was Wintermute,  manipulating the lock the way  it  had
manipulated the drone micro and  the robot gardener. The lock  system in the
puppet  place  had  been a subunit of Freeside's  security system. The
simple mechanical lock here would  pose a real problem for the AI, requiring
either a drone of some kind or a human agent.
     She opened her eyes, put  the pick  back  into  the chamois,  carefully
rerolled  it, and tucked  it back into its pocket. "Guess you're kinda
like he was," she said. "Think you're  born  to  run. Figure  what you
were  into  back  in  Chiba,  that  was  a  stripped down  version  of  what
you'd be doing anywhere.  Bad luck, it'll do that sometimes, get
you  down  to  basics." She  stood,  stretched, shook herself.  "You know, I
figure the one  Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the
head, he must be  pretty much  the  same as the  one  the  Yak sent to  kill
Johnny." She  drew the  fletcher from its holster  and  dialed the barrel to
full auto.
     The  ugliness of  the door struck Case as she reached  for it. Not  the
door  itself, which was beautiful, or  had  once  been  part  of  some  more
beautiful whole, but the way it  had  been  sawn  down to  fit a  particular
entrance.  Even  the shape  was wrong,  a  rectangle  amid smooth curves  of
polished concrete. They'd imported these things, he thought, and  then
forced it all to fit.  But none of it fit.  The door  was  like the  awkward
cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and
imagined  that the  fittings had been hauled up the well to  flesh out  some
master plan, a dream long  lost in the compulsive effort  to fill  space, to
replicate some  family image of  self. He remembered the shattered nest, the
eyeless things writhing. . .
     Molly  grasped one  of the carved dragon's  forelegs and the door
swung open easily.
     The  room behind  was small,  cramped, little  more than a closet. Gray
steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A  light fixture had
come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged
lockers.
     THIRD LEFT,  pulsed  the  optic chip,  Wintermute overriding  her  time
display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than
a shallow tray. Empty. The second  was  empty as well. The  third, which was
deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a  small brown  thing that looked
like a human fingerbone. The  fourth drawer held  a  damp-swollen copy of an
obsolete technical manual in  French  and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the
armored gauntlet  of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key.  It  was like a
dull  brass  coin  with a  short  hollow tube  braised against one edge. She
turned it slowly in her hand and Case  saw that the interior of the tube was
lined  with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face
of the coin. The other was blank.
     "He told me," she whispered. "Wintermute.  How he played a waiting game
for years.  Didn't have  any real  power, then, but  he could use  the
Villa's  security  and  custodial  systems  to  keep  track  of  where
everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this
key twenty years ago, and he  managed to get somebody else to leave it here.
Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight." She
closed her white fingers over the key. "So nobody would find it." She took a
length of  black  nylon  cord  from  the  suit's  kangaroo  pocket and
threaded  it through the  round hole  above CHUBB. Knotting  it, she hung it
around her neck. "They  were always fucking him over with  how old-fashioned
they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He  looked just like
the  Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the
Finn, if I wasn't careful." Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics
superimposed over  the gray steel chests.  "He said  if they'd  turned
into what they'd wanted  to, he could've gotten  out a long time
ago. But they didn't. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what
he called her, but he talked like he liked her."
     She  turned, opened the  door, and stepped  out, her hand brushing  the
checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
     Case flipped.

     Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.
     "Dixie, you think this thing'll work?"
     "Does a bear shit in the woods?" The  Flatline punched them up  through
shifting rainbow strata.
     Something dark was forming  at  the core  of the Chinese  program.  The
density  of  information overwhelmed the fabric  of  the matrix,  triggering
hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in  to a silver-black
focal  point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out
along  translucent  planes: swastikas, skulls and  crossbones dice  flashing
snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form.
It took  a dozen quick, peripheral  takes before he  had  it, a shark thing,
gleaming  like obsidian,  the black mirrors of  its  flanks reflecting faint
distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.
     "That's the sting," the construct said.  "When Kuang's good
and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool  core, we're ridin' that
through."
     "You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the
hardwiring that keeps  Wintermute  under control. However much he  is  under
control," he added.
     "He," the construct said. "He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you . "
     "It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody  has to speak  it  into a
fancy terminal in a certain  room, while  we  take  care of whatever's
waiting for us behind that ice."
     "Well,  you  got  time  to  kill,  kid," the Flatline said.  "Ol'
Kuang's slow but steady."
     Case jacked out.

     Into Maelcum's stare.
     "You dead awhile there mon."
     "It happens," he said. "I'm getting used to it."
     "You dealin' wI' th' darkness, mon."
     "Only game in town, it looks like."
     "Jah  love, Case," Maelcum  said, and turned  back to his radio module.
Case  stared  at  the  matted  dreadlocks, the  ropes of  muscle  around the
man's dark arms.
     He jacked back in.
     And flipped.

     Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have  been the
one she'd  traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and
Case decided they  were moving toward the  tip of the  spindle; gravity  was
growing  weaker. Soon  she  was  bounding smoothly over rolling  hillocks of
carpets. Faint twinges in her leg. . .
     The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.
     She turned right and started  up a freakishly steep  flight  of stairs,
her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and  bundled cables hugged the
stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. The walls  were splotched
with damp.
     She  arrived at  a  triangular landing  and stood rubbing her leg. More
corridors, narrow, their walls  hung with rugs. They branched away in  three
directions.

     LEFT.
     She shrugged. "Lemme look around, okay?"

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

     STOP.

     GO BACK.

     DANGER.

     She  hesitated.  From the half-open oak  door  at the far  end  of  the
passage  came a voice,  loud and slurred, like the  voice of  a  drunk. Case
thought the language might be  French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took
a step,  another, her  hand sliding into the suit to  touch the butt  of her
fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor's field, her ears
rang, a tiny  rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher.
She pitched forward, her striated  muscles slack,  and struck  the door with
her  forehead. She twisted and lay on her  back, her  eyes unfocused, breath
gone.
     "What's this," said the slurred voice, "fancy dress?" A trembling
hand  entered the front of her suit  and found the fletcher, tugging it out.
"Come visit, child. Now."
     She got  up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a  black  automatic
pistol. The man's hand was steady  enough, now; the gun's barrel
seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.
     He was old, very tall, and his  features reminded  Case of  the girl he
had glimpsed  in the  Vingtieme Siecle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk,
quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other
in a black velvet slipper  with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep.
He  motioned her  into  the  room. "Slow, darling." The room was very large,
cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw  a
gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with
sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the  kind of rug
used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Telefunken
entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling
spines cased  in clear plastic, to  a wide worktable littered with  slabs of
silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and  the trodes, but her glance
slid over it without pausing.
     "It would  be  customary," the old man said, "for me to kill  you now."
Case felt her tense, ready for a move.  "But tonight I  indulge myself. What
is your name?"
     "Molly."
     "Molly.  Mine is  Ashpool." He sank back into the creased softness of a
huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He
put her  fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic
vial  of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles  of liquor, soft
plastic envelopes spilling  white  powders.  Case noticed  an  old-fashioned
glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.
     "How  do you cry,  Molly? I  see your eyes are  walled away.  I'm
curious." His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was
very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. "I don't cry, much."
     "But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?"
     "I spit," she said. "The ducts are routed back into my mouth."
     "Then  you've  already  learned an important lesson,  for one  so
young." He  rested  the hand with the  pistol  on his knee and took a bottle
from the table beside him,  without bothering to choose from the  half-dozen
different liquors.  He  drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran  from  the
corner of his  mouth.  "That is  the way to  handle  tears." He drank again.
"I'm  busy tonight, Molly.  I built all this, and now I'm  busy.
Dying."
     "I could go out the way I came," she said.
     He laughed, a harsh high sound. "You intrude on my suicide and then ask
to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief."
     "It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it
out of here in one piece."
     "You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of
decorum.  That's  what  I'm doing,  you understand. But  perhaps
I'll  take you  with  me tonight, down  to hell. . . It would  be very
Egyptian of me." He drank again. "Come here  then." He  held out the bottle,
his hand shaking. "Drink."
     She shook her head.
     "It  isn't  poisoned," he said, but  returned the brandy  to  the
table. "Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk."
     "What  about?"  She  sat.  Case  felt the  blades move, very  slightly,
beneath her nails.
     "Whatever comes to mind. My mind.  It's  my party. The cores woke
me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and l was needed. Were
you the something,  Molly?  Surely they didn't need me  to handle you,
no. Something else  . . .  but I'd  been dreaming, you see. For thirty
years. You weren't born, when last I lay  me down  to sleep. They told
us we wouldn't dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel
cold, either. Madness, Molly.  Lies.  Of course I dreamed.  The cold let the
outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night  I built this to hide us
from.  Just a drop, at  first, one grain of night seeping in,  drawn  by the
cold . . . Others  following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty
pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of
chrome, how the  limbs  went winking  through  the  gardens at  sunset.  . .
I'm  old, Molly.  Over  two hundred years,  if you count the cold. The
cold." The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly,  quivering. The tendons
in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.
     "You can get freezerburn," she said carefully.
     "Nothing burns there," he  said impatiently, lowering  the gun. His few
movements  were increasingly sclerotic.  His head  nodded.  It cost  him  an
effort to stop  it. "Nothing burns. I remember now.  The  cores told me  our
intelligences  are  mad.  And  all  the billions we paid, so  long ago. When
artificial intelligences were  rather  a  racy  concept.  I  told  the cores
I'd deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and
only  our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would
you know, Molly?" The gun rose again. "There are some odd things afoot  now,
in the Villa Straylight."
     "Boss," she asked him, "you know Wintermute?"
     "A  name. Yes. To conjure  with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my
time,  dear Molly, I have known  many lords. And not a  few  ladies. Why,  a
queen of Spain, once, in that very bed. . . But I wander." He coughed wetly,
the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near
his one  bare foot. "How I  do wander.  Through the cold. But soon no  more.
I'd  ordered a Jane thawed,  when I  woke.  Strange, to lie  every few
decades with  what legally amounts  to one's own  daughter."  His gaze
swept  past  her,  to the  rack  of  blank  monitors. He  seemed  to shiver.
"Marie-France's eyes,"  he  said,  faintly, and smiled. "We cause  the
brain  to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting
in a peculiarly pliable  imitation  of autism."  His  head  swayed sideways,
recovered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an
embedded microchip."
     The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.
     "The  dreams grow like  slow  ice," he said.  His  face was tinged with
blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.
     Up,  she  snatched  the gun.  She  stalked  the  room,  Ashpool's
automatic in her hand.
     A vast quilt  or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle
of  congealed blood,  thick  and  shiny  on the patterned  rugs. Twitching a
corner  of  the quilt  back, she  found the body of  a  girl, white shoulder
blades slick with  blood. Her  throat had been slit. The triangular blade of
some sort  of scraper  glinted  in  the dark pool  beside her.  Molly knelt,
careful  to avoid  the  blood, and turned the dead  girl's face to the
light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant.
     There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was
frozen.  Molly's simstim broadcast  had  become  a  still  frame,  her
fingers on the  girl's  cheek.  The freeze held for three seconds, and
then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee.
     Another  click, and the room  blurred. Molly was standing, looking down
at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside
table. A length of fiberoptic  ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a
socket at the base of the slender neck.
     "I  got  your number, fucker," Case  said, feeling his own lips moving,
somewhere, far  away. He  knew  that Wintermute had altered  the  broadcast.
Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face swirl like smoke, to take
on the outline of Linda's deathmask.
     Molly  turned.  She crossed  the  room  to Ashpool's  chair.  The
man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs
and alcohol. She put his  pistol down,  picked  up  her fletcher, dialed the
barrel over to single shot, and very  carefully put a toxin dart through the
center  of  his  closed left  eyelid.  He  jerked  once,  breath halting  in
mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.
     It was still open when she turned and left the room.



        16
     "Got  your boss on hold," the Flatline said. "He's coming through
on the twin Hosaka  in  that boat upstairs, the  one  that's riding us
piggy-back. Called the Haniwa."
     "I know," Case said, absently, "I saw it."
     A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the
Tessier-Ashpool  ice;  it  showed him the  calm,  perfectly focused, utterly
crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.
     "Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care
of mine," Case said.
     Armitage stared. Case resisted the  sudden urge to  look away, drop his
gaze. "You okay, Armitage?"
     "Case"-- and for an instant  something  seemed to move, behind the blue
stare-- "you've seen Wintermute, haven't you? In the matrix."
     Case nodded. A camera on the  face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garvey would
relay the gesture to the Haniwa monitor.  He  imagined  Maelcum listening to
his  tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the  construct
or Armitage.
     "Case"  – and  the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward  his
computer – "what is he, when you see him?"
     "A high-rez simstim construct."
     "But who?"
     "Finn, last time. . . Before that, this pimp I . . ."
     "Not General Girling?"
     "General who?"
     The lozenge went blank.
     "Run  that back  and  get  the  Hosaka to  look  it  up," he  told  the
construct.
     He flipped.

     The  perspective  startled  him.  Molly  was  crouching  between  steel
girders, twenty  meters  above a  broad, stained floor of polished concrete.
The room was a hangar or service bay.  He  could  see three spacecraft, none
larger than Garvey and all in various  stages of repair. Japanese  voices. A
figure in an  orange jumpsuit stepped from  a gap in the  hull of  a bulbous
construction   vehicle   and   stood  beside  one   of   the   thing's
piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man  punched something into
a portable console and  scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into
sight on gray balloon tires.
     CASE, flashed her chip.
     "Hey," she said. "Waiting for a guide."
     She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit
the  color  of the blue-gray paint on the  girders. Her  leg hurt,  a  sharp
steady pain now. "I shoulda gone back to Chin," she muttered.
     Something came ticking quietly out of the  shadows, on a level with her
left  shouder. It  paused,  swayed its spherical body from side  to  side on
high-arched spider legs, fired a microsecond  burst of  diffuse  laserlight,
and  froze.  It  was a Braun microdrone, and  Case had  once  owned the same
model,  a pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package  deal
with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy
longlegs. A red LED began to  pulse, at the sphere's equator. Its body
was no larger than a baseball. "Okay," she said, "I hear you." She stood up,
favoring  her left leg, and watched the little drone  reverse. It picked its
methodical way  back across  its  girder  and into darkness. She turned  and
looked back  at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing
the front of  a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring  and seal the helmet,
pick  up  his  console,  and step  back through the gap in  the construction
boat's hull. There was  a rising whine  of motors  and  the thing slid
smoothly out of sight on  a ten meter circle of flooring that sank away into
a harsh glare  of arc lamps. The red drone waited  patiently at the edge  of
the hole left by the elevator panel.
     Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of
welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on.
     "How you doin', Case? You  back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And
jacked  into this.  I like it, you  know? Like  I've always  talked to
myself, in my head, when I've  been in tight spots. Pretend I got some
friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll  tell 'em  what I  really
think, what I feel  like, and  then I'll pretend they're telling
me what they think about that, and I'll just go along that way. Having
you in is kinda like that. That scene  with Ashpool . . ." She gnawed at her
lower  lip, swinging around  a  strut, keeping  the  drone in sight. "I  was
expecting something maybe a  little less gone, you know? I  mean, these guys
are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the
inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way it looks,
I don't like the way it smells. . ."
     The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder  of U-shaped
steel  rungs,  toward  a  narrow dark opening. "And while  I'm feeling
confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I never much expected to make it out
of this one anyway. Been on this  bad roll for a while, and you're the
only  good change come down since I signed  on with Armitage." She looked up
at  the  black circle. The drone's  LED  winked,  climbing.  "Not that
you're  all that shit hot." She smiled,  but  it was gone too quickly,
and she gritted  her teeth at the  stabbing pain  in her leg as she began to
climb. The ladder continued up through a metal tube, barely  wide enough for
her shoulders.
     She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis.
     Her chip pulsed the time.

     04:23:04 .
     It had been a long day. The  clarity of  her sensorium  cut the bite of
the betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it.
     He preferred the pain in her leg.

C A S E : O O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O .

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

G E N E R A L G I R L I N G : : : T R A I N  E D C O R T O F O R S C R E A M
I N G F I S T A N D S O L D H I S A S S T O T H E P E N T  A G O N : : : : W
/ M U T E ' S P R I M A R Y G R I P O N A R M I T A G E  I S A C O N S T R U
C T O F G I R L I N  G : W / M U T E S E Z A ' S M E N T I O N O F G M E A N
S H E  ' S C R A C K I N G : : : : W A T C H Y O U R A S S : : : : : : D I X
I E

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

     "Maelcum . . ."
     "Mon, you bossman gone ver' strange." The Zionite was  wearing  a
blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older  than the one Case  had rented  in
Freeside, its  helmet under  his arm and  his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap
crocheted from purple  cotton  yarn. His  eyes were slitted  with  ganja and
tension. "Keep  callin' down here wI' orders,  mon, but  be some
Babylon war. . ."  Maelcum shook his head. "Aerol an' I talkin',
an' Aerol  talkin'  wI' Zion, Founders seh  cut  an'
run." He ran the back of a large brown hand across his mouth.
     "Armitage?" Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hangover hit him with
its full intensity, unscreened by the  matrix  or simstim. Brain's got
no nerves in it, he told himself, it can't really feel this bad. "What
do you mean, man? He's giving you orders? What?"
     "Mon, Armitage, he tellin' me set course for Finland, ya know? He
tellin' me  there be hope, ya know? Come  on my  screen wI'  his
shirt  all  blood,  mon,  an'  be  crazy  as  some dog,  talkin'
screamin'  fists  an'  Russian  an'  th'   blood  of
th' betrayers shall be  on  our hands." He shook  his  head again, the
dreadcap swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed. "Founders seh the
Mute voice  be false prophet surely, an' Aerol  an' I mus'
'bandon Marcus Garvey and return."
     "Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?"
     "Can't seh, ya know? But blood, an' stone crazy, Case."
     "Okay," Case said,  "So what about  me? You're  going  home. What
about me, Maelcum?"
     "Mon," Maelcum said, "you comin' wI' me. I an' I come
Zion  wI'  Aerol,  Babylon Rocker. Leave  Mr.  Armitage  t' talk
wI' ghost cassette, one ghost t' 'nother. . ."
     Case glanced over  his  shoulder: his  rented  suit  swung against  the
hammock where he'd snapped it, swaying in the air current from the old
Russian scrubber. He closed his eyes. He saw the sacs of toxin dissolving in
his  arteries.  He saw Molly hauling herself up the endless steel  rungs. He
opened his eyes.
     "I dunno, man," he said, a strange  taste in his mouth. He looked  down
at his  desk, at his  hands. "I  don't know." He looked  back up.  The
brown face was calm now, intent. Maelcum's chin was hidden by the high
helmet  ring   of  his  old  blue  suit.  "She's   inside,"  he  said.
"Molly's  inside. In Straylight, it's called.  If  there's
any  Babylon,  man,  that's  it.  We  leave  on her,  she  ain't
comin' out, Steppin' Razor or not."
     Maelcum nodded,  the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a captive balloon
of crocheted cotton. "She you woman, Case?"
     "I  dunno.  Nobody's  woman, maybe." He shrugged. And  found  his
anger again, real as a shard  of  hot rock beneath his ribs. "Fuck this," he
said. "Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute, and fuck you. I'm stayin'
right here."
     Maelcum's  smile  spread across his  face  like  light  breaking.
"Maelcum a rude  boy, Case. Garvey Maelcum boat." His  gloved hand slapped a
panel  and  the bass-heavy  rocksteady  of Zion  dub came pulsing  from  the
tug's  speakers.  "Maelcum not runnin',  no.  I  talk  wI'
Aerol, he certain t' see it in similar light."
     Case stared.  "I  don't understand you  guys at  all,"  he  said.
"Don' 'stan'  you,  mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the
beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one."
     Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.

     "Get my wire?"
     "Yeah." He  saw that the Chinese program had grown; delicate  arches of
shifting polychrome were nearing the T-A ice.
     "Well,  it's gettin' stickier,"  the Flatline  said.  "Your
boss wiped the  bank on that other Hosaka, and damn near  took ours with it.
But  your  pal Wintermute put me on to  somethin' there before it went
black.   The  reason  Straylight's   not  exactly  hoppin'  with
Tessier-Ashpools is that they're mostly in cold sleep. There's a
law firm  in London  keeps  track of  their powers  of attorney. Has to know
who's awake and exactly when. Armitage  was routing  the transmissions
from London to Straylight through the Hosaka on the  yacht. Incidently, they
know the old man's dead."
     "Who knows?"
     "The law firm and  T-A. He had a medical remote planted in his sternum.
Not that your girl's dart would've left a resurrection crew with
much to work  with.  Shellfish toxin. But the only T-A awake  in  Straylight
right now is  Lady 3Jane  Marie-France. There's a  male, couple  years
older, in Australia on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to
cause  that business  to need this  8Jean's  personal  attention.  But
he's on his way home,  or near as matters. The London lawyers give his
Straylight  ETA  as 09:00:00, tonight.  We slotted  Kuang virus at 02:32:03.
It's 04:45:20. Best  estimate for Kuang penetration of the T-A core is
08:30:00.  Or  a  hair  on  either  side. I  figure  Wintermute's  got
somethin'  goin' with this  3Jane, or  else she's  just as
crazy  as her old man was. But the  boy up from Melbourne'll know  the
score. The  Straylight security systems  keep  trying to go full  alert, but
Wintermute blocks 'em, don't ask me how. Couldn't override
the basic gate program to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a record of all
that  on his  Hosaka;  Riviera  must've talked  3Jane into  doing  it.
She's been able to  fiddle entrances  and exits for years. Looks to me
like  one  of T-A's  main  problems is that every  family  bigwig  has
riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and exceptions. Kinda like
your immune system falling apart  on you. Ripe for virus. Looks good for us,
once we're past that ice."
     "Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm – "
     A  white lozenge snapped into  position,  filled with a closeup of  mad
blue  eyes. Case  could only  stare. Colonel Willie Corto,  Special  Forces,
Strikeforce  Screaming Fist,  had found  his way  back.  The image  was dim,
jerky, badly focused.  Corto was using the Haniwa's navigation deck to
link with the Hosaka in Marcus Garvey.
     "Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder."
     "Say, I. . . Colonel?"
     "Hang in there, boy. Remember your training."
     But where  have you  been,  man? he silently asked the  anguished eyes.
Wintermute had built something  called  Armitage  into a catatonic  fortress
named  Corto.  Had  convinced  Corto that  Armitage was the real  thing, and
Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for
Wintermute in  that room in the Chiba Hilton. . . And now Armitage was gone,
blown away by the winds of Corto's madness. But where had Corto  been,
those years?
     Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.
     "Case,  this  will  be  difficult  for  you to  accept,  I  know  that.
You're an officer. The training. I understand. But, Case, as God is my
witness, we have been betrayed."
     Tears started from the blue eyes.
     "Colonel, ah, who? Who's betrayed us?"
     "General Girling, Case. You may know him by a  code  name. You do  know
the man of whom I speak."
     "Yeah," Case said, as the tears continued to flow, "I guess I do. Sir,"
he added, on impulse. "But, sir, Colonel, what  exactly should we do? Now, I
mean."
     "Our duty at this point, Case, lies in  flight. Escape. Evasion. We can
make the Finnish  border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop flying on manual. Seat
of  the  pants, boy.  But that will  only be the  beginning." The blue  eyes
slitted  above tanned  cheekbones slick  with  tears.  "Only the  beginning.
Betrayal from above. From  above. . ." He stepped back from the camera, dark
stains  on his torn  twill  shirt. Armitage's  face had been masklike,
impassive, but Corto's was the true schizoid mask, illness etched deep
in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.
     "Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel,  okay? I want  you to  open
the, ah . . . shit, what's it called, Dix?"
     "The midbay lock," the Flatline said.
     "Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there to open it,
right?  We'll  be up  there  with you fast, Colonel. Then we can  talk
about getting out of here."
     The lozenge vanished.
     "Boy, I think you just lost me, there,"
     the Flatline said.  "The  toxins," Case said, "the fucking toxins," and
jacked out.

     "Poison?" Maelcum  watched over the scratched blue shoulder of  his old
Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.
     "And get this goddam thing off me. . ."  Tugging at the Texas catheter.
"Like  a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs knows how to counter it, and
now he's  crazier than a shithouse rat." He fumbled with the  front of
the red Sanyo, forgetting how to work the seals.
     "Bossman,  he poison  you?" Maelcum scratched his cheek. "Got a medical
kit, ya know."
     "Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit."
     The Zionite kicked off  from the pink pilot module. "Easy, mon. Measure
twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up there. . ."

     There  was  air   in  the  corrugated  gangway  that  led  from  Marcus
Garvey's  aft lock to the midbay lock  of the yacht called Haniwa, but
they kept their  suits  sealed. Maelcum executed the  passage with  balletic
grace, only pausing to help Case, who'd gone into an awkward tumble as
he'd stepped  out of  Garvey.  The  white  plastic  sides of  the tube
filtered the raw sunlight; there were no shadows.
     Garvey's airlock hatch was patched  and pitted,  decorated with a
laser-carved Lion  of  Zion. Haniwa's  midbay  hatch was  creamy gray,
blank and  pristine.  Maelcum inserted his gloved  hand  in a narrow recess.
Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs  came to  life in the  recess,  counting
down  from fifty. Maelcum  withdrew his hand.  Case,  with  one glove braced
against the hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit
and bones. The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw into the side of
Haniwa.  Maelcum grabbed  the recess with  one hand and Case with the other.
The lock took them with it.

     Haniwa  was  a product  of  the  Dornier-Fujitsu  yards,  her  interior
informed by  a  design  philosophy similar to the one that had  produced the
Mercedes that had  chauffeured them through Istanbul. The  narrow midbay was
walled  in imitation ebony veneer and floored with  gray Italian tiles. Case
felt as though he were invading some rich man's private spa by  way of
the shower. The  yacht, which had been assembled in  orbit,  had  never been
intended  for re-entry. Her  smooth,  wasplike line was simply  styling, and
everything  about  her  interior  was  calculated  to  add  to  the  overall
impression of speed.
     When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case  followed his lead. They
hung there  in the  lock, breathing air that smelled faintly  of pine. Under
it, a disturbing edge of burning insulation. Maelcum sniffed.
     "Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell that. . ."
     A door, padded with  dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly back  into its
housing. Maelcum kicked  off the ebony  wall  and  sailed neatly through the
narrow opening, twisting his broad shoulders, at  the last possible instant,
for  clearance.  Case  followed  him  clumsily,  hand  over  hand,  along  a
waist-high padded rail. "Bridge,"  Maelcum  said, pointing down a  seamless,
creamwalled  corridor,  "be  there."  He  launched  himself   with   another
effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of
a printer turning out  hard  copy. It  grew louder as  he  followed  Maelcum
through another doorway, into  a  swirling  mass of tangled  printout.  Case
snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

     "Systems  crash?" The Zionite flicked  a gloved finger at the column of
zeros.
     "No," Case said,  grabbing for his drifting  helmet, "the Flatline said
Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there."
     "Smell  like he wipe 'em wI' laser, ya know?"  The  Zionite
braced his foot against the  white cage of a Swiss exercise machine and shot
through the floating maze of paper, batting it away from his face.
     "Case, mon. . ."
     The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back of the narrow
articulated  chair  with a length of some sort of fine steel  wire. The wire
was invisible, where it crossed the black temperfoam of the headrest, and it
had  cut  as  deeply  into his larynx.  A single sphere of  dark  blood  had
congealed there  like  some strange precious  stone, a red-black pearl. Case
saw the  crude  wooden handles that drifted at either  end of the  garrotte,
like worn sections of broom handle.
     "Wonder  how  long   he  had  that  on  him?"  Case  said,  remembering
Corto's postwar pilgrimage.
     "He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?"
     "Maybe. He was Special Forces."
     "Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin'. Doubt I pilot her easy
myself. Ver' new boat. . ."
     "So find us the bridge."
     Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.
     Case followed him into a larger  space, a kind of lounge, shredding and
crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him in his passage. There were
more  of the articulated chairs,  here, something that resembled a bar,  and
the Hosaka. The printer, still spewing its flimsy tongue  of  paper, was  an
in-built bulkhead unit,  a  neat slot in  a  panel  of handrubbed veneer. He
pulled himself  over the circle of chairs and reached it,  punching  a white
stud to  the left of  the slot. The chattering stopped. He turned and stared
at the Hosaka. Its face had  been  drilled through,  at least a dozen times.
The  holes  were small,  circular,  edges blackened.  Tiny spheres of bright
alloy were orbiting the dead computer. "Good guess," he said to Maelcum.
     "Bridge  locked, mon,"  Maelcum said,  from the  opposite  side of  the
lounge.
     The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.
     Case  ripped the printout from  its slot. More  zeros. "Wintermute?" He
looked around the beige and brown lounge, the space  scrawled with  drifting
curves of paper. "That you on the lights, Wintermute?"
     A panel beside Maelcum's head slid up, revealing a small monitor.
Maelcum  jerked  apprehensively, wiped  sweat from his forehead  with a foam
patch on the  back of a  gloved hand, and  swung to study  the display. "You
read Japanese, mon?" Case could see figures blinking past on the screen.
     "No," Case said.
     "Bridge is  escape pod, lifeboat. Countin' down, looks  like  it.
Suit up now." He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.
     "What? He's  takin'  off?  Shit!" He  kicked  off from  the
bulkhead and shot through the tangle  of printout. "We gotta open this door,
man!" But Maelcum  could only tap the side of his helmet. Case could see his
lips moving, through the Lexan. He saw  a  bead  of  sweat arc  out from the
rainbow braided  band  of the  purple  cotton  net the Zionite wore over his
locks. Maelcum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him smoothly,
the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. MicroLED monitors to the left of
the faceplate lit as  the  neck  ring connections closed. "No seh Japanese,"
Maelcum  said,  over his  suit's  transceiver, "but  countdown's
wrong." He tapped a particular line on the screen. "Seals not intact, bridge
module. Launchin' wI' lock open."
     "Armitage!" Case tried to pound on the door. The physics of zero-g sent
him tumbling back through the printout. "Corto! Don't do  it! We gotta
talk! We gotta – "
     "Case? Read you, Case. . ." The voice barely resembled Armitage's
now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking. His  helmet  struck the far
wall. "I'm sorry,  Case, but it has to  be this way. One  of us has to
get out. One of  us has to  testify. If we all  go down here, it ends  here.
I'll tell them,  Case,  I'll tell them all  of it. About Girling
and the others. And I'll make it, Case. I know I'll make it.  To
Helsinki."  There  was a sudden  silence; Case felt it fill his helmet  like
some rare  gas.  "But  it's so hard,  Case, so goddam hard.  I'm
blind."
     "Corto, stop.  Wait.  You're  blind,  man. You  can't  fly!
You'll hit the  fucking trees.  And they're trying  to get  you,
Corto, I swear to God, they've left your hatch open. You'll die,
and you'll never get to  tell  'em, and I gotta get the  enzyme,
name of the enzyme, the enzyme, man.  . ." He  was shouting, voice high with
hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet's phone pads.
     "Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do."
     And then the  helmet filled  with a  confused  babble,  roaring static,
harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments  of Russian,
and then a  stranger's  voice,  Midwestern, very  young. "We are down,
repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we . . ."
     "Wintermute,"  Case screamed, "don't do this to  me!" Tears broke
from his lashes, rebounding off the  faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets.
Then Haniwa thudded,  once,  shivered as if some huge soft  thing had struck
her hull. Case  imagined the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive
bolts,  a  second's  clawing  hurricane  of escaping air  tearing  mad
Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final
minute of Screaming Fist.
     "I'm gone, mon." Maelcum looked at the monitor. "Hatch open. Mute
mus' override ejection failsafe."
     Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked
against Lexan.
     "Yacht,  she  tight for air, but  bossman  takin' grapple control
wI' bridge. Marcus Garvey still stuck."
     But  Case  was  seeing  Armitage's endless fall  around Freeside,
through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined  him in
his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich  folds  spread out around him
like the wings of some huge bat.



        17
     "Get what you went for?" the construct asked.
     Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A
ice with hypnotically intricate traceries  of rainbow, lattices fine as snow
crystal on a winter window.
     "Wintermute killed Armitage.  Blew  him out in a lifeboat with  a hatch
open."
     "Tough  shit,"  the  Flatline   said.  "Weren't  exactly  asshole
buddies, were you?"
     "He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs."
     "So Wintermute knows too. Count on it."
     "I don't exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me."
     The  construct's  hideous  approximation   of  laughter   scraped
Case's  nerves  like a  dull  blade. "Maybe  that  means  you're
gettin' smart."
     He hit the simstim switch.

     06:27:52 by  the chip in  her optic nerve;  Case had been following her
progress through Villa Straylight for  over an  hour, letting  the endorphin
analog she'd  taken blot  out  his hangover. The  pain in her  leg was
gone; she seemed to move through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on
her  shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips,  secure in
the polycarbon of the Modern suit.
     The  walls here were  raw steel,  striped with rough  brown  ribbons of
epoxy where some  kind  of covering had been ripped away. She'd hidden
from a work crew,  crouching, the fletcher cradled  in  her  hands, her suit
steel-gray, while the two slender  Africans and their balloon-tired workcart
passed. The men  had shaven heads and wore orange coveralls. One was singing
softly to himself in  a language Case had never heard, the tones and  melody
alien and haunting.
     The head's speech,  3Jane's  essay on Straylight, came back
to him as she worked her way  deeper into the  maze of the place. Straylight
was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from
pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knick-knacks,  all
the bizarre impedimentia they'd  shipped  up  the  well  to line their
winding  nest.  But it  wasn't  a  craziness he understood.  Not  like
Armitage's madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a
man  far  enough, then twist him as  far back, in  the  opposite  direction,
reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length  of wire. And
history had done that for Colonel Corto. History had already done the really
messy work,  when  Wintermute  found him, sifting him  out  of  all  of  the
war's ripe detritus,  gliding into the man's  flat gray field of
consciousness like a  water spider crossing  the face of some stagnant pool,
the  first messages blinking  across the face of a child's  micro in a
darkened  room in a  French  asylum. Wintermute had  built Armitage up  from
scratch,  with Corto's memories  of  Screaming Fist as the foundation.
But Armitage's "memories" wouldn't have been Corto's after
a certain  point. Case doubted  if Armitage had recalled the  betrayal,  the
Nightwings whirling  down in flame. . . Armitage had been  a  sort of edited
version of  Corto,  and when the  stress  of  the  run had reached a certain
point,  the Armitage mechanism  had crumbled; Corto had  surfaced, with  his
guilt and  his sick  fury.  And  now Corto-Armitage was dead, a small frozen
moon for Freeside.
     He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too, drilled through
the  eye with  Molly's microscopic dart, deprived  of whatever  expert
overdose he'd  mixed  for  himself.  That was a more  puzzling  death,
Ashpool's, the death of a mad king.  And he'd  killed the puppet
he'd called his daughter,  the one with 3Jane's face.  It seemed
to Case,  as  he rode  Molly's  broadcast sensory  input  through  the
corridors of Straylight, that he'd never really thought of anyone like
Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.
     Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the
multinationals that shaped  the course of human history, had transcended old
barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a  kind of immortality. You
couldn't kill  a  zaibatsu by  assassinating  a  dozen key executives;
there  were  others  waiting  to  step  up the ladder,  assume  the  vacated
position,    access    the    vast   banks   of    corporate   memory.   But
Tessier–Ashpool wasn't like that,  and he  sensed the difference
in the death of its founder.  T-A was an atavism, a clan. He  remembered the
litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged
spines of  the old audio disks  in their paper sleeves.  One foot bare,  the
other in a velvet slipper.
     The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modem suit  and Molly turned left,
through another archway.
     Wintermute  and   the  nest.  Phobic  vision  of  the  hatching  wasps,
time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren't the zaibatsus more like
that, or  the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms,
their DNA coded in silicon? If Straylight was an expression of the corporate
identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been. The
same  ragged tangle of fears, the  same  strange  sense of  aimlessness. "If
they'd turned  into what  they  wanted  to. .  ." he  remembered Molly
saying. But Wintermute had told her they hadn't.
     Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins
in  a given industry,  would be  both more and less than people.  He'd
seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage
affect the semblance of  it in Night City,  and it had allowed him to accept
Armitage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it
as a  gradual  and willing  accommodation  of  the machine, the  system, the
parent  organism. It was the  root of street  cool, too, the knowing posture
that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.
     But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight?
     Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and concrete.
     "Wonder where our  Peter is  now, huh? Maybe see that  boy  soon,"  she
muttered. "And Armitage. Where's he, Case?"
     "Dead," he  said,  knowing she  couldn't  hear  him,  "he's
dead."
     He flipped.

     The Chinese program was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints
gradually dominated  by the  green of  the rectangle  representing  the  T-A
cores. Arches of emerald across the colorless void.
     "How's it go, Dixie?"
     "Fine. Too slick. Thing's amazing. . . Shoulda had one that  time
in Singapore. Did the old New  Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they
were  worth.  But  that's ancient history.  This  baby  takes all  the
drudgery  out of it. Makes you wonder what a real war would be  like, now. .
."
     "If this kinda shit was on the street, we'd  be out a job,"  Case
said.
     "You  wish. Wait'll  you're  steering that  thing  upstairs
through black ice."
     "Sure."
     Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just appeared on the far
end of one of the emerald arches.
     "Dixie . . ."
     "Yeah. I see it. Don't know if I believe it."
     A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the T-A cores. It
began to advance, across  the bridge built by Kuang Grade Mark  Eleven,  and
Case saw that it  was walking.  As it came,  the  green  section of the arch
extended,  the polychrome  of the virus program rolling  back,  a  few steps
ahead of the cracked black shoes.
     "Gotta  hand it to  you,  boss,"  the  Flatline said,  when the  short,
rumpled figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters away.  "I never seen
anything this funny when I  was alive." But the eerie  nonlaugh didn't
come.
     "I never tried it before," the Finn said,  showing his teeth, his hands
bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.
     "You killed Armitage," Case said.
     "Corto. Yeah.  Armitage  was already gone. Hadda do it. I know, I know,
you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat. I  was the one gave it to Armitage
in the first  place. I  mean I  told  him  what to  use. But  I think  maybe
it's  better to let the deal stand. You  got  enough  time. I'll
give it to you. Only a coupla hours now, right?"
     Case watched  blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn lit up one of
his Partagas.
     "You guys," the Finn  said, "you're a pain. The Flatline here, if
you were all like him, it would be real simple. He's a construct, just
a buncha ROM, so he always  does what  I expect him to. My  projections said
there wasn't  much chance of Molly wandering in on Ashpool's big
exit scene, give you one example." He sighed.
     "Why'd he kill himself?" Case asked.
     "Why's  anybody  kill  himself?" The figure shrugged.  "I guess I
know, if anybody  does,  but it  would take me  twelve  hours to explain the
various factors in  his history and how they interrelate. He was ready to do
it for  a long time, but he kept going back into the freezer. Christ, he was
a  tedious  old  fuck."  The  Finn's  face   wrinkled  with   disgust.
"It's all tied in with  why  he killed his  wife, mainly, you want the
short reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane
figured a way to fiddle  the program that controlled  his cryogenic  system.
Subtle, too. So  basically,  she  killed  him. Except he figured  he'd
killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel  figures she got him with
an eyeball full of shellfish juice." The Finn flicked his butt away into the
matrix  below.  "Well, actually, I guess  I did give  3Jane the odd hint,  a
little of the old how–to, you know?"
     "Wintermute," Case said, choosing the words carefully, "you told me you
were just a  part  of  something  else. Later on you said you wouldn't
exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets the word into the right slot."
     The Finn's streamlined skull nodded.
     "Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead, and
you're gonna be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me how  to get
these  fucking toxin sacs out of  my system? Who's going to  get Molly
back out of there? I mean where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna  be,
we cut you loose from the hardwiring?"
     The  Finn took  a  wooden  toothpick from  his  pocket and  regarded it
critically, like  a surgeon examining  a scalpel. "Good  question," he said,
finally.  "You  know  salmon?  Kinda fish? These  fish,  see,  they're
compelled to swim upstream. Got it?"
     "No," Case said.
     "Well, I'm under  compulsion  myself. And I don't know why.
If  I  were  gonna  subject you to  my  very  own thoughts, let's call
'em  speculations, on the  topic,  it  would  take a  couple  of  your
lifetimes.  Because I've  given it  a  lot  of  thought.  And  I  just
don't know. But when this is over, we do it right,  I'm gonna be
part of  something bigger. Much bigger," The Finn glanced  up and around the
matrix. "But  the parts of me that are me  now, that'll still be here.
And you'll get your payoff."
     Case fought back an insane urge  to  punch himself forward  and get his
fingers around the  figure's throat, just above the ragged knot in the
rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn's larynx.
     "Well, good luck," the Finn said. He turned, hands in pockets and began
trudging back up the green arch.
     "Hey, asshole," the Flatline  said,  when  the  Finn had  gone a  dozen
paces. The  figure  paused,  half  turned. "What  about  me?  What about  my
payoff?"
     "You'll get yours," it said.
     "What's  that mean?" Case asked, as he watched  the narrow  tweed
back recede.
     "I wanna be erased," the construct said. "I told you that, remember?"

     Straylight reminded  Case  of  deserted early  morning shopping centers
he'd known as a teenager, low-density  places  where  the  small hours
brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy,  a  tension that left
you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened
shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of  the Sprawl, too far from the
all-night click and shudder of the hot  core. There  was  that same sense of
being surrounded  by  the  sleeping inhabitants  of a waking world he had no
interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily  suspended, of
futility and repetition soon to wake again.
     Molly had slowed now,  either knowing that she was nearing her  goal or
out of concern  for  her  leg. The pain was starting to  work its jagged way
back through the endorphins, and he  wasn't sure what that meant.  She
didn't speak,  kept her teeth  clenched, and  carefully  regulated her
breathing. She'd passed many things that Case hadn't understood,
but his curiosity was  gone. There had been a room  filled with  shelves  of
books, a million flat leaves  of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of
cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals  by labels that followed a
code of letters  and  numbers;  a crowded  gallery where  Case  had  stared,
through  Molly's incurious eyes, at a shattered,  dust-stenciled sheet
of  glass,  a  thing  labeled--  her  gaze  had  tracked  the  brass  plaque
automatically--  "La  mariée  mise  à  nu  par   ses   célibataires,  même."
She'd  reached  out  and touched  this, her  artificial nails clicking
against the Lexan sandwich protecting the  broken glass. There had been what
was  obviously  the entrance  to Tessier-Ashpool's cryogenic compound,
circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.
     She'd seen no one  since the two Africans and their cart, and for
Case  they'd  taken on  a  sort of  imaginary life;  he pictured  them
gliding gently  through the halls of Straylight,  their smooth  dark  skulls
gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang  his tired little song. And none
of this was anything like the Villa Straylight he would  have expected, some
cross between Cath's fairy tale castle and a half-remembered childhood
fantasy of the Yakuza's inner sanctum.

     07:02:18.
     One and a half hours.
     "Case," she said, "I wanna favor." Stiffly, she lowered herself  to sit
on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of  each  plate protected by
an  uneven coating of clear plastic. She  picked at a rip in the  plastic on
the  topmost  plate,  blades  sliding  from beneath  thumb  and  forefinger.
"Leg's not good, you  know? Didn't figure  any climb  like that,
and the  endorphin won't cut it,  much longer. So maybe--  just maybe,
right?-- I got a problem here. What it is, if I  buy it here, before Riviera
does"-- and she stretched  her  leg, kneaded  the flesh of her thigh through
Modern polycarbon and  Paris leather-- "I want you to tell him. Tell him  it
was me. Got it? Just  say it was Molly. He'll know. Okay?" She glanced
around  the  empty  hallway, the  bare  walls. The floor here was raw  lunar
concrete and the air smelled of resins. "Shit, man,  I don't even know
if you're listening."

        CASE.
     She winced, got to  her feet, nodded.  "What's he  told you, man,
Wintermute?  He  tell  you  about  Marie-France? She  was the  Tessier half,
3Jane's  genetic mother. And of that dead puppet of Ashpool's, I
guess. Can't figure why he'd tell me, down in that cubicle. .  .
lotta stuff. . . Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me
that. It's  not just  a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as
valves,  gears himself down to communicate with  us. Called  it a  template.
Model of  personality."  She  drew her fletcher  and  limped  away  down the
corridor.
     The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced by what Case
at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from solid rock.  Molly  examined
its edge  and  he  saw  that in fact  the steel was  sheathed with panels of
something  that looked and felt like cold  stone. She knelt and  touched the
dark sand spread across  the floor  of the  imitation  tunnel. It felt  like
sand, cool and dry, but when she drew her finger  through it, it closed like
a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A  dozen meters ahead,  the tunnel
curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shadows on  the seamed pseudo-rock  of
the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was  near earth
normal, which meant that she'd had to descend  again, after the climb.
He  was  thoroughly  lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror
for cowboys.
     But she wasn't lost, he told himself.
     Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across the un-sand
of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.
     The  first  of  the  holos waited  just  beyond  the  curve, a  sort of
triptych. She lowered the fletcher before  Case had had time to realize that
the thing was  a recording. The figures were caricatures in light,  lifesize
cartoons:  Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly's  breasts were too large,
visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket.  Her  waist
was impossibly narrow.  Silvered lenses covered  half  her face. She held an
absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a
flanged  overlay  of  scope  sights, silencers, flash  hiders. Her legs were
spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty.
Beside her, Armitage  stood  rigidly at  attention  in  a  threadbare  khaki
uniform. His eyes,  Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully  forward, were tiny
monitor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray  image of a howling waste
of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds.
     She passed  the tips of her fingers through Armitage's television
eyes, then turned  to the figure of Case. Here, it was as if Riviera –
and  Case had known instantly  that Riviera was responsible – had been
unable to find anything worthy of parody. The figure that slouched there was
a  fair  approximation  of the  one  he  glimpsed daily  in  mirrors.  Thin,
high-shouldered,  a forgettable  face  beneath short  dark hair. He needed a
shave, but then he usually did.
     Molly stepped  back.  She looked from  one figure to another. It  was a
static  display, the  only movement the silent gusting of the black trees in
Armitage's frozen Siberian eyes.
     "Tryin' to tell us something,  Peter?" she asked softly. Then she
stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet  of the holo-Molly.
Metal  clinked against  the wall and the  figures  were gone.  She  bent and
picked up  a small display unit.  "Guess he can Jack  into these and program
them direct," she said, tossing it away.
     She  passed  the source of yellow light, an archaic  incandescent globe
set into  the wall, protected  by  a rusty curve of expansion  grating.  The
style  of the improvised fixture suggested childhood, somehow. He remembered
fortresses he'd built with other children on rooftops  and in  flooded
sub-basements.  A  rich  kid's  hideout,  he  thought.  This  kind  of
roughness was expensive. What they called atmosphere.
     She passed a dozen  more holograms  before she reached the  entrance to
3Jane's apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing in the alley behind
the  Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of Riviera's shattered body.
Several  others were scenes  of torture,  the  inquisitors  always  military
officers  and  the  victims  invariably  young  women. These had  the  awful
intensity of Riviera's show  at the  Vingtieme Siecle, as though  they
had been frozen in the blue flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed
them.
     The  last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera  had had to
drag across some private distance  of memory and time.  She had to  kneel to
examine it; it had been projected from the  vantage point  of a small child.
None of the others  had had backgrounds; the figures,  uniforms, instruments
of torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.
     A dark wave of  rubble rose against a colorless sky,  beyond its  crest
the bleached,  half-melted  skeletons of city towers.  The  rubble wave  was
textured like a net,  rusting steel rods twisted  gracefully as fine string,
vast slabs of concrete still clinging there. The foreground might once  have
been a city square; there  was  a sort of stump, something that  suggested a
fountain. At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau
was confusing at first. Molly  must have read it  correctly before Case  had
quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She spat, then stood.
     Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like  knives. Sores on their
contorted faces. The  soldier on his back, mouth and throat open to the sky.
They were feeding.
     "Bonn,"  she  said, something like gentleness in her voice.  "Quite the
product, aren't you, Peter? But you had to  be. Our 3Jane, she's
too jaded now to open the back door  for just any petty thief. So Wintermute
dug you up. The ultimate  taste, if  your taste runs that way.  Demon lover.
Peter."  She shivered. "But  you talked her into letting me  in. Thanks. Now
we're gonna party."
     And  then she was walking –  strolling, really,  in spite  of the
pain – away from Riviera's childhood. She drew the fletcher from
its holster, snapped  the plastic magazine  out, pocketed that, and replaced
it  with another. She hooked  her thumb in  the neck of the Modern suit  and
ripped it open  to the crotch with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting
the tough polycarbon like rotten silk. She freed  herself  from the arms and
legs,  the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they  fell to the dark
false sand.
     Case noticed  the music then. A music he didn't  know, all  horns
and piano.
     The  entrance to  3Jane's  world had  no  door. It was  a  ragged
five-meter gash in the  tunnel wall,  uneven  stairs leading down in a broad
shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows, music.
     "Case," she said, and paused, the fletcher in her  right hand. Then she
raised  her  left,  smiled, touched  her open palm with a  wet  tongue  tip,
kissing him through the simstim link. "Gotta go."
     Then  there was something  small and heavy in her  left hand, her thumb
against a tiny stud, and she was descending.



        18
     She missed it by a fraction. She nearly cut it, but not quite. She went
in just right, Case thought. The right  attitude; it was  something he could
sense, something he could have seen in the posture of another cowboy leaning
into a deck,  fingers flying across the  board. She  had  it: the thing, the
moves. And she'd  pulled it  all together for her entrance.  Pulled it
together around  the pain in her leg and marched  down  3Jane's stairs
like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist
relaxed, swaying the muzzle of  the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of
a Regency duelist.
     It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's
observation  of  martial arts tapes,  cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up
on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao  in the
old Shaw  videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage  back to Lee and Eastwood.
She was walking it the way she talked it.
     Lady  3Jane  Marie-France  Tessier-Ashpool had  carved  herself  a  low
country  flush with the inner surface of  Straylight's hull,  chopping
away the maze of walls that  was  her legacy. She lived  in a single room so
broad and deep that  its far reaches  were lost  to  an inverse horizon, the
floor  hidden  by the  curvature  of  the spindle. The ceiling  was low  and
irregular, done in the same imitation stone  that  walled the corridor. Here
and  there  across  the  floor  were  jagged sections  of  wall,  waist-high
reminders of the labyrinth. There was a rectangular  turquoise pool centered
ten  meters  from  the  foot  of the  stairway,  its  underwater  floods the
apartment's only source  of  light – or it  seemed  that way, to
Case, as Molly took her final step. The pool threw  shifting blobs  of light
across the ceiling above it.
     They were waiting by the pool.
     He'd  known  that her  reflexes  were souped up,  jazzed  by  the
neurosurgeons  for  combat,  but  he hadn't experienced  them  on  the
simstim link. The effect was like tape run at half speed, a slow, deliberate
dance choreographed to the killer instinct and years of training. She seemed
to take the three of them in at a glance: the boy poised on the pool's
high board, the  girl grinning ove her wineglass, and the corpse of Ashpool,
his left socket gaping black and corrupt above his welcoming  smile. He wore
his maroon robe. His teeth were very white.
     The boy dove.  Slender, brown, his  form perfect. The grenade  left her
hand before his hands could cut the water. Case  knew the thing for what  it
was  as it  broke the surface:  a core  of high  explosive wrapped with  ten
meters of fine, brittle steel wire.
     Her  fletcher whined  as she  sent  a  storm  of  explosive darts  into
Ashpool's  face and  chest, and he was gone, smoke  curling  from  the
pocked back of the empty, white-enameled pool chair.
     The  muzzle swung  for 3Jane  as  the  grenade detonated, a symmetrical
wedding cake of water rising, breaking,  falling back, but the  mistake  had
been made.
     Hideo didn't even touch her, then. Her leg collapsed.
     In Garvey, Case screamed.

     "It  took you  long enough,"  Riviera said, as he searched her pockets.
Her  hands  vanished  at the  wrists in a matte black sphere the  size  of a
bowling ball. "I  saw  a  multiple assassination  in  Ankara," he said,  his
fingers plucking things from  her jacket,  "a  grenade job. In  a  pool.  It
seemed  a  very weak explosion,  but  they all died instantly of hydrostatic
shock." Case felt  her move her fingers experimentally.  The material of the
ball seemed to offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her leg
was excruciating,  impossible.  A  red  moire  shifted  in  her  vision.  "I
wouldn't move them, if I were you." The interior of the ball seemed to
tighten slightly. "It's a  sex toy Jane bought in Berlin. Wiggle  them
long enough and it crushes them to a pulp. Variant of the material they make
this flooring from. Something to do  with the molecules, I  suppose. Are you
in pain?"
     She groaned.
     "You seem to have injured your leg." His  fingers found the flat packet
of drugs in the left back pocket  of  her jeans.  "Well. My  last taste from
Ali, and just in time."
     The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.
     "Hideo,"  said another  voice,  a  woman's,  "she's  losing
consciousness.  Give her something. For that  and for the  pain. She's
very  striking, don't  you  think, Peter? These glasses,  are  they  a
fashion where she comes from?"
     Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon's certainty. The sting of a
needle.
     "I wouldn't know," Riviera was saying. "I've never seen her
native habitat. They came and took me from Turkey."
     "The Sprawl, yes. We have  interests there. And once we sent Hideo.  My
fault,  really.  I'd let  someone  in, a  burglar. He took the  family
terminal." She laughed. "I made it easy for him. To annoy the others. He was
a pretty  boy,  my burglar.  Is  she waking, Hideo? Shouldn't she have
more?"
     "More and she would die," said a third voice.
     The blood mesh slid  into black.  The music returned, horns and  piano.
Dance music.

C A S E : : : : : : : : : : J A C K O U T : : : : : :

     Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's eyes and
creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.
     "You scream, mon, while ago."
     "Molly," he said,  his throat dry. "Got hurt." He took  a white plastic
squeeze bottle from  the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat
water. "I don't like how any of this shit is going."
     The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted,
impacted junk. "Neither do I. We gotta problem."
     Maelcum  pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted, and peered
over his shoulder. "Now who is that mon, Case?"
     "That's  just a picture, Maelcum," Case said wearily. "Guy I know
in  the Sprawl. It's  Wintermute talking.  Picture's supposed to
make us feel at home."
     "Bullshit,"  the  Finn said.  "Like  I told  Molly,  these aren't
masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what
you'd  think  of  as  a personality, much.  But all that's  just
pissing in  the  wind,  Case,  'cause,  like I  just  said,  we  gotta
problem."
     "So express thyself, Mute," Maelcum said.
     "Molly's  leg's falling off, for starts.  Can't walk.
How  it was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get  Peter out of  the
way, talk the magic word outa  3Jane, get  up to the head,  and  say it. Now
she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after her."
     Case stared at the face on the screen. "Us?"
     "So who else?"
     "Aerol," Case said, "the guy on Babylon Rocker, Maelcum's pal."
     "No.  Gotta  be  you.  Gotta  be  somebody who understands  Molly,  who
understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle."
     "You maybe forget that  I'm in the middle of a little run,  here.
Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for. . ."
     "Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link
between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's
navigation  system.  You'll  take  Garvey  into  a  very private  dock
I'll show you. The Chinese  virus has completely penetrated the fabric
of the Hosaka. There's  nothing in the Hosaka  but virus now. When you
dock, the virus will be interfaced  with the Straylight custodial system and
we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and
Maelcum .  You'll find 3Jane,  get the  word out of her, kill Riviera,
get  the key from Molly. You can keep track  of the program by jacking  your
deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's
a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons."
     "Kill Riviera!"
     "Kill him."
     Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Maelcum put his
hand on  his shoulder. "Hey. You forget something." He felt the rage rising,
and  a  kind of glee. "You fucked  up. You blew the controls on the grapples
when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried
the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?"
     The Finn nodded.
     "So  we're  stuck out  here. And that means  you're  fucked
man." He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.
     "Case, mon," Maelcum said softly, "Garvey a tug."
     "That's right," said the Finn, and smiled.

     "You havin' fun in the big  world outside?" the  construct asked,
when Case jacked back in. "Figured that was  Wintermute requestin' the
pleasure. . ."
     "Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?"
     "Bang on. Killer virus."
     "Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it."
     "You wanna tell me, maybe?"
     "Don't have time."
     "Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway."
     "Fuck off," Case said, and flipped, cutting off the tornfingernail edge
of the Flatline's laughter.

     "She dreamed  of a state involving very little in the way of individual
consciousness," 3Jane  was saying.  She  cupped a  large cameo  in her hand,
extending it toward  Molly. The carved  profile was very much like her  own.
"Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution  of the forebrain as  a sort
of  sidestep." She withdrew the  brooch and  studied it, tilting it to catch
the  light at  different  angles. "Only in certain heightened modes would an
individual – a clan member  – suffer the more painful aspects of
self-awareness. . ."
     Molly  nodded. Case remembered the injection.  What had they given her?
The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus  of scrambled
impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of
frying  krill  – his mind recoiled  from it. If he avoided focusing on
it, the impressions overlapped, became a  sensory equivalent of white noise.
If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be?
     Her vision  was abnormally  clear and bright,  even sharper than usual.
Things  seemed  to vibrate,  each  person  or  object  tuned to  a  minutely
different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were  on her
lap. She sat in one of  the pool chairs, her broken leg  propped straight in
front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock,
huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.
     "Where'd he go?" Molly asked. "To take his shot?"
     3Jane  shrugged beneath the folds of the  pale heavy robe and  tossed a
strand of dark hair away from her eyes. "He told me when to let you in," she
said. "He wouldn't tell me  why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would
you have hurt us?"
     Case   felt   Molly   hesitate.    "I   would've    killed   him.
I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with
you."
     "Why?"  3Jane  asked,  tucking   the  cameo  back  into   one   of  the
djellaba's inner pockets. "And why? And what about?"
     Molly seemed  to be  studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth,
the  narrow  hawk  nose.  3Jane's eyes were  dark,  curiously  opaque.
"Because I hate him," she said at  last, "and  the why of  that's just
the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am."
     "And the show," 3Jane said. "I saw the show."
     Molly nodded.
     "But Hideo?"
     "Because they're  the best. Because one of them killed  a partner
of mine, once."
     3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.
     "Because I had to see," Molly said.
     "And  then  we would  have talked, you and I? Like this?" Her dark hair
was very straight,  center-parted,  drawn back into a knot of dull sterling.
"Shall we talk now?"
     "Take this off," Molly said, raising her captive hands.
     "You killed my father,"  3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. "I
was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes, he called them."
     "He killed the puppet. It looked like you."
     "He was fond of broad gestures," she said, and then Riviera  was beside
her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he'd worn in
the roof garden of their hotel.
     "Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl,  isn't she?
I thought so when I  first saw her." He  stepped past 3Jane. "It isn't
going to work, you know."
     "Isn't it, Peter?" Molly managed a grin.
     "Wintermute  won't be  the first to have made  the same  mistake.
Underestimating me."  He crossed  the  tiled  pool border to  a white enamel
table and  splashed mineral  water into a heavy crystal  highball glass. "He
talked with  me,  Molly. I  suppose  he  talked to all of us. You, and Case,
whatever there is  of Armitage  to talk to. He can't really understand
us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be
the statistical animal, darling, and Case is  nothing but, but  I  possess a
quality unquantifiable by its very nature." He drank.
     "And what exactly is that, Peter?" Molly asked, her voice flat.
     Riviera beamed. "Perversity." He walked back to the two women, swirling
the  water that  remained in  the  dense,  deeply carved  cylinder  of  rock
crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. "An  enjoyment of the
gratuitous act.  And I  have  made a  decision,  Molly,  a wholly gratuitous
decision."
     She waited, looking up at him.
     "Oh,  Peter,"  3Jane  said,   with  the  sort  of  gentle  exasperation
ordinarily reserved for children.
     "No word for you, Molly. He told me about that you see. 3Jane knows the
code,  of course, but you  won't have it.  Neither will Wintermute. My
Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse way." He smiled  again. "She
has  designs  on  the  family  empire,  and  a  pair  of  insane  artificial
intelligences, kinky as the  concept may be, would only get  in our way. So.
Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter  says, sit tight. Play
Daddy's favorite  swing  records and let Peter call you up  a band  to
match, a floor of dancers, a  wake for dead King Ashpool." He drank off  the
last of the mineral water. "No, you wouldn't do,  Daddy, you would not
do.  Now that  Peter's come home." And  then,  his face pink  with the
pleasure of  cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard  into  her left
lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.

     Maelcum  was  prone  against the cabin ceiling when  Case  removed  the
trodes. A nylon sling around  his waist was fastened to the panels on either
side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and
was  working on a central panel  with  a clumsy-looking  zero-g  wrench, the
thing's  fat  countersprings twanging as  he removed  another hexhead.
Marcus Garvey was groaning and ticking with g-stress.
     "The Mute takin' I an' I  dock," the  Zionite said, popping
the  hexhead  into  a  mesh  pouch at his waist.  "Maelcum  pilot  th'
landin', meantime need we tool f' th' job."
     "You keep tools back there?" Case craned his neck and watched  cords of
muscle bunching in the brown back.
     "This one," Maelcum said,  sliding a long bundle wrapped  in black poly
from the space  behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a single
hexhead to  hold  it  in  place. The  black package  had drifted aft  before
he'd   finished.   He   thumbed   open  the  vacuum   valves   on  the
workbelt's  gray  pads   and  freed  himself,  retrieving  the   thing
he'd removed.
     He  kicked  back, gliding over his  instruments – a green docking
diagram  pulsed  on  his  central  screen – and  snagged the frame  of
Case's  g-web. He pulled himself  down and picked  at the tape  of his
package with  a thick, chipped  thumbnail.  "Some man in China say th'
truth  comes out this,"  he  said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington
automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters  in front of the
battered  forestock. The  shoulderstock had been removed  entirely, replaced
with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and
ganja.
     "That the only one you got?"
     "Sure,  mon,"  he said,  wiping oil  from  the black barrel with  a red
cloth,  the  black poly wrapping  bunched around the pistolgrip in his other
hand, "I an' I th' Rastafarian navy, believe it."
     Case  pulled  the  trodes down across his  forehead.  He'd  never
bothered  to put  the Texas catheter back on; at least he could  take a real
piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last.
     He jacked in.

        x x x
     "Hey," the  construct  said, "ol'  Peter's totally apeshit,
huh?"
     They  seemed  to  be  part  of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the emerald
arches had widened, grown together, become a solid  mass. Green predominated
in the  planes of the Chinese program  that surrounded  them. "Gettin'
close, Dixie?"
     "Real close. Need you soon."
     "Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang's set itself up  solid in our
Hosaka. I'm going to have to jack  you and my deck out of the Circuit,
haul you into  Straylight, and plug you back in, into  the custodial program
there, Wintermute says. Says the Kuang virus will be all through there. Then
we run from inside through the Straylight net."
     "Wonderful," the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple
when I could do it ass-backwards."
     Case flipped.

     Into her  darkness,  a churning synaesthesia,  where  her  pain was the
taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her  cheek.  She
was  unconscious,  and  he was barred from her  dreams.  When the optic chip
flared,  the alphanumerics were haloed,  each one ringed with  a faint  pink
aura.

     07:29:40.
     "I'm very  unhappy with this, Peter."  3Jane's voice seemed
to  arrive  from a hollow  distance.  Molly  could  hear, he  realized, then
corrected himself.  The simstim unit was intact and still in place; he could
feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears registered the vibrations  of the
girl's  voice.  Riviera  said something brief  and indistinct.  "But I
don't," she said, "and it isn't fun.  Hideo will bring a medical
unit down from intensive care, but this needs a surgeon."
     There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water  lap against
the side of the pool.
     "What was  that you  were telling her, when  I came  back?" Riviera was
very close now.
     "About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside from
Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to her?"
     "I wanted to see if they would break."
     "One did. When she  comes around –  if she  comes around  –
we'll see what color her eyes are."
     "She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't been
here to  distract her,  to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo
to draw her little bomb, where would you be? In her power."
     "No,"  3Jane  said, "there  was  Hideo.  I don't think  you quite
understand about Hideo. She does, evidently."
     "Like a drink?"
     "Wine. The white."
     Case jacked out.

     Maelcum was  hunched over Garvey's controls, tapping out commands
for a docking  sequence. The module's central screen displayed a fixed
red square that represented the Straylight dock. Garvey was a larger square,
green, that shrank slowly,  wavering from  side to side with Maelcum's
commands.  To the  left,  a smaller screen  displayed a  skeletal graphic of
Garvey and Haniwa as they approached the curvature of the spindle.
     "We  got an  hour, man," Case  said, pulling the ribbon  of fiberoptics
from  the Hosaka. His  deck's back-up batteries were  good for  ninety
minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be an additional drain. He
worked quickly,  mechanically, fastening the construct to the bottom  of the
Ono-Sendai  with micropore  tape. Maelcum's  workbelt drifted past. He
snagged  it, unclipped  the  two lengths  of  shock  cord, with  their  gray
rectangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other.
He  held the pads  against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb  lever
that  created  suction.  With  the deck, construct,  and improvised shoulder
strap  suspended  in front  of  him, he  struggled into his leather  jacket,
checking the contents of his pockets. The passport  Armitage had  given him,
the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued  when
he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the  betaphenethylamine he'd
bought  from  Bruce, a roll of  New Yen, half a pack  of Yeheyuans, and  the
shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over his shoulders, heard it click off
the Russian scrubber.  He was about  to do the same with the steel star, but
the rebounding credit chip clipped the  back of his skull, spun off,  struck
the  ceiling,  and  tumbled past Maelcum's left  shoulder. The Zionite
interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked  at the shuriken,
then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.
     "You  missin'  th' Mute,  mon,"  Maelcum said. "Mute say he
messin'  th'   security  for  Garvey.  Garvey  dockin'  as
'nother  boat,  boat they 'spectin' out of  Babylon.  Mute
broadcastin' codes for us."
     "We gonna wear the suits?"
     "Too  heavy." Maelcum shrugged. "Stay in web 'til I tell you." He
tapped a final sequence  into the module and grabbed the worn pink handholds
on either side of the navigation board. Case  saw the green  square shrink a
final few  millimeters to overlap  the  red square.  On the smaller  screen,
Haniwa  lowered  her bow to miss the curve of  the  spindle and was  snared.
Garvey  was still  slung  beneath  her like  a  captive grub. The  tug rang,
shuddered. Two stylized  arms sprang out to grip  the  slender  wasp  shape.
Straylight extruded  a tentative yellow rectangle that  curved, groping past
Haniwa for Garvey.
     There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trembling fronds of
caulk.
     "Mon,"  Maelcum said, "mind we  got  gravity."  A  dozen small  objects
struck the floor of the cabin  simultaneously,  as  though drawn  there by a
magnet.  Case gasped  as  his internal organs were pulled  into  a different
configuration. The deck and construct had fallen painfully to his lap.
     They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.
     Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and removed
his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. "Come now, mon,  if you seh time
be mos' precious."



        19
     The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case  reminded himself,
as he stepped  past the tendrils  of caulk and through Marcus Garvey's
forward  hatch.  Straylight bled  air and water out of Freeside, and  had no
ecosystem of its own.
     The gangway tube  the dock had extended was a more elaborate version of
the one he'd tumbled through to reach Haniwa, designed for use  in the
spindle's  rotation  gravity.  A  corrugated  tunnel,  articulated  by
integral  hydraulic  members,  each segment ringed  with a  loop  of  tough,
nonslip plastic, the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had
snaked  its  way  around  Haniwa;  it  was  horizontal  ,  where  it  joined
Garvey'  s  lock, but curved up sharply  and to  the left, a  vertical
climb around the curvature  of  the yacht's hull.  Maelcum was already
making his way  up  the rings, pulling  himself up with his left  hand,  the
Remington in his  right.  He  wore  a stained  pair of  baggy fatigues,  his
sleeveless green nylon  jacket,  and a pair  of ragged canvas  sneakers with
bright  red  soles. The gangway shifted  slightly, each time  he climbed  to
another ring.
     The clips on  Case's makeshift strap  dug into  his shoulder with
the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. All he felt
now was fear, a  generalized dread.  He pushed  it away, forcing himself  to
replay Armitage's lecture  on  the  spindle and Villa  Straylight.  He
started climbing. Freeside's ecosystem  was limited, not closed.  Zion
was a closed  system, capable of cycling  for years without the introduction
of external materials.  Freeside  produced its own air and water, but relied
on  constant  shipments  of  food,  on  the  regular  augmentation  of  soil
nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
     "Mon," Maelcum said quietly, "get up  here, 'side me." Case edged
sideways on the circular la