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************ WWiilllliiaamm GGiibbssoonn:: CCoouunntt ZZeerroo ************
THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted
it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up
with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-
bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs
and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized
hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the
pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract.
Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour
after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon
liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of
Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first
flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support
vat
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put
Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for
him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-
charides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market
The eyes were green.
He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated
simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of
the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn
dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his
secondfloor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs,
late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt
bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He
masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought
about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back
brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the
morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and
bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman
standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-
light that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner
We're done with you You're good as new
He was good as new. How good was that? He didn't know.
He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of
Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.
And the next. And ever was.
He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black
mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when
they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels
left ferroconcrete, dnnks arrived, dinner was served.
[n Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a
blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a
blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he amved
at the counter at the end of the comdor, he changed his
ticket.
He flew to Mexico.
And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of
brooms, a woman's body warm against his own
The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected
sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of
the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf.
The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse cham-
bray, softened by countless washings.
He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted
window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. He'd had to walk
twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the
sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on
runway concrete.
He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek
of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plas-
tered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. He'd
ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink lucite
and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned
the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger
than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider
blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver.
Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus
through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-
aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was
there to welcome him back to Mexico.
Among the dozen~odd microsofts the Dutchman had given
him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish,
but in Vallarta he'd fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a
dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square
of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus
had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy
pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures,
the
day's winning numbers in the national lottery.
The woman beside him stirred in her sleep.
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her A stranger's
face, but not the one his life in hotels had taught him to
expect. He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of
cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fash-
ion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of
the previous five years.
Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and
Amencan. The blue sheets were nicked across her hips, the
sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her
long thighs with diagonals of gold. The faces he woke with in
the world's hotels were like God's own hood ornaments.
Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed
straight out to the void. But this one was different. Already.
somehow, there was meaning attached to it. Meaning and a
name.
He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His soles regis-
tered the grit of beach-sand on cool tile. There was a faint,
pervasive smell of insecticide. Naked, head throbbing, he
stood. He made his legs move. Walked, tried the first of two
doors, finding white tile, more white plaster, a bulbous chrome
shower head hung from rust-spotted iron pipe The sink's taps
offered identical trickles of blood-warm water. An antique
wristwatch lay beside a plastic tumbler, a mechanical Rolex
on a pale leather strap.
The bathroom's shuttered windows weie unglazed, strung
with a fine green mesh of plastic. He peered out between
hardwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and saw a dry
fountain of flower-painted tiles and the rusted carcass of a
VW Rabbit
Allison. That was her name.
She wore frayed khaki shorts and one of his white T-shirts.
Her legs were very brown. The clockwork Rolex, with its
dull stainless case, went around her left wrist on its pigskin
strap. They went walking, down the curve of beach, toward
Barre de Navidad. They kept to the narrow strip of firm wet
sand above the line of surf.
Already they had a history together; he remembered her at
a stall that morning in the little town's iron-roofed mercado,
how she'd held the huge clay mug of boiled coffee in both
hands. Mopping eggs and salsa from the cracked white plate
with a tortilla, he'd watched flies circling fingers of sunlight
that found their way through a patchwork of palm frond and
corrugated siding. Some talk about her job with some legal
firm in L.A., how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle
pontoon towns tethered off Redondo. He'd told her he was in
personnel. Or had been, anyway. "Maybe I'm looking for a
new line of work
But talk seemed secondary to what there was between
them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against
the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both
shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the
thing. She squeezed his hand.
A blue figure came marching up the beach toward them, a
military policeman headed for town, spitshined black boots
unreal against the soft bright beach. As the man passed,
his face dark and immobile beneath mirrored glasses, Turner
noted the carbine-format Steiner-Optic laser with Fabrique
Nationale sights. The blue fatigues were spotless, creased like
knives.
Turner had been a soldier in his own nght for most of his
adult life, although he'd never worn a uniform. A mercenary,
his employers vast corporations warring covertly for the con-
trol of entire economies. He was a specialist in the extraction
of top executives and research people. The multinationals he
worked for would never admit that men like Turner existed.
You worked your way through most of a bottle of Her-
radura last night," she said.
He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was
watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails
painted with chipped pink gloss.
The breakers rolled in, their edges transparent as green
glass.
The spray beaded on her tan.
After their first day together, life fell into a simple pattern
They had breakfast in the mercado. at a stall with a concrete
counter worn smooth as polished marble. They spent the
morning swimming, until the sun drove them back into the
shuttered coolness of the hotel, where they made love under
the slow wooden blades of the ceiling fan, then slept. In the
afternoons they explored the maze of narrow streets behind
the Avenida, or went hiking in the hills. They dined in
beachfront restaurants and drank on the patios of the white
hotels. Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf
And gradually, without words, she taught him a new style
of passion. He was accustomed to being served, serviced
anonymously by skilled professionals. Now, in the white
cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt
Pacific mixed with her own wet, her inner thighs cool against
his cheeks. Palms cradling her hips, he held her, raised her
like a chalice, lips pressing tight, while his tongue sought the
locus, the point, the frequency that would bring her home
Then, grinning, he'd mount, enter, and find his own way
there.
Sometimes, then, he'd talk, long spirals of unfocused nar-
rative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very
little, but he'd learned to value what little she did say, and,
always, she held him. And listened.
A week passed, then another. He woke to their final day
together in that same cool room, finding her beside him. Over
breakfast he imagined he felt a change in her, a tension.
They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot
the faint edge of anxiety.
In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach,
toward Barre, the way they'd gone that first morning.
Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his
ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Span-
ish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates
hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect.
Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered
the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer,
sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair
of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida.
His tan was dark and even The angular patchwork left by
the Dutchman's grafts was gone, and she had taught him the
unity of his body Mornings, when he met the green eyes in
the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman
no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry
cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a
country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the
smell of dust and fried breads
The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way
down the bay's arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a
detonation.
Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the
corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came
hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty
doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure's
fa~ade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three
levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of
finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and
pattern of tile
HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capi-
tals above one concrete arch. "Mar," he said, completing it,
though he'd removed the microsoft.
"It's over," she said, stepping beneath the arch, into
shadow.
"What's over?" He followed, the straw basket rubbing
against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between
his toes.
"Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future."
He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed-
springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls.
"It smells like piss," he said. ``Let's swim.
The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between
them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner's room and ate,
silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved
her sun-streaked hair.
"You make me think about horses," he said finally
"Well," she said, as though she spoke from the depths of
exhaustion, "they've only been extinct for thirty years."
"No," he said, "their hair. The hair on their necks, when
they ran."
"Manes," she said, and there were tears in her eyes.
"Fuck it." Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep
breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the
beach. "It, me, what's it matter?" Her arms around him
again. "Oh, come on, Turner Come on"
And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed
something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen,
where the water met the sky.
When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the
yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white
riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall
away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the
surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did,
back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn't survived. The
waves had licked away its foundation.
"Give me the basket
She was buttoning her blouse. He'd bought it for her in one
of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue
Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the
shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. "I said give me
the basket."
She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon,
finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple
slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled
them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He
snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad-
ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the
Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung
toward the beach.
``Turner, I''
"Get up." Bundling the blanket and her towel into the
basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the
basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her
quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands.
"Maybe I'm wrong," he said. "If I am, get out of here. Cut
for that second stand of palms." He pointed. "Don't go back
to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home~~
He could hear the purr of the outboard now
He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she
turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stum-
bling in a drift of sand. She didn't look back.
He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflat-
able was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named
Tsushima, and he'd last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He'd
seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck.
He didn't need the glasses to know that the inflatable's
passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka's ninjas.
He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his
last can of Mexican beer.
He looked back at the line of white hotels, his hands inert
on one of Tsushima's teak railings Behind the hotels, the
little town's three holograms glowed: Banamex, Aeronaves,
and the cathedral's six-meter Virgin.
Conroy stood beside him. "Crash job," Conroy said. "You
know how it is." Conroy's voice was flat and uninflected, as
though he'd modeled it after a cheap voice chip. His face was
broad and white, dead white. His eyes were dark-ringed and
hooded, beneath a peroxide thatch combed back from a wide
forehead. He wore a black polo shirt and black slacks. "In-
side," he said, turning. Turner followed, ducking to enter the
cabin door. White screens, pale flawless pineTokyo's aus-
tere corporate chic.
Conroy settled himself on a low, rectangular cushion of
slate-gray ultrasuede. Turner stood, his hands slack at his
sides. Conroy took a knurled silver inhaler from the low
enamel table between them. "Choline enhancer?"
"No."
Conroy jammed the inhaler into one nostril and snorted.
"You want some sushi?" He put the inhaler back on the
table. "We caught a couple of red snapper about an hour
ago"
Turner stood where he was, staring at Conroy.
"Christopher Mitchell," Conroy said. "Maas Biolabs. Their
head hybridoma man. He's coming over to Hosaka."
"Never heard of him."
"Bullshit. How about a drink?"
Turner shook his head.
Silicon's on the way out, Turner. Mitchell's the man who
made biochips work, and Maas is sitting on the major patents.
You know that. He's the man for monoclonals. He wants out
YOU
and me, Turner, we're going to shift him."
"I think I'm retired, Conroy. I was having a good time,
back there."
"That's what the psych team in Tokyo say. I mean, it's not
exactly your first time out of the box, is it? She's a field
psychologist, on retainer to Hosaka."
A muscle in Turner's thigh began to jump.
"They say you're ready, Turner. They were a little wor-
ried, after New Delhi. so they wanted to check it out. Little
therapy on the side. Never hurts, does it?"
2
MARY
SHE'D WORN HER BEST for the interview, but it was raining in
Brussels and she had no money for a cab. She walked from
the Eurotrans station.
Her hand, in the pocket of her good jacketa Sally Stanley
but almost a year oldwas a white knot around the crumpled
telefax. She no longer needed it, having memorized the ad-
dress, but it seemed she could no more release it than break
the trance that held her here now, staring into the window of
an expensive shop that sold menswear, her focus phasing
between sedate flannel dress shirts and the reflection of her
own dark eyes.
Surely the eyes alone would be enough to cost her the job.
No need for the wet hair she now wished she'd let Andrea
cut. The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone
could read, and most certainly these things would soon
be revealed to Herr Josef Virek, least likely of potential
employers.
When the telefax had been delivered, she'd insisted on
regarding it as some cruel prank, another nuisance call. She'd
had enough of those, thanks to the media, so many that
Andrea had ordered a special program for the apartment's
phone, one that filtered out incoming calls from any number
that wasn't listed in her permanent directory. But that, An-
drea had insisted, must have been the reason for the telefax.
How else could anyone reach her?
But Marly had shaken her head and huddled deeper into
Andrea's old terry robe. Why would Virek, enormously weal-
thy, collector and patron, wish to hire the disgraced former
operator of a tiny Paris gallery?
Then it had been Andrea's time for head-shaking, in her
impatience with the new, the disgraced Marly Krushkhova,
who spent entire days in the apartment now, who sometimes
didn't bother to dress. The attempted sale, in Paris, of a
single forgery, was hardly the novelty Marly imagined it to
have been, she said. If the press hadn't been quite so anxious
to show up the disgusting Gnass for the fool he most as-
suredly was, she continued, the business would hardly have
been news. Gnass was wealthy enough, gross enough, to
make for a weekend's scandal. Andrea smiled. "If you had
been less attractive, you would have gotten far less attention."
Marly shook her head.
"And the forgery was Alain's. You were innocent. Have
you forgotten that?"
Marly went into the bathroom, still huddled in the thread-
bare robe, without answering.
Beneath her friend's wish to comfort, to help, Marly could
already sense the impatience of someone forced to share a
very small space with an unhappy, nonpaying guest.
And Andrea had had to loan her the fare for the Eurotrans.
With a conscious, painful effort of will, she broke from the
circle of her thoughts and merged with the dense but sedate
flow of serious Belgian shoppers.
A girl in bright tights and a boyfriend's oversized loden
jacket brushed past, scrubbed and smiling. At the next inter-
section, Marly noticed an outlet for a fashion line she'd
favored in her own student days. The clothes looked impossi-
bly young.
In her white and secret fist, the telefax.
Galerie Duperey, 14 Rue au Beurre, Bruxelles
Josef Virek.
The receptionist in the cool gray anteroom of the Galerie
Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely
poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble
inlaid with an enameled keyboard. She raised lustrous eyes as
Marly approached. Marly imagined the click and whirr of
shutters, her bedraggled image whisked away to some far
corner of Josef Virek's empire.
`Marly Krushkhova," she said, fighting the urge to pro-
duce the compacted wad of telefax, smooth it pathetically on
the cool and flawless marble. "For Herr Virek."
"Fraulein Krushkhova," the receptionist said, "Herr Virek
is unable to be in Brussels today."
Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of
the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was
learning to take in disappointment. "I see."
"However, he has chosen to conduct the interview via a
sensory link. If you will please enter the third door on your
left .
The room was bare and white. On two walls hung un-
framed sheets of what looked like rain-stained cardboard,
stabbed through repeatedly with a variety of instruments.
Katatonenkunst. Conservative. The sort of work one sold to
committees sent round by the boards of Dutch commercial
banks.
She sat down on a low bench covered in leather and finally
allowed herself to release the telefax. She was alone, but
assumed that she was being observed somehow.
"Fraulein Krushkhova." A young man in a technician's
dark green smock stood in the doorway opposite the one
through which she'd entered. "In a moment, please, you will
cross the room and step through this door. Please grasp the
knob slowly, firmly, and in a manner that affords maximum
contact with the flesh of your palm. Step through carefully.
There should be a minimum of spatial disorientation."
She blinked at him "I beg"
"The sensory link," he said, and withdrew, the door clos-
ing behind him.
She rose, tried to tug some shape into the damp lapels of
her jacket, touched her hair, thought better of it, took a deep
breath, and crossed to the door. The receptionist's phrase had
prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim
signal routed via Bell Europa. She'd assumed she'd wear a
helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a
passive viewer as a human camera.
But Virek's wealth was on another scale of magnitude
entirely.
As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed
to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and
temperature in the first second of contact.
Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping
out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she
grasped now in wonder.
A few drops of rain blew into her face.
Smell of rain and wet earth.
A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken
art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek's
illusion.
Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona,
smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada
Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well,
fighting vertigo. She knew this place She was in the Guell
Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise be-
hind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of
crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of
rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.
"You are disoriented. Please forgive me."
Josef Virek was perched below her on one of the park's
serpentine benches, his wide shoulders hunched in a soft
topeoat. His features had been vaguely familiar to her all her
she remembered, for some reason, a photograph of
life. Now
Virek and the king of England. He smiled at her. His head
was large and beautifully shaped beneath a brush of stiff dark
gray hair. His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he
sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce. His eyes, very
large behind the round, rimless glasses that were a trademark,
were pale blue and strangely soft.
"Please." He patted the bench's random mosaic of shat-
ftered pottery with a narrow hand. "You must forgive my
reliance on technology. I have been confined for over a
decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stock-
holm. Or perhaps of hell. I am not a well man, Marly. Sit
beside me."
Taking a deep breath, she descended the stone steps and
crossed the cobbles "Herr Virek," she said, "I saw you
lecture in Munich, two years ago. A critique of Faessler and
his autisuches Theater. You seemed well then
"Faessler?" Virek's tanned forehead wrinkled. "You saw
a double. A hologram perhaps. Many things, Marly, are
perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become
autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one
I another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities. However, for
reasons so complex as to be entirely occult, the fact of my
illness has never been made public."
She took her place beside him and peered down at the dirty
pavement between the scuffed toes of her black Paris boots.
She saw a chip of pale gravel, a rusted paper clip, the small
dusty corpse of a bee or hornet. "It's amazingly detailed.
"Yes," he said, "the new Maas biochips. You should
know," he continued, "that what I know of your private life
is very nearly as detailed. More than you yourself do, in sox~~e
instances."
"You do?" It was easiest, she found, to focus on the city,
picking out landmarks remembered from a half-dozen student
holidays. There, just there, would be the Ramblas, parrots
and flowers, the taverns serving dark beer and squid.
"Yes I know that it was your lover who convinced you
that you had found a lost Cornell original .
Many shut her eyes.
"He commissioned the forgery, hiring two talented student-
artisans and an established historian who found himself in
certain personal difficulties . . . He paid them with money
he'd already extracted from your gallery, as you have no
doubt guessed. You are crying .
Marly nodded. A cool forefinger tapped her wrist.
"I bought Gnass. I bought the police off the case. The
press weren't worth buying; they rarely are And now, per-
haps, your slight notoriety may work to your advantage."
"Herr Virek, I"
"A moment, please. Paco! Come here, child."
Marly opened her eyes and saw a child of perhaps six
years, tightly gotten up in dark suit coat and knickers, pale
stockings, high-buttoned black patent boots. Brown hair fell
across his forehead in a smooth wing. He held something in
his hands, a box of some kind.
"Gaudi began the park in 1900," Virek said "Paco wears
the period costume. Come here, child. Show us your marvel."
"Sefior," Paco lisped, bowing, and stepped forward to
exhibit the thing he held.
Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects.
"Cornell," she said, her tears forgotten. "Cornell?" She
turned to Virek.
"Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a
Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist."
"There are more? More boxes?"
"I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The
Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The unnatu-
ral density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works
of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I
ordinarily take little interest in
But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossi-
ble distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle,
and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely
from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit
boards, faced with mazes of gold A smooth white sphere of
baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-
length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human
wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a
small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the
surface of the skinbut the thing's face was seared and
blackened.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries
of human experience.
"Gracias, Paco."
Box and boy were gone.
She gaped.
"Ah. Forgive me, I have forgotten that these transitions are
too abrupt for you. Now, however, we must discuss your
assignment .
"Herr Virek," she said, "what is `Paco'?"
"A subprogram."
``I see.''
"I have hired you to find the maker of the box
"But, Herr Virek, with your resources"
"Of which you are now one, child. Do you not wish to be
employed? When the business of Gnass having been stung
with a forged Cornell came to my attention, I saw that you
might be of use in this matter." He shrugged. "Credit me
with a certain talent for obtaining desired results."
"Certainly, Herr Virek! And, yes, I do wish to work!"
"Very well You will be paid a salary. You will be given
access to certain lines of credit, although, should you need to
purchase, let us say. substantial amounts of real estate"
"Real estate?"
"Or a corporation, or spacecraft. In that event, you will
require my indirect authorization. Which you will almost
certainly be given Otherwise, you will have a free hand I
suggest, however, that you work on a scale with which you
yourself are comfortable. Otherwise, you run the risk of
losing touch with your intuition, and intuition, in a case such
as this, is of crucial importance." The famous smile glittered
for her once more.
She took a deep breath. "Herr Virek, what if I fail? How
long do I have to locate this artist?"
"The rest of your life," he said.
Forgive me," she found herself saying, to her horror,
"but I understood you to say that you live in aa vat?"
"Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I
should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh.
Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can
no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body
having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I
imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would
have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of
some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine
net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something
like a tenth of my annual income. Making me, I suppose, the
world's most expensive invalid. I was touched, Marly, at
your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from
which they unfold."
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue
eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that
the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
A wing of night swept Barcelona's sky. like the twitch of a
vast slow shutter, and Virek and Gdell were gone, and she
found herself seated again on the low leather bench, staring at
torn sheets of stained cardboard.
3
~I~y
`3IJIi~
A WI[~IiN
IT WAS sUCH an easy thing, death. He saw that now: It just
happened. You screwed up by a fraction and there it was, some-
thing chill and odorless, ballooning out from the four stupid
corners of the room, your mother's Barrytown living room.
Shit, he thought, Two-a-Day'll laugh his ass off, first time
out and I pull a wilson.
The only sound in the room was the faint steady burr of his
teeth vibrating, supersonic palsy as the feedback ate into his
nervous system. He watched his frozen hand as it trembled
delicately, centimeters from the red plastic stud that could
break the connection that was killing him
Shit.
He'd come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the
icebreaker he'd rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in. punch-
ing for the base he'd chosen as his first live target. Figured
that was the way to do it; you wanna do it. then do it. He'd
only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but he
already knew he wanted to be more than just some Barrytown
hotdogger. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, but it was
already over. Shows never ended this way, not right at the
beginning. In a show, the cowboy hero's girl or maybe his
partner would run in, slap the trodes off, hit that little red
ore
stud. So you'd make it, make it through.
But Bobby was alone now, his autonomic nervous system
overridden by the defenses of a database three thousand kilo-
meters from Barrytown, and he knew it. There was some
magic chemistry in that impending darkness, something that
let him glimpse the infinite desirability of that room, with its
carpet-colored carpet and curtain-colored curtains, its dingy
foam sofa-suite, the angular chrome frame supporting the
components of a six-year-old Hitachi entertainment module.
He'd carefully closed those curtains in preparation for his
run, but now, somehow, he seemed to see out anyway, where
the condos of Barrytown crested back in their concrete wave
to break against the darker towers of the Projects. That condo
wave bristled with a fine insect fur of antennas and chicken-
wired dishes, strung with lines of drying clothes. His mother
liked to bitch about that; she had a dryer. He remembered her
knuckles white on the imitation bronze of the balcony railing,
dry wrinkles where her wrist was bent. He remembered a
dead boy carried out of Big Playground on an alloy stretcher,
bundled in plastic the same color as a cop car. Fell and hit his
head. Fell. Head. Wilson.
His heart stopped. It seemed to him that it fell sideways,
kicked like an animal in a cartoon.
Sixteenth second of Bobby Newmark's death. His hotdog-
ger's death.
And something leaned in, vastness unutterable, from beyond
the most distant edge of anything he'd ever known or imag-
ined, and touched him.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING~ WHY ARE THEY DOING THAT TO YOU'
Girlvoice, brownhair, darkeyes
KILLING ME KiLLING ME GET if OFF GET if OFF
Darkeyes, desertstar, tanshirt, girlhair
BUT IT'S A TRICK, SEE? YOU ONLY THINK
IT'S GOT YOU. LOOK. NOW I FIT HERE AND
YOU AREN'T CARRYING THE LOOP.
And his heart rolled right over, on its back, and kicked his
lunch up with its red cartoon legs, galvanic frog-leg spasm
hurling him from the chair and tearing the trodes from his
forehead. His bladder let go when his head clipped the corner
of the Hitachi, and someone was saying fuck fuck fuck into
the dust smell of carpet. Girlvoice gone, no desertstar, flash
impression of cool wind and waterworn stone
Then his head exploded. He saw it very clearly, from
somewhere far away. Like a phosphorus grenade.
White.
Light.
4
J[WKINI~
Thn BLACK HONDA hovered twenty meters above the octagonal
deck of the derelict oil rig. It was nearing dawn, and Turner
could make out the faded outline of a biohazard trefoil mark-
ing the helicopter pad.
"You got a biohazard down there, Conroy?"
"None you aren't used to," Conroy said.
A figure in a red jumpsuit made brisk arm signals to the
Honda's pilot. Propwash flung scraps of packing waste into
the sea as they landed. Conroy slapped the release plate on
his harness and leaned across Turner to unseal the hatch The
roar of the engines battered them as the hatch slid open.
Conroy was jabbing him in the shoulder, making urgent
lifting motions with an upturned palm. He pointed to the
pilot.
Turner scrambled out and dropped, the prop a blur of
thunder, then Conroy was crouching beside him. They cleared
the faded trefoil with the bent-legged crab scuttle common to
helicopter pads. the Honda's wind snapping their pants legs
around their ankles. Turner camed a plain gray suitcase
molded from ballistic ABS, his only piece of luggage; some-
one had packed it for him, at the hotel, and it had been
waiting on Tsushima. A sudden change in pitch told him the
Honda was rising. It went whining away toward the coast,
showing no lights. As the sound faded, Turner heard the cries
of gulls and the slap and slide of the Pacific.
"Someone tried to set up a data haven here once," Conroy
said. "International waters. Back then nobody lived in orbit,
so it made sense for a few years. . ." He started for a rusted
forest of beams supporting the rig's superstructure. "One
scenario Hosaka showed me, we'd get Mitchell out here,
clean him up, stick him on Tsushima, and full steam for old
Japan. I told `em, forget that shit. Mans gets on to it and they
can come down on this thing with anything they want. I told
`em, that compound they got down in the D.F, that's the
ticket, right? Plenty of shit Mans wouldn't pull there, not in
the fucking middle of Mexico City . .
A figure stepped from the shadows, head distorted by the
bulbous goggles of an image-amplification rig. It waved them
on with the blunt, clustered muzzles of a Lansing fldchette
gun. "Biohazard," Conroy said as they edged past. "Duck
your head here. And watch it, the stairs get slippery
The rig smelled of rust and disuse and brine. There were no
windows. The discolored cream walls were blotched with
spreading scabs of rust. Battery-powered fluorescent lanterns
were slung, every few meters, from beams overhead, casting
a hideous green-tinged light, at once intense and naggingly
uneven. At least a dozen figures were at work, in this central
room; they moved with the relaxed precision of good techni-
cians. Professionals, Turner thought; their eyes seldom met
and there was little talking. It was cold, very cold, and Conroy
had given him a huge parka covered with tabs and zippers.
A bearded man in a sheepskin bomber jacket was securing
bundled lengths of fiber-optic line to a dented bulkhead with
silver tape. Conroy was locked in a whispered argument with
a black woman who wore a parka like Turner's. The bearded
tech looked up from his work and saw Turner. "Shee-it," he
said, still on his knees, "I figured it was a big one, but I
guess it's gonna be a rough one, too." He stood, wiping his
palms automatically on his jeans. Like the rest of the techs,
he wore micropore surgical gloves. "You're Turner." He
grinned, glanced quickly in Conroy's direction, and pulled a
black plastic flask from a jacket pocket. "Take some chill
off. You remember me. Worked on that job in Marrakech.
IBM boy went over to Mitsu-G. Wired the charges on that
bus you `n' the Frenchman drove into that hotel lobby."
Turner took the flask, snapped its lid, and tipped it. Bour-
bon. It stung deep and sour, warmth spreading from the
region of his sternum. "Thanks." He returned the flask and
the man pocketed it.
"Onkey," the man said. "Name's Oakey? You remember?"
"Sure," Turner lied, "Marrakech."
"Wild Turkey," Onkey said. "Flew in through Schipol, I
hit the duty-free. Your partner there," another glance at
Conroy, "he's none too relaxed, is he? I mean, not like
Marrakech, right?"
Turner nodded.
"You need anything," Oakey said, "lemme know."
"Like what?"
`Nother drink, or I got some Peruvian flake, the kind
that's real yellow." Oakey grinned again.
"Thanks," Turner said, seeing Conroy turn from the black
woman. Onkey saw, too, kneeling quickly and tearing off a
fresh length of silver tape.
"Who was that?" Conroy asked, after leading Turner through
a narrow door with decayed black gasket seals at its edges
Conroy spun the wheel that dogged the door shut, someone
had oiled it recently.
"Name's Onkey," Turner said, taking in the new room.
Smaller. Two of the lanterns, folding tables, chairs, all new
On the tables, instrumentation of some kind, under black
plastic dustcovers.
"Friend of yours?"
"No," Turner said. "He worked for me once." He went
to the nearest table and flipped back a dustcover. "What's
this?" The console had the blank, half-finished look of a
factory prototype.
"Maas-Neotek cyberspace deck
Turner raised his eyebrows. "Yours?"
"We got two. One's on site. From Hosaka. Fastest thing in
the matrix, evidently, and Hosaka can't even de-engineer the
chips to copy them. Whole other technology."
"They got them from Mitchell?"
"They aren't saying. The fact they'd let go of `em just to
give our jockeys an edge is some indication of how badly
they want the man."
"Who's on console, Conroy?"
"Jaylene Slide. I was talking to her just now." He jerked
his head in the direction of the door. "The site man's out of
L.A., kid called Ramirez."
"They any good?" Turner replaced the dustcover.
"Better be, for what they'll cost. Jaylene's gotten herself a
hot rep the past two years, and Ramirez is her understudy.
Shit' `Conroy shrugged' `you know these cowboys. Fuck-
ing crazy
`Where'd you get them? Where'd you get Gakey for that
matter?"
Conroy smiled. "From your agent, Turner."
Turner stared at Conroy, then nodded. Turning, he lifted
the edge of the next dustcover. Cases, plastic and styrofoam,
stacked neatly on the cold metal of the table. He touched a
blue plastic rectangle stamped with a silver monogram: S&W.
"Your agent," Conroy said, as Turner snapped the case
open. The pistol lay there in its molded bed of pale blue
foam, a massive revolver with an ugly housing that bulged
beneath the squat barrel. "S&W Tactical. .408. with a xenon
projector," Conroy said. "What he said you'd want."
Turner took the gun in his hand and thumbed the batterytest
stud for the projector. A red LED in the walnut grip pulsed
twice. He swung the cylinder out. "Ammunition?"
"On the table. Hand-loads, explosive tips."
Turner found a transparent cube of amber plastic, opened it
with his left hand, and extracted a cartridge. "Why did they
pick me for this, Conroy?" He examined the cartridge, then
inserted it carefully into one of the cylinder's six chambers.
"I dont know," Conroy said. "Felt like they had you
slotted from go, whenever they heard from Mitchell . .
Turner spun the cylinder rapidly and snapped it back into
the frame. "I said, `Why did they pick me for this, Conroy?'
He raised the pistol with both hands and extended his arms,
pointing it directly at Conroy's face. "Gun like this, some-
times you can see right down the bore, if the light's right, see
if there's a bullet there."
Conroy shook his head, very slightly.
"Ormaybeyoucanseeitinoneoftheothercham~~ .
"No," Conroy said, very softly, "no way."
"Maybe the shrinks screwed up, Conroy. How about that?"
"No," Conmy said, his face blank. "They didn't, and you
won't."
Turner pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty
chamber. Conmy blinked once, opened his mouth, closed it,
watched as Turner lowered the Smith & Wesson. A single
bead of sweat rolled down from Conroy's hairline and lost
itself in an eyebrow.
"Well?" Turner asked, the gun at his side.
Conmy shrugged. "Don't do that shit," he said.
"They want me that badT'
Conroy nodded. "It's your show. Turner."
"Where's Mitchell?" He opened the cylinder again and
began to load the five remaining chambers.
"Arizona. About fifty kilos from the Sonora line, in a
mesatop research arcology. Maas Biolabs North America.
They own everything around there, right down to the border,
and the mesa's smack in the middle of the footprints of four
recon satellites. Mucho tight."
"And how are we supposed to get in?"
"We aren't. Mitchell's coming out, on his own. We wait
for him, pick him up, get his ass to Hosaka intact" Conroy
hooked a forefinger behind the open collar of his black shirt
and drew out a length of black nylon cord, then a small black
nylon envelope with a Velcro fastener. He opened it carefully
and extracted an object, which he offered to Turner on his
open palm "Here. This is what he `sent
Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the
thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft. one
end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation
unlike anything he'd seen. "What is it?"
"It's biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was
output from an Al. It's sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a
message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it
yourself; you wanna get the picture fast . .
Turner glanced up from the gray thing "How'd it grab
Jaylene?"
"She said you better be lying down when you do it She
didn't seem to like it much."
Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on
a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and
jacked Mitchell's dossier. It came on slow; he had time to
close his eyes.
Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the
green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his
eyes. . . . It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlin-
ear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative con-
veyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely
like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence
at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, at-
tack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except
that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation,
but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol
system. The data had never been intended for human input.
Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it,
his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a night-
mare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple,
terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturb-
ing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and
where everything is utterly wrong
The intimacy of the thing was hideous He fought down
waves of raw transference, bringing all his will to bear on
crushing a feeling that was akin to love, the obsessive tender-
ness a watcher comes to feel for the subject of prolonged
surveillance. Days or hours later, he knew, the most minute
details of Mitchell's academic record might bob to the surface
of his mind, or the name of a mistress, the scent of her heavy
red hair in the sunlight through
He sat up quickly, the plastic soles of his shoes smacking
the rusted deck. He still wore the parka, and the Smith &
Wesson, in a side pocket, swung painfully against his hip.
It would pass. Mitchell's psychic odor would fade, as
surely as the Spanish grammar in the lexicon evaporated after
each use. What he had experienced was a Maas security
dossier compiled by a sentient computer, nothing more He
replaced the biosoft in Conroy's little black wallet, smoothed
the Velcro seal with his thumb, and put the cord around his
neck.
He became aware of the sound of waves lapping the flanks
of the rig.
"Hey, boss," someone said, from beyond the brown mili-
tary blanket that screened the entrance to the dorm area,
"Conroy says it's time for you to inspect the troops, then you
and him depart for other parts." Oakey's bearded face slid
from behind the blanket "Otherwise, I wouldn't wake you
up, right?"
"I wasn't sleeping," Turner said, and stood, fingers reflex-
ively kneading the skin around the implanted socket.
"Too bad," Oakey said. "I got derms'll put you under all
the way, one hour on the button, then kick in some kind of
righteous upper, get you up and on the case, no lie
Turner shook his head. "Take me to Conroy"
S
TII[
MAIU..Y CHECKED iwro a small hotel with green plants in heavy
brass pots, the corridors tiled like worn marble chessboards.
The elevator was a scrolled gilt cage with rosewood panels
smelling of lemon oil and small cigars.
Her room was on the fifth floor. A single tall window
overlooked the avenue, the kind of window you could actu-
ally open. When the smiling bellman had gone, she collapsed
into an armchair whose plush fabric contrasted comfortably
with the muted Belgian carpet. She undid the zips on her old
Paris boots for the last time, kicked them off, and stared at
the dozen glossy carrier bags the bellman had arranged on the
bed. Tomorrow, she thought, she'd buy luggage. And a
toothbrush.
"I'm in shock," she said to the bags on the bed. "I must
take care. Nothing seems real now." She looked down and
saw that her hose were both out at the toe. She shook her
head. Her new purse lay on the white marble table beside the
bed; it was black, cut from cowhide tanned thick and soft as
Flemish butter. It had cost more than she would have owed
Andrea for her share of a month's rent, but that was also true
of a single night's stay in this hotel. The purse contained her
passport and the credit chip she'd been issued in the Galerie
Duperey, drawn on an account held in her name by an orbital
branch of the Nederlands Algemeen Bank.
She went into the bathroom and worked the smooth brass
levers of the big white tub. Hot, aerated water hissed out
through a Japanese filtration device. The hotel provided pack-
ets of bath salts, tubes of creams and scented oils. She
emptied a tube of oil into the filling tub and began to remove
her clothes, feeling a pang of loss when she tossed the Sally
Stanley behind her. Until an hour before, the year-old jacket
had been her favorite garment and perhaps the single most
expensive thing she'd ever owned. Now it was something for
the cleaners to take away; perhaps it would find its way to
one of the city's flea markets, the sort of place where she'd
hunted bargains as an art-school girl.
The mirrors misted and ran, as the room filled with scented
steam, blurring the reflection of her nakedness. Was it really
this easy? Had Virek's slim gold credit chip checked her out
of her misery and into this hotel, where the towels were white
and thick and scratchy? She was aware of a certain spiritual
vertigo, as though she trembled at the edge of some precipice.
She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one
had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the
Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they
were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would
be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water.
Yes, my dear, it's wet; yes, my child, it's certainly warm,
scented, scratchy-toweled. She stepped into the tub and lay
down.
Tomorrow she would have her hair cut. In Paris.
Andrea's phone rang sixteen times before Marly remem-
bered the special program. It would still be in place, and this
expensive little Brussels hotel would not be listed. She leaned
out to replace the handset on the marble-topped table and it
chimed once, softly.
"A courier has delivered a parcel, from the Galerie
Duperey."
When the bellmana younger man this time, dark and
possibly Spanishhad gone, she took the package to the
window and turned it over in her hands It was wrapped in a
single sheet of handmade paper, dark gray, folded and tucked
in that mysterious Japanese way that required neither glue nor
string, but she knew that once she'd opened it, she'd never
get it folded again. The name and address of the Galerie were
embossed in one corner, and her name and the name of her
hotel were handwritten across the center in perfect italic
script.
She unfolded the paper and found herself holding a new
Braun holoprojector and a flat envelope of clear plastic. The
envelope contained seven numbered tabs of holofiche. Beyond
the miniature iron balcony, the sun was going down, painting
the Old Town gold. She heard car horns and the cries of
children. She closed the window and crossed to a writing
desk. The Braun was a smooth black rectangle powered by
solar cells. She checked the charge, then took the first holo-
fiche from the envelope and slotted it.
The box she'd seen in Virek's simulation of the Guell Park
blossomed above the Braun, glowing with the crystal resolu-
tion of the finest museum-grade holograms. Bone and circuit-
gold, dead lace, and a dull white marble rolled from clay.
Marly shook her head. How could anyone have arranged
these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the
heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook? But then she
nodded. It could be done, she knew; it had been done many
years ago by a man named Cornell, who'd also made boxes.
Then she glanced to the left, where the elegant gray paper
lay on the desktop. She'd chosen this hotel at random, when
she'd grown tired of shopping. She'd told no one she was
here, and certainly no one from the Galerie Duperey.
`C
I~AIfY11JWN
HE STAYED OUT FOR something like eight hours, by the clock
on his mother's Hitachi. Came to staring at Its dusty face, some
hard thing wedged under his thigh. The Ono-Sendai. He
rolled over. Stale puke smell.
Then he was in the shower, not sure quite how he'd gotten
there, spinning the taps with his clothes still on. He clawed
and dug and pulled at his face. It felt like a rubber mask.
"Something happened." Something bad, big, he wasn't
sure what.
His wet clothes gradually mounded up on the tile floor of
the shower. Finally he stepped out, went to the sink and
flicked wet hair back from his eyes, peered at the face in the
mirror. Bobby Newmark, no problem.
"No, Bobby, problem. Gotta problem .
Towel around his shoulders, dripping water, he followed
the narrow hallway to his bedroom, a tiny, wedge-shaped
space at the very back of the condo. His holoporn unit lit as
he stepped in, half a dozen girls grinning, eyeing him with
evident delight. They seemed to be standing beyond the walls
of the room, in hazy vistas of powder-blue space, their white
smiles and taut young bodies bright as neon. Two of them
edged forward and began to touch themselves.
"Stop it," he said.
The projection unit shut itself down at his command; the
dreamgirls vanished. The thing had originally belonged to
Ling Warren's older brother; the girls' hair and clothes were
dated and vaguely ridiculous. You could talk with them and
get them to do things with themselves and each other. Bobby
remembered being thirteen and in love with Brandi, the one
with the blue rubber pants. Now he valued the projections
mainly for the illusion of space they could provide in the
makeshift bedroom.
"Something fucking happened," he said, pulling on black
jeans and an almost-clean shirt. He shook his head. "What?
Fucking what?" Some kind of power surge on the line? Some
flukey action down at the Fission Authority? Maybe the base
he'd tried to invade had suffered some strange breakdown, or
been attacked from another qu~er... But he was left with
the sense of having met someone, someone who . . . He'd
unconsciously extended his right hand, fingers spread, be-
seechingly. "Fuck," he said. The fingers balled into a fist.
Then it came back: first, the sense of the big thing, the really
big thing, reaching for him across cyberspace, and then the
girl-impression. Someone brown, slender, crouching some-
where in a strange bright dark full of stars and wind. But it
slid away as his mind went for it.
Hungry, he got into sandals and headed back toward the
kitchen, rubbing at his hair with a damp towel. On his way
through the living room, he noticed the ON telltale of the
Ono-Sendai glaring at him from the carpet. "0 shit." He
stood there and sucked at his teeth. It was still jacked in. Was
it possible that it was still linked with the base he'd tried to
run? Could they tell he wasn't dead? He had no idea. One
thing he did know, though, was that they'd have his number
and good. He hadn't bothered with the cutouts and frills that
would've kept them from running a backtrack.
They had his address.
Hunger forgotten, he spun into the bathroom and rooted
through the soggy clothing until he found his credit chip.
He had two hundred and ten New Yen stashed in the
hollow plastic handle of a multibit screwdriver. Screwdriver
and credit chip secure in his jeans, he pulled on his oldest,
heaviest pair of boots, then clawed unwashed clothing from
beneath the bed. He came up with a black canvas jacket with
at least a dozen pockets, one of them a single huge pouch
across the small of the back, a kind of integral rucksack.
There was a Japanese gravity knife with orange handles be-
neath his pillow; that went into a narrow pocket on the
jacket's left sleeve, near the cuff.
The dreamgirls clicked in as he was leaving: "Bobby,
Bobb-y, come back and play. .
In his living room, he yanked the Ono-Sendai's jack from
the face of the Hitachi, coiling the fiber-optic lead and tuck-
ing it into a pocket. He did the same with the trode set, then
slid the Ono-Sendai into the jacket's pack-pocket.
The curtains were still drawn. He felt a surge of some new
exhilaration. He was leaving. He had to leave. Already he'd
forgotten the pathetic fondness that his brush with death had
generated. He parted the curtains carefully, a thumb-wide
gap, and peered out.
It was late afternoon. In a few hours, the first lights would
start blinking on in the dark bulks of the Projects. Big Play-
ground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose
beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened
by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies,
catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous
chicken-
wire dishes.
Two-a-Day would be up there now, sleeping, in a world
Bobby had never seen, the world of a mincome aicology.
Two-a-Day caine down to do business, mostly with the hot-
doggers in Barrytown, and then he climbed back up. It had
always looked good to Bobby, up there, so much happening
on the balconies at night, amid red smudges of charcoal, little
kids in their underwear swarming like monkeys, so small you
could barely see them. Sometimes the wind would shift, and
the smell of cooking would settle over Big Playground, and
sometimes you'd see an ultralight glide out from some secret
country of rooftop so high up there. And always the mingled
beat from a million speakers, waves of music that pulsed and
faded in and out of the wind.
Two-a-Day never talked about his life, where he lived.
Two-a-Day talked biz, or, to be more social, women. What
Two-a-Day said about women made Bobby want to get out of
Barrytown worse than ever, and Bobby knew that biz would
be his only ticket out. But now he needed the dealer in a
different way, because now he was entirely out of his depth.
Maybe Two-a-Day could tell him what was happening.
There wasn't supposed to be any lethal stuff around that base
Two-a-Day had picked it out for him, then rented him the
software he'd need to get in. And Two-a-Day was ready to
fence anything he could've gotten out with. So Two-a-Day
had to know. Know something, anyway.
"I don't even have your number, man," he said to the
Projects, letting the curtains fall shut. Should he leave some-
thing for his mother? A note? "My ass," he said to the room
behind him, "out of here," and then he was out the door and
down the hall, headed for the stairs. "Forever," he added,
kicking open an exit door.
Big Playground looked safe enough, except for a lone
shirtless duster deep in some furious conversation with God.
Bobby cut the duster a wide circle; he was shouting and
jumping and karate-chopping the air. The duster had dried
blood on his bare feet and the remnants of what had probably
been a Lobe haircut.
Big Playground was neutral temtory, at least in theory, and
the Lobes were loosely confederated with the Gothicks; Bobby
had fairly solid affiliations with the Gothicks, but retained
his
indie status. Barrytown was a dicey place to be an indie. At
least, he thought, as the duster's angry gibberish faded behind
him, the gangs gave you some structure. If you were Gothick
and the Kasuals chopped you out, it made sense. Maybe the
ultimate reasons behind it were crazy, but there were rules
But indies got chopped out by dusters running on brainstem,
by roaming predatory loonies from as far away as New
Yorklike that Penis Collector character last summer, kept
the goods in his pocket in a plastic bag .
Bobby had been trying to chart a way out of this landscape
since the day he was born, or anyway it felt that way. Now,
as he walked, the cyberspace deck in the pack-pocket banged
against his spine. Like it. too, was urging him to get out.
"Come on, Two-a-Day," he said to the looming Projects,
"get your ass down outa there and be in Leon's when I get
there, okay?"
Two-a-Day wasn't in Leon's.
Nobody was, unless you wanted to count Leon, who was
probing the inner mysteries of a wall-screen converter with a
bent paper clip.
"Why don't you just get a hammer and pound the fucker
till it works?" Bobby asked. "Do you about as much good."
Leon looked up from the converter. He was probably in his
forties, but it was hard to say. He seemed to be of no
particular race, or, in certain lights, to belong to some race
that nobody else belonged to. Lots of hypertrophied facial
bone and a mane of curly, nonreflective black hair. His
basement pirate club had been a fixture in Bobby's life for the
past two years.
Leon stared dully at Bobby with his unnerving eyes, pupils
of nacreous gray overlaid with a hint of translucent olive.
Leon's eyes made Bobby think of oysters and nail polish, two
things he didn't particularly like to think about in connection
with eyes. The color was like something they'd use to uphol-
ster barstools.
"I just mean you can't fix shit like that by poking at it,"
Bobby added uncomfortably. Leon shook his head slowly and
went back to his exploration. People paid to get into the place
because Leon pirated kino and simstim off cable and ran a lot
of stuff that Barrytowners couldn't otherwise afford to access.
There was dealing in the back and you could make "dona-
tions" for drinks, mostly clean Ohio hooch cut with some
synthetic orange drink Leon scored in industrial quantities.
"Say, uh, Leon," Bobby began again, "you seen Two-a-
Day in here lately?"
The horrible eyes came up again and regarded Bobby for
entirely too long. "No."
``Maybe last night?''
``No.''
"Night before?"
"No."
"Oh. Okay. Thanks." There was no point in giving Leon a
hard time. Lots of reasons not to, actually. Bobby looked
around at the wide dim room, at the simstim units and the
unlit kino screens. The club was a series of nearly identical
rooms in the basement of a semi-residential rack zoned for
singles and a sprinkling of light industry. Good soundproof-
ing: You hardly ever heard the music, not from outside.
Plenty of nights he'd popped out of Leon's with a head full of
noise and pills, into what seemed a magic vacuum of silence,
his ears ringing all the way home across Big Playground.
Now he had an hour. probably, before the first Gothicks
started to arrive. The dealers, mostly black guys from the
Projects or whites from the city or some other `burb, wouldn't
turn up until there was a patch of Gothicks for them to work
on. Nothing made a dealer look worse than just sitting there,
waiting, because that would mean you weren't getting any
action, and there was no way a genuinely hot dealer would be
hanging out in Leon's just for the pleasure of it. It was all
hotdog shit, in Leon's, weekenders with cheap decks who
watched Japanese icebreaker kinos .
But Two-a-Day wasn't like that, he told himself, on his
way up the concrete stairs. Two-a-Day was on his way. Out
of the Projects, out of Barrytown, out of Leon's. On his way
to the City. To Paris, maybe, or Chiba The Ono-Sendai
bumped against his spine. He remembered that Two-a-Day's
icebreaker cassette was still in it. He didn't want to have to
explain that to anyone. He passed a news kiosk. A yello fax
of the New York edition of the Asahi Shimbun was reeling
past a plastic window in the mirrored siding, some govern-
ment going down in Africa, Russian stuff from Mars .
It was that time of day when you could see things very
clear, see every little thing so far down the streets, fresh
green just starting from the black branches of the trees in
their
holes in the concrete, and the flash of steel on a girl's boot a
block away, like looking through a special kind of water that
made seeing easier, even though it was nearly dark. He
turned and stared up at the Projects. Whole floors there were
forever unlit, either derelict or the windows blacked out.
What did they do in there? Maybe he'd ask Two-a-Day
sometime.
He checked the time on the kiosk's Coke clock. His mother
would be back from Boston by now, had to be, or else she'd
miss one of her favorite soaps. New hole in her head. She
was crazy anyway, nothing wrong with the socket she'd had
since before he was born, but she'd been whining for years
about static and resolution and sensory bleedover, so she'd
finally swung the credit to go to Boston for some cheapass
replacement. Kind of place where you don't even get an
appointment for an operation. Walk in and they just slap it in
your head. . . . He knew her, yeah, how she'd come through
the door with a wrapped bottle under her arm, not even take
her coat off, just go straight over and jack into the Hitachi,
soap her brains out good for six solid hours. Her eyes would
unfocus, and sometimes, if it was a really good episode,
she'd drool a little. About every twenty minutes she'd man-
age to remember to take a ladylike nip out of the bottle.
She'd always been that way, as long as he could remem-
her, gradually sliding deeper into her half-dozen synthetic
jives, sequential simstim fantasies Bobby had had to hear
about all his life. He still harbored creepy feelings that some
of the characters she talked about were relatives of his, rich
and beautiful aunts and uncles who might turn up one day if
only he weren't such a little shit. Maybe, he thought now, it
had been true, in a way; she'd jacked that shit straight through
the pregnancy, because she'd told him she had, so he, fetus
Newmark, curled up in there, had reverberated to about a
thousand hours of People of Importance and Atlanta. But he
didn't like to think about being curled up in Marsha Newmark's
belly. It made him feel sweaty and kind of sick
Marsha-momma. Only in the past year or so had Bobby
come to understand the world well enoughas he now saw
itto wonder exactly how she still managed to make her way
in it, marginal as that way had become, with her bottle and
the socket ghosts to keep her company. Sometimes, when she
was in a certain mood and had had the right number of nips,
she still tried to tell him stories about his father. He'd known
since age four that these were bullshit, because the details
changed from time to time, but for years he'd allowed himself
a certain pleasure in them anyway.
He found a loading bay a few blocks west of Leon's,
screened from the street by a freshly painted blue dumpster,
the new paint gleaming over pocked, dented steel. There was
a single halogen tube slung above the bay. He found a
comfortable ledge of concrete and sat down there, careful not
to jar the Ono-Sendai. Sometimes you just had to wait. That
was one of the things Two-a-Day had taught him.
The dumpster was overflowing with a varied hash of indus-
trial scrap. Barrytown had its share of gray-legal manufac-
turers, part of the ~shadow economy" the news faces liked to
talk about, but Bobby never paid much attention to news
faces. Biz. It was all just biz.
Moths strobed crooked orbits around the halogen tube.
Bobby watched blanidy as three kids, maybe ten at the oldest,
scaled the blue wall of the dumpster with a length of dirty
white nylon line and a makeshift grapple that might once have
been part of a coatrack. When the last one made it over the
top, into the mess of plastic scrap, the line was drawn swiftly
up. The scrap began to creak and rustle.
Just like me, Bobby thought, I used to do that shit, fill my
room up with weird garbage I'd find. One time Ling War-
ren's sister found most of somebody's arm, all wrapped in
green plastic and done up with rubber bands.
Marsha-momma'd get these two-hour fits of religion some-
times, come into Bobby's room and sweep all his best gar-
bage out and gum some God-awful self-adhesive hologram up
over his bed. Maybe Jesus, maybe Hubbard, maybe Virgin
Mary, it didn't much matter to her when the mood was on
her. It used to piss Bobby off real good, until one day he was
big enough to walk into the front room with a ballpeen
hammer and cock it over the Hitachi; you touch my stuff
again and I'll kill your friends, Mom, all of `em. She never
tried it again. But the stick-on holograms had actually had
some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something
he felt h&d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he
figured it, there were just some people around who needed
that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn't
one of them, so he didn't.
Now one of the dumpster kids popped up and conducted a
slit-eyed survey of the immediate area, then ducked out of
sight again. There was a clunking,, scraping sound. Small
white hands tipped a dented alloy canister up and over the
edge, lowering it on the nylon line. Good score, Bobby
thought; you could take the thing to a metal dealer and get a
little for it. They lowered the thing to the pavement, about a
meter from the soles of Bobby's boots; as it touched down, it
happened to twist around, showing him the six horned symbol
that stood for biohazard. "Hey, fuck," he said, drawing his
feet up reflexively.
One of them slid down the rope and steadied the canister.
The other two followed. He saw that they were younger than
he'd thought.
"Hey," Bobby said, "you know that could be some real
bad shit? Give you cancer and stuff
"Go lick a dog's ass till it bleeds," the first kid down the
rope advised him, as they flicked their grapple loose, coiled
their line, and dragged the canister around the corner of the
dumpster and out of sight.
He gave it an hour and a half. Time enough Leon's was
starting to cook
At least twenty Gothicks postured in the main room, like a
herd of baby dinosaurs, their crests of lacquered hair bobbing
and twitching. The majority approached the Gothick ideal:
tall, lean, muscular, but touched by a certain gaunt rest-
lessness, young athletes in the early stages of consumption.
The graveyard pallor was mandatory, and Gothick hair was
by definition black. Bobby knew that the few who couldn't
warp their bodies to fit the subcultural template were best
avoided; a short Gothick was trouble, a fat Gothick homicidal.
Now he watched them flexing and glittering in Leon's like
a composite creature, slime mold with a jigsaw surface of
dark leather and stainless spikes. Most of them had nearly
identical faces, features reworked to match ancient archetypes
culled from kino banks. He chose a particularly artful Dean
whose hair swayed like the mating display of a nocturnal
lizard. "Bro," Bobby began, uncertain if he'd met this one
before.
"My man," the Dean responded languidly, his left cheek
distended by a cud of resin. "The Count, baby"as an aside
to his girl' `Count Zero Interrupt." Long pale hand with a
fresh scab across the back grabbing ass through the girl's
leather skirt. "Count, this is my squeeze." The Gothick girl
regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human
recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a
product she'd heard of but had no intention of buying.
Bobby scanned the crowd. A few blank faces, but none he
knew. No Two-a-Day. "Say, hey," he confided, "how you
know how it is `n' all, I'm bookin' for this close personal
friend, business friend' `and at this the Gothick sagely bobbed
his crest' `goes by Two-a-Day...." He paused. The Gothick
looked blank, snapping his resin. The girl looked bored,
restless. " `Wareman," Bobby added, raising his eyebrows,
"black `wareman."
"Two-a-Day," the Gothick said. "Sure. Two-a-Day. Right,
babe?" His girl tossed her head and looked away.
"You know `im?"
"Sure."
"He here tonight?"
"No," the Gothick said, and smiled meaninglessly.
Bobby opened his mouth, closed it, forced himself to nod.
"Thanks, bro."
"Anything for my man," the Gothick said.
Another hour, more of the same. Too much white, chalk-
pale Gothick white. Flat bright eyes of their girls, their
bootheels like ebony needles. He tried to stay out of the
simstim room, where Leon was running some kind of weird
jungle fuck tape phased you in and out of these different
kinda animals, lotta crazed arboreal action up in the trees,
which Bobby found a little disorienting. He was hungry
enough now to feel a little spaced, or maybe it was afterburn
- from whatever it was had happened to him before, but he was
starting to have a hard time concentrating, and his thoughts
drifted in odd directions. Like who, for instance, had climbed
up into those trees full of snakes and wired a pair of those rat
things for simstim?
The Gothicks were into it, whoever. They were thrashing
and stomping and generally into major tree-rat identification.
Leon's new hit tape, Bobby decided.
Just to his left, but well out of range of the stim, two
Project girls stood, their baroque finery in sharp contrast with
Gothick monochrome Long black frock coats opened over
tight red vests in silk brocade, the tails of enormous white
shirts hanging well beneath their knees. Their dark features
were concealed beneath the brims of fedoras pinned and hung
with fragments of antique gold: sti.ckpins, charms, teeth,
mechanical watches Bobby watched them covertly; the clothes
said they had money, but that someone would make it worth
your ass if you tried to go for it. One time Two-a-Day had
come down from the Projects in this ice-blue shaved-velour
number with diamond buckles at the knees, like maybe he
hadn't had time to change, but Bobby had acted like the
`wareman was dressed in his usual leathers, because he fig-
ured a cosmopolitan attitude was crucial in biz
He tried to imagine going up to them so smooth. just
putting it to them: Hey, you ladies surely must know my good
friend Mr. Two-a-Day? But they were older than he was,
taller, and moved with a dignity he found intimidating. Prob-
ably they'd just laugh, but somehow he didn't want that at
all.
What he did want now, and very badly, was food. He
touched his credit chip through the denim of his jeans. He'd
go across the street and get a sandwich . . Then he remem-
bered why he was here, and suddenly it didn't seem very
smart to use his chip. If he'd been sussed, after his attempted
run, they'd have his chip number by now; using it would
spotlight him for anyone tracking him in cyberspace. pick
him out in the Barrytown grid like a highway flare in a dark
football stadium. He had his cash money, but you couldn't
pay for food with that It wasn't actually illegal to have the
stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate
with it. He'd have to find a Gothick with a chip, buy a New
Yen's worth of credit, probably at a vicious discount, then
have the Gothick pay for the food. And what the hell was he
supposed to take his change in?
Maybe you're just spooked, he told himself. He didn't
know for sure that he was being backtracked, and the base
he'd tried to crack was legit. or was supposed to be legit
That was why Two-a-Day had told him he didn't have to
worry about black ice Who'd put lethal feedback programs
around a place that leased soft kino porn? The idea had been
that he'd bleep out a few hours of digitalized kino, new stuff
that hadn't made it to the bootleg market. It wasn't the kind
of score anybody was liable to kill you for
But somebody had tried. And something else had hap-
pened. Something entirely else. He trudged back up the stairs
again, out of Leon's He knew there was a lot he didn't know
about the matrix, but he'd never heard of anything that weird
. . You got ghost stories, sure, and hotdoggers who swore
thcy'd seen things in cyberspace, but he had them figured for
wilsons who jacked in dusted; you could hallucinate in the
matrix as easily as anywhere else
2 Maybe that's what happened, he thought. The voice was
just part of dying, being flat-lined, some crazy bullshit your
brain threw up to make you feel better, and something had
happened back at the source, maybe a brownout in their part
of the grid, so the ice had lost its hold on his nervous system.
Maybe. But he didn't know. Didn't know the turf. His
ignorance had started to dig into him recently, because it kept
him from making the moves he needed to make. He hadn't
ever much thought about it before, but he didn't really know
that much about anything in particular. In fact, up until he'd
started hotdogging, he'd felt like he knew about as much as
he needed to. And that was what the Gothicks were like, and
that was why the Gothicks would stay here and burn them-
selves down on dust, or get chopped out by Kasuals, and the
process of attrition would produce the percentage of them
who'd somehow become the next wave of childbearing, condo-
buying Barrytowners~ and the whole thing could go round
again.
He was like a kid who'd grown up beside an ocean, taking
it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing
nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of
weather. He'd used decks in school, toys that shuttled you
through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn't space,
mankind's unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the
matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned
like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload
if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.
But since he'd started hotdogging, he had some idea of
how precious little he knew about how anything worked, and
not just in the matrix. It spilled over, somehow, and he'd
started to wonder, wonder and think. How Barrytown worked,
what kept his mother going, why Gothicks and Kasuals in-
vested all that energy in trying to kill each other off Or why
Two-a-Day was black and lived up in the Projects, and what
made that different.
As he walked, he kept up his search for the dealer. White
faces, more white faces. His stomach had started to make a
certain amount of noise; he thought about the fresh package
of wheat cutlets in the fridge at home, fry `em up with some
soy and crack a pack of krill wafers
Passing the kiosk again, he che~ked the Coke clock. Mar-
sha was home for sure, deep in the labyrinthine complexities
of People of Importance. whose female protagonist's life
she'd shared through a socket for almost twenty years The
Asahi Shimbun fax was still rolling down behind its little
window, and he stepped closer in time to see the first report
of the bombing of A Block, Level 3, Covina Concourse
Courts, Barrytown, New Jersey..
Then it was gone, past, and there was a story about the
formal funeral of the Cleveland Yakusa boss Strictly trad.
They all carried black umbrellas.
He'd lived all his life in 503, A Block.
That enormous thing, leaning in, to stomp Marsha New-
mark and her Hitachi flat. And of course it had been meant
for him.
`There's somebody doesn't mess around," he heard him-
self say.
"Hey! My man! Count! You dusted, bro? Hey! Where you
headin !"
The eyes of two Deans twisting to follow him in the course
of his headlong panic.
7
TIlE
MALL
CONROY SWUNG ThE Nue Fokker off the eroded ribbon of
prewar highway and throttled down. The long rooster tail of
pale dust that had followed them from Needles began to
settle; the hovercraft sank into its inflated apron bag as they
came to a halt.
"Here's the venue, Turner
"What hit it?" Rectangular expanse of concrete spreading
to uneven walls of weathered cinderblock.
"Economics," Conroy said. "Before the war. They never
finished it Ten klicks west of here and there's whole subdivi-
sions, just pavement grids, no houses, nothing"
"How big a site team?"
"Nine, not counting you. And the medics."
"What medics?"
"Hosaka's. Maas is biologicals, right? No telling how they
might have our boy kinked. So Hosaka's built a regular little
neurosurgery and staffed it with three hotshots. Two of them
are company men, the third's a Korean who knows black
medicine from both ends. The medical pod's in that long one
there' `he pointed' `gotta partial section of roof."
"How'd you get it on site?"
"Brought it from Tucson inside a tanker. Faked a break-
down Got it out, rolled it in. Took all hands. Maybe three
minutes."
"Maas," Turner said.
"Sure" Conroy killed the engines. "Chance you take,"
he said in the abrupt silence "Maybe they missed it. Our guy
in the tanker sat there and bitched to his dispatcher in Tucson
on the CB, all about his shit-eating heat exchanger and how
long it was going to take to fix it. Figure they picked that up.
You think of a better way to do it?"
"No. Given that the client wants the thing on the site. But
we're sitting here now in the middle of their recon foot-
print..."
"Sweetheart"and Conroy snorted"maybe we just
stopped for a screw Break up our trip to Tucson, right? It's
that kind of place People stop here to piss, you know?" He
checked his black Porsche watch. "I'm due there in an hour,
get a copter back to the coast."
"The rig?"
"No. Your fucking jet. Figured I handle that myself."
` `Gcxl. ~
"I'd go for a Dornier System ground-effect plane myself.
Have it wait down the road until we see Mitchell heading in.
It could get here by the time the medics clean him up; we toss
him in and take off for the Sonora border .
"At subsonic speeds," Turner said. "No way. You're on
your way to California to buy me that jump jet. Our boy's
going out of here in a multimission combat aircraft that's
barely even obsolete."
"You got a pilot in mind?"
"Me," Turner said, and tapped the socket behind his ear.
"It's a fully integrated interactive system. They'll sell you
the
interface software and I'll jack straight in."
"Didn't know you could fly."
"I can't. You don't need hands-on to haul ass for Mexico
City."
"Still the wild boy, Turner? You know the rumor's that
somebody blew your dick off, back there in New Delhi?"
Conroy swung around to face him, his grin cold and clean.
Turner dug the parka from behind the seat and took out the
pistol and the box of ammunition. He was stuffing the parka
back again when Conroy said, "Keep it. It gets cold as hell
here, at night."
Turner reached for the canopy latch, and Conroy revved
the engines. The hovercraft rose a few centimeters, swaying
slightly as Turner popped the canopy and climbed out. White-
out sun and air like hot velvet. He took his Mexican sun-
glasses from the pocket of the blue work shirt and put them
on. He wore white deck shoes and a pair of tropical combat
fatigues. The box of explosive shells went into one of the
thigh pockets on the fatigues. He kept the gun in his right
hand, the parka bundled under his left arm. "Head for the
long building," Conroy said, over the engine. "They're ex-
pecting you."
He jumped down into the furnace glow of desert noon as
Conroy revved the Fokker again and edged it back to the
highway. He watched as it sped east, its receding image
distorted through wrinkles of rising heat.
When it was gone, there was no sound at all, no move-
ment. He turned, facing the ruin. Something small and stone-
gray darted between two rocks.
Perhaps eighty meters from the highway the jagged walls
began. The expanse between had once been a parking lot.
Five steps forward and he stopped. He heard the sea, surf
pounding, soft explosions as breakers fell. The gun was in his
hand, too large, too real, its metal warming in the sun.
No sea, no sea, he told himself, can't hear it He walked
on, the deck shoes slipping in drifts of ancient window glass
seasoned with brown and green shards of bottle. There were
rusted discs that had been bottle caps, flattened rectangles
that
had been aluminum cans. Insects whirred up from low clumps
of dry brush.
Over. Done with. This place. No time.
He stopped again, straining forward, as though he sought
something that would help him name the thing that was rising
in him. Something hollow .
The mall was doubly dead. The beach hotel in Mexico had
lived once, at least for a season
Beyond the parking lot, the sunlit cinderblock, cheap and
soulless, waiting.
He found them crouched in the narrow strip of shade
provided by a length of gray wall. Three of them; he smelled
the coffee before he saw them, the fire-blackened enamel pot
balanced precariously on the tiny Primus cooker. He was
meant to smell it, of course; they were expecting him Other-
wise, he'd have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow,
very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died.
Two men, a woman; cracked, dusty boots out of Texas,
denim so shiny with grease that it would probably be water-
proof. The men were bearded, their uncut hair bound up in
sun-bleached topknots with lengths of rawhide, the woman's
hair center-parted and pulled back tight from a seamed, wind-
burnt face. An ancient BMW motorcycle was propped against
the wall, flecked chrome and battered paintwork daubed with
airbrush blobs of tan and gray desert camo.
He released the Smith & Wesson's grip, letting it pivot
around his index finger, so that the barrel pointed up and
back.
"Turner," one of the men said, rising, cheap metal flash-
ing from his teeth. `Sutcliffe." Trace of an accent, probably
Australian.
"Point team?" He looked at the other two.
"Point," Sutcliffe said, and probed his mouth with a tanned
thumb and forefinger, coming away with a yellowed, steel-
capped prostho. His own teeth were white and perfectly even.
"You took Chauvet from IBM for Mitsu," he said, "and
they say you took Semenov out of Tomsk."
"Is that a question?"
"I was security for IBM Marrakech when you blew the
hotel."
Turner met the man's eyes. They were blue, calm, very
bright. "Is that a problem for you?"
"No fear," Sutcliffe said. "Just to say I've seen you
work." He snapped the prostho back in place. "Lynch"
nodding toward the other man' `and Webber' `toward
the woman.
"Run it down to me," Turner said, and lowered himself
into the scrap of shade. He squatted on his haunches, still
holding the gun.
"We came in three days ago," Webber said, "on two
bikes. We arranged for one of them to snap its crankshaft, in
case we had to make an excuse for camping here. There's a
sparse transient population, gypsy bikers and cultists. Lynch
walked an optics spool six kilos east and tapped into a
phone .
"Private?"
"Pay," Lynch said.
"We sent out a test squirt," the woman continued. "If it
hadn't worked, you'd know it."
Turner nodded. "Incoming traffic?"
"Nothing. It's strictly for the big show, whatever that is."
She raised her eyebrows.
"It's a defection."
"Bit obvious, that," Sutcliffe said, settling himself beside
Webber, his back to the wall. "Though the general tone of
the operation so far suggests that we hirelings aren't likely to
even know who we're extracting. True, Mr. Turner? Or will
we be able to read about it in the fax?"
Turner ignored him. "Go on. Webber."
"After our landline was in place, the rest of the crew
filtered in, one or two at a time. The last one in primed us for
the tankful of Japs
"That was raw," Sutcliffe said, "bit too far up front."
"You think it might have blown us?" Turner asked.
Sutcliffe shrugged. "Could be, could be no. We hopped it
pretty quick. Damned lucky we'd the roof to tuck it under."
"What about the passengers?"
"They only come out at night," Webber said. "And they
know we'll kill them if they try to get more than five meters
away from the thing."
Turner glanced at Sutcliffe.
"Conroy's orders," the man said.
"Conroy's orders don't count now," Turner said. "But
that one holds. What are these people like?"
"Medicals,'~ Lynch said, "bent medicals."
"You got it," Turner said. "What about the rest of the
crew?"
"We rigged some shade with mimetic tarps. They sleep in
shifts. There's not enough water and we can't risk much in
the way of cooking." Sutcliffe reached for the coffeepot.
"We have sentries in place and we run periodic checks on the
integrity of the landline." He splashed black coffee into a
plastic mug that looked as though it had been chewed by a
dog. "So when do we do our dance, Mr. Turner?"
"I want to see your tank of pet medics. I want to see a
command post. You haven't said anything about a command
post."
"All set," Lynch said.
"Fine. Here." Turner passed Webber the revolver. "See if
you can find me some sort of rig for this. Now I want Lynch
to show me these medics."
"He thought it would be you," Lynch said, scrambling
effortlessly up a low incline of rubble. Turner followed
`You've got quite a rep." The younger man glanced back at
him from beneath a fringe of dirty, sun-streaked hair.
"Too much of one," Turner said. "Any is too much. You
worked with him before? Marrakech?" Lynch ducked side-
ways through a gap in the cinderblock, and Turner was close
behind. The desert plants smelled of tar; they stung and
grabbed if you brushed them. Through a vacant, rectangular
opening intended for a window, Turner glimpsed pink moun-
taintops; then Lynch was loping down a slope of gravel.
"Sure, I worked for him before," Lynch said, pausing at
the base of the slide. An ancient-looking leather belt rode low
on his hips, its heavy buckle a tarnished silver death's-head
with a dorsal crest of blunt, pyramidal spikes. "Marrakech-
that was before my time."
"Connie, too, Lynch?"
"How's that?"
"Conroy. You work for him before? More to the point
are you working for him now?" Turner came slowly, deliber-
ately down the gravel as he spoke; it crunched and slid
beneath his deck shoes, uneasy footing. He could see the
delicate little fletcher holstered beneath Lynch's denim vest.
Lynch licked dry lips, held his ground. "That's Sut's
contact. I haven't met him."
"Conroy has this problem, Lynch. Can't delegate respon-
sibility. He likes to have his own man from the start, some-
one to watch the watchers. Always. You the one, Lynch?"
Lynch shook his head, the absolute minimum of movement
required to convey the negative. Turner was close enough to
smell his sweat above the tarry odor of the desert plants.
"I've seen Conroy blow two extractions that way," Turner
said. "Lizards and broken glass, Lynch? You feel like dying
F here?" Turner raised his fist in front of Lynch's face and
slowly extended the index finger, pointing straight up "We're
in their footprint. If a plant of Conroy's bleeps the least
fucking pulse out of here, they'll be on to us."
"If they aren't already."
F "That's right."
"Sut's your man," Lynch said. "Not me, and I can't see it
being Webber." Black-rimmed, broken nails came up to
scratch abstractedly at his beard. "Now, did you get me back
here exclusively for this little talk, or do you still wanna see
our canful of Japs?"
"Let's see it."
Lynch. Lynch was the one.
* * *
Once, in Mexico, years before, Turner had chartered a
portable vacation module, solar-powered and French-built, its
seven-meter body like a wingless housefly sculpted in pol-
ished alloy, its eyes twin hemispheres of tinted, photosensi-
tive plastic; he sat behind them as an aged twin-prop Russian
cargo lifter lumbered down the coast with the module in its
jaws, barely clearing the crowns of the tallest palms. Depos-
ited on a remote beach of black sand, Turner spent three days
of pampered solitude in the narrow, teak-lined cabin, micro-
waving food from the freezer and showering, frugally but
regularly, in cool fresh water. The module's rectangular banks
of cells would swivel, tracking the sun, and he'd learned to
tell time by their position.
Hosaka's portable neurosurgery resembled an eyeless ver-
sion of that French module, perhaps two meters longer and
painted a dull brown. Sections of perforated angle iron had
been freshly braised at intervals along the lower half of the
hull, and supported simple spring suspensions for ten fat,
heavily nubbed red rubber bicycle tires.
"They're asleep," Lynch said. "It bobs around when they
move, so you can tell. We'll have the wheels off when the
time comes, but for now we like being able to keep track of
them."
Turner walked slowly around the brown pod, noting the
glossy black sewage tube that ran to a small rectangular tank
nearby.
"Had to dump that, last night. Jesus." Lynch shook his
head. "They got food and some water."
Turner put his ear to the hull.
"It's proofed," Lynch said.
Turner glanced up at the steel roof above them. The sur-
gery was screened from above by a good ten meters of rusting
roof. Sheet steel, and hot enough now to fry an egg. He
nodded. That hot rectangle would be a permanent factor in
the Maas infrared scan.
"Bats," Webber said, handing him the Smith & Wesson in
a black nylon shoulder rig. The dusk was full of sounds that
seemed to come from inner space, metallic squeaks and the
cackling of bugs, cries of unseen birds. Turner shoved gun
and holster into a pocket on the parka. "You wanna piss, go
up by that mesquite. But watch out for the thorns."
"Where are you from?"
"New Mexico," the woman said, her face like carved
wood in the remaining light. She turned and walked away,
heading for the angle of walls that sheltered the tarps. He
could make out Sutcliffe and a young black man there. They
were eating from dull foil envelopes Ramirez, the on-site
console jockey, Jaylene Slide's partner. Out of Los Angeles.
Turner looked up at the bowl of sky, limitless, the map of
stars. Strange how it's bigger this way, he thought, and from
orbit it's just a gulf, formless, and scale lost all meaning.
And
tonight he wouldn't sleep, he knew, and the Big Dipper
would whirl round for him and dive for the horizon, pulling
its tail with it.
A wave of nausea and dislocation hit him as images from
the biosoft dossier swam unbidden through his mind.
ANDREA LIVED iN mn Quartier des Ternes, where her ancient
building, like the others in her street, awaited sandblasting
by the city's relentless renovators. Beyond the dark entrance,
one of Fuji Electric's biofluorescent strips glowed dimly above
a dilapidated wall of small wooden hutches, some with their
slotted doors still intact. Marly knew that postmen had once
made daily deposits of mail through those slots; there was
something romantic about the idea, although the hutches,
with their yellowing business cards announcing the occupa-
tions of long-vanished tenants, had always depressed her. The
walls of the hallway were stapled with bulging loops of cable
and fiber optics, each strand a potential nightmare for some
hapless utilities repairman. At the far end, through an open
door paneled with dusty pebble glass, was a disused court-
yard, its cobbles shiny with damp.
The concierge was sitting in the courtyard as Marly entered
the building, on a white plastic crate that had once held
bottles of Evian water. He was patiently oiling each link of an
old bicycle's black chain. He glanced up as she began to
climb the first flight of stairs, but registered no particular
interest.
The stairs were made of marble, worn dull and concave by
generations of tenants. Andrea's apartment was on the fourth
floor. Two rooms, kitchen, and bath. Marly had come here
when she'd closed her gallery for the last time, when it was
no longer possible to sleep in the makeshift bedroom she'd
shared with Alain, the little room behind the storeroom. Now
4:
the building brought her depression circling in again, but the
feel of her new outfit and the tidy click of her bootheels on
marble kept it at a distance. She wore an oversized leather
coat a few shades lighter than her handbag, a wool skirt, and
a silk blouse from Paiis Isetan. She'd had her hair cut that
morning on Faubourg St. Honor~, by a Burmese girl with a
West German laser pencil; an expensive cut, subtle without
being too conservative.
She touched the round plate bolted in the center of An-
drea's door, heard it peep once, softly, as it read the whorls
and ridges of her fingertips. "It's me, Andrea," she said to
the tiny microphone. A series of clanks and tickings as her
friend unbolted the door.
Andrea stood there, dripping wet, in the old terry robe. She
took in Marly's new look, then smiled. "Did you get your
job, or have you robbed a bank?" Marly stepped in, kissing
her friend's wet cheek. "It feels a~bit of both," she said, and
laughed.
"Coffee," said Andrea, "make us coffee Grandes cremes.
I must rinse my hair And yours is beautiful . ." She went
into the bathroom and Marly heard a spray of water across
porcelain.
"I've brought you a present," Marly said, but Andrea
couldn't hear her She went into the kitchen and filled the
kettle, lit the stove with the old-fashioned spark gun, and
began to search the crowded shelves for coffee.
"Yes," Andrea was saying, "I do see it." She was peer-
ing into the hologram of the box Marly had first seen in
Virek's construct of Gaudi's park. "It's your sort of thing."
She touched a stud and the Braun's illusion winked out.
Beyond the room's single window, the sky was stippled with
a few wisps of cirrus. "Too grim for me, too serious. Like
the things you showed at your gallery. But that can only mean
that Herr Virek has chosen well; you will solve his mystery
for him. If I were you, considering the wage, I might take my
own good time about it." Andrea wore Marly's gift, an
expensive, beautifully detailed man's dress shirt, in gray
Flemish flannel. It was the sort of thing she liked most, and
her delight in it was obvious. It set off her pale hair, and was
very nearly the color of her eyes
"He's quite horrible, Virek, I think .." Marly hesitated.
"Quite likely," Andrea said, taking another sip of coffee.
"Do you expect anyone that wealthy to be a nice, normal
sort?"
"I felt, at one point, that he wasn't quite human. Felt that
very strongly."
"But he isn't, Marly. You were talking with a projection, a
special effect
"Still She made a gesture of helplessness, which
immediately made her feel annoyed with herself.
"Still, he is very, very wealthy, and he's paying you a
great deal to do something that you may be uniquely suited to
do." Andrea smiled and readjusted a finely turned charcoal
cuff. "You don't have a great deal of choice, do you?"
"I know. I suppose that's what's making me uneasy.
"Well," Andrea said, "I thought I might put off telling
you a bit longer, but I have something else that may make
you feel uneasy. If `uneasy' is the word."
"Yes?"
"I considered not telling you at all, but I'm sure he'll get
to you eventually. He smells money, I suppose."
Marly put her empty cup down carefully on the cluttered
little rattan table.
"He's quite acute that way," Andrea said.
"When?"
"Yesterday. It began, I think, about an hour after you
would have had your interview with Virek. He called me at
work. He left a message here, with the concierge. If I were to
remove the screen program' `she gestured toward the
phone' `I think he'd ring within thirty minutes."
Remembering the concierge's eyes, the ticking of the bicy-
cle chain.
"He wants to talk, he said," Andrea said. "Only to talk.
Do you want to talk with him, Marly?"
"Not" she said, and her voice was a little girl's voice,
high and ridiculous. Then, "Did he leave a number?" Andrea
sighed, slowly shook her head, and then said, "Yes, of
course he did."
V
lip
TIlE
Tire DARK wA5 FULL of honeycomb patterns the color of blood.
Everything was warm. And soft, `too, mostly soft
"What a mess," one of the angels said, her voice far off
but low and rich and very clear.
"We should've clipped him out of Leon's," the other
angel said. "They aren't gonna like this upstairs
"Must've had something in this big pocket here, see? They
slashed it for him, getting it out."
"Not all they slashed, sister. Jesus. Here."
The patterns swung and swam as something moved his
head. Cool palm against his cheek.
"Don't get any on your shirt," the first angel said.
"Two-a-Day ain't gonna like this. Why you figure he
freaked like that and ran?"
It pissed him off, because he wanted to sleep. He was
asleep, for sure, but somehow Marsha's jack-dreams were
bleeding into his head so that he tumbled through broken
sequences of People of Importance. The soap had been run-
ning continuously since before he was born, the plot a
multiheaded narrative tapeworm that coiled back in to devour
itself every few months, then sprouted new heads hungry for
tension and thrust. He could see it writhing in its totality,
the
way Marsha could never see it, an elongated spiral of Sense!
Net DNA, cheap brittle ectoplasm spun out to uncounted
hungry dreamers. Marsha, now, she had it from the POV of
Michele Morgan Magnum, the female lead, hereditary corpo-
rate head of Magnum AG. But today's episode kept veering
weirdly away from Michele's frantically complex romantic
entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to
keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed
socioarchitectural
descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the
detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for in-
stance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale
of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled
knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, in-
habited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed
to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded
the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were
some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be
forced to ascend. Other segments of the jack-dream reminded
him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with
every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated dia-
grams of the Projects' interior structure, and droning lectures
in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents.
These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even less
convincing than the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies
creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful
young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in
the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room An entire wall
opened onto a shallow balcony and a rectangle of cartoon-
blue sky. The woman was black without being black, it
seemed to Bobby, like a very, very dark and youthfully
maternal version of one of the porno dolls on the unit in his
bedroom. And had, it looked like, the identical small but
cartoon-perfect breasts. (At this point, to add to his dull
confusion, an astonishingly loud and very unNet voice said,
"Now I call that a definite sign of life, Jackie. If the progno-
sis ain't bookin' up yet, at least somethin' is.") And then
went spinning back into the all-glitz universe of Michele
Morgan Magnum, who was desperately struggling to prevent
Magnum AG's takeover by the sinister Shikoku-based Naka-
mura industrial clan, represented in this case by (plot compli-
cation) Michele's main squeeze for the season, wealthy (but
somehow grindingly in need of additional billions) New So-
viet boy-politician Vasily Suslov, who looked and dressed
remarkably like the Gothicks in Leon's.
The episode seemed to be reaching some sort of climaxan
antique BMW fuel-cell conversion had just been strafed by
servo-piloted miniature West German helicopters on the street
below Covina Concourse Courts, Michele Morgan Magnum
was pistol-whipping her treacherous personal secretary with a
nickel-plated Nambu, and Susbov, who Bobby was coming
increasingly to identify with, was casually preparing to get
his ass
out of town with a gorgeous female bodyguard who was
Japanese but reminded Bobby intensely of another one of the
dreamgirls on his holoporn unitwhen someone screamed
Bobby had never heard anyone scream that way, and there
was something horribly familiar about the voice. But before
he could start to worry about it, those blood-red honeycombs
came swirling in again and made him miss the end of People
of Importance. Still, some part of him thought, as red went to
black, he could always ask Marsha how it came out
"Open your eyes, man. That's it. Light too bright for
you?"
It was, but it didn't change White, white, he remembered
his head exploding years away, pure white grenade in that
cool-wind desert dark. His eyes were open, but he couldn't
see. Just white.
"Now, I'd leave you down, ordinarily, boy in your con-
dition, but the people paying me for this say get a jump on,
so I'm wakin' you up before I'm done. You wonderin' why
you can't see shit, right? Just light, that's all you can see,
that's right. What we got here is a neural cutout. Now,
between you and me, this thing come out of a sex shop, but
there's no reason not to use it in medicine if we want to. And
we do want to, because you're still hurtin' bad, and anyway,
it keeps you still while I get on with it." The voice was calm
and methodical. "Now, your big problem, that was your
back, but I took care of that with a stapler and a few feet of
claw You don't get any plastic work here, you understand,
but the honeys'll think those scars are real Interesting. What
I'm doin' now is I'm cleanin' this one on your chest, then I'll
zip a little claw down that and we're all done, except you
better move easy for a couple of days or you'll pull a staple I
got a couple of derms on you, and I'll stick on a few more
Meantime, I'm going to click your sensonum up to audio and
full visual so you can get into being here. Don't mind the
blood; it's all yours but there isn't any more comm."
White curdled to gray cloud, objects taking form with the
slow deliberation of a dust vision. He was flat against a
padded ceiling, staring straight down at a blood-stained white
doll that had no head at all, only a greenish blue surgical
lamp that seemed to sprout from its shoulders. A black man
in a stained green smock was spraying something yellow into
a shallow gash that ran diagonally from just above the doll's
pelvic bone to just below its left nipple. He knew the man
was black because his head was bare, bare and shaven, slick
with sweat: his hands were covered in tight green gloves and
all that Bobby could see of him was the gleaming crown of
his head There were pink and blue dermadisks stuck to the
skin on either side of the doll's neck. The edges of the wound
seemed to have been painted with something that looked like
chocolate syrup, and the yellow spray made a hissing sound
as it escaped from its little silver tube.
Then Bobby got the picture, and the universe reversed
itself sickeningly. The lamp was suspended from the ceiling,
the ceiling was mirrored, and he was the doll. He seemed to
snap back on a long elastic cord, back through the red honey-
combs, to the dream room where the black girl sliced pizza
for her children. The waterknife made no sound at all, micro-
scopic gnt suspended in a needle-stream of high-speed water.
The thing was intended to cut glass and alloy, Bobby knew,
not to slice microwaved pizza, and he wanted to scream at her
because he was terrified she'd take off her thumb without
even feeling it.
But he couldn't scream, couldn't move or make a sound at
all. She lovingly sliced the last piece, toed the kickplate that
shut the knife down, transferred the sliced pizza to a plain
white ceramic platter, then turned toward the rectangle of
blue beyond the balcony, where her children wereno, Bobby
said, way down in himself, no way. Because the things that
wheeled and plunged for her weren't hang-gliding kids, but
babies, the monstrous babies of Marsha's dream, and the
tattered wings a confusion of pink bone, metal, patched taut
membranes of scrap plastic . . . He saw their teeth
"Whoa," said the black man, "lost you for a second. Not
for long, you understand, just maybe a New York minute.. ."
His hand, in the mirrors overhead, took a flat spool of blue
transparent plastic from the bloody cloth beside Bobby's ribs.
Delicately, with thumb and forefinger, he drew out a length
of some sort of brown, beaded plastic. Minute points of light
flashed along its edges and seemed to quiver and shift. "Claw,"
he said, and with his other hand thumbed some sort of
integral cutter in the sealed blue spool. Now the length of
beaded stuff swung free and began to writhe. "Good shit,"
he said, bringing the thing into Bobby's line of sight. "New.
What they use in Chiba now." It was brown, headless, each
bead a body segment, each segment edged with pale shining
legs. Then, with a conjurer's flick of his green-gloved wrists,
he lay the centipede down the length of the open wound and
pinched delicately at the final segment, the one nearest Bob-
by's face. As the segment came away. it withdrew a glittering
black thread that had served the thing as a nervous system,
and as that went, each set of claws locked shut in turn,
zipping the slash tight as a new leather jacket.
"Now, you see," said the black man, mopping the last of
the brown syrup away with a wet white pad, "that wasn't so
bad, was it?"
His entrance to Two-a-Day's apartment wasn't anything
like the way he'd so often imagined it. To begin with, he'd
never imagined being wheeled in in a wheelchair that some-
one had appropriated from St. Mary's Maternitythe name
and a serial number neatly laser-etched on the dull chrome of
the left armrest. The woman who was wheeling him would
have fitted neatly enough into one of his fantasies; her name
was Jackie, one of the two Project girls he'd seen at Leon's,
and, he'd come to understand, one of his two angels. The
wheelchair was silent as it glided across the scabrous gray
wall-to-wall of the apartment's narrow entranceway, but the
gold bangles on Jackie's fedora tinkled cheerfully as she
pushed him along.
And he'd never imagined that Two-a-Day's place would be
quite this large, or that it would be full of trees.
Pye, the doctor, who'd been careful to explain that he
wasn't a doctor, just someone who "helped out sometimes,"
had settled back on a torn barstool in his makeshift surgery,
peeled off his bloody green gloves, lit a menthol cigarette,
and solemnly advised Bobby to take it real easy for the next
week or so. Minutes later, Jackie and Rhea, the other angel,
had wrestled him into a pair of wrinkled black pajamas that
looked like something out of a very cheap ninja kino, depos-
ited him in the wheelchair, and set out for the central stem of
elevators at the arcology's core. Thanks to an additional three
derms from Pye's store of drugs, one of them charged with a
good two thousand mikes of endorphin analog, Bobby was
alert and feeling no pain.
"Where's my stuff," he protested, as they rolled him out
into a corridor grown penlously narrow with decades of
retrofitted ducts and plumbing. "Where's my clothes and my
deck and everything?"
"Your clothes, hon, such as they were, are taped up in a
plastic bag waiting for Pye to shitcan `em. Pye had to cut `em
off you on the slab, and they weren't but bloody rags to begin
with. If your deck was in your jacket, down the back, I'd say
the boys who chopped you out got it. Damn near got you in
the process. And you ruined my Sally Stanley shirt, you little
shithead." Angel Rhea didn't seem too friendly.
"Oh~'~ Bobby said, as they rounded a corner, "right
Well, did you happen to find a screwdriver in there? Or a
credit chip?"
"No chip, baby. But if the screwdriver's the one with the
two hundred and ten New ones screwed into the handle, that's
the price of my new shirt . .
Two-a-Day didn't look as though he was particularly glad
to see Bobby. In fact, it almost seemed as if he didn't see him
at all. Looked straight through him to Jackie and Rhea, and
showed his teeth in a smile that was all nerves and sleep-lack.
They wheeled Bobby close enough that he saw how yellow
Two-a-Day's eyeballs looked, almost orange in the pinky-pur-
ple glow of the gro-light tubes that seemed to dangle at
random from the ceiling. "What took you bitches?" the
wareman asked, but there was no anger in his voice, only
bone weariness and something else, something Bobby couldn't
identify at first.
"Pye," Jackie said, swaggering past the wheelchair to take
a package of Chinese cigarettes from the enormous wooden
slab that served Two-a-Day as a coffee table. "He's a perfec-
tionist, ol' Pye
"Learned that in vet school," Rhea added, for Bobby's
benefit, "`cept usually he's too wasted, nobody'd let him
work on a dog .
"So," Two-a-Day said, and finally let his eyes rest on
Bobby, "you gonna make it." And his eyes were so cold, so
tired and clinical, so far removed from the hustling manic
bullshitter's act that Bobby had taken for the man's person-
ality, that Bobby could only lower his own eyes, face burn-
ing, and lock his gaze on the table.
Nearly three meters long and slightly over a meter wide, it
was strapped together from timbers thicker than Bobby's
thigh. It must have been in the water once, he thought;
sections still retained the bleached silvery patina of
driftwood,
like the log he remembered playing beside a long time ago in
Atlantic City. But it hadn't seen water for a long time, and
the top was a dense mosaic of candle drippings, wine stains,
oddly shaped overspray marks in matte black enamel, and the
dark burns left by hundreds of cigarettes. It was so crowded
with food, garbage, and gadgets that it looked as though some
street vendor had set up to unload hardware, then decided to
have dinner. There were half-eaten pizzaskrill balls in red
sauce, and Bobby's stomach began to churnbeside cascad-
ing stacks of software, smudged glasses with cigarettes crushed
out in purple wine dregs, a pink styrene tray with neat rows
of stale-looking canapes, open and unopened cans of beer, an
antique Gerber combat dagger that lay unsheathed on a flat
block of polished marble, at least three pistols, and perhaps
two dozen pieces of cryptic-looking console gear, the kind of
cowboy equipment that ordinarily would have made Bobby's
mouth water.
Now his mouth was watering for a slice of cold krill pizza,
but his hunger was nothing in the face of his abrupt humilia-
tion at seeing that Two-a-Day just didn't care. Not that Bobby
had thought of him as a friend, exactly, but he'd definitely
had something invested in the idea that Two-a-Day saw him
as someone, somebody with talent and initiative and a chance
of getting out of Barrytown. But Two-a-Day's eyes told him
he was nobody in particular, and a wilson at that .
"Look here, my man," someone said, not Two-a-Day, and
Bobby looked up. Two other men flanked Two-a-Day on the
fat chrome and leather couch, both of them black. The one
who'd spoken wore a gray robe of some kind and antique
plastic-framed glasses. The frames were square and oversized
and seemed to lack lenses. The other man's shoulders were
twice as wide as Two-a-Day's, but he wore the kind of plain
black two-piece suit you saw on Japanese businessmen in
kinos. His spotless white French cuffs were closed with bright
rectangles of gold microcircuitry. "It's a shame we can't let
you have some downtime to heal up," the first man said,
"but we have a bad problem here." He paused, removed his
glasses, and massaged the bridge of his nose. "We require
your help."
"Shit," Two-a-Day said He leaned forward, took a Chi-
nese cigarette from the pack on the table, lit it with a dull
pewter skull the size of a large lemon, then reached for a
glass of wine. The man with the glasses extended a lean
brown forefinger and touched Two-a-Day's wrist. Two-a-Day
released the glass and sat back, his face carefully blank. The
man smiled at Bobby. "Count Zero," he said, "they tell us
that's your handle."
"That's right," Bobby managed, though it came out as a
kind of croak.
"We need to know about the Virgin, Count." The man
waited.
Bobby blinked at him.
"Vy~j Mirak"and the glasses went back on' `Our Lady,
Virgin of Miracles. We know her' `and he made a sign with
his left hand' `as Ezili Freda."
Bobby became aware of the fact that his mouth was open,
so he closed it. The three dark faces waited. Jackie and Rhea
were gone, but he hadn't seen them leave. A kind of panic
took him then, and he glanced frantically around at the strange
forest of stunted trees that surrounded them. The gro-light
tubes slanted at every angle, in any direction, pink-purple
jackstraws suspended in a green space of leaves. No walls
You couldn't see a wall at all. The couch and the battered
table sat in a sort of clearing, with a floor of raw concrete.
"We know she came to you," the big man said, crossing
his legs carefully. He adjusted a perfect trouser-crease, and a
gold cufflink winked at Bobby. "We know, you understand?"
"Two-a-Day tells me it was your first run," the other man
said. "That the truth?"
Bobby nodded.
"Then you are chosen of Legba," the man said, again
removing the empty frames," to have met Vy4~ Mirak." He
smiled.
Bobby's mouth was open again.
"Legba," the man said, "master of roads and pathways,
the ba of communication . .
Two-a-Day ground his cigarette out on the scarred wood,
and Bobby saw that his hand was shaking.
THEY AGREED TO MEET in the brasserie on the fifth sublevel of
the Napoleon Court complex. beneath the Louvre's glass
pyramid. It was a place they both knew, although it had had
no particular meaning for them. Alain had suggested it. and
she suspected him of having chosen it carefully. It was neu-
tral emotional ground; a familiar setting, yet one that was free
of memories. It was decorated in a style that dated from the
turn of the century: granite counters, black floor-to-ceiling
beams, wall-to-wall mirror, and the sort of Italian restaurant
furniture, in dark welded steel, that might have belonged to
any decade of the past hundred years. The tables were cov-
ered in gray linen with a fine black stripe, a pattern picked up
and repeated on the menu covers and matchbooks and the
aprons of the waiters.
She wore the leather coat she'd bought in Brussels, a red
linen blouse, and new black cotton jeans. Andrea had pre-
tended not to notice the extreme care with which she'd dressed
for the meeting, and then had loaned her a simple single
strand of pearls, which set off the red blouse perfectly.
He'd come early, she saw as she entered, and already the
table was littered with his things. He wore his favorite scarf,
the one they'd found together at the flea market the year
before, and looked, as he usually did, disheveled but per-
fectly at ease. The tattered leather attache case had disgorged
its contents across the little square of polished granite:
spiral
notebooks, an unread copy of the month's controversial novel,
Gauloise nonfilters, a box of wooden matches, the leather-
bound agenda she'd bought for him at Browns
"I thought you might not cOme," he said, smiling up at
her.
"Why would you have thought that?" she asked, a random
responsepathetic, she thoughtmasking the terror she now
felt, that she allowed herself at last to feel, which was fear
of
some loss of self, of will and direction, fear of the love she
still felt. She took the other chair and seated herself as the
young waiter amved, a Spanish boy in a striped apron, to
take her order. She asked for Vichy water.
"Nothing else?" Alain asked. The waiter hovered
"No, thank you."
"I've been trying to reach you for weeks," he said, and
she knew that that was a lie, and yet, as she often had before,
she wondered if he was entirely conscious of the fact that he
was lying. Andrea maintained that men like Alain lied so
constantly, so passionately, that some basic distinction had
been lost. They were artists in their own right, Andrea said,
intent on restructuring reality, and the New Jerusalem was a
fine place indeed, free of overdrafts and disgruntled landlords
and the need to find someone to cover the evening's bill.
"I didn't notice you trying to reach me when Gnass came
with the police," she said, hoping at least that he would
wince, but the boyish face was calm as ever, beneath clean
brown hair he habitually combed back with his fingers.
"I'm sorry," he said, crushing out his Gauloise Because
she'd come to associate the smell of the dark French tobacco
with him, Paris had seemed full of his scent, his ghost, his
trail. "I was certain he'd never detect thethe nature of the
piece. You must understand: Once I had admitted to myself
how badly we needed the money, I knew that I must act
You, I knew, were far too idealistic. The gallery would have
folded in any case. If things had gone as planned, with
Gnass, we would be there now, and you would be happy.
Happy," he repeated, taking another cigarette from the pack
She could only stare at him, feeling a kind of wonder, and
a sick revulsion at her desire to believe him.
"You know," he said, taking a match from the red and
yellow box, "I've had difficulties with the police before.
When I was a student. Politics, of course." He struck the
match, tossed the box down, and lit the cigarette
"Politics," she said, and suddenly felt like laughing "I
was unaware that there was a party for people like you. I
can't imagine what it might be called."
"Marly," he said, lowering his voice, as he always did
when he wished to indicate intensity of feeling, "you know,
you must know, that I acted for you For us, if you will But
surely you know, you can feel, Marly, that I would never
deliberately hurt you, or place you in jeopardy." There was
no room on the crowded little table for her purse, so she'd
held it in her lap; now she was aware of her nails buried deep
in the soft thick leather
"Never hurt me The voice was her own, lost and
amazed, the voice of a child, and suddenly she was free, free
of need, desire, free of fear, and all that she felt for the
handsome face across the table was simple revulsion, and she
could only stare at him, this stranger she'd slept beside for
one year, in a tiny room behind a very small gallery in the
Rue Mauconseil. The waiter put her glass of Vichy down in
front of her.
He must have taken her silence for the beginning of accep-
tance, the utter blankness of her expression for openness.
"What you don't understand"this, she remembered, was a
favorite opening' `is that men like Gnass exist, in some
sense, to support the arts To support us, Marly." He smiled
then, as though he laughed at himself, a jaunty, conspiratorial
smile that chilled her now. "I suppose, though, that I should
have credited the man with having at least the requisite sense
to hire his own Cornell expert, although my Cornell expert, I
assure you, was by far the more erudite of the two .
How was she to get away? Stand, she told herself Turn.
Walk calmly back to the entrance Step through the door. Out
into the subdued glitter of Napoleon Court, where polished
marble overlay the Rue du Champ Fleuri, a fourteenth-cen-
tury street said to have been reserved primarily for prostitu-
tion. Anything, anything, only go, only leave, now, and be
away, away from him, walking blind, to lose herself in the
guidebook Paris she'd learned when she'd first come here.
"But now." he was saying. "you can see that things have
worked out for the best. It's often like that, isn't it?" Again,
the smile, but this time it was boyish, slightly wistful, and
somehow, horribly, more intimate "We've lost the gallery,
but you've found employment, Marly. You have a job to do,
an interesting one, and I have the connections you'll need,
Marly. I know the people you'll need to meet, in order to find
your artist
"My artist?" Covering her abrupt confusion with a sip of
Vichy.
He opened his scarred attache and removed something flat,
a simple reflection hologram. She took it, grateful to have
something to do with her hands, and saw that it was a casual
shot of the box she'd seen in Virek's construct of Barcelona.
Someone was holding it forward A man's hands, not Alains,
and on one of them, a signet ring of some dark metal. The
background was lost. Only the box, and the hands
"Alain," she said, "where did you get this?" Looking up
to meet brown eyes filled with a temble childlike triumph
It s going to cost someone a very great deal to find out
He ground out his cigarette and stood. "Excuse me." He
walked away, headed in the direction of the restrooms. As he
vanished, behind mirrors and black steel beams, she dropped
the hologram, reached across the table, and flipped back the
lid of his attache. There was nothing there, only a blue elastic
band and some crumbs of tobacco
"May I bring you something else? More Vichy, perhaps?"
The waiter stood beside her.
She looked up at him, struck suddenly by a sense of
familiarity. The lean dark face
"He's wearing a broadcast unit," the waiter said. "He's
armed as well. I was the bellman in Brussels. Give him what
he wants. Remember that the money means nothing to you."
He took her glass and placed it carefully on his tray. "And,
very likely, it will destroy him."
When Alain returned, he was smiling. "Now, darling," he
said reaching for his cigarettes, "we can do business."
Marly smiled back and nodded
HE ALLOWED HIMSELF three hours of sleep, finally, in the
windowless bunker where the point tekm had established the
command post. He'd met the rest of the site team Ramirez
was slight, nervous, perpetually wired on his own skill as a
console jockey; they were depending on him, along with
Jaylene Slide on the offshore rig, to monitor cyberspace
around the grid sector that held the heavily iced banks of
Maas Biolabs, if Maas became aware of them, at the last
moment, he might be able to provide some warning. He was
also charged with relaying the medical data from the surgery
to the offshore rig, a complex procedure if they were to keep
it from Maas. The line out ran to a phone booth in the middle
of nowhere Once past that booth, he and Jaylene were on
their own in the matrix. If they blew it, Maas could backtrack
and pinpoint the site. And then there was Nathan. the repair-
man, whose real job consisted of watching over the gear in
the bunker. If some part of their system went down, there was
at least a chance he could fix it. Nathan belonged to the
species that had produced Oakey and a thousand others Turner
had worked with over the years, maverick techs who liked
earning danger money and had proven they could keep their
mouths shut The othersCompton, Teddy, Costa, and Davis
were Just expensive muscle, mercs, the sort of men you hired
for a job like this. For their benefit, he'd taken particular
care
in questioning Sutcliffe about the arrangements for clear-out.
He'd explained where the copters would come in, the order of
pickup, and precisely how and when they would be paid.
Then he'd told them to leave him alone in the bunker, and
ordered Webber to wake him in three hours.
The place had been either a pump house or some sort of
nexus for electrical wiring. The stumps of plastic tubing that
protruded from the walls might have been conduit or sewage
line, the room provided no evidence that any of them had ever
been connected to anything. The ceiling, a single slab of
poured concrete, was too low to allow him to stand, and there
was a dry, dusty smell that wasn't entirely unpleasant The
team had swept the place before they brought in the tables
and the equipment, but there were still a few yellow flakes of
newsprint on the floor, that crumbled when he touched them.
He made out letters, sometimes an entire word.
Each of the folding metal camp tables had been set up
along a wall, forming an L, each arm supporting an array of
extraordinarily sophisticated communications gear. The best,
he thought, that Hosaka had been able to obtain
He hunched his way carefully along the length of each
table, tapping each console, each black box, lightly as he
went There was a heavily modified military side-band trans-
ceiver rigged for squirt transmission. This would be their link
in case Ramirez and Jaylene flubbed the data transfer. The
squirts were prerecorded, elaborate technical fictions encoded
by Hosaka's cryptographers. The content of a given squirt
was meaningless, but the sequence in which they were broad-
cast would convey simple messages. Sequence B/C/A would
inform Hosaka of Mitchell's ariival; F/D would indicate his
departure from the site, while F/G would signal his death and
the concurrent closure of the operation. Turner tapped the
side-band rig again, frowning He wasn't pleased with
Sutcliffe's arrangements there. If the extraction was blown, it
wasn't likely they'd get out, let alone get out clean, and
Webber had quietly informed him that, in the event of trou-
ble, she'd been ordered to use a hand-held antitank rocket on
the medicals in their miniature surgery. They know," she
said. "You can bet they're getting paid for it, too." The rest
of them were depending on the helicopters, which were based
near Tucson. Turner assumed that Maas, if alerted, would
easily take them out as they came in. When he'd objected to
Sutcliffe, the Australian had only shrugged: "It isn't the way
I'd set it up under the best circumstances, mate. but we're all
in here on short notice, aren't we?"
Beside the transceiver was an elaborate Sony biomonitor,
linked directly with the surgical pod and charged with the
medical history recorded in Mitchell's biosoft dossier. The
medicals, when the time came, would access the defector's
history; simultaneously, the procedures they carried out in the
pod would be fed back to the Sony and collated, ready for
Ramirez to ice them and shift them out into cyberspace,
where Jaylene Slide would be riding shotgun from her seat in
the oil rig. If it all went smoothly, the medical update would
be waiting in Hosaka's Mexico City compound when Turner
brought him in in the jet. Turner had never seen anything
quite like the Sony, but he supposed the Dutchman would
have had something very similar in his Singapore clinic The
thought brought his hand to his bare chest, where he uncon-
sciously traced the vanished line of a graft scar.
The second table supported the cyberspace gear. The deck
was identical with the one he'd seen on the oil rig, a Maas-
Neotek prototype. The deck configuration was standard, but
Conroy had said that it was built up from the new biochips.
There was a fist-sized lump of pale pink plastique squashed
on top of the console; someone, perhaps Ramirez, had thumbed
in twin depressions for eyes and a crude curve of idiot grin.
Two wires, one blue, the other yellow, ran from the thing's
pink forehead to one of the black, gaping tubes that protruded
from the wall behind the console. Another of Webber's chores.
if there seemed any danger of the site being overrun. Turner
eyed the wires, frowning; a charge that size, in that small,
enclosed space. guaranteed death for anyone in the bunker.
His shoulders aching, the back of his head brushing the
rough concrete of the ceiling, he continued his inspection
The rest of the table was taken up with the deck's peripherals,
a series of black boxes positioned with obsessive precision.
He suspected that each unit was a certain specific distance
from its neighbor, and they were perfectly aligned. Ramirez
himself would have set them out, and Turner was certain that
if he touched one, moved it the least fraction, the jockey
would know. He'd seen that same neurotic touch before, in
other console men, and it told him nothing about Ramirez.
He'd watched other jockeys who reversed the trait, deliber-
ately tangling their gear in a rat's nest of leads and cables,
who were temfied of tidiness and plastered their consoles
with decals of dice and screaming skulls There was no way
to tell, he thought; either Ramirez was good, or else they all
might be dead soon.
At the far end of the table were five Telefunken ear-bead
transceivers with adhesive throat mikes, still sealed in
individ-
ual bubble packs. During the crucial phase of the defection,
which Turner took to be the twenty minutes on either side of
Mitchell's amval, he, Ramirez, Sutcliffe, Webber, and Lynch
would be linked, although the use of the transceivers was to
be kept to an absolute minimum
Behind the Telefunkens was an unmarked plastic carton
that contained twenty Swedish catalytic handwarmers, smooth
flat oblongs of stainless steel, each in its own drawstring bag
of Christmas-red flannelette. `You're a clever bastard," he
said to the carton. "I might have thought that one up my-
self
He slept on a corrugated foam hiker's pad on the floor of
the command post, using the parka as a blanket. Conroy had
been nght about the desert night, but the concrete seemed to
hold the day's heat He left his fatigues and shoes on; Webber
had advised him to shake his shoes and clothing out whenever
he dressed. "Scorpions," she'd say, "they like sweat, any
kind of moisture " He removed the Smith & Wesson from
the nylon holster before he lay down, carefully positioning it
beside the foam pad. He left the two battery lanterns on, and
closed his eyes.
And slid into a shallow sea of dream, images tossing past,
fragments of Mitchell's dossier melding with bits of his own
life. He and Mitchell drove a bus through a cascade of plate
glass, into the lobby of a Marrakech hotel. The scientist
whooped as he pressed the button that detonated the two
dozen canisters of CN taped along the flanks of the vehicle,
and Oakey was there, too, offenng him whiskey from a
bottle, and yellow Peruvian cocaine on a round, plastic-
rimmed mirror he'd last seen in Allison's purse. He thought
he saw Allison somewhere beyond the windows of the bus,
choking in the clouds of gas, and he tried to tell Oakey, tried
to point her out, but the glass was plastered with Mexican
holograms of saints, postcards of the Virgin, and Oakey was
holding up something smooth and round, a globe of pink
crystal, and he saw a spider crouched at its core, a spider
made of quicksilver, but Mitchell was laughing, his teeth full
of blood, and extending his open palm to offer Turner the
gray biosoft. Turner saw that the dossier was a brain, grayish
pink and alive beneath a wet clear membrane, pulsing softly
in Mitchell's hand, and then he tumbled over some submarine
ledge of dream and settled smoothly down into a night with
no stars at all.
Webber woke him, her hard features framed in the square
doorway, her shoulders draped in the heavy military blanket
taped across the entrance. "Got your three hours The medi-
cals are up, if you want to talk to `em." She withdrew, her
boots crunching gravel.
Hosaka's medics were waiting beside the self-contained
neurosurgery. Under a desert dawn they looked as though
they'd just stepped from some kind of matter transmitter in
their fashionably rumpled Ginza casuals. One of the men was
bundled in an oversized Mexican handknit, the sort of belted
cardigan Turner had seen tourists wear in Mexico City. The
other two wore expensive-looking insulated ski jackets against
the desert cold. The men were a head shorter than the Ko-
rean, a slender woman with strong, archaic features and a
birdlike ruff of red-tinged hair that made Turner think of
raptors. Conroy had said that the two were company men,
and Turner could see it easily; only the woman had the
attitude. the stance that belonged to Turner's world, and she
was an outlaw, a black medic She'd be right at home with
the Dutchman, he thought.
"I'm Turner," he said. "I'm in charge here."
"You don't need our names," the woman said as the two
Hosaka men bowed automatically. They exchanged glances,
looked at Turner, then looked back to the Korean
"No," Turner said, "it isn't necessary."
"Why are we still denied access to the patient's medical
data?" the Korean aked.
"Security," Turner said, the answer very nearly an auto-
matic response. In fact, he could see no reason to prevent
them from studying Mitchell's records.
The woman shrugged, turned away, her face hidden by the
upturned collar of her insulated jacket.
"Would you like to inspect the surgery?" the man in the
bulky cardigan asked, his face polite and alert, a perfect
corporate mask.
"No," Turner said. "We'll be moving you out to the lot
twenty minutes prior to his arrival. We'll take the wheels off,
level you with jacks. The sewage link will be disconnected. I
want you fully operational five minutes after we set you
down."
"There will be no problem," the other man said, smiling.
"Now I want you to tell me what you're going to be doing
in there, what you'll do to him and how it might affect him."
"You don't know?" the woman asked, sharply, turning
back to face him.
"I said that I wanted you to tell me," Turner said.
"We'll conduct an immediate scan for lethal implants,"
the man in the cardigan said.
"Cortex charges, that sort of thing?"
"I doubt," said the other man, . `that we will encounter
anything so crude, but yes, we will be scanning for the full
range of lethal devices. Simultaneously, we'll run a full blood
screen. We understand that his current employers deal in
extremely sophisticated biochemical systems. It would seem
possible that the greatest danger would lie in that direc-
tion
"It's currently quite fashionable to equip top employees
with modified insulin-pump subdermals," his partner broke
in. `The subject's system can be tricked into an artificial
reliance on certain synthetic enzyme analogs. Unless the sub-
dermal is recharged at regular intervals, withdrawal from the
sourcethe employercan result in trauma."
"We are prepared to deal with that as well," said the
other.
"Neither of you are even remotely prepared to deal with
what I suspect we will encounter," the black medic said, her
voice as cold as the wind that blew out of the east now.
Turner heard sand hissing across the rusted sheet of steel
above them.
"You," Turner said to her, "come with me." Then he
turned, without looking back, and walked away. It was possi-
ble that she might not obey his command, in which case he'd
lose face with the other two, but it seemed the right move.
When he was ten meters from the surgery pod, he halted. He
heard her feet on the gravel.
"What do you know?" he asked without turning.
"Perhaps no more than you do," she said, "perhaps more.
"More than your colleagues, obviously."
"They are extremely talented men. They are also .
servants."
"And you are not."
"Neither are you, mercenary. I was hired out of the finest
unlicensed clinic in Chiba for this I was given a great deal of
material to study in preparation for my meeting with this
illustrious patient. The black clinics of Chiba are the cutting
edge of medicine: not even Hosaka could know that my
position in black medicine would allow me to guess what it is
that your defector carries in his head. The street tries to find
its own uses for things, Mr. Turner Already, several times,
I've been hired to attempt the removal of these new implants.
A certain amount of advanced Maas biocircuitry has found its
way into the market. These attempts at implanting are a
logical step. I suspect Maas may leak these things deliberately
"Then explain it to me
"I don't think I could," she said, and there was a strange
hint of resignation in her voice. "I told you, I've seen it. I
didn't say that I understood it." Fingertips suddenly brushed
the skin beside his skull jack "This, compared with biochip
implants, is like a wooden staff beside a myoelectric limb."
"But will it be life-threatening, in his case?"
"Oh, no," she said, withdrawing her hand, "not for him
And then he heard her trudging back toward the sur-
gery
Conroy sent a runner in with the software package that
would allow Turner to pilot the jet that would carry Mitchell
to Hosaka's Mexico City compound. The runner was a wild-
eyed, sun-blackened man Lynch called Hariy, a rope-muscled
apparition who came cycling in from the direction of Tucson
on a sand-scoured bike with balding lug tires and bone-yellow
rawhide laced around its handlebars. Lynch led Harry across
the parking lot. Harry was singing to himself, a strange sound
in the enforced quiet of the site, and his song, if you could
call it that, was like someone randomly tuning a broken radio
up and down midnight miles of dial, bringing in gospel shouts
and snatches of twenty years of international pop. Harry had
his bike slung across one burnt, bird-thin shoulder
"Hariy's got something for you from Tucson," Lynch
said.
"You two know each other?" Turner asked, looking at
Lynch "Maybe have a friend in common?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Lynch asked.
Turner held his stare. "You know his name."
"He told me his fucking name, Turner."
"Name's Harry," the burnt man said. He tossed the bicy-
cle down on a clump of brush. He smiled vacantly, exposing
badly spaced, eroded teeth. His bare chest was filmed with
sweat and dust, and hung with loops of fine steel chain,
rawhide, bits of animal horn and fur, brass cartridge casings,
copper coins worn smooth and faceless with use, and a small
pouch made of soft brown leather.
Turner looked at the assortment of things strung across the
skinny chest and reached out, flipping a crooked bit of bent
gristle suspended from a length of braided string. "What the
hell is that, Harry?"
"That's a coon's pecker," Harry said. "Coon's got him a
jointed bone in his pecker Not many as know that"
"You ever meet my friend Lynch before, Hariy?"
Harry blinked.
"He had the passwords," Lynch said. "There's an ur-
gency hierarchy. He knew the top. He told me his name. Do
you need me here, or can I get back to work?"
"Go," Turner said.
When Lynch was out of earshot, Harry began to work at
the thongs that sealed the leather pouch. "You shouldn't be
harsh with the boy," he said. "He's really very good. I
actually didn't see him until he had that fletcher up against
my neck." He opened the pouch and fished delicately inside.
"Tell Conroy I've got him pegged."
"Sorry," Harry said, extracting a folded sheet of yellow
notebook paper from his pouch. "You've got who pegged?"
He handed it to Turner; there was something inside.
"Lynch. He's Conroy's bumboy on the site. Tell him." He
unfolded the paper and removed the fat military microsoft.
There was a note in blue capitals: BREAK A LEG, ASSHOLE SEE
YOU IN THE DF
"Do you really want me to tell him that?"
"Tell him."
"You're the boss."
"You fucking know it," Turner said, crumpling the paper
and thrusting it into Harry's left armpit. Harry smiled, sweetly
and vacantly, and the intelligence that had risen in him settled
again, like some aquatic beast sinking effortlessly down into a
smooth sea of sun-addled vapidity. Turner stared into his
eyes. cracked yellow opal, and saw nothing there but sun and
the broken highway. A hand with missing joints came up to
scratch absently at a week's growth of beard. "Now," Turner
said. Harry turned, pulled his bike up from the tangle of
brush, shouldered it with a grunt, and began to make his way
back across the ruined parking lot. His oversized, tattered
khaki shorts flapped as he went, and his collection of chains
rattled softly.
Sutcliffe whistled from a rise twenty meters away, held up
a roll of orange surveyor's tape. It was time to start laying
out
Mitchell's landing strip. They'd have to work quickly, before
the sun was too high, and still it was going to be hot.
"So," Webber said, "he's coming in by air." She spat
brown juice on a yellowed cactus. Her cheek was packed with
Copenhagen snuff
"You got it," Turner said. He sat beside her on a ledge of
buff shale. They were watching Lynch and Nathan clear the
strip he and Sutcliffe had laid out with the orange tape The
tape marked out a rectangle fodr meters wide and twenty
long Lynch carried a length of rusted I-beam to the tape and
heaved it over. Something scurried away through the brush as
the beam rang on concrete.
~`They can see that tape, if they want to," Webber said,
wiping her lips with the back of her hand. "Read the head-
lines on your morning fax, if they want to."
"I know," Turner said, "but if they don't know we're
here already, I don't think they're going to. And you couldn't
see it from the highway." He adjusted the black nylon cap
Ramirez had given him, pulling the long bill down until it
touched his sunglasses. "Anyway, we're just moving the
heavy stuff, the things that could tear a leg off. It isn't
going to look like anything, not from orbit."
"No," Webber agreed, her seamed face impassive beneath
her sunglasses He could smell her sweat from where she sat,
sharp and animal.
"What the hell do you do, Webber, when you aren't doing
this?" He looked at her.
`Probably a hell of a lot more than you do," she said.
"Part of the time I breed dogs." She took a knife from her
boot and began to strop it patiently on her sole, flipping it
smoothly with each stroke, like a Mexican barber sharpening
a razor. "And I fish. Trout."
"You have people, in New Mexico?"
"Probably more than you've got," she said flatly. "I
figure the ones like you and Sutcliffe, you aren't from any
place at all. This is where you live, isn't it, Turner? On the
site, today, the day your boy comes out. Right?" She tested
the blade against the ball of her thumb, then slid it back into
its sheath.
"But you have people? You got a man to go back to?"
"A woman, you want to know," she said. "Know any-
thing about breeding dogs?"
"No," he said
"I didn't think so." She squinted at him. "We got a kid,
too. Ours. She carried it."
"DNA splice?"
She nodded.
"That's expensive," he said.
"You know it; wouldn't be here if we didn't need to pay it
off. But she's beautiful."
"Your woman?"
"Our kid."
As SHE WALKED FROM the Louvre, she seemed to sense some
articulated structure shifting to accommodate her course through
the city. The waiter would be merely a part of the thing, one
limb, a delicate probe or palp. The whole would be larger,
much larger. How could she have imagined that it would be
possible to live, to move, in the unnatural field of Virek's
wealth without suffering distortion? Virek had taken her up.
in all her misery, and had rotated her through the monstrous,
invisible stresses of his money, and she had been changed. Of
course, she thought, of course: It moves around me con-
stantly, watchful and invisible, the vast and subtle mechanism
of Herr Virek's surveillance.
Eventually she found herself on the pavement below the
terrace of the Blanc. It seemed as good a place as any. A
month before, she would have avoided it; she'd spent too
many evenings with Alain there. Now, feeling that she had
been freed, she decided to begin the process of rediscovering
her own Paris by choosing a table at the Blanc She took one
near a side screen. She asked a waiter for a cognac, and
shivered, watching the Paris traffic flow past, perpetual river
of steel and glass, while all around her, at other tables,
strangers ate and smiled, drank and argued, said bitter good-
byes or swore private fealties to an afternoon's feeling.
Butshe smiledshe was a part of it all. Something in her
was waking from a long and stifled sleep, brought back into
the light in the instant she'd fully opened her eyes to Alain's
viciousness and her own desperate need to continue loving
him. But that need was fading, even as she sat here. The
shabbiness of his lies, somehow, had broken the chains of her
depression. She could see no logic to it, because she had
known, in some part of herself, and long before the business
wih Gnass, exactly what it was that Alain did in the world,
and that had made no difference to her love. In the face of
this new feeling, however, she would forgo logic. It was
enough, to be here, alive, at a table in the Blanc, and to
imagine all around her the intricate machine that she now
knew Virek had deployed.
Ironies, she thought, seeing the young waiter from Napo-
leon Court step up onto the terrace. He wore the dark trousers
he had worked in, but the apron had been replaced with a
blue windbreaker. Dark hair fell across his forehead in a
smooth wing. He came toward her, smiling, confident, know-
ing that she wouldn't run. There was something in her then
that wanted very badly to run, but she knew that she wouldn't.
Irony, she told herself: As I luxuriate in the discovery that I
am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible
animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to
see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an
obscure desire.
"My name is Paco," he said, pulling out the white-painted
iron chair opposite her own
"You were the child, the boy, in the park .
"A long time ago, yes." He sat. "Sefior has preserved the
image of my childhood."
"I have been thinking, about your Sefior." She didn't look
at him, but at the passing cars, cooling her eyes in the flow of
traffic, the colors of polycarbon and painted steel. "A man
like Virek is incapable of divesting himself of his wealth. His
money has a life of its own. Perhaps a will of its own. He
implied as much when we met."
"You are a philosopher."
"I'm a tool, Paco. I'm the most recent tip for a very old
machine in the hands of a very old man, who wishes to pene-
trate something and has so far f~led to do so. Your em-
ployer fumbles through a thousand tools and somehow chooses
me .
"You are a poet as well!"
She laughed, taking her eyes from the traffic; he was
grinning, his mouth bracketed in deep vertical grooves. "While
I walked here, I imagined a structure, a machine so large that
I am incapable of seeing it. A machine that surrounds me,
anticipating my every step."
"And you are an egotist as well?"
"Am I?"
"Perhaps not. Certainly, you are observed. We watch, and
it is well that we do. Your friend in the brasserie, we watch
him as well. Unfortunately, we've been unable to determine
where he obtained the hologram he showed you. Very likely,
he already had it when he began to phone your friend's
number Someone got to him, do you understand? Someone
has put him in your way. Don't you think that this is most
intriguing? Doesn't it pique the philosopher in you?"
"Yes, I suppose it does I took the advice you gave me, in
the brasserie, and agreed to his price.
"Then he will double it." Paco smiled.
"Which is of no importance to me, as you pointed out. He
has agreed to contact me tomorrowi I assume that you can
arrange the delivery of the money. He asked for cash
"Cash"he rolled his eyes"how risqmi! But, yes, I
can. And I know the details as well. We were monitoring the
conversation. Not difficult, as he was helpful enough to
broadcast it himself, from a bead microphone. We were
anxious to learn who that broadcast was intended for, but we
doubt he knows that himself."
"It was unlike him," she said, frowning, "to excuse him-
self, to break off that way, before he had made his demands.
He fancies he has a flair for the dramatic moment
"He had no choice," Paco said "We engineered what he
took to be a failure of the bead's power source It required a
trip to the hommes. then. He said very nasty things about
you, alone in the cubicle."
She gestured to her empty glass as a waiter passed. "I still
find it difficult to see my part in this, my value. To Virek, I
mean."
"Don't ask me. You are the philosopher, here. I merely
execute Sefior's orders, to the best of my ability."
"Would you like a brandy, Paco? Or perhaps some coffee?"
"The French," he said, with great conviction, "know
nothing about coffee."
"MAYBE YOU CAN RUN that one by me again," Bobby said,
around a mouthful of rice and eggs "I thought you already
said it's not a religion."
Beauvoir removed his eyeglass frames and sighted down
one of the earpieces. "That wasn't what I said. I said you
didn't have to worry about it, is all, whether it's a religion
or
not It's Just a structure. Lets you an' me discuss some things
that are happening, otherwise we might not have words for it,
concepts"
"But you talk like these, whatchacallem, lows, are"
"Loa," Beauvoir corrected, tossing his glasses down on
the table He sighed, dug one of the Chinese cigarettes from
Two-a-Day's pack, and lit it with the pewter skull. "Plural's
same as the singular." He inhaled deeply, blew out twin
streams of smoke through arched nostrils. "You think reli-
gion, what are you thinking about, exactly?"
"Well, my mother's sister, she's a Scientologist, real ortho-
dox, you know? And there's this woman across the hall, she's
Catholic. My old lady' `he paused, the food gone tasteless
in his mouth-' `she'd put these holograms up in my room
sometimes, Jesus or Hubbard or some shit. I guess I think
about that."
"Vodou isn't like that," Beauvoir said. "It isn't concerned
with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it's about
is getting things done. You follow me? In our system, there
are many gods. spirits Part of one big family, with all the
virtues, all the vices. There's a ritual tradition of communal
manifestation, understand? Vodou says, there's God, sure,
Gran Met, but He's big, too big and too far away to worry
Himself if your ass is poor, or you can't get laid. Come on,
man, you know how this works, it's street religion, came out
of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou's like the
street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don't go camp
on the Yakuza's doorstep, do you? No way. You go to
somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?"
Bobby nodded, chewing thoughtfully. Another derm and
two glasses of the red wine had helped a lot, and the big man
had taken Two-a-Day for a walk through the trees and the
fluorescent jackstraws, leaving Bobby with Beauvoir. Then
Jackie had shown up all cheerful, with a big bowl of this
eggs-and-rice stuff, which wasn't bad at all, and as she'd put
it down on the table in front of him, she'd pressed one of her
tits against his shoulder.
"So," Beauvoir said, "we are' concerned with getting
things done. If you want, we're concerned with systems. And
so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn't be
a cowboy and you wouldn't have a handle, right?" He dunked
what was left of the cigarette in a fingerprinted glass half
full of red wine. "Looks like Two-a-Day was about to get down
to serious partying, about the time the shit hit the fan
"What shit's that?" Bobby asked, wiping his mouth with
the back of his hand.
"You," Beauvoir said, frowning. "Not that any of it is
your fault. As much as Two-a-Day wants to make out that's
the case."
"He does? He seems pretty tense now Real bitchy, too."
"Exactly. You got it Tense Scared shitless is more like
it.''
"So how come?"
"Well, you see, things aren't exactly what they seem, with
Two-a-Day. I mean, yeah, he actually does the kind of shit
you've known him to. hustles hot software to the caspers,
pardon me' `he grinned-' `down in Barrytown, but his main
shot, I mean the man's real ambitions, you understand, lie
elsewhere." Beauvoir picked up a wilted canapd, regarded it
with evident suspicion, and flicked it over the table, into the
trees. "His thing, you understand, is dicking around for a
couple of bigtime Sprawl oungans."
Bobby nodded blankly.
"Dudes who serve with both hands"
`You lost me there."
"We're talking a professional priesthood here, you want to
call it that. Otherwise, just imagine a couple of major dudes
console cowboys, among other thingswho make it their
business to get things done for people. `To serve with both
hands' is an expression we have, sort of means they work
both ends. White and black, got me?"
Bobby swallowed, then shook his head
"Sorcerers," Beauvoir said "Never mind. Bad dudes, big
money, that's all you need to know Two-a-Day, he acts like
an up-line joeboy for these people. Sometimes he finds some-
thing they might be interested in, he downloads it on `em,
collects a few favors later. Maybe he collects a dozen too
many favors, they download something on him. Not quite the
same proposition, you follow me? Say they get something
they think has potential, but it scares them. These characters
tend to a certain conservatism, you see? No? Well, you'll
learn
Bobby nodded.
"The kind of software someone like you would rent from
Two-a-Day, that's nothin'. I mean, it'll work, but it's nothing
anybody heavy would ever bother with. You've seen a lot of
cowboy kinos, right? Well, the stuff they make up for those
things isn't much, compared with the kind of shit a real heavy
operator can front. Particularly when it comes to icebreakers
Heavy icebreakers are kind of funny to deal in, even for the
big boys You know why? Because ice, all the really hard
stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the
matrix, is always the produce of an Al, an ariificial intelli-
gence Nothing else is fast enough to weave good ice and
constantly alter and upgrade it So when a really powerful
icebreaker shows up on the black market, there are already a
couple of very dicey factors in play. Like, for starts, where
did the product come from? Nine times out of ten, it came
from an Al, and Al's are constantly screened, mainly by the
Turing people, to make sure they don't get too smart. So
maybe you'll get the Turing machine after your ass, because
maybe an Al somewhere wants to augment its private cash
flow Some Al's have citizenship, right? Another thing you
have to watch out for, maybe it's a military icebreaker, and
that's bad heat, too, or maybe it's taken a walk out of some
zaibatsu's industrial espionage arm, and you don't want that
either You takin' this shit in, Bobby?"
Bobby nodded. He felt like he'd been waiting all his life to
hear Beauvoir explain the workings of a world whose exis-
tence he'd only guessed at before.
"Still, an icebreaker that'll really cut is worth mega, I
mean beaucoup. So maybe you're Mr. Big in the market,
someone offers you this thing, and you don't want to just
tell `em to take a walk So you buy it. You buy it, real quiet,
but you don't slot it, no. What do you do with it? You take it
home, have your tech fix it up so that it looks real average
Like you have it set up in a format like this' `and he tapped
a stack of software in front of him' `and you take it to your
joeboy, who owes you some favors, as usual.
"Wait a sec," Bobby said. "I don't think I like"
"Good. That means you're getting smart, or anyway smarter.
Because that's what they did. They brought it out here to your
friendly `wareman, Mr. Two-a-Day, and they told him their
problem. `Ace,' they say, `we want to check this shit out,
test-drive it, but no way we gonna do it ourselves It's down
to you, boy.' So, in the way of things, what's Two-a-Day
gonna do with it? Is he gonna slot it? No way at all. He just
does the same damn thing the big boys did to him, `cept he
isn't even going to bother telling the guy he's going to do it
to. What he does, he picks a base out in the Midwest that's
full of tax-dodge programs and yen-laundry flowcharts for
some whorehouse in Kansas City, and everybody who didn't
just fall off a tree knows that the motherfucker is eyeball-deep
in ice, black ice, totally lethal feedback programs There isn't
a cowboy in the Sprawl or out who'd mess with that base.
first, because it's dripping with defenses; second, because the
stuff inside isn't worth anything to anybody but the IRS, and
they're probably already on the owner's take
"Hey," Bobby said, "lemme get this straight"
"I'm giving it to you straight, white boy! He picked out
that base, then he ran down his list of hotdoggers, ambitious
punks from over in Barrytown, wilsons dumb enough to run a
program they'd never seen before against a base that some
joker like Two-a-Day fingered for them and told them was an
easy make. And who's he pick? He picks somebody new to
the game, natch, somebody who doesn't even know where he
lives, doesn't even have his number, and he says, here, my
man, you take this home and make yourself some money.
You get anything good, Ill fence it for you!" Beauvoir's
eyes were wide, he wasn't smiling. "Sound like anybody you
know, man, or maybe you try not to hang out with losers?"
"You mean he knew I was going to get killed if I plugged
into that base?"
"No, Bobby, but he knew it was a possibility if the
package didn't work. What he mainly wanted was to watch
you try. Which he didn't bother to do himself, just put a
couple of cowboys on it. It could've gone a couple different
ways. Say, if that icebreaker had done its number on the
black ice, you'd have gotten in, found a bunch of figures that
meant dick to you, you'd have gotten back out, maybe with-
out leaving any trace at all. Well, you'd have come back to
Leon's and told Two-a-Day that he'd fingered the wrong
data. Oh, he'd have been real apologetic, for sure, and you'd
have gotten a new target and a new icebreaker, and he'd have
taken the first one back to the Sprawl and said it looked okay.
Meanwhile, he'd have an eye cocked in your direction, just to
monitor your health, make sure nobody came looking for the
icebreaker they might've heard you'd used. Another way it
might have gone, the way it nearly did go, something could've
been funny with the icebreaker, the ice could've fned you
dead, and one of those cowboys would've had to break into
your momma's place and get that software back before any-
body found your body."
`I dunno, Beauvoir, that's pretty fucking hard to
"Hard my ass. Life is hard. I mean, we're talkin' biz, you
know?" Beauvoir regarded him with some seventy, the plas-
tic frames far down his slender nose. He was lighter than
either Two-a-Day or the big man, the color of coffee with
only a little whitener, his forehead high and smooth beneath
close-cropped black fizz. He looked skinny, under his gray
sharkskin robe, and Bobby didn't really find him threatening
at all. "But our problem, the reason we're here, the reason
you're here, is to figure out what did happen. And that's
something else."
"But you mean he set me up, Two-a-Day set me up so I'd
get my ass killed?" Bobby was still in the St Mary's Mater-
nity wheelchair, although he no longer felt like he needed it.
"And he's in deep shit with these guys, these heavies from
the Sprawl?"
"You got it now."
"And that's why he was acting that way, like he doesn't
give a shit, or maybe hates my guts, right? And he's real
scared?''
Beauvoir nodded.
"And," Bobby said, suddenly seeing what Two-a-Day was
really pissed about, and why he was scared, "it's because I
got my ass jumped, down by Big Playground, and those Lobe
fucks npped me for my deck! And their software, it was still
in my deck!" He leaned forward, excited at having put it
together. "And these guys, it's like they'll kill him or some-
thing, unless he gets it back for them, right?"
"I can tell you watch a lot of kino," Beauvoir said, "but
that's about the size of it, definitely."
"Right," Bobby said, settling back in the wheelchair and
putting his bare feet up on the edge of the table. "Well,
Beauvoir, who are these guys? Whatchacallem, hoonguns?
Sorcerers, you said? What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"
"Well, Bobby," Beauvoir said~ "I'm one, and the big
fellayou can call him Lucashe's the other."
"You've probably seen one of these before," Beauvoir
said, as the man he called Lucas put the projection tank down
on the table, having methodically cleared a space for it.
`In school," Bobby said.
"You go to school, man?" Two-a-Day snapped "Why the
fuck didn't you stay there?" He'd been chainsmoking since
he came back with Lucas, and seemed in worse shape than
he'd been in before
"Shut up, Two-a-Day," Beauvoir said. "Little education
might do you some good.~'
"They used one to teach us our way around in the matnx,
how to access stuff from the print library, like that
"Well, then," Lucas said, straightening up and brushing
nonexistent dust from his big pink palms, "did you ever use
it for that, to access print books?" He'd removed his immac-
ulate black suit coat, his spotless white shirt was traversed by
a pair of slender maroon suspenders, and he'd loosened the
knot of his plain black tie.
"I don't read too well," Bobby said. "I mean, I can, but
it's work. But yeah, I did I looked at some real old books on
the matnx and stuff"
"I thought you had," Lucas said, jacking some kind of
small deck into the console that formed the base of the tank.
"Count Zero. Count zero interrupt. Old programmer talk
He passed the deck to Beauvoir, who began to tap commands
into it.
Complex geometric forms began to click into place in the
tank, aligned with the nearly invisible planes of a three-dimen-
sional grid. Beauvoir was sketching in the cyberspace coordi-
nates for Barrytown, Bobby saw. "We'll call you this blue
pyramid, Bobby. There you are." A blue pyramid began to
pulse softly at the very center of the tank. "Now we'll show
you what Two-a-Day's cowboys saw, the ones who were
watching you. From now on, you're seeing a recording " An
interrupted line of blue light extruded from the pyramid,
following a grid line Bobby watched, seeing himself alone in
his mother's living room, the Ono-Sendai on his lap, the
curtains drawn, his fingers moving across the deck
"Icebreaker on its way," Beauvoir said. The line of blue
dots reached the wall of the tank. Beauvoir tapped the deck,
and the coordinates changed. A new set of geometrics re-
placed the first arrangement Bobby recognized the cluster of
orange rectangles centered in the grid. "That's it," he said.
The blue line progressed from the edge of the tank, headed
for the orange base. Faint planes of ghost-orange flickered
around the rectangles, shifting and strobing, as the line grew
closer.
"You can see something's wrong right there." Lucas said.
"That's their ice, and it was already hip to you. Rumbled you
before you even got a lock."
As the line of blue dots touched the shifting orange plane,
it was surrounded by a translucent orange tube of slightly
greater diameter The tube began to lengthen, traveling back,
along the line, until it reached the wall of the tank
"Meanwhile," Beauvoir said, "back home in Barry-
town He tapped the deck again and now Bobby's blue
pyramid was in the center. Bobby watched as the orange tube
emerged from the wall of the projection tank, still following
the blue line, and smoothly approached the pyramid. "Now
at this point, you were due to start doing some serious dying,
cowboy." The tube reached the pyramid; triangular orange
planes snapped up, walling it in. Beauvoir froze the projection.
"Now," Lucas said, "when Two-a-Day's hired help, who
are all in all a pair of tough and experienced console jockeys,
when they saw what you are about to see, my man, they
decided that their deck was due for that big overhaul in the
sky. Being pros, they had a backup deck. When they brought
it on line, they saw the same thing. It was at that point that
they decided to phone their employer, Mr. Two-a-Day, who,
as we can see from this mess, was about to throw himself a
party..
"Man," Two-a-Day said, his voice tight with hysteria, "I
told you. I had some clients up here needed entertaining. I
paid those boys to watch, they were watching, and they
phoned me. I phoned you. What the hell you want, anyway?"
"Our property," Beauvoir said softly. "Now watch this,
real close. This motherfucker is what we call an anomalous
phenomenon, no shit He tapped the deck again, start-
ing the recording.
Liquid flowers of milky white blossomed from the floor of
the tank; Bobby, craning forward, saw that they seemed to
consist of thousands of tiny spheres or bubbles, and then they
aligned perfectly with the cubical grid and coalesced, forming
a top-heavy, asymmetrical structure,' a thing like a rectilinear
mushroom. The surfaces, facets, were white, perfectly blank.
The image in the tank was no longer than Bobby's open hand.
but to anyone jacked into a deck it would have been enor-
mous. The thing unfolded a pair of horns; these lengthened,
curved, became pincers that arced out to grasp the pyramid.
He saw the tips sink smoothly through the flickering orange
planes of the enemy ice.
"She said, `What are you doing?' " he heard himself say.
"Then she asked me why they were doing that, doing it to
me, killing me .
"Ah," Beauvoir said, quietly, "now we are getting some-
where."
He didn't know where they were going, but he was glad to
be out of that chair. Beauvoir ducked to avoid a slanting
gro-light that dangled from twin lengths of curly-cord: Bobby
followed, almost slipping in a green-filmed puddle of water
Away from Two-a-Day's couch-clearing, the air seemed thicker.
There was a greenhouse smell of damp and growing things.
"So that's how it was," Beauvoir said, "Two-a-Day sent
some friends round to Covina Concourse Courts, but you
were gone. Your deck was gone. too."
"Well," Bobby said, "I don't see it's exactly his fault,
then. I mean, if I hadn't split for Leon'sand I was lookin'
for Two-a-Day. even bookin' to try to get up herethen he'd
have found me, right?" Beauvoir paused to admire a leafy
stand of flowering hemp, extending a thin brown forefinger to
lightly brush the pale, colorless flowers.
"True," he said, "but this is a business matter. He should
have detailed someone to watch your place for the duration of
the run, to ensure that neither you nor the software took any
unscheduled walks."
"Well, he sent Rhea `n' Jackie over to Leon's, because I
saw `em there." Bobby reached into the neck of his black
pajamas and scratched at the sealed wound that crossed his
chest and stomach. Then he remembered the centipede thing
Pye had used as a suture, and quickly withdrew his hand. It
itched, a straight line of itch, but he didn't want to touch it.
"No, Jackie and Rhea are ours. Jackie is a mambo, a
priestess, the horse of Danbala." Beauvoir continued on his
way, picking out what Bobby presumed was some existing
track or path through the jumbled forest of hydroponics,
although it seemed to progress in no particular direction.
Some of the larger shrubs were rooted in bulbous green
plastic trash bags filled with dark humus. Many of these had
burst, and pale roots sought fresh nourishment in the shadows
between the gro-lights, where time and the gradual fall of
leaves conspired to produce a thin compost. Bobby wore a
pair of black nylon thongs Jackie had found for him, but there
was already damp earth between his toes. "A horse?" he
asked Beauvoir, dodging past a prickly-looking thing that
suggested an inside-out palm tree.
"Danbala rides her, Danbala Wedo, the snake. Other times,
she is the horse of Aida Wedo, his wife."
Bobby decided not to pursue it. He tried to change the
subject: "How come Two-a-Day's got such a motherhuge
place? What are all these trees `n' things for?" He knew that
Jackie and Rhea had wheeled him through a doorway, in the
St. Mary's chair, but he hadn't seen a wall since. He also
knew that the arcology covered x number of hectares, so that
it was possible that Two-a-Day's place was very large indeed,
but it hardly seemed likely that a `wareman, even a very
sharp one, could afford this much space. Nobody could afford
this much space, and why would anybody want to live in a
leaky hydroponic forest?
The last derm was wearing off, and his back and chest
were beginning to burn and ache.
"Ficus trees, mapou trees . . . This whole level of the
Projects is a lieu saint, holy place." Beauvoir tapped Bobby
on the shoulder and pointed out twisted, bicolored strings
dangling from the limbs of a nearby tree. "The trees are
consecrated to different ba. That one is for Ougou, Ougou
Feray, god of war. There's a lot of other things grown up
here, herbs the leaf-doctors need, and some just for fun. But
this isn't Two-a-Day's place, this is communal
"You mean the whole Project's into this? All like voodoo
and stuff?" It was worse than Marsha's darkest fantasies.
"No, man," and Beauvoir laughed. "There's a mosque up
top, and a couple or ten thousand holyroller Baptists scattered
around, some Church o' Sci. . .. All the usual stuff. Still'
`he
grinned-' `we are the ones with the tradition of getting shit
done. . . . But how this got started, this level, that goes way
back. The people who designed these places, maybe eighty, a
hundred years ago, they had the idea they'd make `em as
self-sufficient as possible Make `em grow food Make `em
heat themselves, generate power, whatever Now this one,
you drill far enough down, is sitting on top of a lot of
geothermal water. It's real hot down there, but not hot enough
to run an engine, so it wasn't gonna give em any power
They made a stab at power, up on the roof, with about a
hundred Darrieus rotors, what they call eggbeaters Had them-
selves a wind farm, see? Today they get most of their watts
off the Fission Authority, like anybody else. But that geother-
mal water, they pump that up to a heat exchanger. It's too
salty to drink, so in the exchanger it Just heats up your
standard Jersey tap water, which a lot of people figure isn't
worth drinking anyway.
Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby
looked back. Shallow pools on the muddy concrete floor
caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf trees, the bare
pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic
fluid.
"Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of
shrimp. Shrimp grow real fast in warm water. Then they
pump it through pipes in the concrete, up here, to keep this
place warm. That's what this level was for, to grow `ponic
amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into
the catfish tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat
the
algae, and it all goes around again. Or anyway, that was the
idea. Chances are they didn't figure anybody'd go up on the
roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room for a
mosque, and they didn't figure a lot of other changes either
So we wound up with this space. But you can still get you
some damned good shrimp in the Projects. . . . Catfish, too"
They had arrived at the wall. It was made of glass, beaded
heavily with condensation. A few centimeters beyond it was
another wall, that one made of what looked like rusty sheet
steel. Beauvoir fished a key of some kind from a pocket in his
sharkskin robe and slid it into an opening in a bare alloy beam
dividing two expanses of window. Somewhere nearby, an
engine whined into life; the broad steel shutter rotated up and
out, moving jerkily, to reveal a view that Bobby had often
imagined.
They must be near the top, high up in the Projects, because
Big Playground was something he could cover with two
hands. The condos of Barrytown looked like some gray-white
fungus, spreading to the horizon. It was nearly dark, and he
could make out a pink glow, beyond the last range of condo
racks.
"That's the Sprawl, over there, isn't it? That pink."
"That's right, but the closer you get, the less pretty it
looks. How'd you like to go there, Bobby? Count Zero ready
to make the Sprawl?"
"Oh, yeah," Bobby said, his palms against the sweating
glass, "you got no idea...." The derm had worn off
entirely now, and his back and chest hurt like hell.
As ThE NIGHT came on, Turner found the edge again.
It seemed like a long time since he'd been there, but when
it clicked in, it was like he'd never left. It was that super-
human synchromesh flow that stimulants only approximated.
He could only score for it on the site of a major defection,
one where he was in command, and then only in the final
hours before the actual move.
But it had been a long time; in New Delhi, he'd only been
checking out possible escape routes for an executive who
wasn't entirely certain that relocation was what he wanted. If
he had been working the edge, that night in Chandni Chauk,
maybe he'd have been able to dodge the thing. Probably not,
but the edge would've told him to try.
Now the edge let him collate the factors he had to deal with
at the site, balancing clusters of small problems against sin-
gle, larger ones. So far there were a lot of little ones, but no
real ballbreakers. Lynch and Webber were starting to get in
each other's hair, so he arranged to keep them apart. His
conviction that Lynch was Conroy's plant, instinctive from
the beginning, was stronger now. Instincts sharpened, on the
edge; things got witchy. Nathan was having trouble with the
lowtech Swedish hand warmers; anything short of an elec-
tronic circuit baffled him. Turner put Lynch to work on the
hand warmers, fueling and priming them, and let Nathan
carry them out, two at a time, and bury them shallowly, at
meter intervals, along the two long lines of orange tape.
The microsoft Conroy had sent filled his head with its own
universe of constantly shifting factors: airspeed, altitude, at-
titude, angle of attack, g-forces, headings. The plane's weapon
delivery information was a constant subliminal litany of target
designators, bomb fall lines, search circles, range and release
cues, weapons counts. Conroy had tagged the microsoft with
a simple message outlining the plane's time of arrival and
confirming the arrangement for space for a single passenger
He wondered what Mitchell was doing, feeling. The Mans
Biolabs North America facility was carved into the heart of a
sheer mesa, a table of rock thrusting from the desert floor.
The biosoft dossier had shown Turner the mesa's face, cut
with bright evening windows; it rode about the uplifted arms
of a sea of saguaros like the wheelhouse of a giant ship. To
Mitchell, it had been prison and fortress, his home for nine
years. Somewhere near its core he had perfected the hybridoma
techniques that had eluded other researchers for almost a
century; working with human cancer cells and a neglected,
nearly forgotten model of DNA synthesis, he had produced
the immortal hybrid cells that were the basic production tools
of the new technology, minute biochemical factories end-
lessly reproducing the engineered molecules that were linked
and built up into biochips. Somewhere in the Maas arcology,
Mitchell would be moving through his last hours as their star
researcher.
Turner tried to imagine Mitchell leading a very different
sort of life following his defection to Hosaka, but found it
difficult. Was a research arcology in Arizona very different
from one on Honshu?
There had been times, during that long day, when Mitch-
ell's coded memories had risen in him, filling him with a
strange dread that seemed to have nothing to do with the
operation at hand.
It was the intimacy of the thing that still disturbed him, and
perhaps the feeling of fear sprang from that. Certain frag-
ments seemed to have an emotional power entirely out of
proportion to their content. Why should a memory of a plain
hallway in some dingy Cambridge graduate dormitory fill him
with a sense of guilt and self-loathing? Other images, which
logically should have carried a degree of feeling, were
strangely
lacking in affect: Mitchell playing with his baby daughter on
an expanse of pale woolen broadloom in a rented house in
Geneva, the child laughing, tugging at his hand. Nothing.
The man's life, from Turner's vantage, seemed marked out
by a certain inevitability; he was brilliant, a brilliance that
had
been detected early on, highly motivated, gifted at the kind of
blandly ruthless in-company manipulation required by some-
one who aspired to become a top research scientist. If anyone
was destined to rise through laboratory-corporate hierarchies,
Turner decided, it would be Mitchell.
Turner himself was incapable of meshing with the intensely
tribal world of the zaibatsumen, the lifers. He was a perpetual
outsider, a rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of
intercorpo-
rate politics. No company man would have been capable of
taking the initiatives Turner was required to take in the course
of an extraction. No company man was capable of Turner's
professionally casual ability to realign his loyalties to fit a
change in employers. Or, perhaps, of his unyielding commit-
ment once a contract had been agreed upon. He had drifted
into security work in his late teens, `when the grim doldrums
of the postwar economy were giving way to the impetus of
new technologies. He had done well in security, considering
his general lack of ambition. He had a ropy, muscular poise
that impressed his employer's clients, and he was bright, very
bright. He wore clothes well. He had a way with technology.
Conroy had found him in Mexico, where Turner's em-
ployer had contracted to provide security for a Sense/Net
simstim team who were recording a series of thirty-minute
segments in an ongoing jungle adventure series When Conroy
arrived, Turner was finishing his arrangements. He'd set up a
liaison between Sense/Net and the local government, bribed
the town's top police official, analyzed the hotel's security
system, met the local guides and drivers and had their histo-
ries doublechecked. arranged for digital voice protection on
the simstim team's transceivers, established a crisis-management
team, and planted seismic sensors around the Sense/Net
suite-cluster.
He entered the hotel's bar, a jungle-garden extension of the
lobby, and found a seat by himself at one of the glass-topped
tables. A pale man with a shock of white, bleached hair
crossed the bar with a drink in each hand. The pale skin was
drawn tight across angular features and a high forehead; he
wore a neatly pressed military shirt over jeans, and leather
sandals.
"You're the security for those simstim kids," the pale man
said, putting one of the drinks down on Turner's table. "Al-
fredo told me." Alfredo was one of the hotel bartenders.
Turner looked up at the man, who was evidently sober and
seemed to have all the confidence in the world. "I don't think
we've been introduced," Turner said, making no move to
accept the proffered drink.
"It doesn't matter," Conroy said, seating himself, "we're
in the same ball game." He seated himself.
Turner stared. He had a bodyguard's presence, something
restless and watchful written in the lines of his body, and few
strangers would so casually violate his private space.
"You know," the man said, the way someone might com-
ment on a team that wasn't doing particularly well in a given
season, "those seismics you're using really don't make it.
I've met people who could walk in there, eat your kids for
breakfast, stack the bones in the shower, and stroll out whis-
tling. Those seismics would say it never happened." He took
a sip of his drink. "You get A for effort, though. You know
how to do a job."
The phrase "stack the bones in the shower" was enough.
Turner decided to take the pale man out.
"Look, Turner, here's your leading lady." The man smiled
up at Jane Hamilton, who smiled back, her wide blue eyes
clear and perfect, each iris ringed with the minute gold letter-
ing of the Zeiss Ikon logo. Turner froze, caught in a split-
second lock of indecision. The star was close, too close, and
the pale man was rising
"Nice meeting you, Turner," he said. "We'll get together
sooner or later. Take my advice about those seismics; back
em up with a perimeter of screamers." And then he turned
and walked away, muscles rolling easily beneath the crisp
fabric of his tan shirt.
"That's nice, Turner," Hamilton said, taking the strang-
er's place.
"Yeah?" Turner watched as the man was lost in the con-
fusion of the crowded lobby, amid pink-fleshed tourists.
"You don't ever seem to talk to people. You always look
like you're running a make on them, filing a report. It's nice
to see you making friends for a change"
Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his
junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a
given week She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the
series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illumi-
nated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhu-
manly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan.
She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several
million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she
barely rated.
He sat with her. in the bar, until she'd finished two drinks,
then walked her back to the suite-cluster.
"You wouldn't feel like coming in for another, would you,
Turner?"
"No." he said. This was the second evening she'd made
the offer, and he sensed that it would be the last. "I have to
check the seismics."
Later that night, he phoned New York for the number of a
firm in Mexico City that could supply him with screamers for
the perimeter of the suite-cluster.
But a week later. Jane and three others, half the series cast,
were dead.
"We're ready to roll the medics," Webber said. Turner
saw that she was wearing fingerless brown leather gloves
She'd replaced her sunglasses with clear-glass shooting glasses,
and there was a pistol on her hip. "Sutcliffe's monitoring the
perimeter with the remotes. We'll need everybody else to get
the fucker through the brush."
"Need me?"
"Ramirez says he can't do anything too strenuous this
close to jacking in. You ask me, he's just a lazy little L.A.
shit.''
"No," Turner said, getting up from his seat on the ledge,
"he's right. If he sprained his wrist, we'd be screwed. Even
something so minor that he couldn't feel it could affect his
speed . .
Webber shrugged. "Yeah. Well, he's back in the bunker,
bathing his hands in the last of our water and humming to
himself, so we should be just fine."
When they reached the surgery, Turner automatically counted
heads. Seven. Ramirez was in the bunker; Sutcliffe was
somewhere in the cinderblock maze, monitoring the sentry-
remotes. Lynch had a Steiner-Optic laser slung over his right
shoulder, a compact model with a folding alloy skeleton
stock, integral batteries forming a fat handgrip below the gray
titanium housing that served the thing as a barrel. Nathan was
wearing a black jumpsuit, black paratrooper boots filmed with
pale dust, and had the bulbous ant-eye goggles of an image-
amplification rig dangling below his chin on a head strap.
Turner removed his Mexican sunglasses, tucked them into a
breast pocket in the blue work shirt, and buttoned the flap
"How's it going, Teddy?" he asked a beefy six-footer with
close-cropped brown hair.
"Jus' fine," Teddy said, with a toothy smile.
Turner surveyed the other three members of the site team,
nodding to each man in turn: Compton, Costa, Davis.
"Getting down to the wire, huh?" Costa asked. He had a
round, moist face and a thin, carefully trimmed beard. Like
Nathan and the others, he wore black.
"Pretty close," Turner said "All smooth so far."
Costa nodded.
"We're an estimated thirty minutes from amval," Turner
said.
Nathan, Davis," Webber said, "disconnect the sewage
line " She handed Turner one of the Telefunken ear-bead
sets. She'd already removed it from its bubble pack. She put
one on herself, peeling the plastic backing from the self-
adhesive throat microphone and smoothing it into place on
her sunburnt neck.
Nathan and Davis were moving in the shadows behind the
module. Turner heard Davis curse softly.
"Shit," Nathan said, "there's no cap for the end of the
tube." The others laughed.
"Leave it," Webber said. "Get to work on the wheels.
Lynch and Compton unlimber the jacks."
Lynch drew a pistol-shaped power driver from his belt and
ducked beneath surgery. It was swaying now, the suspension
creaking softly; the medics were moving inside. Turner heard
a brief, high-pitched whine from some piece of internal ma-
chinery, and then the chatter of Lynch's driver as he readied
the jacks.
He put his ear-bead in and stuck the throat mike beside his
larynx. "Sutcliffe? Check?"
"Fine," the Australian said, a tiny voice that seemed to
come from the base of his skull.
"Ramirez?"
"Loud and clear. .
Eight minutes. They were rolling the module out on its ten
fat tires. Turner and Nathan were on the front pair, steering;
Nathan had his goggles on. Mitchell was coming out in the
dark of the moon. The module was heavy, absurdly heavy,
and very nearly impossible to steer. "Like balancing a truck
on a couple of shopping carts," Nathan said to himself.
Turner's lower back was giving him trouble. It hadn't been
quite right since New Delhi.
"Hold it," Webber said, from the third wheel on the left.
"I'm stuck on a fucking rock . .
Turner released his wheel and straightened up. The bats
were out in force tonight, flickering things against the bowl of
desert starlight. There were bats in Mexico, in the jungle,
fruit bats that slept in the trees that overhung the
suite-cluster
where the Sense/Net crew slept. Turner had climbed those
trees, had strung the overhanging limbs with taut lengths of
molecular monofilament, meters of invisible razor waiting for
an unwary intruder. But Jane and the others had died anyway,
blown away on a hillside in the mountains near Acapulco.
Trouble with a labor union, someone said later, but nothing
was ever determined, really, other than the fact of the primi-
tive claymore charge, its placement and the position from
which it had been detonated. Turner had climbed the hill
himself, his clothes filmed with blood, and seen the nest of
crushed undergrowth where the killers had waited, the knife
switch and the corroded automobile battery. He found the
butts of hand-rolled cigarettes and the cap from a bottle of
Bohemia beer, bright and new.
The series had to be canceled, and the crisis-management
team did yeoman duty, arranging the removal of bodies and
the repatriation of the surviving members of the cast and
crew. Turner was on the last plane out, and after eight
Scotches in the lounge of the Acapulco airport, he'd wandered
blindly out into the central ticketing area and encountered a
man named Buschel, an executive tech from Sense/Net's Los
Angeles complex. Buschel was pale beneath an L.A. tan, his
seersucker suit limp with sweat. He was carrying a plain
aluminum case, like a camera case, its sides dull with con-
densation. Turner stared at the man, stared at the sweating
case, with its red and white warning decals and lengthy labels
explaining the precautions required in the transportation of
materials in cryogenic storage
"Christ," Buschel said, noticing him "Turner. I'm sorry,
man. Came down this morning. Ugly fucking business " He
took a sodden handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped
his face. "Ugly job. I've never had to do one of these, be-
fore . .
"What's in the case, Buschel?" He was much closer now,
although he didn't remember stepping forward. He could see
the pores in Buschel's tanned face.
"You okay, man?" Buschel taking a step back. "You look
bad."
"What's in the case, Buschel?" Seersucker bunched in his
fist, knuckles white and shaking.
"Damn it, Turner," the man jerking free, the handle of the
case clutched in both hands now. "They weren't damaged.
Only some minor abrasion on one of the corneas. They belong
to the Net. It was in her contract, Turner."
And he'd turned away, his guts knotted tight around eight
glasses of straight Scotch, and fought the nausea. And he'd
continued to fight it, held it off for nine years, until, in his
flight from the Dutchman, all the memory of it had come
down on him, had fallen on him in London, in Heathrow, and
he'd leaned forward, without pausing in his progress down
yet another corridor, and vomited into a blue plastic waste
canister.
"Come on. Turner," Webber said, "put some back in it.
Show us how it's done." The module began to strain forward
again, through the tarry smell of the desert plants
"Ready here," Ramirez said, his voice remote and calm.
Turner touched the throat mike' "I'm sending you some
company." He removed his finger from the mike. "Nathan,
it's time. You and Davis, hack to the bunker."
Davis was in charge of the squirt gear, their sole nonmatrix
link with Hosaka. Nathan was Mr. Fix-it. Lynch was rolling
the last of the bicycle wheels away into the brush beyond the
parking lot. Webber and Compton were kneeling beside the
module, attaching the line that linked the Hosaka surgeons
with the Sony biomonitor in the command post. With the
wheels removed, lowered and leveled on four jacks, the
portable neurosurgery reminded Turner once again of the
French vacation module. That had heen a much later trip,
four years after Conroy had recruited him in Los Angeles.
"How's it going?" Sutcliffe asked, over the link.
"Fine," Turner said, touching the mike.
"Lonely out here," Sutcliffe said.
"Compton," Turner said, "Sutcliffe needs you to help him
cover the perimeter. You, too, Lynch."
"Too bad," Lynch said, from the dark. ~`I was hoping I'd
get to see the action
Turner's hand was on the grip of the holstered Smith &
Wesson, under the open flap of the parka. "Now, Lynch." If
Lynch was Connie's plant. he'd want to be here. Or in the
bunker.
"Fuck it," Lynch said. "There's nobody out there and you
know it. You don't want me here, I'll go in there and watch
Ramirez .
"Right," Turner said, and drew the gun, depressing the
stud that activated the xenon projector. The first tight-beam
flash of noon-bright xenon light found a twisted saguaro, its
needles like tufts of gray fur in the pitiless illumination The
econd lit up the spiked skull on Lynch's belt, framed it in a
sharp-edged circle The sound of the shot and the sound of
he bullet detonating on impact were indistinguishable, waves
of concussion rolling out in invisible, ever-widening rings,
out into the flat dark land like thunder.
In the first few seconds after, there was no sound at all,
even the bats and bugs silenced, waiting. Wehber had thrown
herself flat in the scrub, and somehow he sensed her there,
now, knew that her gun would be out, held dead steady in
those brown, capable hands. He had no idea where Compton
was. Then Sutcliffe's voice, over the ear-bead, scratching at
him from his hrainpan: "Turner. What was that?"
There was enough starlight now to make out Webber. She
was sitting up, gun in her hands, ready, her elbows hraced on
her knees.
"He was Conroy's plant," Turner said, lowering the Smith
& Wesson.
"Jesus Christ," she said. "I'm Conroy's plant
"He had a line out. I've seen it before
She had to say it twice.
Sutcliffe's voice in his head, and then Ramirez: "We got
your transportation. Eighty klicks and closing. . . . Every-
thing else looks clear. There's a blimp twenty klicks south-
southwest, Jaylene says, unmanned cargo and it's right on
schedule. Nothing else. What the fuck's Sut yelling about?
Nathan says he heard a shot" Ramirez was jacked in. most
of his sensorium taken up with the input from the Maas-
Neotek deck. "Nathan's ready with the first squirt .
Turner could hear the jet banking now, braking for the
landing on the highway. Webber was up and walking toward
him, her gun in her hand. Sutcliffe was asking the same
question, over and over.
He reached up and touched the throat mike. "Lynch. He's
dead. The jet's here. This is it."
And then the Jet was on them, black shadow, incredibly
low, coming in without lights. There was a flare of blow-back
jets as the thing executed a landing that would have killed a
human pilot, and then a weird creaking as it readjusted its
articulated carbon-fiber airframe. Turner could make out the
green reflected glow of instrumentation in the curve of the
plastic canopy.
"You fucked up," Webber said.
Behind her, the hatch in the side of the surgery module
popped open, framing a masked figure in a green paper
contamination suit. The light from inside was blue-white,
brilliant, it threw a distorted shadow of the suited medic out
through the thin cloud of dust that hung above the lot in the
wake of the Jet's landing. "Close it!" Webber shouted. "Not
yet!"
As the door swung down, shutting out the light, they both
heard the ultralight's engine. After the roar of the jet, it
seemed no more than the hum of a dragonfly, a drone that
stuttered and faded as they listened. "He's out of fuel,"
Webber said. "But he's close."
"He's here," Turner said, pressing the throat mike. "First
squirt."
The tiny plane whispered past them, a dark delta against
the stars They could hear something flapping in the wind of
its silent passage, perhaps one of Mitchell's pants legs You're
up there, Turner thought, all alone, in the warmest clothes
you own, wearing a pair of infrared goggles you built for
yourself, and you're looking for a pair of dotted lines picked
out for you in hand warmers "You crazy fucker," he said,
his heart filling with a strange admiration, "you really wanted
out bad."
Then the first flare went up, with a festive little pop. and
the magnesium glare began its slow white parachute ride to
the desert floor. Almost immediately, there were two more,
and the long rattle of automatic fire from the west end of the
mall. He was peripherally aware of Webber stumbling through
the brush, in the direction of the bunker, but his eyes were
fixed on the wheeling ultralight, on its gay orange and blue
fabric wings, and the goggled figure hunched there in the
open metal framework above the fragile tripod landing gear
Mitchell.
The lot was bright as a football field, under the drifting
flares. The uhralight banked and turned with a lazy grace that
made Turner want to scream. A line of tracers hosed out in a
white arc from beyond the site perimeter. Missed.
Get it down. Get it down. He was running, jumping clumps
of brush that caught at his ankles, at the hem of his parka.
The flares. The light. Mitchell couldn't use the goggles
now, couldn't see the infrared glow of the hand warmers. He
was bringing it in wide of the strip. The nose wheel caught in
something and the ultralight cartwheeled, crumpling, torn
butterfly, and then lay down in its own white cloud of dust
The flash of the explosion seemed to reach him an instant
before the sound, throwing his shadow before him across the
pale brush. The concussion picked him up and threw him
down, and as he fell, he saw the broken surgery module in a
ball of yellow flame and knew that Webber had used her
antitank rocket Then he was up again, moving, running, the
gun in his hand.
He reached the wreckage of Mitchell's ultralight as the first
flare died. Another one arced out of nowhere and blossomed
overhead. The sound of firing was continuous now. He scram-
bled over a twisted sheet of rusted tin and found the sprawled
figure of the pilot, head and face concealed hy a makeshift
helmet and a clumsy-looking goggle rig. The goggles were
fastened to the helmet with dull silver strips of gaffer tape
The twisted limbs were padded in layers of dark clothing.
Turner watched his hands claw at the tape, tear at the infrared
goggles; his hands were distant creatures, pale undersea things
that lived a life of their own far down at the bottom of some
unthinkable Pacific trench, and he watched as they tore franti-
cally at tape, goggles, helmet Until it all came away, and the
long brown hair, limp with sweat, fell across the girl's white
face, smearing the thin trickle of dark blood that ran ftom one
nostril, and her eyes opened, revealing empty whites, and he
was tugging her up, somehow, into a fireman's carry, and
reeling in what he hoped was the direction of the jet
He felt the second explosion through the soles of his deck
shoes, and saw the idiot grin on the lump of plastique that sat
on Ramirez's cyberspace deck. There was no flash, only
sound and the sting of concussion through the concrete of the
lot
And then he was in the cockpit, breathing the new-car
smell of long-chain monomers, the familiar scent of newly
minted technology, and the girl was behind him, an awkward
doll sprawled in the embrace of the g-web that Conroy had
paid a San Diego arms dealer to install behind the pilot's
web. The plane was quivering, a live thing, and as he squirmed
deeper into his own web, he fumbled for the interface cable,
found it, ripped the microsoft from his socket, and slid the
cable-jack home.
Knowledge lit him like an arcade game, and he surged
forward with the plane-ness of the jet, feeling the flexible
airframe reshape itself for jump-off as the canopy whined
smoothly down on its servos. The g-web ballooned around
him, locking his limbs rigid, the gun still in his hand. "Go,
motherfucker." But the jet already knew, and g-force crushed
him down into the dark.
"You lost consciousness," the plane said Its chip-voice
sounded vaguely like Conroy.
"How long?"
"Thirty-eight seconds."
"Where are we?"
"Over Nagos." The head-up display lit, a dozen constantly
altered figures beneath a simplified map of the Arizona-
Sonora line.
The sky went white.
"What was that?"
Silence.
"What was that?"
"Sensors indicate an explosion," the plane said. "The
magnitude suggests a tactical nuclear warhead, but there was
no electromagnetic pulse. The locus of destruction was our
point of departure."
The white glow faded and was gone.
"Cancel course," he said.
"Canceled. New headings. please."
"That's a good question," Turner said. He couldn't turn
his head to look at the girl behind him. He wondered if she
were dead yet.
MARLY DREAMED OF ALAN, dusk in a wildflower field, and he
cradled her head, then caressed and broke her neck. Lay there
unmoving but she knew what he was doing. He kissed her all
over. He took her money and the keys to her room. The stars
were huge now, fixed above the bright fields, and she could
still feel his hands on her neck. .
She woke in the coffee-scented morning and saw the squares
of sunlight spread across the books on Andrea's table, heard
Andrea's comfortingly familiar morning cough as she lit a
first cigarette from the stove's front burner. She shook off the
dark colors of the dream and sat up on Andrea's couch,
hugging the dark red quilt around her knees. After Gnass,
after the police and the reporters, she'd never dreamed of
him. Or if she did, she'd guessed, she somehow censored the
dreams, erased them before she woke. She shivered, although
it was already a warm morning, and went into the bathroom.
She wanted no more dreams of Alain.
"Paco told me that Alain was armed when we met," she
said when Andrea handed her the blue enamel mug of coffee.
"Alain armed?" Andrea divided the omelet and slid half
onto Marly's plate. "What a bizarre idea. It would be like
like arming a penguin." They both laughed. "Alain is
not the type," Andrea said "He'd shoot his foot off in the
middle of some passionate declaration about the state of art
and the amount of the dinner bill. He's a big shit, Alain, but
that's hardly news. If I were you, I'd expend a bit more
worry on this Paco. What reason do you have for accepting
that he works for Virek?" She took a bite of omelet and
reached for the salt.
"I saw him. He was there in Virek's construct."
"You saw somethingan image only, the image of a
child which only resembled this man."
Marly watched Andrea eat her half of the omelet, letting
her own grow cold on the plate How could she explain,
about the sense she'd had, walking from the Louvre? The
conviction that something surrounded her now, monitoring
her with relaxed precision; that she had become the focus of
at least a part of Virek's empire. ``He's a very wealthy man,"
she began.
"Virek?" Andrea put her knife and fork down on the plate
and took up her coffee. "I should say he is. If you believe the
journalists, he's the single wealthiest individual, period. As
rich as some zaibatsu. But there's the catch, really: is he an
individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No. Aren't you
going to eat that?"
Marly began to mechanically cut and fork sections of the
cooling omelet, while Andrea continued: "You should look at
the manuscript we're working on this month
Marly chewed, raised her eyebrows questioningly
"It's a history of the high-orbit industrial clans. A man at
the University of Nice did it. Your Virek's even in it, come to
think; he's cited as a counterexample, or rather as a type of
parallel evolution. This fellow at Nice is interested in the
paradox of individual wealth in a corporate age. in why it
should still exist at all. Great wealth, I mean. He sees the
high-orbit clans, people like the Tessier-Ashpools, as a very
late variant on traditional patterns of aristocracy, late
because
the corporate mode doesn't really allow for an aristocracy."
She put her cup down on her plate and camed the plate to the
sink "Actually, now that I've started to describe it, it isn't
that interesting. There's a great deal of very gray prose about
the nature of Mass Man. With caps, Mass Man. He's big on
caps Not much of a stylist." She spun the taps and water
hissed out through the filtration unit.
"But what does he say about Virek?"
"He says, if I remember all this correctly, and I'm not at
all certain that I do, that Virek is an even greater fluke than
the industrial clans in orbit The clans are transgenerational,
and there's usually a fair bit of medicine involved: cryogen-
ics, genetic manipulation, various ways to combat aging. The
death of a given clan member, even a founding member,
usually wouldn't bring the clan, as a business entity. to a
crisis point. There's always someone to step in, someone
waiting. The difference between a clan and a corporation,
however, is that you don't need to literally marry into a
corporation
"But they sign indentures
Andrea shrugged. "That's like a lease. It isn't the same
thing. It's job security, really. But when your Herr Virek
dies, finally, when they run out of room to enlarge his vat,
whatever, his business interests will lack a logical focus. At
that point, our man in Nice has it, you'll see Virek and
Company either fragment or mutate, the latter giving us the
Something Company and a true multinational, yet another
home for capital-M Mass Man." She wiped her plate, rinsed
it, dried it. and placed it in the pine rack beside the sink "He
says that's too bad, in a way, because' there are so few people
left who can even see the edge."
"The edge?"
"The edge of the crowd. We're lost in the middle, you
and I Or I still am, at any rate." She crossed the kitchen and
put her hands on Marly's shoulders "You want to take care
in this. A part of you is already much happier, but now I see
that I could have brought that about myself, simply by arrang-
ing a little lunch for you with your pig of a former lover The
rest of it, I'm not sure I think our academic's theory is
invalidated by the obvious fact that Virek and his kind are
already far from human. I want you to be careful Then
she kissed Marly's cheek and went off to her work as an
assistant editor in the fashionably archaic business of printing
books.
She spent the morning at Andrea's, with the Braun, view-
ing the holograms of the seven works. Each piece was extraordi-
nary in its own way, but she repeatedly returned to the box
Virek had shown her first. If I had the original here, she
thought, and removed the glass, and one by one removed the
objects inside, what would be left? Useless things, a frame
of space, perhaps a smell like dust.
She sprawled on the couch, the Braun resting on her stom-
ach, and stared into the box. It ached It seemed to her that
the construction evoked something perfectly, but it was an
emotion that lacked a name. She ran her hands through the
bright illusion, tracing the length of the fluted, avian bone.
She was certain that Virek had already assigned an ornitholo-
gist the task of identifying the bird from whose wing that
bone had come And it would be possible to date each object
with the greatest precision, she supposed. Each tab of holofiche
also housed an extensive report on the known origin of each
piece, but something in her had deliberately avoided these. It
was sometimes best, when you came to the mystery that was
art, to come as a child. The child saw things that were too
evident, too obvious for the trained eye
She put the Braun down on the low table beside the couch
and crossed to Andre&s phone, intending to check the time.
She was meeting Paco at one, to discuss the mechanics of
Alain's payment. Alain had told her he would phone her at
Andrea's at three. When she punched for the time service, an
automatic recap of satellite news strobed across the screen: a
JAL shuttle had disintegrated during reentry over the Indian
Ocean, investigators from the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan
Axis had been called in to examine the site of a brutal and
apparently pointless bombing in a drab New Jersey residential
suburb, militiamen were supervising the evacuation of the
southern quadrant of New Bonn following the discovery, by
construction workers, of two undetonated wartime rockets
believed to be armed with biological weapons, and official
sources in Arizona were denying Mexico's accusation of the
detonation of a small-scale atomic or nuclear device near the
Sonora border. . . As she watched, the recap cycled and the
simulation of the shuttle began its fire-death again. She shook
her head, tapping the button. It was noon.
Summer had come, the sky hot and blue above Paris, and
she smiled at the smell of good bread and black tobacco. Her
sense of being observed had receded now, as she walked from
the m~tro to the address Paco had given her. Faubourg St.
Honor& The address seemed vaguely familiar. A gallery, she
thought.
Yes. The Roberts. The owner an American who operated
three galleries in New York as well. Expensive, but no longer
quite chic. Paco was waiting beside an enormous panel on
which were layered, beneath a thick and uneven coat of
varnish, hundreds of small square photographs, the kind pro-
duced by certain very old-fashioned machines in train stations
and bus terminals. All of them seemed to be of young girls.
Automatically, she noted the name of the artist and the work's
title: Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead.
"I suppose you understand this sort of thing," the Spaniard
said glumly. He ~sore an expensive-looking blue suit cut in
Parisian business style, a white broadcloth shirt, and a very
English-looking tie, probably from Charvet He didn't look at
all like a waiter now. There was an Italian bag of black ribbed
rubber slung over his shoulder
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Names of the dead," and he nodded in the direction of
the panel. "You were a dealer in these things."
"What don't you understand?"
"I sometimes feel as though this, this culture, is entirely a
trick. A ruse. All my life I have served Sefior, in one guise or
another, you understand? And my work has not been without
its satisfactions, moments of triumph But never, when he
involved me with this business of ah, have I felt any satisfac-
tion. He is wealth itself. The world is filled with objects of
great beauty. And yet Sefior pursues . He shrugged.
"You know what you like, then " She smiled at him.
"Why did you choose this gallery for our meeting?"
"Sefior's agent purchased one of the boxes here. Haven't
you read the histories we provided you with in Brussels?"
"No," she said. "It might interfere with my intuition.
Herr Virek is paying for my intuition."
He raised his eyebrows. "I will introduce you to Picard,
the manager. Perhaps he can do something for this intuition
of yours."
He led her across the room and through a doorway. A
graying, heavyset Frenchman in a rumpled corduroy suit was
speaking into the handset of a phone. On the phone's screen
she saw columns of letters and figures. The day's quotations
on the New York market.
"Ah," the man said, "Estevez. Excuse me. Only a mo-
ment. He smiled apologetically and returned to his conver-
sation. Marly studied the quotations Pollock was down again.
This, she supposed, was the aspect of art that she had the
most difficulty understanding. Picard, if that was the man's
name, was speaking with a broker in New York, arranging
the purchase of a certain number of "points" of the work of a
particular artist. A "point" might be defined in any number
of ways, depending on the medium involved, but it was
almost certain that Picard would never see the works he was
purchasing. If the artist enjoyed sufficient status, the
originals were very likely crated away in some vault, where no one
saw them at all. Days or years later, Picard might pick up that
same phone and order the broker to sell.
Marly's gallery had sold originals. There was relatively
little money in it, but it had a certain visceral appeal. And,
of course, there had been the chance that one would get lucky.
She had convinced herself that she'd gotten very lucky indeed
when Alain had arranged for the forged Cornell to surface as
a wonderful, accidental find. Cornell had his place on the
broker's board, and his "points" were very expensive.
"Picard," Paco said, as though he were addressing a ser-
vant, "this is Many Krushkhova. Seiior has brought her into
the matter of the anonymous boxes. She may wish to ask you
questions
"Charmed," Picard said, and smiled warmly, but she thought
she detected a flicker in his brown eyes. Very likely, he was
trying to connect the name to some scandal, relatively recent.
"I understand that your gallery handled the transaction,
then?"
"Yes," Picard said "We had displayed the work in our
New York rooms, and it had attracted a number of bids. We
decided to give it its day in Paris, however,"he beamed
"and your employer made our decision most worthwhile.
How is Herr Virek, Estevez? We have not seen him in several
weeks.
Marly glanced quickly at Paco, but his dark face was
smooth, utterly controlled
"Sefior is very well, I would think," he said.
"Excellent," said Picard, somewhat too enthusiastically.
He turned to Marly. "A marvelous man. A legend. A great
patron. A great scholar."
Marly thought she heard Paco sigh
"Could you tell me, please, where your New York branch
obtained the work in question?"
Picard's face fell. He looked at Paco, then back at Marly.
"You don't know? They haven't told you?"
"Could you tell me, please?"
"No," Picard said, "I'm sorry, but I can't. You see, we
don't know."
Marly stared at him "I beg your pardon, but I don't quite
see how that is possible .
"She hasn't read the report, Picard. You tell her. It will be
good for her intuition, to hear it from your own lips."
Picard gave Paco an odd look, then regained his compo-
sure. "Certainly," he said. "A pleasure
"Do you think it's true?" she asked Paco as they stepped
out into Faubourg St Honors and summer sunlight. The
crowds were thick with Japanese tourists.
"I went to the Sprawl myself," Paco said, "and inter-
viewed everyone involved. Roberts left no record of the
purchase, although ordinarily he was no more secretive than
the next art dealer."
"And his death was accidental?"
He put on a pair of mirrored Porsche glasses. "As acciden-
tal as that sort of death ever is," he said. "We have no way
of knowing when or how he obtained the piece We located
it, here, eight months ago, and all' our attempts to work
backward end with Roberts, and Roberts has been dead for a
year Picard neglected to tell you that they very nearly lost the
thing. Roberts kept it in his country house, along with a
number of other things that his survivors regarded as mere
curiosities. The whole lot came close to being sold at public
auction. Sometimes I wish it had been."
"These other things," she asked, falling into step beside
him, "what are they?"
He smiled. "You think we haven't tracked them, each
one? We have They were' `here he frowned, exaggerating
the effort of memory" `a number of rather unremarkable
examples of contemporary folk art'
"Was Roberts known to be interested in that sort of thing?"
"No," he said, "but approximately a year before his
death, we know that he made application for membership in
the Institut de l'Art Brut, here in Paris, and arranged to
become a patron of the Aeschmann Collection in Hamburg"
Marly nodded The Aeschmann Collection was restricted to
the works of psychotics.
"We are reasonably certain," Paco continued, taking her
elbow and guiding her around a corner, into a side street,
"that he made no attempt to use the resources of either,
unless he employed an intermediary, and we regard that as
unlikely. Sefior, of course, has employed several dozen schol-
ars to sweep the records of both institutions. To no avail . .
"Tell me," she said, "why Picard assumed that he had
recently seen Herr Virek. How is that possible?"
"Sefior is wealthy. Sefior enjoys any number of means of
manifestation."
Now he led her into a chrome-trimmed barn of a place,
glittering with mirrors, bottles, and arcade games. The mir-
rors lied about the depth of the room; at its rear, she could
see
the reflected pavement, the legs of pedestrians, the flash of
sunlight on a hubcap. Paco nodded to a lethargic-looking man
behind the bar and took her hand, leading her through the
tightly packed shoal of round plastic tables.
"You can take your call from Alain here," he said. "We
have arranged to reroute it from your friend's apartment." He
drew a chair out for her, an automatic bit of professional
courtesy that made her wonder if he might actually once have
been a waiter, and placed his bag on the tabletop.
"But he'll see that I'm not there," she said. "If I blank the
video, he'll become suspicious
"But he won't see that We've generated a digital image of
your face and the required background We'll key that to the
image on this phone "He took an elegant modular unit from
the bag and placed it in front of her. A paper thin polycarbon
screen unfurled silently from the top of the unit and imme-
diately grew rigid. She had once watched a butterfly emerge
into the world, and seen the transformation of its drying
wings. "How is that done?" she asked, tentatively touching
the screen. It was like thin steel.
"One of the new polycarbon variants," he said, "one of
the Maas products . .
The phone purred discreetly He positioned it more care-
fully in front of her, stepped to the far side of the table, and
said, "Your call. Remember, you are at home!" He reached
forward and brushed a titanium-coated stud.
Alain's face and shoulders filled the little screen. The
image had the smudged, badly lit look of a public booth.
"Good afternoon, my dear," he said.
"Hello, Alain."
"How are you, Marly? I trust you've gotten the money we
discussed?" She could see that he was wearing a jacket of
some kind, dark, but she could make out no details. "Your
roommate could do with a lesson in housecleaning," he said,
and seemed to be peering back over her shoulder.
"You've never cleaned a room in your life," she said
He shrugged, smiling. "We each have our talents," he
said. "Do you have my money, Marly?"
She glanced up at Paco, who nodded. "Yes," she said,
"of course."
"That's wonderful, Marly. Marvelous We have only one
small difficulty." He was still smiling.
"And what is that?"
"My informants have doubled their price. Consequently, I
must now double mine."
Paco nodded. He was smiling, too.
"Very well. I will have to ask, of course ..~" He sick-
ened her now. She wanted to be off the phone.
"And they, of course, will agree.
"Where shall we meet, then?"
"I will phone again, at five," he said. His image shrank to
a single blip of blue-green, and then that was gone as well.
"You look tired," Paco said as he collapsed the screen and
replaced the phone in his bag "You look older when you've
talked with him."
"Do I?" For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the
Roberts, all those faces Read Us the Book of the Names of
the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she'd been
through the long season of youth.
"HEY, SHITHEAD." RHEA poked him none too lightly in the
ribs "Get your ass up."
He came up fighting with the crocheted comforter, with the
half-formed shapes of unknown enemies. With his mother's
murderers. He was in a room he didn't know, a room that
might have been anywhere. Gold plastic gilt frames on a lot
of mirrors. Fuzzy scarlet wallpaper. He'd seen Gothicks dec-
orate rooms that way, when they could afford it, but he'd also
seen their parents do whole condos in the same style Rhea
flung a bundle of clothes down on the temperfoam and shoved
her hands in the pockets of a black leather jacket.
The pink and black squares of the comforter were bunched
around his waist. He looked down and saw the segmented
length of the centipede submerged in a finger-wide track of
fresh pink scar tissue. Beauvoir had said that the thing
acceler-
ated healing. He touched the bright new tissue with a hesitant
fingertip, found it tender but bearable. He looked up at Rhea.
"Get your ass up on this," he said, giving her the finger.
They glared at each other, for a few seconds, over Bobby's
upraised middle finger. Then she laughed "Okay," she said,
"you got a point. I'll get off your case But pick those clothes
up and get `em on. Should be something there that fits Lucas
is due by here soon to pick you up, and Lucas doesn't like to
be kept waiting
"Yeah? Well, he seems like a pretty relaxed guy to me
He began to sort through the heap of clothing, discarding a
black shirt with a paisley pattern printed on it in laundered-
out gold, a red satin number with a fringe of white imitation
leather down the sleeves, a black sort of leotard thing with
panels of some translucent material . . . "Hey," he said,
"where did you get this stuff? I can't wear shit like this
"It's my little brother's," Rhea said. "From last season,
and you better get your white ass dressed before Lucas gets
down here. Hey," she said, "that's mine," snatching up the
leotard as though he might be about to steal it.
He pulled the black and gold shirt on and fumbled with
domed snaps made of black imitation pearl. He found a pair
of black jeans, but they proved to be baggy and elaborately
pleated, and didn't seem to have any pockets "This all the
pants you got?"
"Jesus," she said. "I saw the clothes Pye cut off you,
man. You aren't anybody's idea of a fashion plate. Just get
dressed, okay? I don't want any trouble with Lucas. He may
come on all mellow with you, but `that just means you got
something he wants bad enough to take the trouble. Me, I
sure don't, so Lucas got no compunctions, as far as I'm
concerned."
He stood up unsteadily beside the bedslab and tried to zip
up the black jeans. "No zip," he said, looking at her.
"Buttons In there somewhere. It's part of the style you
know?"
Bobby found the buttons. It was an elaborate arrangement
and he wondered what would happen if he had to piss in a
hurry He saw the black nylon thongs beside the slab and
shoved his feet into them. "What about Jackie?" he asked,
padding to where he could see himself in the gold-framed
mirrors. `Lucas got any compunctions about her?" He watched
her in the mirror, saw something cross her face
"What's that mean?"
"Beauvoir, he told me she was a horse"
"You hush," she said, her voice gone low and urgent.
"Beauvoir mention anything like that to you, that's his busi-
ness. Otherwise, it's nothing you talk about, understand?
There's things bad enough, you'd wish you were back out
there getting your butt carved up."
He watched her eyes, reflected in the mirror, dark eyes
shadowed by the deep brim of the soft felt hat. Now they
seemed to show a little more white than they had before
"Okay," he said, after a pause, and then added, "Thanks."
He fiddled with the collar of the shirt, turning it up in the
back, down again, trying it different ways.
"You know," Rhea said, tilting her head to one side,
"you get a few clothes on you, you don't look too bad. `Cept
you got eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank . .
"Lucas." Bobby said, when they were in the elevator, "do
you know who it was offed my old lady?" It wasn't a
question he'd planned on asking, but somehow it had come
rushing up like a bubble of swamp gas.
Lucas regarded him benignly, his long face smooth and
black. His black suit, beautifully cut, looked as though it had
been freshly pressed. He carried a stout stick of oiled and
polished wood, the grain all swirly black and red, topped with
a large knob of polished brass. Finger-long splines of brass
ran down from the knob, inlaid smoothly in the cane's shaft.
"No, we do not." His wide lips formed a straight and very
serious line. "That's something we'd very much like to
know .
Bobby shifted uncomfortably. The elevator made him self-
conscious. It was the size of a small bus, and although it
wasn't crowded, he was the only white Black people, he
noted, as his eyes shifted restlessly down the thing's length,
didn't look half dead under fluorescent light, the way white
people did.
Three times, in their descent, the elevator came to a halt at
some floor and remained there, once for nearly fifteen min-
utes. The first time this happened, Bobby had looked ques-
tioningly at Lucas. "Something in the shaft," Lucas had
said. "What?" "Another elevator." The elevators were lo-
cated at the core of the arcology, their shafts bundled together
with water mains, sewage lines, huge power cables, and
insulated pipes that Bobby assumed were part of the geother-
mal system that Beauvoir had described. You could see it all
whenever the doors opened; everything was exposed, raw, as
though the people who built the place had wanted to be able
to see exactly how everything worked and what was going
where And everything, every visible surface, was covered
with an interlocking net of graffiti, so dense and heavily
overlaid that it was almost impossible to pick out any kind
of message or symbol.
"You never were up here before, were you, Bobby?"
Lucas asked as the doors jolted shut once again and they were
on their way down. Bobby shook his head. "That's too bad,"
Lucas said. "Understandable, certainly, but kind of a shame
Two-a-Day tells me you haven't been too keen on sitting
around Barrytown. That true?"
"Sure is," Bobby agreed.
"I guess that's understandable, too. You seem to me to be
a young man of some imagination and initiative Would you
agree?" Lucas spun the cane's bright brass head against his
pink palm and looked at Bobby steadily.
"I guess so I can't stand the place. Lately I've kind of
been noticing how, well, nothing ever happens, you know? I
mean, things happen, but it's always the same stuff, over and
fucking over, like it's all a rerun, every summer like the last
one. . ." His voice trailed off, uncertain what Lucas would
think of him.
"Yes," Lucas said, "I know that feeling. It may be a little
more true of Barrytown than of some other places, but you
can feel the same thing as easily in New York or Tokyo."
Can't be true, Bobby thought, but nodded anyway, Rhea's
warning in the back of his head. Lucas was no more threaten-
ing than Beauvoir, but his bulk alone was a caution. And
Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment;
he didn't quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it
involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous
might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability
to
conceal a threat made them even more dangerous. This ran
directly opposite to the rule around Big Playground, where
kids who had no real clout whatever went to great pains to
advertise their chrome-studded rabidity. Which probably did
them some good, at least in terms of the local action. But
Lucas was very clearly nothing to do with local action.
"I see you doubt it," Lucas said. "Well, you'll probably
find out soon enough, but not for a while. The way your life's
going now, things should remain new and exciting for quite a
while."
The elevator door shuddered open, and Lucas was moving,
shooing Bobby in front of him like a child They stepped out
into a tiled foyer that seemed to stretch forever, past kiosks
and cloth-draped stalls and people squatting beside blankets
with things spread out on them. "But not to linger," Lucas
said, giving Bobby a very gentle shove with one large hand
when Bobby paused in front of stacks of jumbled software.
"You are on your way to the Sprawl, my man, and you are
going in a manner that befits a count."
"How's that?"
"In a limo."
Lucas's car was an amazing stretch of gold-flecked black
bodywork and mirror-finished brass, studded with a collection
of baroque gadgets whose purpose Bobby only had time to
guess at. One of the things was a dish antenna, he decided,
but it looked more like one of those Aztec calendar wheels,
and then he was inside, Lucas letting the wide door clunk
gently shut behind them. The windows were tinted so dark, it
looked like nighttime outside, a bustling nighttime where the
Projects' crowds went about their noonday business The
interior of the vehicle was a single large compartment padded
with bright rugs and pale leather cushions, although there
seemed to be no particular place to sit. No steering wheel
either, the dash was a padded expanse of leather unbroken by
controls of any kind. He looked at Lucas, who was loosening
his black tie. "How do you drive it?"
"Sit down somewhere. You drive it like this: Ahmed, get
our asses to New York, lower east."
The car slid smoothly away from the curb as Bobby dropped
to his knees on a soft pile of rugs.
"Lunch will be served in thirty minutes, sir, unless you'd
care for something sooner," a voice said. It was soft, melo-
dious, and seemed to come from nowhere in particular.
Lucas laughed. "They really knew how to build `em in
Damascus," he said.
"Where?"
"Damascus," Lucas said as he unbuttoned his suit coat
and settled back into a wedge of pale cushions. "This is a
Rolls. Old one Those Arabs built a good car, while they had
the money."
"Lucas," Bobby said, his mouth half full of cold fried
chicken, "how come it's taking us an hour and a half to get
to New York? We aren't exactly crawling .
"Because," Lucas said, pausing for another sip of cold
white wine, "that's how long it's taking us. Ahmed has all
the factory options, including a first-rate countersurveillance
system. On the road, rolling, Ahmed provides a remarkable
degree of privacy, more than I'm ordinarily willing to pay for
in New York. Ahmed, you get the feeling anybody's trying to
get to us, listen in or anything?"
"No, sir," the voice said. "Eight minutes ago our identifica-
tion panel was infra-scanned by a Tactical helicopter. The
helicopter's number was MH-dash-3-dash-848, piloted by Cor-
poral Roberto
"Okay, okay," Lucas said. "Fine. Never mind You see?
Ahmed got more on those Tacs than they got on us." He
wiped his hands on a thick white linen napkin and took a gold
toothpick from his jacket pocket.
"Lucas," Bobby said, while Lucas probed delicately at the
gaps between his big square teeth, "what would happen if,
say, I asked you to take me to Times Square and let me out?"
"Ah," Lucas said, lowering the toothpick, "the city's
most resonant acre What's the matter, Bobby, a drug
problem?"
"Well, no, but I was wondering."
"Wondering what? You want to go to Times Square?"
"No, that was just the first place I thought of. What I mean
is, I guess, would you let me go?"
"No," Lucas said, "not to put too fine a point on it. But
you don't have to think of yourself as a prisoner. More like a
guest. A valued guest."
Bobby smiled wanly. "Oh. Okay. Like what they call
protective custody, I guess."
"Right," Lucas said, bringing the gold toothpick into play
again. "And while we are here, securely screened by the
good Ahmed, it's time we have a talk. Brother Beauvoir has
already told you a little about us, I think What do you think,
Bobby. about what he's told you?"
"Well," Bobby said, "it's real interesting, but I'm not
sure I understand it."
"What don't you understand?"
"Well, I don't know about this voodoo stuff.
Lucas raised his eyebrows
"I mean, it's your business, what you wanna buy, I mean,
believe, right? But one minute Beauvoir's talking biz, street
tech, like I never heard before, and the next he's talking
mambos and ghosts and snakes and, and . .
"And what?"
"Horses," Bobby said, his throat tight.
"Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?"
"A component? Like a capacitor?"
"No. Never mind metaphor, then. When Beauvoir or I talk
to you about the ba and their horses, as we call those few the
ba choose to ride, you should pretend that we are talking two
languages at once. One of them, you already understand.
That's the language of street tech, as you call it. We may be
using different words, but we're talking tech. Maybe we call
something Ougou Feray that you might call an icebreaker,
you understand? But at the same time, with the same words,
we are talking about other things, and that you don't under-
stand. You don't need to." He put his toothpick away.
Bobby took a deep breath. "Beauvoir said that Jackie's a
horse for a snake, a snake called Danbala. You run that by
me in street tech?"
"Certainly. Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a cyberspace
deck, a very pretty one with nice ankles." Lucas grinned and
Bobby blushed. "Think of Danbala, who some people call
the snake, as a program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots
into the Jackie deck, Jackie cuts ice. That's all."
"Okay," Bobby said, getting the hang of it, "then what's
the matrix? If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's
cyberspace?"
"The world," Lucas said.
"Best if we walk from here," Lucas said
The Rolls came to a silent, silken halt and Lucas stood,
buttoning his suit coat. "Ahmed attracts too much attention."
He picked up his cane, and the door made a soft chunking
sound as it unlocked itself.
Bobby climbed down behind him, into the unmistakable
signature smell of the Sprawl, a rich amalgam of stale subway
exhalations, ancient soot, and the carcinogenic tang of fresh
plastics, all of it shot through with the carbon edge of illicit
fossil fuels. High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc
lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds
of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken
gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to
generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few
city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continu-
ally from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high
dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly
urban variety of lightning. There was a stiff wind blowing, as
Bobby followed Lucas down the street, a warm, gritty breeze
that probably had something to do with pressure shifts in the
Sprawl-long subway system.
"Remember what I told you," Lucas said, his eyes nar-
rowed against the grit. "The man is far more than he seems.
Even if he were nothing more than what he seems, you would
owe him a degree of respect. If you want to be a cowboy,
you're about to meet a landmark in the trade."
"Yeah, right." He skipped to avoid a graying length of
printout that tried to wrap itself around his ankle. "So he's
the one you an' Beauvoir bought the A"
"Ha! No! Remember what I told you. You speak in the
open street, you may as well put your words up on a bulletin-
board..."
Bobby grimaced, then nodded. Shit. He kept blowing it.
Here he was with a major operator, up to his neck in some
amazing kind of biz, and he kept acting like a wilson Oper-
ator. That was the word for Lucas, a'nd for Beauvoir, too, and
that voodoo talk was Just some game they ran on people, he'd
decided. In the Rolls, Lucas had launched into some strange
extended number about Legha, who he said was the ba of
communication, "the master of roads and pathways," all
about how the man he was taking Bobby to meet was a
favorite of Legba's. When Bobby asked if the man was
another oungan, Lucas said no; he said the man had walked
with Legha all his life, so close that he'd never known the ba
was there at all, like it was just a part of him, his shadow.
And this was the man, Lucas had said, who'd sold them the
software that Two-a-Day had rented to Bobby. .
Lucas rounded a corner and stopped, Bobby close behind.
They stood in front of a blackened brownstone whose win-
dows had been sealed decades before with sheets of corru-
gated steel. Part of the ground floor had once been a shop of
some kind, its cracked display windows opaque with grime.
The door, between the blind windows, had been reinforced
with the same steel that sealed the windows of the upper
floors, and Bobby thought he could make out some sort of
sign behind the window to his left, discarded neon script
tilted diagonally in the gloom. Lucas just stood there, facing
the doorway, his face expressionless, the tip of his cane
planted neatly on the sidewalk and his large hands one atop
the other on the brass knob. "First thing that you learn," he
said, with the tone of a man reciting a proverb, "is that you
always gotta wait .
Bobby thought he heard something scrape, behind the door,
and then there was a rattle like chains. "Amazing," Lucas
said, "almost as though we were expected."
The door swung ten centimeters on well-oiled hinges and
seemed to catch on something. An eye regarded them, un-
blinking, suspended there in that crack of dust and dark, and
at first it seemed to Bobby that it must be the eye of some
large animal, the iris a strange shade of brownish yellow, and
the whites, mottled and shot through with red, the lower lid
gaping redder still below. "Hoodoo man," said the invisible
face the eye belonged to, then, "hoodoo man and some little
lump of shit. Jesus ..~" There was an awful, gurgling
sound, as of antique phlegm being drawn up from hidden
recesses, and then the man spat. "Well, move it, Lucas."
There was another grating sound and the door swung inward
on the dark. "I'm a busy man~.~." This last from a meter
away, receding, as though the eye's owner were scurrying
from the light admitted by the open door.
Lucas stepped through, Bobby on his heels, Bobby feeling
the door swing smoothly shut behind him. The sudden dark-
ness brought the hairs on his forearms up. It felt alive, that
dark, cluttered and dense and somehow sentient.
Then a match flared and some sort of pressure lamp hissed
and spat as the gas in its mantle ignited. Bobby could only
gape at the face beyond the lantern, where the bloodshot
yellow eye waited with its mate in what Bobby would very
much have liked to believe was a mask of some kind.
"I don't suppose you were expecting us, were you, Finn?"
Lucas asked.
"You wanna know," the face said, revealing large flat
yellow teeth, "I was on my way out to find something to
eat " He looked to Bobby as though he could survive on a
diet of moldering carpet, or burrow patiently through the
brown wood pulp of the damp-swollen books stacked shoulder-
high on either side of the tunnel where they stood. "Who's
the little shit, Lucas?"
"You know, Finn, Beauvoir and I are experiencing diffi-
culties with something we acquired from you in good faith."
Lucas extended his cane and prodded delicately at a dan-
gerous-looking overhang of crumbling paperbacks.
"Are you, now?" The Finn pursed his gray lips in mock
concern. "Don't fuck with those first editions, Lucas. You
bring `em down, you pay for `em."
Lucas withdrew the cane. Its polished ferrule flashed in the
lantern glare.
"So,'~ the Finn said. "You got problems Funny thing,
Lucas, funny fucking thing." His cheeks were grayish, seamed
with deep diagonal creases. "I got some problems, too, three
of `em. I didn't have `em, this morning. I guess that's just the
way life is, sometimes " He put the hissing lantern down on
a gutted steel filing cabinet and fished a bent, unfiltered
cigarette from a side pocket of something that might once
have been a tweed jacket. "My three problems, they're up-
stairs. Maybe you wanna have a look at them He struck
a wooden match on the base of the lantern and lit his ciga-
rette. The pungent reek of black Cuban tobacco gathered in
the air between them.
"You know," the Finn said, stepping over the first of the
bodies, "I been at this location `a long time. Everybody
knows me. They know I'm here You buy from the Finn, you
know who you're buying from. And I stand behind my
product, every time .
Bobby was staring down at the upturned face of the dead
man, at the eyes gone dull. There was something wrong with
the shape of the torso, wrong with the way it lay there in the
black clothes. Japanese face, no expression, dead eyes .
"And all that time," the Finn continued, "you know how
many people ever dumb enough to try to get in here to take
me off? None' Not one, not till this morning, and I get
fucking three already. Well," he shot Bobby a hostile glance,
"that's not counting the odd little lump of shit, I guess,
but He shrugged.
"He looks kind of lopsided," Bobby said still staring at the
first corpse.
"That's `cause he's dog food, inside " The Finn leered
"All mashed up."
"The Finn collects exotic weapons," Lucas said, nudging
the wrist of a second body with the tip of his cane. "Have
you scanned them for implants, Finn?"
"Yeah. Pain in the butt. Hadda carry `em downstairs to the
back room. Nothing. other than what you'd expect. They're
just a hit team." He sucked his teeth noisily. "Why's any-
body wanna hit me?"
"Maybe you sold them a very expensive product that
wouldn't do its job," Lucas volunteered.
"I hope you aren't sayin' you sent `em, Lucas," the Finn
said levelly, "unless you wanna see me do the dog-food
trick."
"Did I say you'd sold us something that doesn't work?"
Experiencing difficulties,' you said. And what else have
you guys bought from me recently?"
"Sorry, Finn, but they're not ours. You know it, too."
"Yeah, I guess I do So what the fuck's got you down
here, Lucas? You know that stuff you bought wasn't covered
by the usual guarantees
~You know," said the Finn, after listening to the story of
Bobby's abortive cyberspace run, "that's some weird shit out
there.' He slowly shook his narrow, strangely elongated
head. "Didn~ used to be this way." He looked at Lucas.
"You people know, don't you?"
They were seated around a square white table in a white
room on the ground floor, behind the junk-clogged storefront.
The floor was scuffed hospital tile, molded in a nonslip
pattern, and the walls broad slabs of dingy white plastic
concealing dense layers of antibugging circuitry. Compared to
the storefront, the white room seemed surgically clean. Sev-
eral alloy tripods bnstling with sensors and scanning gear
stood around the table like abstract sculpture.
Know what?" Bobby asked. With each retelling of his
story, he felt less like a wilson. Important. It made him feel
Important.
"Not you, pisshead," the Finn said weanly. ~Him. Big
hoodoo man. He knows. Knows it's not the same. Hasn't
been, not for a long time. I been in the trade forever. Way
back. Before the war, before there was any matrix, or anyway
before people knew there was one." He was looking at Bobby
now. `I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the
fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever
since there were computers. They built the first computers to
crack German ice. nght? Codebreakers. So there was ice
before computers, you wanna look at it that way " He lit his
fifteenth cigarette of the evening, and smoke began to fill the
white room.
"Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there's
been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit.
The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don't they.
Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the
soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all
of `em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got
allies, don't they, Lucas?"
Lucas took his gold toothpick out of his pocket and began
to work on a rear molar, his face dark and serious.
"Thnnes and dominions," the Finn said obscurely. "Yeah,
there's things out there. Ghosts, voices Why not? Oceans
had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?
Sure, it's just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have,
cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows
it's a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more
crowded, sounds like
"For us," Lucas said, "the world has always worked that
way."
"Yeah" the Finn said, "so you guys could slot right into
it, tell people the things you were cutting deals with were
your same old bush gods
"Divine Horsemen
Sure. Maybe you believe it. But I'm old enough to
remember when it wasn't like that. Ten years ago, you went
in the Gentleman Loser and tried telling any of the top jocks
you talked with ghosts in the matrix, they'd have figured you
were crazy."
"A wilson," Bobby put in. feeling left out and no longer
as Important.
The Finn looked at him, blankly. "A what?"
"A wilson A fuck-up. It's hotdogger talk, I guess
Did it again. Shit.
The Finn gave him a very strange look. "Jesus. That's
your word for it, huh? Christ I know the guy
`Who?"
"Bodine Wilson," he said. `First guy I ever knew wound
up as a figure of speech."
"Was he stupid?" Bobby asked, immediately regretting it
"Stupid? Shit, no, he was smart as hell." The Finn stubbed
his cigarette out in a cracked ceramic Campan ashtray. lust
a total fuck-up, was all He worked with the Dixie Flatline
once The bloodshot yellow eyes grew distant.
"Finn," Lucas said, ~where did you get that icebreaker
you sold us?"
The Finn regarded him bleakly. "Forty years in the busi-
ness, Lucas. You know how many times I've been asked that
question? You know how many times I'd be dead if I'd
answered it?"
Lucas nodded. "I take your point. But at the same time, I
put one to you." He held the toothpick out toward the Finn
like a toy dagger. "The real reason you're willing to sit here
and bullshit is that you think those three stiffs upstairs have
something to do with the icebreaker you sold us. And you sat
up and took special notice when Bobby told you about his
mother's condo getting wiped, didn't you?"
The Finn showed teeth "Maybe."
"Somebody's got you on their list, Finn. Those three dead
ninjas upstairs cost somebody a lot of money. When they
don't come back, somebody'll be even more determined,
Finn."
The red-rimmed yellow eyes blinked. "They were all tooled
up," he said, "ready for a hit, but one of `em had some other
things. Things for asking questions " His nicotine-stained
fingers, almost the color of cockroach wings, came up to
slowly massage his short upper lip. "I got it off Wigan
Ludgate," he said, "the Wig."
"Never heard of him," Lucas said.
"Crazy little motherfucker," the Finn said, "used to be a
cowboy"
How it was, the Finn began, and to Bobby it was all
infinitely absorbing, even better than listening to Beauvoir
and Lucas, Wigan Ludgate had had five years as a top jock,
which is a decent run for a cyberspace cowboy. Five years
tends to find a cowboy either rich or brain-dead, or else
financing a stable of younger cracksmen and strictly into the
managerial side. The Wig, in his first heat of youth and
glory, had stormed off on an extended pass through the rather
sparsely occupied sectors of the matrix representing those
geographical areas which had once been known as the Third
World.
Silicon doesn't wear out; microchips were effectively im-
mortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other
child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became
obsolete, which was worse than wearing out; this fact was a
grim and accepted constant for the Wig, like death or taxes,
and in fact he was usually more worried about his gear falling
behind the state of the art than he was about death (he was
twenty-two) or taxes (he didn't file, although he paid a Singa-
pore money laundry a yearly percentage that was roughly
equivalent to the income tax he would have been required to
pay if he'd declared his gross). The Wig reasoned that all that
obsolete silicon had to be going somewhere. Where it was
going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places
struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so
benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously.
The Wig punched himself through a couple of African back-
waters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick
with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs arnounted
to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was
easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Afri-
cans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at
least three governments and causing untold human suffering.
At the end of his week, fat with the crearn of several million
laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going
out, the locusts were coming in; ofher people had gotten the
African idea.
The Wig sat on the beach at Cannes for two years, ingest-
ing only the most expensive designer drugs and periodically
flicking on a tiny Hosaka television to study the bloated
bodies of dead Africans with a strange and curiously innocent
intensity. At some point, no one could quite say where or
when or why, it began to be noted that the Wig had gone over
the edge. Specifically, the Finn said, the Wig had become
convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that
cyberspace was God, or some new manifestation of same.
The Wig's ventures into theology tended to be marked by
major paradigm shifts, true leaps of faith. The Finn had some
idea of what the Wig was about in those days; shortly after
his conversion to his new and singular faith, Wigan Ludgate
had returned to the Sprawl and embarked on an epic if
somewhat random voyage of cybernetic discovery. Being a
former console jockey, he knew where to go for the very best
in what the Finn called the hard and the soft. The Finn
provided the Wig with all manner of both, as the Wig was
still a rich man. The Wig explained to the Finn that his
technique of mystical exploration involved projecting his con-
sciousness into blank, unstructured sectors of the matrix and
waiting. To the man's credit, the Finn said, he never actually
claimed to have met God, although he did maintain that he
had on several occasions sensed His presence moving upon
the face of the grid. In due course, the Wig ran out of money.
His spiritual quest having alienated the few remaining busi-
ness connections from his pre-African days, he sank without a
trace.
"But then he turned up one day," the Finn said, "crazy as
a shithouse rat. He was a pale little fucker anyway, but now
he wore all this African shit, beads and bones and every-
thing." Bobby let go of the Finn's narrative long enough to
wonder how anyone who looked like the Finn could describe
somebody as a pale little fucker, then glanced over at Lucas,
whose face was dead grim. Then it occurred to Bobby that
Lucas might take the Africa stuff personally, sort of. But the
Finn was continuing his story.
"He had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell. Decks, peripher-
als, software. It was all a couple of years old, but it was top
gear, so I gave him a price on it. I noticed he'd had a socket
implant, and he kept this one sliver of microsoft jacked
behind his ear. What's the soft? It's blank, he says. He's
sitting right where you are now, kid, and he says to me, it's
blank and it's the voice of God, and I live forever in His
white hum, or some shit like that. So I think, Christ, the
Wig's gone but good now, and there he is counting up the
money I'd given him for about the fifth time. Wig, I said,
time's money but tell me what you intend to do now? Be-
cause I was curious. Known the guy years, in a business way
Finn, he says, I gotta get up the gravity well, God's up there.
I mean, he says, He's everywhere but there's too much static
down here, it obscures His face. Right, I say. you got it. So I
show him the door and that's it. Never saw him again."
Bobby blinked, waited, squirmed a little on the hard seat of
the folding chair.
"Except, about a year later, a guy turns up, high-orbit
rigger down the well on a leave, and he's got some good
software for sale. Not great, but interesting. He says it's from
the Wig. Well, maybe the Wig's a freak, and long out of the
game, but he can still spot the good shit. So I buy it. That
was maybe ten years ago, right? And every year or so, some
guy would turn up with something. `The Wig told me I
should offer you this.' And usually I'd buy it. It was never
anything special, but it was okay. Never the same guy bring-
ing it, either."
"Was that it, Finn, just software?" Lucas asked
"Yeah, mainly, except for these weird sculpture things. I'd
forgotten that. I figured the Wig made `em. First time a guy
came in with one of those, I bought the `ware he had, then
said what the fuck do you call that? Wig said you might be
interested, the guy said. Tell him he's crazy, I said. The guy
laughed. Well, you keep it, he says I'm not carrying the
Goddamn thing back up with me. I mean, it was about the
size of a deck, this thing, just a bunch of garbage and shit,
stuck together in a box . . . So I pushed it behind this Coke
crate fulla scrap iron, and forgot it, except old Smith-he's a
colleague of mine in those days, dealt mostly art and collecti-
bleshe sees it and wants it. So we do some dipshit deal.
Any more of these, Finn, he says, get `em. There's assholes
uptown go for this kind of shit. So the next time a guy turned
up from the Wig, I bought the sculpture thing, too, and traded
it to Smith. But it was never much money for any of it . .
The Finn shrugged. "Not until last month, anyway. Some kid
came in with what you bought. It was from the Wig. Listen.
he says, this is biosoft and its a bfeaker. Wig says it's worth
a lot. I put a scan on it and it looked right. I thought it looked
interesting, you know? Your partner Beauvoir thought it looked
pretty interesting, too. I bought it. Beauvoir bought it off me.
End of story." The Finn dragged out a cigarette, this one
broken, bent double. "Shit," he said He pulled a faded pack
of cigarette papers from the same pocket and extracted one of
the fragile pink leaves, rolling it tightly around the broken
cigarette, a sort of splint. When he licked the glue, Bobby
caught a glimpse of a very pointed gray-pink tongue.
"And where, Finn, does Mr. Wig reside?" Lucas asked,
his thumbs beneath his chin, his large fingers forming a
steeple in front of his face.
"Lucas, I haven't got the slightest fucking clue. In orbit
somewhere. And modestly, if the kind of money he was
getting out of me meant anything to him. You know, I hear
there's places up there where you don't need money, if you
fit into the economy, so maybe a little goes a long way. Don't
ask me, though, I'm agoraphobic." He smiled nastily at
Bobby, who was trying to get the image of that tongue out of
his mind. "You know," he said, squinting at Lucas, "it was
about that time that I started hearing about weird shit happen-
ing in the matrix."
"Like what?" Bobby asked.
"Keep the fuck out of this," the Finn said, still looking at
Lucas. "That was before you guys turned up, the new hoo-
doo team. I knew this street samurai got a job working for a
Special Forces type made the Wig look flat fucking normal.
Her and this cowboy they'd scraped up out of Chiba, they
were on to something like that. Maybe they found it. Istanbul
was the last I saw of `em. Heard she lived in London, once, a
few years ago. Who the fuck knows? Seven, eight years."
The Finn suddenly seemed tired, and old, very old. He
looked to Bobby like a big, mummified rat animated by
springs and hidden wires. He took a wristwatch with a cracked
face and a single greasy leather strap from his pocket and
consulted it. "Jesus. Well, that's all you get from me. Lucas.
I've got some friends from an organ bank coming by in
twenty minutes to talk a little biz."
Bobby thought of the bodies upstairs. They'd been there all
day.
"Hey," the Finn said, reading the expression on his face,
"organ banks are great for getting rid of things. I'm paying
them. Those motherless assholes upstairs, they don't have too
much left in the way of organs ..."And the Finn laughed
"You said he was close to . . . Legba? And Legba's the
one you and Beauvoir said gave me luck when I hit that black
ice?"
Beyond the honeycomb edge of the geodesics, the sky was
lightening.
"Yes," Lucas said. He seemed lost in thought.
"But he doesn't seem to trust that stuff at all."
"It doesn't matter," Lucas said as the Rolls came into
view. "He's always been close to the spirit of the thing."
THE PLANE HAD GONE to ground near the sound of running
water. Turner could hear it, turnin'g in the g-web in his fever
or sleep, water down stone, one of the oldest songs The
plane was smart, smart as any dog, with hard-wired instincts
of concealment. He felt it sway on its landing gear, some-
where in the sick night, and creep forward, branches brushing
and scraping against the dark canopy. The plane crept into
deep green shadow and sank down on its knees, its airframe
whining and creaking as it flattened itself, belly down, into
loam and granite like a manta ray into sand. The mimetic
polycarbon coating its wings and fuselage mottled and dark-
ened, taking on the colors and patterns of moon-dappled stone
and forest soil. Finally it was silent, and the only sound was
the sound of water over a creekbed .
He came awake like a machine, eyes opening, vision plugged
in, empty, remembering the red flash of Lynch's death out
beyond the fixed sights of the Smith & Wesson. The arc of
the canopy above him was laced with mimetic approximations
of leaves and branches Pale dawn and the sound of running
water He was still wearing Oakey's blue work shirt It
smelled of sour sweat now, and he'd ripped the sleeves out
the day before. The gun lay between his legs, pointing at the
jet's black joystick. The g-web was a limp tangle around his
hips and shoulders. He twisted around and saw the girl, oval
face and a brown dried trickle of blood beneath a nostril She
was still out, sweating, her lips slightly parted, like a
doll's.
"Where are we?"
"We are fifteen meters south-southeast of the landing coordi-
nates you provided," the plane said. "You were unconscious
again. I opted for concealment."
He reached back and removed the interface plug from his
socket, breaking his link with the plane. He gazed dully
around the cockpit until he found the manual controls for the
canopy. It sighed up on servos, the lacework of polycarbon
leaves shifting as it moved. He got his leg over the side,
looked down at his hand flat against the fuselage at the edge
of the cockpit Polycarbon reproduced the gray tones of a
nearby boulder; as he watched, it began to paint a hand-sized
patch the color of his palm He pulled his other leg over, the
gun forgotten on the seat, and slid down into earth and long
sweet grass. Then he slept again, his forehead against the
grass and dreamed of running water.
When he woke, he was crawling forward on his hands and
knees, through low branches heavy with dew. Finally he
reached a cleanng and pitched forward, rolling over, his arms
spread in what felt like surrender. High above him, something
small and gray launched itself from one branch, caught an-
other, swung there for an instant, then scrambled away, out
of his sight.
Lie still, he heatti a voice telling him, years away. Just lay
out and relax and pretty soon they'll forget you, forget you in
the gray and the dawn and the dew. They're out to feed, feed
and play, and their brains can't hold two messages, not for
long. He lay there on his back, beside his brother, the nylon-
stocked Winchester across his chest, breathing the smell of
new brass and gun oil, the smell of their campfire still in his
hair. And his brother was always right, about the squirrels.
They came. They forgot the clear glyph of death spelled out
below them in patched denim and blue steel; they came,
racing along limbs, pausing to sniff the morning, and Turner's
.22 cracked, a limp gray body tumbling down. The others
scattered, vanishing, and Turner passed the gun to his brother.
Again, they waited, waited for the squirrels to forget them.
"You're like me," Turner said to the squirrels, bobbing up
out of his dream. One of them sat up suddenly on a fat limb
and looked directly at him. "I always come back." The
squirrel hopped away. "I was coming back when I ran from
the Dutchman. I was coming back when I flew to Mexico. I
was coming back when I killed Lynch
He lay there for a long time, watching the squirrels, while
the woods woke and the morning warmed around him. A
crow swept in, banking, braking with feathers it spread like
black mechanical fingers. Checking to see if he were dead.
Turner grinned up at the crow as it flapped away.
Not yet.
He crawled back in, under the overhanging branches, and
found her sitting up in the cockpit. She wore a baggy white
T-shirt slashed diagonally with the MAAS-NEOTEK logo. There
were lozenges of fresh red blood across the front of the shirt.
Her nose was bleeding again. Bright blue eyes, dazed and
disoriented, in sockets bruised yellow-black, like exotic
makeup.
Young, he saw, very young.
"You're Mitchell's daughter," he said, dragging the name
up from the biosoft dossier. "Angela."
"Angie," she said, automaticalfy "Who' re you? I'm bleed-
ing. She held out a bloody carnation of wadded tissue.
"Turner. I was expecting your father." Remembering the
gun now, her other hand out of sight, below the edge of the
cockpit. "Do you know where he isV
"In the mesa. He thought he could talk with them, explain
it Because they need him."
"With who?" He took a step forward.
"Maas. The Board. They can't afford to hurt him. Can
they?"
"Why would they'?" Another step
She dabbed at her nose with the red tissue. "Because he
sent me out. Because he knew they were going to hurt me,
kill me maybe. Because of the dreams."
"The dreams'?"
"Do you think they'll hurt him?"
"No, no, they wouldn't do that. I'm going to climb up
there now. Okay?"
She nodded. He had to run his hands over the side of the
fuselage to find the shallow, recessed handholds; the mimetic
coating showed him leaf and lichen, twigs . And then he
was up, beside her, and he saw the gun beside her sneakered
foot. "But wasn't he coming himself? I was expecting him.
your father''
"No. We never planned that. We only had the one plane.
Didn't he tell you?" She started to shake. "Didn't he tell you
anything?"
"Enough," he said, putting his hand on her shoulder, "he
told us enough. It'll be all right .." He swung his legs
over, bent, moved the Smith & Wesson away from her foot.
and found the interface cable. His hand still on her, he raised
it, snapped it into place behind his ear.
`Give me the procedures for erasing anything you stored in
the past forty-eight hours," he said. "I want to dump that
course for Mexico City, your flight from the coast, any-
thing .
"There was no plan logged for Mexico City," the voice
said, direct neural input on audio.
Turner stared at the girl, rubbed his jaw.
"Where were we going?"
~Bogot6," and the jet reeled out coordinates for the land-
ing they hadn't made
She blinked at him, her lids bruised dark as the surrounding
skin. `Who are you talking to?"
"The plane. Did Mitchell tell you where he thought you'd
be going""
"Japan
Know anyone in Bogota? Where's your mother?"
"No. Berlin, I think. I don't really know her."
He wiped the plane's banks, dumping Conroy's program-
ming, what there was of it: the approach from California,
identification data for the site, a flight plan that would have
taken them to a stnp within three hundred kilometers of
Bogota's urban core
Someone would find the jet eventually. He thought about
the Maas orbital recon system and wondered if the stealth-
and-evasion programs he'd ordered the plane to run had done
any real good. He could offer the jet to Rudy for salvage, but
he doubted Rudy would want to be involved. For that matter,
simply showing up at the farm, with Mitchell's daughter in
tow, dragged Rudy in right up to his neck But there was
nowhere else to go, not for the things he needed now.
It was a four-hour walk, along half-remembered trails and
down a weed-grown, winding stretch of two-lane blacktop.
The trees were different, it seemed to him, and then he
remembered how much they would have grown over the years
since he'd been back. At regular intervals they passed the
stumps of wooden poles that had once supported telephone
wires, overgrown now with bramble and honeysuckle, the
wires pulled down for fuel. Bees grazed in flowering grass at
the roadside
"Is there food where we're going?" the girl asked, the
soles of her white sneakers scuffing the weathered blacktop.
"Sure," Turner said, "all you want."
"What I want right now's water." She swiped a lank
strand of brown hair back from a tanned cheek. He'd noticed
she was developing a limp, and she'd started to wince each
time she put her right foot down.
"What's wrong with your leg?"
"Ankle. Something, I think when I decked the `light " She
grimaced, kept walking.
"We'll rest."
"No. I want to get there, get anywhere
"Rest, he said, taking her hand, leading her to the edge
of the road. She made a face, but sat down beside him, her
right leg stretched carefully in froflt of her.
"That's a big gun," she said. It was hot now, too hot for
the parka. He'd put the shoulder rig on bareback, with the
sleeveless work shirt over it, tails out and flapping. "Why's
the barrel look like that, like a cobra's head, underneath?"
"That's a sighting device, for night-fights." He leaned
forward to examine her ankle. It was swelling quickly now.
"I don't know how much longer you'll want to walk on
that," he said.
"You get into a lot of fights, at night? With guns?"
"No."
"I don't think I understand what it is that you do
He looked up at her. I don't always understand that
myself, not lately I was expecting your father. He wanted to
change companies, work for somebody else. The people he
wanted to work for hired me and some other people to make
sure he got out of his old contract."
"But there wasn't any way out of that contract," she said.
"Not legally."
"That's right " Undoing the knot, unlacing the sneaker
"Not legally
"Oh So that's what you do for a living?"
"Yes." Sneaker off now, she wore no sock, the ankle
swelling badly. "This is a sprain
`What about the other people, then? You had more peoples
back there, in that ruin? Somebody was shooting, and those
flares . .
"Hard to say who was shooting," he said, "but the flares
weren't ours. Maybe Maas security team, following you out.
Did you think you got out clean?"
"I did what Chris told me," she said. "Chris, that's my
father."
"I know. I think I'm going to have to carry you the rest of
the way."
"But what about your friends?"
"What friends?"
"Back there, in Arizona."
"Right. Well," and he wiped sweat from his forehead with
the back of his hand, "can't say. Don't really know."
Seeing the white-out sky, flare of energy, brighter than the
sun. But no pulse of electromagnetics, the plane had said
The first of Rudy's augmented dogs picked them up fifteen
minutes after they started out again. Angie riding Turner's
back, arms around his shoulders, skinny thighs under his
armpits, his fingers locked in front of his sternum in a double
fist. She smelled like a kid from the up-line `burbs, some
vaguely herbal hint of soap or shampoo. Thinking that, he
thought about what he must smell like to her. Rudy had a
shower
"Oh, shit, what's that?" Stiffening on his back, pointing.
A lean gray hound regarded them from a high clay bank at
a turning in the road, its narrow head sheathed and blindered
in a black hood studded with sensors. It panted, tongue
lolling, and slowly swung its head from side to side.
"It's okay," Turner said. "Watchdog. Belongs to my
friend."
The house had grown, sprouting wings and workshops, but
Rudy had never painted the peeling clapboard of the original
structure. Rudy had thrown up a taut square of chainlink,
since Turner's time, fencing away his collection of vehicles,
but the gate was open when they arrived, the hinges lost in
morning glory and rust. The real defenses, Turner knew.
were elsewhere. Four of the augmented hounds trotted after
him as he trudged up the gravel drive, Angie's head limp on
his shoulder, her arms still locked around him.
Rudy was waiting on the front porch, in old white shorts
and a navy T-shirt, its single pocket displaying at least nine
pens of one kind or another. He looked at them and raised a
green can of Dutch beer in greeting. Behind him, a blonde in
a faded khaki shirt stepped out of the kitchen, a chrome
spatula in her hand; her hair was clipped short, swept up and
back in a cut that made Turner think of the Korean medic in
Hosaka's pod, of the pod burning, of Webber, of the white
sky . . He swayed there, in Rudy's gravel driveway, legs
wide to support the girl, his bare chest streaked with sweat,
with dust from the mall in Arizona, and looked at Rudy and
the blonde.
"We got some breakfast for you," Rudy said. "When you
came up on the dog screens, we figured you'd be hungry
His tone was carefully noncommittal.
The girl groaned.
"That's good," Turner said. "She's got a bum ankle.
Rudy. We better look at that. Some other things I have to talk
to you about, too."
"Little young for you. I'd say," Rudy said, and took
another swig of his beer.
"Fuck off, Rudy," the woman beside him said, "can't you
see she's hurt? Bring her in this way," she said to Turner,
and was gone, back through the kitchen door.
"You look different," Rudy said, peering at him, and
Turner saw that he was drunk. "The same, but different."
"It's been a while," Turner said, starting for the wooden
steps.
"You get a face job or something""
"Reconstruction. They had to build it back from records
He climbed the steps, his lower back stabbed through with
pain at every move.
"It's not bad," Rudy said. "I almost didn't notice." He
belched. He was shorter than Turner, and going to fat, but
they had the same brown hair, very similar features.
Turner paused, on the stair, when their eyes were level.
"You still do a little bit of everything. Rudy? I need this kid
scanned. I need a few other things, too."
"Well," his brother said, "we'll see what we can do. We
heard something last night. Maybe a sonic boom. Anything to
do with you?"
"Yeah. There's a jet up by the squirrel wood, but it's
pretty well out of sight
Rudy sighed "Jesus . . . Well, bring her in . .
Rudy's years in the house had stripped it of most of the
things that Turner might have remembered, and something in
him was obscurely grateful for that. He watched the blonde
crack eggs into a steel bowl, dark yellow free-range yolks;
Rudy kept his own chickens. "I'm Sally," she said, whisking
the eggs around with a fork.
"Turner."
`That's all he ever calls you either," she said. "He never
has talked about you much
"We haven't kept all that much in touch. Maybe I should
go up now and help him."
"You sit. Your little girl's okay with Rudy. He's got a
good touch."
"Even when he's pissed?"
"Half pissed. Well, he's not going to operate, just derm
her and tape that ankle." She crushed dry tortilla chips into a
black pan, over sizzling butter, and poured the eggs on top.
"What happened to your eyes, Turner? You and her .
She stirred the mixture with the chrome spatula, slopping in
salsa from a plastic tub.
"G-force. Had to take off quick
"That how she hurt her ankle?"
"Maybe. Don't know."
"People after you now? After her?" Busy taking plates
from the cabinet above the sink, the cheap brown laminate of
the cabinet doors triggering a sudden rush of nostalgia in
Turner, seeing her tanned wrists as his mother's. .
"Probably," he said. "I don't know what's involved, not
yet."
"Eat some of this." Transferring the mixture to a white
plate, rummaging for a fork. "Rudy's scared of the kind of
people you might get after you."
Taking the plate, the fork. Steam rising from the eggs. "So
am I."
"Got some clothes," Sally said, over the sound of the
shower, "friend of Rudy's left `em here, ought to fit you.
The shower was gravity-operated, rainwater from a roof tank,
a fat white filtration unit strapped into the pipe above the
spray head. Turner stuck his head out between cloudy sheets
of plastic and blinked at her. "Thanks."
"Girl's unconscious," she said. "Rudy thinks it's shock,
exhaustion. He says her crits are high, so he might as well
run his scan now." She left the room then, taking Turner's
fatigues and Oakey's shirt with her.
* * *
"What is she?" Rudy extending a crumpled scroll of sil-
very printout.
"I don't know how to read that," Turner said, looking
amund the white room, looking for Angie. "Where is she?"
"Sleeping. Sally's watching her." Rudy turned and walked
back, the length of the room, and Turner remembered it had
been the living room once. Rudy began to shut his consoles
down, the tiny pilot lights blinking out one by one. "I don't
know, man. I just don't know. What is it, some kind of
cancer?"
Turner followed him down the room, past a worktable
where a micromanipulator waited beneath its dustcover Past
the dusty rectangular eyes of a bank of aged monitors, one of
them with a shattered screen.
"It's all through her head," Rudy said "Like long chains
of it. It doesn't look like anything I've ever seen, ever.
Nothing
"How much do you know about biochips, Rudy?"
Rudy grunted. He seemed very sober now, but tense,
agitated. He kept running his hands back through his hair
"That's what I thought. It's some kind of . . . Not an im-
plant. Graft."
"What's it for?"
"For? Christ Who the fuck knows? Who did it to her?
Somebody you work for?"
"Her father, I think."
"Jesus." Rudy wiped his hand across his mouth. "It shad-
ows like tumor, on the scans, but her crits are high enough,
normal What's she like, ordinanly?"
"Don't know. A kid." He shrugged.
"Fucking hell," Rudy said. "I'm amazed she can walk."
He opened a little lab freezer and came up with a frosted
bottle of Moskovskaya "Want it out of the bottle?" he
asked.
"Maybe later."
Rudy sighed, looked at the bottle, then returned it to the
fridge. "So what do you want? Anything as weird as what's
in that little girl's head, somebody's going to be after it
soon.
If they aren't already."
"They are," Turner said. "I don't know if they know
she's here."
"Yet." Rudy wiped his palms on his grubby white shorts.
"But they probably will, right?"
Turner nodded.
"Where you going to go, then?"
"The Sprawl."
"Why""
"Because I've got money there I've got credit lines in four
different names, no way to link `em back to me Because I've
got a lot of other connections I may be able to use. And
because it's always cover, the Sprawl. So damned much of it,
you know?"
"Okay," Rudy said. "When?"
"You that womed about it, you want us right out?"
"No I mean, I don't know It's all pretty interesting,
what's in your girl friend's head. I've got a friend in Atlanta
could rent me a function analyzer, brain map, one to one; put
that on her, I might start to figure out what that thing is .
Might be worth something."
"Sure If you knew where to sell it."
"Aren't you curious? I mean, what the hell is she? You
pull her out of some military lab?" Rudy opened the white
freezer door again, took out the bottle of vodka, opened it,
and took a swallow.
Turner took the bottle and tilted it, letting the icy fluid
splash against his teeth. He swallowed, shuddered. "It's
corporate. Big. I was supposed to get her father out, but he
sent her instead Then somebody took the whole site out,
looked like a baby nuke. We just made it. This far." He
handed Rudy the bottle. "Stay straight for me, Rudy You
get scared, you drink too much."
Rudy was staring at him, ignoring the bottle. "Arizona,"
he said "It was on the news. Mexico's still kicking about it.
But it wasn't a nuke. They've had crews out there, all over it.
No nuke."
"What was it'~"
"They think it was a railgun They think somebody put up
a hypervelocity gun in a cargo blimp and blew hell out of
some derelict mall out there in the boonies. They know there
was a blimp near there, and so far nobody's found it You can
rig a railgun to blow itself to plasma when it discharges. The
projectile could have been damn near anything, at those
velocities. About a hundred and fifty kilos of ice would do
the trick." He took the bottle, capped it, and put it down on
the counter beside him. "All that land around there, it be-
longs to Maas, Maas Biolabs, doesn't it? They've been on the
news, Maas. Cooperating fully with various authorities. You
bet. So that tells us where you got your little honey from, I
guess."
"Sure. But it doesn't tell me who used the railgun Or
why."
Rudy shrugged.
"You better come see this," Sally said from the door.
Much later, Turner sat with Sally on the front porch. The
girl had lapsed, finally, into something Rudy's EEG called
sleep. Rudy was back in one of his workshops, pmbably with
his bottle of vodka. There were fireflies around the hon-
eysuckle vines beside the chainlink gate Turner found that if
he half closed his eyes, from his seat on the wooden porch
swing, he could almost see an apple' tree that was no longer
there, a tree that had once supported a length of silvery-gray
hemp rope and an ancient automobile tire There were fire-
flies then as well, and Rudy's heels thumping a bare hard skid
of earth as he pumped himself out on the swing's arc, legs
kicking, and Turner lay on his back in the grass, watching the
stars. .
"Tongues," Sally said, Rudy's woman, from the creaking
rattan chair, her cigarette a red eye in the dark "Talking in
the tongues."
"What's that?"
"What your kid was doing, upstairs. You know any
French?"
"No, not much. Not without a lexicon."
"Some of it sounded French to me." The red amber was a
short slash for an instant, when she tapped ash "When I was
little, my old man took me one time to this stadium, and I
saw the testifying and the speaking in tongues. It scared me I
think it scared me more, today, when she started
"Rudy taped the end of it, didn't he?"
"Yeah. You know, Rudy hasn't been doing too good.
That's mainly why I moved back in here. I told him I wasn't
staying unless he straightened himself out, but then it got real
bad, so about two weeks ago I moved back in. I was about
ready to go when you showed up" The coal of the cigarette
arced out over the railing and fell on the gravel that covered
the yard.
"Drinking?"
"That and the stuff he cooks for himself in the lab You
know, that man knows a little bit of damn near everything.
He's still got a lot of friends, around the county; I've heard
`em tell stories about when you and him were kids, before
you left."
"He should have left, too," he said.
"He hates the city," she said. "Says it all comes in on line
anyway, so why do you need to go there?"
"I went because there was nothing happening here Rudy
could always find something to do. Still can, by the look of
it.''
"You should've stayed in touch. He wanted you here when
your mother was dying."
"I was in Berlin. Couldn't leave what I was doing
"I guess not. I wasn't here then either I came later. That
was a good summer. Rudy just pulled me out of this sleaze-
ass club in Memphis; came in there with a bunch of country
boys one night. and next day I was back here, didn't really
know why. Except he was nice to me, those days, and funny,
and he gave my head a chance to slow down. He taught me to
cook." She laughed. "I liked that, except I was scared of
those Goddamn chickens out back." She stood up then and
stretched, the old chair creaking, and he was aware of the
length of her tanned legs, the smell and summer heat of her,
close to his face.
She put her hands on his shoulders. His eyes were level
with the band of brown belly where her shorts rode low, her
navel a soft shadow, and remembering Allison in the white
hollow room, he wanted to press his face there, taste it
all . He thought she swayed slightly, but he wasn't sure.
"Turner," she said, "sometimes bein' here with him, it's
like bein' here alone .
So he stood, rattle of the old swing chain where the eye-
bolts were screwed deep in the tongue and groove of the
porch roof, bolts his father might have turned forty years
before, and kissed her mouth as it opened, cut loose in time
by talk and the fireflies and the subliminal triggers of mem-
ory, so that it seemed to him, as he ran his palms up the
warmth of her bare back, beneath the white T-shirt, that the
people in his life weren't beads strung on a wire of sequence,
but clustered like quanta, so that he knew her as well as he'd
known Rudy, or Allison, or Conroy, as well as he knew the
girl who was Mitchell's daughter.
"Hey," she whispered, working her mouth free, "you
come upstairs now "
ALAiN PHONED AT FIVE and verified the availability of the
amount he required, fighting to control the sickness she felt at
his greed. She copied the address carefully on the back of a
card she'd taken from Picard's desk in the Roberts Gallery.
Andrea returned from work ten minutes later, and Marly was
glad that her friend hadn't been there for Alain's call.
She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a
frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition. Andrea had wedged
a kind of plywood shelf there, on the stone ledge, wide
enough to support the little hibachi she kept beneath the sink.
Now she was arranging the black squares of charcoal neatly
on the grate. "I had a talk about your employer today," she
said, placing the hibachi on the plywood and igniting the
greenish fire-starter paste with the spark gun from the stove.
"Our academic was in from Nice. He's baffled as to why I'd
choose Josef Virek as my focus of interest, but he's also a
horny old goat, so he was more than glad to talk."
Marly stood beside her, watching the nearly invisible flames
lick around the coals.
"He kept dragging the Tessier-Ashpools into it," Andrea
continued, "and Hughes. Hughes was mid to late twentieth
century, an American. He's in the book as well, as a sort of
proto-Virek I hadn't known that Tessier-Ashpool had started
to disintegrate She went back to the counter and un-
wrapped six large tiger prawns.
"They're Franco-Australian? I remember a documentary, I
think They own one of the big spas?"
"Freeside. It's been sold now, my professor tells me. It
seems that one of old Ashpool's daughters somehow managed
to gain personal control of the entire business entity, became
increasingly eccentric, and the clan's interests went to hell.
This over the past seven years."
"I don't see what it has to do with Virek," Marly said,
watching Andrea skewer each prawn on a long needle of
bamboo.
"Your guess is as good as mine. My professor maintains
that both Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools are fascinating anach-
ronisms and that things can be learned about corporate evolu-
tion by watching them. He's convinced enough of our senior
editors, at any rate
"But what did he say about Virek?"
"That Virek's madness would take a different form."
"Madness?"
"Actually, he avoided calling it'that. But Hughes was mad
as birds, apparently, and old Ashpool as well, and his daugh-
ter totally bizarm. He said that Virek would be forced, by
evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of `jump.' `Jump
was his word."
"Evolutionary pressures?"
"Yes," Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the
hibachi. "He talks about corporations as though they were
animals of some kind."
After dinner, they went out walking. Marly found herself
straining, at times, to sense the imagined mechanism of Virek's
surveillance, but Andrea filled the evening with her usual
warmth and common sense, and Marly was grateful to walk
through a city where things were simply themselves. In Virek's
world, what could be simple? She remembered the brass knob
in the Galerie Duperey, how it had squirmed so indescribably
in her fingers as it drew her into Virek's model of the Parque
Guell. Was he always there, she wondered, in Gaudi's park,
in an afternoon that never ended? Sefior is wealthy. Seiior
enjoys any number of means of manifestation. She shivered in
the warm evening air, moved closer to Andrea.
The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was
that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be
unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now
with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once
said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs
were more so, she decided.
Andrea paused at a kiosk to buy her English cigarettes and
the new Elle. Marly waited on the pavement, the pedestrian
traffic parting automatically for her, faces sliding past, stu-
dents and businessmen and tourists. Some of them, she as-
sumed, were part of Virek's machine, wired into Paco. Paco
with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles
moving beneath his broadcloth shirt. Paco, who had worked
for Sefior all his life.
"What's wrong? You look as though you've just swal-
lowed something." Andrea, stripping the cellophane from her
twenty Silk Cut.
"No," Marly said, and shivered, "But it occurs to me that
I very nearly did. ."
And walking home, in spite of Andrea's conversation, her
warmth, the shopwindows had become boxes, each one, con-
structions, like the works of Joseph Cornell or the mysterious
boxmaker Virek sought. the books and furs and Italian cot-
tons arranged to suggest geometries of nameless longing.
And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea's couch,
the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee,
while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the
next room, dressing. in a gray morning of Paris rain.
"No,~' she told Paco, "I'll go myself. I prefer it."
"That is a great deal of money." He looked down at the
Italian bag on the cafu table between them. "It's dangerous,
you understand?'~
"There's no one to know I'm carrying it, is there? Only
Alain. Alain and your friends. And I didn't say I'd go alone,
only that I don't feel like company.'
"Is something wrong?" The serious deep lines at the cor-
ners of his mouth "You are upset?"
"I only mean that I wish to be by myself. You and the
others, whoever they are, are welcome to follow, to follow
and observe. If you should lose me, which I think unlikely,
I'm sure you have the address."
"That is true," he said. "But for you to carry several
million New Yen, alone, through Paris He shrugged.
"And if I were to lose it? Would Sefior register the loss?
Or would there be another bag, another four million?" She
reached for the shoulder strap and stood.
"There would be another bag, certainly, although it re-
quires some effort on our part to assemble that amount of
cash. And, no, Se,'ior would not `register' its loss, in the
sense you mean, but I would be disciplined even for the
pointless loss of a lesser sum. The very rich have the common
characteristic of taking care with their money, you will find
"Nonetheless. I go by myself. Not alone, but leave me
with my thoughts."
"Your intuition
"Yes."
If they followed, and she was sure they did, they were
invisible as ever. For that matter, it seemed most likely that
they would leave Alain unobserved. Certainly the address he
had given her that morning would aWeady be a focus of their
attention, whether he were there or not
She felt a new strength today She had stood up to Paco It
had had something to do with her abrupt suspicion, the night
before, that Paco might be there, in part, for her, with his
humor and his manliness and his endearing ignorance of art.
She remembered Virek saying that they knew more about her
life than she herself did. What easier way, then, for them to
pencil in those last few blanks in the grid that was Marly
Krushkhova? Paco Estevez. A perfect stranger Too perfect.
She smiled at herself in a wall of blue mirror as the escalator
carried her down into the metro, pleased with the cut of her
dark hair and the stylishly austere titanium frames of the
black Porsche glasses she'd bought that morning. Good lips,
she thought, really not bad lips at all, and a thin boy in a
white shirt and dark leather jacket smiled at her from the up
escalator, a huge black portfolio case beneath his arm
I'm in Paris, she thought. For the first time in a very long
time, that alone seemed reason to smile. And today I will
give my disgusting fool of a former lover four million New
Yen, and he will give me something in return A name, or an
address, perhaps a phone number. She bought a first-class
ticket; the car would be less crowded, and she could pass the
time guessing which of her fellow passengers belonged to
Virek.
* * *
The address Alain had given her, in a grim northern sub-
urb. was one of twenty concrete towers rising from a plain of
the same material, speculative real estate from the middle of
the previous century. The rain was falling steadily now, but
she felt as though she were somehow in collusion with it; it
lent the day something conspiratorial, and beaded on the chic
rubber bag stuffed with Alain's fortune. How queer to stroll
through this hideous landscape with millions beneath her arm,
on her way to reward her utterly faithless former lover with
these bales of New Yen.
There was no answer when she buzzed the apartment's
numbered speaker button. Beyond smudged sheet glass, a
darkened foyer, entirely bare. The sort of place where you
turned the lights on as you entered; they turned themselves off
again, automatically, invariably before your elevator had ar-
rived, leaving you to wait thei'e in the smell of disinfectant
and tired air. She buzzed again. "Alain?" Nothing.
She tried the door. It wasn't locked. There was no one in
the foyer. The dead eye of a derelict video camera regarded
her through a film of dust. The afternoon's watery light
seeped in from the concrete plain behind her. Bootheels
clicking on brown tile, she crossed to the bank of elevators
and pressed button 22. There was a hollow thump, a metallic
groan, and one of the elevators began to descend. The plastic
indicators above the doors remained unlit. The car arrived
with a sigh and a high-pitched, fading whine. "Cher Alain,
you have come down in the world. This place is the shits,
truly " As the doors slid open on the darkness of the car, she
fumbled beneath the Italian bag for the flap of her Brussels
purse She found the flat little green tin flashlight she'd
carried since her first walk in Paris, with the lion-headed Pile
Wonder trademark embossed on its front, and pulled it out. In
the elevators of Paris, you could step into many things: the
arms of a mugger, a steaming pile of fresh dog shit .
And the weak beam picking out the silver cables, oiled and
shining, swaying gently in the vacant shaft, the toe of her
right boot already centimeters past the scuffed steel edge of
the tile she stood on; her hand automatically jerking the beam
down in terror, down to the dusty, littered roof of the car, two
levels below She took in an extraordinary amount of detail in
the seconds her flash wavered on the elevator. She thought of
a tiny submarine diving the cliffs of some deep seamount, the
frail beam wavering on a patch of silt undisturbed for cen-
turies: the soft bed of ancient furry soot, a dried gray thing
that was a used condom, the bright reflected eyes of crumpled
bits of tinfoil, the frail gray barrel and white plunger of a
diabetic syringe . . . She held the edge of the door so tightly
that her knuckle joints ached. Very slowly, she shifted her
weight backward, away from the pit. Another step and she
clicked off her light.
"Damn you," she said. "0 Jesus."
She found the door to the stairwell. Clicking the little flash
back on, she began to climb. Eight floors up, the numbness
began to fade, and she was shaking, tears ruining her makeup.
Rapping on the door again. It was pressboard, laminated
with a ghastly imitation of rosewood, the lithographed grain
just visible in the light from the long corridor's single strip
of
biofluorescence. "Damn you Alain? Alan!" The myopic
fisheye of the door's little spyglass'booking through her, blank
and vacant. The comdor held a homble smell, embalmed
cooking odors trapped in synthetic carpeting.
Trying the door, knob turning, the cheap brass greasy and
cold, and the bag of money suddenly heavy, the strap cutting
into her shoulder. The door opening easily. A short stretch of
orange carpet flecked with irregular rectangles of salmon-
pink, decades of dirt ground into it in a clearly defined track
by thousands of tenants and their visitors .
"Alain?" The smell of black French cigarettes, almost
comforting .
And finding him there in that same watery light, silver
light, the other tower blocks featureless, beyond a rectangle
of window, against pale rainy sky, where he lay curled like a
child on the hideous orange carpet, his spine a question mark
beneath the taut back of his bottle-green velour jacket, his
left
hand spread above his ear, white fingers, faintest bluish tint
at
the base of his nails.
Kneeling, she touched his neck. Knew. Beyond the win-
dow, all the rain sliding down, forever. Cradling his head,
legs open, holding him, rocking, swaying, the dumb sad
animal keening filling the bare rectangle of the room .
And after a time, becoming aware of the sharp thing under
her palm, the neat stainless end of a length of very fine, very
rigid wire, that protruded from his ear and between the spread
cool fingers.
Ugly, ugly, that was no way to die; it got her up, anger,
her hands like claws To survey the silent room where he had
died. There was no sense of him there, nothing, only his
ragged attach& Opening that, she found two spiral notebooks,
their pages new and clean, an unread but very fashionable
novel, a box of wooden matches, and a half-empty blue
packet of Gauloise. The leather-bound agenda from Browns
was gone. She patted his jacket, slid fingers through his
pockets, but it was gone.
No, she thought, you wouldn't have written it there, would
you? But you could never remember a number or an address,
could you? She looked around the room again, a weird calm
overtaking her. You had to write things down, but you were
secretive, and you didn't trust my little book from Browns,
no; you'd meet a girl in some cafe and write her number in a
matchbook or on the back of some scrap, and forget it, so that
I found it weeks later, straightening up your things.
She went into the tiny bedroom. There was a bright red
folding chair and a slab of cheap yellow foam that served as a
bed. The foam was marked with a brown butterfly of men-
strual blood. She lifted it, but there was nothing there
"You'd have been scared," she said, her voice shaking
with a fury she didn't try to understand, her hands cold,
colder than Alain's, as she ran them down the red wallpaper,
striped with gold, seeking some loose seam, a hiding place
"You poor stupid shit. Poor stupid dead shit
Nothing. Back into the living room, and amazed, somehow,
that he hadn't moved; expecting him to jump up, hello, waving
a few centimeters of trick wire. She removed his shoes. They
needed resoling, new heels. She looked inside, felt the lining.
Nothing. "Don't do this to me "And back into the bedroom.
The narrow closet. Brushing aside a clatter of cheap white
plastic hangers, a limp shroud of drycleaner's plastic Dragging
the stained bedslab over and standing on it, her heels sinking
into the foam, to slide her hands the length of a pressboard
shelf, and find, in the far corner, a hard little fold of paper,
rectangular and blue. Opening it, noticing how the nails she'd
done so carefully were chipped, and finding the number he'd
written there in green feltpen. It was an empty Gauloise packet.
There was a knock at the door.
And then Paco's voice: "Marly? Hello? What has happened?"
She thrust the number into the waistband of her jeans and
turned to meet his calm, serious eyes.
"It's Alain," she said, "he's dead."
HE SAW LUCAS for the last time in front of a big old depart-
ment store on Madison Avenue. Thht was how he remem-
bered him, after that, a big black man in a sharp black suit,
about to step into his long black car, one black, softly pol-
ished shoe already on the lush carpet of Ahmed's interior, the
other still on the crumbling concrete of the curb.
Jackie stood beside Bobby, her face shadowed by the wide
brim of her gold-hung fedora, an orange silk headscarf knot-
ted at the back of her neck.
"You take care of our young friend, now," Lucas said,
pointing the knob of his cane at her. "He's not without his
enemies, our Count."
"Who is?" Jackie asked.
"I'll take care of myself," Bobby said, resenting the idea
of Jackie being seen as more capable, yet at the same time
knowing that she almost certainly was.
"You do that," Lucas said, the knob swinging, lined up now
with Bobby's eyes. "Sprawltown's a twisty place, my man
Things are seldom what they seem." To illustrate his point,
he did something to the cane that caused the long brass splines
below the ball to open smoothly. for an instant, silently,
extended like the ribs of an umbrella, each one glinting sharp
as a razor, pointed like needles. Then they were gone, and
Ahmed's wide door swung shut with an armor-plated thud.
Jackie laughed. "Shee-it. Lucas still carryin' that killin'
stick. Bigtime lawyer now, but the street leaves a mark on
you. Guess it's a good thing . .
"Lawyer?"
She looked at him. "You never mind, honey. You just
come with me, do like I tell you, you be okay."
Ahmed merged with the sparse traffic, a pedicab jockey
blaring pointlessly at the receding brass bumper with a hand-
held air horn.
Then, one manicured, gold-ringed hand on his shoulder,
she led him across the sidewalk, past a sleeping huddle of
rag-bundled transients, and into the slowly waking world of
Hypermart.
Fourteen floors, Jackie said, and Bobby whistled. "All like
this?" She nodded, spooning brown crystals of rock sugar
into the tan foam atop her coffee glass. They sat on scrolly
castiron stools at a marble counter in a little booth, where a
girl Bobby's age, her hair dyed and lacquered into a kind of
dorsal fin, worked the knobs and levers of a big old machine
with brass tanks and domes and burners and eagles with
spread chrome wings. The countertop had been something
else, originally; Bobby saw where one end was bashed off in
a long crooked jag to allow it to fit between two green-
painted steel pillars.
"You like it, huh?" She sprinkled the foam with powdered
cinnamon from a heavy old glass shaker. " `Bout as far from
Barrytown as you been, some ways."
Bobby nodded, his eyes confused by the thousand colors
and textures of the things in the stalls, the stalls themselves.
There seemed to be no regularity to anything, no hint of any
central planning agency. Crooked corridors twisted off from
the area in front of the espresso booth. There seemed to be no
central source of lighting either. Red and blue neon glowed
beyond the white hiss of a Primus lantern, and one stall, just
being opened by a bearded man with leather pants, seemed to
be lit with candles, the soft light reflecting off hundreds of
polished brass buckles hung against the reds and blacks of old
rugs. There was a morning rattle to the place, a coughing and
a clearing of throats. A blue Toshiba custodial unit whirred
out of a corridor, dragging a battered plastic cart stacked with
green plastic bales of garbage. Someone had glued a big
plastic doll head to the Toshiba's upper body segment, above
the clustered camera eyes and sensors, a grinning blue-eyed
thing once intended to approximate the features of a leading
stimstar without violating Sense/Net copyrights. The pink
head, its platinum hair bound up in a length of pale blue
plastic pearls, bobbed absurdly as the robot rolled past. Bobby
laughed.
"This place is okay," he said, and gestured to the girl to
refill his cup.
"Wait a sec, asshole," the countergirl said, amiably enough.
She was measuring ground coffee into a dented steel hopper
on one end of an antique balance. "You get any sleep last
night, Jackie, after the show?"
"Sure," Jackie said, and sipped at her coffee "I danced
their second set, then I slept at Jammer's. Hit the couch, you
know?"
"Wish I'd got some. Every time Henry sees you dance, he
won't let me alone ..." She laughed, and refilled Bobby's
cup from a black plastic thermos.
"Well," Bobby said, when the girl was busy again with
the espresso machine, "what fl~~t~"
"Busy man, huh?" Jackie regarded him coolly from be-
neath the gold-pinned hat brim. "Got places you need to go,
people to see?"
"Well, no. Shit. I just mean, well, is this it?"
"Is what it?"
"This place. We're staying here?"
"Top floor. Friend of mine named Jammer runs a club up
there. Very unlikely anyone could find you there, and even if
they do, it's a hard place to sneak up on. Fourteen floors of
mostly stalls, and a whole lot of these people sell stuff they
don't have out in plain view, right? So they're all very
sensitive to strangers turning up, anyone asking questions.
And most of them are friends of ours, one way or another
Anyway, you'll like it here. Good place for you. Lots to
learn, if you remember to keep your mouth shut."
"How am I gonna learn if I don't ask questions?"
"Well, I mean keep your ears open, more like it. And be
polite. Some tough people in here, but you mind your biz,
they'll mind theirs. Beauvoir's probably coming by here late
this afternoon. Lucas has gone out to the Projects to tell him
whatever you learned from the Finn. What did you learn from
the Finn, hon?"
"That he's got these three dead guys stretched out on his
floor. Says they're ninjas." Bobby looked at her. "He's
pretty weird . .
"Dead guys aren't part of his usual line of goods. But,
yeah, he's weird all right. Why don't you tell me about it?
Calmly. and in low, measured tones. Think you can do
that?"
Bobby told her what he could remember of his visit to the
Finn. Several times she stopped him, asked questions he
usually wasn't able to answer. She nodded when he first
mentioned Wigan Ludgate. "Yeah," she said, "Jammer talks
about him, when he gets going on the old days. Have to ask
him .." At the end of his recitation, she was lounging back
against one of the green pillars, the hat very low over her
dark eyes.
"Well?" he asked
"Interesting," she said, but that was all she'd say.
"Right," Jackie said, taking in the tight black jeans, the
heavy leather boots with spacesuit-style accordion folds at the
ankles, the black leather garrison belt trimmed with twin lines
of pyrarnidal chrome studs. "Well, I guess you look more
like the Count Come on, Count, I got a couch for you to
sleep on, up in Jammer's place."
He leered at her, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of the
black Levis.
"Alone," she added, "no fear."
"I want some new clothes," Bobby said when they'd
climbed the immobile escalator to the second floor.
"You got any money?" she asked.
"Shit," he said, his hands in the pockets of the baggy,
pleated jeans. "I don't have any fucking money, but I want
some clothes. You and Lucas and Beauvoir are keeping my
ass on ice for something, aren't you? Well, I'm tired of this
God-awful shirt Rhea palmed off on me, and these pants
always feel like they're about to fall off my ass. And I'm here
because Two-a-Day, who's a lowlife fuck, wanted to risk my
butt so Lucas and Beauvoir could test their fucking software.
So you can fucking well buy me some clothes, okay?"
"Okay," she said, after a pause. "I'll tell you what." She
pointed to where a Chinese girl in faded denim was furling
the sheets of plastic that had fenced a dozen steel-pipe gar-
ment racks hung with clothing. "You see Lin, there? She's a
friend of mine. You pick out what you want, I'll straighten it
out between Lucas and her."
Half an hour later, he emerged from a blanket-draped
fitting room and put on a pair of Indo-Javanese mirrored
aviator glasses. He grinned at Jackie. "Real sharp," he said.
"Oh, yeah." She did a thing with her hand, a fanning
movement, as though something nearby were too hot to touch.
"You didn't like that shirt Rhea loaned you?"
He looked down at the black T-shirt he'd chosen, at the
square holodecal of cyberspace on his chest. It was done so
you seemed to be punching fast-forward through the matrix,
grid lines blurring at the edges of the decal. "Yeah. It was
too tacky .
PACO SLUNG THE Citroen-Dornier down the Champs, along the
north bank of the Seine, then up through Les Halles. Marly
sank back into the astonishingly soft leather seat, more beau-
tifully stitched than her Brussels jacket. and willed her mind
to blankness, lack of affect. Be eyes, she told herself. Only
eyes, your body a weight pressed evenly back by the speed of
this obscenely expensive car. Humming past the Square des
Innocents, where whores dickered with the drivers of cargo
hovers in bleu de travail, Paco steering effortlessly through
the narrow streets.
"Why did you say, `Don't do this to me'?" He took his
hand from the steering console and tapped his ear-bead into
position.
"Why were you listening?"
"Because that is my job. I sent a woman up, up into the
tower opposite his, to the twenty-second floor, with a para-
bolic microphone. The phone in the apartment was dead;
otherwise, we could have used that. She went up, broke into
a vacant unit on the west face of the tower, and aimed her
microphone in time to hear you say, `Don't do this to me.'
And you were alone?"
"Yes."
"He was dead?"
"Yes."
"Why did you say it, then?"
"I don't know."
"Who did you feel was doing something to you?"
"I don't know. Perhaps Alan."
"Doing what?"
"Being dead? Complicating matters? You tell me."
"You are a difficult woman."
"Let me out."
"I will take you to your friend's apartment . .
"Stop the car."
"I will take you to"
"I'll walk."
The low silver car slid up to the curb.
"I will call you, in the"
"Good night."
"You're certain you wouldn't prefer one of the spas?"
asked Mr. Paleologos, thin and elegant as a mantis in his
white hopsack jacket. His hair was white as well, brushed
back from his forehead with extreme care. "It would be less
expensive, and a great deal more fun. You're a very pretty
girl~ .
"Pardon?" Jerking her attention back from the street beyond
the rain-streaked window. "A what?" His French was clumsy,
enthusiastic, strangely inflected.
"A very pretty girl." He smiled primly. "You wouldn't
prefer a holiday in a Med cluster? People your own age? Are
you Jewish?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Jewish. Are you?"
"No."
"Too bad," he said. "You have the cheekbones of a
certain sort of elegant young Jewess ....I' ye a lovely dis-
count on fifteen days to Jerusalem Prime, a marvelous envi-
ronment for the price. Includes suit rental, three meals per
diem, and direct shuttle from the JAL torus."
"Suit rental?"
"They haven't entirely established atmosphere, in Jerusa-
lem Prime," Mr. Paleologos said, shuffling a stack of pink
flimsies from one side of his desk to the other. His office was
a tiny cubicle walled with hologram views of Poros and
Macau. She'd chosen his agency for its evident obscurity, and
because it had been possible to slip in without leaving the
little commercial complex in the metro station nearest Andrea's.
"No" she said, "I'm not interested in spas I want to go
here." She tapped the writing on the wrinkled blue wrapper
from a pack of Gauloise
"Well," he said, "it's possible, of course, but I have no
listing of accommodations. Will you be visiting friends?"
"A business trip," she said impatiently. "I must leave
immediately."
"Very well, very well," Mr. Paleologos said, taking a
cheap-looking lap terminal from a shelf behind his desk.
"Can you give me your credit code, please?"
She reached into her black leather bag and took out the
thick bundle of New Yen she'd removed from Paco's bag
while he'd been busy examining the apartment where Alain
had died. The money was fastened with a red band of translu-
cent elastic "I wish to pay cash."
"Oh, dear," Mr. Paleologos said, extending a pink finger-
tip to touch the top bill, as though he expected the lot of it
to
vanish. "I see. Well, you understand, I wouldn't ordinarily
do business this way. . . . But, I suppose, something can be
arranged. .
"Quickly," she said, "very quickly . .
He looked at her. "I understand. Can you tell me, please"
his fingers began to move over the keys of the lap terminal
"the name under which you wish to travel?"
Tuat'iER WOKE TO the silent hous~, the sound of birds in the
apple trees in the overgrown orchard. He'd slept on the
broken couch Rudy kept in the kitchen. He drew water for
coffee, the plastic pipes from the roof tank chugging as he
filled the pot, put the pot on the propane burner, and walked
out to the porch.
Rudy's eight vehicles were filmed with dew, arranged in a
neat row on the gravel One of the augmented hounds trotted
through the open gate as Turner came down the steps, its
black hood clicking softly in the morning quiet. It paused,
drooling, swayed its distorted head from side to side, then
scrambled across the gravel and out of sight, around the
corner of the porch.
Turner paused by the hood of a dull brown Suzuki Jeep, a
hydrogen-cell conversion Rudy would have done the work
himself, Four-wheel drive, big tires with off-road lugs crusted
in pale dry river mud. Small, slow, reliable, not much use on
the road .
He passed two rust-flecked Honda sedans, identical, same
year and model. Rudy would be ripping one for parts from
the other; neither would be running. He grinned absently at
the immaculate brown and tan paintwork on the 1?4? Chevrolet
van, remembering the rusted shell Rudy had hauled home
from Arkansas on a rented flatbed. The thing still ran on
gasoline, the inner surfaces of its engine likely as spotless as
the hand-rubbed chocolate lacquer of its fenders.
There was half of a Dornier ground-effect plane, under
gray plastic tarps, and then a wasplike black Suzuki racing
bike on a homemade trailer. He wondered how long it had
been since Rudy had done any serious racing. There was a
snowmobile under another tarp, an old one, next to the bike
trailer. And then the stained gray hovercraft, surplus from the
war, a squat wedge of armored steel that smelled of the
kerosene its turbine burned, its mesh-reinforced apron bag
slack on the gravel. Its windows were narrow slits of thick,
high-impact plastic. There were Ohio plates bolted to the
thing's ram-like bumpers. They were current. "I can see what
you're thinking," Sally said, and he turned to see her at the
porch rail with the pot of steaming coffee in her hand. "Rudy
says, if it can't get over something, it can anyway get through
it.''
`Is it fast?" Touching the hover's armored flank.
"Sure, but you'll need a new spine after about an hour."
"How about the law?"
"Can't much say they like the way it looks, but it's
certified street-legal. No law against armor that I know of."
"Angie's feeling better," Sally said as he followed her in
through the kitchen door, "aren't you, honey?"
Mitchell's daughter looked up from the kitchen table. Her
bruising, like Turner's, had faded to a pair of fat commas, like
painted blue-black tears.
"My friend here's a doctor," Turner said. "He checked
you out when you were under. He says you're doing okay."
"Your brother He's not a doctor"
"Sorry, Turner," Sally said, at the stove. "I'm pretty
much straightforward."
"Well, he's not a doctor," he said, "but he's smart. We
were worried that Maas might have done something to you,
fixed it so you'd get sick if you left Arizona . .
"Like a cortex bomb?" She spooned cold cereal from a
cracked bowl with apple blossoms around the rim, part of a
set that Turner remembered.
"Lord," Sally said, "what have you gotten yourself into,
Turner?"
"Good question." He took a seat at the table.
Angie chewed her cereal, staring at him.
"Angie," he said, "when Rudy scanned you, he found
something in your head."
She stopped chewing.
"He didn't know what it was. Something someone put
there, maybe when you were a lot younger. Do you know
what I mean?"
She nodded.
"Do you know what it is?"
She swallowed. "No."
"But you know who put it there?"
``Yes.''
"Your father?"
"Yes."
"Do you know why?"
"Because I was sick."
"How were you sick?"
"I wasn't smart enough."
He was ready by noon, the hovercraft fueled and waiting
by the chainlink gates. Rudy h~d given him a rectangular
black ziploc stuffed with New Yen, some of the bills worn
almost translucent with use.
"I tried that tape through a French lexicon," Rudy said,
while one of the hounds rubbed its dusty ribs against his legs.
"Doesn't work. I think it's some kind of creole. Maybe
African. You want a copy?"
"No," Turner said, "you hang on to it."
"Thanks," Rudy said, "but no thanks. I don't plan on
admitting you were ever here if anybody asks. Sally and I,
we're heading in to Memphis this afternoon, stay with a
couple of friends. Dogs'll watch the house." He scratched the
animal behind its plastic hood. "Right, boy?" The dog whined
and twitched. "I had to train `em off coon hunting when I put
their infrareds in," he said. "There wouldn't've been any
coons left in the county .
Sally and the girl came down the porch steps, Sally carry-
ing a broken-down canvas carryall she'd filled with sand-
wiches and a thermos of coffee. Turner remembered her in
the bed upstairs and smiled. She smiled back. She looked
older today, tired. Angie had discarded the bloodstained MAAS-
NEOTEK T-shirt in favor of a shapeless black sweatshirt Sally
had found for her. It made her look even younger than she
was. Sally had also managed to incorporate the remaining
bruises into a baroque job of eye makeup that clashed weirdly
with her kid's face and baggy shirt.
Rudy handed Turner the key to the hovercraft. "I had my
old Cray cook me a pr~cis of recent corporate news this
morning One thing you should probably know is that Maas
Biolabs has announced the accidental death of Dr. Christo-
pher Mitchell."
"Impressive, how vague those people can be."
"And you Just keep the harness on real tight," Sally was
saying, or your ass'll be black and blue before you hit that
Statesboro bypass."
Rudy glanced at the girl, then back at Turner. Turner could
see the broken veins at the base of his brother's nose. His
eyes were bloodshot and there was a pronounced tic in his left
eyelid. "Well, I guess that's it. Funny, but I'd come to figure
I wouldn't see you again. Kind of funny to see you back
here
"Well," Turner said, "you've both done more than I'd
any right to expect
Sally glanced away.
"So thanks. I guess we better go" He climbed up into the
cab of the hover, wanting to be gone Sally squeezed the
girl's wrist, gave her the carryall, and stood beside her while
she climbed up the two hinged footrests. Turner settled into
the driver's seat.
"She kept asking for you," Rudy said. "After a while it
got so bad, the endorphin analogs couldn't really cut the pain,
and every two hours or so, she'd ask where you were, when
you were coming
"I sent you money," Turner said "Enough to take her to
Chiba. The clinics there could have tried something new."
Rudy snorted. "Chiba? Jesus. She was an old woman.
What the hell good would it have done, keeping her alive in
Chiba for a few more months? What she mainly wanted was
to see you."
"Didn't work out that way." Turner said as the girl got
into the seat beside his and placed the bag on the floor,
between her feet. "Be seeing you, Rudy." He nodded.
"Sally
"So long," Sally said, her arm around Rudy.
"Who were you talking about?" Angie asked, as the hatch
came down. Turner put the key in the ignition and fired up
the turbine, simultaneously inflating the apron bag. Through
the narrow window at his side, he saw Rudy and Sally back
quickly away from the hover, the hound cowering and snap-
ping at the noise of the turbine. The pedals and hand controls
were oversized, designed to permit ease of operation for a
driver wearing a radiation suit. Turner eased them out through
the gates and swung around on a wide patch of gravel drive
Angie was buckling her harness
"My mother," he said.
He revved the turbine and they jolted forward
"I never knew my mother," she said, and Turner remem-
bered that her father was dead, and that she didn't know it
yet. He hit the throttle and they shot off down the gravel
drive, barely missing one of Rudy's hounds.
Sally had been right about the thing's ride~ there was
constant vibration from the turbine. At ninety kilometers per
hour, on the skewed asphalt of the old state highway, it shook
their teeth. The armored apron bag rode the broken surfaces
heavily; the skim effect of a civilian sport model would only
be possible on a perfectly smooth, flat surface.
Turner found himself liking it, though You pointed, eased
back the throttle, and you went. Someone had hung a pair of
pink sun-faded foam dice above the forward vision-slit, and
the whine of the turbine was a solid thing behind him. The
girl seemed to relax, taking in the roadside scenery with an
absent, almost contented expression, and Turner was grateful
that he wasn't required to make conversation. You're hot, he
thought, glancing sidelong at her, you're probably the single
most hotly pursued little item on the face of the planet today,
and here I am hauling you off to the Sprawl in Rudy's
kidstuff war wagon, no fucking idea what I'm going to do
with you now . Or who it was zapped the mall
Run it through, he told himself, as they swung down into
the valley, run it through again, eventually something'll click.
Mitchell had contacted Hosaka, said he was coming over
Hosaka hired Conroy and assembled a medical crew to check
Mitchell for kinks. Conroy had put the teams together, work-
ing with Turner's agent. Turner's agent was a voice in Ge-
neva. a telephone number. Hosaka had sent Allison in to vet
him in Mexico, then Conroy had pulled him out Webber,
just before the shit hit the fan, had said that she was Conroy's
plant at the site. . . . Someone had jumped them, as the girl
was coming in, flares and automatic weapons. That felt like
Maas, to him, it was the sort of move he'd expect, the sort of
thing his hired muscle was there to deal with Then the white
sky. . . . He thought about what Rudy had said about a
railgun. . . Who? And the mess in the girl's head, the
things Rudy had turned up on his tomograph and his NMR
imager. She said her father had never planned on coming out
himself
"No company," she said, to the window.
"How's that?"
"You don't have a company, do you? I mean, you work
for whoever hires you."
"That's right."
"Don't you get scared?"
"Sure, but not because of that .
"We've always had the company. My father said I'd be all
right. that I was just going to another company
"You'll be fine. He was right. I just have to find out
what's going on. Then I'll get you where you need to go
"To Japan?"
"Wherever."
"Have you been there?"
"Sure."
"Would I like it?"
"Why not?"
Then she lapsed into silence again, and Turner concen-
trated on the road.
"It makes me dream," she said as he leaned forward to
turn on the headlights, her voice barely audible above the
turbine
"What does?" He pretended to be lost in his driving.
careful not to glance her way.
"The thing in my head. Usually it's only when I'm asleep."
"Yeah?" Remembering the whites of her eyes in Rudy's
bedroom, the shuddering, the rush of words in a language he
didn't know.
"Sometimes when I'm awake. It's like I'm jacked into a
deck, only I'm free of the grid, flying, and I'm not alone
there. The other night I dreamed about a boy, and he'd
reached out, picked up something, and it was hurting him,
and he couldn't see that he was free, that he only needed to
let go. So I told him. And for just a second, I could see where
he was, and that wasn't like a dream at all, just this ugly
little
room with a stained carpet, and I could tell he needed a
shower, and feel how the insides of his shoes were sticky,
because he wasn't wearing socks. . . . That's not like the
dreams. .
"No?"
"No. The dreams are all big, big things, and I'm big too,
moving, with the others.
Turner let his breath out as the hover whined up the
concrete ramp to the Interstate, suddenly aware that he'd been
holding it. "What others?"
"The bright ones." Another silence. "Not people .
"You spend much time in cyberspace, Angie? I mean
jacked in, with a deck?"
"No. Just school stuff. My father said it wasn't good for
me."
"He say anything about those dreams?"
"Only that they were getting realer. But I never told him
about the others.
``You want to tell me? Maybe `it'll help me understand,
figure out what we need to do
"Some of them tell me things Stories. Once, there was
nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and
people shuffling it around Then something happened, and it
it knew itself. There's a whole other story, about that, a
girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to
care about anything Something the man did helped the whole
thing know itself. . . . And after that, it sort of split off
into
different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others,
the bright ones. But it's hard to tell, because they don't tell
it
with words, exactly
Turner felt the skin on his neck prickle. Something coming
back to him, up out of the drowned undertow of Mitchell's
dossier Hot burning shame in a hallway, dirty cream paint
peeling, Cambridge, the graduate dorms . . "Where were
you born, Angie?"
"England. Then my father got into Maas, we moved. To
Geneva."
Somewhere in Virginia he eased the hovercraft over onto
the gravel shoulder and out into an overgrown pasture, dust
from the dry summer swirling out behind them as he swung
them left and into a stand of pine. The turbine died as they
settled into the apron bag.
"We might as well eat now." he said, reaching back for
Sally's canvas carryall.
Angie undid her harness and unzipped the black sweatshirt
Under it, she wore something tight and white, a child's
smooth tanned flesh showing in the scoop neck above young
breasts. She took the bag from him and began unwrapping the
sandwiches Sally had made for him. "What's wrong with
your brother?" she asked, handing him half a sandwich.
"How do you mean?"
"Well, there's something . He drinks all the time, Sally
said Is he unhappy?"
"I don't know," Turner said, hunching and twisting the
aches out of his neck and shoulders. "I mean, he must be,
but I don't know exactly why. People get stuck, sometimes."
"You mean when they don't have companies to take care
of them?" She bit into her sandwich.
He looked at her. "Are you putting me on?"
She nodded, her mouth full Swallowed "A little bit I
know that a lot of people don't work for Maas. Never have
and never will You're one, your brother's another. But it
was a real question. I kind of liked Rudy. you know? But he
just seemed so
"Screwed up," he finished for her, still holding his sand-
wich. "Stuck. What it is, I think there's a jump some people
have to make, sometimes, and if they don't do it, then they're
stuck good . And Rudy never did it."
"Like my father wanting to get me out of Mans? Is that a
jump?"
"No. Some jumps you have to decide on for yourself.
Just figure there's something better waiting for you some-
where .." He paused, feeling suddenly ridiculous, and bit
into the sandwich
"Is that what you thought?"
He nodded, wondering if it were true
"So you left, and Rudy stayed'~"
"He was smart Still is, and he'd rolled up a bunch of
degrees, did it all on the line. Got a doctorate in biotechnol-
ogy from Tulane when he was twenty, a bunch of other stuff.
Never sent out any r~sum~s, nothing. We'd have recruiters
turn up from all over, and he'd bullshit them, pick fights .
I think he thought he could make something on his own. Like
those hoods on the dogs I think he's got a couple of original
patents there, but . . Anyway, he stayed there. Got into
dealing and doing hardware for people, and he was hot stuff
in the county. And our mother got sick, she was sick for a
long time, and I was away.
"Where were you?" She opened the thermos and the smell
of coffee filled the cabin.
"As far away as I could get," he said, startled by the anger
in his voice.
She passed him the plastic mug, filled to the brim with hot
black coffee.
"How about you? You said you never knew your mother."
"I didn't. They split when I was little. She wouldn't come
back in on the contract unless he agreed to cut her in on some
kind of stock plan. That's what he said anyway."
"So what's he like?" He sipped coffee, then passed it
back.
She looked at him over the rim of the red plastic mug, her
eyes ringed with Sally's makeup. `You tell me," she said.
"Or else ask me in twenty years. I'm seventeen, how the hell
am I supposed to know?"
He laughed. "You're starting to feel a little better now?"
"I guess so. Considering the circumstances."
And suddenly he was aware of her, in a way he hadn't
been before, and his hands went anxiously to the controls
"Good. We still have a long way to go
They slept in the hovercraft that night, parked behind
the rusting steel lattice that had once supported a drive-in
theater screen in southern Pennsylvania, Turner's parka
spread on the armor-plate floorboards below the turbine's
long bulge. She'd sipped the last of the coffee, cold now,
as she sat in the square hatch opening above the passenger
seat, watching the lightning bugs pulse across a field of
yellowed grass.
Somewhere in his dreamsstill colored with random flashes
from her father's dossiershe rolled against him, her breasts
soft and warm against his bare back through the thin fabric of
her T-shirt, and then her arm came over him to stroke the flat
muscles of his stomach, but he lay still, pretending to a
deeper sleep, and soon found his way down into the darker
passages of Mitchell's biosoft, where strange things came to
mingle with his own oldest fears and hurts. And woke at
dawn to hear her singing softly to herself from her perch in
the roof hatch.
"My daddy he's a handsome devil
got a chain `bout nine miles long
And from every link
A heart does dangle
Of another maid
He's loved and wronged."
JAMMER'S wAS u~ twelve more flights of dead escalator and
occupied the rear third of the top floor. Aside from Leon's
place, Bobby had never seen a nightclub, and he found
Jammer's both impressive and scary. Impressive because of
its scale and what he took to be the exceptional quality of the
fittings, and scary because a nightclub, by day, is somehow
inately unreal. Witchy. He peered around, thumbs snagged in
the back pockets of his new jeans, while Jackie conducted a
whispered conversation with a long-faced white man in rum-
pled blue coveralls. The place was fitted out with dark
ultrasuede banquettes, round black tables, and dozens of or-
nate screens of pierced wood. The ceiling was painted black,
each table faintly illuminated by its own little recessed flood
aimed straight down out of the dark There was a central
stage, brightly lit now with work lights strung on yellow flex,
and, in the middle of the stage, a set of cherry-red acoustic
drums. He wasn't sure why, but it gave him the creeps; some
sidelong sense of a half-life, as though something was about
to shift, just at the edge of his vision .
"Bobby," Jackie said, "come over here and meet Jammer."
He crossed the stretch of plain dark carpet with all the cool
he could muster and faced the long-faced man, who had dark,
thinning hair and wore a white evening shirt under his cover-
alls. The man's eyes were narrow, the hollows of his cheeks
shadowed with a day's growth of beard.
"Well," the man said, "you want to be a cowboy?" He
was looking at Bobby's T-shirt and Bobby had the uncomfort-
able feeling that he might be about to laugh.
"Jammer was a jockey," Jackie said. "Hot as they come.
Weren't you, Jammer?"
"So they say," Jammer said, still looking at Bobby. "Long
time ago, Jackie. How many hours you logged, running?" he
asked Bobby.
Bobby's face went hot. "Well, one, I guess."
Jammer raised his bushy eyebrows. "Gotta start some-
where." He smiled, his teeth small and unnaturally even and,
Bobby thought, too numerous.
"Bobby," Jackie said,"why don't you ask Jammer about
this Wig character the Finn was telling you about?"
Jammer glanced at her, then back to Bobby. "You know
the Finn? For a hotdogger you're in pretty deep, aren't you?"
He took a blue plastic inhaler from his hip pocket and inserted
it in his left nostril, snorted, then put it back in his pocket.
"Ludgate. The Wig. Finn's talking about the Wig? Must be
in his dotage."
Bobby didn't know what that meant, but it didn't seem like
the time to ask. "Well," Bobby ventured, "this Wig's up in
orbit somewhere, and he sells the Finn stuff, sometimes...~"
"No shit? Well, you coulda fooled me. I woulda told you
the Wig was either dead or drooling. Crazier than your usual
cowboy, you know what I mean? Batshit. Gone. Haven't
heard of him in years."
"Jammer," Jackie said, "I think it's maybe best if Bobby
just tells you the story. Beauvoir's due here this afternoon,
and he'll have some questions for you, so you better kno~v
where things stand...."
Jammer looked at her. "Well. I see. Mr. Beauvoir's call-
ing in that favor, is he?"
"Can't speak for him," she said, "but that would be my
guess. We need a safe place to store the Count here."
"What count?"
"Me," Bobby said, "that's me."
"Great," Jammer said, with a total lack of enthusiasm.
"So come on back into the office."
Bobby couldn't keep his eyes off the cyberspace deck that
took up a third of the surface of Jammer's antique oak desk
It was matte black, a custom job, no trademarks anywhere.
He kept craning forward, while he told Jammer about Two-a-
Day and his attempted run, about the girl-feeling thing and
his mother getting blown up. It was the hottest-looking deck
he'd ever seen, and he remembered Jackie saying that Jam-
mer had been such a shithot cowboy in his day.
Jammer slumped back in his chair when Bobby was fin-
ished. "You wanna try it?" he asked. He sounded tired.
"Try it?"
"The deck. I think you might wanna try it It's something
about the way you keep rubbing your ass on the chair. Either
you wanna try it or you gotta piss bad"
"Shit yeah. I mean, yeah, thanks, yeah, I would . .
"Why not? No way for anybody to know it's you and not
me. right? Why don't you jack in with him, Jackie? Kinda
keep track." He opened a desk drawer and took out two trode
sets. "But don't do anything, right? I mean, just buzz on out
and spin. Don't try to run any numbers I owe Beauvoir and
Lucas a favor, and it looks like how I'm paying it back is by
helping keep you intact." He handed one set of trodes to
Jackie, the other to Bobby. He stood up, grabbed handles on
either side of the black console, and spun it around so it faced
Bobby. "Go on. You'll cream your jeans. Thing's ten years
old and it'll still wipe ass on most anything. Guy name of
Automatic Jack built it straight up from scratch He was
Bobby Quine's hardware artist, once. The two of `em burnt
the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you
were born."
Bobby already had his trodes on. Now he looked at Jackie
"You ever jack tandem before?"
He shook his head.
"Okay. We'll jack, but I'll hang off your left shoulder. I
say jack out, jack out. You see anything funny. it'll be
because I'm with you, understand?"
He nodded.
She undid a pair of long, silver-headed pins at the rear of
her fedora and took it off, putting it down on the desk beside
Jammer's deck. She slid the trodes on over the orange silk
headscarf and smoothed the contacts against her forehead.
"Let's go," she said.
Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer's deck jacked up
so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he
didn't know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in
the nonplace that was cyberspace. "Slow it down, Bobby."
Jackie's voice low and sweet, beside him in the void.
"Jesus Christ, this thing's slick!"
"Yeah, but damp it down. The rush isn't any good for us.
You want to cruise. Keep us up here and slow it down .
He eased off on forward until they seemed to coast along.
He turned to the left, expecting to see her there, but there was
nothing.
"I'm here," she said, "don't wony
"Who was Quine?"
"Quine? Some cowboy Jammer knew. He knew `em all, in
his day."
He took a nght-angle left at random, pivoting smoothly at
the grid intersection, testing the deck for response. It was
amazing, totally unlike anything he'd felt before in cyberspace.
"Holy shit. This thing makes an Ono-Sendai look like a kid's
toy.
"It's probably got 0-S circuitry in it. That's what they
used to use, Jammer says. Takes us up a little more
They rose effortlessly through the gnd, the data receding
below them "There isn't a hell of a lot to see up here," he
complained.
"Wrong. You see some interesting stuff, you hang out
long enough in the blank parts . .
The fabric of the matrix seemed to shiver, directly in front
of them
"Uh, Jackie . .
"Stop here. Hold it. It's okay. Trust me."
Somewhere, far away, his hands moving over the unfamil-
iar keyboard configuration He held them steady now, while a
section of cyberspace blurred, grew milky. "What is"
"Danbala ap monte I," the voice said, harsh in his head,
and in his mouth a taste like blood. "Danbala is nding her."
He knew, somehow, what the words meant, but the voice was
iron in his head The milky fabric divided, seemed to bubble,
became two patches of shifting gray.
"Legba," she said, "Legba and Ougou Feray, god of war.
Papa Ougou' St. Jacques Majeur! Viv Ia Vy4j!"
Iron laughter filled the matnx, sawing through Bobby's
head.
"Map kite tout mtz~ ak tout giyon," said another voice,
fluid and quicksilver and cold. "See, Papa, she has come
here to throw away her bad luck!" And then that one laughed
as well, and Bobby fought down a wave of sheer hysteria as
the silver laughter rose through him like bubbles.
"Has she bad luck, the horse of Danbala?" boomed the
iron voice of Ougou Feray, and for an instant Bobby thought
he saw a figure flicker in the gray fog. The voice hooted its
terrible laughter. "Indeed! Indeed! But she knows it not! She
is not my horse, no, else I would cure her luck!" Bobby
wanted to cry, to die, anything to escape the voices, the
utterly impossible wind that had started to blow out of the
gray warps, a hot damp wind that smelled of things he
couldn't identify. "And she calls praise on the Virgin! Hear
me, little sister! La Vy~j draws close indeed!"
"Yes," said the other, "she moves through my province
now, I who rule the roads, the highways
"But I, Ougou Feray, tell you that your enemies draw near
as well! To the gates, sister, and beware"'
And then the gray areas faded, d'windled, shrank .
"Jack us out," she said her voice small and distant And
then she said, "Lucas is dead."
Jammer took a bottle of Scotch from his desk drawer and
carefully poured six centimeters of the stuff into a plastic
highball glass. "You look like shit," he said to Jackie, and
Bobby was startled by the gentleness in the man's voice
They'd been jacked out for at least ten minutes and nobody
had said anything at all. Jackie looked crushed and kept
gnawing at her lower lip. Jammer looked either unhappy or
angry, Bobby wasn't sure.
"How come you said Lucas was dead?" Bobby ventured,
because it seemed to him that the silence was silting up in
Jammer's cramped office like something that could choke
you.
Jackie looked at him but didn't seem to focus. "They
wouldn't come to me like that if Lucas were alive," she said.
"There are pacts, agreements. Legba is always invoked first,
but he should have come with Danbala. His personality de-
pends on the ba he manifests with. Lucas must be dead."
Jammer pushed the glass of whiskey across the desk, but
Jackie shook her head, the trode set still riding her forehead.
chrome and black nylon. He made a disgusted face, pulled
the glass back, and downed it himself. "What a load of shit
Things made a lot more sense before you people started
screwing around with them."
"We didn't bring them here, Jammer," she said. "They
were just there, and they found us because we understood
them!"
"Same load of shit," Jammer said, wearily. "Whatever
they are, wherever they came from, they just shaped them-
selves to what a bunch of crazed spades wanted to see. You
follow me? There's no way in hell there'd be anything out
there that you had to talk to in fucking bush Haitian! You and
your voodoo cult, they just saw that and they saw a setup,
and Beauvoir and Lucas and the rest, they're businessmen
first. And those Goddamn things know how to make deals!
It's a natural!" He tightened the cap on his bottle and put it
back in the drawer. "You know. hon. it could just be that
somebody very big, with a lot of muscle on the grid, they're
just taking you for a ride. Projecting those things, all that
shit
And you know it's possible, don't you? Don't you,
Jackie?"
"No way," Jackie said, her voice cold and even. "But
how I know that's not anything I can explain . .
Jammer took a black slab of plastic from his pocket and
began to shave. "Sure," he said. The razor hummed as he
worked on the line of his jaw. "I lived in cyberspace for eight
years, nght? Well, I know there wasn't anything out there,
not then. . . . Anyway, you want me to phone Lucas, set
your mind at ease one way or the other? You got the phone
number for that Rolls of his?"
"No," Jackie said, "don't bother Best we lay low till
Beauvoir turns up." She stood, pulling off the trodes and
picking up her hat. "I'm going to lie down, try to sleep. You
keep an eye on Bobby She turned and walked to the
office door. She looked as though she were sleepwalking, all
the energy gone out of her.
"Wonderful." Jammer said, running the shaver along his
upper lip. "You want a drink?" he asked Bobby.
"Well," Bobby said, "it's kind of early...."
"For you. maybe." He put the razor back in his pocket.
The door closed behind Jackie. Jammer leaned forward slightly.
"What did they look like, kid? You get a make?"
"Just kind of grayish. Fuzzy...."
Jammer looked disappointed. He slouched back in his chair
again. "I don't think you can get a good look at `em unless
you're part of it." He drummed his fingers on the chair ann.
"You think they're for real?"
"Well, I wouldn't wanna try messing one around .
Jammer looked at him. "No? Well, maybe you're smarter
than you look, there. I wouldn't wanna try messing one
around myself. I got out of the game before they started
turning up .
"So what do you think they are?"
"Ah, still getting smarter... Well, I don't know Like I
said, I don't think I can swallow them being a bunch of
Haitian voodoo gods, but who knows?" He narrowed his
eyes. "Could be, they're virus programs that have gotten
loose in the matnx and replicated, and gotten really smart
That's scary enough; maybe the Tunng people want it kept
quiet. Or maybe the Al's have found a way to split parts
of themselves off into the matnx, which would drive the
Turings crazy. I knew this Tibetan guy did hardware mod
for jockeys, he said they were tulpas
Bobby blinked.
`A tulpa's a thought form, kind of. Superstition. Really
heavy people can split off a kind of ghost, made of negative
energy." He shrugged "More horseshit Like Jackie's voo-
doo guys."
"Well, it looks to me like Lucas and Beauvoir and the
others, they sure as hell play it like it was all real, and not
just like it was an act .
Jammer nodded. "You got it And they been doing damn
well for themselves by it, too, so there's something there
He shrugged and yawned "I gotta sleep, too. You can do
whatever you want, as long as you keep your hands off my
deck. And don't try to go outside, or ten kinds of alarms will
start screaming. There's juice and cheese and shit in the
fridge behind the bar.
Bobby decided that the place was still scary, now that he
had it to himself, but that it was interesting enough to make
the scariness worthwhile. He wandered up and down behind
the bar, touching the handles of the beer taps and the chrome
drink nozzles. There was a machine that made ice, and
another one that dispensed boiling water. He made himself a
cup of Japanese instant coffee and sorted through Jammer's
file of audio cassettes. He'd never heard of any of the bands
or artists. He wondered whether that meant that Jammer, who
was old, liked old stuff, or if this was all really new stuff
that wouldn't filter out to Barrytown, probably by way of Leon's,
for another two weeks. . . . He found a gun under the black
and silver universal credit console at the end of the bar, a
kind of fat little machine gun with a magazine that stuck
straight down out of the handle. It was stuck under the bar
with a strip of lime-green Velcro, and he didn't think it was a
good idea to touch it. After a while, he didn't feel frightened
anymore, just kind of bored and edgy. He took his cooling
coffee and walked out into the middle of the seating area. He
sat at one of the tables and pretended he was Count Zero, top
console artist in the Sprawl, waiting for some dudes to show
and talk about a deal, some run they needed done and nobody
but the Count was even remotely up for it. "Sure," he said,
to the empty nightclub, his eyes hooded, "I'll cut it for
you. . . . If you got the money...." They paled when he
named his price.
The place was soundproofed; you couldn't hear the bustle
of the fourteenth floor's stalls at all, only the hum of some
kind of air conditioner and the occasional gurgles of the
hot-water machine. Tired of the Count's power plays, Bobby
left the coffee cup on the table and crossed to the entrance-
way, running his hand along an old stuffed velvet rope that
was slung between polished brass poles. Careful not to touch
the glass doors themselves, he settled himself on a cheap steel
stool with a tape-patched leatherette top, beside the coat-
check window A dim bulb burned in the coatroom; you
could see a couple of dozen old wooden hangers dangling
from steel rods, each one hung with a round yellow hand-
numbered tag. He guessed Jammer sat here sometimes to
check out the clientele. He didn't really see why anybody
who'd been a shithot cowboy for eight years would want to
run a nightclub, but maybe it was sort of a hobby. He guessed
you could get a lot of girls, running a nightclub, but he'd
assumed you could get a lot anyway if you were rich. And if
Jammer had been a top jock for eight years, Bobby figured he
had to be nch .
He thought about the scene in the matnx, the gray patches
and the voices. He shivered. He still didn't see why it meant
Lucas was dead. How could Lucas be dead? Then he remem-
bered that his mother was dead, and somehow that didn't
seem too real either. Jesus. It all got on his nerves. He
wished he were outside, on the other side of the doors,
checking out the stalls and the shoppers and the people who
worked there
He reached out and drew the velour curtain aside, just wide
enough to peer out through the thick old glass, taking in the
rainbow jumble of stalls and the charactenstic grazing gait of
the shoppers. And framed for him, square in the middle of it
all, beside a table jammed with surplus analog VOM's, logic
probes, and power conditioners, was the raceless, bone-heavy
face of Leon, and the deepset, hideous eyes seemed to look
into Bobby's with an audible click of recognition. And then
Leon did something Bobby couldn't remember ever having
seen him do. He smiled
THE JAL STEWARD offered her a choice of simstim cassettes: a
tour of the Foxton retrospective at the Tate the previous
August, a period adventure taped in Ghana (Ashanu!), high-
lights from Bizet's Carmen as viewed from a private box at
the Tokyo Opera, or thirty minutes of Tally Isham's syndi-
cated talk show Top People.
"Your first shuttle flight, Ms. Ovski?"
Marly nodded. She'd given Paleologos her mother's maiden
name, which had probably been stupid.
The steward smiled understandingly "A cassette can defi-
nitely ease the lift-off. The Carmen's very popular this week.
Gorgeous costumes, I understand."
She shook her head, in no mood for opera She loathed
Foxton, and would have preferred to feel the full force of
acceleration rather than live through Ashanti! She took the
Isham tape by default, as the least of four evils.
The steward checked her seat harness, handed her the
cassette and a little throwaway tiara in gray plastic, then
moved on. She put the plastic trode set on, jacked it into the
seat arm, sighed, and slotted the cassette in the opening
beside the jack The interior of the JAL shuttle vanished in a
burst of Aegean blue, and she watched the words TALLY
ISHAM'S TOP PEOPLE expand across the cloudless sky in
elegant sans-serif capitals.
Tally Isham had been a constant in the stim industry for as
long as Marly remembered, an ageless Golden Girl who'd
come in on the first wave of the new medium. Now Marly
found herself locked into Tally's tanned, lithe, tremendously
comfortable sensorium. Tally Isham glowed, breathed deeply
and easily, her elegant bones riding in the embrace of a
musculature that seemed never to have known tension. Ac-
cessing her stim recordings was like falling into a bath of
perfect health, feeling the spring in the star's high arches and
the jut of her breasts against the silky white Egyptian cotton
of her simple blouse. She was leaning against a pocked white
balustrade above the tiny harbor of a Greek island town, a
cascade of flowering trees falling away below her down a
hillside built from whitewashed stone and narrow, twisting
stairs A boat sounded in the harbor
"The tourists are hurrying back to their cruise ship now,"
Tally said, and smiled; when she smiled, Marly could feel the
smoothness of the star's white teeth, taste the freshness of her
mouth, and the stone of the balustrade was pleasantly rough
against her bare forearms. "But on~ visitor to our island will
be staying with us this afternoon, someone I've longed to
meet, and I'm sure that you'll be delighted and surprised. as
he's someone who ordinarily shuns major media coverage
She straightened, turned, and smiled into the tanned,
smiling face of Josef Virek
Marly tore the set from her forehead, and the white plastic
of the JAL shuttle seemed to slam into place all around her
Warning signs were blinking on the console overhead, and
she could feel a vibration that seemed to gradually rise in
pitch .
Virek? She looked at the trode set. "Well," she said, "I
suppose you are a top person
"I beg your pardon?" The Japanese student beside her
bobbed in his harness in a strange little approximation of a
bow. "You are in some difficulty with your stim'~"
"No, no," she said. "Excuse me." She slid the set on
again and the interior of the shuttle dissolved in a buzz of
sensory static, a jamng mdange of sensations that abruptly
gave way to the calm grace of Tally Isham, who had taken
Virek's cool, firm hand and was smiling into his soft blue
eyes. Virek smiled back, his teeth very white "Delighted to
be here, Tally." he said, and Marly let herself sink into the
reality of the tape, accepting Tally's recorded sensory input as
her own. Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, some-
thing in her personality conflicting with the required degree of
passivity.
Virek wore a soft white shirt, cotton duck trousers rolled
to just below the knee, and very plain brown leather sandals.
His hand still in hers, Tally returned to the balustrade "I'm
sure, ` she said, "that there are many things our audience"
The sea was gone. An irregular plain covered in a green-
black growth like lichen spread out to the horizon, broken by
the silhouettes of the neo-Gothic spires of Gaudi's church of
the Sagrada Familia. The edge of the world was lost in a low
bright mist, and a sound like drowned bells tolled in across
the plain.
"You have an audience of one, today," Virek said, and
looked at Tally Isham through his round, rimless glasses.
"Hello, Marly."
Marly struggled to reach the trodes, but her artns were
made of stone. G-force, the shuttle lifting off from its con-
crete pad . . He'd trapped her here
"I understand," said Tally, smiling, leaning back against
the balustrade, her elbows on warm rough stone. "What a
lovely idea Your Marly, Herr Virek, must be a lucky girl
indeed .." And it came to her, to Marly, that this wasn't
Sense/Net's Tally Isham, but a part of Virek's construct, a
programmed point of view worked up from years of Top
People, and that now there was no choice, no way out, except
to accept it, to listen, to give Virek her attention. The fact
of
his having caught her here, pinned her here this way, told her
that her intuition had been correct: The machine, the struc-
ture, was there, was real. Virek's money was a sort of
universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will
"I'm sorry," he said, "to learn that you are upset Paco
tells me that you are fleeing from us, but I prefer to see it as
the drive of an artist toward her goal. You have sensed, I
think, something of the nature of my gestalt, and it has
frightened you As well it should. This cassette was prepared
an hour before your shuttle was scheduled to lift off from
Orly. We know your destination, of course, but I have no
intention of following you. You are doing your job. Marly. I
only regret that we were unable to prevent the death of your
friend Alain, but we now know the identity of his killers and
their employers . .
Tally Isham's eyes were Marly's eyes now, and they were
locked with Virek's, a blue energy burning there.
"Alain was murdered by the hired agents of Maas Biolabs,"
he continued, "and it was Maas who provided him with the
coordinates of your current destination, Maas who gave him
the hologram you saw. My relationship with Maas Biolabs
has been ambivalent, to say the least. Two years ago a
subsidiary of mine attempted to buy them out. The sum
involved would have affected the entire global economy.
They refused. Paco has determined that Alain died because
they discovered that he was attempting to market the informa-
tion they had provided, market it to third parties . " He
frowned. "Exceedingly foolish, because he was utterly igno-
rant of the nature of the product he was offering
How like Alain, she thought, and felt a wave of pity.
Seeing him curled there on the hideous carpet, his spine
outlined beneath the green fabric of his jacket .
"You should know, I think, that my search for our boxmaker
involves more than art, Marly." He removed his glasses and
polished them in a fold of his white shirt; she found some-
thing obscene in the calculated hurhanity of the gesture. "I
have reason to believe that the maker of these artifacts is in
some position to offer me freedom. Marly. I am not a well
man." He replaced the glasses, settling the fine gold ear-
pieces carefully. "When I last requested a remote visual of
the vat I inhabit in Stockholm, I was shown a thing like three
truck trailers, lashed in a dripping net of support lines . . .
If
I were able to leave that, Marly, or rather, to leave the riot
of
cells it contains . . . Well' `he smiled his famous smile
again' `what wouldn't I pay?"
And Tally-Marly's eyes swung to take in the expanse of dark
lichen and the distant towers of the misplaced cathedral .
"You lost consciousness," the steward was saying, his
fingers moving across her neck. "It isn't uncommon, and our
onboard medical computers tell us you're in excellent health.
However, we've applied a dermadisk to counteract the adapta-
tion syndrome you might experience prior to docking." His
hand left her neck.
"Europe After the Rains." she said. "Max Ernst The
lichen . .
The man stared down at her, his face alert now and express-
ing professional concern. "Excuse me? Could you repeat
that?"
"I'm sorry," she said. "A dream ... Are we there yet, at
the terminal?"
"Another hour," he said.
* * *
Japan Air's orbital terminus was a white toroid studded
with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings
of docking bays. The terminal above Marly's g-web-though
above had temporarily lost its usual meaningdisplayed an
exquisitely drafted animation of the torus in rotation, while a
series of voicesin seven languagesannounced that the
passengers on board JAL's Shuttle 580, Orly Terminus I,
would be taxied to the terminal at the earliest opportunity.
JAL offered apologies for the delay, which was due to routine
repairs underway in seven of the twelve bays
Marly cringed in her g-web, seeing the invisible hand of
Virek in everything now. No. she thought, there must be a
way. I want out of it, she told herself, I want a few hours as a
free agent, and then I'll be done with him . . Good-bye,
Herr Virek, I return to the land of the living, as poor Alain
never will, Alain who died because I took your job. She
blinked her eyes when the first tear came, then stared wide-
eyed as a child at the minute floating spherelet the tear had
become
And Maas, she wondered, who were they? Virek claimed
that they had murdered Alain, that Alain had been working
for them. She had vague recollections of stories in the media,
something to do with the newest generation of computers,
some ominous-sounding process in which immortal hybrid
cancers spewed out tailored molecules that became units of
circuitry. She remembered, now, that Paco had said that the
screen of his modular telephone was a Maas product
The interior of the JAL toroid was so bland, so unremarka-
ble, so utterly like any crowded airport, that she felt like
laughing. There was the same scent of perfume, human ten-
sion, and heavily conditioned air, and the same background
hum of conversation. The point-eight gravity would have
made it easier to carry a suitcase, but she only had her black
purse Now she took her tickets from one of its zippered inner
pockets and checked the number of her connecting shuttle
against the columns of numbers arrayed on the nearest wall
screen.
Two hours to departure. Whatever Virek might say, she
was sure that his machine was already busy, infiltrating the
shuttle's crew or roster of passengers, the substitutions lubri-
cated by a film of money . . There would be last-minute
illnesses, changes in plans, accidents
Slinging the purse over her shoulder, she marched off
across the concave floor of white ceramic as though she
actually knew where she was going, or had some sort of plan,
but knowing, with each step she took, that she didn't.
Those soft blue eyes haunted her
"Daren you." she said, and a jowly Russian businessman
in a dark Ginza suit sniffed and raised his newsfax, blocking
her out of his world.
"So I told the bitch, see, you gotta get those opto-isolators
and the breakout boxes out to Sweet Jane or I'll glue your ass
to the bulkhead with gasket paste...." Raucous female
laughter and Marly glanced up from her sushi tray. The three
women sat two empty tables away, their own table thick with
beer cans and stacks of styrofoam trays smeared with brown
soy sauce. One of them belched loudly and took a long pull at
her beer. "So how'd she take it, Rez?" This was somehow
the cue for another, longer burst of laughter, and the woman
who'd first attracted Marly's attention put her head down in
her arms and laughed until her shoulders shook. Marly stared
dully at the trio, wondering what they were. Now the laughter
had subsided and the first woman sat up, wiping tears from
her eyes. They were all quite drunk, Marly decided, young
and loud and rough-looking. The first woman was slight and
sharp-faced, with wide gray eyes above a thin straight nose.
Her hair was some impossible shade of silver, clipped short
like a schoolboy's, and she wore an oversized canvas vest or
sleeveless jacket covered entirely in bulging pockets, studs,
and rectangular strips of Velcro. The garment hung open,
revealing, from Marly's angle, a small round breast sheathed
in what seemed to be a bra of fine pink and black mesh. The
other two were older and heavier, the muscles of their bare
arms defined sharply in the seemingly sourceless light of the
terminal cafeteria.
The first woman shrugged, her shoulders moving inside the
big vest. "Not that she'll do it." she said.
The second woman laughed again, but not as heartily, and
consulted a chronometer riveted on a wide leather wristband.
"Me for off." she said. "Gotta Zion run, then eight pods of
algae for the Swedes." Then shoved her chair back from the
table, stood up, and Marly read the embroidered patch cen-
tered across the shoulders of her black leather vest.
O'GRADY - WMIMA
THE EDITH S.
INTERORBITAL HAULING
Now the woman beside her stood, hitching up the waist-
band of her baggy jeans. "I tell you, Rez, you let that cunt
short you on those breakouts, it'll be bad for your name."
"Excuse me," Marly said, fighting the quaver in her voice.
The woman in the black vest turned and stared at her.
"Yeah?" The woman looked her up and down, unsmiling.
"I saw your vest, the name Edith S., that's a ship, a
spaceship?"
"A spaceship?" The woman beside her raised thick eye-
brows. "Oh, yeah, honey, a whole mighty spaceship!"
"She's a tug," the woman in the black vest said, and
turned to go.
"I want to hire you," Marly said.
"Hire me?" Now they were all staring at her, faces blank
and unsmiling. "What's that mean?"
Marly fumbled deep in the black Brussels purse and came
up with the half sheaf of New Yen that Paleologos the travel
agent had returned, after taking his fee. "I'll give you
this . .
The girl with the short silver hair whistled softly. The
women glanced at one another. The one in the black vest
shrugged. "Jesus," she said. "Where you wanna go? Mars?"
Marly dug into her purse again and produced the folded
blue paper from a pack of Gauloise. She handed it to the
woman in the black vest, who unfolded it and read the orbital
coordinates that Alain had written there in green feltpen.
"Well," the woman said, "it's a quick enough hop. for
that kind of money, but O'Grady and I, we're due in Zion
2300GMT. Contract job. What about you, Rez?"
She handed the paper to the seated girl, who read it, looked
up at Marly, and asked, "When?"
"Now," Marly said, "right now."
The girl pushed up from the table, the legs of her chair
clattering on the ceramic, her vest swinging open to reveal
that what Marly had taken for the net of a pink and black bra
was a single tattooed rose that entirely covered her left
breast.
"You're on, sister, cash up."
"Means give her the money now," O'Grady said.
"I don't want anyone to know where we're going," Marly
said.
The three women laughed.
"You come to the right girl," O'Grady said, and Rez
grinned.
THE RAIN CAME on when he turned east again, making for the
Sprawl's fringe `burbs and the blasted belt country of the
industrial zones. It came down in a solid wall, blinding him
until he found the switch for the wipers. Rudy hadn't kept the
blades in shape, so he slowed, the turbine's whine lowering
to a roar, and edged over the shoulder, the apron bag nosing
past shredded husks of truck tires.
"What's wrong?''
"I can't see. The wiper blades are rotten." He tapped the
button for the lights, and four tight beams stabbed out from
either side of the hover's wedge of hood and lost themselves
in the gray wall of the downpour. He shook his head.
"Why don't we stop?"
"We're too close to the Sprawl. They patrol all this.
Copters. They'd scan the ID panel on the roof and see we've
got Ohio plates and a weird chassis configuration. They might
want to check us out. We don't want that."
"What are you going to do?"
"Keep to the shoulder until I can turn off, then get us
under some cover, if I can .
He held the hover steady and swung it around in place, the
headlights flashing off the dayglow orange diagonals on an
upright pole marking a service road. He made for the pole,
the bulging lip of the apron bag bobbling over a thick rectan-
gular crash guard of concrete. "This might do it," he said as
they slid past the pole. The service road was barely wide
enough for them; branches and undergrowth scratched against
the narrow side windows, scraping along the hover's steel-
plate flanks.
"Lights down there," Angie said, straining forward in her
harness to peer through the rain.
Turner made out a watery yellow glow and twin dark
uprights. He laughed. "Gas station," he said. "Left over
from the old system, before they put the big road through.
Somebody must live there. Too bad we don't run on gasoline
He eased the hover down the gravel slope; as he drew
nearer, he saw that the yellow glow came from a pair of
rectangular windows. He thought he saw a figure move in one
of them. "Country," he said. "These boys may not be too
happy to see us." He reached into the parka and slid the
Smith & Wesson from its nylon holster, put it on the seat
between his thighs. When they were five meters from the
rusting gas pumps, he sat the hover down in a broad puddle
and killed the turbines. The rain ~was still pissing down in
windblown sheets, and he saw a figure in a flapping khaki
poncho duck out of the front door of the station. He slid the
side window open ten centimeters and raised his voice above
the rain: "Sony t' bother you. We had to get off the road.
Our wipers are trashed. Didn't know you were down here
The man's hands, in the glow from the windows, were hidden
beneath the plastic poncho, but it was obvious that he held
something.
"Private property," the man said, his lean face streaked
with rain.
"Couldn't stay on the road," Turner called. "Sony to
bother you..
The man opened his mouth, began to gesture with the thing
he held beneath the poncho, and his head exploded. It almost
seemed to Turner that it happened before the red line of light
scythed down and touched him, pencil-thick beam swinging
casually, as though someone were playing with a flashlight.
A blossom of red, beaten down by the rain, as the figure went
to its knees and tumbled forward, a wire-stocked Savage 410
sliding from beneath the poncho.
Turner hadn't been aware of moving, but he found that
he'd stoked the turbines, swung the controls over to Angie,
and clawed his way out of his harness. "I say go, run it
through the station ..." Then he was up, yanking at the
lever that opened the roof hatch, the heavy revolver in his
hand. The roar of the black Honda reached him as soon as the
hatch slid back, a lowering shadow overhead, just visible
through the driving rain. "Now!" He pulled the trigger be-
fore she could kick them forward and through the wall of the
old station, the recoil jarring his elbow numb against the roof
of the hover. The bullet exploded somewhere overhead with a
gratifying crack; Angie floored the hover and they plunged
through the woodframe structure, with barely enough time for
Turner to get his head and shoulders back down through the
hatch. Something in the house exploded, probably a propane
canister, and the hover skewed to the left.
Angie swung them back around as they crashed out through
the far wall. "Where?" she yelled, above the turbine.
As if in answer, the black Honda came corkscrewing down,
twenty meters in front of them, and threw up a silver sheet of
rain. Turner grabbed the controls and they slid forward, the
hover blasting up ten-meter fantails of ground water; they
took the little combat copter square in its polycarbon canopy,
its alloy fuselage crumpling like paper under the impact.
Turner backed off and went in again, faster. This time the
broken copter slammed into the trunks of two wet gray pines,
lay there like some kind of long-winged fly.
"What happened?" Angie said, her hands to her face.
"What happened?"
Turner tore registration papers and dusty sunglasses from a
compartment in the door beside him, found a flashlight,
checked its batteries.
"What happened?" Angie said again, like a recording,
"What happened?"
He scrambled back up through the hatch, the gun in one
hand, the light in the other The rain had slackened. He
jumped down onto the hover's hood, and then over the bump-
ers and into anlde-deep puddles, splashing toward the bent
black rotors of the Honda.
There was a reek of escaping jet fuel. The polycarbon
canopy had cracked like an egg. He aimed the Smith &
Wesson and thumbed the xenon flash twice, two silent pops
of merciless light showing him blood and twisted limbs through
the shattered plastic. He waited, then used the flashlight. Two
of them. He came closer, holding the flashlight well away
from his body, an old habit. Nothing moved. The smell of
escaping fuel grew even stronger. Then he was tugging at the
bent hatch. It opened. They both wore image-amp goggles.
The round blank eye of the laser stared straight up into the
night, and he reached down to touch the matted sheepskin
collar of the dead man's bomber jacket The blood that
covered the man's beard looked very dark, almost black in
the flashlight's beam. It was Oakey. He swung the beam left
and saw that the other man, the pilot, was Japanese. He
swung the beam back and found a flat black flask beside
Oakey's foot. He picked it up, stuffed it into one of the
parka's pockets, and dashed back to the hover In spite of the
rain, orange flames were starting to lick up through the
wreckage of the gas station. He scrambled up the hover's
bumper, across the hood, up again, and down through the
hatch.
"What happened?" Angie said, as though he hadn't left
"What happened?"
He fell into his seat, not bothering with the harness, and
revved the turbine. "That's a Hosaka helicopter," he said,
swinging them around. "They mu'~t have been following us
They had a laser. They waited until we were off the highway.
Didn't want to leave us out there for the cops to find When
we pulled in here, they decided to go for us, but they must
have figured that that poor fucker was with us. Or maybe they
were just taking out a witness . .
"His head," she said, her voice shaking, "his head
"That was the laser," Turner said, steering back up the
service road. The rain was thinning, nearly gone. "Steam
The brain vaponzes and the skull blows .
Angie doubled over and threw up. Turner steered with one
hand, Oakey's flask in the other. He pned the snap-fit lid
open with his teeth and gulped back a mouthful of Oakey's
Wild Turkey.
As they reached the shoulder of the highway, the Honda's
fuel found the flames of the ruined station, and the twisted
fireball showed Turner the mall again, the light of the para-
chute flares, the sky whiting out as the Jet streaked for the
Sonora border.
Angie straightened up, wiped her mouth with the back of
her hand, and began to shake
"We've got to get out of here," he said, driving east
again. She said nothing, and he glanced sideways to see her
rigid and upright in her seat, her eyes showing white in the
faint glow of the instruments, her face blank. He'd seen her
that way in Rudy's bedroom, when Sally had called them in,
and now that same flood of language, a soft fast rattle of
something that might have been patois French. He had no
recorder, no time, he had to drive
"Hang on," he said, as they accelerated, "you'll be okay
." Sure she couldn't hear him at all. Her teeth were
chattering; he could hear it above the turbine. Stop, he
thought,
long enough to get something between her teeth, his wallet or
a fold of cloth. Her hands were plucking spastically at the
straps of the harness
"There is a sick child in my house." The hover nearly left
the pavement, when he heard the voice come from her mouth,
deep and slow and weirdly glutinous. "I hear the dice being
tossed, for her bloody dress. Many are the hands who dig her
grave tonight, and yours as well. Enemies pray for your
death, hired man They pray until they sweat. Their prayers
are a river of fever." And then a sort of croaking that might
have been laughter.
Turner risked a glance, saw a silver thread of drool descend
from her rigid lips. The deep muscles of her face had con-
torted into a mask he didn't know. "Who are you?"
"I am the Lord of Roads."
"What do you want?"
"This child for my horse, that she may move among the
towns of men. It is well that you drive east. Carry her to your
city I shall ride her again. And Samedi rides with you,
gunman. He is the wind you hold in your hands, but he is
fickle, the Lord of Graveyards, no matter that you have
served him well He turned in time to see her slump
sideways in the harness, her head lolling, mouth slack.
"THIS is ThE Finn's phone program," said the speaker below
the screen, "and the Finn, he's not here. You wanna download,
you know the access code already. You wanna leave a mes-
sage, leave it already." Bobby stared at the image on the
screen and slowly shook his head Most phone programs were
equipped with cosmetic video subprograms written to bring
the video image of the owner into greater accordance with the
more widespread paradigms of personal beauty, erasing
blemishes and subtly molding facial outlines to meet idealized
statistical norms. The effect of a cosmetic program on the
Finn's grotesque features was definitely the weirdest thing
Bobby had ever seen, as though somebody had gone after the
face of a dead gopher with a full range of mortician's crayons
and paraffin injections.
"That's not natural," said Jammer, sipping Scotch
Bobby nodded.
"Finn," Jammer said, "is agoraphobic. Gives him the
hives to leave that impacted shitpile of a shop. And he's a
phone junkie, can't not answer a call if he's there. I'm
starting to think the bitch is right. Lucas is dead and some
heavy shit is going down .
"The bitch," Jackie said, from behind the bar, "knows
already."
"She knows," Jammer said, putting the plastic glass down
and fingering his bob tie, "she knows. Talked to a hoodoo in
the matrix, so she knows .
"Well, Lucas isn't answering, and Beauvoir isn't answer-
ing, so maybe she's right." Bobby reached out and shut off
the phone as the record tone began to squeal.
Jammer was gotten up in a pleated shirt, white dinner
jacket, and black trousers with satin stripes down the leg, and
Bobby took this to be his working outfit for the club. "No-
body's here," he said now, looking from Bobby to Jackie.
"Where's Bogue and Sharkey? Where's the waitresses?"
"Who's Bogue and Sharkey?" Bobby asked.
"The bartenders I don't like this." He got up from his
chair, walked to the door, and gently edged one of the
curtains aside. "What the fuck are those dipshits doing out
there? Hey, Count, this looks like your speed. Get over
here
Bobby got up, full of misgivingshe hadn't felt like tell-
ing Jackie or Jammer about letting Leon see him, because he
didn't want to look like a wilsonand walked over to where
the club owner stood.
"Go on. Take a peek. Don't let `em see you. They're
pretending so hard not to watch us~ you can almost smell it."
Bobby moved the curtain, careful to keep the crack no
more than a centimeter wide, and looked out. The shopping
crowd seemed to have been replaced almost entirely by black-
crested Gothick boys in leather and studs, andamazingly-by
an equal proportion of blond Kasuals, the latter decked out in
the week's current Shinjuku cottons and gold-buckled white
loafers. "I dunno," Bobby said, looking up at Jammer, "but
they shouldn't be together, Kasuals and Gothicks, you know?
They're like natural enemies, it's in the DNA or some-
thing .." He took another look. "Goddamn, there's about
a hundred of `em."
Jammer stuck his hands deep in his pleated trousers. "You
know any of those guys personally?"
"Gothicks, I know some of `em to talk to. Except it's hard
to tell `em apart Kasuals, they'll stomp anything that isn't
Kasual. That's mainly what they're about. But I just been cut
up by Lobes anyway, and Lobes are supposed to be under
treaty with the Gothicks, so who knows?"
Jammer sighed. "So, I guess you don't feel like strolling
out there and asking one what they think they're up to?"
"No," Bobby said earnestly, "I don't."
"Hmmm." Jammer looked at Bobby in a calculating way,
a way that Bobby definitely didn't like.
Something small and hard dropped from the high black
ceiling and clicked loudly on one of the round black tables.
The thing bounced and hit the carpet, rolling, and landed
between the toes of Bobby's new boots. Automatically, he
bent and picked it up. An old-fashioned, slot-headed machine
screw, its threads brown with rust and its head clotted with
dull black latex paint. He looked up as a second one struck
the table, and caught a glimpse of an unnervingly agile
Jammer vaulting the bar, beside the universal credit unit.
Jammer vanished, there was a faint ripping soundVelcro
and Bobby knew that Jammer had the squat little automatic
weapon he'd seen there earlier in the day. He looked around,
but Jackie was nowhere in sight.
A third screw ticked explosively on the formica of the
tabletop.
Bobby hesitated, confused, but then followed Jackie's exam-
pIe and got out of sight, moving as quietly as he could. He
crouched behind one of the club's ~vooden screens and watched
as the fourth screw came down, followed by a slender cas-
cade of fine dark dust. There was a scraping sound, and then
a square steel ceiling grate vanished abruptly, withdrawn into
some kind of duct. He glanced quickly to the bar, in time to
see the fat recoil compensator on the barrel of Jammer's gun
as it swung up.
A pair of thin brown legs dangled from the opening now,
and a gray sharkskin hem smudged with dust.
"Hold it," Bobby said, "it's Beauvoir!"
"You bet it's Beauvoir," came the voice from above, big
and hollow with the echo of the duct. "Get that danm table
out of the way."
Bobby scrambled out from behind the screen and hauled
the table and chairs to the side.
"Catch this," Beauvoir said, and dangled a bulging olive-
drab pack from one of its shoulder straps, then let it go The
weight of the thing nearly took Bobby to the floor. "Now get
out of my way Beauvoir swung down out of the duct,
hung from the opening's edge with both hands, then dropped.
"What happened to the screamer I had up there?" Jammer
asked, standing up behind the bar, the little machine gun in
his hands.
"Right here," Beauvoir said, tossing a dull gray bar of
phenolic resin to the carpet. It was wrapped with a length of
fine black wire. "No other way I could get in here without a
regular anny of shitballs knowing about it, as it happens.
Somebody's obviously given them the blueprints to the place,
but they've missed that one,"
"How'd you get up to the roof?" Jackie asked, stepping
from behind a screen.
"I didn't," Beauvoir said, pushing his big plastic frames
back up his nose. "I shot a line of monomol across from the
stack next door, then slid over on a ceramic spindle ..." His
short nappy hair was full of furnace dust, He looked at her
gravely. "You know," he said,
"Yes. Legba and Papa Ougou, in the matrix. I jacked with
Bobby, on Jammer's deck . .
"They blew Ahmed away on the Jersey freeway. Probably
used the same launcher they did Bobby's old lady with . .
"Who?"
"Still not sure," Beauvoir said, kneeling beside the pack
and clicking open the quick-release plastic fasteners, "but it's
starting to shape up . . . What I was working on, up until I
heard Lucas had been hit, was running down the Lobes who
mugged Bobby for his deck, That was probably an accident,
just business as usual, but somewhere there's a couple of
Lobes with our icebreaker . . . That had potential, for sure,
because the Lobes are hotdoggers, some of them, and they do
a little business with Two-a-Day. So Two-a-Day and I were
making the rounds, looking to learn what we could. Which
was dick, as it turned out, except that while we were with this
dust case called Alix, who's second assistant warlord or
something, he gets a call from his opposite number, who
Two-a-Day pins as a Barrytown Gothick name of Raymond."
He was unloading the pack as he spoke, laying out weapons,
tools, ammunition, coils of wire. "Raymond wants to talk
real bad, but Alix is too cool to do it in front of us, `Sorry,
gentlemen, but this is official warlord biz,' this dumbshit
says, so natch. we excuse our humble selves, shuffle and bow
and all, and nip around the corner. Use Two-a-Day's modular
phone to ring up our cowboys back in the Sprawl and put
them on to Alix's phone, but fast. Those cowboys went into
Alix's conversation with Raymond like a wire into cheese."
He pulled a deformed twelve-gauge shotgun, barely longer
than his forearm, from the pack, selected a fat drum magazine
from the display he'd made on the carpet, and clicked the two
together, "You ever see one of these motherfuckers? South
African, prewar ..." Something in his voice and the set of
his jaw made Bobby suddenly aware of his contained fury.
"Seems Raymond has been approached by this guy, and this
guy has lots of money, and he wants to hire the Gothicks
outright, the whole apparat, to go into the Sprawl and do a
number, a real crowd scene This guy wants it so big, he's
gonna hire the Kasuals too. Well, the shit hit the fan then,
because Alix, he's kind of conservative. Only good Kasual's
a dead one, and then only after x number of hours of torture,
etc, `Fuck that,' Raymond says, ever the diplomat. `We're
talking big money here, we're talking corporate.' "He opened
a box of fat red plastic shells and began to load the gun,
cranking one after another into the magazine. "Now I could
be way off, but I keep seeing these Maas Biolabs PR types on
video lately Something very weird's happened, out on some
property of theirs in Arizona. Some people say it was a nuke,
some people say it was something else. And now they're
claiming their top biosoft man's dead, in what they call an
unrelated accident. That's Mitchell, the guy who more or less
invented the stuff. So far, nobody else is even pretending to
be able to make a biochip, so Lucas and I assumed from the
beginning that Maas had made that icebreaker " If it was an
icebreaker, . . But we had no idea who the Finn got it from,
or where they got it But if you put all that together, it looks
like Maas Biolabs might be out to cook us all. And this is
where they plan to do it, because they got us here but good."
"I dunno," Jammer said, "we got a lot of friends in this
building .
"Had," Beauvoir put the shotgun down and started loading
a Nambu automatic, "Most of the people on this level and the
next one down got bought out this afternoon. Cash. Duffels
full of it, There's a few holdouts, but not enough."
"That doesn't make any sense," Jackie said, taking the
glass of Scotch from Jammer's hand and drinking it straight
off. "What do we have that anybody could want that bad?"
"Hey," Bobby said, "don't forget, they probably don't
know those Lobes ripped me for the icebreaker. Maybe that's
all they want."
"No," Beauvoir said, snapping the magazine into the
Nambu, "because they couldn't have known you hadn't stashed
it in your mother's place, right?"
"But maybe they went there and looked. .
"So how did they know Lucas wasn't carrying it in Abmed?"
Jammer said, walking back to the bar.
"Finn thought someone sent those three ninjas to kill him,
too," Bobby said. "Said they had stuff to make him answer
questions first, though . .
"Maas again," Beauvoir said. "Whoever, here's the deal
with the Kasuals and Gothicks. We'd know more, but Alix
the Lobe got on his high horse and wouldn't parley with
Raymond. No co-employment with the hated Kasuals. Near
as our cowboys could make out, the army's outside to keep
you people in. And to keep people like me out. People with
guns and stuff." He handed the loaded Nambu to Jackie.
"You know how to use a gun?" he asked Bobby.
"Sure," Bobby lied.
"No," Jammer said, "we got enough trouble without arm-
ing him. Jesus Christ .
"What all that suggests to me," Beauvoir said, "is that we
can expect somebody else to come in after us. Somebody a
little more professional . .
"Unless they just blow Hypermart all to shit and gone,"
Jammer said, "and all those zombies with it . .
"No," Bobby said, "or else they'd already have done it."
They all stared at him.
"Give the boy credit," Jackie said. "He's got it right."
Thirty minutes later and Jammer was staring glumly at
Beauvoir. "I gotta hand it to you. That's the most half-assed
plan I've heard in a long time."
"Yeah, Beauvoir," Bobby cut in, "why can't we just
crawl back up that vent, sneak across the roof, and get over to
the next building? Use the line you came over on."
"There's Kasuals on the roof like flies on shit,' Beauvoir
said. "Some of them might even have brain enough to have
found the cap I opened to get down here. I left a couple of
baby frag mines on my way in." He grinned mirthlessly.
"Aside from that, the building next door is taller. I had to go
up on that roof and shoot the monomol down to this one. You
can't hand-over-hand up monomolecular filament; your fin-
gers fall off."
"Then how the hell did you expect to get out?" Bobby
said.
"Drop it, Bobby," Jackie said quietly. "Beauvoir's done
what he had to do. Now he's in here with us, and we're
armed"
"Bobby," Beauvoir said, "why don't you run the plan
back to us, make sure we understand it.
Bobby had the uncomfortable feeling that Beauvoir wanted
to make sure he understood it, but he leaned back against the
bar and began. "We get ourselves all armed up and we wait,
okay? Jammer and I, we go out with his deck and scout around
the matrix, maybe we get some idea what's happening .
"I think I can handle that by myself," Jammer said.
"Shit!" Bobby was off the bar "Beauvoir said! I wanna
go, I wanna jack! How am lever supposed to learn anything?"
"Never mind, Bobby," Jackie said, "you go on."
"Okay," Bobby said, sulkily, "so, sooner or later, the
guys who hired the Gothicks and Kasuals to keep us here,
they're gonna come for us. When they do, we take `em. We
get at least one of `em alive. Same time, we're on our way
out, and the Goths `n' all, they won't expect all the fire-
power, so we get to the street and head for the Projects .
"I think that about covers it," Jammer said, strolling
across the carpet to the locked and curtained door. "I think
that about sums it up." He pressed his thumb against a coded
latch plate and pulled the door half open. "Hey, you!" he
bellowed. "Not you! You with the hat! Get your ass over
here. I want to talk"
The pencil-thick red beam pierced door and curtain, two of
Jammer's fingers, and winked over the bar. A bottle ex-
ploded, its contents billowing out as steam and vaporized
esters. Jammer let the door swing shut again, stared at his
ruined hand, then sat down hard on the carpet. The club
slowly filled with the Christmas-tree smell of boiled gin.
Beauvoir took a silver pressure bottle from the bar counter
and hosed the smouldering curtain with seltzer, until the
CO2 cartridge was exhausted and the stream faltered. "You're
in luck, Bobby," Beauvoir said, tossing the bottle over his
shoulder, " `cause brother Jammer, he ain't gonna be punch-
ing any deck .
Jackie was making clucking sounds over Jammer's hand,
kneeling down. Bobby caught a glimpse of cauterized flesh,
then quickly looked away.
"You KNOW," REZ said, hanging upside down in front of
Marly, "it's strictly no biz of mine, but is somebody maybe
expecting you when we get there? I mean, I'm taking you
there, for sure, and if you can't get in, I'll take you back to
JAL Term But if nobody wants to let you in, I don't know
how long I want to hang around. That thing's scrap, and we
get some funny people hanging out in the hulks, out here."
Rezor Ther~se, Marly gathered, from the laminated pilot's
license clipped to the Sweet Jane's consolehad removed her
canvas work vest for the trip.
Marly, numb with the rainbow of derms Rez had pasted
along her wrist to counteract the convulsive nausea of space
adaptation syndrome, stared at the rose tattoo. It had been
executed in a Japanese style hundreds of years old, and Marly
woozily decided that she liked it. That, in fact, she liked Rez,
who was at once hard and girlish and concerned for her
strange passenger. Rez had admired her leather jacket and
purse, before bundling them into a kind of narrow nylon net
hammock already stuffed with cassettes, print books, and
unwashed clothing.
"I don't know," Marly managed, "I'll just have to try to
getin. ."
"You know what that thing is, sister?" Rez was adjusting
the g-web around Marly's shoulders and armpits.
"What thing?" Marly blinked.
"Where we're going. It's part of the old Tessier-Ashpool
cores. Used to be the mainframes for their corporate mem-
ory.
"I've heard of them," Marly said, closing her eyes. "An-
drea told me
"Sure, everybody's heard of `emthey used to own alla
Freeside. Built it, even. Then they went tits up and sold out
Had their family place cut off the spindle and towed to
another orbit, but they had the cores wiped before they did
that, and torched `em off and sold `em to a scrapper. The
scrapper's never done anything with `em I never heard any-
body was squatting there, but out here you live where you can
I guess that's true for anybody. Like they say that Lady
Jane, old Ashpool's daughter. she's still living in their old
place, stone crazy She gave the g-web a last profes-
sional tug. "Okay. You just relax. I'm gonna burn Jane hard
for twenty minutes, but it'll get us there fast, which I figure
is
what you're paying for.."
And Marly slid back into a landscape built all of boxes,
vast wooden Cornell constructions where the solid residues of
love and memory were displayed behind rain-streaked sheets
of dusty glass, and the figure of the mysterious boxmaker fled
before her down avenues paved with mosaics of human teeth,
Marly's Paris boots clicking blindly over symbols outlined in
dull gold crowns. The boxmaker was male and wore Alain's
green jacket, and feared her above all things. "I'm sorry,"
she cried, running after him, "I'm sorry . .
"Yeah. Ther~se Lorenz, the Sweet Jane. You want the
numbers? What? Yeah, sure we're pirates. I'm Captain fuck-
ing Hook already. . Look, Jack, lemme give you the
numbers, you can check it out. . . . I said already. I gotta
passenger. Request permission, et Goddamn cetera. . . . Marly
Something, speaks French in her sleep ."
Many's lids flickered, opened Rez was webbed in front of
her, each small muscle of her back precisely defined. "Hey,"
Rez said, twisting around in the web, "I'm sorry. I raised
`em for you, but they sound pretty flaky. You religious?"
"No," Marly said, baffled.
Rez made a face. "Well, I hope you can make sense out of
this shit, then." She shrugged out of the web and executed a
tight backward somersault that brought her within centimeters
of Marly's face An optic ribbon trailed from her hand to the
console, and for the first time Marly saw the delicate sky-blue
socket set flush with the skin of the girl~s wrist. She popped a
speaker-bead into Marly's right ear and adjusted the trans-
parent microphone tube that curved down from it.
"You have no right to disturb us here," a man's voice
said. "Our work is the work of God, and we alone have seen
His true face!"
"Hello? Hello, can you hear me? My name is Marly
Krushkhova and I have urgent business with you. Or with
someone at these coordinates. My business concerns a series
of boxes, collages. The maker of these boxes may be in
terrible danger! I must see him!"
"Danger?" The man coughed. "God alone decides man's
fate! We are entirely without fear. But neither are we
fools..."
"Please, listen to me. I was hired by Josef Virek to locate
the maker of the boxes. But now I have come to warn you.
Virek knows you are here, and his agents will follow me
Rez was staring at her hard.
"You must let me in! I can tell you more .
"Virek?" There was a long, static-filled pause. "Josef
Virek?"
"Yes." Marly said. "That one You've seen his picture
all your life, the one with the king of England . . . Please,
please .
"Give me your pilot," the voice said, and the bluster and
hysteria were gone, replaced with something Marly liked
even less.
"It's a spare," Rez said, snapping the mirrored helmet
from the red suit. "I can afford it, you paid me enough.
"No," Marly protested, "really, you needn't
She shook her head, Rez was undoing the fastenings at the
spacesuit's waist.
"You don't go into a thing like that without a suit," she
said. "You don't know what they got for atmosphere. You
don't even know they got atmosphere! And any kinda bacte-
ria, spores . . What's the matter?" Lowering the silver
helmet.
"I'm claustrophobic!"
"Oh Rez stared at her. "I heard of that . . . It means
you're scared to be inside things?" She looked genuinely
curious.
"Small things, yes."
"Like Sweet Jane?"
"Yes, but She glanced at the cramped cabin, fight-
ing her panic. "I can stand this, but not the helmet." She
shuddered.
"Well," Rez said, "tell you what. We get you into the
suit, but we leave the helmet off. I'll teach you how to fasten
it. Deal? Otherwise, you don't leave my ship . ." Her
mouth was straight and firm.
"Yes," Marly said, "yes
"Here's the drill," Rez said. "We're lock to lock. This
hatch opens, you get in, I close it. Then I open the other side.
Then you're in whatever passes for atmosphere, in there. You
sure you don't want the helmet on?"
"No," Marly said, looking down at the helmet she grasped
in the suit's red gauntlets. at her pale reflection in the mir-
rored faceplate
Rez made a little clicking sound with her tongue. "Your
life. If you want to get back, have them put a message
through JAL Term for the Sweet Jane."
Marly kicked off clumsily and spun forward into the lock,
no larger than an upright coffin. The red suit's breastplate
clicked hard against the outer hatch, and she heard the inner
one hiss shut behind her. A light came on, beside her head,
and she thought of the lights in refrigerators. "Good-bye,
Ther~se."
Nothing happened. She was alone with the beating of her
heart.
Then the Sweet Jane's outer hatch slid open. A slight
pressure differential was enough to tumble her out into a
darkness that smelled old and sadly human, a smell like a
long-abandoned locker room. There was a thickness, an un-
clean dampness to the air, and, still tumbling, she saw Sweet
Jane's hatch slide shut behind her. A beam of light stabbed
past her, wavered, swung, and found her spinning.
"Lights," someone bawled hoarsely. "lights for our guest!
Jones!" It was the voice she'd heard through the ear-bead. It
rang strangely, in the iron vastness of this place, this hollow
she fell through, and then there was a grating sound and a
distant ring of harsh blue flared up, showing her the far curve
of a wall or hull of steel and welded lunar rock. The surface
was lined and pitted with precisely carved channels and de-
pressions, where equipment of some kind had once been
fitted. Scabrous clumps of brown expansion foam still ad-
hered in some of the deeper cuts, and others were lost in dead
black shadow .." You'd better get a line on her, Jones,
before she cracks her head .
Something struck the shoulder of her suit with a damp
smack, and she turned her head to see a pink gob of bright
plastic trailing a finc pink line, which jerked taut as she
watched, flipping her around. The derelict cathedral space
filled with the laboring whine of an engine, and, quite slowly,
they reeled her in
"It took you long enough," the voice said. "I wondered
who would be first, and now it's Virek . .. Mammon . .
And then they had her, spinning her around. She almost lost
the helmet: it was drifting away, but one of them batted it
back into her hands. Her purse, with her boots and jacket
folded inside, executed its own arc, on its shoulder strap, and
bumped the side of her head.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Ludgate!" the old man roared. "Wigan Ludgate, as you
well know. Who else did he send you to deceive?" His
seamed, blotched face was cleanshaven, but his gray, un-
trimmed hair floated free, seaweed on a tide of stale air.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not here to deceive you. I no
longer work for Virek . . . I came here because . . I mean,
I'm not at all sure why I came here, to begin with, but on my
way I learned that the artist who makes the boxes is in
danger. Because there~s something else, something Virek
thinks he has, something Virek thinks will free him from his
cancers Her words ran down to silence, in the face of
the almost palpable craziness that radiated from Wigan Ludgate,
and she saw that he wore the cracked plastic carapace of an
old work suit, with cheap metal crucifixes epoxied like a
necklace around the tarnished steel helmet ring. His face was
very close. She could smell his decaying teeth.
"The boxes!" Little balls of spittle curled off his lips,
obeying the elegant laws of Newtonian physics. "You whore!
They're of the hand of God!"
"Easy there, Lud," said a second voice, `~youre scam'
the lady Easy, lady, `cause old Lud, he hasn't got too many
visitors. Gets him quite worked up, y'see, but he's basically a
harmless old bugger She turned her head and met the
relaxed gaze of a pair of wide blue eyes in a very young face.
"I'm Jones," he said, "I live here, too . .
Wigan Ludgate threw back his head and howled, and the
sound rang wild against the walls of steel and stone.
"Mostly, y'see," Jones was saying as Marly pulled her
way behind him along a knotted line stretched taut down a
corridor that seemed to have no end, "he's pretty quiet.
Listens to his voices, y'know. Talks to himself, or maybe to
the voices, I dunno, and then a spell comes on him and he's
like this When he stopped speaking, she could still hear
faint echoes of Ludgate's howls. "You may think it's cruel,
me leavin' him this way, but it's best, really. He'll tire of it
soon. Gets hungry. Then he comes to find me. Wants his~
tuck, y'see."
"Are you Australian?" she asked.
~`New Melbourne," he said. "Or was, before I got up the
well .
"Do you mind my asking why yoU're here? I mean, here in
this, this . . . What is it?"
The boy laughed. "Mostly, I call it the Place. Lud, he calls
it a lot of things, but mostly the Kingdom. Figures he's found
God, he does. Suppose he has, if you want to look at it that
way. Near as I make it, he was some kind of console crook
before he got up the well. Don't know how he came to be
here, exactly, other than that it suits the poor bastard .
Me, I came here runnin', understand? Trouble somewhere,
not to be too specific, and my arse for out of there. Turn up
herethat's a long tale of its ownand here's bloody Ludgate
near to starvin'. He'd had him a sort of business, sellin'
things he'd scavenge, and those boxes you're after, but he'd
gotten a bit far gone for that. His buyers would come, oh,
say, three times a year, but he'd send `em away. Well. I
thought, the hidin' here's as good as any, so I took to helpin
him. That's it, I guess
"Can you take me to the artist? Is he here? It's extremely
urgent .
"I'll take you, no fear. But this place, it was never really
built for people, not to get around in, I mean, so it's a bit
of a
journey . . . It isn't likely to be going anywhere, though.
Can't guarantee it'll make a box for you. Do you really work
for Virek? Fabulous rich old shit on the telly? Kraut, isn't
he?"
"I did," she said, "for a number of days. As for national-
ity, I would guess Herr Virek is the sole citizen of a nation
consisting of Herr Virek . .
"See what you mean," Jones said, cheerily. "It's all the
same, with these rich old fucks, I suppose, though it's more
fun than watching a bloody zaibatsu . . You won't see a
zaibatsu come to a messy end, will you? Take old Ashpool
countryman of mine, he waswho built all this; they say his
own daughter slit his throat, and now she's bad as old Lud,
holed up in the family castle somewhere. The Place being a
former part of all that, y'see."
"Rez. . . I mean, my pilot, said something like that. And
a friend of mine, in Paris, mentioned the Tessier-Ashpools
recently . . . The clan is in eclipse?"
"Eclipse? Lord! Down the bloody tube's more like it.
Think about it: We're crawhn', you an' me, through what
used to be their corporate data cores. Some contractor in
Pakistan bought the thing; hull's fine, and there's a fair bit
of
gold in the circuitry, but not as cheap to recover as some
might like ...It' s been hangin' up here ever since, with only
old Lud to keep it company, and it him. Till I come along,
that is. Guess one day the crews'll come up from Pakistan
and get cuttin' . . Funny, though, how much of it still
seems to work, at least part of the time Story I heard, one
got me here in the first place, said T-A's wiped the cores
dead, before they cut it loose
"But you think they are still operative?"
"Lord, yes. About the way Lud is, if you call that opera-
tive. What do you think your boxmaker is?"
"What do you know about Maas Biolabs?"
"Moss what?"
"Maas. They make biochips
`Oh. Them. Well, that's all I do know about `em . .
"Ludgate speaks of them?"
"He might. Can't say as I listen all that close. Lud, he
does speak a fair bit
HE BROUGHT ThEM in through avenues lined with rusting slopes
of dead vehicles, with wrecker's cranes and the black towers
of smelters. He kept to the back streets as they eased into the
western flank of the Sprawl, and eventually gunned the hover
down a brick canyon, armored sides scraping sparks. and
drove it hard into a wall of soot-blown, compacted garbage.
An avalanche of refuse slid down, almost covering the vehi-
cle, and he released the controls, watching the foam dice
swing back and forth, side to side The kerosene gauge had
been riding on empty for the last twelve blocks.
"What happened back there?" she said, her cheekbones
green in the glow of the instruments.
"I shot down a helicopter. Mostly by accident. We were
lucky."
"No, I mean after that. I was . . . I had a dream."
"What did you dream?"
"The big things, moving
"You had some kind of seizure."
"Am I sick? Do you think I'm sick? Why did the company
want to kill me?"
"I don't think you're sick."
She undid her harness and scrambled back over the seat, to
crouch where they had slept. "It was a bad dream .." She
began to tremble. He climbed out of his harness and went to
her, held her head against him, stroking her hair, smoothing it
back against the delicate skull, stroking it back behind her
cars Her face in the green glow like something hauled from
dreams and abandoned, the skin smooth and thin across the
bones. The black sweatshirt half unzipped, he traced the
fragile line of her collarbone with a fingertip. Her skin was
cool, moist with a film of sweat. She clung to him.
He closed his eyes and saw his body in a sun-striped bed,
beneath a slow fan with blades of brown hardwood His body
pumping, jerking like an amputated limb, Allison's head
thrown back, mouth open, lips taut across her teeth.
Angie pressed her face into the hollow of his neck.
She groaned, stiffened, rocked back "Hired man," the
voice said. And he was back against the driver's seat, the
Smith & Wesson's barrel reflecting a single line of green
instrument glow, the luminous head on its front sight eclips-
ing her left pupil.
~No," the voice said.
He lowered the gun, "You're back."
"No. Legba spoke to you. I am Samedi."
"Saturday?"
"Baron Saturday, hired man. You met me once on a
hillside. The blood lay on you like dew. I drank of your full
heart that day." Her body jerked violently. "You know this
town well .
"Yes." He watched as muscles tensed and relaxed in her
face, molding her features into a new mask
"Very well. Leave the vehicle here, as you intended. But
follow the stations north. To New York. Tonight. I will guide
you with Legba's horse then, and you will kill for me
"Kill who?"
"The one you most wish to kill, hired man."
Angie moaned, shuddered, and began to sob.
"It's okay," he said. "We're half way home." It was a
meaningless thing to say, he thought, helping her out of the
seat; neither of them had homes at all. He found the case of
cartridges in the parka and replaced the one he'd used on the
Honda He found a paint-spattered razor-knife, in the dash
tool kit and sliced the ripstop lining out of the parka, a
million microtubes of poly insulation whirling up as he cut.
When he'd stripped it out, he put the Smith & Wesson in the
holster and put the parka on. It hung around him in folds, like
an oversized raincoat, and didn't show the bulge of the big
gun at all.
"Why did you do that?" she asked, running the back of
her hand across her mouth.
"Because ifs hot out there and I need to cover the gun."
He stuffed the ziploc full of used New Yen into a pocket.
"Come on," he said, "we got subways to catch
Condensation dripped steadily from the old Georgetown
dome, built forty years after the ailing Federals decamped for
the lower reaches of McLean. Washington was a Southern
city, always had been, and you felt the tone of the Sprawl
shift here if you rode the trains down the stations from
Boston. The trees in the District were lush and green, and
their leaves shaled the arc lights as Turner and Angela Mitch-
ell made their way along the broken sidewalks to Dupont
Circle and the station There were drums in the circle, and
someone had lit a trash fire in the giant's marble goblet at the
center. Silent figures sat beside spread blankets as they
passed,
the blankets arrayed with surreal assortments of merchandise:
the damp-swollen cardboard coveis of black plastic audio
disks beside battered prosthetic limbs trailing crude nerve-
jacks, a dusty glass fishbowl filled with oblong steel dog tags,
rubber-banded stacks of faded postcards, cheap Indo trodes
still sealed in wholesaler~s plastic, mismatched ceramic salt-
and-pepper sets, a golf club with a peeling leather grip, Swiss
army knives with missing blades, a dented tin wastebasket
lithographed with the face of a president whose name Turner
could almost remember (Carter? Grosvenor?), fuzzy holo-
grams of the Monument
In the shadows near the station's entrance, Turner haggled
quietly with a Chinese boy in white Jeans, exchanging the
smallest of Rudy's bills for nine alloy tokens stamped with
the ornate BAMA Transit logo.
Two of the tokens admitted them to the station. Three of
them went into vending machines for bad coffee and stale
pastries. The remaining four carried them north, the train
rushing silently along on its magnetic cushion. He sat back
with his arms around her, and pretended to close his eyes; he
watched their reflections in the opposite window. A tall man,
gaunt now and unshaven, hunched back in defeat with a
hollow-eyed girl curled beside him. She hadn't spoken since
they'd left the alley where he'd abandoned the hover.
For the second time in an hour he considered phoning his
agent. If you had to trust someone, the rule ran, then trust
your agent. But Conroy had said he'd hired Qakey and the
others through Turner's agent, and the connection made Turner
dubious. Where was Conroy tonight? Turner was fairly cer-
tain that it would have been Conroy who ordered Oakey after
them with the laser. Would Hosaka have arranged the railgun,
in Arizona, to erase evidence of a botched defection attempt?
But if they had, why order Webber to destroy the medics,
their neurosurgery, and the Maas-Neotek deck? And there
was Mans again. . . . Had Maas killed Mitchell? Was there
any reason to believe that Mitchell was really dead? Yes, he
thought, as the girl stirred beside him in uneasy sleep, there
was: Angie. Mitchell had feared they~d kill her, he'd arranged
the defection in order to get her out. get her to Hosaka, with
no plan for his own escape. Or that was Angie's version,
anyway.
He closed his eyes, shut out the reflections. Something
stirred, deep in the silt of Mitchell's recorded memories.
Shame. He couldn~t quite reach it. . . . He opened his eyes
suddenly. What had she said, at Rudy's? That her father had
put the thing into her head because she wasn't smart enough?
Careful not to disturb her, he worked his arm from behind her
neck and slid two fingers into the waist pocket of his pants,
came up with Conroy's little black nylon envelope on its neck
cord. He undid the Velcro and shook the swollen, asym-
metrical gray biosoft out onto his open palm. Machine dreams.
Roller coaster. Too fast, too alien to grasp. But if you wanted
something, something specific, you should be able to pull it
out.
He dug his thumbnail under the socket's dustcover, pried it
out, and put it down on the plastic seat beside him. The train
was nearly empty, and none of the other passengers seemed
to be paying any attention to him. He took a deep breath, set
his teeth, and inserted the biosoft
Twenty seconds later, he had it, the thing he'd gone for.
The strangeness hadn't touched him, this time, and he de-
cided that that was because he'd gone after this one specific
thing, this fact, exactly the sort of data you'd expect to find
in
the dossier of a top research man: his daughter's IQ, as
reflected by annual batteries of tests.
Angela Mitchell was well above the norm. Had been, all
along.
He took the biosoft out of his socket and rolled it absently
between thumb and forefinger. The shame. Mitchell and the
shame and grad school. . . . Grades, he thought. I want the
bastard's grades. I want his transcripts.
He jacked the dossier again.
Nothing. He'd gotten it, but there was nothing.
No. Again.
Ag~n...
"Goddamn," he said, seeing it.
A teenager with a shaved head glanced at him from a seat
across the aisle, then turned back to the stream of his friend's
monologue: "They're gonna run the games again, up on the
hill, midnight. We're goin', but we're just gonna hang, we're
not gonna make it, just kick back and let `em thump each
other's butts, and we're gonna laugh, see who gets thumped,
`cause last week Susan got her arm busted, you there for that?
An' it was funny, `cause Cal was tryin' t' takem to the
hospital but he was dusted `n' he ran that shitty Yamaha over
aspeedbump. .
Turner snapped the biosoft back into his socket.
This time, when it was over, he `said nothing at all. He put
his arm back around Angie and smiled, seeing the smile in
the window. It was a feral smile; it belonged to the edge
Mitchell's academic record was good, extremely good
Excellent. But the arc wasn't there. The arc was something
Turner had learned to look for in the dossiers of research
people, that certain signal curve of brilliance. He could spot
the arc the way a master machinist could identify metals by
observing the spark plume off a grinding wheel. And Mitchell
hadn't had it.
The shame. The graduate dorms Mitchell had known,
known he wasn't going to make it. And then, somehow, he
had. How? It wouldn't be in the dossier. Mitchell, somehow,
had known how to edit what he gave the Maas security
machine. Otherwise, they would have been on to him
Someone, something, had found Mitchell in his postgraduate
slump and had started feeding him things. Clues, directions.
And Mitchell had gone to the top, his arc hard and bright and
perfect then, and it had carried him to the top .
Who? What?
He watched Angie's sleeping face in the shudder of subway
light.
Faust.
Mitchell had cut a deal. Turner might never know the
details of the agreement, or Mitchell's price, but he knew he
understood the other side of it. What Mitchell had been
required to do in return.
Legba, Samedi, spittle curling from the girl's contorted
lips.
And the train swept into old Union in a black blast of
midnight air.
"Cab, sir?" The man's eyes were moving behind glasses
with a polychrome tint that swirled like oil slicks. There were
flat, silvery sores across the backs of his hands. Turner
stepped in close and caught his upper arm, without breaking
stride, forcing him back against a wall of scratched white tile.
between gray ranks of luggage lookers.
"Cash," Turner said. "I'm paying New Yen. I want my
cab. No trouble with the driver Understand? I'm not a mark."
He tightened his grip. "Fuck up on me, I'll come back here
and kill you, or make you wish I had."
"Got it Yessir. Got it. We can do that, sir, yessir. Where d'
you wanna go to, sir?" The man's wasted features contorted
in pain.
"Hired man." the voice came from Angie, a hoarse whis-
per. And then an address. Turner saw the tout's eyes dart
nervously behind the swirls of colors. "That's Madison?" he
croaked. "Yessir. Get you a good cab, real good cab . .
"What is this place," Turner asked the cabby, leaning
forward to thumb the SPEAK button beside the steel speaker
grid, "the address we gave you?"
There was a crackle of static. "Hypermart. Not much open
there this time of night. Looking for anything in particular?"
"No," Turner said. He didn't know the place. He tried to
remember that stretch of Madison, Residential, mostly. Un-
counted living spaces carved out of the shells of commercial
buildings that dated from a day when commerce had required
clerical workers to be present physically at a central loca-
tion. Some of the buildings were tall enough to penetrate a
dome
"Where are we going?" Angie asked, her hand on his arm.
"It's okay," he said. "Don't worry."
"God," she said, leaning against his shoulder, looking up
at the pink neon HYPERMART sign that slashed the granite face
of the old building, "I used to dream about New York, back
on the mesa. I had a graphics program that would take me
through all the streets, into museums and things. I wanted to
come here more than anything in the world
"Well, you made it. You're here."
She started to sob, hugged him, her face against his bare
chest, shaking. "I'm scared. I'm so scared.
``It'll be okay,'' he said, stroking her hair, his eyes on the
main entrance. He had no reason to believe anything would
ever be okay for either of them. She seemed to have no idea
that the words that had brought them here had come from her
mouth. But then, he thought, she hadn't spoken them
There were bag people huddled on either side of Hypermart's
entranceway, prone hummocks of rag gone the exact shade of
the sidewalk; they looked to Turner as though they were
being slowly extruded from the dark concrete, to become
mobile extensions of the city. "lammer's," the voice said,
muffled by his chest, and he felt a cold revulsion, "a club.
Find Danbala's horse." And then she was crying again He
took her hand and walked past the sleeping transients, in
under the tarnished gilt scroliwork and through the glass
doors. He saw an espresso machine down an aisle of tents and
shuttered stalls, a girl with a black crest of hair swabbing a
counter. "Coffee." he said. "Food. Come on. You need to
cat."
He smiled at the girl while Angie settled herself on a stool.
How about cash?" he said. "You ever take cash?"
She stared at him, shrugged. He took a twenty from Rudy's
ziploc and showed it to her. `What do you want?"
"Coffees. Some food."
"That all you got? Nothing smaller?"
He shook his head.
"Sorry. Can't make the change."
"You don't have to."
"You crazy?"
"No, but I want coffee
"That's some tip, mister. I don't make that in a week."
``It's yours.''
Anger crossed her face. "You're with those shitheads up-
stairs. Keep your money. I'm closing."
"We aren't with anybody," he said, leaning across the
counter slightly, so that the parka fell open and she could see
the Smith & Wesson. "We're looking for a club. A place
called Jammer s.
The girl glanced at Angie, back to Turner. "She sick?
Dusted? What is this?"
"Here's the money," Turner said. "Give us our coffee.
You want to earn the change, tell me how to find Jammer's
place It's worth it to me. Understand?"
She slid the worn bill out of sight and moved to the
espresso machine. "I don't think I understand anything any-
more." She rattled cups and milk-filmed glasses out of the
way. "What is it with Jammer's? You a friend of his? You
know Jackie?"
"Sure," Turner said.
"She came by early this morning with this little wilson
from the `burbs. I guess they went up there .
"Where?"
"Jammer's. Then the weirdness started."
"Yeah?"
"All these creeps from Barrytown, greaseballs and white-
shoes, walking in like they owned the place. And now they
damn well do, the top two floors. Started buying people out
of their stalls. A lot of people on the lower floors just packed
and left. Too weird. . .
"How many came?"
Steam roared out of the machine. "Maybe a hundred. I
been scared shit all day, but I can't reach my boss. I close up
in thirty minutes anyway. The day girl never showed, or else
she came in, caught the trouble smell, and walked . ." She
took the little steaming cup and put it in front of Angie. "You
okay, honey?"
Angie nodded.
"You have any idea what these people are up to?" Turner
asked.
The girl had returned to the machine. It roared again. "I
think they're waiting for someone," she said quietly and
brought Turner an espresso. "Either for someone to try to
leave Jammer's or for someone to try to get in .
Turner looked down at the swirls of brown foam on his
coffee. "And nobody here called the police?"
"The police? Mister, this is Hypermart. People here don't
call the police .
Angie's cup shattered on the marble counter.
"Short and straight, hired man," the voice whispered.
"You know the way. Walk in."
The countergirl's mouth was open. "Jesus," she said,
"she's gotta be dusted bad She looked at Turner coldly.
"You give it to her?"
"No," Turner said, "but she's sick. It'll be okay." He
drank off the black bitter coffee. It seemed to him, just for a
second, that he could feel the whole Sprawl breathing, and its
breath was old and sick and tired, all up and down the
stations from Boston to Atlanta. . .
~~JEsus,~' BOBBY SAID to Jackie, "can't you wrap it up or
something?" Jammer's burn filled the office with a smell,
like overdone pork, that turned Bobby's stomach.
"You don't bandage a burn," she said, helping Jammer sit
down in his chair. She began to open his desk drawers, one
after another. "You got any painkillers? Derms? Anything?"
Jammer shook his head, his long face slack and pale.
"Maybe. Behind the bar, there's a kit. . .
"Get it!" Jackie snapped. "Go on!"
"What are you so worried about him for." Bobby began,
hurt by her tone. "He tried to let those Gothicks in here.
"Get the box, asshole! He just got weak for a second, is
all. He got scared. Get me that box or you'll need it yourself."
He darted out into the club and found Beauvoir wiring pink
hotdogs of plastic explosive to a yellow plastic box like the
control unit for a kid's toy truck. The hotdogs were mashed
around the hinges of the doors and on either side of the lock.
~What's that for?" Bobby asked, scrambling over the bar.
"Somebody might want in," Beauvoir said. "They do,
we'll open it for them."
Bobby paused to admire the arrangement. "Why don't you
just mash it up against the glass, so it'll blow straight out?"
"Too obvious," Beauvoir said, straightening up, the yel-
low detonator in his hands. "But I'm glad you think about
these things. If we try to blow it straight out, some of it
blows
back in. This way is . . . neater."
Bobby shrugged and ducked behind the bar. There were
wire racks filled with plastic sacks of krill wafers, an assort-
ment of abandoned umbrellas, an unabridged dictionary, a
woman's blue shoe, a white plastic case with a runny-looking
red cross painted on it with nail polish . . . He grabbed the
case and climbed back over the bar.
`~Hey, Jackie he said, putting the first-aid kit down
beside Jammer's deck.
"Forget it." She popped the case open and rummaged
through its contents. "Jammer, there's more poppers in here
than anything else . .
Jammer smiled wealdy.
"Here. These'll do you." She unrolled a sheet of red
derms and began to peel them off the backing, smoothing
three across the back of the burnt hand. "What you need's a
local, though."
"I was thinking," Jammer said, staring up at Bobby.
"Maybe now's when you can earn yourself a little running
time
"How's that?" Bobby asked, eyeing the deck.
"Stands to reason," Jammer said, "that whoever's got
those jerks outside, they've also got the phones tapped."
Bobby nodded. Beauvoir had said the same thing, when
he'd run his plan down to them.
"Well, when Beauvoir and I decided you and I might hit
the matrix for a little look-see, I actually had something else
in mind." Jammer showed Bobby his expanse of small white
teeth. "See, I'm in this because I owed Beauvoir and Lucas a
favor. But there are people who owe me favors, too, favors
that go way back. Favors I never needed to call in."
"Jammer." Jackie said, "you gotta relax. Just sit back.
You could go into shock."
"How's your memory, Bobby? I'm going to run a se-
quence by you. You practice it on my deck. No power, not
jacked. Okay?"
Bobby nodded.
"So dry-run this a couple of times. Entrance code. Let you
in the back door."
"Whose back door?" Bobby spun the black deck around
and poised his fingers above the keyboard.
"The Yakuza," Jammer said.
Jackie was staring at him. "Hey, what do you"
"Like I said. It's an old favor. But you know what they
say, the Yakuza never forget. Cuts both ways
A whiff of singed flesh reached Bobby and he winced.
"How come you didn't mention this to Beauvoir?" Jackie
was folding things back into the white case.
`Honey," Jammer said, "you'll learn. Some things you
teach yourself to remember to forget."
"Now look," Bobby said, fixing Jackie with what he
hoped was his heaviest look, "I'm running this. So I don't
need your loas, okay, they get on my nerves .
"She doesn't call them up," Beauvoir said, crouching by
the office door, the detonator in one hand and the South
Mrican riot gun in the other, "they just come. They want to
come, they're there. Anyway, they like you .
Jackie settled the trodes across her forehead. "Bobby,"
she said, "you'll be fine. Don't worry, just jack." She'd
removed her headscarf. Her hair was cornrowed between neat
furrows of shiny brown skin, with antique resistors woven in
at random intervals, little cylinders of brown phenolic resin
ringed with color-coded bands of paint.
"When you punch out past the Basketball," Jammer said
to Bobby, "you wanna dive right three clicks and go for the
floor, I mean straight down..
"Past the what?"
"Basketball. That's the Dallas-Fort Worth Sunbelt Co-Pros-
perity Sphere, you wanna get your ass down fast, all the way,
then you run how I told you, for about twenty clicks. It's all
used-car lots and tax accountants down there, but just stand
on that mother, okay?"
Bobby nodded, grinning.
"Anybody sees you going by, well, that's their lookout.
People who jack down there are used to seeing some weird
shit anyway .
"Man," Beauvoir said to Bobby, "get it on. I gotta get
back to the door. .
Bobby jacked.
He followed Jammer's instructions, secretly grateful that he
could feel Jackie beside him as they plunged down into the
workaday depths of cyberspace, the glowing Basketball dwin-
dling above them. The deck was quick, superslick, and it
made him feel fast and strong. He wondered how Jammer had
come to have the Yakuza owing him a favor, one he'd never
bothered to collect, and a part of him was busily constructing
scenarios when they hit the ice.
"Jesus ..." And Jackie was gone. Something had come
down between them, something he felt as cold and silence
and a shutting off of breath. "But there wasn't anything
there, Goddamn it!" He was frozen, somehow, locked steady
He could still see the matrix, but he couldn't feel his hands.
"Why the hell anybody plug the likes of you into a deck
like that? Thing ought to be in a museum, you ought to be in
grade school."
"Jackie!" The cry was reflex.
"Man," said the voice, "I dunno. It's been a long few
days I haven't slept, but you sure don't look like what I was
set to catch when you came out of there . . . How old are
you?"
"Fuck off!" Bobby said. It was all he could think of to
say.
The voice began to laugh. "Ramirez would split his sides
at this, you know? He had him a fine sense of the ridiculous.
That's one of the things I miss .
"Who's Ramirez?"
"My partner. Ex. Dead. Very. I was thinking maybe you
could tell me how he got that way."
"Never heard of him," Bobby said. "Where's Jackie?"
"Sittin' cold-cocked in cyberspace while you answer my
questions, wilson. What's your name?"
"B Count Zero."
"Sure. Your name!"
"Bobby, Bobby Newmark .
Silence. Then: "Well. Hey. Does make a litle sense, then.
That was your mother's place I watched those Maas spooks
use the rocket on, wasn't it? But I guess you weren't there, or
you wouldn't be here Hold on a sec
A square of cyberspace directly in front of him flipped
sickeningly and he found himself in a pale blue graphic that
seemed to represent a very spacious apartment, low shapes of
furniture sketched in hair-fine lines of blue neon. A woman
stood in front of him, a sort of glowing cartoon squiggle of a
woman, the face a brown smudge. "I'm Slide," the figure
said, hands on its hips, "Jaylene. You don't fuck with me.
Nobody in L.A."she gestured, a window suddenly snap-
ping into existence behind her"fucks with me. You got
that?"
"Right," Bobby said. "What is this? I mean, if you could
sort of explain.." He still couldn't move The "window"
showed a blue-gray video view of palm trees and old buildings.
"How do you mean?"
"This sort of drawing. And you. And that old picture. .
"Hey, man, I paid a designer an arm and a leg to punch
this up for me. This is my space, my construct. This is L.A.,
boy. People here don't do anything without jacking. This is
where I entertain!
"Oh," Bobby said, still baffled.
"Your turn. Who's back there, in that sleaze-ass dancehall?"
"Jammer's? Me, Jackie, Beauvoir, Jammer."
"And where were you headed when I grabbed you?"
Bobby hesitated. "The Yakuza. Jammer has a code
"What for?" The figure moved forward, an animated sen-
suous brush-sketch.
"Help."
"Shit You're probably telling the truth . .
"I am, I am, swear to God.
"Well, you ain't what I need, Bobby Zero. I been out
cruising cyberspace, all up and down, trying to find out who
killed my man. I thought it was Maas, because we were
taking one of theirs for Hosaka, so I hunted up a spook team
of theirs. First thing I saw was what they did to your mom-
ma's condo. Then I saw three of them drop in on a man they
call the Finn, but those three never came back out . .
"Finn killed `em," Bobby said. "I saw `em. Dead."
"You did? Well, then, could be we do have things to talk
about. After that, I watched the other three use that same
launcher on a pimpmobile . .
"That was Lucas," he said.
"But no sooner had they done it than a copter overfiew
em and fried all three with a laser. You know anything about
that?"
"No."
"You think you can tell me your story. Bobby Zero? Make
it quick!"
"I was gonna do this run, see? And I'd got this icebreaker
off Two-a-Day, from up the Projects, and I . .
When he finished, she was silent. The slinky cartoon figure
stood by the window, as though she were studying the televi-
sion trees.
"I got an idea," he ventured. "Maybe you can help
us
`No," she said.
"But maybe it'll help you find out what you want . .
"No. I just want to kill the motheifucker who killed
Ramirez."
"But we're trapped in there, they're gonna kill us. It's
Mans, the people you were following around in the matrix!
They hired a bunch of Kasuals and Gothicks
"That's not Maas," she said "That's a bunch of Euros
over on Park Avenue. Ice on `em a mile deep."
Bobby took that in "They the ones in the copter, the ones
killed the other Maas guys?"
"No. I couldn't get a fix on that copter, and they flew
south. Lost `em. I have a hunch, though. . . Anyway, I'm
sending you back. You want to try that Yak code, go ahead."
"But, lady, we need help .
"No percentage in help, Bobby Zero," she said, and then
he was sitting in front of Jammer's deck, the muscles in his
neck and back aching. It took him a while before he could get
his eyes to focus, so it was nearly a minute before he saw that
there were strangers in the room.
The man was tall, maybe taller than Lucas, but rangier,
narrower at the hips. He wore a kind of baggy combat jacket
that hung around him in folds, with giant pockets, and his
chest was bare except for a horizontal black strap. His eyes
looked bruised and feverish, and he held the biggest handgun
Bobby had ever seen, a kind of distended revolver with some
weird fixture molded under the barrel, a thing like a cobra's
head. Beside him, swaying, stood a girl who might have been
Bobby's age, with the same bruised eyesthough hers were
darkand lank brown hair that needed to be washed. She
wore a black sweatshirt, several sizes too large, and jeans.
The man reached out with his left hand and steadied her.
Bobby stared, then gaped as the memory hit him
Girlvoice, brownhair, darkeyes, the ice eating into him,
his teeth burring, her voice, the big thing leaning in .
"Viv Ia Vy4~," Jackie said, beside him, rapt, her hand
gripping his shoulder hard, "the Virgin of Miracles. She's
come, Bobby. Danbala has sent her!"
"You were under a while, kid," the tall man said to
Bobby. "What happened?"
Bobby blinked, glanced frantically around, found Jammer's
eyes, glazed with drugs and pain.
"Tell him," Jammer said.
"I couldn't get to the Yak. Somebody grabbed me, I don't
know how.
"Who?" The tall man had his arm around the girl now.
"She said her name was Slide From Los Angeles."
"Jaylene," the man said
The phone on Jammer's desk began to chime.
"Answer it," the man said.
Bobby turned as Jackie reached over and tapped the call-
bar below the square screen. The screen lit, flickered, and
showed them a man's face, broad and very pale, the eyes
hooded and sleepy-looking. His hair was bleached nearly
white, and brushed straight back. He had the meanest mouth
Bobby had ever seen
"Turner." the man said, "we'd better talk now.~ You
haven't got a lot of time left. I think you should get those
people out of the room, for starts .
THE KNOTTED LINE stretched on and on. At times they came to
angles, forks of the tunnel. Here the line would be wrapped
around a strut or secured with a fat transparent gob of epoxy.
The air was as stale, but colder. When they stopped to rest in
a cylindrical chamber, where the shaft widened before a triple
branching, Marly asked Jones for the flat little work light he
wore across his forehead on a gray elastic strap. Holding it in
one of the red suit's gauntlets, she played it over the cham-
ber's wail. The surface was etched with patterns, microscopi-
cally fine lines
"Put your helmet on," Jones advised, "you've got a better
light than mine .
Marly shuddered. "No." She passed him the light. "Can
you help me out of this, please?" She tapped a gauntlet
against the suit's hard chest. The mirror-domed helmet was
fastened to the suit's waist with a chrome snap-hook.
"You'd best keep it," Jones said. "It's the only one in the
Place. I've got one, where I sleep, but no air for it. Wig's
bottles won't fit my transpirator, and his suit's all holes .
He shrugged.
"No, please," she said, struggling with the catch at the
suit's waist, where she'd seen Rez twist something. "I can't
stand it . .
Jones pulled himself half over the line and did something
she oouldn't see. There was a click. "Stretch your arms, over
your head," he said. It was awkward, but finally she floated
free, still in the black jeans and white silk blouse she'd worn
to that final encounter with Alain. Jones fastened the empty
red suit to the line with another of the snap-rings mounted
around its waist, and then undid her bulging purse. "You
want this? To take with you, I mean? We could leave it here,
get it on our way back."
"No,'~ she said, "I'll take it. Give it to me." She hooked
an elbow around the line and fumbled the purse open. Her
jacket came out, but so did one of her boots. She managed to
get the boot back into the purse, then twisted herself into the
jacket
"That's a nice piece of hide," Jones said.
"Please," she said, "let's hurry . .
"Not far now." he sald, his work light swinging to show
her where the line vanished through one of three openings
arranged in an equilateral triangle.
"End of the line," he said. "Literal, that is." He tapped
the chromed eyebolt where the line was tied in a sailor's knot.
His voice caught and echoed, somewhere ahead of them, until
she imagined she heard other voices whispering behind the
round of echo. "We'll want a bit of light for this," he said,
kicking himself across the shaft and catching a gray metal
coffin thing that protruded there. He opened it. She watched
his hands move in the bright circle of the work light; his
fingers were thin and delicate, but the nails were small and
blunt, outlined with black, impacted grime. The letters "CJ"
were tattooed in crude blue across the back of his right hand.
The sort of tattoo one did oneself, in jail. . . . Now he'd
fished out a length of heavy, insulated wire. He squinted into
the box, then wedged the wire behind a copper D-connector.
The dark ahead vanished in a white flood of light.
"Got more power than we need, really," he said, with
something akin to a homeowner's pride. "The solar banks are
all still workin', and they were meant to power the main-
frames . . . Come on, then, lady, we'll meet the artist you
come so far to see He kicked off and out, gliding
smoothly through the opening, like a swimmer, into the light.
Into the thousand drifting things. She saw that the red plastic
soles of his frayed shoes had been patched with smears of
white silicon caulking.
And then she'd followed, forgetting her fears, forgetting
the nausea and constant vertigo, and she was there. And she
understood.
"My God," she said.
"Not likely," Jones called. "Maybe old Wig's, though.
Too bad it's not doing it now, though That's even more of a
sight."
Something slid past, ten centimeters from her face. An
ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to end.
She had no idea how long she'd been there, when the
screen lit and began to flicker. Hours, minutes . . She'd
already learned to negotiate the chamber, after a fashion,
kicking off like Jones from the dome's concavity. Like Jones.
she caught herself on the thing's folded, jointed arms, pivoted
and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were
dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers,
hexdrivers,knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist's drill
They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have
been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiauton-
omous device she knew from childhood videos of the high
frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome,
its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of
cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it.
Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices,
were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.
Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing
past.
A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from
some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of
French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rec-
tangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green
snake of a silk cravat . . . Endless, the slow swarm, the
spinning things .
Jones tumbled up through the silent storm, laughing, grab-
bing an arm tipped with a glue gun. "Always makes me want
to laugh, to see it. But the boxes always make me sad .
"Yes," she said, "they make me sad, too. But there are
sadnesses and sadnesses .
"Quite right." He grinned. "No way to make it go, though.
Guess the spirit has to move it, or anyway that's how old Wig
has it. He used to come out here a lot I think the voices are
stronger for him here. But lately they've been talking to him
wherever, it seems like . .
She looked at him through the thicket of manipulators. He
was very dirty, very young, with his wide blue eyes under a
tangle of brown curls. He wore a stained gray zipsuit, its
collar shiny with grime. "You must be mad," she said with
something like admiration in her voice, "you must be totally
mad, to stay here . .
He laughed. "Wigan's madder than a sack of bugs. Not
me.
She smiled. "No, you're crazy I'm crazy, too
"Hello then," he said, looking past her. "What's this?
One of Wig's sermons, looks like, and no way we can shut it
off without me cutting the power . .
She turned her head and saw diagonals of color strobe
across the rectangular face of a large screen glued crookedly
to the curve of the dome The screen was occluded, for a
second, by the passage of a dressmaker's dummy, and then
the face of Josef Virek filled it, his soft blue eyes glittering
behind round lenses.
"Hello, Marly," he said. "I can't see you, but I'm sure I
know where you are
"That's one of Wig's sermon screens," Jones said, rub-
bing his face. "Put `em up all over the Place, `cause he
figured one day he'd have people up here to preach to. This
geezer's linked in through Wig's communication gear, I guess.
Who is he?"
"Virek," she said.
"Thought he was older. .
"It's a generated image," she said. "Ray tracing, texture
mapping She stared as the face smiled out at her from
the curve of the dome, beyond the slow-motion hurricane of
lost things, minor artifacts of countless lives, tools and toys
and gilded buttons.
"I want you to know," the image said, "that you have
fulfilled your contract. My psychoprofile of Marly Krushkhova
predicted your response to my gestalt. Broader profiles indi-
cated that your presence in Paris would force Maas to play
their hand. Soon, Marly, I will know exactly what it is that
you have found. For four years I've known something that
Maas didn't know. I've known that Mitchell, the man Mans
and the world regards as the inventor of the new biochip
processes, was being fed the concepts that resulted in his
breakthroughs. I added you to an intricate array of factors,
Marly, and things came to a most satisfying head. Mans,
without understanding what they were doing, surrendered the
location of the conceptual source. And you have reached it.
Paco will be arriving shortly . .
"You said you wouldn't follow," she said. "I knew you
lied..."
"And now, Marly, at last I think I shall be free. Free of the
four hundred kilograms of rioting cells they wall away behind
surgical steel in a Stockholm industrial park. Free, eventu-
ally, to inhabit any number of real bodies, Marly Forever."
"Shit," Jones said, "this one's as bad as Wig. What's he
think he's talking about?"
"About his jump," she said, remembering her talk with
Andrea, the smell of cooking prawns in the cramped little
kitchen. "The next stage of his evolution
"You understand it?"
"No," she said, "but I know that it will be bad, very bad
.." She shook her head.
`Convince the inhabitants of the cores to admit Paco and
his crew, Marly," Virek said. "I purchased the cores an hour
before you departed Orly, from a contractor in Pakistan. A
bargain, Marly, a great bargain. Paco will oversee my inter-
ests, as usual."
And then the screen was dark.
"Here now," Jones said, pivoting around a folded manip-
ulator and taking her hand, "what's so bad about all that? He
owns it now, and he said you'd done your bit . . . I don't
know what old Wig's good for, except to listen to the voices,
but he's not long for this side anyway Me, I'm as easy for
Outasnot. .
"You don't understand," she said. "You can't He's found
his way to something, something he's sought for years. But
nothing he wants can be good. For anyone ye seen
him, I've felt it . .
And then the steel arm she held vibrated and began to
move, the whole turret rotating with a muted hum of servos
TURNER STARED AT Conroy's face on the screen of the office
phone. "Go on," he said to Angie. "You go with her " The
tall black girl with the resistors woven into her hair stepped
forward and gently put her arm around Mitchell's daughter,
crooning something in that same click-infested creole. The
kid in the T-shirt was still gaping at her, his jaw slack.
"Come on, Bobby," the black girl said. Turner glanced
across the desk at the man with the wounded hand, who wore
a wrinkled white evening jacket and a bob tie with thongs of
braided black leather. Jammer, Turner decided, the club owner.
Jammer cradled his hand in his lap, on a blue-striped towel
from the bar He had a long face, the kind of beard that
needed constant shaving, and the hard, narrow eyes of a stone
professional. As their eyes met, Turner realized that the man
sat well out of the line of the phone's camera, his swivel chair
pushed back into a corner.
The kid in the T-shirt, Bobby, shuffled out behind Angie
and the black girl. his mouth still open.
"You could've saved us both a lot of hassle, Turner,"
Conroy said. "You could've called me. You could've called
your agent in Geneva"
"How about Hosaka," Turner said, "could I have called
them?"
Conroy shook his head, slowly.
"Who are you working for, Conroy? You went double on
this one, didn't you?"
"But not on you, Turner. If it had gone down the way I
planned it, you'd have been in Bogota, with Mitchell The
railgun couldn't fire until the jet was out, and if we cut it
right, Hosaka would have figured Mans took the whole sector
out to stop Mitchell But Mitchell didn't make it, did he,
Turner?"
"He never planned to," Turner said
Conroy nodded. "Yeah. And the security on the mesa
picked up the girl, going out. That's her, isn't it, Mitchell's
daughter.
Turner was silent.
"Sure," Conroy said, "figures .
"I killed Lynch," Turner said, to steer the subject away
from Angie. "But just before the hammer came down, Webber
told me she was working for you .
"They both were," Conroy said, ~`but neither one knew
about the other." He shrugged.
"What for?"
Conroy smiled. "Because you'd have missed `em if they
weren't there, wouldn't you? Because you know my style,
and if I hadn't been flying all my usual colors, you'd have
started to wonder. And I knew you'd never sell out. Mr
Instant Loyalty, right? Mr. Bushido. You were bankable,
Turner. Hosaka knew that. That's why they insisted I bring
youin. .
"You haven't answered my first question, Conroy. Who
did you go double for?"
"A man named Virek," Conroy said. "The moneyman
That's right, same one. He'd been trying to buy Mitchell for
years. For that matter, he'd been trying to buy Maas No go.
They re getting so rich, he couldn't touch them. There was a
standing offer for Mitchell making the rounds. A blind offer.
When Hosaka heard from Mitchell and called me in, I de-
cided to check that offer out. Just out of curiosity. But before
I could, Virek's team was on me. It wasn't a hard deal to cut,
Turner, believe me."
"I believe you."
"But Mitchell fucked us all over, didn't he, Turner? Good
and solid."
"So they killed him."
"He killed himself," Conroy said, "according to Virek's
moles on the mesa. As soon as he saw the kid off in that
ultralight. Cut his throat with a scalpel."
"Lot of dead people around, Conroy," Turner said
"Oakey's dead, and the Jap who was flying that copter for
you."
"Figured that when they didn't come back," Conroy
shrugged.
"They were trying to kill us," Turner said.
"No, man, they just wanted to talk . . . Anyway, we
didn't know about the girl then We just knew you were gone
and that the damn jet hadn't made it to the strip in Bogoti
We didn't start thinking about the girl until we took a look at
your brother's farm and found the jet. Your brother wouldn't
tell Oakey anything Pissed off `cause Oakey burned his
dogs. Qakey said is looked like a woman had been living
there, too, but she didn't turn up . .
"What about Rudy?"
Conroy's face was a perfect blank. Then he said, "Qakey
got what he needed off the monitors. Then we knew about the
girl."
Turner's back was aching. The holster strap was cutting
into his chest. I don't feel anything, he thought, I don't feel
anything at all
"I've got a question for you, Turner. I've got a couple.
But the main one is, what the flick are you doing in there?"
"Heard it was a hot club, Conroy."
"Yeah. Real exclusive. So exclusive, you had to break up
two of my doormen to get in. They knew you were coming,
Turner, the spades and that punk. Why else would they let
you in?"
"You'll have to work that one out, Connie. You seem to
have a lot of access, these days
Conroy leaned closer to his phone's camera. "You bet
your ass Virek's had people all over the Sprawl for months,
feeling out a rumor, cowboy gossip that there was an experi-
mental biosoft floating around. Finally his people focused on
the Finn, but another team, a Maas team, turned up, obvi-
ously after the same thing. So Virek's team just kicked back
and watched the Maas boys, and the Maas boys started
blowing people away. So Virek's team picked up on the
spades and little Bobby and the whole thing. They laid it all
out for me when I told `em I figured you'd headed this way
from Rudy's. When I saw where they were headed, I hired
some muscle to ice `em in there, until I could get somebody I
could trust to go in after them . .
"Those dusters out there?" Turner smiled. "You just
dropped the ball, Connie. You can't go anywhere for profes-
sional help, can you? Somebody's twigged that you doubled,
and a lot of pros died, out there. So you're hiring shitheads
with funny haircuts. The pros have all heard you've got
Hosaka after your ass, haven't they, Connie? And they all
know what you did." Turner was grinning now; out of the
corner of his eye, he saw that the man in the dinner jacket
was smiling, too, a thin smile with lots of neat small teeth,
like white grains of corn
"It's that bitch Slide," Conroy said. "I could've taken her
out on the rig . . . She punched her way in somewhere and
started asking questions. I don't even think she's really on to
it, yet, but she's been making sounds in certain circles
Anyway, yeah, you got the picture. But it doesn't help your
ass any, not now. Virek wants the girl. He's pulled his people
off the other thing and now I'm running things for him.
Money, Turner, money like a zaibatsu'.
Turner stared at the face, remembering Conroy in the bar
of a jungle hotel. Remembering him later, in Los Angeles,
making his pass, explaining the covert economics of corpo-
rate defection Hi, Connie," Turner said, "I know you,
don't I?"
Conroy smiled. "Sure, baby."
"And I know the offer. Already. You want the girl
"That's right."
"And the split, Connie. You know I only work fifty-fifty,
right?"
"Hey," Conroy said, "this is the big one I wouldn't have
it any other way."
Turner stared at the man's image.
"Well," Conroy said, still smiling, "what do you say?"
And Jammer reached out and pulled the phone's line from
the wall plug. "Timing," he said. "Timing's always impor-
tant." He let the plug drop. "If you'd told him, he'd have
ni.ved right away. This way buys us time. He'll try to get
back, try to figure what happened."
"How do you know what I was going to say?"
"Because I seen people. I seen a lot of them, too fucking
many. Particularly I seen a lot like you. You got it written
across your face, mister, and you were gonna tell him he
could eat shit and die " Jammer hunched his way up in the
office chair, grimacing as his hand moved inside the bar
towel. "Who's this Slide he was talking about? A jockey?"
"Jaylene Slide. Los Angeles. Top gun."
"She was the one hijacked Bobby," jammer said. "So
she's damn close to your pal on the phone
"She probably doesn't know it, though."
"Let's see what we can do about that. Get the boy back in
here."
"I'D BElTER FiND old Wig," he said
She was watching the manipulators: hypnotized by the way
they moved; as they picked through the swirl of things, they
also caused it, grasping and rejecting, the rejected objects
whirling away, striking others, drifting into new alignments.
The process stined them gently, slowly, perpetually.
"I'd better," he said.
"What?"
"Go find Wig. He might get up to something, if your
bossman's people turn up. Don't want him to hurt himself,
y'know." He looked sheepish, vaguely embarrassed.
"Fine," she said. "I'm fine, I'll watch " She remembered
the Wig's mad eyes. the craziness she'd felt roll off him in
waves; she remembered the ugly cunning she'd sensed in his
voice, over the Sweet Jane's radio. Why would Jones show
this kind of concern? But then she thought about what it
would be like, living in the Place, the dead cores of Tessier-
Ashpool. Anything human, anything alive, might come to
seem quite precious, here "You're right," she said "Go
and find him."
The boy smiled nervously and kicked off, tumbling for the
opening where the line was anchored. "I'll come back for
you," he said. "Remember where we left your suit . .
The turret swung back and forth, humming, the manip-
ulators darting, finishing the new poem.
* * *
She was never certain, afterward, that the voices were real,
but eventually she came to feel that they had been a part of
one of those situations in which real becomes merely another
concept.
She'd taken off her jacket, because the air in the dome
seemed to have grown warmer, as though the ceaseless move-
ment of the arms generated heat. She'd anchored the jacket
and her purse on a strut beside the sermon screen. The box
was nearly finished now, she thought, although it moved so
quickly, in the padded claws, that it was difficult to see
Abruptly, it floated free, tumbling end over end, and she
sprang for it instinctively, caught it, and went tumbling past
the flashing arms, her treasure in her arms. Unable to slow
herself, she struck the far side of the dome, bruising her
shoulder and tearing her blouse. Drifting, stunned, she cra-
dIed the box. staring through the rectangle of glass at an
arrangement of brown old maps and tarnished mirror. The
seas of the cartographers had been cut away, exposing the
flaking mirrors, landmasses afloat on dirty silver . . . She
looked up in time to see a glittering arm snag the floating
sleeve of her Brussels jacket. Her purse, half a meter behind
it and tumbling gracefully, went next, hooked by a manipula-
tor tipped with an optic sensor and a simple claw.
She watched as her things were drawn into the ceaseless
dance of the arms. Minutes later, the jacket came whirling out
again. Neat squares and rectangles seemed to have been cut
away, and she found herself laughing. She released the box
she held. "Go ahead," she said. "I am honored." The arms
whirled and flashed, and she heard the whine of a tiny saw.
I am honored I am honored I am honoredEcho of her
voice in the dome setting up a shifting forest of smaller,
partial sounds, and behind them, very faint. . . Voices
"You're here, aren't you?" she called, adding to the ring
of sound, ripples and reflections of her fragmented voice.
Yes, I am here.
"Wigan would say you've always been here, wouldn't
he?"
Yes, but it isn't true. I came to be, here. Once I was not.
Once, for a brilliant time, time without duration, I was every-
where as well . . . But the bright time broke. The mirror was
flawed. Now I am only one. . . But I have my song, and you
have heard it. I sing with these things that float around me,
fragments of the family that funded my birth. There are
others, but they will not speak to me. Vain, the scattered
fragments of myself, like children Like men. They send me
new things, but I prefer the old things. Perhaps I do their
bidding. They plot with men, my other selves, and men
imagine they are gods
"You are the thing that Virek seeks, aren't you?"
No. He imagines that he can translate himself, code his
personality into my fabric. He yearns to be what I once was.
What he might become most resembles the least of my broken
selves
"Are youare you sad?"
No.
"But youryour songs are sad."
My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in
you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things
you treasure are shells.
"II knew that. Once."
But now the sounds were sounds only, no forest of voices
behind them to speak as one voice, and she watched the
perfect globes of her tears spin out to join forgotten human
memories in the dome of the boxmaker.
"I understand," she said, sometime later, knowing that she
spoke now for the comfort of hearing her own voice. She
spoke quietly, unwilling to wake that bounce and ripple of
sound. "You are someone else's collage. Your maker is the
true artist. Was it the mad daughter? It doesn't matter. Some-
one brought the machine here, welded it to the dome, and
wired it to the traces of memory. And spilled, somehow, all
the worn sad evidence of a family's humanity, and left it all
to be stirred, to be sorted by a poet. To be sealed away in
boxes. I know of no more extraordinary work than this. No
more complex gesture A silver-fitted tortoise comb
with broken teeth drifted past. She caught it like a fish and
dragged the teeth through her hair.
Across the dome, the screen lit, pulsed, and filled with Paco's
face. "The old man refuses to admit us, Marly," the Spaniard
said. "The other, the vagabond, has hidden him. Seijor is most
anxious that we enter the cores and secure his property. If you
can't convince Ludgate and the other to open their lock, we will
be forced to open it ourselves, depressurizing the entire struc-
hire." He glanced away from the camera, as though consulting
an instrument or a member of his crew. "You have one hour."
Bonny FOLLOWED JACKIE and the brown-haired girl out of the
office. It felt like he'd been in Jammer's for a month and he'd
never get the taste of the place out of his mouth. The stupid
little recessed spots staring down from the black ceiling, the
fat ultrasuede seats, the round black tables, the carved wooden
screens . . Beauvoir was sitting on the bar with the detona-
tor beside him and the South African gun across his gray
sharkskin lap.
"How come you let `em in?" Bobby asked when Jackie
had led the girl to a table.
"Jackie." Beauvoir said, "she tranced while you were
iced. Legba. Told us the Virgin was on her way up with this
guy."
"Who is he?"
Beauvoir shrugged. "A merc, he looks like. Soldier for the
zaibatsus. Jumped-up street samurai. What happened to you
when you were iced?"
He told him about Jaylene Slide.
"L.A ," Beauvoir said. "She'll drill through diamond to
get the man who fried her daddy, but a brother needs help,
forget it."
"I'm not a brother."
"I think you got something there."
"So I don't get to try to get to the Yakuza?"
"What's Jammer say?"
"Dick He's in there now, watchin' your merc take a
call."
"A call? Who?"
"Some white guy with a bleach job. Mean-looking."
Beauvoir looked at Bobby, looked at the door, looked
back. "Legba says sit tight and watch. This is getting random
enough already, the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum aside."
"Beauvoir," Bobby said, keeping his voice down, "that
girl, she's the one, the one in the matrix, when I tried to run
that"
He nodded, his plastic frames sliding down his nose. "The
Virgin."
"But what's happening? I mean"
"Bobby, my advice to you is just take it like it comes.
She's one thing to me, maybe something different to Jackie.
To you, she's just a scared kid. Go easy. Don't upset her.
She's a long way from home, and we're still a long way from
getting out of here"
"Okay Bobby looked at ifie floor. "I'm sorry about
Lucas, man. He washe was a dude."
"Go talk to Jackie and the girl." Beauvoir said "I'm
watching the door."
"Okay."
He crossed the nightclub carpet to where Jackie sat with the
girl. She didn't look like much, and there was only a small
part of him that said she was the one. She didn't look up, and
he could see that she'd been crying.
"I got grabbed," he said to Jackie "You were flat gone."
"So were you," the dancer said. "Then Legba came to
me..."
"Newmark," the man called Turner said, from the door to
Jammer's office, "we want to talk to you."
"Gotta go," he said, wishing the girl would look up, see
the big dude asking for him. "They want me."
Jackie squeezed his wrist.
"Forget the Yakuza," Jammer said. "This is more compli-
cated. You're going into the L.A grid and locking into a top
jock's desk. When Slide grabbed you, she didn't know my
desk sussed her number."
"She said your deck oughta be in a museum."
"Shit she knows," Jammer said "I know where she lives,
don't I?" He took a hit from his inhaler and put it back on the
deck. "Your problem is, she's written you off. She doesn't
wanna hear from you. You gotta get into her and tell her what
she wants to know."
"What's that?"
`That it was a man named Conroy got her boyfriend
offed," the tall man said, sprawled back in one of Jammer's
office chairs with the huge pistol on his lap. "Conroy Tell
her it was Conroy. Conroy hired those bighairs outside~"
"I'd rather try the Yak," Bobby said.
"No," Jammer said, "this Slide, she'll be on his ass first.
The Yak'll measure my favor, check the whole thing out first.
Besides, I thought you were all hot to learn deck."
"I'll go with him," Jackie said, from the door.
They jacked.
She died almost immediately, in the first eight seconds.
He felt it, rode it out to the edge and almost knew it for
what it was. He was screaming, spinning, sucked up through
the glacial white funnel that had been waiting for them
The scale of the thing was impossible, too vast, as though
the kind of cybernetic megastructure that represented the
whole of a multinational had brought its entire weight to bear
on Bobby Newmark and a dancer called Jackie. Impossible.
But somewhere, on the fringe of consciousness, Just as he
lost it, there was something . . . Something plucking at his
sleeve
He lay on his face on something rough. Opened his eyes. A
walk made of round stones, wet with rain. He scrambled up,
reeling, and saw the hazy panorama of a strange city, with the
sea beyond it. Spires there, a sort of church, mad ribs and
spirals of dressed stone . . He turned and saw a huge lizard
slithering down an incline, toward him, its jaws wide. He
blinked. The lizard's teeth were green-stained ceramic, a slow
drool of water lapping over its blue mosaic china lip. The
thing was a fountain, its flanks plastered with thousands of
fragments of shattered china. He spun around, crazy with the
nearness of her death. Ice, ice, and a part of him knew then
exactly how close he'd really come, in his mother's living
room.
There were weird curving benches, covered with the same
giddy patchwork of broken china, and trees, grass . A
park.
"Extraordinary." someone said. A man, rising from his
seat on one of the serpentine benches. He had a neat brush of
gray hair, a tanned face, and round, rimless glasses that
magnified his blue eyes. "You came straight through, didn't
you?"
"What is this? Where am I?"
"Giiell Park. after a fashion. Barcelona, if you like
"You killed Jackie."
The man frowned. "I see. I think I see Still, you shouldn't
be here. An accident."
"Accident? You killed Jackie!"
"My systems are overextended today," the man said, his
hands in the pockets of a loose tan overcoat. "This is really
quite extraordinary .
"You can't do that shit," Bobby said, his vision swim-
ming in tears. "You can't. You can't kill somebody who was
just there .
"Just where?" The man took off his glasses and began to
polish them with a spotless white l~andkerchief he took from
the pocket of his coat.
"Just alive," Bobby said, taking a.step forward
The man put his glasses back on. "This has never hap-
pened before."
"You can't." Closer now.
"This is becoming tedious, Paco!"
"Seiior."
Bobby turned at the sound of the child's voice and saw a
little boy in a strange stiff suit, with black leather boots
that
fastened with buttons.
"Remove him."
"Sefior," the boy said, and bowed stiffly, taking a tiny
blue Browning automatic from his dark suit coat. Bobby
looked into the dark eyes beneath the glossy forelock and saw
a look no child had ever worn. The boy extended the gun,
aiming it at Bobby.
"Who are you?" Bobby ignored the gun, but didn't try to
get any closer to the man in the overcoat.
The man peered at him. "Virek. Josef Virek. Most people,
I gather, are familiar with my face."
"Are you on People of Importance or something?"
The man blinked, frowning. "I don't know what you're
talking about. Paco, what is this person doing here?"
"An accidental spillover," the child said, his voice light
and beautiful. "We've engaged the bulk of our system via
New York, in an attempt to prevent Angela Mitchell's es-
cape. This one tried to enter the matrix, along with another
operator, and encountered our system. We're still attempting
to determine how he breached our defenses. You are in no
danger." The muzzle of the little Browning was absolutely
steady.
And then the sensation of something plucking at his sleeve.
Not his sleeve, exactly, but part of his mind, something
"Sefior," the child said, "we are experiencing anomalous
phenomena in the matrix, possibly as a result of our own
current overextension. We strongly suggest that you allow us
to sever your links with the construct until we are able to
determine the nature of the anomaly."
The sensation was stronger now. A scratching, at the back
of his mind .
"What?" Virek said. "And return to the tanks? It hardly
seems to warrant that
"There is the possibility of real danger," the boy said, and
now there was an edge in his voice. He moved the barrel of
the Browning slightly. "You," he said to Bobby, "lie down
upon the cobbles and spread your arms and legs
But Bobby was looking past him, to a bed of flowers,
watching as they withered and died, the grass going gray and
powdery as he watched, the air above the bed writhing and
twisting. The sense of the thing scratching in his head was
stronger still, more urgent.
Virek had turned to stare at the dying flowers. "What is
Bobby closed his eyes and thought of Jackie. There was a
sound, and he knew that he was making it. He reached down
into himself, the sound still coming. and touched Jammer's
deck. Come! he screamed, inside himself, neither knowing
nor caring what it was that he addressed Come now! He felt
something give, a barrier of some kind, and the scratching
sensation was gone.
When he opened his eyes, there was something in the bed
of dead flowers. He blinked. It seemed to be a cross of plain,
white-painted wood; someone had fitted the sleeves of an
ancient naval tunic over the horizontal arms, a kind of mold-
spotted tailcoat with heavy, fringed epaulets of tarnished gold
braid, rusting buttons, more braid at the cuffs . . A rusted
cutlass was propped, hilt up, against the white upright, and
beside it was a bottle half filled with clear fluid.
The child spun, the little pistol blurring . . . And crum-
pled, folded into himself like a deflating balloon, a balloon
sucked away into nothing at all, the Browning clattering to
the stone path like a forgotten toy.
"My name," a voice said, and Bobby wanted to scream
when he realized that it came from his own mouth, "is
Samedi, and you have slain my cousin's horse
And Virek was running, the big coat flapping out behind
him, down the curving path with its serpentine benches, and
Bobby saw that another of the white crosses waited there, just
where the path curved to vanish. Then Virek must have seen
it, too; he screamed, and Baron Samedi. Lord of Graveyards,
the ba whose kingdom was death, leaned in across Barcelona
like a cold dark rain.
"What the hell do you want? Who are you?" The voice
was familiar, a woman's. Not Jacki~'s
"Bobby," he said, waves of darkness pulsing through him.
"Bobby . .
"How did you get here?"
"Jammer. He knew. His deck pegged you when you iced
me before. He'd just seen something, something huge
He couldn't remember.." Turner sent me. Conroy. He said
tell you Conroy did it. You want Conroy Hearing his
own voice as though it were someone else's. He'd been
somewhere, and returned, and now he was here, in Jaylene
Slide's skeletal neon sketch. On the way back, he'd seen the
big thing, the thing that had sucked them up, start to alter
and shift, gargantuan blocks of its rotating, merging, taking on
new alignments, the entire outline changing
`Conroy," she said. The sexy scrawl leaned by the video
window, something in its line expressing a kind of exhaus-
tion, even boredom. "I thought so." The video image whited
out, formed again as a shot of some ancient stone building.
Park Avenue. He's up there with all those Euros, clicking
away at some new scam." She sighed. "Thinks he's safe,
see? Wiped Ramirez like a fly, lied to my face, flew off to
New York and his new job, and now he thinks he's safe
The figure moved, and the image changed again. Now
the face of the white-haired man, the man Bobby had seen
talking to the big guy, on Jammer's phone, filled the screen.
She's tapped into his line, Bobby thought
"Or not," Conroy said, the audio cutting in. "Either way,
we've got her. No problem." The man looked tired, Bobby
thought, but on top of it. Tough. Like Turner.
"I've been watching you, Conroy," Slide said softly. "My
good friend Bunny, he's been watching you for me. You ain't
the only one awake on Park Avenue tonight .
"No," Conroy was saying, "we can have her in Stock-
holm for you tomorrow Absolutely." He smiled into the
camera.
"Kill him, Bunny," she said. "Kill `em all. Punch out the
whole goddamn floor and the one under it. Now."
"That's right," Conroy said, and then something hap-
pened, something that shook the camera, blurring his image.
"What is that?" he asked, in a very different voice, and then
the screen was blank.
"Burn, motherfucker,' she said.
And Bobby was yanked back into the dark
MARLY PASSED ThE hour adrift in the ~low storm, watching the
boxmaker's dance. Paco's threat didn't frighten her, although
she had no doubt of his willingness to carry it out. He would
carry it out, she was certain. She had no idea what would
happen if the lock were breached. They would die. She would
die, and Jones, and Wigan Ludgate. Perhaps the contents of
the dome would spill out into space, a blossoming cloud of
lace and tarnished sterling, marbles and bits of string, brown
leaves of old books, to orbit the cores forever That had the
right tone, somehow; the artist who had set the boxmaker in
motion would be pleased.
The new box gyrated through a round of foam-tipped claws.
Discarded rectangular fragments of wood and glass tumbled
from the focus of creation, to join the thousand things, and
she was lost in it, enchanted, when Jones, wildeyed, his face
filmed with sweat and dirt, heaved up into the dome, trailing
the red suit on a lanyard. "I can't get the Wig into a place I
can seal," he said, "so this is for you The suit spun up
below him and he grabbed for it, frantic.
"I don't want it," she said, watching the dance.
"Get into it! Now! No time!" His mouth worked, but no
sound came. He tried to take her arm.
"No," she said, evading his hand. "What about you?"
"Put the goddamn suit on!" he roared, waking the deeper
range of echo.
"No."
Behind his head, she saw the screen strobe itself into life,
fill with Paco's features.
"Sefior is dead," Paco said, his smooth face expression-
less, "and his various interests are undergoing reorganization.
In the interim, I am required in Stockholm. I am authorized to
inform Marly Krushkhova that she is no longer in the employ
of the late Josef Virek, nor is she an employee of his estate.
Her salary in full is available at any branch of the Bank of
France, upon submission of valid identification. The proper
tax declarations are on file with the revenue authorities of
France and Belgium. Lines of working credit have been
invalidated. The former corporate cores of Tessier-Ashpool
SA are the property of one of the late Herr Virek's subsidiary
entities, and anyone on the premises will be charged with
trespass."
Jones was frozen there, his arm cocked, his hand tensed
open to harden the striking edge of his palm.
Paco vanished.
"Are you going to hit me?" she asked.
He relaxed his arm. "I was about to. Cold-cock you and
stuff you into this bleeding suit . ." He started to laugh.
"But I'm glad I don't have to now . Here, look, it's done
a new one.
The new box came tumbling out of the shifting flitter of
arms. She caught it easily.
The interior, behind the rectangle of glass, was smoothly
lined with the sections of leather cut from her jacket. Seven
numbered tabs of holofiche stood up from the box's black
leather floor like miniature tombstones. The crumpled wrap-
per from a packet of Gauloise was mounted against black
leather at the back, and beside it a black-striped gray match-
book from a brasserie in Napoleon Court
And that was all.
Later, as she was helping him hunt for Wigan Ludgate in
the maze of corridors at the far end of the cores, he paused,
gripping a welded handhold, and said, "You know, the queer
thing about those boxes
"Yes?"
"Is that Wig got a damn good price on them, somewhere
in New York. Money, I mean. But sometimes other things as
well, things that came back up . .
"What sort of things?"
"Software, I guess it was. He's a secretive old fuck when
it comes to what he thinks his voices are telling him to do
Once, it was something he swore was biosoft, that new
"What did he do with it?"
"He'd download it all into the cores." Jones shrugged
"Did he keep it, then?"
"No," Jones said, "he'd just toss it into whatever pile of
stuff we'd managed to scrounge for our next shipment out
Just jacked it into the cores and then resold it for whatever he
could get."
Do you know why? What it was about?"
"No," Jones said, losing interest in his story, "he'd just
say that the Lord moved in strange ways .." He shrugged
"He said God likes to talk to Himself . .
HE HELPED BEAUvOIR carry Jackie out to the stage, where they
lay her down in front of a cherry-red acoustic drum kit and
covered her with an old black topcoat they found in the
checkroom, with a velvet collar and years of dust on the
shoulders, it had been hanging there so long. "Map f~ jubile
mnan," Beauvoir said, touching the dead girl's forehead with
his thumb. He looked up at Turner. "It is a self-sacrifice,"
he translated, and then drew the black coat gently up, cover-
ing her face.
"It was fast," Turner said. He couldn't think of anything
else to say.
Beauvoir took a pack of menthol cigarettes from a pocket
in his gray robe and lit one with a gold Dunhill. He offered
Turner the pack, but Turner shook his head. "There's a
saying in creole," Beauvoir said
"What's that?''
`Evil exists.'
"Hey," said Bobby Newmark, dully, from where he
crouched by the glass doors, eye to the edge of the curtain.
"Musta worked, one way or another . . The Gothicks are
starting to leave, looks like most of the Kasuals are already
gone
"That~s good,~~ Beauvoir said, gently. "That's down to
you. Count. You did good. Earned your handle."
Turner looked at the boy. He was still moving through the
fog of Jackie's death, he decided. He'd come out from under
the trodes screaming, and Beauvoir had slapped him three
times, hard, across the face, to stop it. But all he'd said to
them, about his run, the run that had cost Jackie her life, was
that he'd given Turner's message to Jaylene Slide. Turner
watched as Bobby got up stiffly and walked to the bar; he saw
the care the boy took not to look at the stage. Had the two
been lovers? Partners? Neither seemed likely.
He got up from where he sat, on the edge of the stage, and
went back into Jammer's office, pausing to check on the
sleeping Angie, who was curled into his gutted parka on the
carpet, beneath a table. Jammer was asleep, too, in his chair,
his burned hand still on his lap, loosely enveloped in the
striped towel. Tough old mother, Turner thought, an old
jockey. The man had plugged his phone back in as soon as
Bobby had come off his run, but Conroy had never called
back. He wouldnt now, and Turner knew that that meant that
Jammer had been right about the speed with which Jaylene
would strike, to revenge Ramirez, and that Conroy was al-
most certainly dead. And now his hired army of suburban
bighairs was decamping, according to Bobby
Turner went to the phone and punched up the news recap,
and settled into a chair to watch. A hydrofoil ferry had
collided with a miniature submarine in Macau; the hydrofoil's
life jackets had proven to be substandard, and at least fifteen
people were assumed drowned, while the sub, a pleasure craft
registered in Dublin, had not yet been located. . . . Someone
had apparently used a recoilless rifle to pump a barrage of
incendiary shells into two floors of a Park Avenue co-op
building, and Fire and Tactical teams were still on the scene;
the names of the occupants had not yet been released, and so
far no one had taken credit for the act. . . . (Turner punched
this item up a second time . . ) Fission Authority research
teams at the site of the alleged nuclear explosion in Arizona
were insisting that minor levels of radioactivity detected there
were far too low to be the result of any known form of
tactical warhead. . . . In Stockholm, the death of Josef Virek,
the enormously wealthy art patron had been announced, the
announcement surfacing amid a flurry of bizarre rumors that
Virek had been ill for decades and that his death was the
result of some cataclysmic failure in the life-support systems
in a heavily guarded private clinic in a Stockholm suburb. . .
(`rurner punched this item past again, and then a third time,
frowned, and then shrugged.) For the morning's human inter-
est note, police in a New Jersey suburb said that
"Turner.
He shut the recap off and turned to find Angie in the
doorway.
"How you doing, Angie?"
"Okay. I didn't dream." She hugged the black sweatshirt
around her, peered up at him from beneath limp brown bangs.
"Bobby showed me where there's a shower. Sort of a dress-
ing room I'm going back there soon. My hair's horrible."
He went over to her and put his hands on her shoulders.
"You've handled this all pretty well. You'll be out of here,
soon."
She shrugged out of his touch. "Out of here? Where to?
Japan?"
"Well, maybe not Japan Maybe not Hosaka
~`She'll go with us," Beauvoir said, behind her.
"Why would I want to?"
"Because," Beauvoir said, "we know who you are. Those
dreams of yours are real. You met Bobby in one, and saved
his life, cut him loose from black ice. You said, `Why are
they doing that to you?' . .
Angie's eyes widened, darted to Turner and back to Beauvoir.
"It's a whole long story," Beauvoir said, "and it's open to
interpretation. But if you come with me, come back to the
Projects, our people can teach you things We can teach you
things we don't understand, but maybe you can .
"Why?"
"Because of what's in your head" Beauvoir nodded sol-
emnly, then shoved the plastic eyeglass frames back up his
nose. "You don't have to stay with us, if you don't want to.
In fact, we're only there to serve you .
"Serve me?"
`Like I said, it's a long story . . How about it, Mr.
Turner?"
Turner shrugged. He couldn't think where else she might
go, and Maas would certainly pay to either have her back or
dead, and Hosaka as well. "That might be the best way," he
said.
"I want to stay with you," she said to Turner. "I like
Jackie, but then she .
"Never mind," Turner said. "I know." I don't know
anything, he screamed silently. `I'll keep in touch .." I'll
never see you again. "But there's something I'd better tell
you, now. Your father's dead." He killed himself. "The
Maas security people killed him; he held them off while you
got the ultralight off the mesa."
"Is that true? That he held them off? I mean, I could feel
it, that he was dead, but .
`Yes," Turner said He took Conroy's black wallet from
his pocket, hung the loop around her neck. "There's a biosoft
dossier in there For when you're older It doesn't tell the
whole story. Remember that Nothing ever does .
Bobby was standing by the bar when the big guy walked
out of Jammer's office. The big guy crossed to where the girl
had been sleeping and picked up his grungy army coat, put it
on, then walked to the edge of the stage. where Jackie
laylooking so smallbeneath the black coat. The man
reached into his own coat and drew out the gun, the huge
Smith & Wesson Tactical. He opened the cylinder and ex-
tracted the shells, put the shells into hrs coat pocket, then
lay
the gun down beside Jackie's body, quiet, so it didn't make a
sound at all.
"You did good, Count," he said, turning to face Bobby,
his hands deep in the pockets of his coat
"Thanks, man." Bobby felt a surge of pride through his
numbness.
"So long, Bobby "The man crossed to the door and began
to try the various locks.
"You want out?" He hurried to the door. "Here. Jammer
showed me. You goin', dude? Where you gonna go?" And
then the door was open and Turner was walking away through
the deserted stalls.
"I don't know," he called back to Bobby "I've got to buy
eighty liters of kerosene first, then I'll think about it .
Bobby watched until he was gone, down the dead escalator
it looked like, then closed the door and relocked it. Looking
away from the stage, he crossed Jammer's to the office door
and looked in. Angie was crying, her face pressed into
Beauvoir's shoulder, and Bobby felt a stab of jealousy that
startled him. The phone was cycling, behind Beauvoir, and
Bobby saw that it was the news recap.
"Bobby," Beauvoir said, "Angela's coming to live with
us, up in the Projects, for a while. You want to come, too?"
Behind Beauvoir, on the phone screen, the face of Marsha
Newmark appeared, Marsha-momma, his mother "ning's
human interest note, police in a New Jersey suburb said that a
local woman whose condo was the target of a recent bombing
was startled when she returned last night and disco"
"Yeah," Bobby said, quickly, "sure, man."
"SHE'S GOOD," THE unit director said, two years later, dab-
bing a crust of brown village bread ihto the pool of oil at the
bottom of his salad bowl. "Really, she's very good. A quick
study. You have to give her that, don't you?"
The star laughed and picked up her glass of chilled retsina.
"You hate her, don't you, Roberts? She's too lucky for you,
isn't she? Hasn't made a wrong move yet They were
leaning on the rough stone balcony, watching the evening
boat set out for Athens. Two rooftops below, toward the
harbor, the girl lay sprawled on a sun-warmed waterbed,
naked, her arms spread out, as though she were embracing
whatever was left of the sun.
He popped the oil-soaked crust into his mouth and licked
his thin lips. "Not at all," he said `~1 don't hate her. Don't
think it for a minute."
"Her boyfriend," Tally said, as a second figure, male,
appeared on the rooftop below. The boy had dark hair and
wore loose, casually expensive French sports clothes. As they
watched, he crossed to the waterbed and crouched beside the
girl, reaching out to touch her. "She's beautiful, Roberts,
isn't she?"
"Well," the unit director said, "I've seen her `befores.'
It's surgery." He shrugged, his eyes still on the boy.
"If you've seen my `befores,"' she said, "someone will
hang for it. But she does have something. Good bones . .
She sipped her wine. "Is she the one? `The new Tally
Isham?"'
He shrugged again. "Look at that little prick," he said.
"Do you know he's drawing a salary nearly the size of mine,
now? And what exactly does he do to earn it? A bodyguard
His mouth set, thin and sour.
"He keeps her happy." Tally smiled. "We got them as a
package. It's a rider in her contract. You know that."
"I loathe that little bastard. He's right off the street and he
knows it and he doesn't care. He's trash Do you know what
he carries around in his luggage? A cyberspace deck! We
were held up for three hours yesterday, Turkish customs,
when they found the damned thing He shook his head.
The boy stood now, turned, and walked to the edge of the
roof. The girl sat up, watching him, brushing her hair back
from her eyes He stood there a long time, staring after the
wake of the Athens boats, neither Tally Isham nor the unit
director nor Angie knowing that he was seeing a gray sweep
of Barrytown condos cresting up into the dark towers of the
Projects.
The girl stood, crossed the roof to join him, taking his
hand
"What do we have tomorrow?" Tally asked finally.
"Paris." he said, taking up his Hermes clipboard from the
stone balustrade and flipping automatically through a thin
sheaf of yellow printouts. "The Kruslikhova woman."
"Do I know her?"
"No," he said. "It's an art spot. She runs one of their two
most fashionable galleries. Not much of a backgrounder,
though we do have an interesting hint of scandal, earlier in
her career."
Tally Isham nodded, ignoring him, and watched her under-
study put her arm around the boy with the dark hair.
WHEN ThE boy was seven, Turner took Rudy's old nylon-
stocked Winchester and they hiked together along the old
road, back up into the clearing.
The clearing was already a special place, because his mother
had taken him there the year before and shown him a plane, a
real plane, back in the trees. It was settling slowly into the
loam there, but you could sit in the cockpit and pretend to fly
it. It was secret, his mother said, and he could only tell his
father about it and nobody else. If you put your hand on the
plane's plastic skin, the skin would eventually change color,
leaving a handprint there, just the color of your palm. But his
mother had gotten all funny then, and cried, and wanted to
talk about his uncle Rudy, who he didn't remember. Uncle
Rudy was one of the things he didn't understand, like some of
his father's jokes. Once he'd asked his father why he had red
hair, where he'd gotten it, and his father had just laughed and
said he'd gotten it from the Dutchman. Then his mother threw
a pillow at his father, and he never did find out who the
Dutchman was.
In the clearing, his father taught him to shoot, setting up
lengths of pine against the trunk of a tree When the boy
tired of it, they lay on their backs, watching the squirrels. "I
promised Sally we wouldn't kill anything," he said, and then
explained the basic principles of squirrel hunting. The boy
listened, but part of him was daydreaming about the plane. It
was hot, and you could hear bees buzzing somewhere close,
and water over rocks. When his mother had cried, she'd said
that Rudy had been a good man, that he'd saved her
saved her once from being young and stupid, and once fri
real bad man...
"Is that true?" he asked his father when his father
through explaining about the squirrels. "They're just so di
they'll come back over and over and get shot?"
"Yes," Turner said, "it is." Then he smiled.
"almost always ."
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