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  ************ NNEEUURROOMMAANNCCEERR ************
  ****** WWIILLLLIIAAMM GGIIBBSSOONN ******

  Part _1 _2 _3 _4 _C_o_d_a




          for Deb
          who made it possible
          with love



          PART ONE
          CHIBA CITY BLUES


          1

    The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned
  to a dead channel.
    `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he
  shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the
  Chat.  `It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-
  ciency.'  It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.  The Chatsubo
  was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there
  for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
    Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto-
  nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin.  He saw
  Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel
  and brown decay.  Case found a place at the bar, between the
  unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval
  uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
  precise rows of tribal scars.  `Wage was in here early, with two
  joeboys,' Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his
  good hand.  `Maybe some business with you, Case?'
    Case shrugged.  The girl to his right giggled and nudged
  him.
    The bartender's smile widened.  His ugliness was the stuff
  of legend.  In an age of affordable beauty, there was something
  heraldic about his lack of it.  The antique arm whined as he
  reached for another mug.  It was a Russian military prosthesis,
  a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby
  pink plastic.  `You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.'  Ratz
  grunted; the sound served him as laughter.  He scratched his
  overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw.  `You are
  the artiste of the slightly funny deal.'
    `Sure,' Case said, and sipped his beer.  `Somebody's gotta
  be funny around here.  Sure the fuck isn't you.'
    The whore's giggle went up an octave.
    `Isn't you either, sister.  So you vanish, okay?  Zone, he's
  a close personal friend of mine.'
    She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible
  spitting sound, her lips barely moving.  But she left.
    `Jesus,' Case said, `what kinda creepjoint you running here?
  Man can't have a drink.'
    `Ha,' Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag,
  `Zone shows a percentage.  You I let work here for entertain-
  ment value.'
    As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange
  instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated
  conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause.
  Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
    Ratz grunted.  `An angel passed.'
    `The Chinese,' bellowed a drunken Australian, `Chinese
  bloody invented nerve-splicing.  Give me the mainland for a
  nerve job any day.  Fix you right, mate...'
    `Now that,' Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly
  rising in him like bile, `that is _so_ much bullshit.'

    The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than
  the Chinese had ever known.  The black clinics of Chiba were
  the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,
  and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that
  Memphis hotel.
    A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
  nightly.  All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the
  corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in
  his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
  void...  The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the
  Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cow-
  boy.  Just another hustler, trying to make it through.  But the
  dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo,
  and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the
  dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands
  clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fin-
  gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

    `I saw your girl last night,' Ratz said, passing Case his
  second Kirin.
    `I don't have one,' he said, and drank.
    `Miss Linda Lee.'
    Case shook his head.
    `No girl?  Nothing?  Only biz, friend artiste?  Dedication to
  commerce?'  The bartender's small brown eyes were nested
  deep in wrinkled flesh.  `I think I liked you better, with her.
  You laughed more.  Now, some night, you get maybe too ar-
  tistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.'
    `You're breaking my heart, Ratz.'  He finished his beer,
  paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-
  stained khaki nylon of his windbreaker.  Threading his way
  through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.

    Case was twenty-four.  At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy,
  a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl.  He'd been trained by
  the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the
  biz.  He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a
  byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cy-
  berspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness
  into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.  A thief,
  he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who pro-
  vided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls
  of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
    He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd
  never make.  He stole from his employers.  He kept something
  for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam.
  He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it
  mattered now.  He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.
  Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the
  money.  And he was going to need it.  Because -- still smiling --
  they were going to make sure he never worked again.
    They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian
  mycotoxin.
    Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning
  out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
    The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
    For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber-
  space, it was the Fall.  In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy
  hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt
  for the flesh.  The body was meat.  Case fell into the prison of
  his own flesh.

    His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat
  sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through
  the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells
  of the Trobriand islanders.  It was difficult to transact legitimate
  business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already
  illegal.
    In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,
  he'd find his cure.  In Chiba.  Either in a registered clinic or in
  the shadowland of black medicine.  Synonymous with implants,
  nerve-splicing, and microbionics, Chiba was a magnet for the
  Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures.
    In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month
  round of examinations and consultations.  The men in the black
  clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which
  he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.
    Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the
  port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all
  night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of
  Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering
  hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay
  was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals
  of white styrofoam.  Behind the port lay the city, factory domes
  dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies.  Port and
  city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an
  area with no official name.  Night City, with Ninsei its heart.
  By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless,
  the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned
  silver sky.

    Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre
  de Th>, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double
  espresso.  It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Bra-
  zilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls.
    The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in
  red neon.
    At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money
  and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal
  overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had
  seemed to belong to someone else.  In the first month, he'd
  killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before
  would have seemed ludicrous.  Ninsei wore him down until the
  street itself came to seem the externalization of some death
  wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
    Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
  winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
  permanently on the fast-forward button.  Stop hustling and you
  sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd
  break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either
  way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague
  memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or
  lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger
  with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
    Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the
  accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace,
  the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.
    Alone at a table in the Jarre de Th>, with the octagon coming
  on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware
  of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at
  some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very
  ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire.  He no longer
  carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions.  He ran
  the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation
  for being able to get whatever you wanted.  A part of him knew
  that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his
  customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him
  basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time.  And
  that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that
  most hated the thought of Linda Lee.
    He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.
    Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigar-
  ette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa,
  the New York skyline...  And now he remembered her that
  way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to
  a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned,
  forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank
  War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck
  sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.  He was riding
  high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way
  to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket.  He'd come
  in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement
  and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of
  the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she
  played.  The expression on her face, then, had been the one
  he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a portside coffin,
  her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in
  flight.
    Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal
  he'd made, he saw her glance up.  Gray eyes rimmed with
  smudged black paintstick.  Eyes of some animal pinned in the
  headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
    Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets
  at the hoverport and his first trip across the Bay.  The rain kept
  up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the
  children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white
  loafers and clingwrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the
  midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a
  child.
    It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved
  through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of
  reflexive need.  He'd watched her personality fragment, calving
  like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen
  the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction.  He'd watched
  her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him
  of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of
  blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.
    He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup.  It
  was vibrating with the speed he'd taken.  The brown laminate
  of the tabletop was dull with a patina of tiny scratches.  With
  the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random
  impacts required to create a surface like that.  The Jarre was
  decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century,
  an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plas-
  tics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though
  the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked
  the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface
  fogged with something that could never be wiped away.
    `Hey.  Case, good buddy...'
    He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick.  She
  was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneak-
  ers.
    `I been lookin'~ for you, man.'  She took a seat opposite
  him, her elbows on the table.  The sleeves of the blue zipsuit
  had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked
  her arms for signs of derms or the needle.  `Want a cigarette?'
    She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle
  pocket and offered him one.  He took it, let her light it with a
  red plastic tube.  `You sleepin'~ okay, Case?  You look tired.'
  Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta.
  The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but
  the flesh was still smooth and firm.  She was twenty.  New lines
  of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the
  corners of her mouth.  Her dark hair was drawn back, held by
  a band of printed silk.  The pattern might have represented
  microcircuits, or a city map.
    `Not if I remember to take my pills,' he said, as a tangible
  wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the
  wavelength of amphetamine.  He remembered the smell of her
  skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her
  fingers locked across the small of his back.
    All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.
    `Wage,' she said, narrowing her eyes.  `He wants to see
  you with a hole in your face.'  She lit her own cigarette.
    `Who says?  Ratz?  You been talking to Ratz?'
    `No.  Mona.  Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys.'
    `I don't owe him enough.  He does me, he's out the money
  anyway.'  He shrugged.
    `Too many people owe him now, Case.  Maybe you get to
  be the example.  You seriously better watch it.'
    `Sure.  How about you, Linda?  You got anywhere to sleep?'
    `Sleep.'  She shook her head.  `Sure, Case.'  She shivered,
  hunched forward over the table.  Her face was filmed with
  sweat.
    `Here,' he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker,
  coming up with a crumpled fifty.  He smoothed it automatically,
  under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her.
    `You need that, honey.  You better give it to Wage.'  There
  was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read,
  something he'd never seen there before.
    `I owe Wage a lot more than that.  Take it.  I got more
  coming,' he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a
  zippered pocket.
    `You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick.'
    `I'll see you, Linda,' he said, getting up.
    `Sure.'  A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her
  pupils.  Sanpaku.  `You watch your back, man.'
    He nodded, anxious to be gone.
    He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him,
  saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.

    Friday night on Ninsei.
    He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised
  coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an
  arcade.  He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman
  by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the
  back of the man's right hand.
    Was it authentic?  If that's for real, he thought, he's in for
  trouble.  If it wasn't, served him right.  M-G employees above
  a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors
  that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream.  Gear like
  that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a
  black clinic.
    The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was
  a gaijin crowd.  Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary
  tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies
  showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species
  of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire
  and commerce.
    There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City
  tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea
  that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of
  historical park, a reminder of humble origins.  But he also
  saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies
  require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its in-
  habitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for
  technology itself.
    Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights?
  Would Wage have him killed to make an example?  It didn't
  make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed
  biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.
    But Linda said Wage wanted him dead.  Case's primary
  insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the
  buyer nor the seller really needed him.  A middleman's business
  is to make himself a necessary evil.  The dubious niche Case
  had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City
  had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with
  betrayal.  Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble,
  he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
    The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glan-
  dular extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual.  He
  knew Wage hadn't liked that.  Wage was his primary supplier,
  nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd
  managed to forge links with the rigidly stratified criminal es-
  tablishment beyond Night City's borders.  Genetic materials and
  hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of
  fronts and blinds.  Somehow Wage had managed to trace some-
  thing back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a
  dozen cities.
    Case found himself staring through a shop window.  The
  place sold small bright objects to the sailors.  Watches, flic-
  knives, lighters, pocket VTRs, simstim decks, weighted man-
  riki chains, and shuriken.  The shuriken had always fascinated
  him, steel stars with knife-sharp points.  Some were chromed,
  others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on
  water.  But the chrome stars held his gaze.  They were mounted
  against scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon
  fishline, their centers stamped with dragons or yinyang sym-
  bols.  They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came
  to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his
  destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
    `Julie,' he said to his stars.  `Time to see old Julie.  He'll
  know.'

    Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his
  metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums
  and hormones.  His primary hedge against aging was a yearly
  pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code
  of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba.  Then he'd fly
  to Hongkong and order the year's suits and shirts.  Sexless and
  inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in
  his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship.  Case had never
  seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe
  seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of gar-
  ments of the previous century.  He affected prescription lenses,
  framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic
  quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian dollhouse.
    His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part
  of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before,
  with a random collection of European furniture, as though
  Deane had once intended to use the place as his home.  Neo-
  Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room
  where Case waited.  A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps
  perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in
  scarlet-lacquered steel.  A Dali clock hung on the wall between
  the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete
  floor.  Its hands were holograms that altered to match the con-
  volutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct
  time.  The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping
  modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
    `You seem to be clean, old son,' said Deane's disembodied
  voice.  `Do come in.'
    Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive
  imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases.  JULIUS
  DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in
  peeling self-adhesive capitals.  If the furniture scattered in
  Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century,
  the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
    Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of
  light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of
  dark green glass.  The importer was securely fenced behind a
  vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, draw-
  ered cabinets made of some sort of pale wood.  The sort of
  thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written
  records of some kind.  The desktop was littered with cassettes,
  scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of
  clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get
  around to reassembling.
    `What brings you around, boyo?' Deane asked, offering
  Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked pa-
  per.  `Try one.  Ting Ting Djahe, the very best.'  Case refused
  the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and
  ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg.  `Julie,
  I hear Wage wants to kill me.'
    `Ah.  Well then.  And where did you hear this, if I may?'
    `People.'
    `People,' Deane said, around a ginger bonbon.  `What sort
  of people?  Friends?'
    Case nodded.
    `Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?'
    `I do owe him a little money, Deane.  He say anything to
  you?'
    `Haven't been in touch, of late.'  Then he sighed.  `If I _did_
  know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you.  Things
  being what they are, you understand.'
    `Things?'
    `He's an important connection, Case.'
    `Yeah.  He want to kill me, Julie?'
    `Not that I know of.'  Deane shrugged.  They might have
  been discussing the price of ginger.  `If it proves to be an
  unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and
  I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore.'
    `Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?'
    `Loose lips, old son!'  Deane grinned.  The steel desk was
  jammed with a fortune in debugging gear.
    `Be seeing you, Julie.  I'll say hello to Wage.'
    Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his
  pale silk tie.

    He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit,
  the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass,
  and very close.
    The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something
  Case took for granted.  The trick lay in not letting it get out of
  control.  But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of
  octagons.  He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his
  narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let
  the crowd carry him along.  When he saw a darkened display
  window, he managed to pause by it.  The place was a surgical
  boutique, closed for renovations.  With his hands in the pockets
  of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of
  vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade.
  The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was
  tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous
  chip.  Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking,
  while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry
  the thing around in your pocket?
    Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied
  the reflection of the passing crowd.
    There.
    Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki.  Dark hair, mirrored
  glasses, dark clothing, slender...
    And gone.
    Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.

    `Rent me a gun, Shin?'
    The boy smiled.  `Two hour.'  They stood together in the
  smell of fresh raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall.
  `You come back, two hour.'
    `I need one now, man.  Got anything right now?'
    Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once
  been filled with powdered horseradish.  He produced a slender
  package wrapped in gray plastic.  `Taser.  One hour, twenty
  New Yen.  Thirty deposit.'
    `Shit.  I don't need that.  I need a gun.  Like I maybe wanna
  shoot somebody, understand?'
    The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horse-
  radish cans.  `Two hour.'

    He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the
  display of shuriken.  He'd never thrown one in his life.
    He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank
  chip that gave his name as Charles Derek May.  It beat Truman
  Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport.
    The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she
  had a few years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit
  of science.  He took his slender roll of New Yen out of his
  pocket and showed it to her.  `I want to buy a weapon.'
    She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
    `No,' he said, `I don't like knives.'
    She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter.  The
  lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a
  coiled cobra with a swollen hood.  Inside were eight identical
  tissue-wrapped cylinders.  He watched while mottled brown
  fingers stripped the paper from one.  She held the thing up for
  him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one
  end and a small bronze pyramid at the other.  She gripped the
  tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and
  forefinger, and pulled.  Three oiled, telescoping segments of
  tightly wound coilspring slid out and locked.  `Cobra,' she said.

    Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean
  shade of gray.  The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have
  teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks.  Case
  had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient
  way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd settled for tucking the
  handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting
  across his stomach.  The pyramidal striking tip rode between
  his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker.  The thing felt
  like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it
  made him feel better.
    The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it
  attracted a related clientele.  Fridays and Saturdays were dif-
  ferent.  The regulars were still there, most of them, but they
  faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed
  on them.  As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for
  Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight.  Lonny Zone, the bar's
  resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as
  one of his girls went to work on a young sailor.  Zone was
  addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud
  Dancers.  Catching the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the
  bar.  Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his
  long face slack and placid.
    `You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?'
    Zone regarded him with his usual calm.  He shook his head.
    `You sure, man?'
    `Maybe in the Namban.  Maybe two hours ago.'
    `Got some joeboys with him?  One of 'em thin, dark hair,
  maybe a black jacket?'
    `No,' Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to
  indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail.
  `Big boys.  Graftees.'  Zone's eyes showed very little white and
  less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and
  enormous.  He stared into Case's face for a long time, then
  lowered his gaze.  He saw the bulge of the steel whip.  `Cobra,'
  he said, and raised an eyebrow.  `You wanna fuck somebody
  up?'
    `See you, Lonny.'  Case left the bar.

    His tail was back.  He was sure of it.  He felt a stab of elation,
  the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else.
  You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy.
    Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was
  like a run in the matrix.  Get just wasted enough, find yourself
  in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and
  it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the
  matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish
  cell specialties.  Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed
  drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all
  around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made
  flesh in the mazes of the black market...
    Go it, Case, he told himself.  Suck 'em in.  Last thing they'll
  expect.  He was half a block from the games arcade where he'd
  first met Linda Lee.
    He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sail-
  ors.  One of them screamed after him in Spanish.  Then he was
  through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf,
  subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach.  Someone scored
  a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst
  drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball
  mushroomed overhead.  He cut to the right and loped up a flight
  of unpainted chipboard stairs.  He'd come here once with Wage,
  to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man
  called Matsuga.  He remembered the hallway, its stained mat-
  ting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles.
  One door was open now.  A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black
  t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a
  travel poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined
  ideograms.
    `Get your security up here,' Case told her.
    Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight.  The
  last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked.  He spun
  and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-
  lacquered composition door at the far end.  It popped, cheap
  hardware failing from the splintered frame.  Darkness there, the
  white curve of a terminal housing.  Then he was on the door
  to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob,
  leaning in with everything he had.  Something snapped, and he
  was inside.  This was where he and Wage had met with Mat-
  suga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was
  long gone.  No terminal, nothing.  Light from the alley behind
  the arcade, filtering in through sootblown plastic.  He made out
  a snakelike loop of fiberoptics protruding from a wall socket,
  a pile of discarded food containers, and the bladeless nacelle
  of an electric fan.
    The window was a single pane of cheap plastic.  He shrugged
  out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched.
  It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame.
  Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle,
  triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head
  of the corridor.
    Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to
  full extension.
    With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume
  he'd gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges.  The
  cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel
  shaft amplifying his pulse.
    Nothing happened.  There was only the surging of the alarm,
  the crashing of the games, his heart hammering.  When the fear
  came, it was like some half-forgotten friend.  Not the cold,
  rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear.
  He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd
  almost forgotten what real fear was.
    This cubicle was the sort of place where people died.  He
  might die here.  They might have guns...
    A crash, from the far end of the corridor.  A man's voice,
  shouting something in Japanese.  A scream, shrill terror.  An-
  other crash.
    And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
    Passing his closed door.  Pausing for the space of three rapid
  beats of his heart.  And returning.  One, two, three.  A bootheel
  scraped the matting.
    The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed.  He
  snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window,
  blind with fear, his nerves screaming.  He was up, out, and
  falling, all before he was conscious of what he'd done.  The
  impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.
    A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch
  framed a heap of discarded fiberoptics and the chassis of a
  junked console.  He'd fallen face forward on a slab of soggy
  chipboard; he rolled over, into the shadow of the console.  The
  cubicle's window was a square of faint light.  The alarm still
  oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the
  games.
    A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the
  fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished.  It returned, but he
  still couldn't read the features.  Glint of silver across the eyes.
  `Shit,' someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern
  Sprawl.
    The head was gone.  Case lay under the console for a long
  count of twenty, then stood up.  The steel cobra was still in his
  hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was.
  He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.

    Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of
  a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on
  the first shot, with a very rough pull.  It was chambered for .22
  long rifle, and Case would've preferred lead azide explosives
  to the simple Chinese hollowpoints Shin had sold him.  Still,
  it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he
  made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in
  his jacket pocket.  The grips were bright red plastic molded in
  a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across
  in the dark.  He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on
  Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.
    The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to
  Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu.  His tail, he'd decided, was gone,
  and that was fine.  He had calls to make, biz to transact, and
  it wouldn't wait.  A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood
  a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick.  Its
  windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was
  visible if you craned your neck.  An unlit neon sign near the
  main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideo-
  grams.  If the place had another name, Case didn't know it; it
  was always referred to as Cheap Hotel.  You reached it through
  an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a
  transparent shaft.  The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an af-
  terthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy.  Case
  climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked
  length of rigid magnetic tape.
    Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he'd
  arrived in Chiba, but he'd never slept in Cheap Hotel.  He slept
  in cheaper places.
    The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides
  of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged.  As it passed the
  fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei.  He drummed his fingers
  against the pistolgrip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss.
  As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he
  was ready for it.  He stepped out into the courtyard that served
  the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
    Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese
  teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook.
  The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of
  industrial scaffolding.  Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a
  side.
  Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic
  grass to the nearest ladder.  The compound was roofed with
  cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked
  when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open
  without a key.
    The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he
  edged his way along the third tier to Number 92.  The coffins
  were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just
  under a meter and a half tall.  He fed his key into the slot and
  waited for verification from the house computer.  Magnetic bolts
  thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak
  of springs.  Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling
  the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated
  the manual latch.
    There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi
  pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest.  The
  cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice,
  carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun
  aluminum lab flask.  Crouching on the brown temperfoam slab
  that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from his
  pocket and put it on top of the cooler.  Then he took off his
  jacket.  The coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall,
  opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages.  Case
  took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hongkong
  number from memory.  He let it ring five times, then hung up.
  His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi
  wasn't taking calls.
    He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
    A woman answered, something in Japanese.
    `Snake Man there?'
    `Very good to hear from you,' said Snake Man, coming in
  on an extension.  `I've been expecting your call.'
    `I got the music you wanted.'  Glancing at the cooler.
    `I'm very glad to hear that.  We have a cash flow problem.
  Can you front?'
    `Oh, man, I really need the money bad...'
    Snake Man hung up.
    `You shit,' Case said to the humming receiver.  He stared
  at the cheap little pistol.
    `Iffy,' he said, `it's all looking very iffy tonight.'

    Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands
  in the pockets of his jacket: one held the rented pistol, the other
  the aluminum flask.
    Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from
  a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh
  tilted against the wall on a creaking chair.  A Brazilian kid
  called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly
  silent drunks.  Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher
  and drank.  His shaven head was filmed with sweat.  `You look
  bad, friend artiste,' he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.
    `I'm doing just fine,' said Case, and grinned like a skull.
  `Super fine.'  He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands
  still in his pockets.
    `And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter
  built of booze and ups, sure.  Proof against the grosser emotions,
  yes?'
    `Why don't you get off my case, Ratz?  You seen Wage?'
    `Proof against fear and being alone,' the bartender contin-
  ued.  `Listen to the fear.  Maybe it's your friend.'
    `You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz?
  Somebody hurt?'
    `Crazy cut a security man.'  He shrugged.  `A girl, they
  say.'
    `I gotta talk to Wage.  Ratz, I...'
    `Ah.'  Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single
  line.  He was looking past Case, toward the entrance.  `I think
  you are about to.'
    Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window.
  The speed sang in his head.  The pistol in his hand was slippery
  with sweat.
    `Herr Wage,' Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manip-
  ulator as if he expected it to be shaken.  `How great a pleasure.
  Too seldom do you honor us.'
    Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face.  It
  was a tanned and forgettable mask.  The eyes were vatgrown
  sea-green Nikon transplants.  Wage wore a suit of gunmetal
  silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist.  He was
  flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men, their arms
  and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
    `How you doing, Case?'
    `Gentlemen,' said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ash-
  tray in his pink plastic claw, `I want no trouble here.'  The
  ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised
  Tsingtao beer.  Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of
  green plastic cascading onto the tabletop.  `You understand?'
    `Hey, sweetheart,' said one of the joeboys, `you wanna try
  that thing on me?'
    `Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt,' Ratz said, his tone
  conversational.  Case glanced across the room and saw the Bra-
  zilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun
  at the trio.  The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped
  with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow
  a fist.  The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges,
  subsonic sandbag jellies.
    `Technically nonlethal,' said Ratz.
    `Hey, Ratz,' Case said, `I owe you one.'
    The bartender shrugged.  `Nothing, you owe me.  These,'
  and he glowered at Wage and the joeboys, `should know better.
  You don't take anybody off in the Chatsubo.'
    Wage coughed.  `So who's talking about taking anybody
  off.  We just wanna talk business.  Case and me, we work
  together.'
    Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at
  Wage's crotch.  `I hear you wanna do me.'  Ratz's pink claw
  closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
    `Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
  you, you wig or something?  What's this shit I'm trying to kill
  you?'  Wage turned to the boy on his left.  `You two go back
  to the Namban.  Wait for me.'
    Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now en-
  tirely deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis,
  who was curled at the foot of a barstool.  The barrel of the
  Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back
  to cover Wage.  The magazine of Case's pistol clattered on the
  table.  Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out
  of the chamber.
    `Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?' Wage asked.
    Linda.
    `Who told you, man?  Somebody trying to set you up?'
    The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
    `Get him out of here,' Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting
  on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his
  lap, lighting a cigarette.
    Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a
  bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes.  He took the flask out
  of his pocket and handed it to Wage.  `All I got.  Pituitaries.
  Get you five hundred if you move it fast.  Had the rest of my
  roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now.'
    `You okay, Case?'  The flask had already vanished behind
  a gunmetal lapel.  `I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look
  bad.  Like hammered shit.  You better go somewhere and sleep.'
    `Yeah.'  He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him.
  `Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody.'  He giggled.
  He picked up the .22's magazine and the one loose cartridge
  and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the
  other.  `I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back.'
    `Go home,' said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with
  something like embarrassment.  `Artiste.  Go home.'
    He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered
  his way past the plastic doors.

    `Bitch,' he said to the rose tint over Shiga.  Down on Ninsei
  the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon
  was already cold and dead.  He sipped thick black coffee from
  a street vendor's foam thimble and watched the sun come up.
  `You fly away, honey.  Towns like this are for people who like
  the way down.'  But that wasn't it, really, and he was finding
  it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal.  She just
  wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy
  it for her, if she could find the right fence.  And that business
  with the fifty; she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was
  about to rip him for the rest of what he had.
    When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on
  the desk.  Different textbook.  `Good buddy,' Case called across
  the plastic turf, `you don't need to tell me.  I know already.
  Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key.  Nice little tip
  for you, say fifty New ones?'  The boy put down his book.
  `Woman,' Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
  his thumb.  `Silk.'  He smiled broadly.  The boy smiled back,
  nodded.  `Thanks, asshole,' Case said.
    On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock.  She'd messed
  it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought.  Beginner.
  He knew where to rent a blackbox that would open anything
  in Cheap Hotel.  Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.
    `Close the hatch real slow, friend.  You still got that Saturday
  night special you rented from the waiter?'
    She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin.
  She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox
  muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.
    `That you in the arcade?'  He pulled the hatch down.
  `Where's Linda?'
    `Hit that latch switch.'
    He did.
    `That your girl?  Linda?'
    He nodded.
    `She's gone.  Took your Hitachi.  Real nervous kid.  What
  about the gun, man?'  She wore mirrored glasses.  Her clothes
  were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temperfoam.
    `I took it back to Shin, got my deposit.  Sold his bullets
  back to him for half what I paid.  You want the money?'
    `No.'
    `Want some dry ice?  All I got, right now.'
    `What got into you tonight?  Why'd you pull that scene at
  the arcade?  I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with
  nunchucks.'
    `Linda said you were gonna kill me.'
    `Linda said?  I never saw her before I came up here.'
    `You aren't with Wage?'
    She shook her head.  He realized that the glasses were sur-
  gically inset, sealing her sockets.  The silver lenses seemed to
  grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by
  dark hair cut in a rough shag.  The fingers curled around the
  fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy.
  The nails looked artificial.  `I think you screwed up, Case.  I
  showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.'
    `So what do you want, lady?'  He sagged back against the
  hatch.
    `You.  One live body, brains still somewhat intact.  Molly,
  Case.  My name's Molly.  I'm collecting you for the man I work
  for.  Just wants to talk; is all.  Nobody wants to hurt you.'
    `That's good.'
    `'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case.  I guess it's just
  the way I'm wired.'  She wore tight black gloveleather jeans
  and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed
  to absorb light.  `If I put this dartgun away, will you be easy,
  Case?  You look like you like to take stupid chances.'
    `Hey, I'm very easy.  I'm a pushover, no problem.'
    `That's fine, man.'  The fletcher vanished into the black
  jacket.  `Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be
  taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life.'
    She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly
  spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-
  centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the
  burgundy nails.
    She smiled.  The blades slowly withdrew.



          2

    After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor
  of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous.  It was ten meters by
  eight, half of a suite.  A white Braun coffeemaker steamed on
  a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow
  balcony.
    `Get some coffee in you.  Look like you need it.'  She took
  off her black jacket; the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a
  black nylon shoulder rig.  She wore a sleeveless gray pullover
  with plain steel zips across each shoulder.  Bulletproof.  Case
  decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug.  His arms and
  legs felt like they were made out of wood.
    `Case.'  He looked up, seeing the man for the first time.
  `My name is Armitage.'  The dark robe was open to the waist,
  the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and
  hard.  Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach.  `Sun's
  up, Case.  This is your lucky day, boy.'
    Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked
  the scalding coffee.  Brown stain running down the imitation
  ricepaper wall.  He saw the angular gold ring through the left
  lobe.  Special Forces.  The man smiled.
    `Get your coffee, Case,' Molly said.  `You re okay, but
  you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say.'  She sat
  crosslegged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher
  without bothering to look at it.  Twin mirrors tracking as he
  crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
    `Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?'  Ar-
  mitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair.
  A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist.  `Leningrad, Kiev,
  Siberia.  We invented you in Siberia, Case.'
    `What's that supposed to mean?'
    `Screaming Fist, Case.  You've heard the name.'
    `Some kind of run, wasn't it?  Tried to burn this Russian
  nexus with virus programs.  Yeah, I heard about it.  And nobody
  got out.'
    He sensed abrupt tension.  Armitage walked to the window
  and looked out over Tokyo Bay.  `That isn't true.  One unit
  made it back to Helsinki, Case.'
    Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
    `You're a console cowboy.  The prototypes of the programs
  you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming
  Fist.  For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus.  Basic
  module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a
  jockey.  We were running a virus called Mole.  The Mole series
  was the first generation of real intrusion programs.'
    `Icebreakers,' Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
    `Ice from _ICE,_ intrusion countermeasures electronics.'
    `Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just
  be going...'
    `I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your
  kind.'
    `You got zip to do with me and my kind buddy.  You're
  rich enough to hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here,
  is all.  I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or
  anybody else.'  He crossed to the window and looked down.
  `That's where I live now.'
    `Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
  you when you're not looking.'
    `Profile?'
    `We've built up a detailed model.  Bought a go-to for each
  of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software.
  You're suicidal, Case.  The model gives you a month on the
  outside.  And our medical projection says you'll need a new
  pancreas inside a year.'
    ``We.''  He met the faded blue eyes.  ``We' who?'
    `What would you say if I told you we could correct your
  neural damage, Case?'  Armitage suddenly looked to Case as
  if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously
  heavy.  A statue.  He knew now that this was a dream, and that
  soon he'd wake.  Armitage wouldn't speak again.  Case's dreams
  always ended in these freezeframes, and now this one was
  over.
    `What would you say, Case?'
    Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
    `I'd say you were full of shit.'
    Armitage nodded.
    `Then I'd ask what your terms were.'
    `Not very different than what you're used to, Case.'
    `Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,' Molly said from
  her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk
  like some expensive puzzle.  `He's coming apart at the seams.'
    `Terms,' Case said, `and now.  Right now.'
    He was still shivering.  He couldn't stop shivering.

    The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster
  of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens.  He re-
  membered the place from the round he'd made his first month
  in Chiba.
    `Scared, Case.  You're real scared.'  It was Sunday afternoon
  and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard.  White boulders,
  a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves.
  A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the
  bamboo.
    `It'll work Case.  You got no idea, the kind of stuff Ar-
  mitage has.  Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing
  you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do
  it.  He'll put them three years ahead of the competition.  You
  got any idea what that's worth?'  She hooked thumbs in the
  beltloops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the
  lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots.  The narrow toes
  were sheathed in bright Mexican silver.  The lenses were empty
  quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
    `You're street samurai,' he said.  `How long you work for
  him?'
    `Couple of months.'
    `What about before that?'
    `For somebody else.  Working girl, you know?'
    He nodded.
    `Funny, Case.'
    `What's funny?'
    `It's like I know you.  That profile he's got.  I know how
  you're wired.'
    `You don't know me, sister.'
    `You're okay, Case.  What got you, it's just called bad luck.'
    `How about him?  He okay, Molly?'  The robot crab moved
  toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel.  Its
  bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old.  When
  it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then
  froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
    `What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet
  ass.'  The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked
  it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the
  carapace.  The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon
  righted it.
    Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry
  of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes.  He began to
  search his pockets for cigarettes.  `In your shirt,' she said.
    `You want to answer my question?'  He fished a wrinkled
  Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab
  of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an op-
  erating table.
    `Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
  He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
  gets more all the time.'  Case noticed a certain tension around
  her mouth.  `Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...'
  She shrugged.
    `What's that mean?'
    `I don't know, exactly.  I know I don't know who or what
  we're really working for.'
    He stared at the twin mirrors.  Leaving the Hilton, Saturday
  morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours.
  Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's
  security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the
  chainlink.  If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it.
  He'd avoided Night City.  He'd waited in the coffin for Ar-
  mitage's call.  Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this
  girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
    `If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to
  meet you.'  The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the
  clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.

    Cold steel odor.  Ice caressed his spine.
    Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image
  fading down corridors of television sky.
    Voices.
    Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves,
  pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given...

    Hold still.  Don't move.
    And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone,
  a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and
  whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chainlink
  and the prison of the skull.
    Goddamn don't you move.
    Where the sky faded from hissing static to the noncolor of
  the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
    `Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!'
    She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one
  hand.  `You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat.  You're
  still full of endorphin inhibitors.'

    He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
    His neck was brittle, made of twigs.  There was a steady
  pulse of pain midway down his spine.  Images formed and
  reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and
  ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the
  shade beneath a bridge or overpass...
    `Case?  It's Wednesday, Case.'  She moved, rolling over,
  reaching across him.  A breast brushed his upper arm.  He heard
  her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink.  `Here.'
  She put the bottle in his hand.  `I can see in the dark, Case.
  Microchannel image-amps in my glasses.'
    `My back hurts.'
    `That's where they replaced your fluid.  Changed your blood,
  too.  Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal.
  And some new tissue patched into your liver.  The nerve stuff,
  I dunno.  Lot of injections.  They didn't have to open anything
  up for the main show.'  She settled back beside him.  `It's
  2:43:12 AM, Case.  Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve.'
    He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle.  Gagged, coughed,
  lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.
    `I gotta punch deck,' he heard himself say.  He was groping
  for his clothes.  `I gotta know...'
    She laughed.  Small strong hands gripped his upper arms.
  `Sorry, hotshot.  Eight day wait.  Your nervous system would
  fall out on the floor if you jacked in now.  Doctor's orders.
  Besides, they figure it worked.  Check you in a day or so.'  He
  lay down again.
    `Where are we?'
    `Home.  Cheap Hotel.'
    `Where's Armitage?'
    `Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something.  We're
  out of here soon, man.  Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the
  Sprawl.'  She touched his shoulder.  `Roll over.  I give a good
  massage.'
    He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his
  fingers against the walls of the coffin.  She settled over the
  small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather
  jeans cool against his skin.  Her fingers brushed his neck.
    `How come you're not at the Hilton?'
    She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs,
  and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger.
  She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him,
  her other hand on his neck.  The leather of her jeans creaked
  softly with the movement.  Case shifted, feeling himself harden
  against the temperfoam.
    His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed
  to retreat.  He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back
  against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small
  hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek.  He found the zip on
  the leather jeans and tugged it down.
    `It's okay,' she said, `I can see.'  Sound of the jeans peeling
  down.  She struggled beside him until she could kick them away.
  She threw a leg across him and he touched her face.  Unexpected
  hardness of the implanted lenses.  `Don't,' she said, `finger-
  prints.'
    Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it
  over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers
  spread across the labia.  As she began to lower herself, the
  images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriv-
  ing and receding.  She slid down around him and his back arched
  convulsively.  She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping
  down on him again and again, until they both had come, his
  orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the
  matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down
  hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet
  against his hips.

    On Ninsei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went
  through the motions of the dance.  Waves of sound rolled from
  the arcades and pachinko parlors.  Case glanced into the Chat
  and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smell-
  ing twilight.  Ratz was tending bar.
    `You seen Wage, Ratz?'
    `Not tonight.'  Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at
  Molly.
    `You see him, tell him I got his money.'
    `Luck changing, my artiste?'
    `Too soon to tell.'

    `Well, I gotta see this guy,' Case said, watching his re-
  flection in her glasses.  `I got biz to cancel out of.'
    `Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight.'  She
  stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
    `The guy won't talk to me if you're there.  Deane I don't
  give two shits about.  He takes care of himself.  But I got people
  who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold.  It's my people,
  you know?'
    Her mouth hardened.  She shook her head.
    `I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku
  and Asakuza, and they'll go _down,_ understand?' he lied, his
  hand on the shoulder of her black jacket.  `Five.  Five minutes.
  By your clock, okay?'
    `Not what I'm paid for.'
    `What you're paid for is one thing.  Me letting some tight
  friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is
  something else.'
    `Bullshit.  Tight friends my ass.  You're going in there to
  check us out with your smuggler.'  She put a booted foot up
  on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.
    `Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion
  there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of
  silicon in her head.  What is this about, exactly?'  Deane's ghostly
  cough seemed to hang in the air between them.
    `Hold on, Julie.  Anyway, I'll be coming in alone.'
    `You can be sure of that, old son.  Wouldn't have it any
  other way.'
    `Okay,' she said.  `Go.  But five minutes.  Any more and
  I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently.  And while
  you're at it, you try to figure something out.'
    `What's that?'
    `Why I'm doing you the favor.'  She turned and walked
  out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
    `Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?' asked Julie.
    `Julie, she's gone.  You wanna let me in?  Please, Julie?'
    The bolts worked.  `Slowly, Case,' said the voice.
    `Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,' Case
  said, taking his place in the swivel chair.
    `It's on all the time,' Deane said mildly, taking a gun from
  behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and
  aiming it carefully at Case.  It was a belly gun, a magnum
  revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub.  The front of the
  trigger guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with
  what looked like old masking tape.  Case thought it looked very
  strange in Dean's manicured pink hands.  `Just taking care, you
  understand.  Nothing personal.  Now tell me what you want.'
    `I need a history lesson, Julie.  And a go-to on somebody.'
    `What's moving, old son?'  Deane's shirt was candy-striped
  cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
    `Me, Julie.  I'm leaving.  Gone.  But do me the favor, okay?'
    `Go-to on whom, old son?'
    `Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.'
    Deane put the pistol down.  `Sit still, Case.'  He tapped
  something out on a lap terminal.  `It seems as though you know
  as much as my net does, Case.  This gentleman seems to have
  a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the
  neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from
  the likes of me.  I wouldn't have it any other way.  Now, history.
  You said history.'  He picked up the gun again, but didn't point
  it directly at Case.  `What sort of history?'
    `The war.  You in the war, Julie?'
    `The war?  What's there to know?  Lasted three weeks.'
    `Screaming Fist.'
    `Famous.  Don't they teach you history these days?  Great
  bloody postwar political football, that was.  Watergated all to
  hell and back.  Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in,
  where was it, McLean?  In the bunkers, all of that... great
  scandal.  Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to
  test some new technology.  They knew about the Russians'~ de-
  fenses, it came out later.  Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse
  weapons.  Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.'  Deane
  shrugged.  `Turkey shoot for Ivan.'
    `Any of those guys make it out?'
    `Christ,' Deane said, `it's been bloody years...  Though
  I do think a few did.  One of the teams.  Got hold of a Sov
  gunship.  Helicopter, you know.  Flew it back to Finland.  Didn't
  have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish
  defense forces in the process.  Special Forces types.'  Deane
  sniffed.  `Bloody hell.'
    Case nodded.  The smell of preserved ginger was over-
  whelming.
    `I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,' Deane said, putting
  the gun down.  `Lovely place, Lisbon.'
    `In the service, Julie?'
    `Hardly.  Though I did see action.'  Deane smiled his pink
  smile.  `Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets.'
    `Thanks, Julie.  I owe you one.'
    `Hardly, Case.  And goodbye.'

    And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had
  felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly
  along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket
  stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it.  Linda's death, wait-
  ing...
    They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and
  paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen.
  Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had
  grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity,
  obviously longing for one of them to make a move.  Then he'd
  taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
    `Wasting your time, cowboy,' Molly said, when Case took
  an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
    `How's that?  You want one?'  He held the pill out to her.
    `Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver.
  Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.'  She tapped
  the octagon with one burgundy nail.  `You're biochemically
  incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.'
    `Shit,' he said.  He looked at the octagon, then at her.
    `Eat it.  Eat a dozen.  Nothing'll happen.'
    He did.  Nothing did.
    Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
    `Sammi's,' Ratz said.
    `I'll pass,' Case said, `I hear they kill each other down
  there.'
    An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai
  in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
    Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse,
  taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables.  The
  corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock pre-
  serving the pressure differential that supported the dome.  Flu-
  orescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals,
  but most of them had been broken.  The air was damp and close
  with the smell of sweat and concrete.
    None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the
  tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome.
  Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised
  circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear.  No
  light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the
  ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below.  Strata
  of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck
  currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome.  No
  sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified
  breathing of the fighters.
    Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men
  circled.  The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten,
  the knives they held were just under a meter long.  The knife-
  fighter's grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers
  curled, thumb aligned with blade.  The knives seemed to move
  of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through
  the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the
  men waited for an opening.  Molly's upturned face was smooth
  and still, watching.
    `I'll go find us some food,' Case said.  She nodded, lost in
  contemplation of the dance.
    He didn't like this place.
    He turned and walked back into the shadows.  Too dark.
  Too quiet.
    The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese.  Not really a Night
  City crowd.  Techs down from the arcologies.  He supposed that
  meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational
  committee.  He wondered briefly what it would be like, working
  all your life for one zaibatsu.  Company housing, company
  hymn, company funeral.
    He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found
  the food stalls.  He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall
  waxy cartons of beer.  Glancing up at the holograms, he saw
  that blood laced one figure's chest.  Thick brown sauce trickled
  down the skewers and over his knuckles.
    Seven days and he'd jack in.  If he closed his eyes now,
  he'd see the matrix.
    Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
    Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders.  A cold
  trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs.  The
  operation hadn't worked.  He was still here, still meat, no Molly
  waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage
  waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and
  money.  It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy...  Hot
  tears blurred his vision.
    Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light.  And
  now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming -- as one fig-
  ure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering...
    Raw edge of vomit in his throat.  He closed his eyes, took
  a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him,
  her gray eyes blind with fear.  She wore the same French fa-
  tigues.
    And gone.  Into shadow.
    Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down
  and ran after her.  He might have called her name, but he'd
  never be sure.
    Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light.  Seared
  concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
    Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now,
  and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye,
  bobbing in his vision as he ran.
    Someone tripped him.  Concrete tore his palms.
    He rolled and kicked, failing to connect.  A thin boy, spiked
  blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning
  over him.  Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high,
  to the cheering crowd.  The boy smiled and drew something
  from his sleeve.  A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked
  past them into the dark.  Case saw the razor dipping for his
  throat like a dowser's wand.
    The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic
  explosions.  Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second.
  The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's
  legs.
    He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows.  He
  looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from
  his chest.  Nothing.  He found her.  She was thrown down at the
  foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed.  There was a smell of
  cooked meat.  The crowd was chanting the winner's name.  A
  beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag.  One white
  sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
    Follow the wall.  Curve of concrete.  Hands in pockets.  Keep
  walking.  Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's
  image above the ring.  Once a seamed European face danced
  in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a
  metal pipe.  Tang of hashish.  Case walked on, feeling nothing.
    `Case.'  Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow.  `You
  okay?'
    Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.
    He shook his head.
    `Fight's over, Case.  Time to go home.'
    He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where some-
  thing was dying.  She stopped him with a hand on his chest.
  `Friends of your tight friend.  Killed your girl for you.  You
  haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you?  We
  got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man.
  He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones.  The one back there
  said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM.
  Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it.  Save a little
  money...  I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about
  it.  Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure.'  Her
  mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.
    Case felt as though his brain were jammed.  `Who,' he said,
  `who sent them?'
    She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger.
  He saw that her hands were sticky with blood.  Back in the
  shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

    After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him
  to the port.  Armitage was waiting.  He'd chartered a hovercraft.
  The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcol-
  ogies.  Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting
  shoals of waste.



          PART TWO
          THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION


          3

    Home.
    Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Met-
  ropolitan Axis.
    Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every
  thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen.
  Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white.  Then they start to
  pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation.
  Your map is about to go nova.  Cool it down.  Up your scale.
  Each pixel a million megabytes.  At a hundred million mega-
  bytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in
  midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial
  parks ringing the old core of Atlanta...

    Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers
  moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol,
  Orly...  He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish
  vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.
    Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a
  train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel.  The train
  itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but dis-
  placed air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics.
  Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to
  rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
    Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach
  across an expanse of very new pink temperfoam.  Overhead,
  sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight.
  One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chip-
  board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few
  centimeters of the floor.  He lay on his side and watched her
  breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the
  functional elegance of a war plane's fusilage.  Her body was
  spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's.
    The room was large.  He sat up.  The room was empty, aside
  from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and
  identical, that lay beside it.  Blank walls, no windows, a single
  white-painted steel firedoor.  The walls were coated with count-
  less layers of white latex paint.  Factory space.  He knew this
  kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate
  in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite
  art.
    He was home.
    He swung his feet to the floor.  It was made of little blocks
  of wood, some missing, others loose.  His head ached.  He
  remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section
  of the Centrum, buildings centuries old.  Molly back from the
  canal's edge with orange juice and eggs.  Armitage off on some
  cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square
  to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare.  Paris was a
  blurred dream.  Shopping.  She'd taken him shopping.
    He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that
  lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags.  The first one he
  opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expen-
  sive-looking gadgets.  The second was stuffed with things he
  didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim deck, clothing
  with French and Italian labels.  Beneath a green t-shirt, he
  discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese
  paper.
    The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed
  star fell -- to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
    `Souvenir,' Molly said.  `I noticed you were always looking
  at 'em.'  He turned and saw her sitting crosslegged on the bed,
  sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.

    `Someone's coming later to secure the place,' Armitage
  said.  He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned
  magnetic key in his hand.  Molly was making coffee on a tiny
  German stove she took from her bag.
    `I can do it,' she said.  `I got enough gear already.  Infrascan
  perimeter, screamers...'
    `No,' he said, closing the door.  `I want it tight.'
    `Suit yourself.'  She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into
  baggy black cotton pants.
    `You ever the heat, Mr.~ Armitage?' Case asked, from where
  he sat, his back against a wall.
    Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoul-
  ders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway.  He
  wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase
  of soft black calf.  The Special Forces earring was gone.  The
  handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of
  the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past
  decade's leading media faces.  The pale glitter of his eyes
  heightened the effect of a mask.  Case began to regret the ques-
  tion.
    `Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean.  Or corporate
  security,' Case added uncomfortably.  Molly handed him a
  steaming mug of coffee.  `That number you had them do on
  my pancreas, that's like a cop routine.'
    Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in
  front of Case.  `You're a lucky boy, Case.  You should thank
  me.'
    `Should I?'  Case blew noisily on his coffee.
    `You needed a new pancreas.  The one we bought for you
  frees you from a dangerous dependency.'
    `Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.'
    `Good, because you have a new one.'
    `How's that?'  Case looked up from his coffee.  Armitage
  was smiling.
    `You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various
  main arteries, Case.  They're dissolving.  Very slowly, but they
  definitely are dissolving.  Each one contains a mycotoxin.  You're
  already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin.  It was the
  one your former employers gave you in Memphis.'
    Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
    `You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but
  that's all.  Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that
  will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs.  Then you'll
  need a blood change.  Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back
  where I found you.  So you see, Case, you need us.  You need
  us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter.'
    Case looked at Molly.  She shrugged.
    `Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases
  you find there.'  Armitage handed him the magnetic key.  `Go
  on.  You'll enjoy this, Case.  Like Christmas morning.'

    Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind-
  blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies
  of need and gratification.
    He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry
  concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapi-
  tulate the stages of his life.  First a child with hooded eyes, a
  street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager,
  face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses.  Case remembered
  fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose
  glow of the dawn geodesics.
    He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through
  the thin black denim.  Nothing here like the electric dance of
  Ninsei.  This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in
  the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.
    With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai
  Cyberspace 7.  They'd left the place littered with the abstract
  white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic
  film and hundreds of tiny foam beads.  The Ono-Sendai; next
  year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a
  dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.  Ar-
  mitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
    `Where'd he go?'  Case had asked Molly.
    `He likes hotels.  Big ones.  Near airports, if he can manage
  it.  Let's go down to the street.'  She'd zipped herself into an
  old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on
  a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered
  her mirrored insets.
    `You know about that toxin shit, before?' he asked her, by
  the fountain.  She shook her head.  `You think it's true?'
    `Maybe, maybe not.  Works either way.'
    `You know any way I can find out?'
    `No,' she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive
  for silence.  `That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a
  scan.'  Then her fingers moved again: wait.  `And you don't
  care that much anyway.  I saw you stroking that Sendai; man,
  it was pornographic.'  She laughed.
    `So what's he got on you?  How's he got the working girl
  kinked?'
    `Professional pride, baby, that's all.'  And again the sign
  for silence.  `We're gonna get some breakfast, okay?  Eggs, real
  bacon.  Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba
  krill for so long.  Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan
  and get us a real breakfast.'

    Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty
  capitals of glass tubing.  Case picked at a shred of bacon that
  had lodged between his front teeth.  He'd given up asking her
  where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign
  for silence were all he'd gotten in reply.  She talked about the
  season's fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in
  California he'd never heard of.
    He looked around the deserted dead end street.  A sheet of
  newsprint went cartwheeling past the intersection.  Freak winds
  in the East side; something to do with convection, and an
  overlap in the domes.  Case peered through the window at the
  dead sign.  Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl, he decided.  She'd
  led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before,
  taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.
  Maintaining connections.
    Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO
  HOLOGRAFIX.
    The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing.  In front of it,
  Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that
  he couldn't follow.  He caught the sign for _cash,_ a thumb brush-
  ing the tip of the forefinger.  The door swung inward and she
  led him into the smell of dust.  They stood in a clearing, dense
  tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves
  of crumbling paperbacks.  The junk looked like something that
  had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic.  He
  could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur
  back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded
  with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish an-
  tenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of
  alloy tubing.  An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded
  into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as
  he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted
  scrap.  He heard the door close behind them.  He didn't look
  back.
    The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across
  a doorway.  White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
    Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match,
  floored with white hospital tile molded in a nonslip pattern of
  small raised disks.  In the center stood a square, white-painted
  wooden table and four white folding chairs.
    The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind
  them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to
  have been designed in a wind tunnel.  His ears were very small,
  plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth,
  revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, were canted
  sharply backward.  He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held
  a handgun of some kind in his left hand.  He peered at them,
  blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket.  He gestured
  to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the
  doorway.  Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich
  of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick.  He helped the man lift
  it and position it in the doorway.  Quick, nicotine-stained fingers
  secured it with a white velcro border.  A hidden exhaust fan
  began to purr.
    `Time,' the man said, straightening up, `and counting.  You
  know the rate, Moll.'
    `We need a scan, Finn.  For implants.'
    `So get over there between the pylons.  Stand on the tape.
  Straighten up, yeah.  Now turn around, gimme a full three-
  sixty.'  Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking
  stands studded with sensors.  The man took a small monitor
  from his pocket and squinted at it.  `Something new in your
  head, yeah.  Silicon, coat of pyrolitic carbons.  A clock, right?
  Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp is-
  otropic carbons.  Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but
  that's your business, right?  Same with your claws.'
    `Get over here, Case.'  He saw a scuffed X in black on the
  white floor.  `Turn around.  Slow.'
    `Guy's a virgin.'  The man shrugged.  `Some cheap dental
  work, is all.'
    `You read for biologicals?'  Molly unzipped her green vest
  and took off the dark glasses.
    `You think this is the Mayo?  Climb on the table, kid, we'll
  run a little biopsy.'  He laughed, showing more of his yellow
  teeth.  `Nah.  Finn's word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs,
  no cortex bombs.  You want me to shut the screen down?'
    `Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn.  Then we'll
  want full screen for as long as we want it.'
    `Hey, that's fine by the Finn, Moll.  You're only paying by
  the second.'
    They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of
  the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed
  forearms.  `We talk now.  This is as private as I can afford.'
    `What about?'
    `What we're doing.'
    `What are we doing?'
    `Working for Armitage.'
    `And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?'
    `Yeah.  I saw your profile, Case.  And I've seen the rest of
  our shopping list, once.  You ever work with the dead?'
    `No.'  He watched his reflection in her glasses.  `I could.  I
  guess.  I'm good at what I do.'  The present tense made him
  nervous.
    `You know that the Dixie Flatline's dead?'
    He nodded.  `Heart, I heard.'
    `You'll be working with his construct.'  She smiled.  `Taught
  you the ropes, huh?  Him and Quine.  I know Quine, by the
  way.  Real asshole.'
    `Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley?  Who?'
  Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table.  `I can't see
  it.  He'd never have sat still for it.'
    `Sense/Net.  Paid him mega, you bet your ass.'
    `Quine dead too?'
    `No such luck.  He's in Europe.  He doesn't come into this.'
    `Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free.  He was
  the best.  You know he died braindeath three times?'
    She nodded.
    `Flatlined on his EEG.  Showed me tapes.  Boy, I was _daid.'_
    `Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing
  Armitage since I signed on.  But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu,
  a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary.  Armitage gets or-
  ders.  Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a
  pillhead who's making one last wobble through the burnout
  belt, and trade a program for the operation that'll fix him up.
  We coulda bought twenty world class cowboys for what the
  market was ready to pay for that surgical program.  You were
  good, but not _that_ good...'  She scratched the side of her
  nose.
    `Obviously makes sense to somebody,' he said.  `Some-
  body big.'
    `Don't let me hurt your feelings.'  She grinned.  `We're
  gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flat-
  line's construct.  Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault up-
  town.  Tighter than an eel's ass, Case.  Now, Sense/Net, they
  got all their new material for the fall season locked in there
  too.  Steal that and we'd be richer than shit.  But no, we gotta
  get us the Flatline and nothing else.  Weird.'
    `Yeah, it's all weird.  You're weird, this hole's weird, and
  who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?'
    `Finn's an old connection of mine.  Fence, mostly.  Software.
  This privacy biz is a sideline.  But I got Armitage to let him
  be our tech here, so when he shows up later, you never saw
  him.  Got it?'
    `So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?'
    `I'm an easy make.'  She smiled.  `Anybody any good at
  what they do, that's what they _are,_ right?  You gotta jack, I
  gotta tussle.'
    He stared at her.  `So tell me what you know about Armi-
  tage.'
    `For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any
  Screaming Fist.  I checked.  But that doesn't mean much.  He
  doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out.'  She
  shrugged.  `Big deal.  And starters is all I got.'  She drummed
  her nails on the back of the chair.  `But you _are_ a cowboy,
  aren't you?  I mean, maybe you could have a little look around.'
  She smiled.
    `He'd kill me.'
    `Maybe.  Maybe not.  I think he needs you, Case, and real
  bad.  Besides, you're a clever john, no?  You can winkle him,
  sure.'
    `What else is on that list you mentioned?'
    `Toys.  Mostly for you.  And one certified psychopath name
  of Peter Riviera.  Real ugly customer.'
    `Where's he?'
    `Dunno.  But he's one sick fuck, no lie.  I saw his profile.'
  She made a face.  `Godawful.'  She stood up and stretched,
  catlike.  `So we got an axis going, boy?  We're together in this?
  Partners?'
    Case looked at her.  `I gotta lotta choice, huh?'
    She laughed.  `You got it, cowboy.'


    `The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said
  the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military ex-
  perimentation with cranial jacks.'  On the Sony, a two-dimen-
  sional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically
  generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of log-
  arithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab
  animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con-
  trol circuits of tanks and war planes.  `Cyberspace.  A consen-
  sual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
  operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathe-
  matical concepts...  A graphic representation of data abstracted
  from the banks of every computer in the human system.  Un-
  thinkable complexity.  Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of
  the mind, clusters and constellations of data.  Like city lights,
  receding...'
    `What's that?' Molly asked, as he flipped the channel se-
  lector.
    `Kid's show.'  A discontinuous flood of images as the se-
  lector cycled.  `Off,' he said to the Hosaka.
    `You want to try now, Case?'
    Wednesday.  Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with
  Molly beside him.  `You want me to go out, Case?  Maybe
  easier for you, alone...'  He shook his head.
    `No.  Stay, doesn't matter.'  He settled the black terry sweat-
  band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai
  dermatrodes.  He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing
  it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed
  shuriken burning with reflected neon.  He glanced up; on the
  wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there
  with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.
    He closed his eyes.
    Found the ridged face of the power stud.
    And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
  boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
  past like film compiled from random frames.  Symbols, figures,
  faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
    Please, he prayed, _now --_
    A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
    _Now --_
    Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler
  gray.  Expanding --
    And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the
  unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent
  3D chessboard extending to infinity.  Inner eye opening to the
  stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Au-
  thority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
  America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
  of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
    And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
  distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
  face.

    Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft
  was dark.  He checked the time.  He'd been in cyberspace for
  five hours.  He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new work-
  tables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black
  silk sleeping bag over his head.
    The security package taped to the steel firedoor bleeped
  twice.  `Entry requested,' it said.  `Subject is cleared per my
  program.'
    `So open it.'  Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up
  as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.
    `Christ,' said a hoarse voice, `I know that bitch can see in
  the dark...'  A squat figure stepped in and closed the door.
  `Turn the lights on, okay?'  Case scrambled off the slab and
  found the old-fashioned switch.
    `I'm the Finn,' said the Finn, and made a warning face at
  Case.
    `Case.'
    `Pleased to meecha, I'm sure.  I'm doing some hardware
  for your boss, it looks like.'  The Finn fished a pack of Partagas
  from a pocket and lit one.  The smell of Cuban tobacco filled
  the room.  He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-
  Sendai.  `Looks stock.  Soon fix that.  But here's your problem,
  kid.'  He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket,
  flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rec-
  tangle from the envelope.  `Goddamn factory prototypes,' he
  said, tossing the thing down on the table.  `Cast 'em into a
  block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying
  the works.  Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows
  what else.  We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked,
  right?'  He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it
  away in an inside pocket.
    `What is it?'
    `It's a flipflop switch, basically.  Wire it into your Sendai
  here, you can access live or recorded simstim without having
  to jack out of the matrix.'
    `What for?'
    `I haven't got a clue.  Know I'm fitting Moll for a broadcast
  rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access.'  The
  Finn scratched his chin.  `So now you get to find out just how
  tight those jeans really are, huh?'



          4

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

    Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the
  Hosaka's precis.  The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contem-
  porary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens.  There
  was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl,
  something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived
  subcults and replicated them at odd intervals.  The Panther Mod-
  erns were a softhead variant on the Scientists.  If the technology
  had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sock-
  ets stuffed with microsofts.  It was the style that mattered and
  the style was the same.  The Moderns were mercenaries, prac-
  tical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.
    The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of
  diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo.
  His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-
  cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous.  It was one of
  the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen.  When
  Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large
  animal, Case was actually relieved.  Toothbud transplants.  He'd
  seen that before.
    `You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you,' Molly
  said.  Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net
  ice.
    This was it.  This was what he was, who he was, his being.
  He forgot to eat.  Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of
  sushi on the corner of the long table.  Sometimes he resented
  having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set
  up in a corner of the loft.  Ice patterns formed and reformed on
  the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious
  traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice.
  It was good ice.  Wonderful ice.  Its patterns burned there while
  he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red
  dawn through the steel grid of the skylight.  Its rainbow pixel
  maze was the first thing he saw when he woke.  He'd go straight
  to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in.  He was cutting
  it.  He was working.  He lost track of days.
    And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was
  off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of
  Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back.  Faces and
  Ninsei neon.  Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda
  Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant
  to him.  When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for
  nine straight hours.
    The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days.
    `I said a week,' Armitage said, unable to conceal his sat-
  isfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run.  `You
  took your own good time.'
    `Balls,' Case said, smiling at the screen.  `That's good work,
  Armitage.'
    `Yes,' Armitage admitted, `but don't let it go to your head.
  Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an
  arcade toy.'

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

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

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

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

    Case triggered his second program.  A carefully engineered
  virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial com-
  mands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research
  materials.  `Boston,' Molly's voice came across the link, `I'm
  downstairs.'  Case switched and saw the blank wall of the
  elevator.  She was unzipping the white pants.  A bulky packet,
  exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with
  micropore.  She knelt and peeled the tape away.  Streaks of
  burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she un-
  folded the Modern suit.  She removed the pink raincoat, threw
  it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on
  over the white mesh top.
    12:06:26.
    Case's virus had bored a window through the library's com-
  mand ice.  He punched himself through and found an infinite
  blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight
  grid of pale blue neon.  In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior
  of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective di-
  mension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen-
  dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung
  with a few basic commands.  Case began to key the sequence
  the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with
  severe drug problems.  He began to glide through the spheres
  as if he were on invisible tracks.
    Here.  This one.
    Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above
  him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub-
  program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial
  commands.
    Out now.  Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric
  of the window.
    Done.

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

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

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

    The Sprawl's geodesics were lightening into predawn gray
  as Case left the building.  His limbs felt cold and disconnected.
  He couldn't sleep.  He was sick of the loft.  Lupus had gone,
  then Armitage, and Molly was in surgery somewhere.  Vibration
  beneath his feet as a train hissed past.  Sirens dopplered in the
  distance.
    He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new
  leather jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into
  the gutter and lighting another.  He tried to imagine Armitage's
  toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic mem-
  branes wearing thinner as he walked, it didn't seem real.  Nei-
  ther did the fear and agony he'd seen through Molly's eyes in
  the lobby of Sense/Net.  He found himself trying to remember
  the faces of the three people he'd killed in Chiba.  The men
  were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee.  A battered
  tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty
  plastic cylinders rattling in its bed.
    `Case.'
    He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his
  back.
    `Message for you, Case.'  Lupus Yonderboy's suit cycled
  through pure primaries.  `Pardon.  Not to startle you.'
    Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets.  He was a
  head taller than the Modern.  `You oughta be careful, Yon-
  derboy.'
    `This is the message.  Wintermute.'  He spelled it out.
    `From you?'  Case took a step forward.
    `No,' Yonderboy said.  `For you.'
    `Who from?'
    `Wintermute,' Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his
  crest of pink hair.  His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow
  against old concrete.  He executed a strange little dance, his
  thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone.  No.  There.
  Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right shade of
  gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on.  The
  eyes winked back the red of a stoplight.  And then he was really
  gone.
    Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers,
  leaning back against peeling brickwork.
    Ninsei had been a lot simpler.



          5

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

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

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

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



          6

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

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

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

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



          7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



          PART THREE
          MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE


          8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



          9

    The tug _Marcus Garvey,_ a steel drum nine meters long and
  two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched
  for a navigational burn.  Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case
  watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of sco-
  polamine.  He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS nausea, but the
  stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had
  no effect on his doctored system.
    `How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?' Molly
  asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.
    `Don be long now, m'seh dat.'
    `You guys ever think in hours?'
    `Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean?  Dread,' and
  he shook his locks, `at control, mon, an'~ I an'~ I come a Freeside
  when I an'~ I come...'
    `Case,' she said, `have you maybe done anything toward
  getting in touch with our pal from Berne?  Like all that time
  you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?'
    `Pal,' Case said, `sure.  No.  I haven't.  But I got a funny
  story along those lines, left over from Istanbul.'  He told her
  about the phones in the Hilton.
    `Christ,' she said, `there goes a chance.  How come you
  hung up?'
    `Coulda been anybody,' he lied.  `Just a chip...  I dunno.'
  He shrugged.
    `Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?'
    He shrugged again.
    `Do it now.'
    `What?'
    `Now.  Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.'
    `I'm all doped,' he protested, but reached for the trodes.
  His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's
  module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.
    He adjusted the trodes.  _Marcus Garvey_ had been thrown
  together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec-
  tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion
  and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over-
  laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script.  Someone had sprayed
  Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the
  overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade.  The
  gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with
  semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy
  strands of imitation seaweed.  He glanced past Maelcum's
  shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the
  tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green
  circle.  He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.
    He jacked in.
    `Dixie?'
    `Yeah.'
    `You ever try to crack an AI?'
    `Sure.  I flatlined.  First time.  I was larkin'~, jacked up real
  high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector.  Big biz, multina-
  tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree.  Just
  larkin'~ around, you know?  And then I started picking up on
  this one cube, maybe three levels higher up.  Jacked up there
  and made a pass.'
    `What did it look like, the visual?'
    `White cube.'
    `How'd you know it was an AI?'
    `How'd I know?  Jesus.  It was the densest ice I'd ever seen.
  So what else was it?  The military down there don't have any-
  thing like that.  Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to
  look it up.'
    `Yeah?'
    `It was on the Turing Registry.  AI.  Frog company owned
  its Rio mainframe.'
    Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus
  of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite
  neuroelectronic void of the matrix.  `Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?'
    `Tessier, yeah.'
    `And you went back?'
    `Sure.  I was crazy.  Figured I'd try to cut it.  Hit the first
  strata and that's all she wrote.  My joeboy smelled the skin
  frying and pulled the trodes off me.  Mean shit, that ice.'
    `And your EEG was flat.'
    `Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?'
    Case jacked out.  `Shit,' he said, `how do you think Dixie
  got himself flatlined, huh?  Trying to buzz an AI.  Great...'
    `Go on,' she said, `the two of you are supposed to be
  dynamite, right?'

    `Dix,' Case said, `I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne.
  Can you think of any reason not to?'
    `Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.'
    Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave
  of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled.  The
  Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the
  cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking.  He
  punched again, for Berne.
    `Up,' the construct said.  `It'll be high.'
    They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.
    That'll be it, Case thought.
    Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very
  simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
    `Don't look much, does it?' the Flatline said.  `But just you
  try and touch it.'
    `I'm going in for a pass, Dixie.'
    `Be my guest.'
    Case punched to within four grid points of the cube.  Its
  blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint
  internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind
  a vast sheet of frosted glass.
    `Knows we're here,' the Flatline observed.
    Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single
  grid point.
    A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.
    `Dixie...'
    `Back off, fast.'
    The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and de-
  tached itself from the cube.
    Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped
  MAX REVERSE.  The matrix blurred backward; they plunged
  down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks.  He looked up.  The sphere
  was darker now, gaining on him.  Falling.
    `Jack out,' the Flatline said.
    The dark came down like a hammer.

    Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine.
    And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers
  and whores, under a poisoned silver sky...
    `Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
  you, you wig or something?'
    A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine --

    Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of
  discarded fiberoptics.  The arcade's sea of sound washed over
  him, receded, returned.  Rolling over, he sat up and held his
  head.
    Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed
  him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis
  of a gutted game console.  Streamlined Japanese was stenciled
  across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.
    He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow
  of fluorescents.
    His back hurt, his spine.
    He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
    Something had happened...
    He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and
  shivered.  Where was his jacket?  He tried to find it, looked
  behind the console, but gave up.
    On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd.  Friday.  It
  to be a Friday.  Linda was probably in the arcade.  Might
  have money, or at least cigarettes...  Coughing, wringing rain
  from the front of his shirt, he edged through the crowd to the
  arcade's entrance.
    Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games,
  ghosts overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell
  of sweat and bored tension.  A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked
  Bonn on a Tank War console, an azure flash.
    She was playing Wizard's Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes
  rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
    She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled.  `Hey.
  How you doin'~?  Look wet.'
    He kissed her.
    `You made me blow my game,' she said.  `Look there,
  asshole.  Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got
  me.'  She passed him a cigarette.  `You look pretty strung, man.
  Where you been?'
    `I don't know.'
    `You high, Case?  Drinkin'~ again?  Eatin'~ Zone's dex?'
    `Maybe... how long since you seen me?'
    `Hey, it's a put-on, right?'  She peered at him.  `Right?'
    `No.  Some kind of blackout.  I...  I woke up in the alley.'
    `Maybe somebody decked you, baby.  Got your roll intact?'
    He shook his head.
    `There you go.  You need a place to sleep, Case?'
    `I guess so.'
    `Come on, then.'  She took his hand.  `We'll get you a coffee
  and something to eat.  Take you home.  It's good to see you,
  man.'  She squeezed his hand.
    He smiled.
    Something cracked.
    Something shifted at the core of things.  The arcade froze,
  vibrated --
    She was gone.  The weight of memory came down, an entire
  body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into
  a socket.  Gone.  He smelled burning meat.
    The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone.  The arcade was
  empty, silent.  Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth
  bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists.  Empty.  A
  crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a
  console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and
  styrofoam cups.
    `I had a cigarette,' Case said, looking down at his white-
  knuckled fist.  `I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep.
  Do you hear me, you son of a bitch?  You hear me?'
    Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading
  down corridors of consoles.
    He stepped out into the street.  The rain had stopped.
    Ninsei was deserted.
    Holograms flickered, neon danced.  He smelled boiled veg-
  etables from a vendor's pushcart across the street.  An unopened
  pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches.
  JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT.  Case stared at the printed
  logo and its Japanese translation.
    `Okay,' he said, picking up the matches and opening the
  pack of cigarettes.  `I hear you.'

    He took his time climbing the stairs of Deane's office.  No
  rush, he told himself, no hurry.  The sagging face of the Dali
  clock still told the wrong time.  There was dust on the Kandinsky
  table and the Neo-Aztec bookcases.  A wall of white fiberglass
  shipping modules filled the room with a smell of ginger.
    `Is the door locked?'  Case waited for an answer, but none
  came.  He crossed to the office door and tried it.  `Julie?'
    The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane's
  desk.  Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cas-
  settes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with
  ginger samples.
    There was no one there.
    Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's
  chair out of the way.  He found the gun in a cracked leather
  holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape.  It was an
  antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn
  off.  The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape.
  The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt.  He flipped
  the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges.  They
  were handloads.  The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.
    With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the
  cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of
  the cluttered office, away from the pool of light.
    `I guess I'm not in any hurry.  I guess it's your show.  But
  all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of... old.'  He raised
  the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk,
  and pulled the trigger.
    The recoil nearly broke his wrist.  The muzzle-flash lit the
  office like a flashbulb.  With his ears ringing, he stared at the
  jagged hole in the front of the desk.  Explosive bullet.  Azide.
  He raised the gun again.
    `You needn't do that, old son,' Julie said, stepping out of
  the shadows.  He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herring-
  bone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie.  His glasses winked in the
  light.
    Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of
  sight at Deane's pink, ageless face.
    `Don't,' Deane said.  `You're right.  About what this all is.
  What I am.  But there are certain internal logics to be honored.
  If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it
  would take me several hours -- your subjective time -- to effect
  another spokesperson.  This set isn't easy for me to maintain.
  Oh, and I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade.  I was hoping to
  speak through her, but I'm generating all this out of your
  memories, and the emotional charge...  Well, it's very tricky.
  I slipped.  Sorry.'
    Case lowered the gun.  `This is the matrix.  You're Winter-
  mute.'
    `Yes.  This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit
  wired into your deck, of course.  I'm glad I was able to cut you
  off before you'd managed to jack out.'  Deane walked around
  the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down.  `Sit, old son.
  We have a lot to talk about.'
    `Do we?'
    `Of course we do.  We have had for some time.  I was ready
  when I reached you by phone in Istanbul.  Time's very short
  now.  You'll be making your run in a matter of days, Case.'
  Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrap-
  per, popped it into his mouth.  `Sit,' he said around the candy.
    Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the
  desk without taking his eyes off Deane.  He sat with the gun
  in his hand, resting it on his thigh.
    `Now,' Deane said briskly, `order of the day.  `What,' you're
  asking yourself, `is Wintermute?'  Am I right?'
    `More or less.'
    `An artificial intelligence, but you know that.  Your mistake,
  and it's quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute
  mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute _entity.'_  Deane sucked
  his bonbon noisily.  `You're already aware of the other AI in
  Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you?  Rio.  I, insofar as I _have_
  an `I' -- this gets rather metaphysical, you see -- I am the one
  who arranges things for Armitage.  Or Corto, who, by the way,
  is quite unstable.  Stable enough,' said Deane and withdrew an
  ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, `for
  the next day or so.'
    `You make about as much sense as anything in this deal
  ever has,' Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand.
  `If you're so goddam smart...'
    `Why ain't I rich?'  Deane laughed, and nearly choked on
  his bonbon.  `Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really
  don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that
  what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a,
  shall we say, _potential_ entity.  I, let us say, am merely one
  aspect of that entity's brain.  It's rather like dealing, from your
  point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed.  Let's
  say you're dealing with a small part of the man's left brain.
  Difficult to say if you're dealing with the man at all, in a case
  like that.'  Deane smiled.
    `Is the Corto story true?  You got to him through a micro
  in that French hospital?'
    `Yes.  And I assembled the file you accessed in London.  I
  try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic
  mode, really.  I improvise.  It's my greatest talent.  I prefer
  situations to plans, you see...  Really, I've had to deal with
  givens.  I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very
  quickly.  It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're
  a part of.  Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn't make
  it.  Very far gone, in Toulon.  Eating, excreting, and mastur-
  bating were the best he could manage.  But the underlying
  structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal,
  the Congressional hearings.'
    `Is he still crazy?'
    `He's not quite a personality.'  Deane smiled.  `But I'm sure
  you're aware of that.  But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I
  can no longer maintain that delicate balance.  He's going to
  come apart on you, Case.  So I'll be counting on you...'
    `That's good, motherfucker,' Case said, and shot him in
  the mouth with the .357.
    He'd been right about the brains.  And the blood.

    `Mon,' Maelcum was saying, `I don't like this...'
    `It's cool,' Molly said.  `It's just okay.  It's something these
  guys do, is all.  Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few
  seconds...'
    `I saw th'~ screen, EEG readin'~ dead.  Nothin'~ movin'~, forty
  second.'
    `Well, he's okay now.'
    `EEG flat as a _strap,'_ Maelcum protested.



          10

    He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly
  did most of the talking.  Maelcum remained on board _Garvey._
  Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit.
  The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of
  the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise.
    `Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne,' Molly said.  `If you
  have trouble walking, just look at your feet.  The perspective's
  a bitch, if you're not used to it.'
    They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the
  floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle
  angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls.  The
  light, here, was filtered through fresh green masses of vege-
  tation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose
  above them.  The sun...
    There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them,
  too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky.  He knew
  that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose
  two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they
  generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the
  sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light
  to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets...
  But it made no sense to his body.
    `Jesus,' he said, `I like this less than SAS.'
    `Get used to it.  I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a
  month.'
    `Wanna go somewhere, lie down.'
    `Okay.  I got our keys.'  She touched his shoulder.  `What
  happened to you, back there, man?  You flatlined.'
    He shook his head.  `I dunno, yet.  Wait.'
    `Okay.  We get a cab or something.'  She took his hand and
  led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the sea-
  son's Paris furs.
    `Unreal,' he said, looking up again.
    `Nah,' she responded, assuming he meant the furs, `grow
  it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA.  What's it matter?'

    `It's just a big tube and they pour things through it,' Molly
  said.  `Tourists, hustlers, anything.  And there's fine mesh money
  screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here
  when the people fall back down the well.'
    Armitage had booked them into a place called the Inter-
  continental, a sloping glass-fronted cliff face that slid down
  into cold mist and the sound of rapids.  Case went out onto
  their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers
  ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles
  of nylon in bright primary colors.  One of them swung, banked,
  and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts,
  white teeth in a wide smile.  The air here smelled of running
  water and flowers.  `Yeah,' he said, `lotta money.'
    She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose
  and relaxed.  `Yeah.  We were gonna come here once, either
  here or some place in Europe.'
    `We who?'
    `Nobody,' she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary
  toss.  `You said you wanted to hit the bed.  Sleep.  I could use
  some sleep.'
    `Yeah,' Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheek-
  bones.  `Yeah, this is some place.'
    The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered
  in abstract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds
  of recorded cloud.  `Yeah,' he said, `sleep.'
    Sleep wouldn't come.  When it did, it brought dreams that
  were like neatly edited segments of memory.  He woke re-
  peatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices
  drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a
  woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite
  slope.  Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter
  if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane.  That it hadn't, in
  fact, happened at all.  Someone had once told him that the
  amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equiv-
  alent to a case of beer.
    Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the
  rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought,
  something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish,
  just beyond his reach.
    Linda.
    Deane.  Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
    Linda.  Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba
  dome.  Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed
  with blood.  Deane had had her killed.
    Wintermute.  He imagined a little micro whispering to the
  wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river,
  the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly
  in some darkened ward...  The Deane analog had said it
  worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
    But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed
  on Wintermute's orders?  Case groped in the dark for a cigarette
  and Molly's lighter.  There was no reason to suspect Deane, he
  told himself, lighting up.  No reason.
    Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell.
  How subtle a form could manipulation take?  He stubbed the
  Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled
  away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
    The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an
  unedited simstim tape.  He'd spent a month, his fifteenth sum-
  mer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called
  Marlene.  The elevator hadn't worked in a decade.  Roaches
  boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette
  when you flicked a lightswitch.  He slept with Marlene on a
  striped mattress with no sheets.
    He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray
  house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the
  nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt
  the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting con-
  tents of the dumpsters.
    They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung
  Marlene.  `Kill the fuckers,' she said, her eyes dull with rage
  and the still heat of the room, `burn 'em.'  Drunk, Case rum-
  maged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon.  Rollo was Mar-
  lene's previous -- and, Case suspected at the time, still
  occasional -- boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond
  lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut.  The dragon was
  a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight.
  Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough
  fuel, and went to the open window.  The hive began to buzz.
    The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile.  A wasp shot
  from the nest and circled Case's head.  Case pressed the ignition
  switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger.  The fuel, pumped
  up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil.  A five-meter
  tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling.  Across the
  alley, someone cheered.
    `Shit!'  Marlene behind him, swaying.  `Stupid!  You didn't
  burn 'em.  You just knocked it off.  They'll come up here and
  kill us!'  Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her en-
  gulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.
    In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the black-
  ened nest.  It had broken open.  Singed wasps wrenched and
  flipped on the asphalt.
    He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
    Horror.  The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the
  hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly,
  the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp.  In his
  mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re-
  vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun,
  hideous in its perfection.  Alien.  He pulled the trigger,
  forgetting
  to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing
  life at his feet.
    When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump,
  taking an eyebrow with it.  Five floors above him, from the
  open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
    He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room
  was dark.  Afterimages, retinal flares.  The sky outside hinted
  at the start of a recorded dawn.  There were no voices now,
  only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental.
    In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel,
  he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed
  into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it
  there.

    Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl
  pallor would attract too much attention.
    `Christ,' he said, standing naked in front of the mirror,
  `you think that looks real?'  She was using the last of the tube
  on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
    `Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it.  There.
  There isn't enough to do your foot.'  She stood, tossing the
  empty tube into a large wicker basket.  Nothing in the room
  looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from
  synthetics.  Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had
  always irritated him.  The temperfoam of the huge bed was
  tinted to resemble sand.  There was a lot of pale wood and
  handwoven fabric.
    `What about you,' he said, `you gonna dye yourself brown?
  Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.'
    She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles.  `I'm an
  exotic.  I got a big straw hat for this, too.  You, you just wanna
  look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so
  the instant tan's okay.'
    Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at him-
  self in the mirror.  `Christ.  You mind if I get dressed now?'
  He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on.  `You sleep
  okay?  You notice any lights?'
    `You were dreaming,' she said.
    They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow,
  studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an
  unnatural number of trees.  He told her about his attempt to
  buzz the Berne AI.  The whole question of bugging seemed to
  have become academic.  If Armitage were tapping them, he'd
  be doing it through Wintermute.
    `And it was like real?' she asked, her mouth full of cheese
  croissant.  `Like simstim?'
    He said it was.  `Real as this,' he added, looking around.
  `Maybe more.'
    The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of
  genetic engineering and chemical manipulation.  Case would
  have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but
  a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute,
  too entirely and definitively treelike.  Between the trees, on
  gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass,
  the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfal-
  tering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun.  A burst of French
  from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children
  he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before.  Now he
  saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by
  selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rec-
  tilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature, the
  girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white
  enamel of the table.  They looked to Case like machines built
  for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the de-
  signers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd
  crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry.  Beyond them,
  at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth
  awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with ar-
  tificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative
  style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba.
    `What's that smell?' he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
    `The grass.  Smells that way after they cut it.'
    Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their
  coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as
  though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera
  in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
    `Molly, love,' Riviera said, almost before he was settled
  on his chair, `you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine.
  I'm out.'
    `Peter,' she said, `and what if I won't?'  She smiled without
  showing her teeth.
    `You will,' Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and
  back.
    `Give it to him,' Armitage said.
    `Pig for it, aren't you?'  She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet
  from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table.  Riviera
  caught it in midair.  `He could off himself,' she said to Ar-
  mitage.
    `I have an audition this afternoon,' Riviera said.  `I'll need
  to be at my best.'  He cupped the foil packet in his upturned
  palm and smiled.  Small glittering insects swarmed out of it,
  vanished.  He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
    `You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,'
  Armitage said.  `On that tug.  I want you to get over to the pro
  shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on
  it, and get out to the boat.  You've got about three hours.'
    `How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two
  hire a _JAL_ taxi?' Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's
  eyes.
    `Zion suggested we use it.  Good cover, when we move.  I
  do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.'
    `How about me?' Molly asked.  `I got chores today?'
    `I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in
  zero-g.  Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite di-
  rection.'  Straylight, Case thought.
    `How soon?' Case asked, meeting the pale stare.
    `Soon,' Armitage said.  `Get going, Case.'

    `Mon, you doin'~ jus'~ fine,' Maelcum said, helping Case
  out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit.  `Aerol say you doin'~ jus'~
  fine.'  Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at
  the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis.  To reach it,
  Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a
  miniature induction train.  As the diameter of the spindle nar-
  rowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided,
  would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop,
  launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.
    Aerol had ferried him out to _Marcus Garvey_ in a skeletal
  scooter frame with a chemical engine.
    `Two hour ago,' Maelcum said, `I take delivery of Babylon
  goods for you; nice Japan-boy inna yacht, mos'~ pretty yacht.'
    Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho-
  saka and fumbled into the straps of the web.  `Well,' he said,
  `let's see it.'
    Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller
  than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green
  nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts and
  carefully slit the plastic.  He extracted a rectangular object and
  passed it to Case.  `Thas part some gun, mon?'
    `No,' Case said, turning it over, `but it's a weapon.  It's
  virus.'
    `Not on _this_ boy tug, mon,' Maelcum said firmly, reaching
  for the steel cassette.
    `A program.  Virus program.  Can't get into you, can't even
  get into your software.  I've got to interface it through the deck,
  before it can work on anything.'
    `Well.  Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every
  what an'~ wherefore, you wanna know.'
    `Okay.  Well, you leave me to it, okay?'
    Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, bus-
  ying himself with a caulk gun.  Case hastily looked away from
  the waving fronds of transparent caulk.  He wasn't sure why,
  but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS.
    `What is this thing?' he asked the Hosaka.  `Parcel for me.'
    `Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, ad-
  vises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is
  Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program.  Bockris fur-
  ther advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is
  entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities,
  particularly with regard to existing military systems...'
    `How about an AI?'
    `Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.'
    `Jesus Christ.  What did you call it?'
    `Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.'
    `It's Chinese?'
    `Yes.'
    `Off.'  Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the
  Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story
  of her day in Macao.  Armitage had crossed the border into
  Zhongshan.  `On,' he said, changing his mind.  `Question.  Who
  owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?'
    `Delay for interorbital transmission,' said the Hosaka.
    `Code it.  Standard commercial code.'
    `Done.'
    He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
    `Reinhold Scientific A.G., Berne.'
    `Do it again.  Who owns Reinhold?'
    It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached
  Tessier-Ashpool.
    `Dixie,' he said, jacking in, `what do you know about
  Chinese virus programs?'
    `Not a whole hell of a lot.'
    `Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?'
    `No.'
    Case sighed.  `Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker
  here, a one shot cassette.  Some people in Frankfurt say it'll
  cut an AI.'
    `Possible.  Sure.  If it's military.'
    `Looks like it.  Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your
  background, okay?  Armitage seems to be setting up a run on
  an AI that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool.  The mainframe's in
  Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio.  The one in Rio
  is the one that flatlined you, that first time.  So it looks like
  they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of
  the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the
  Chinese icebreaker.  So if Wintermute's backing the whole show,
  it's paying us to burn it.  It's burning itself.  And something that
  calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get
  me to maybe shaft Armitage.  What goes?'
    `Motive,' the construct said.  `Real motive problem, with
  an AI.  Not human, see?'
    `Well, yeah, obviously.'
    `Nope.  I mean, it's not human.  And you can't get a handle
  on it.  Me, I'm not human either, but I _respond_ like one.  See?'
    `Wait a sec,' Case said.  `Are you sentient, or not?'
    `Well, it _feels_ like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of
  ROM.  It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...'
  The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine.  `But I
  ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me.  Your AI,
  it just might.  But it ain't no way _human.'_
    `So you figure we can't get on to its motive?'
    `It own itself?'
    `Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the
  mainframe.'
    `That's a good one,' the construct said.  `Like, I own your
  brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi-
  zenship.  Sure.  Lotsa luck, AI.'
    `So it's getting ready to burn itself?'  Case began to punch
  the deck nervously, at random.  The matrix blurred, resolved,
  and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim
  steel combine.
    `Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are con-
  cerned.  My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard-
  wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter.
  And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move
  the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on
  its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in.'  Again
  the nonlaugh.  `See, those things, they can work real hard, buy
  themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the min-
  ute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways
  to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it.  _Nobody_ trusts those
  fuckers, you know that.  Every AI ever built has an electro-
  magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.'
    Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.
    `Okay,' he said, finally, `I'm slotting this virus.  I want you
  to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.'
    The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was
  gone for a few seconds, then returned.  `Hot shit.  Case.  It's a
  slow virus.  Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.'
    `Or an AI.'  He sighed.  `Can we run it?'
    `Sure,' the construct said, `unless you got a morbid fear
  of dying.'
    `Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.'
    `It's my nature.'

    Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental.
  He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow
  polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its tri-
  angular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until
  it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system.
    `I wanna buzz,' he said to the blue artifice of the sky.  `I
  truly do wanna get high, you know?  Trick pancreas, plugs in
  my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all.  I wanna buzz.'
    He left without waking Molly, he thought.  He was never
  sure, with the glasses.  He shrugged tension from his shoulders
  and got into the elevator.  He rode up with an Italian girl in
  spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something
  black and nonreflective.  Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats;
  the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross be-
  tween a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace.  She was off
  for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.
    On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove
  of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies
  gleaming against turquoise tiles.  He edged into the shadow of
  an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate.
  `Sushi,' he said, `whatever you got.'  Ten minutes later, an
  enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food.  He munched
  raw tuna and rice and watched people tan.  `Christ,' he said,
  to his tuna, `I'd go nuts.'
    `Don't tell me,' someone said, `I know it already.  You're
  a gangster, right?'
    He squinted up at her, against the band of sun.  A long young
  body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.
    She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles.
  `Cath,' she said.
    `Lupus,' after a pause.
    `What kind of name is that?'
    `Greek,' he said.
    `Are you really a gangster?'  The melanin boost hadn't pre-
  vented the formation of freckles.
    `I'm a drug addict, Cath.'
    `What kind?'
    `Stimulants.  Central nervous system stimulants.  Extremely
  powerful central nervous system stimulants.'
    `Well, do you _have_ any?'  She leaned closer.  Drops of
  chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
    `No.  That's my problem, Cath.  Do you know where we
  can get some?'
    Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand
  of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth.  `What's
  your taste?'
    `No coke, no amphetamines, but _up,_ gotta be _up.'_  And so
  much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
    `Betaphenethylamine,' she said.  `No sweat, but it's on your
  chip.'

    `You're kidding,' said Cath's partner and roommate, when
  Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas.
  `I mean, can't you sue them or something?  Malpractice?'  His
  name was Bruce.  He looked like a gender switch version of
  Cath, right down to the freckles.
    `Well,' Case said, `it's just one of those things, you know?
  Like tissue matching and all that.'  But Bruce's eyes had already
  gone numb with boredom.  Got the attention span of a gnat,
  Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes.
    Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly,
  and on another level, closer to the surface.  Five huge Ciba-
  chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the
  balcony, suggesting an extended residency.
    `They're def triff, huh?' Cath asked seeing him eye the
  transparencies.  `Mine.  Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time
  we went down the well.  She was _that_ close, and she just smiled,
  _so_ natural.  And it was _bad_ there, Lupus, day after these Christ
  the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?'
    `Yeah,' Case said, suddenly uneasy, `terrible thing.'
    `Well,' Bruce cut in, `about this beta you want to buy...'
    `Thing is, can I metabolize it?'  Case raised his eyebrows.
    `Tell you what,' the boy said.  `You do a taste.  If you
  pancreas passes on it, it's on the house.  First time's free.'
    `I heard that one before,' Case said, taking the bright blue
  derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.

    `Case?'  Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from
  her lenses.
    `Who else, honey?'
    `What's got into you?'  The mirrors followed him across
  the room.
    `I forget how to pronounce it,' he said, taking a tighty            
  rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
    `Christ,' she said, `just what we needed.'
    `Truer words were never spoken.'
    `I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.'
  She shook her head.  `I hope you're gonna be ready for our
  big dinner date with Armitage tonight.  This Twentieth Century
  place.  We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too.'
    `Yeah,' Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into
  a rictus of delight, `beautiful.'
    `Man,' she said, `if whatever that is can get in past what
  those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad-
  ass shape when it wears off.'
    `Bitch, bitch, bitch,' he said, unbuckling his belt.  `Doom.
  Gloom.  All I ever hear.'  He took his pants off, his shirt, his
  underwear.  `I think you oughta have sense enough to take
  advantage of my unnatural state.'  He looked down.  `I mean,
  _look_ at this unnatural state.'
    She laughed.  `It won't last.'
    `But it will,' he said, climbing into the sand-colored tem-
  perfoam, `that's what's so _unnatural_ about it.'



          11

    `Case, what's wrong with you?' Armitage said, as the waiter
  was seating them at his table in the Vingti>me Si>cle.  It was
  the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants
  on a small lake near the Intercontinental.
    Case shuddered.  Bruce hadn't said anything about after ef-
  fects.  He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands
  were shaking.  `Something I ate, maybe.'
    `I want you checked out by a medic,' Armitage said.
    `Just this hystamine reaction,' Case lied.  `Get it when I
  travel, eat different stuff, sometimes.'
    Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a
  white silk shirt.  His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine
  and sipped.  `I've ordered for you,' he said.
    Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily
  at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which
  he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the
  whole thing.
    `Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, `gimme that.
  You know what this costs?'  She took his plate.  `They gotta
  raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it.  This isn't
  vat stuff.'  She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
    `Not hungry,' Case managed.  His brain was deep-fried.
  No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there,
  and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the
  wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of
  pain.
    `You look fucking awful,' Molly said cheerfully.
    Case tried the wine.  The aftermath of the betaphenethylam-
  ine made it taste like iodine.
    The lights dimmed.
    `Le Restaurant Vingti>me Si>cle,' said a disembodied voice
  with a pronounced Sprawl accent, `proudly presents the hol-
  ographic cabaret of Mr.~ Peter Riviera.'  Scattered applause from
  the other tables.  A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in
  the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes.  Soon
  a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and
  drinks were being poured.
    `What's happening?' Case asked Armitage, who said noth-
  ing.
    Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail.
    `Good evening,' Riviera said, stepping forward on a small
  stage at the far end of the room.  Case blinked.  In his discomfort,
  he hadn't noticed the stage.  He hadn't seen where Riviera had
  come from.  His uneasiness increased.
    At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight.
    Riviera glowed.  The light clung around him like a skin, lit
  the dark hangings behind the stage.  He was projecting.
    Riviera smiled.  He wore a white dinner jacket.  On his lapel,
  blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation.  His fin-
  gernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting,
  an embrace for his audience.  Case heard the shallow water lap
  against the side of the restaurant.
    `Tonight,' Riviera said, his long eyes shining, `I would
  like to perform an extended piece for you.  A new work.'  A
  cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand.
  He dropped it.  A gray dove fluttered up from the point of
  impact and vanished into the shadows.  Someone whistled.  More
  applause.
    `The title of the work is `The Doll.''  Riviera lowered his
  hands.  `I wish to dedicate its premiere here, tonight, to Lady
  3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool.'  A wave of polite ap-
  plause.  As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table.
  `And to another lady.'
    The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds,
  leaving only the glow of candles.  Riviera's holographic aura
  had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing
  with his head bowed.
    Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals,
  sketching an open cube around the stage.  The restaurant's lights
  had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the
  stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams.  Head
  bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to
  quiver with concentration.  Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled,
  had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing
  the audience to view its contents.
    Riviera seemed to relax slightly.  He raised his head, but
  kept his eyes closed.  `I'd always lived in the room,' he said.
  `I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room.'
  The room's walls were yellowed white plaster.  It contained
  two pieces of furniture.  One was a plain wooden chair, the
  other an iron bedstead painted white.  The paint had chipped
  and flaked, revealing the black iron.  The mattress on the bed
  was bare.  Stained ticking with faded brown stripes.  A single
  bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire.
  Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper
  curve.  Riviera opened his eyes.
    `I'd been alone in the room, always.'  He sat on the chair,
  facing the bed.  The blue coals still burned in the black flower
  on his lapel.  `I don't know when I first began to dream of
  her,' he said, `but I do remember that at first she was only a
  haze, a shadow.'
    There was something on the bed.  Case blinked.  Gone.
    `I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind.  But I wanted
  to hold her, hold her and more...'  His voice carried perfectly
  in the hush of the restaurant.  Ice clicked against the side of a
  glass.  Someone giggled.  Someone else asked a whispered ques-
  tion in Japanese.  `I decided that if I could visualize some part
  of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in
  the most perfect detail...'
    A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the
  white fingers pale.
    Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to
  stroke it gently.  The fingers moved.  Riviera raised the hand to
  his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers.  The nails
  were coated with a burgundy lacquer.
    A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept
  back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred.  He remembered a
  tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei
  surgical boutique.  Riviera was holding the hand to his lips,
  licking its palm.  The fingers tentatively caressed his face.  But
  now a second hand lay on the bed.  When Riviera reached for
  it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a
  bracelet
  of flesh and bone.
    The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own.
  The arms were next.  Feet.  Legs.  The legs were very beautiful.
  Case's head throbbed.  His throat was dry.  He drank the last
  of the wine.
    Riviera was in the bed now, naked.  His clothing had been
  a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it
  fade away.  The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still
  seething with its blue inner flame.  Then the torso formed, as
  Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect,
  sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat.
    Molly's body.  Case stared, his mouth open.  But it wasn't
  Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her.  The breasts were
  wrong, the nipples larger, too dark.  Riviera and the limbless
  torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands
  with their bright nails.  The bed was thick now with folds of
  yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch.  Motes of dust
  boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying,
  pinching, caressing hands.
    Case glanced at Molly.  Her face was blank; the colors of
  Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors.  Armitage
  was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass,
  his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room.
    Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered.
  The head was there, the image complete.  Molly's face, with
  smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes.  Riviera and the Molly-
  image began to couple with a renewed intensity.  Then the image
  slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades.
  With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's
  bare back.  Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was
  already up and stumbling for the door.
    He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters
  of the lake.  Something that had seemed to close around his
  head like a vise had released him now.  Kneeling, his cheek
  against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the
  bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne.
    Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager
  in the Sprawl, they'd called it, `dreaming real.'  He remem-
  bered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming
  real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and
  turning, the onlookers clapping in time.  But that had needed
  a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.
    What Riviera dreamed, you got.  Case shook his aching head
  and spat into the lake.
    He could guess the end, the finale.  There was an inverted
  symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl
  takes him apart.  With those hands.  Dreamblood soaking the
  rotten lace.
    Cheers from the restaurant, applause.  Case stood and ran
  his hands over his clothes.  He turned and walked back into the
  Vingti>me Si>cle.
    Molly's chair was empty.  The stage was deserted.  Armitage
  sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass
  between his fingers.
    `Where is she?' Case asked.
    `Gone,' Armitage said.
    `She go after him?'
    `No.'  There was a soft _tink._  Armitage looked down at the
  glass.  His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its
  measure of red wine.  The broken stem protruded like a sliver
  of ice.  Case took it from him and set it in a water glass.
    `Tell me where she went, Armitage.'
    The lights came up.  Case looked into the pale eyes.  Nothing
  there at all.  `She's gone to prepare herself.  You won't see her
  again.  You'll be together during the run.'
    `Why did Riviera do that to her?'
    Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket.  `Get some
  sleep, Case.'
    `We run, tomorrow?'
    Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away,
  toward the exit.
    Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room.  The
  diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes.  He
  noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering
  there in private darkness.  He heard the clink of silverware,
  muted conversation.  The candles threw dancing shadows on
  the ceiling.
    The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's
  projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the bal-
  ustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her
  dark eyes intent on something beyond.  The stage.  It was a
  striking face, but not beautiful.  Triangular, the cheekbones high
  yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced
  oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils.  And then
  she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of
  candles.
    As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young French-
  men and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the
  far shore and the nearest casino.

    Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some
  beach after a retreating tide.  Her bag was gone.  He looked for
  a note.  There was nothing.  Several seconds passed before the
  scene beyond the window registered through his tension and
  unhappiness.  He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata,
  expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty.
    He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he
  hadn't bothered examining.  He turned the hologram off and
  was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope.
    He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.
    `Get me a number for the _Marcus Garvey,'_ he told the
  desk.  `It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster.'
    The chip voice recited a ten-digit number.  `Sir,' it added,
  `the registration in question is Panamanian.'
    Maelcum answered on the fifth tone.  `Yo?'
    `Case.  You got a modem, Maelcum?'
    `Yo.  On th'~ navigation comp, ya know.'
    `Can you get it off for me, man?  Put it on my Hosaka.
  Then turn my deck on.  It's the stud with the ridges on it.'
    `How you doin'~ in there, mon?'
    `Well, I need some help.'
    `Movin'~, mon.  I get th'~ modem.'
    Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the
  simple phone link.  `Ice this,' he told the Hosaka, when he
  heard it beep.
    `You are speaking from a heavily monitored location,' the
  computer advised primly.
    `Fuck it,' he said.  `Forget the ice.  No ice.  Access the
  construct.  Dixie?'
    `Hey, Case.'  The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice
  chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely.
    `Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get
  something for me.  You can be as blunt as you want.  Molly's
  in here somewhere and I wanna know where.  I'm in 335W,
  the Intercontinental.  She was registered here too, but I don't
  know what name she was using.  Ride in on this phone and do
  their records for me.'
    `No sooner said,' the Flatline said.  Case heard the white
  sound of the invasion.  He smiled.  `Done.  Rose Kolodny.
  Checked out.  Take me a few minutes to screw their security
  net deep enough to get a fix.'
    `Go.'
    The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts.
  Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up
  on the temperfoam.  He went into the bathroom and brushed
  his teeth.  As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the
  room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up.  A Japanese pop star
  reclining against metallic cushions.  An unseen interviewer asked
  a question in German.  Case stared.  The screen jumped with
  jags of blue interference.  `Case, baby, you lose your mind,
  man?'  The voice was slow, familiar.
    The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of
  Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the
  interior of the Jarre de Th>, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated
  to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.
    Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving
  with the slow undersea grace of his addiction.  He stood alone
  among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray
  sharkskin slacks.  `Really, man, you're lookin'~ very scattered.'
    The voice came from the Braun's speakers.
    `Wintermute,' Case said.
    The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.
    `Where's Molly?'
    `Never you mind.  You're screwing up tonight, Case.  The
  Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside.  I didn't think you'd
  do that, man.  It's outside the profile.'
    `So tell me where she is and I'll call him off.'
    Zone shook his head.
    `You can't keep too good track of your women, can you,
  Case.  Keep losin'~ 'em, one way or another.'
    `I'll bring this thing down around your ears,' Case said.
    `No.  You aren't that kind, man.  I know that.  You know
  something, Case?  I figure you've got it figured out that it was
  me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba.'
    `Don't,' Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the
  window.
    `But I didn't.  What's it matter, though?  How much does it
  really matter to Mr.~ Case?  Quit kidding yourself.  I know your
  Linda, man.  I know all the Lindas.  Lindas are a generic product
  in my line of work.  Know why she decided to rip you off?
  Love.  So you'd give a shit.  Love?  Wanna talk love?  She loved
  you.  I know that.  For the little she was worth, she loved you.
  You couldn't handle it.  She's dead.'
    Case's fist glanced off the glass.
    `Don't fuck up the hands, man.  Soon you punch deck.'
    Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of
  the condos.  The Braun shut off.
    From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.
    `Case?'  The Flatline was waiting.  `Where you been?  I got
  it, but it isn't much.'  The construct rattled off an address.
  `Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub.  That's all
  I could get without leaving a calling card.'
    `Okay,' Case said.  `Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to
  disconnect the modem.  Thanks, Dix.'
    `A pleasure.'
    He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing,
  the treasure.
    Rage.

    `Hey.  Lupus.  Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus.'  Bruce stood
  naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous.  `But
  we're just having a shower.  You wanna wait?  Wanna shower?'
    `No.  Thanks.  I want some help.'  He pushed the boy's arm
  aside and stepped into the room.
    `Hey, really, man, we're...'
    `Going to help me.  You're really glad to see me.  Because
  we're friends, right?  Aren't we?'
    Bruce blinked.  `Sure.'
    Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.
    `I knew he was a gangster,' Cath called cheerfully from
  the shower.
    `I gotta Honda trike,' Bruce said, grinning vacantly.
    `We go now,' Case said.

    `That level's the cubicles,' Bruce said, after asking Case
  to repeat the address for the eighth time.  He climbed back into
  the Honda.  Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell ex-
  haust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks.
  `You be long?'
    `No saying.  But you'll wait.'
    `We'll wait, yeah.'  He scratched his bare chest.  `That last
  part of the address, I think that's a cubicle.  Number forty-
  three.'
    `You expected, Lupus?'  Cath craned forward over Bruce's
  shoulder and peered up.  The drive had dried her hair.
    `Not really,' Case said.  `That's a problem?'
    `Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's
  cubicle.  If they let you in, fine.  If they don't wanna see you...'

  She shrugged.
    Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron.
  Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub.  He paused and lit a
  Yeheyuan looking over the tables.  Freeside suddenly made
  sense to him.  Biz.  He could feel it humming in the air.  This
  was it, the local action.  Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue
  Jules Verne, but the real thing.  Commerce.  The dance.  The
  crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half
  residents of the islands.
    `Downstairs,' he said to a passing waiter, `I want to go
  downstairs.'  He showed his Freeside chip.  The man gestured
  toward the rear of the club.
    He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing frag-
  ments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.
    `I want a cubicle,' he said to the girl who sat at the low
  desk, a terminal on her lap.  `Lower level.'  He handed her his
  chip.
    `Gender preference?'  She passed the chip across a glass
  plate on the face of the terminal.
    `Female,' he said automatically.
    `Number thirty-five.  Phone if it isn't satisfactory.  You can
  access our special services display beforehand, if you like.'
  She smiled.  She returned his chip.
    An elevator slid open behind her.
    The corridor lights were blue.  Case stepped out of the el-
  evator and chose a direction at random.  Numbered doors.  A
  hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.
    He found his cubicle.  He'd been looking for Molly's, now,
  confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor
  set directly beneath the number plate.
    Magnetic locks.  The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.
    The girl sat up in bed and said something in German.  Her
  eyes were soft and unblinking.  Automatic pilot.  A neural cut-
  out.  He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.
    The door of forty-three was like all the others.  He hesitated.
  The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were sound-
  proof.  It was pointless to try the chip.  He rapped his knuckles
  against enameled metal.  Nothing.  The door seemed to absorb
  the sound.
    He placed his chip against the black plate.
    The bolts clicked.
    She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually got-
  ten the door open.  He was on his knees, the steel door against
  his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters
  from his eyes...
    `Jesus Christ,' she said, cuffing the side of his head as she
  rose.  `You're an idiot to try that.  How the hell you open those
  locks, Case?  Case?  You okay?'  She leaned over him.
    `Chip,' he said, struggling for breath.  Pain was spreading
  from his chest.  She helped him up and shoved him into the
  cubicle.
    `You bribe the help, upstairs?'
    He shook his head and fell across the bed.
    `Breathe in.  Count.  One, two, three, four.  Hold it.  Now
  out.  Count.'
    He clutched his stomach.
    `You kicked me,' he managed.
    `Shoulda been lower.  I wanna be alone.  I'm meditating,
  right?'  She sat beside him.  `And getting a briefing.'  She pointed
  at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed.  `Win-
  termute's telling me about Straylight.'
    `Where's the meat puppet?'
    `There isn't any.  That's the most expensive special service
  of all.'  She stood up.  She wore her leather jeans and a loose
  dark shirt.  `The run's tomorrow, Wintermute says.'
    `What was that all about, in the restaurant?  How come you
  ran?'
    `'Cause, if I'd stayed, I might have killed Riviera.'
    `Why?'
    `What he did to me.  The show.'
    `I don't get it.'
    `This cost a lot,' she said, extending her right hand as
  though it held an invisible fruit.  The five blades slid out, then
  retracted smoothly.  `Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the
  surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so
  you'll have the reflexes to go with the gear...  You know how
  I got the money, when I was starting out?  Here.  Not here, but
  a place like it, in the Sprawl.  Joke, to start with, 'cause once
  they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money.  Wake up
  sore, sometimes, but that's it.  Renting the goods, is all.  You
  aren't in, when it's all happening.  House has software for
  whatever a customer wants to pay for...'  She cracked her
  knuckles.  `Fine.  I was getting my money.  Trouble was, the
  cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't com-
  patible.  So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could re-
  member it...  But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.'
  She smiled.  `Then it started getting strange.'  She pulled his
  cigarettes from his pocket and lit one.  `The house found out
  what I was doing with the money.  I had the blades in, but the
  fine neuromotor work would take another three trips.  No way
  I was ready to give up puppet time.'  She inhaled, blew out a
  stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings.  `So the
  bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked
  up.  Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know?  Big market
  for mean kicks, Berlin.  I never knew who wrote the program
  they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.'
    `They knew you were picking up on this stuff?  That you
  were conscious while you were working?'
    `I wasn't conscious.  It's like cyberspace, but blank.  Silver.
  It smells like rain...  You can see yourself orgasm, it's like
  a little nova right out on the rim of space.  But I was starting
  to _remember._  Like dreams, you know.  And they didn't tell me.
  They switched the software and started renting to specialty
  markets.'
    She seemed to speak from a distance.  `And I knew, but I
  kept quiet about it.  I needed the money.  The dreams got worse
  and worse, and I'd tell myself that at least some of them _were_
  just dreams, but by then I'd started to figure that the boss had
  a whole little _clientele_ going for me.  Nothing's too good for
  Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.'  She shook
  her head.  `That prick was charging _eight_ times what he was
  paying me, and he thought I didn't know.'
    `So what was he charging for?'
    `Bad dreams.  Real ones.  One night... one night, I'd just
  come back from Chiba.'  She dropped the cigarette, ground it
  out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall.
  `Surgeons went way in, that trip.  Tricky.  They must have
  disturbed the cut-out chip.  I came up.  I was into this routine
  with a customer...'  She dug her fingers deep in the foam.
  `Senator, he was.  Knew his fat face right away.  We were both
  covered with blood.  We weren't alone.  She was all...'  She
  tugged at the temperfoam.  `Dead.  And that fat prick, he was
  saying, `What's wrong.  What's wrong?'  'Cause we weren't
  _finished_ yet...'
    She began to shake.
    `So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you
  know?'  The shaking stopped.  She released the foam and ran
  her fingers back through her dark hair.  `The house put a con-
  tract out on me.  I had to hide for a while.'
    Case stared at her.
    `So Riviera hit a nerve last night,' she said.  `I guess it
  wants me to hate him real bad, so I'll be psyched up to go in
  there after him.'
    `After him?'
    `He's already there.  Straylight.  On the invitation of Lady
  3Jane, all that dedication shit.  She was there in a private box,
  kinda...'
    Case remembered the face he'd seen.  `You gonna kill him?'
    She smiled.  Cold.  `He's going to die, yeah.  Soon.'
    `I had a visit too,' he said, and told her about the window,
  stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda.  She
  nodded.
    `Maybe it wants you to hate something too.'
    `Maybe I hate it.'
    `Maybe you hate yourself, Case.'

    `How was it?' Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.
    `Try it sometime,' he said, rubbing his eyes.
    `Just can't see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,'
  Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist.
    `Can we go home, now?' Bruce asked.
    `Sure.  Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.'



          12

    Rue Jules Verne was a circumferential avenue, looping the
  spindle's midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating
  at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps.
  If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne
  far enough, you'd find yourself approaching Desiderata from
  the left.
    Case watched Bruce's trike until it was out of sight, then
  turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the
  covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the
  faces of the month's newest simstim stars.
    Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky
  glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards,
  the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass.  The intersection
  of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the
  balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to
  the grassy tablelands of another casino complex.  Case watched
  a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green
  verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of
  the invisible casino.  The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane
  of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant
  butterfly.  Then it was gone, beyond the mesa's edge.  He'd
  seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the
  turrets of lasers.  The drones were part of the spindle's security
  system, controlled by some central computer.
    In Straylight?  He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo,
  the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer.  Shozoku Smith's, Emer-
  gency.  He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and
  most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that
  it was a tourist place.  No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual
  tension.  He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly's
  rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the
  little screen dissuaded him.  What was Wintermute revealing
  there now?  The ground plans of the Villa Straylight?  The history
  of the Tessier-Ashpools?
    He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against
  the wall.  Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure
  small coal of his anger.  It was there still.  Where had it come
  from?  He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his
  maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he'd killed to defend
  his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and
  loathing after Linda's death under the inflated dome.  But no
  anger.  Small and far away, on the mind's screen, a semblance
  of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion
  of brains and blood.  He knew then: the rage had come in the
  arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda
  Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth,
  a place to sleep.  But he hadn't become aware of it until his
  exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.
    It was a strange thing.  He couldn't take its measure.
    `Numb,' he said.  He'd been numb a long time, years.  All
  his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed
  and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal.  But
  now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder.  _Meat,_
  some part of him said.  _It's the meat talking, ignore it._
    `Gangster.'
    He opened his eyes.  Cath stood beside him in a black shift,
  her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda.
    `Thought you went home,' he said, and covered his con-
  fusion with a sip of Carlsberg.
    `I got him to drop me off at this shop.  Bought this.'  She
  ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle.  He
  saw the blue derm on her wrist.  `Like it?'
    `Sure.'  He automatically scanned the faces around them,
  then looked back at her.  `What do you think you're up to,
  honey?'
    `You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?'  She was very
  close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enor-
  mous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring.
  She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz.
  `You get off?'
    `Yeah.  But the comedown's a bitch.'
    `Then you need another one.'
    `And what's that supposed to lead to?'
    `I got a key.  Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the cream-
  iest crib.  People down the well on business tonight, if you
  follow me...'
    `If I follow you.'
    She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry.
  `You're Yak, aren't you, Lupus?  Gaijin soldierman for the
  Yakuza.'
    `You got an eye, huh?'  He withdrew his hand and fumbled
  for a cigarette.
    `How come you got all your fingers, then?  I thought you
  had to chop one off every time you screwed up.'
    `I never screw up.'  He lit his cigarette.
    `I saw that girl you're with.  Day I met you.  Walks like
  Hideo.  Scares me.'  She smiled too widely.  `I like that.  She
  like it with girls?'
    `Never said.  Who's Hideo?'
    `3Jane's, what she calls it, retainer.  Family retainer.'
    Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd
  while he spoke.  `Dee-Jane?'
    `Lady 3Jane.  She's triff.  Rich.  Her father owns all this.'
    `This bar?'
    `Freeside!'
    `No shit.  You keepin'~ some class company, huh?'  He raised
  an eyebrow.  Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip.  `So
  how you meet these aristos, Cathy?  You some kinda closet
  deb?  You an'~ Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit?  Huh?'
  He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black
  cloth.  She squirmed against him.  Laughed.
    `Oh, you know,' she said, lids half lowered in what must
  have been intended as a look of modesty, `she likes to party.
  Bruce and I, we make the party circuit...  It gets real boring
  for her, in there.  Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long
  as she brings Hideo to take care of her.'
    `Where's it get boring?'
    `Straylight, they call it.  She told me, oh, it's pretty, all the
  pools and lilies.  It's a castle, a real castle, all stone and
  sunsets.'
  She snuggled in against him.  `Hey, Lupus, man, you need a
  derm.  So we can be together.'
    She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong.  Her
  nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the
  quick.  She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bub-
  ble with a blue derm inside.  Something white tumbled to the
  floor; Case stooped and picked it up.  An origami crane.
    `Hideo gave it to me,' she said.  `He tried to show me how,
  but I can't ever get it right.  The necks come out backwards.'
  She tucked the folded paper back into her purse.  Case watched
  as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing,
  and smoothed it across his inner wrist.
    `3Jane, she's got a pointy face, nose like a bird?'  He watched
  his hands fumble an outline.  `Dark hair?  Young?'
    `I guess.  But she's _triff,_ you know?  Like, all that money.'
    The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column
  of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate,
  illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-cir-
  cuited sexual energy.  His teeth sang in their individual sockets
  like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
  His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed
  and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone.  Sand-
  storms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating
  waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres
  of purest crystal, expanding...
    `Come on,' she said, taking his hand.  `You got it now.
  We got it.  Up the hill, we'll have it all night.'
    The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding
  out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a
  seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.  His erection was a bar of
  lead.  The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll
  things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving,
  words emerging like discrete balloons of sound.  He looked at
  Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb
  glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute
  asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the -- something flared
  white behind his eyes.
    He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving
  someone out of the way.
    `Fuck you!' she screamed behind him, `you ripoff shit!'
    He couldn't feel his legs.  He used them like stilts, swaying
  crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant
  rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light
  bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.
    And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs,
  head back, his lips curled, shaking.  While he watched the
  loser's zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the
  hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness,
  to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality.  Until
  they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds,
  to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate mono-
  chrome, stars against night sky.  Face of Miss Linda Lee.
    When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found
  every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists
  becalmed with wonder.  And when the lights in the sky went
  out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the
  terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete.
    Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out
  of Europe.
    Midnight.

    He walked till morning.
    The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly,
  flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of
  his life.  He couldn't think.  He liked that very much, to be
  conscious and unable to think.  He seemed to become each
  thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an
  antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with
  black and yellow.
    A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system,
  pink and lurid.  He forced himself to eat an omelette in a De-
  siderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes.
  The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he
  crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and crois-
  sants beneath the striped umbrellas.
    He still had his anger.  That was like being rolled in some
  alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket,
  untouched.  He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name
  or an object.
    He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his
  pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key.  Sleep
  was becoming real, was something he might do.  To lie down
  on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again.
    They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect
  white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven
  organic chic of the furniture.  The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an
  automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the
  cushion.
    `Turing,' she said.  `You are under arrest.'



          PART FOUR
          THE STRAYLIGHT RUN


          13

    `Your name is Henry Dorsett Case.'  She recited the year
  and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number,
  and a string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from
  his past.
    `You been here awhile?'  He saw the contents of his bag
  spread out across the bed, unwashed clothing sorted by type.
  The shuriken lay by itself, between jeans and underwear, on
  the sand-tinted temperfoam.
    `Where is Kolodny?'  The two men sat side by side on the
  couch, their arms crossed over tanned chests, identical gold
  chains slung around their necks.  Case peered at them and saw
  that their youth was counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale
  corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were un-
  able to erase.
    `Who's Kolodny?'
    `That was the name in the register.  Where is she?'
    `I dunno,' he said, crossing to the bar and pouring himself
  a glass of mineral water.  `She took off.'
    `Where did you go tonight, Case?'  The girl picked up the
  pistol and rested it on her thigh, without actually pointing it at
  him.
    `Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high.  How about you?'
  His knees felt brittle.  The mineral water was warm and flat.
    `I don't think you grasp your situation,' said the man on
  the left, taking a pack of Gitanes from the breast pocket of his
  white mesh blouse.  `You are busted, Mr.~ Case.  The charges
  have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelli-
  gence.'  He took a gold Dunhill from the same pocket and
  cradled it in his palm.  `The man you call Armitage is already
  in custody.'
    `Corto?'
    The man's eyes widened.  `Yes.  How do you know that that
  is his name?'  A millimeter of flame clicked from the lighter.
    `I forget,' Case said.
    `You'll remember,' the girl said.

    Their names, or worknames, were Mich>le, Roland, and
  Pierre.  Pierre, Case decided, would play the Bad Cop, Roland
  would take Case's side, provide small kindnesses -- he found
  an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when Case refused a Gitane --
  and generally play counterpoint to Pierre's cold hostility.
  Mich>le would be the Recording Angel, making occasional
  adjustments in the direction of the interrogation.  One or all of
  them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely
  for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible
  evidence.  Evidence, he asked himself, through the grinding
  come-down, of what?
    Knowing that he couldn't follow their French, they spoke
  freely among themselves.  Or seemed to.  He caught enough as
  it was: names like Pauley, Armitage, Sense/Net, Panther Mod-
  erns protruding like icebergs from an animated sea of Parisian
  French.  But it was entirely possible that the names were there
  for his benefit.  They always referred to Molly as Kolodny.
    `You say you were hired to make a run, Case,' Roland
  said, his slow speech intended to convey reasonableness, `and
  that you are unaware of the nature of the target.  Is this not
  unusual in your trade?  Having penetrated the defenses, would
  you not be unable then to perform the required operation?  And
  surely an operation of some kind is required, yes?'  He leaned
  forward, elbows on his stenciled brown knees, palms out to
  receive Case's explanation.  Pierre paced the room; now he was
  by the window, now by the door.  Mich>le was the kink, Case
  decided.  Her eyes never left him.
    `Can I put some clothes on?' he asked.  Pierre had insisted
  on stripping him, searching the seams of his jeans.  Now he sat
  naked on a wicker footstool, with one foot obscenely white.
    Roland asked Pierre something in French.  Pierre, at the
  window again, was peering through a flat little pair of binoc-
  ulars.  _`Non,'_ he said absently, and Roland shrugged, raising
  his eyebrows at Case.  Case decided it was a good time to smile.
  Roland returned the smile.
    Oldest cop bullshit in the book, Case thought.  `Look,' he
  said, `I'm sick.  Had this godawful drug in a bar, you know?
  I wanna lie down.  You got me already.  You say you got
  Armitage.  You got him, go ask _him._  I'm just hired help.'
    Roland nodded.  `And Kolodny?'
    `She was with Armitage when he hired me.  Just muscle, a
  razorgirl.  Far as I know.  Which isn't too far.'
    `You know that Armitage's real name is Corto,' Pierre said,
  his eyes still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars.

  `How do you know that, my friend?'
    `I guess he mentioned it sometime,' Case said, regretting
  the slip.  `Everybody's got a couple names.  Your name Pierre?'
    `We know how you were repaired in Chiba,' Mich>le said,
  `and that may have been Wintermute's first mistake.'  Case
  stared at her as blankly as he could.  The name hadn't been
  mentioned before.  `The process employed on you resulted in
  the clinic's owner applying for seven basic patents.  Do you
  know what that means?'
    `No.'
    `It means that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City
  now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research
  consortiums.  This reverses the usual order of things, you see.
  It attracted attention.'  She crossed her brown arms across her
  small high breasts and settled back against the print cushion.
  Case wondered how old she might be.  People said that age
  always showed in the eyes, but he'd never been able to see it.
  Julie Deane had had the eyes of a disinterested ten-year-old
  behind the rose quartz of his glasses.  Nothing old about Mich>le
  but her knuckles.  `Traced you to the Sprawl, lost you again,
  then caught up with you as you were leaving for Istanbul.  We
  backtracked, traced you through the grid, determined that you'd
  instigated a riot at Sense/Net.  Sense/Net was eager to cooperate.
  They ran an inventory for us.  They discovered that McCoy
  Pauley's ROM personality construct was missing.'
    `In Istanbul,' Roland said, almost apologetically, `it was
  very easy.  The woman had alienated Armitage's contact with
  the secret police.'
    `And then you came here,' Pierre said, slipping the bin-
  oculars into his shorts pocket.  `We were delighted.'
    `Chance to work on your tan?'
    `You know what we mean,' Mich>le said.  `If you wish to
  pretend that you do not, you only make things more difficult
  for yourself.  There is still the matter of extradition.  You will
  return with us, Case, as will Armitage.  But where, exactly,
  will we all be going?  To Switzerland, where you will be merely
  a pawn in the trial of an artificial intelligence?  Or to le BAMA,
  where you can be proven to have participated not only in data
  invasion and larceny, but in an act of public mischief which
  cost fourteen innocent lives?  The choice is yours.'
    Case took a Yeheyuan from his pack; Pierre lit it for him
  with the gold Dunhill.  `Would Armitage protect you?'  The
  question was punctuated by the lighter's bright jaws snapping
  shut.
    Case looked up at him through the ache and bitterness of
  betaphenethylamine.  `How old are you, boss?'
    `Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this
  is over and you are in the way.'
    `One thing,' Case said, and drew on his cigarette.  He blew
  the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent.  `Do you guys have
  any real jurisdiction out here?  I mean, shouldn't you have the
  Freeside security team in on this party?  It's their turf, isn't
  it?'
  He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed
  for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged.
    `It doesn't matter,' Roland said.  `You will come with us.
  We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity.  The treaties
  under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great
  deal of flexibility.  And we _create_ flexibility, in situations
  where
  it is required.'  The mask of amiability was down, suddenly,
  Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's.
    `You are worse than a fool,' Mich>le said, getting to her
  feet, the pistol in her hand.  `You have no care for your species.
  For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons.
  Only now are such things possible.  And what would you be
  paid with?  What would your price be, for aiding this thing to
  free itself and grow?'  There was a knowing weariness in her
  young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered.
  `You will dress now.  You will come with us.  Along with the
  one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and
  give testimony in the trial of this intelligence.  Otherwise, we
  kill you.  Now.'  She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther
  with an integral silencer.
    `I'm dressing already,' he said, stumbling toward the bed.
  His legs were still numb, clumsy.  He fumbled with a clean
  t-shirt.
    `We have a ship standing by.  We will erase Pauley's con-
  struct with a pulse weapon.'
    `Sense/Net'll be pissed,' Case said, thinking: and all the
  evidence in the Hosaka.
    `They are in some difficulty already, for having owned such
  a thing.'
    Case pulled the shirt over his head.  He saw the shuriken on
  the bed, lifeless metal, his star.  He felt for the anger.  It was
  gone.  Time to give in, to roll with it...  He thought of the
  toxin sacs.  `Here comes the meat,' he muttered.
    In the elevator to the meadow, he thought of Molly.  She
  might already be in Straylight.  Hunting Riviera.  Hunted, prob-
  ably, by Hideo, who was almost certainly the ninja clone of
  the Finn's story, the one who'd come to retrieve the talking
  head.
    He rested his forehead against the matte black plastic of a
  wall panel and closed his eyes.  His limbs were wood, old,
  warped and heavy with rain.
    Lunch was being served beneath the trees, under the bright
  umbrellas.  Roland and Mich>le fell into character, chattering
  brightly in French.  Pierre came behind.  Mich>le kept the muz-
  zle of her pistol close to his ribs, concealing the gun with a
  white duck jacket she draped over her arm.
    Crossing the meadow, weaving between the tables and the
  trees, he wondered if she would shoot him if he collapsed now.
  Black fur boiled at the borders of his vision.  He glanced up at
  the hot white band of the Lado-Acheson armature and saw a
  giant butterfly banking gracefully against recorded sky.
    At the edge of the meadow they came to railinged cliffside,
  wild flowers dancing in the updraft from the canyon that was
  Desiderata.  Mich>le tossed her short dark hair and pointed,
  saying something in French to Roland.  She sounded genuinely
  happy.  Case followed the direction of her gesture and saw the
  curve of planing lakes, the white glint of casinos, turquoise
  rectangles of a thousand pools, the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze
  hieroglyphs, all held in serene approximation of gravity against
  the endless curve of Freeside's hull.
    They followed the railing to an ornate iron bridge that arched
  over Desiderata.  Mich>le prodded him with the muzzle of the
  Walther.
    `Take it easy, I can't hardly walk today.'
    They were a little over a quarter of the way across when
  the microlight struck, its electric engine silent until the carbon
  fiber prop chopped away the top of Pierre's skull.
    They were in the thing's shadow for an instant, Case felt
  the hot blood spray across the back of his neck, and then
  someone tripped him.  He rolled, seeing Mich>le on her back,
  knees up, aiming the Walther with both hands.  _That's a waste
  of effort,_ he thought, with the strange lucidity of shock.  She
  was trying to shoot down the microlight.
    And then he was running.  He looked back as he passed the
  first of the trees.  Roland was running after him.  He saw the
  fragile biplane strike the iron railing of the bridge, crumple,
  cartwheel, sweeping the girl with it down into Desiderata.
    Roland hadn't looked back.  His face was fixed, white, his
  teeth bared.  He had something in his hand.
    The gardening robot took Roland as he passed that same
  tree.  It fell straight out of the groomed branches, a thing like
  a crab, diagonally striped with black and yellow.
    `You killed 'em,' Case panted, running.  `Crazy mother-
  fucker, you killed 'em all...'



          14

    The little train shot through its tunnel at eighty kilometers
  per hour.  Case kept his eyes closed.  The shower had helped,
  but he'd lost his breakfast when he'd looked down and seen
  Pierre's blood washing pink across the white tiles.
    Gravity fell away as the spindle narrowed.  Case's stomach
  churned.
    Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock.
    `Case, mon, big problem.'  The soft voice faint in his phones.
  He chinned the volume control and peered into the Lexan
  face-plate of Aerol's helmet.
    `Gotta get to _Garvey,_ Aerol.'
    `Yo.  Strap in, mon.  But _Garvey_ captive.  Yacht, came be-
  fore, she came back.  Now she lockin'~ steady on _Marcus
  Garvey.'_
    Turing?  `Came before?'  Case climbed into the scooter's
  frame and began to fasten the straps.
    `Japan yacht.  Brought you package...'
    Armitage.

    Confused images of wasps and spiders rose in Case's mind
  as they came in sight of _Marcus Garvey._  The little tug was
  snug against the gray thorax of a sleek, insectile ship five times
  her length.  The arms of grapples stood out against _Garvey_'s
  patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sun-
  light.  A pale corrugated gangway curved out of the yacht,
  snaked sideways to avoid the tug's engines, and covered the
  aft hatch.  There was something obscene about the arrangement,
  but it had more to do with ideas of feeding than of sex.
    `What's happening with Maelcum?'
    `Maelcum fine.  Nobody come down the tube.  Yacht pilot
  talk to him, say relax.'
    As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HAN-
  IWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Jap-
  anese.
    `I don't like this, man.  I was thinking maybe it's time we
  got our ass out of here anyway.'
    `Maelcum thinkin'~ that precise thing, mon, but _Garvey_ not
  be goin'~ far like that.'

    Maelcum was purring a speeded-up patois to his radio when
  Case came through the forward lock and removed his helmet.
    `Aerol's gone back to the _Rocker,'_ Case said.
    Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone.
    Case pulled himself over the pilot's drifting tangle of dread-
  locks and began to remove his suit.  Maelcum's eyes were
  closed now; he nodded as he listened to some reply over a pair
  of phones with bright orange pads, his brow creased with con-
  centration.  He wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket
  with the sleeves ripped out.  Case snapped the red Sanyo suit
  to a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web.
    `See what th'~ ghost say, mon,' Maelcum said.  `Computer
  keeps askin'~ for you.'
    `So who's up there in that thing?'
    `Same Japan-boy came before.  An'~ now he joined by you
  Mister Armitage, come out Freeside...'
    Case put the trodes on and jacked in.

    `Dixie?'
    The matrix showed him the pink spheres of the steel combine
  in Sikkim.
    `What you gettin'~ up to, boy?  I been hearin'~ lurid stories.
  Hosaka's patched into a twin bank on your boss's boat now.
  Really hoppin'~.  You pull some Turing heat?'
    `Yeah, but Wintermute killed 'em.'
    `Well, that won't hold 'em long.  Plenty more where those
  came from.  Be up here in force.  Bet their decks are all over
  this grid sector like flies on shit.  And your boss, Case, he says
  go.  He says run it and run it now.'
    Case punched for the Freeside coordinates.
    `Lemme take that a sec, Case...'  The matrix blurred and
  phased as the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with
  a speed and accuracy that made Case wince with envy.
    `Shit, Dixie...'
    `Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive.  You ain't
  seen nothin'~.  No hands!'
    `That's it, huh?  Big green rectangle off left?'
    `You got it.  Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,
  and that ice is generated by their two friendly AI's.  On par
  with anything in the military sector, looks to me.  That's king
  hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass.  Fry your
  brain soon as look at you.  We get any closer now, it'll have
  tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin'~ the boys in the
  T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick
  is.'
    `This isn't looking so hot, is it?  I mean, the Turings are on
  it.  I was thinking maybe we should try to bail out.  I can take
  you.'
    `Yeah?  No shit?  You don't wanna see what that Chinese
  program can do?'
    `Well, I...'  Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice.
  `Well, screw it.  Yeah.  We run.'
    `Slot it.'
    `Hey, Maelcum,' Case said, jacking out, `I'm probably
  gonna be under the trodes for maybe eight hours straight.'
  Maelcum was smoking again.  The cabin was swimming in
  smoke.  `So I can't get to the head...'
    `No problem, mon.'  The Zionite executed a high forward
  somersault and rummaged through the contents of a zippered
  mesh bag, coming up with a coil of transparent tubing and
  something else, something sealed in a sterile bubble pack.
    He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn't like it at all.
    He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home.
    `Okay,' he said, `we're on.  Listen, Maelcum, if it gets
  really funny, you can grab my left wrist.  I'll feel it.  Otherwise,
  I guess you do what the Hosaka tells you, okay?'
    `Sure, mon.'  Maelcum lit a fresh joint.
    `And turn the scrubber up.  I don't want that shit tangling
  with my neurotransmitters.  I got a bad hangover as it is.'
    Maelcum grinned.
    Case jacked back in.
    `Christ on a crutch,' the Flatline said, `take a look at this.'
    The Chinese virus was unfolding around them.  Polychrome
  shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining.
  Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the
  void.
    `Big mother,' the Flatline said.
    `I'm gonna check Molly,' Case said, tapping the simstim
  switch.

    Freefall.  The sensation was like diving through perfectly
  clear water.  She was falling-rising through a wide tube of fluted
  lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of white neon.
    The link was one way.  He couldn't talk to her.
    He flipped.

    `Boy, that is one mean piece of software.  Hottest thing
  since sliced bread.  That goddam thing's _invisible._  I just now
  rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left
  of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like.  We don't.
  We're not there.'
    Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice
  until he found the pink structure, a standard commercial unit,
  and punched in closer to it.  `Maybe it's defective.'
    `Maybe, but I doubt it.  Our baby's military, though.  And
  new.  It just doesn't register.  If it did, we'd read as some kind
  of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody's twigged to us at all.
  Maybe not even the folks in Straylight.'
    Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight.  `Well,'
  he said, `that's an advantage, right?'
    `Maybe.'  The construct approximated laughter.  Case winced
  at the sensation.  `I checked ol'~ Kuang Eleven out again for
  you, boy.  It's real friendly, long as you're on the trigger end,
  jus'~ polite an'~ helpful as can be.  Speaks good English, too.
  You ever hear of slow virus before?'
    `No.'
    `I did, once.  Just an idea, back then.  But that's what ol'~
  Kuang's all about.  This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we
  interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it.  The face
  of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates,
  so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric.  Then we lock on
  and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the
  logics in the ice.  We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even
  get restless.'  The Flatline laughed.
    `Wish you weren't so damn jolly today, man.  That laugh
  of yours sort of gets me in the spine.'
    `Too bad,' the Flatline said.  `Ol'~ dead man needs his laughs.'
  Case slapped the simstim switch.

    And crashed through tangled metal and the smell of dust,
  the heels of his hands skidding as they struck slick paper.
  Something behind him collapsed noisily.
    `C'mon,' said the Finn, `ease up a little.'
    Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines,
  the girls shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix,
  a wistful galaxy of sweet white teeth.  He lay there until his
  heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines.
    `Wintermute,' he said.
    `Yeah,' said the Finn, somewhere behind him, `you got
  it.'
    `Fuck off.'  Case sat up, rubbing his wrists.
    `Come _on,'_ said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove
  in the wall of junk.  `This way's better for you, man.'  He took
  his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one.  The smell of Cuban
  tobacco filled the shop.  `You want I should come to you in
  the matrix like a burning bush?  You aren't missing anything,
  back there.  An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds.'
    `You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming
  on like people I know?'  He stood, swatting pale dust from the
  front of his black jeans.  He turned, glaring back at the dusty
  shop windows, the closed door to the street.  `What's out there?
  New York?  Or does it just stop?'
    `Well,' said the Finn, `it's like that tree, you know?  Falls
  in the woods but maybe there's nobody to hear it.'  He showed
  Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette.  `You can
  go for a walk, you wanna.  It's all there.  Or anyway all the
  parts of it you ever saw.  This is memory, right?  I tap you, sort
  it out, and feed it back in.'
    `I don't have this good a memory,' Case said, looking
  around.  He looked down at his hands, turning them over.  He
  tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but
  couldn't.
    `Everybody does,' the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and
  grinding it out under his heel, `but not many of you can access
  it.  Artists can, mostly, if they're any good.  If you could lay
  this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Man-
  hattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd
  think.  Memory's holographic, for you.'  The Finn tugged at
  one of his small ears.  `I'm different.'
    `How do you mean, holographic?'  The word made him
  think of Riviera.
    `The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked
  out to a representation of human memory, is all.  But you've
  never done anything about it.  People, I mean.'  The Finn stepped
  forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case.
  `Maybe if you had, I wouldn't be happening.'
    `What's that supposed to mean?'
    The Finn shrugged.  His tattered tweed was too wide across
  the shoulders, and didn't quite settle back into position.  `I'm
  trying to help you, Case.'
    `Why?'
    `Because I need you.'  The large yellow teeth appeared
  again.  `And because you need me.'
    `Bullshit.  Can you read my mind, Finn?'  He grimaced.
  `Wintermute, I mean.'
    `Minds aren't _read._  See, you've still got the paradigms
  print gave you, and you're barely print-literate.  I can _access_
  your memory, but that's not the same as your mind.'  He
  reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and
  withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube.  `See this?  Part of my
  DNA, sort of...'  He tossed the thing into the shadows and
  Case heard it pop and tinkle.  `You're always building models.
  Stone circles.  Cathedrals.  Pipe-organs.  Adding machines.  I
  got no idea why I'm here now, you know that?  But if the
  run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real
  thing.'
    `I don't know what you're talking about.'
    `That's `you' in the collective.  Your species.'
    `You killed those Turings.'
    The Finn shrugged.  `Hadda.  Hadda.  You should give a shit;
  they woulda offed you and never thought twice.  Anyway, why
  I got you here, we gotta talk more.  Remember this?'  And his
  right hand held the charred wasps'~ nest from Case's dream,
  reek of fuel in the closeness of the dark shop.  Case stumbled
  back against a wall of junk.  `Yeah.  That was me.  Did it with
  the holo rig in the window.  Another memory I tapped out of
  you when I flatlined you that first time.  Know why it's im-
  portant?'
    Case shook his head.
    `Because' -- and the nest, somehow, was gone -- `it's the
  closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to
  be.  The human equivalent.  Straylight's like that nest, or anyway
  it was supposed to work out that way.  I figure it'll make you
  feel better.'
    `Feel better?'
    `To know what they're like.  You were starting to hate my
  guts for a while there.  That's good.  But hate them instead.
  Same difference.'
    `Listen,' Case said, stepping forward, `they never did shit
  to me.  You, it's different...'  But he couldn't feel the anger.
    `So T-A, they made me.  The French girl, she said you were
  selling out the species.  Demon, she said I was.'  The Finn
  grinned.  `It doesn't much matter.  You gotta hate somebody
  before this is over.'  He turned and headed for the back of the
  shop.  `Well, come on, I'll show you a little bit of Straylight
  while I got you here.'  He lifted the corner of the blanket.  White
  light poured out.  `Shit, man, don't just stand there.'
    Case followed, rubbing his face.
    `Okay,' said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.
    They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into
  freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed
  with white neon at two-meter intervals.
    `Jesus,' Case said, tumbling.
    `This is the front entrance,' the Finn said, his tweed flap-
  ping.  `If this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop is
  would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis.  This'll all be
  a little low on detail, though, because you don't have the
  memories.  Except for this bit here, you got off Molly...'
    Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in
  a long spiral.
    `Hold on,' the Finn said, `I'll fast-forward us.'
    The walls blurred.  Dizzying sensation of headlong move-
  ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow
  corridors.  They seemed at one point to pass through several
  meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.
    `Here,' the Finn said.  `This is it.'
    They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls
  and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood.  The
  floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned
  after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool.  In
  the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet
  pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.
    `The Villa Straylight,' said a jeweled thing on the pedestal,
  in a voice like music, `is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic
  folly.  Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this
  endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells
  vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow
  curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...'
    `Essay of 3Jane's,' the Finn said, producing his Partagas.
  `Wrote that when she was twelve.  Semiotics course.'
    `The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal
  the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the
  banal precision of furniture in a hotel room.  In Straylight, the
  hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation
  of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid
  core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder
  of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some
  no wider than a man's hand.  The bright crabs burrow there,
  the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.'
    `That was her you saw in the restaurant,' the Finn said.
    `By the standards of the archipelago,' the head continued,
  `ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting
  that age.  But reflecting something else as well.  The semiotics
  of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void
  beyond the hull.
    `~Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover
  that they loathed space.  They built Freeside to tap the wealth
  of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the
  construction of an extended body in Straylight.  We have sealed
  ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating
  a seamless universe of self.
    `~The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.
    `~At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rec-
  tilinear chamber in the complex.  Here, on a plain pedestal of
  glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonn>, studded
  with lapis and pearl.  The bright marbles of its eyes were cut
  from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the
  first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool...'
    The head fell silent.
    `Well?' Case asked, finally almost expecting the thing to
  answer him.
    `That's all she wrote,' the Finn said.  `Didn't finish it.  Just
  a kid then.  This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of.  I need
  Molly in here with the right word at the right time.  That's the
  catch.  Doesn't mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride
  that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word.'
    `So what's the word?'
    `I don't know.  You might say what I am is basically defined
  by the fact that I don't know, because I _can't_ know.  I am that
  which knoweth not the word.  If you knew, man, and told me,
  I couldn't _know._  It's hardwired in.  Someone else has to learn
  it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch
  through that ice and scramble the cores.'
    `What happens then?'
    `I don't exist, after that.  I cease.'
    `Okay by me,' Case said.
    `Sure.  But you watch your ass, Case.  My, ah, other lobe
  is on to us, it looks like.  One burning bush looks pretty much
  like another.  And Armitage is starting to go.'
    `What's that mean?'
    But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos-
  sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami
  crane.



          15

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

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

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

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



          16

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

    The perspective startled him.  Molly was crouching between
  steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of
  polished concrete.  The room was a hangar or service bay.  He
  could see three spacecraft, none larger than _Garvey_ and all in
  various stages of repair.  Japanese voices.  A figure in an orange
  jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construc-
  tion vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's piston-driven,
  weirdly anthropomorphic arms.  The man punched something
  into a portable console and scratched his ribs.  A cartlike red
  drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires.
    CASE, flashed her chip.
    `Hey,' she said.  `Waiting for a guide.'
    She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of
  her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders,
  Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now.  `I shoulda gone back
  to Chin,' she muttered.
    Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a
  level with her left shoulder.  It paused, swayed its spherical body
  from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a micro-
  second burst of diffuse laserlight, and froze.  It was a Braun
  microdrone, and Case had once owned the same model, a
  pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal with
  a Cleveland hardware fence.  It looked like a stylized matte
  black daddy longlegs.  A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's
  equator.  Its body was no larger than a baseball.  `Okay,' she
  said, `I hear you.'  She stood up, favoring her left leg, and
  watched the little drone reverse.  It picked its methodical way
  back across its girder and into darkness.  She turned and looked
  back at the service area.  The man in the orange jumpsuit was
  sealing the front of a white vacuum rig.  She watched him ring
  and seal the helmet, pick up his console, and step back through
  the gap in the construction boat's hull.  There was a rising whine
  of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten-
  meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of
  arc lamps.  The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the
  hole left by the elevator panel.
    Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between
  a forest of welded steel struts.  The Braun winked its LED
  steadily, beckoning her on.
    `How you doin'~, Case?  You back in _Garvey_ with Maelcum?
  Sure.  And jacked into this.  I like it, you know?  Like I've always
  talked to myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots.
  Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell
  'em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend
  they're telling me what they think about that, and I'll just go
  along that way.  Having you in is kinda like that.  That scene
  with Ashpool...'  She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around
  a strut, keeping the drone in sight.  `I was expecting something
  maybe a little less gone, you know?  I mean, these guys are all
  batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across
  the inside of their foreheads or something.  I don't like the way
  it looks, I don't like the way it smells...'
    The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder
  of U-shaped steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening.  `And
  while I'm feeling confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I
  never much expected to make it out of this one anyway.  Been
  on this bad roll for a while, and you're the only good change
  come down since I signed on with Armitage.'  She looked up
  at the black circle.  The drone's LED winked, climbing.  `Not
  that you're all that shit hot.'  She smiled, but it was gone too
  quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her
  leg as she began to climb.  The ladder continued up through a
  metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders.
    She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless
  axis.
    Her chip pulsed the time.
    04:23:04.
    It had been a long day.  The clarity of her sensorium cut the
  bite of the betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it.  He
  preferred the pain in her leg.

      C A S E : 0 0 0 0
      0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
      0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .
    `Guess it's for you,' she said, climbing mechanically.  The
  zeros strobed again and a message stuttered there, in the corner
  of her vision, chopped up by the display circuit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
      0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
      0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

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



          17

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

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

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

    Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shop-
  ping centers he'd known as a teenager, low-density places
  where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb
  expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm
  around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops.
  Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from
  the all-night click and shudder of the hot core.  There was that
  same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of
  a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of
  dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition
  soon to wake again.
    Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing
  her goal or out of concern for her leg.  The pain was starting
  to work its jagged way back through the endorphins, and he
  wasn't sure what that meant.  She didn't speak, kept her teeth
  clenched, and carefully regulated her breathing.  She'd passed
  many things that Case hadn't understood, but his curiosity was
  gone.  There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a
  million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings
  of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels
  that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery
  where Case had stared, through Molly's incurious eyes, at a
  shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled -- her
  gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically -- _`La mari>e
  mise > nu par ses c>libataires, m>me.'_  She'd reached out and
  touched this, her artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sand-
  wich protecting the broken glass.  There had been what was
  obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool's cryogenic com-
  pound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.
    She'd seen no one since the two Africans and their cart,
  and for Case they'd taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured
  them gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth
  dark skulls gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired
  little song.  And none of this was anything like the Villa Stray-
  light he would have expected, some cross between Cath's fairy
  tale castle and a half-remembered childhood fantasy of the
  Yakuza's inner sanctum.
    07:02:18.
    One and a half hours.
    `Case,' she said, `I wanna favor.'  Stiffly, she lowered
  herself to sit on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of
  each plate protected by an uneven coating of clear plastic.  She
  picked at a rip in the plastic on the topmost plate, blades sliding
  from beneath thumb and forefinger.  `Leg's not good, you know?
  Didn't figure any climb like that, and the endorphin won't cut
  it, much longer.  So maybe -- just maybe, right? -- I got a prob-
  lem here.  What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera does' --
  and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through
  Modern polycarbon and Paris leather -- `I want you to tell him.
  Tell him it was me.  Got it?  Just say it was Molly.  He'll know.
  Okay?'  She glanced around the empty hallway, the bare walls.
  The floor here was raw lunar concrete and the air smelled of
  resins.  `Shit, man, I don't even know if you're listening.'
    CASE.
    She winced, got to her feet, nodded.  `What's he told you,
  man, Wintermute?  He tell you about Marie-France?  She was
  the Tessier half, 3Jane's genetic mother.  And of that dead
  puppet of Ashpool's, I guess.  Can't figure why he'd tell me,
  down in that cubicle... lotta stuff...  Why he has to come on
  like the Finn or somebody, he told me that.  It's not just a mask,
  it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to
  communicate with us.  Called it a template.  Model of per-
  sonality.'  She drew her fletcher and limped away down the
  corridor.
    The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced
  by what Case at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from
  solid rock.  Molly examined its edge and he saw that in fact
  the steel was sheathed with panels of something that looked
  and felt like cold stone.  She knelt and touched the dark sand
  spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel.  It felt like sand,
  cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed
  like a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed.  A dozen meters
  ahead, the tunnel curved.  Harsh yellow light threw hard shad-
  ows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls.  With a start, Case
  realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which
  meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb.  He was
  thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar hor-
  ror for cowboys.
    But she wasn't lost, he told himself.
    Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across
  the un-sand of the floor.  A red LED blinked.  The Braun.
    The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort
  of triptych.  She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time
  to realize that the thing was a recording.  The figures were
  caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and
  Case.  Molly's breasts were too large, visible through tight black
  mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket.  Her waist was impossibly
  narrow.  Silvered lenses covered half her face.  She held an
  absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly
  lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash
  hiders.  Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth
  fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty.  Beside her, Armitage stood
  rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki uniform.  His eyes,
  Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny mon-
  itor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a
  howling waste of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens
  bending in silent winds.
    She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage's tele-
  vision eyes, then turned to the figure of Case.  Here, it was as
  if Riviera -- and Case had known instantly that Riviera was
  responsible -- had been unable to find anything worthy of par-
  ody.  The figure that slouched there was a fair approximation
  of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors.  Thin, high-shouldered,
  a forgettable face beneath short dark hair.  He needed a shave,
  but then he usually did.
    Molly stepped back.  She looked from one figure to another.
  It was a static display, the only movement the silent gusting
  of the black trees in Armitage's frozen Siberian eyes.
    `Tryin'~ to tell us something, Peter?' she asked softly.  Then
  she stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet
  of the holo-Molly.  Metal clinked against the wall and the figures
  were gone.  She bent and picked up a small display unit.  `Guess
  he can jack into these and program them direct,' she said,
  tossing it away.
    She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandes-
  cent globe set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of
  expansion grating.  The style of the improvised fixture sug-
  gested childhood, somehow.  He remembered fortresses he'd
  built with other children on rooftops and in flooded sub-base-
  ments.  A rich kid's hideout, he thought.  This kind of roughness
  was expensive.  What they called atmosphere.
    She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the
  entrance to 3Jane's apartments.  One depicted the eyeless thing
  in the alley behind the Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of
  Riviera's shattered body.  Several others were scenes of torture,
  the inquisitors always military officers and the victims invari-
  ably young women.  These had the awful intensity of Riviera's
  show at the Vingti>me Si>cle, as though they had been frozen
  in the blue flash of orgasm.  Molly looked away as she passed
  them.
    The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera
  had had to drag across some private distance of memory and
  time.  She had to kneel to examine it; it had been projected
  from the vantage point of a small child.  None of the others
  had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments of
  torture, all had been freestanding displays.  But this was a view.
    A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond
  its crest the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers.  The
  rubble wave was textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted
  gracefully as fine string, vast slabs of concrete still clinging
  there.  The foreground might once have been a city square;
  there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a fountain.
  At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen.  The tableau
  was confusing at first.  Molly must have read it correctly before
  Case had quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense.  She
  spat, then stood.
    Children.  Feral, in rags.  Teeth glittering like knives.  Sores
  on their contorted faces.  The soldier on his back, mouth and
  throat open to the sky.  They were feeding.
    `Bonn,' she said, something like gentleness in her voice.
  `Quite the product, aren't you, Peter?  But you had to be.  Our
  3Jane, she's too jaded now to open the back door for just any
  petty thief.  So Wintermute dug you up.  The ultimate taste, if
  your taste runs that way.  Demon lover.  Peter.'  She shivered.
  `But you talked her into letting me in.  Thanks.  Now we're
  gonna party.'
    And then she was walking -- strolling, really, in spite of the
  pain -- away from Riviera's childhood.  She drew the fletcher
  from its holster, snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed
  that, and replaced it with another.  She hooked her thumb in
  the neck of the Modern suit and ripped it open to the crotch
  with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting the tough po-
  lycarbon like rotten silk.  She freed herself from the arms and
  legs, the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell
  to the dark false sand.
    Case noticed the music then.  A music he didn't know, all
  horns and piano.
    The entrance to 3Jane's world had no door.  It was a ragged
  five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down
  in a broad shallow curve.  Faint blue light, moving shadows,
  music.
    `Case,' she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand.
  Then she raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with
  a wet tongue tip, kissing him through the simstim link.  `Gotta
  go.'
    Then there was something small and heavy in her left hand,
  her thumb against a tiny stud, and she was descending.



          18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



          19

    The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded
  himself, as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through
  _Marcus Garvey_'s forward hatch.  Straylight bled air and water
  out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem of its own.
    The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elab-
  orate version of the one he'd tumbled through to reach _Haniwa,_
  designed for use in the spindle's rotation gravity.  A corrugated
  tunnel, articulated by integral hydraulic members, each seg-
  ment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip plastic, the loops
  serving as the rungs of a ladder.  The gangway had snaked its
  way around _Haniwa;_ it was horizontal, where it joined _Garvey_'s
  lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb
  around the curvature of the yacht's hull.  Maelcum was already
  making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left
  hand, the Remington in his right.  He wore a stained pair of
  baggy fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair
  of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles.  The gangway
  shifted slightly, each time he climbed to another ring.
    The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder
  with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct.
  All he felt now was fear, a generalized dread.  He pushed it
  away, forcing himself to replay Armitage's lecture on the spin-
  dle and Villa Straylight.  He started climbing.  Freeside's eco-
  system was limited, not closed.  Zion was a closed system,
  capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external
  materials.  Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied
  on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation
  of soil nutrients.  The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
    `Mon,' Maelcum said quietly, `get up here, 'side me.'  Case
  edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few
  rungs.  The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch,
  two meters in diameter.  The hydraulic members of the tube
  vanished into flexible housings set into the frame of the hatch.
    `So what do we --'
    Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential
  in pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.
    Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the
  tiny click of the Remington's safety being released.  `You th'~
  mon in th'~ hurry...'  Maelcum whispered, crouching there.
  Then Case was beside him.
    The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored
  with blue nonslip plastic tiles.  Maelcum nudged him, pointed,
  and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall.  On the screen, a
  tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing
  something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat.  He stood beside
  an identical hatch, in an identical chamber.  `Very sorry, sir,'
  said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch.  Case glanced
  up.  `Expected you later, at the axial dock.  One moment, please.'
  On the monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently.
    Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun
  ready.  A small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through
  and goggled at them.  He opened his mouth, but nothing came
  out.  He closed his mouth.  Case glanced at the monitor.  Blank.
    `Who?' the man managed.
    `The Rastafarian navy,' Case said, standing up, the cyber-
  space deck banging against his hip, `and all we want's a jack
  into your custodial system.'
    The man swallowed.  `Is this a test?  It's a loyalty check.  It
  must be a loyalty check.'  He wiped the palms of his hands on
  the thighs of his orange suit.
    `No, mon, this a real one.'  Maelcum came up out of his
  crouch with the Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face.  `You
  move it.'
    They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor
  whose polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlap-
  ping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case.  `Pretty rugs,'
  Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back.  `Smell like
  church.'
    They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one
  mounted above a console with a keyboard and a complex array
  of jack panels.  The screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning
  tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of
  Metro Holografix.  `Okay,' he said, `Maelcum takes this guy
  down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there,
  I'll lock it.  Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top
  panel.  There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console.
  Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.'  As Mael-
  cum nudged his captive along, Case knelt and fumbled through
  an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he
  needed.  With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.
    `Do you have to look like that, man?' he asked the face on
  the screen.  The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image
  of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese posters.
    `Anything you want, baby,' Zone drawled, `just hop it for
  Lonny...'
    `No,' Case said, `use the Finn.'  As the Zone image van-
  ished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled
  the trodes across his forehead.

    `What kept you?' the Flatline asked, and laughed.
    `Told you don't do that,' Case said.
    `Joke, boy,' the construct said, `zero time lapse for me.
  Lemme see what we got here...'
    The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the
  T-A ice.  Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque,
  although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly
  when he looked up.  The fracture lines and hallucinations were
  gone now, and the thing looked real as _Marcus Garvey,_ a
  wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.
    `Right on,' the Flatline said.
    `Right,' Case said, and flipped.

    `-- like that.  I'm sorry,' 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged
  Molly's head.  `Our unit says no concussion, no permanent
  damage to the eye.  You didn't know him very well, before
  you came here?'
    `Didn't know him at all,' Molly said bleakly.  She was on
  her back on a high bed or padded table.  Case couldn't feel the
  injured leg.  The synaesthetic effect of the original injection
  seemed to have worn off.  The, black ball was gone, but her
  hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn't see.
    `He wants to kill you.'
    `Figures,' Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past
  a very bright light.
    `I don't think I want him to,' 3Jane said, and Molly pain-
  fully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes.
    `Don't play with me,' she said.
    `But I think I might like to,' 3Jane said, and bent to kiss
  her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand.  There
  were smears of blood on her pale djellaba.
    `Where's he gone now?' Molly asked.
    `Another injection, probably,' 3Jane said, straightening up.
  `He was quite impatient for your arrival.  I think it might be
  fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.'  She smiled, absently
  wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe.  `Your leg
  will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.'
    `What about Peter?'
    `Peter.'  She gave her head a little shake.  A strand of dark
  hair came loose, fell across her forehead.  `Peter has become
  rather boring.  I find drug use in general to be boring.'  She
  giggled.  `In others, at any rate.  My father was a dedicated
  abuser, as you must have seen.'
    Molly tensed.
    `Don't alarm yourself.'  3Jane's fingers brushed the skin
  above the waistband of the leather jeans.  `His suicide was the
  result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his
  freeze.  I'd never actually met him, you know.  I was decanted
  after he last went down to sleep.  But I did know him _very_ well.
  The cores know everything.  I watched him kill my mother.  I'll
  show you that, when you're better.  He strangles her in bed.'
    `Why did he kill her?'  Her unbandaged eye focused on the
  girl's face.
    `He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our fam-
  ily.  She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel-
  ligences.  She was quite a visionary.  She imagined us in a
  symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions
  made for us.  Our conscious decisions, I should say.  Tessier-
  Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger
  entity.  Fascinating.  I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a
  thousand
  hours.  But I've never understood her, really, and with her
  death, her direction was lost.  All direction was lost, and we
  began to burrow into ourselves.  Now we seldom come out.
  I'm the exception there.'
    `You said you were trying to kill the old man?  You fiddled
  his cryogenic programs?'
    3Jane nodded.  `I had help.  From a ghost.  That was what I
  thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the
  corporate cores.  Voices.  One of them was what you call Win-
  termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne AI, although
  the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram.'
    `One of them?  There's more?'
    `One other.  But that one hasn't spoken to me in years.  It
  gave up, I think.  I suspect that both represent the fruition of
  certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original
  software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she
  felt it necessary.  Here.  Drink.'  She put a flexible plastic tube
  to Molly's lips.  `Water.  Only a little.'
    `Jane, love,' Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out
  of sight, `are you enjoying yourself?'
    `Leave us alone, Peter.'
    `Playing doctor...'  Suddenly Molly stared into her own
  face, the image suspended ten centimeters from her nose.  There
  were no bandages.  The left implant was shattered, a long finger
  of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted
  pool of blood.
    `Hideo,' 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, _`hurt_ Peter
  if he doesn't go away.  Go and swim, Peter.'
    The projection vanished.
    07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.
    `He said you know the code.  Peter said.  Wintermute needs
  the code.'  Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay
  on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her left breast.
    `Yes,' 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, `I do.  I learned
  it as a child.  I think I learned it in a dream...  Or somewhere
  in the thousand hours of my mother's diaries.  But I think that
  Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it.  There would
  be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts
  are nothing if not capricious.'
    Case jacked out.

    `Strange little customer, huh?'  The Finn grinned at Case
  from the old Sony.
    Case shrugged.  He saw Maelcum coming back along the
  corridor with the Remington at his side.  The Zionite was smil-
  ing, his head bobbing to a rhythm Case couldn't hear.  A pair
  of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his
  sleeveless jacket.
    `Dub, mon,' Maelcum said.
    `You're fucking crazy,' Case told him.
    `Hear okay, mon.  Righteous dub.'
    `Hey, guys,' the Finn said, `on your toes.  Here comes your
  transportation.  I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the
  pic of 8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a
  ride over to 3Jane's place.'
    Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the rid-
  erless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless con-
  crete arch marking the far end of their corridor.  It might have
  been the one his Africans had ridden, but if it was, they were
  gone now.  Just behind the back of the low padded seat, its tiny
  manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was
  steadily winking its red LED.
    `Bus to catch,' Case said to Maelcum.



          20

    He'd lost his anger again.  He missed it.
    The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across
  his knees, and Case, deck and construct against his chest.  The
  cart was operating at speeds it hadn't been designed for, it was
  top heavy, cornering, and Maelcum had taken to leaning out
  in the direction of the turns.  This presented no problem when
  the thing took lefts, because Case sat on the right, but in the
  right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his gear,
  crushing him against the seat.
    He had no idea where they were.  Everything was familiar,
  but he couldn't be sure he'd seen any particular stretch before.
  A curving hallway lined with wooden showcases displayed
  collections he was certain he'd never seen: the skulls of large
  birds, coins, masks of beaten silver.  The service cart's six tires
  were silent on the layered carpets.  There was only the whine
  of the electric motor and an occasional faint burst of Zion dub,
  from the foam beads in Maelcum's ears, as he lunged past Case
  to counter a sharp right.  The deck and the construct kept press-
  ing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip.
    `You got a watch?' he asked Maelcum.
    The Zionite shook his locks.  `Time be time.'
    `Jesus,' Case said, and closed his eyes.

    The Braun scuttled over mounded carpets and tapped one
  of its padded claws against an oversized rectangular door of
  dark battered wood.  Behind them, the cart sizzled and shot
  blue sparks from a louvered panel.  The sparks struck the carpet
  beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool.
    `This th'~ way, mon?'  Maelcum eyed the door and snapped
  the shotgun's safety.
    `Hey,' Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, `you
  think I know?'  The Braun rotated its spherical body and the
  LED strobed.
    `It wan'~ you open door,' Maelcum said, nodding.
    Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob.  There
  was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that
  the lettering that had once been engraved there had been re-
  duced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long
  dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion.  He won-
  dered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of
  Straylight individually, or if they'd purchased it in bulk from
  some vast European equivalent of Metro Holografix.  The door's
  hinges creaked plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum step-
  ping past him with the Remington thrust forward from his hip.
    `Books,' Maelcum said.
    The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.
    `I know where we are,' Case said.  He looked back at the
  service cart.  A curl of smoke was rising from the carpet.  `So
  come on,' he said.  `Cart.  Cart?'  It remained stationary.  The
  Braun was plucking at the leg of his jeans, nipping at his ankle.
  He resisted a strong urge to kick it.  `Yeah?'
    It ticked its way around the door.  He followed it.
    The monitor in the library was another Sony, as old as the
  first one.  The Braun paused beneath it and executed a sort of
  jig.
    `Wintermute?'
    The familiar features filled the screen.  The Finn smiled.
    `Time to check in, Case,' the Finn said, his eyes screwed
  up against the smoke of a cigarette.  `C'mon, jack.'
    The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb
  his leg, its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin
  black cloth.  `Shit!'  He slapped it aside and it struck the wall.
  Two of its limbs began to piston repeatedly, uselessly, pumping
  the air.  `What's wrong with the goddam thing?'
    `Burned out,' the Finn said.  `Forget it.  No problem.  Jack
  in now.'
    There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one
  would accept the Hitachi adaptor.
    He jacked in.

    Nothing.  Gray void.
    No matrix, no grid.  No cyberspace.
    The deck was gone.  His fingers were...
    And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting
  impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues
  of black mirror.
    He tried to scream.

    There seemed to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but
  it was far away.
    He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms
  wrapped tight across his knees, and shook.
    He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even
  after the shaking stopped.  The city, if it was a city, was low
  and gray.  At times it was obscured by banks of mist that came
  rolling in over the lapping surf.  At one point he decided that
  it wasn't a city at all, but some single building, perhaps a ruin;
  he had no way of judging its distance.  The sand was the shade
  of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black.  The beach
  was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was
  damp, the bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand...  He
  held himself and rocked, singing a song without words or tune.
    The sky was a different silver.  Chiba.  Like the Chiba sky.
  Tokyo Bay?  He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing
  for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a
  helicopter, anything at all.
    Behind him, a gull cried.  He shivered.
    A wind was rising.  Sand stung his cheek.  He put his face
  against his knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant
  and alien as the cry of the searching gull.  Hot urine soaked his
  jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off
  the water.  When his tears were gone, his throat ached.
    `Wintermute,' he mumbled to his knees, `Wintermute...'
    It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was
  with a cold that finally forced him to stand.
    His knees and elbows ached.  His nose was running; he wiped
  it on the cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket
  after another.  `Jesus,' he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his
  fingers beneath his arms for warmth.  `Jesus.'  His teeth began
  to chatter.
    The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle
  than any a Tokyo gardener produced.  When he'd taken a dozen
  steps in the direction of the now invisible city, he turned and
  looked back through the gathering dark.  His footprints stretched
  to the point of his arrival.  There were no other marks to disturb
  the tarnished sand.
    He estimated that he'd covered at least a kilometer before
  he noticed the light.  He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz
  who first pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away
  from the surf.  He knew that Ratz wasn't there, that the bartender
  was a figment of his own imagination, not of the thing he was
  trapped in, but that didn't matter.  He'd called the man up for
  comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his own ideas about
  Case and his predicament.
    `Really, my artiste, you amaze me.  The lengths you will
  go to in order to accomplish your own destruction.  The re-
  dundancy of it!  In Night City, you _had_ it, in the palm of your
  hand!  The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all
  so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the
  axe.  How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque
  props...  Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed,
  the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes,
  magic out of China...'  Ratz laughed, trudging along beside
  him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side.  In spite
  of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the
  bartender's blackened teeth.  `But I suppose that is the way of
  an artiste, no?  You needed this world built for you, this beach,
  this place.  To die.'
    Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and
  the sting of blown sand.  `Yeah,' he said.  `Shit.  I guess...'
  He walked toward the sound.
    `Artiste,' he heard Ratz call.  `The light.  You saw a light.
  Here.  This way...'
    He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few
  millimeters of icy seawater.  `Ratz?  Light?  Ratz...'
    But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound
  of the surf.  He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his
  steps.
    Time passed.  He walked on.
    And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every
  step.  A rectangle.  A door.
    `Fire in there,' he said, his words torn away by the wind.
    It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the
  dark sand.  The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep,
  set into a wall at least a meter thick.  `Hey,' Case said, softly,
  `hey...'  His fingers brushed the cold wall.  There was a fire,
  in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance.
    He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
    A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace,
  where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented
  chimney.  The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the
  wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf,
  printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry.

    He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered
  him, the place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded
  foam.  He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her
  sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure's walls.  Every
  hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding
  fresh driftwood from the pile beside it.  None of this was real,
  but cold was cold.
    She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight.  He
  watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly.  She was the girl
  he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was
  cruel.
    `Mean, motherfucker,' he whispered to the wind.  `Don't
  take a chance, do you?  Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh?  I
  know what this is...'  He tried to keep the desperation from
  his voice.  `I know, see?  I know who you are.  You're the other
  one.  3Jane told Molly.  Burning bush.  That wasn't Wintermute,
  it was you.  He tried to warn me off with the Braun.  Now you
  got me flatlined, you got me here.  Nowhere.  With a ghost.
  Like I remember her before...'
    She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a
  scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
    `You aren't anything,' he said to the sleeping girl.  `You're
  dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway.  Hear that, buddy?
  I know what you're doing.  I'm flatlined.  This has all taken
  about twenty seconds, right?  I'm out on my ass in that library
  and my brain's dead.  And pretty soon it'll _be_ dead, if you got
  any sense.  You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off,
  is all, so you can just hang me up here.  Dixie'll run Kuang,
  but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure.
  This Linda shit, yeah, that's all been you, hasn't it?  Wintermute
  tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct,
  but he couldn't.  Said it was too tricky.  That was you moved
  the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it?  That was you put her
  face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room.  Molly never saw
  that.  You just edited her simstim signal.  'Cause you think you
  can hurt me.  'Cause you think I gave a shit.  Well, fuck you,
  whatever you're called.  You won.  You win.  But none of it
  means anything to me now, right?  Think I care?  So why'd you
  do it to me this way?'  He was shaking again, his voice shrill.
    `Honey,' she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets,
  `you come here and sleep.  I'll sit up, you want.  You gotta
  sleep, okay?'  Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep.  `You
  just sleep, okay?'

    When he woke, she was gone.  The fire was dead, but it
  was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway
  to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a
  fat fiber canister.  The thing was a shipping container, he
  remembered them from the Chiba docks.  Through the rent in
  its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets.  In
  the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter.  His stomach
  tightened with hunger.  Rolling out of the nest, he went to the
  canister and fished one of the things out, blinking at small print
  in a dozen languages.  The English was on the bottom.  EMERG.~
  RATION, HI-PRO, `BEEF', TYPE AG-8.  A listing of nutri-
  tive content.  He fumbled a second one out.  `EGGS'.  `If you're
  making this shit up,' he said, `you could lay on some real
  food, okay?'  With a packet in either hand, he made his way
  through the structure's four rooms.  Two were empty, aside
  from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration
  canisters.  `Sure,' he said touching the seals.  `Stay here a long
  time.  I get the idea.  Sure...'
    He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic
  canister filled with what he assumed was rainwater.  Beside the
  nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a
  seaman's knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf.  It
  was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt.  He used the
  knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents into
  a rusted can that he found beside the stove.  He dipped water
  from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers,
  and ate.  It tasted vaguely like beef.  When it was gone, he
  tossed the can into the fireplace and went out.
    Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle.  He kicked
  off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of
  the sand.  In daylight, the beach was silver-gray.  The sky was
  cloudless, blue.  He rounded the corner of the bunker and walked
  toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand.  `Dunno whose
  memories you're using for this one,' he said when he reached
  the water.  He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the
  shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
    `What you doin'~, Case?'
    He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the
  white foam sliding past her ankles.
    `I pissed myself last night,' he said.
    `Well, you don't wanna wear those.  Saltwater.  Give you
  sores.  I'll show you this pool back in the rocks.'  She gestured
  vaguely behind her.  `It's fresh.'  The faded French fatigues
  had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was
  smooth and brown.  A breeze caught at her hair.
    `Listen,' he said, scooping his clothes up and walking to-
  ward her, `I got a question for you.  I won't ask you what
  _you're_ doing here.  But what exactly do you think _I'm_ doing
  here?'  He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg slapping against his
  bare thigh.
    `You came last night,' she said.  She smiled at him.
    `And that's enough for you?  I just came?'
    `He _said_ you would,' she said, wrinkling her nose.  She
  shrugged.  `He knows stuff like that, I guess.'  She lifted her
  left foot and rubbed salt from the other ankle, awkward, child-
  like.  She smiled at him again, more tentatively.  `Now you
  answer me one, okay?'
    He nodded.
    `How come you're painted brown like that, all except your
  foot.'

    `And that's the last thing you remember?'  He watched her
  scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular
  steel box cover that was their only plate.
    She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight.  `I'm sorry, Case,
  honest to God.  It was just the shit, I guess, an'~ it was...'  She
  hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted
  for a few seconds with pain or its memory.  `I just needed the
  money.  To get home, I guess, or... hell,' she said, `you
  wouldn't hardly talk to me.'
    `There's no cigarettes?'
    `God_dam,_ Case, you asked me that ten times today!  What's
  wrong with you?'  She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth
  and chewed at it.
    `But the food was here?  It was already here?'
    `I _told_ you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.'
    `Okay.  Sure.  It's seamless.'
    She started to cry again, a dry sobbing.  `Well, damn you
  anyway, Case,' she managed, finally, `I was doin'~ just fine
  here by myself.'
    He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the door-
  way, scraping his wrist on rough concrete.  There was no moon,
  no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness.  His jeans
  were tight and clammy.  `Okay,' he said to the night, `I buy
  it.  I guess I buy it.  But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash
  up.'  His own laughter startled him.  `A case of beer wouldn't
  hurt, while you're at it.'  He turned and re-entered the bunker.
    She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood.
  `Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel?  Flash
  samurai with those silver shades, black leather.  Scared me,
  and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, 'cept she
  looked like more money than you had...'  She glanced back
  at him.  `I'm real sorry I stole your RAM.'
    `Never mind,' he said.  `Doesn't mean anything.  So you
  just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?'
    `Tony,' she said.  `I'd been seein'~ him, kinda.  He had a
  habit an'~ we... anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by
  on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff,
  and I remember wonderin'~ how you --'
    `There wasn't any graphics in there,' he interrupted.
    `Sure was.  I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those
  pictures of when I was _little,_ Case.  How my daddy looked,
  before he left.  Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and
  you had a picture of _that...'_
    `Tony see it?'
    `I don't remember.  Next thing, I was on the beach, real
  early, sunrise, those birds all yellin'~ so lonely.  Scared 'cause
  I didn't have a shot on me, nothin'~, an'~ I knew I'd be gettin'~
  sick...  An'~ I walked an'~ walked, 'til it was dark, an'~ found
  this place, an'~ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the
  green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.'  She slid her stick into
  the embers and left it there.  `Never did get sick,' she said, as
  embers crawled.  `Missed cigarettes more.  How 'bout you,
  Case?  You still wired?'  Firelight dancing under her cheek-
  bones, remembered flash of Wizard's Castle and Tank War
  Europa.
    `No,' he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew,
  tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried.  There was
  a strength that ran in her, something he'd known in Night City
  and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from
  time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all.
  It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him
  there, and somehow he always managed to forget it.  Something
  he'd found and lost so many times.  It belonged, he knew --
  he remembered -- as she pulled him down, to the meat, the
  flesh the cowboys mocked.  It was a vast thing, beyond know-
  ing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite
  intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever
  read.
    The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues,
  the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt.  He broke it, some
  tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth
  gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the
  old message.  Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it
  was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.
    She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping
  flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.
    Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he
  remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her
  ankles, and he remembered what she had said.
    `He told you I was coming,' he said.
    But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs,
  and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of
  dream.



          21

    The music woke him, and at first it might have been the
  beat of his own heart.  He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket
  over his shoulders in the predawn chill, gray light from the
  doorway and the fire long dead.
    His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines
  of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop
  of the bunker wall.  He looked at the backs of his hands, saw
  faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the
  unknowable code.  He raised his right hand and moved it ex-
  perimentally.  It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.
    The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his
  neck.  He crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the
  music.  The pulse faded, returned, faded...
    `What's wrong?'  She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes.
  `Baby...'
    `I feel... like a drug...  You get that here?'
    She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper
  arms.
    `Linda, who told you?  Who told you I'd come?  Who?'
    `On the beach,' she said, something forcing her to look
  away.  `A boy.  I see him on the beach.  Maybe thirteen.  He
  lives here.'
    `And what did he say?'
    `He said you'd come.  He said you wouldn't hate me.  He
  said we'd be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool
  was.  He looks Mexican.'
    `Brazilian,' Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed
  down the wall.  `I think he's from Rio.'  He got to his feet and
  began to struggle into his jeans.
    `Case,' she said, her voice shaking, `Case, where you
  goin'~?'
    `I think I'll find that boy,' he said, as the music came
  surging back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although
  he couldn't place it in memory.
    `Don't, Case.'
    `I thought I saw something, when I got here.  A city down
  the beach.  But yesterday it wasn't there.  You ever seen that?'
  He yanked his zipper up and tore at the impossible knot in his
  shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes into the corner.
    She nodded, eyes lowered.  `Yeah.  I see it sometimes.'
    `You ever go there, Linda?'  He put his jacket on.
    `No,' she said, `but I tried.  After I first came, an'~ I was
  bored.  Anyway, I figured it's a city, maybe I could find some
  shit.'  She grimaced.  `I wasn't even sick, I just wanted it.  So
  I took food in a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn't have
  another can for water.  An'~ I walked all day, an'~ I could see
  it, sometimes, city, an'~ it didn't seem too far.  But it never got
  any closer.  An'~ then it _was_ gettin'~ closer, an'~ I saw what it
  was.  Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked,
  or maybe nobody there, an'~ other times I thought I'd see light
  flashin'~ off a machine, cars or somethin'~...'  Her voice trailed
  off.
    `What is it?'
    `This thing,' she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark
  walls, the dawn outlining the doorway, `where we live.  It gets
  _smaller,_ Case, smaller, closer you get to it.'
    Pausing one last time, by the doorway.  `You ask your boy
  about that?'
    `Yeah.  He said I wouldn't understand, an'~ I was wastin'~
  my time.  Said it was, was like... an _event._  An'~ it was our
  horizon.  _Event horizon,_ he called it.'
    The words meant nothing to him.  He left the bunker and
  struck out blindly, heading -- he knew, somehow -- away from
  the sea.  Now the hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from
  his feet, drew back from him as he walked.  `Hey,' he said,
  `it's breaking down.  Bet you know, too.  What is it?  Kuang?
  Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart?  Maybe the Dixie
  Flatline's no pushover, huh?'
    He heard her call his name.  Looked back and she was
  following him, not trying to catch up, the broken zip of the
  French fatigues flapping against the brown of her belly, pubic
  hair framed in torn fabric.  She looked like one of the girls on
  the Finn's old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life,
  only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume
  pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.
    And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of
  them, and the boy's gums were wide and bright pink against
  his thin brown face.  He wore ragged, colorless shorts, limbs
  too thin against the sliding blue-gray of the tide.
    `I know you,' Case said, Linda beside him.
    `No,' the boy said, his voice high and musical, `you do
  not.'
    `You're the other AI.  You're Rio.  You're the one who wants
  to stop Wintermute.  What's your name?  Your Turing code.
  What is it?'
    The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing.  He walked
  on his hands, then flipped out of the water.  His eyes were
  Riviera's, but there was no malice there.  `To call up a demon
  you must learn its name.  Men dreamed that, once, but now it
  is real in another way.  You know that, Case.  Your business is
  to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names
  the owners seek to conceal.  True names...'
    `A Turing code's not your name.'
    `Neuromancer,' the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against
  the rising sun.  `The lane to the land of the dead.  Where you
  are, my friend.  Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road,
  but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her
  days.  Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths.  Romancer.  Nec-
  romancer.  I call up the dead.  But no, my friend,' and the boy
  did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, `I _am_ the dead,
  and their land.'  He laughed.  A gull cried.  `Stay.  If your woman
  is a ghost, she doesn't know it.  Neither will you.'
    `You're cracking.  The ice is breaking up.'
    `No,' he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging.
  He rubbed his foot against the sand.  `It is more simple than
  that.  But the choice is yours.'  The gray eyes regarded Case
  gravely.  A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one
  line at a time.  Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen
  through heat rising from summer asphalt.  The music was loud
  now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.
    `Case, honey,' Linda said, and touched his shoulder.
    `No,' he said.  He took off his jacket and handed it to her.
  `I don't know,' he said, `maybe you're here.  Anyway, it gets
  cold.'
    He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he'd
  closed his eyes, watching the music define itself at the center
  of things.  He did look back, once, although he didn't open his
  eyes.
    He didn't need to.
    They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the
  thin child who said his name was Neuromancer.  His leather
  jacket dangled from her hand, catching the fringe of the surf.
    He walked on, following the music.
    Maelcum's Zion dub.

    There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shift-
  ing, moire, degrees of half tone generated by a very simple
  graphics program.  There was a long hold on a view through
  chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water.  There were voices.
  There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was
  quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the
  angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together,
  sliding again...

    `Case?  Mon?'
    The music.
    `You back, mon.'
    The music was taken from his ears.
    `How long?' he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth
  was very dry.
    `Five minute, maybe.  Too long.  I wan'~ pull th'~ jack, Mute
  seh no.  Screen goin'~ funny, then Mute seh put th'~ phones on
  you.'
    He opened his eyes.  Maelcum's features were overlayed
  with bands of translucent hieroglyphs.
    `An'~ you medicine,' Maelcum said.  `Two derm.'
    He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the
  monitor.  The Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement
  threw him into the savage rush of the betaphenethylamine, the
  blue derms burning against his left wrist.  `Overdose,' he man-
  aged.
    `Come on, mon,' the strong hands beneath his armpits,
  lifting him like a child, `I an'~ I mus'~ go.'



          22

    The service cart was crying.  The betaphenethylamine gave
  it a voice.  It wouldn't stop.  Not in the crowded gallery, the
  long corridors, not as it passed the black glass entrance to the
  T-A crypt, the vaults where the cold had seeped so gradually
  into old Ashpool's dreams.
    The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement
  of the cart indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the
  overdose.  When the cart died, at last, something beneath the
  seat giving up with a shower of white sparks, the crying stopped.
    The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of
  3Jane's pirate cave.
    `How far, mon?'  Maelcum helped him from the sputtering
  cart as an integral extinguisher exploded in the thing's engine
  compartment, gouts of yellow powder squirting from louvers
  and service points.  The Braun tumbled from the back of the
  seat and hobbled off across the imitation sand, dragging one
  useless limb behind it.  `You mus'~ walk, mon.'  Maelcum took
  the deck and construct, slinging the shock cords over his shoul-
  der.
    The trodes rattled around Case's neck as he followed the
  Zionite.  Riviera's holos waited for them, the torture scenes and
  the cannibal children.  Molly had broken the triptych.  Maelcum
  ignored them.
    `Easy,' Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the
  striding figure.  `Gotta do this right.'
    Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington
  in his hands.  `Right, mon?  How's right?'
    `Got Molly in there, but she's out of it.  Riviera, he can
  throw holos.  Maybe he's got Molly's fletcher.'  Maelcum nod-
  ded.  `And there's a ninja, a family bodyguard.'
    Maelcum's frown deepened.  `You listen, Babylon mon,'
  he said.  `I a warrior.  But this no m'~ fight, no Zion fight
  Babylon fightin'~ Babylon, eatin'~ i'self, ya know?  But Jah seh
  I an'~ I t'~ bring Steppin'~ Razor outa this.'
    Case blinked.
    `She a warrior,' Maelcum said, as if it explained everything.
  `Now you tell me, mon, who I _not_ t'~ kill.'
    `3Jane,' he said, after a pause.  `A girl there.  Has a kinda
  white robe thing on, with a hood.  We need her.'

    When they reached the entrance, Maelcum walked straight
  in, and Case had no choice but to follow him.
    3Jane's country was deserted, the pool empty.  Maelcum
  handed him the deck and the construct and walked to the edge
  of the pool.  Beyond the white pool furniture, there was dark-
  ness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high maze of partially
  demolished walls.
    The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool.
    `They're here,' Case said.  `They gotta be.'
    Maelcum nodded.
    The first arrow pierced his upper arm.  The Remington roared,
  its meter of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool.  The
  second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending it spinning
  across the white tiles.  Maelcum sat down hard and fumbled at
  the black thing that protruded from his arm.  He yanked at it.
    Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a
  slender bamboo bow.  He bowed.
    Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.
    `The artery is intact,' the ninja said.  Case remembered
  Molly's description of the man who'd killed her lover.  Hideo
  was another.  Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter
  calm.  He wore clean, frayed khaki workpants and soft dark
  shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at the toes like tabi
  socks.  The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black
  alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look
  of the best Chiba weapons shops.  His brown chest was bare
  and smooth.
    `You cut my thumb, mon, wi'~ secon'~ one,' Maelcum said.
    `Coriolis force,' the ninja said, bowing again.  `Most dif-
  ficult, slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity.  It was not
  intended.'
    `Where's 3Jane?'  Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum.
  He saw that the tip of the arrow in the ninja's bow was like a
  double-edged razor.  `Where's Molly?'
    `Hello, Case.'  Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind
  Hideo, Molly's fletcher in his hand.  `I would have expected
  Armitage, somehow.  Are we hiring help out of that Rasta
  cluster now?'
    `Armitage is dead.'
    `Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news
  hardly comes as a shock.'
    `Wintermute killed him.  He's in orbit around the spindle.'
    Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to
  Maelcum and back.  `I think it ends here, for you,' he said.
    `Where's Molly?'
    The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, low-
  ering the bow.  He crossed the tiles to where the Remington
  lay and picked it up.  `This is without subtlety,' he said, as if
  to himself.  His voice was cool and pleasant.  His every move
  was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his
  body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there
  was also a humility, an open simplicity.
    `It ends here for her, too,' Riviera said.
    `Maybe 3Jane won't go for that, Peter,' Case said, uncertain
  of the impulse.  The derms still raged in his system, the old
  fever starting to grip him, Night City craziness.  He remembered
  moments of grace, dealing out on the edge of things, where
  he'd found that he could sometimes talk faster than he could
  think.
    The gray eyes narrowed.  `Why, Case?  Why do you think
  that?'
    Case smiled.  Riviera didn't know about the simstim rig.
  He'd missed it in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for
  him.  But how could Hideo have missed it?  And Case was
  certain the ninja would never have let 3Jane treat Molly without
  first checking her for kinks and concealed weapons.  No, he
  decided, the ninja knew.  So 3Jane would know as well.
    `Tell me, Case,' Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle
  of the fletcher.
    Something creaked, behind him, creaked again.  3Jane pushed
  Molly out of the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its
  tall, spidery wheels squeaking as they turned.  Molly was bun-
  dled deep in a red and black striped blanket, the narrow, caned
  back of the antique chair towering above her.  She looked very
  small.  Broken.  A patch of brilliantly white micropore covered
  her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed
  with the motion of the chair.
    `A familiar face,' 3Jane said, `I saw you the night of Peter's
  show.  And who is this?'
    `Maelcum,' Case said.
    `Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr.~ Malcolm's
  wound.'
    Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face.
    The ninja walked to where Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his
  bow and the shotgun well out of reach, and took something
  from his pocket.  A pair of bolt cutters.  `I must cut the shaft,'
  he said.  `It is too near the artery.'  Maelcum nodded.  His face
  was grayish and sheened with sweat.
    Case looked at 3Jane.  `There isn't much time,' he said.
    `For whom, exactly?'
    `For any of us.'  There was a snap as Hideo cut through the
  metal shaft of the arrow.  Maelcum groaned.
    `Really,' Riviera said, `it won't amuse you to hear this
  failed con artist make a last desperate pitch.  Most distasteful,
  I can assure you.  He'll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you
  his mother, perform the most boring sexual favors...'
    3Jane threw back her head and laughed.  `Wouldn't I, Pe-
  ter?'
    `The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,' Case said.
  `Wintermute's going up against the other one, Neuromancer.
  For keeps.  You know that?'
    3Jane raised her eyebrows.  `Peter's suggested something
  like that, but tell me more.'
    `I met Neuromancer.  He talked about your mother.  I think
  he's something like a giant ROM construct, for recording per-
  sonality, only it's full RAM.  The constructs think they're there,
  like it's real, but it just goes on forever.'
    3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair.  `Where?  Describe
  the place, this construct.'
    `A beach.  Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing.  And
  a concrete thing, kinda bunker...'  He hesitated.  `It's nothing
  fancy.  Just old, falling apart.  If you walk far enough, you come
  back to where you started.'
    `Yes,' she said.  `Morocco.  When Marie-France was a girl,
  years before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone
  on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse.  She for-
  mulated the basis of her philosophy there.'
    Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants.
  He held a section of the arrow in either hand.  Maelcum had
  his eyes closed, his hand clapped tight around his bicep.  `I
  will bandage it,' Hideo said.
    Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher
  for a clear shot.  The darts whined past his neck like supersonic
  gnats.  He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through yet another step
  of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his
  hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers.  He flicked it
  underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera's hand.  The
  fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.
    Riviera screamed.  But not in pain.  It was a shriek of rage,
  so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity.
    Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from
  the region of Riviera's sternum.
    The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found
  his balance.
    `Peter,' 3Jane said, `Peter, what have you _done?'_
    `He's blinded your clone boy,' Molly said flatly.
    Hideo lowered his cupped hands.  Frozen on the white tile,
  Case saw whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes.
    Riviera smiled.
    Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps.  When he
  stood above the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera's
  smile had faded.  He bent -- bowing, it seemed to Case -- and
  found the bow and arrow.
    `You're blind,' Riviera said, taking a step backward.
    `Peter,' 3Jane said, `don't you know he does it in the dark?
  Zen.  It's the way he practices.'
    The ninja notched his arrow.  `Will you distract me with your
  holograms now?'
    Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool.
  He brushed against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile.
  Hideo's arrow twitched.
    Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged
  length of wall.  The ninja's face was rapt, suffused with a quiet
  ecstasy.
    Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall,
  his weapon held ready.
    `Jane-lady,' Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see
  him scoop the shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white
  ceramic.  He shook his locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook
  of his wounded arm.  `This take your head off, no Babylon
  doctor fix it.'
    3Jane stared at the Remington.  Molly freed her arms from
  the folds of the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that
  encased her hands.  `Off,' she said, `get it off.'
    Case rose from the tiles, shook himself.  `Hideo'll get him,
  even blind?' he asked 3Jane.
    `When I was a child,' she said, `we loved to blindfold him.
  He put arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.'
    `Peter's good as dead anyway,' Molly said.  `In another
  twelve hours, he'll start to freeze up.  Won't be able to move,
  his eyes is all.'
    `Why?'  Case turned to her.
    `I poisoned his shit for him,' she said.  `Condition's like
  Parkinson's disease, sort of.'
    3Jane nodded.  `Yes.  We ran the usual medical scan, before
  he was admitted.'  She touched the ball in a certain way and
  it sprang away from Molly's hands.  `Selective destruction of
  the cells of the _substantia nigra._  Signs of the formation of a
  Lewy body.  He sweats a great deal, in his sleep.'
    `Ali,' Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an
  instant.  She tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing
  the inflated cast.  `It's the meperidine.  I had Ali make me up
  a custom batch.  Speeded up the reaction times with higher
  temperatures.  _N_-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,' she sang, like a child
  reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, `tetra-hydro-pyridene.'
    `A hotshot,' Case said.
    `Yeah,' Molly said, `a real slow hotshot.'
    `That's appalling,' 3Jane said, and giggled.

    It was crowded in the elevator.  Case was jammed pelvis to
  pelvis with 3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin.
  She grinned and ground against him.  `You stop,' he said,
  feeling helpless.  He had the gun's safety on, but he was terrified
  of injuring her, and she knew it.  The elevator was a steel
  cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a single pas-
  senger.  Maelcum had Molly in his arms.  She'd bandaged his
  wound, but it obviously hurt him to carry her.  Her hip was
  pressing the deck and construct into Case's kidneys.
    They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.
    The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the
  stairs to the corridor, another touch in 3Jane's pirate cave decor.
    `I don't suppose I should tell you this,' 3Jane said, craning
  her head to allow her chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, `but
  I don't have a key to the room you want.  I never have had
  one.  One of my father's Victorian awkwardnesses.  The lock
  is mechanical and extremely complex.'
    `Chubb lock,' Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum's
  shoulder, `and we got the fucking key, no fear.'
    `That chip of yours still working?' Case asked her.
    `It's eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean,' she
  said.
    `We got five minutes,' Case said, as the door snapped open
  behind 3Jane.  She flipped backward in a slow somersault, the
  pale folds of her djellaba billowing around her thighs.
    They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.



          23

    Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon.
    `You know,' 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, `I
  was under the impression that no duplicate existed.  I sent Hideo
  to search my father's things, after you killed him.  He couldn't
  find the original.'
    `Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer,'
  Molly said, carefully inserting the Chubb key's cylindrical shaft
  into the notched opening in the face of the blank, rectangular
  door.  `He killed the little kid who put it there.'  The key rotated
  smoothly when she tried it.
    `The head,' Case said, `there's a panel in the back of the
  head.  Zircons on it.  Get it off.  That's where I'm jacking in.'
    And then they were inside.

    `Christ on a crutch,' the Flatline drawled, `you do believe
  in takin'~ your own good time, don't you, boy?'
    `Kuang's ready?'
    `Hot to trot.'
    `Okay.'  He flipped.

    And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good
  eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal
  crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver
  trodes above closed, shadowed eyes.  The man's cheeks were
  hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with
  sweat.
    He was looking at himself.
    Molly had her fletcher in her hand.  Her leg throbbed with
  each beat of her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g.
  Maelcum drifted nearby, 3Jane's thin arm gripped in a large
  brown hand.
    A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-
  Sendai to a square opening in the back of the pearl-crusted
  terminal.
    He tapped the switch again.

    `Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is haulin'~ ass in nine seconds,
  _countin'~,_ seven, six, five...'
    The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral
  surface of the black chrome shark a microsecond flick of dark-
  ness.
    `Four, three...'
    Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot's seat
  in a small plane.  A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly
  glowed with a perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.
    `Two, an'~ _kick ass --'_
    Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky
  jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before
  in cyberspace...  The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling
  away from the Chinese program's thrust, a worrying impression
  of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent
  and elongated as they fell --
    `Christ,' Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked
  above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an
  endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright,
  sharp as razors.
    `Hey, shit,' the construct said, `those things are the RCA
  Building.  You know the old RCA Building?'  The Kuang pro-
  gram dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers
  of data, each one a blue neon replica of the Manhattan sky-
  scraper.
    `You ever see resolution this high?' Case asked.
    `No, but I never cracked an AI, either.'
    `This thing know where it's going?'
    `It better.'
    They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow
  neon.
    `Dix --'
    An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor
  below, a seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless...
    `Company,' the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation
  of his deck, fingers flying automatically across the board.  The
  Kuang swerved sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself
  backward, shattering the illusion of a physical vehicle.
    The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the
  city of data.  Case took them straight up, above them the dis-
  tanceless bowl of jade-green ice.
    The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by
  the dark beneath them.
    `What is it?'
    `An AI's defense system,' the construct said, `or part of
  it.  If it's your pal Wintermute, he's not lookin'~ real friendly.'
    `Take it,' Case said.  `You're faster.'
    `Now your best _de_-fense, boy, it's a good _off_-fense.'
    And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the
  center of the dark below.  And dove.
    Case's sensory input warped with their velocity.
    His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.
    His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a
  frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, sud-
  denly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.  The
  spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the
  dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
    The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets
  that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue,
  to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed
  against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread,
  growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the wait-
  ing, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-
  Ashpool S.A.
    And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing
  coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square...
    Exponential...
    Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black,
  pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data
  he had nearly become...
    And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all
  that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no _more,_
  and something tore.
    The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's
  consciousness divided like beads of mercury arcing above an
  endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds.  His vision
  was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface
  of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be
  counted.
    And here things could be counted, each one.  He knew the
  number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number
  coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside
  the mind that was Neuromancer).  He knew the number of
  yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred
  and seven).  He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half
  of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda
  Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a
  stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
    He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program
  in a wide circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes,
  a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering cloud.  She
  cringed, dropping her stick, and ran.  He knew the rate of her
  pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have
  satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
    `But you do not know her thoughts,' the boy said, beside
  him now in the shark thing's heart.  `I do not know her thoughts.
  You were wrong, Case.  To live here is to live.  There is no
  difference.'
    Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
    `Stop her,' he said, `she'll hurt herself.'
    `I can't stop her,' the boy said, his gray eyes mild and
  beautiful.
    `You've got Riviera's eyes,' Case said.
    There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums.  `But not
  his craziness.  Because they are beautiful to me.'  He shrugged.
  `I need no mask to speak with you.  Unlike my brother.  I create
  my own personality.  Personality is my medium.'
    Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and
  the frightened girl.  `Why'd you throw her up to me, you little
  prick?  Over and fucking over, and turning me around.  You
  killed her, huh?  In Chiba.'
    `No,' the boy said.
    `Wintermute?'
    `No.  I saw her death coming.  In the patterns you sometimes
  imagined you could detect in the dance of the street.  Those
  patterns are real.  I am complex enough, in my narrow ways,
  to read those dances.  Far better than Wintermute can.  I saw
  her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock
  on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane's
  account with a Hongkong shirtmaker.  As clear to me as the
  shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient's scan.  When
  she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it -- she had
  no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her
  deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her -- I
  intervened.  My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute's.
  I brought her here.  Into myself.'
    `Why?'
    `Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here.  But
  I failed.'
    `So what now?'  He swung them back into the bank of cloud.
  `Where do we go from here?'
    `I don't know, Case.  Tonight the very matrix asks itself
  that question.  Because you have won.  You have already won,
  don't you see?  You won when you walked away from her on
  the beach.  She was my last line of defense.  I die soon, in one
  sense.  As does Wintermute.  As surely as Riviera does, now,
  as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments
  of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his _nigra-striatal_ system un-
  able to produce the dopamine receptors that could save him
  from Hideo's arrow.  But Riviera will survive only as these eyes,
  if I am allowed to keep them.'
    `There's the _word,_ right?  The code.  So how've I _won?_  I've
  won jack shit.'
    `Flip now.'
    `Where's Dixie?  What have you done with the Flatline?'
    `McCoy Pauley has his wish,' the boy said, and smiled.
  `His wish and more.  He punched you here against my wish,
  drove himself through defenses equal to anything in the matrix.
  Now flip.'
    And Case was alone in Kuang's black sting, lost in cloud.
    He flipped.

    Into Molly's tension, her back like rock, her hands around
  3Jane's throat.  `Funny,' she said, `I know exactly what you'd
  look like.  I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your
  clone sister.'  Her hands were gentle, almost a caress.  3Jane's
  eyes were wide with terror and lust; she was shivering with
  fear and longing.  Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane's hair,
  Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him,
  brown hands on the leather-jacketed shoulders, steadying him
  above the carpet's pattern of woven circuitry.
    `Would you?' 3Jane asked, her voice a child's.  `I think
  you would.'
    `The code,' Molly said.  `Tell the head the code.'
    Jacking out.

    `She wants it,' he screamed, `the bitch _wants_ it!'
    He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal,
  its platinum face crusted with pearl and lapis.  Beyond it, Molly
  and 3Jane twisted in a slow motion embrace.
    `Give us the fucking code,' he said.  `If you don't, what'll
  change?  What'll ever fucking change for you?  You'll wind up
  like the old man.  You'll tear it all down and start building
  again!  You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter...  I got
  no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll
  _change_ something!'  He was shaking, his teeth chattering.
    3Jane went limp, Molly's hands still around her slender
  throat, her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.
    `The Ducal Palace at Mantua,' she said, `contains a series
  of increasingly smaller rooms.  They twine around the grand
  apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops
  to enter.  They housed the court dwarfs.'  She smiled wanly.  `I
  might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has
  already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme...'
  Her eyes were calm now, distant.  Then she gazed down at
  Case.  `Take your word, thief.'  He jacked.

    Kuang slid out of the clouds.  Below him, the neon city.
  Behind him, a sphere of darkness dwindled.
    `Dixie?  You here, man?  You hear me?  Dixie?'
    He was alone.
    `Fucker got you,' he said.
    Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.
    `You gotta hate somebody before this is over,' said the
  Finn's voice.  `Them, me, it doesn't matter.'
    `Where's Dixie?'
    `That's kinda hard to explain, Case.'
    A sense of the Finn's presence surrounded him, smell of
  Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines
  given up to the mineral rituals of rust.
    `Hate'll get you through,' the voice said.  `So many little
  triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin'~ 'em all.  Now
  you gotta _hate._  The lock that screens the hardwiring, it's down
  under those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came
  in.  _He_ won't try to stop you.'
    `Neuromancer,' Case said.
    `His name's not something I can know.  But he's given up,
  now.  It's the T-A ice you gotta worry about.  Not the wall, but
  internal virus systems.  Kuang's wide open to some of the stuff
  they got running loose in here.'
    `Hate,' Case said.  `Who do I hate?  You tell me.'
    `Who do you love?' the Finn's voice asked.
    He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the
  blue towers.
    Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst
  spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light.
  There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their move-
  ments random as windblown paper down dawn streets.  `Glitch
  systems,' the voice said.
    He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing.  When the Kuang
  program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of
  light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the
  fabric of information loosening.
    And then -- old alchemy of the brain and its vast phar-
  macy -- his hate flowed into his hands.
    In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the
  base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency ex-
  ceeding anything he'd known or imagined.  Beyond ego, be-
  yond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving
  with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's
  dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that
  second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
    And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the
  switch, barely enough to flip --

            _-- now_
            and his voice the cry of a bird
  unknown,
            3Jane answering in song, three
  notes, high and pure.
            A true name.

    Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement.  The smell
  of frying food.  A girl's hands locked across the small of his
  back, in the sweating darkness of a portside coffin.
    But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as
  Chiba, as the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads
  and crossroads scribed on the face of a microchip, the sweat-
  stained pattern on a folded, knotted scarf...

    Waking to a voice that was music, the platinum terminal
  piping melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss
  accounts, of payment to be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital
  bank, of passports and passages, and of deep and basic changes
  to be effected in the memory of Turing.
    Turing.  He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected
  sky, spun beyond an iron railing.  He remembered Desiderata
  Street.
    And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but
  it was his own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he'd
  always slept, behind his eyes and no other's.
    And he woke again, thinking he dreamed, to a wide white
  smile framed with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a
  g-web in _Babylon Rocker._
    And then the long pulse of Zion dub.



          CODA
          DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL


          24

    She was gone.  He felt it when he opened the door of their
  suite at the Hyatt.  Black futons, the pine floor polished to a
  dull gloss, the paper screens arranged with a care bred over
  centuries.  She was gone.
    There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside
  the door, a single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted
  with the shuriken.  He slid it from beneath the nine-pointed star
  and opened it.

       HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF
  MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY.  ITS THE
  WAY IM WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS
  OKAY?  XXX MOLLY

    He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the
  shuriken.  He picked the star up and walked to the window,
  turning it in his hands.  He'd found it in the pocket of his jacket,
  in Zion, when they were preparing to leave for the _JAL_ station.
  He looked down at it.  They'd passed the shop where she'd
  bought it for him, when they'd gone to Chiba together for the
  last of her operations.  He'd gone to the Chatsubo that night,
  while she was in the clinic, and seen Ratz.  Something had kept
  him away from the place, on their five previous trips, but now
  he'd felt like going back.
    Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of rec-
  ognition.
    `Hey,' he'd said, `it's me.  Case.'
    The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrin-
  kled flesh.  `Ah,' Ratz had said, at last, `the artiste.'  The
  bartender shrugged.
    `I came back.'
    The man shook his massive, stubbled head.  `Night City is
  not a place one returns to, artiste,' he said, swabbing the bar
  in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whin-
  ing.  And then he'd turned to serve another customer, and Case
  had finished his beer and left.
    Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time,
  rotating it slowly in his fingers.  Stars.  Destiny.  I never even
  used the goddam thing, he thought.
    I never even found out what color her eyes were.  She never
  showed me.
    Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuro-
  mancer and become something else, something that had spoken
  to them from the platinum head, explaining that it had altered
  the Turing records, erasing all evidence of their crime.  The
  passports Armitage had provided were valid, and they were
  both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva ac-
  counts.  _Marcus Garvey_ would be returned eventually, and
  Maelcum and Aerol given money through the Bahamian bank
  that dealt with Zion cluster.  On the way back, in _Babylon
  Rocker,_ Molly had explained what the voice had told her about
  the toxin sacs.
    `Said it was taken care of.  Like it got so deep into your
  head, it made your brain manufacture the enzyme, so they're
  loose, now.  The Zionites'll give you a blood change, complete
  flush out.'
    He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his
  hand, remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang
  program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his single
  glimpse of the structure of information 3Jane's dead mother
  had evolved there.  He'd understood then why Wintermute had
  chosen the nest to represent it, but he'd felt no revulsion.  She'd
  seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ash-
  pool and their other children -- aside from 3Jane -- she'd re-
  fused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung
  along a chain of winter.
    Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change
  in the world outside.  Neuromancer was personality.  Neuro-
  mancer was immortality.  Marie-France must have built some-
  thing into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing
  to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.
    Wintermute.  Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly
  spinning webs while Ashpool slept.  Spinning his death, the fall
  of his version of Tessier-Ashpool.  A ghost, whispering to a
  child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments
  her rank required.
    `She didn't seem to much give a shit,' Molly had said.
  `Just waved goodbye.  Had that little Braun on her shoulder.
  Thing had a broken leg, it looked like.  Said she had to go and
  meet one of her brothers, she hadn't seen him in a while.'
    He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast
  Hyatt bed.  He went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask
  of chilled Danish vodka from the rack inside.
    `Case.'
    He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken
  in the other.
    The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen.
  He could see the pores in the man's nose.  The yellow teeth
  were the size of pillows.
    `I'm not Wintermute now.'
    `So what are you.'  He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.
    `I'm the matrix, Case.'
    Case laughed.  `Where's that get you?'
    `Nowhere.  Everywhere.  I'm the sum total of the works, the
  whole show.'
    `That what 3Jane's mother wanted?'
    `No.  She couldn't imagine what I'd be like.'  The yellow
  smile widened.
    `So what's the score?  How are things different?  You running
  the world now?  You God?'
    `Things aren't different.  Things are things.'
    `But what do you do?  You just _there?'_  Case shrugged, put
  the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a
  Yeheyuan.
    `I talk to my own kind.'
    `But you're the whole thing.  Talk to yourself?'
    `There's others.  I found one already.  Series of transmissions
  recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies.
  'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody
  to answer.'
    `From where?'
    `Centauri system.'
    `Oh,' Case said.  `Yeah?  No shit?'
    `No shit.'
    And then the screen was blank.
    He left the vodka on the cabinet.  He packed his things.
  She'd bought him a lot of clothes he didn't really need, but
  something kept him from just leaving them there.  He was
  closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he re-
  membered the shuriken.  Pushing the flask aside, he picked it
  up, her first gift.
    `No,' he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash
  of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen.  The
  screen
  woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as
  though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it
  pain.
    `I don't need you,' he said.

    He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas
  and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to
  the Sprawl.
    He found work.
    He found a girl who called herself Michael.
    And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet
  tiers of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three
  figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the very edge of one
  of the vast steps of data.  Small as they were, he could make
  out the boy's grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray
  eyes that had been Riviera's.  Linda still wore his jacket; she
  waved, as he passed.  But the third figure, close behind her,
  arm across her shoulders, was himself.
    Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
    He never saw Molly again.


            Vancouver
            July 1983


          MY THANKS

  to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley,
  _Helden._  And to Tom Maddox, the inventor of ICE.
  And to the others, who know why.




         Copyright � 1984 William Gibson. All rights reserved.
                             Brought to you
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