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PART THREE. MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
Archipelago.
The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data in the L-S archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen.
Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town, and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.
On the THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Armitage on the aisle. Once, as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once.
"No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that."
Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger. "That's right, Peter. Don't."
Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.
Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell instantly asleep.
Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.
"You been up, haven't you?" Molly asked, as he squirmed his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle.
"Nah. Never travel much, just for biz." The steward was
attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
"Hope you don't get SAS," she said.
"Airsick? No way."
"It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g, and
your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex,
like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of
adrenaline." The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new
set of trodes from his red plastic apron.
Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of
the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by
graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the
window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb.
He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a
big airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane,
like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened
to the piped koto music and waited.
Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a
great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.
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 Riviera.
The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek.
"In the head," Riviera said, and smiled.
Case laughed.
"Good," Riviera said, "you can laugh. I would have tried
to help you, but I'm no good with my hands." He held up his
palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
"Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?" Molly stepped
between them.
"Yo," Aerol said, from the hatch, "you wan' come wi' me,
cowboy mon."
"It's your deck," Armitage said, "and the other gear. Help
him get it in from the cargo bay."
"You ver' pale, mon," Aerol said, as they were guiding the
foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor.
"Maybe you wan' eat somethin'."
Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.
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. l said, what's eatin' you? Goddam
thumb's itchin', he says. So l 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 Al, 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."
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, moo, 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. "lust 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, Lioos 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 Al?"
"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. Al. 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
had 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
ass hole. Seventh level dungeon and the god dam 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 staled 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 her ing-
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-
pcr, popped h 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 Winterrnute
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 masturbating 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.