PART THREE. MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
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 fiesh 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 clff 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 absract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds
of worded 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 l00 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 Al. 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 packd in his uptumed
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, meedng 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 lapan-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 plasdc. 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 compatdble and yields optimal penetradon 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. "Questdon. Who
owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?"
"Delay for interorbital transmission," said the Hosaka.
"Code it. Standard commerical code."
"Done."
He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
"Reinhold Scientdfic 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 Al."
"Possible. Sure. If it's military."
"Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your
background, okay? Arrnitage seems to be setdng up a run on
an Al 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 Annitage. What goes?"
"Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with
an Al. 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 Al'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 Al 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 Al 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 Al." 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 your
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 tightly
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."