"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 Michele, 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.
Michele 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. Michele 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," Michele 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 Michele
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," Michele 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," Michele 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 Michele fell into character, chattering
brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Michele 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. Michele 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. Michele 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 Michele 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 motherfucker, you killed 'em all...."