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 Al'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
"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 darkshop. 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. l 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 cloisonne, 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 Vingtieme Siecle. 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 l 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.